DURJOY DATTA

  While We Wait

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part 1

  1. Raghav

  2. Aditi

  3. Raghav

  4. Aditi

  5. Raghav

  6. Aditi

  7. Aditi

  8. Raghav

  9. Aditi

  10. Raghav

  11. Aditi

  12. Raghav

  13. Aditi

  14. Raghav

  Part 2: Twelve Months Later

  15. Raghav

  16. Aditi

  17. Raghav

  18. Aditi

  19. Raghav

  20. Aditi

  21. Raghav

  22. Aditi

  23. Raghav

  24. Aditi

  25. Raghav

  26. Aditi

  27. Raghav

  Part 3: Six Months Later

  28. Aditi

  29. Raghav

  30. Aditi

  31. Raghav

  32. Aditi

  33. Raghav

  34. Aditi

  35. Raghav

  36. Aditi

  37. Raghav

  Epilogue

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  WHILE WE WAIT

  Durjoy Datta is the author of twenty-one bestselling romance novels. Born in New Delhi, he completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book, Of Course I Love You . . !, published when he was twenty-one, was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Till the Last Breath, Hold My Hand, When Only Love Remains, World’s Worst Best Boyfriend, The Girl of My Dreams, The Boy Who Loved, The Boy with a Broken Heart and The Perfect Us—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India.

  Durjoy also has to his credit eleven television shows, for which he has written over 1000 episodes. For more updates, you can follow him on Instagram (www.instagram.com/durjoydatta).

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  World’s Best Ex-Girlfriend

  World’s Worst Best Girlfriend

  When I Am with You

  A Touch of Eternity

  Wish I Could Tell You

  The Perfect Us

  When Only Love Remains

  The Boy with a Broken Heart

  The Boy Who Loved

  The Girl of My Dreams

  Our Impossible Love

  World’s Worst Best Boyfriend

  Hold My Hand

  Someone Like You (with Nikita Singh)

  If It’s Not Forever . . . It’s Not Love (with Nikita Singh)

  Now That You’re Rich . . . Let’s Fall in Love!

  (with Maanvi Ahuja)

  Till the Last Breath . . .

  You Were My Crush . . . Till You Said You Love Me!

  (with Orvana Ghai)

  Oh Yes, I’m Single! And So Is My Girlfriend!

  (with Neeti Rustagi)

  She Broke Up, I Didn’t! I Just Kissed Someone Else!

  Of Course I Love You . . . Till I Find Someone Better

  (with Maanvi Ahuja)

  To Avantika

  PART 1

  1

  Raghav

  I can feel the steam rising from people’s bodies around me. They are losing patience, their pulses quickening, their weight shifting from one foot to another. They are looking over their shoulder and hoping that the line in front of them moves quicker. People with hope. I hate that. I envy that. Hope should come from logic, not optimism. Which line have we ever been in moved quicker than we anticipated? I used to be like them. But that was before today. Hope’s nice, like a toy. But real life runs on being real. It’s in the phrase. I don’t know how I missed that for so long.

  I want to tell everyone in the line that it’s going to take as long as it does. You’re just bitter, everyone will tell me. But I’m also happy. Can I be both bitter and happy?

  ‘Hey? Can you move ahead?’

  I step forward. I want to tell her that we moved one tiny step, and that no one has moved away from the counter. We are still the same number of people in this line, but I’m still doing what Megha says I have started doing a lot—misplacing my frustration.

  ‘One more step,’ says the girl in a dark grey T-shirt two sizes too big, and a pair of jeans that are way too balloony, and over her shoulder is a backpack bursting at its seams.

  This time I want to tell her off, but before I can say anything, her phone beeps and she begins to text. Phones are a great way to cut a conversation you don’t want to have. And common sense says she shouldn’t have a conversation with me. She’s 5’1” and I’m 5’10”, and the way we’ve broken the world, those numbers alone are reason enough for a girl to think twice before speaking to a man, even in a public space.

  So I don’t move.

  She looks up from her phone.

  ‘If you move up,’ she says, ‘there’s a fan there.’ She points to the one hanging precariously over the signboard that says, ‘Visitor’s Tickets, Delhi Airport’. She continues brightly, ‘The sooner you get there, the quicker you can stop sweating.’

  She points to the rivulets of sweat pouring down my forehead and sweat patches forming under my arms. Fucking embarrassing. But I usually don’t stink. That’s because I already know I sweat like a pig and invest heavily in deodorants. But maybe she can detect a stink. She looks the kind—petite with a sensitive nose. I step away from her, move closer to the man ahead of me, and take a deo out from my backpack.

  I’m about to spray it when she says, ‘My fiancé has the same perfume. I could smell it on you.’

  ‘So I’m not stinking?’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  She’s on her phone again. The line moves and now I’m right below the fan and the air is cool and I get what she meant. The line moves once more, but I’m still looking at her, still thinking if I should spray the perfume or not, when the cashier slaps the cool marble ledge and calls out to me. ‘Haanji?’

  When I turn back to face him, he looks at me with irritation and outstretched hands. ‘Cash, 200 rupees. No UPI.’

