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Instead you type out a letter to the Institute.
Sometimes you have to run away from a situation to protect yourself and you know you are doing just that. You do not have a choice. He has left you no choice.
42
That night, in the semi-darkness of her flat where they had spent the whole evening talking, Atharv gently pulled Koyal to him. Koyal wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.
Atharv had brought up the old question again, in vain.
‘Why did you leave, Koyal?’ he had asked.
Koyal just shook her head and said nothing.
Atharv stared down at Koyal now, unable to get the letter out of his mind.
‘Koyal Jayakrishna,’ Atharv said and when Koyal looked up, startled, he realized what he had just said. Red-faced, he corrected himself. ‘Koyal Raje … I mean.’
Koyal Jayakrishna.
Koyal repeated the name silently to herself, again and again. Life, she thought to herself, could be blissfully intoxicating if you have someone to love.
Yet when Atharv covered her face and neck with the softest kisses, Koyal found herself putting a cautionary hand on his chest. Atharv paused, pulled Koyal’s face up at him, stared into her fearful eyes. He understood. He leaned closer and said, ‘What Amit did was wrong, Koyal. He deserves to be behind bars for it. In no way, no way, was that your fault,’ he said, meaning every word.
Did Atharv know more than she thought he did, Koyal wondered for one mad minute, but then she shook her head. That wasn’t possible.
‘Anything we do tonight, or ever, that you don’t like, just say it and I will stop,’ Atharv said.
Koyal stared into the most earnest eyes she had ever seen and felt that her heart would burst with the immensity of the love she felt.
When Atharv unzipped her top, lifted it off her head and whi
spered a cheeky ‘Am I allowed to look now?’ she couldn’t help but laugh and blush at the same time.
And when Atharv took off his shirt to reveal a chiselled torso and mumbled, ‘I never said you could look,’ Koyal playfully boxed him in the gut.
And when dawn broke, Koyal, her limbs entwined with those of a sleeping Atharv, looked out of the window with a wide smile on her face.
She turned to face Atharv, and rested her chin on his chest. She had never felt this happy.
She realized for the first time how beautiful a touch could be, how a kiss could make you feel, and how peaceful it was to wake up next to the man you loved more than anyone else in the world.
Atharv stared at the bag left on his table and shook his head. That girl was becoming more and more careless by the minute, he thought. Koyal had offered to pick up Atharv’s Mac that he had, by mistake, left at the hospital. As she had just left, Atharv grabbed her bag and dashed out of the room, hoping to catch her, tripped on the curb and fell with a crash.
All the contents of the bag spilled on the road and Atharv was hastily stuffing things back in when his eyes fell on a crumpled piece of paper.
He smoothed out the paper. A letter.
His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the name at the bottom.
Amit.
It was a letter from Amit to Koyal. Atharv had asked Koyal about her meeting with Amit and she had spoken in great detail about the stinging slap she had administered across his ‘pig-like face’. Atharv had hooted with laughter at the description and not asked for any more details.
But now, a letter.
Atharv wondered why his heart was thumping as he began to read. A little voice told him that this was personal correspondence and he shouldn’t be reading it, but the voice gradually faded into silence.
Dear Koyal,
