“Once in my life I laughed. Once in my life that empty space in my heart was filled. Once in my life I loved someone more than anything in this world. For once in my life, I had you”

It’smore than a month and his status message still read the same. The orange color next to his gtalk id reminds me that I have not seen him online during the usual hours. With his life messed up, even his routine is completely screwed. I don’t know why he sleeps when the whole world is wide awake and wake up at some unearthly hours. I wonder if he is trying to avoid people, for whom he doesn’t even exist. With a festival like Diwali around I did not want him to lie alone in his 2BHK house where he moved three months ago. I still remember how he came back home one evening, all charged up to tell that he is planning to move out of our flat and stay separately. We were not surprised, it was pretty much expected. The pace at which his relationship was moving, we were aware of loosing him to someone who claim’s to love him more than us (that’s what her emails and cards to nakul claimed).

We never saw ‘Nakul’ so happy, he started blushing on people abused remarks “It is love or dove?”. We agreed to his declaration, though he never asked our opinion. And the same weekend he moved to a lavish flat in ‘Dollars Colony’. Though we were ready with our advices without-a-price and people in love need the most but it fell on deaf ears. I still had the guts to ask “Why Dollars Colony, it’s so expensive?” and I hear an unreasonable answer “She is fond of that area”. I somehow got myself convinced that love is not only blind, it is deaf and dumb as well.

But then when you never had so called success in ‘Love’, you have no rights to pass a judgment or ask a question. Otherwise your good friends might be nice enough not to say anything on your face while they avoid answering you, but you can hear them murmur “Khisiyani billi khambha noche”. So I zipped my widely opened mouth and kept quite while I loaded nakuls luggage on the ‘truck’. It included a big carton which read “handle with care”. On insistence he unfolded that carton carries “Her Highness” cards, gifts, chocolate wrappers, and also few piece of cloth, she kept forgetting intentionally in our flat. I remember how he even forgot to HUG before leaving but than friends are not meant to expect, esp. after someone get into a relation. F-r-i-e-n-d-s are only meant to listen to their love stories and sometime sob stories and give appropriate expression nothing more or less.

A cracker breaks my thoughts and I decide to take a ride to his place. No matter what happened to him over the last three months, today two facts stands valid one is that “His relationship is over” and another is “its time for friends to enter the stage” once again with shoulders, cheerful words, move-on lessons and some booze. I called nammo, if she is interested to join me and I get to hear that she is no more interested in handling “cry babies”. Its nothing new or surprising, she has been like this all her life and that’s what keeps her happy. Unlike us “I-have-a-shoulder” kind of people who are ready to be used like a tissue paper to wipe the tears and then are thrown out once its turn for another courtship. These are people who truly believe in love and assume that it’s their responsibility to keep falling in love so that love doesn’t become a part of some museum as extinct species.

Anyways I always assumed ‘Nakul’ to be one among them but this time its taking more than usual for him to get out of it and that’s what scares me. Sometime by mistake you actually fall in love, which might be a case with him. How sometimes these “I-am-very-practical” kinds off people also get trapped in these “emotional-games”. Let me put it otherwise Menka still exists; there are species on this earth who have capability of ruining Life. Whatever is the case, I am pretty proud of my consoling techniques and I have done wonders in the past, of getting people all of this “I-wanna-die-scenario”, so as I drove all the way to ‘Dollars Colony’ I recollected all possible consoling lines.

I pushed the latched door to realize that lock doesn’t work. The door board still read “Nuks and Niks” to be precise “Nakul and Nikita”. I wish I can call her and tell “you did delete him from your orkut and messenger list, do us a favor come and delete yourself from his flat and mind as well”. But there was no point, does she even cares?

Contd.