  ‘But I only—’

  ‘Only cash. Did you not hear? Next.’

  ‘I will pay,’ says the girl from behind me. ‘Two tickets, please.’

  Before I can say anything, the girl has opened her bag, fetched two notes and paid. Tickets in our hands, we are politely shoved out of the line by the people behind us.

  ‘If you can give me your UPI details—’

  She cuts me with a smile. ‘You can buy me a chai inside. Or a water. Whatever is 200 rupees. Or whoever you’re meeting can pay me back. Whatever suits you.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say to the girl who has somehow helped me twice in a matter of minutes. ‘Thank you for the . . . fan thing? And for helping me pay.’

  ‘You call that help? Are we calling basic decency help now?’

  She’s walking away from me now, and I follow her. I feel like I should be talking to her, to make up for the stubbornness of not moving two minutes ago.

  ‘Who have you come to receive?’ I ask her.

  Her face is suddenly even brighter. ‘My fiancé.’

  Fiancé. The word warms my heart. So weird that a word can hold so much power. I’m thinking of Megha now. Her opened boxes in our new apartment. Those framed pictures of ours which we will put up together in the evening because she doesn’t trust me with their positioning.

  ‘You?’ she asks.

  ‘Fiancée too,’ I answer, savouring the word.

  The first time I used it was a couple of days ago at the landlord’s. The landlord had been sceptical, the word being abused by bachelors to get into apartment buildings that don’t allow bachelors, but the landlord seemingly liked me so he let it slide. Sumrit is also the only one who knows I’m here at the airport. The other three guys had all responded with, ‘Dekh le, if you really want to do it. Don’t regret it later,’ when I’d first mentioned it. That was disappointing. You want your friends to back every decision of yours, even if it is a bad one. What are friends for, if not for shouldering a part of the blame and responsibility for your actions? But what blame? Nothing will go wrong.

  ‘What?’ she exclaims. ‘Crazy! Where’s she coming from?’

  ‘Lucknow.’

  ‘No way! Seriously? Which flight?’

  I check the ticket. ‘10.20 a.m. landing. Indigo.’

  I watch her eyes grow wide and lips curve in a small circle. ‘Noooooo.’

  ‘10.20 a.m. landing too?’

  ‘Wow!’ she says and grabs my hand excitedly. ‘This is going to be so crazy when we tell them!’

  Will it be crazy for Megha? Will I tell her about this? Or will she be anxious about the new life that awaits us? Will she be thinking—and blaming me—about how I uprooted us? But this girl has been nice to me so I don’t say any of that. I don’t tell her that I feel a deep sense of relief or that I’m deeply terrified of what lies in the future. I don’t tell her how scared I am. I don’t tell her that it’s hard for me to hold myself together till 10.20 a.m., and all I am waiting for is for Megha to land and hold me and tell me that we are doing the right thing. That I need her to walk towards me and say the words, ‘We’re okay.’

  Just that.

  ‘Hey?’ she says.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ And then add, ‘As you said, it will totally be crazy.’

/>
  2

  Aditi

  I can’t stay in this washroom stall for too long.

  I could lie to Raghav—the nervous guy outside—and say I had an upset stomach. But then he’d picture me on the toilet, sweating, eyes twitching. Because that’s better than saying that I have trouble controlling my tears. And then he would have to ask why out of politeness and it would get weird. Just stop crying, Aditi! This is what you want! I wipe my tears even as more threaten to flow. I can’t cry for too long. In ninety minutes, Aman lands, and he’ll expect me to jump into his arms. I wonder if he’ll find me any heavier, considering my heart feels like lead at the moment.

  I wipe my tears and leave the bathroom stall.

  Outside, Raghav is waiting for me, two steaming plates of idlis in front of him. I want to remind him that it was two hundred rupees, not a thousand, and that the chai he ordered earlier would have been enough. Under normal circumstances, I would have cut off the conversation a long time ago. But nothing about today is normal. I needed to talk to someone to stop thinking and he was there: polite, second-guessing if he should keep talking to me or go away respectfully—which are three golden rules of any man talking to a girl that he doesn’t know.

  Also, I can’t ignore the fact that his fiancée and mine are on the same flight(!), and that he seems to be carrying the same nervousness that I am.

  ‘My stomach’s a bit upset,’ I tell him as I sit down.

  ‘Stress can do that to you.’

  ‘What? I’m not stressed!’

  He looks at me as though he knows I’m lying.

  ‘Their flight’s delayed. Forty-five minutes,’ he tells me.

  I turn to look at the arrivals board. Just behind it, I see rain pattering on the large glass walls of the airport.

  He continues, ‘A few flights have already tried landing but ended up turning around.’

  ‘The rain’s not that much.’

  ‘Visibility’s pretty low,’ he says, checking his weather app. ‘Although they are saying it will clear up.’

  He breaks off a small piece of idli, dips it in the sambhar first, then in the coconut chutney and puts it in his mouth. As he does, I notice the discoloured front tooth.

  ‘Your front tooth is a cap, right? It’s gotten a bit off-colour,’ I say and immediately regret it. Why? Why would I say this tooth’s off-colour? Am I slowly becoming him? Noticing teeth is his job, not mine.

  He stops eating and meets my eye. ‘You’re a dentist?’

  ‘Just graduated my MBA, but my internship was in a chain of clinics like Clove Dental Clinic. Anyway,’ I say, ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘That’s not important.’

  ‘We have time to kill.’

  ‘I was punched in the face a few times,’ he says. ‘Lost the front tooth. Got a few chipped teeth at the back as well.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘It wasn’t painful.’

  ‘You don’t have to be macho. It has to be painful.’

  ‘The root canal and the dentist visits were more painful,’ he says with a smile. I start to laugh, and he says with all seriousness. ‘No, really.’

  ‘C’mon, dentists just get bad PR for no reason,’ I say. ‘They aren’t that bad. Some of them are really nice.’

  ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Is your fiancé . . . a dentist?’

  ‘What? How did you guess?’

  ‘No one defends dentists. So, you met him at the internship?’

  I nod, and the memory comes flooding back. I had been so excited to stay with my maasi, mother’s sister, in Lucknow, my first time living away from home. I had made plans to visit every corner of the city, to loiter in the streets, eat all the best food, and finally be myself—or maybe find myself, like people are supposed to do when they’re on their own and travelling. Papa never believed in travel. Waste of money, he used to say. Unless it was to the Vaishnodevi shrine, which we have been to a total of six times. The Lucknow internship was my only twisted shot at solo travel.

  But soon, I wasn’t alone. Within the first week of my two-month internship, Aman and I were eating lunch in the clinic together. He would pull teeth out all morning while I presented and rejected marketing ideas. Then, we would both order sandwiches from the same place. Slowly, lunch meetings bled into mid-afternoon snack breaks and then strolls after work. Soon, I was lying to my maasi, telling her I was meeting with ‘office friends’ on weekends and in the evenings.

  ‘And you’re getting married within one or two years of meeting him?’ Raghav breaks into my thoughts.

  That question pricks me. But he doesn’t deserve my anger because he doesn’t know my story. So I say, ‘Two years is a long time. I would have married him the day I met him.’

  ‘Same,’ he says with a wide smile. ‘I knew it, too. But I was in the eighth standard and it was the 1850s or I would have too.’

  That makes me giggle. Not every day do you meet someone who believes in the stupidity of love and not swipes. ‘What do you do?’

  The question literally seems to take the wind out of him. His sigh was never-ending.

  ‘Data engineering for an EdTech firm,’ he says.

  ‘So, what exactly?’

  ‘I build machine learning models to predict which student gives up when. Then I help marketing sell them hope right before they do.’

  ‘You don’t like your job?’ I ask him.

  ‘I like the people I work with. I like my salary. I like what I can afford,’ he says. ‘Job’s not my life.’

  And then, his eyes flit towards the arrivals board. His face falls. ‘Delayed by another thirty.’

  I turn to look at the arrivals board. A cascading change of graphics announces the delays. I pick up my phone and send a text to Aman, reminding him that I love him, that I miss him, and it’s rude that he’s not barging into the cockpit and demanding that the plane be landed, no matter the weather.

  When I look up, he’s smiling at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were smiling while texting someone who won’t get that text,’ he says.

  I roll my eyes. ‘But imagine switching on the phone and getting so many? What could be better?’

  ‘If I land and get so many texts, it would give me instant anxiety that something’s gone wrong.’

  I smile at his naivety, but then again, what does he know about what’s happened.

  ‘Whatever could have gone wrong has already gone wrong,’ I say.

  ‘As in?’

  Before I can brush it away, he’s looking around at the murmur. Everyone’s staring at the board again. The flight’s delayed by another thirty. He slumps back into his chair, and now his eyes are back at me.

  ‘What has gone wrong?’ he says.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Didn’t you just say that something has?’

  I want to nip this in the bud, but his eyes are focused on me. It’s the first time I notice them. These are what I imagine a therapist’s eyes might look like—deep, inviting, tricking you into spilling all that’s inside of you. I don’t want to say anything, but the words seem to form into sentences on their own and leave my mouth.

  ‘My parents don’t like Aman,’ I tell this random stranger. ‘I left my house this morning.’

  ‘Left as in?’

  ‘Left as in, I won’t be going back. I wrote them a letter.’

  Growing up, eloping and starting a new life somewhere sounded romantic, heroic even, freeing. But it feels like being shackled to a boulder, every step heavier than the last. I wrote them a letter? Even now, it seems almost comical. Running away from the house you grew up in, leaving the parents that raised you, because you found a guy cute and kind? It makes no sense and yet it was the only thing to do.

  He looks at me for a bit as if trying to figure out if he should continue this conversation. I want him to. I can’t be in my head for now. I think he knows because he nods and then asks, ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s . . . older,’ I say. And then add what is a truth about him but somehow doesn’t feel true, ‘. . . and divorced.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘And him?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  ‘That’s not too much. I thought you would say forty.’

  ‘I wish my parents understood.’