If it's not forever...it's not love

Diary part 3

'Deb?' A voice calls out from behind. It is Avantika. I always like her the best when she is half-sleepy and all messed up. That's when I feel the luckiest. Even when she is not at her best, she still is the best looking girl I have ever come across. I feel like the guy from the diary, looking at someone I love like a cowardly geek.
   It is 3AM in the night. I slept while reading the diary for the third time that night. The pages are now creased from where I had folded them. I have made some notes on my cell phone and some on little scraps of paper. They make no sense at all. I am very anxious and I cannot get what I had read out of my head. It is very disturbing, yet enamouring. All I know is that I have to find Ragini. The mysterious girl from the book, the girl who screwed up, the girl who has to know about this guy,RD, and his undying love for her.
   'Why did you get up?' I ask. I slip the diary behind me to avoid her from spotting it.
  'Won't you sleep?'
'I guess, I will,' I say and hug her. For the first time in the past few days, I feel sleepy. The images are still there in my head but there are blurring a little. Suddenly, my head is filled by images from the notes in that diary. The guy. His best friend. The pretty girl. The unfortunate sister. The inconsiderate guy. There are no faces in the pictures in my head, there are no places, but there is a story. The story of a person who is now dead. The dead guy left behind a story. A story that I have to make sense out of. It is incomplete and I cannot let it be that way. The girl has to know.
  I write for a living and every time I write a book,the only thing I look forward to is the ending. A book without an ending makes no sense. It is the same with this diary. It is incomplete. The first and the last few pages are burnt beyond recognition. Maybe they were all blank, but I want to know and I will find out. Even if they were blank, Ragini, the girl from the diary, needs to know about this guy's love for her! I hug Avantika that night and sleep like a baby.
  The next morning. I wake up with a start. I am clutching and grabbing around the bed for it. The diary.
    'What happened?' Avantika ask as she dusts her face with makeup. Not that she needs any. She looks better without it.
  'Nothing,' I say, not wanting to sound like a creep.
  She tells me that she has served the breakfast on the table and that she needs to rush. She is working very hard and I don't like her working her ass off. She should work her ass off for me...if you know what I mean. Anyway, she leaves and I get the diary from where I had hidden it. It almost draws me towards it. I turn over the pages I have already read thrice by now.
   I finish my breakfast and rush to the office. I take an cab  and it takes the same route it had taken that day. For a second, I feel like getting down and walking around place where I found the diary, but I decided against it. I have horrendous images in my head of this guy burning to dead. I do not want them to get more vivid. I can almost feel him around me, asking me,'So, now that you have read my diary, what will you do about it?'
     There is a lot of pending work in office and Shrey is going to meet that someone from The Times again. It's strange to see him go for a second date. Maybe he's taking his work very seriously. He is working too hard this time. He leaves me with a few manuscript to go through. But none of them interest me.
  I have already found the perfect manuscript. It is on my desk – the diary. The only problem is that it doesn't have an end. The last few pages are either missing or it just ended abruptly. Ever since I read it, all my mental energies have been diverted to it's content. It is nothing phenomenal, but the sheer circumstance around it is so powerful. What lay in my desk was someone's dying words. Could a story be more perfect?
   There were some books that I had written before I started my own publishing house and they have done well, but I don't write much now.
  I pick up the diary and flip over the pages. The writing is ornate, slow, and deliberated. It hardly seems like a guy has written it. I guess the guy always wanted to show this diary to Ragini. The writing is too pretty to not show off.
  I like this guy. He's creepy, but he isn't that creepy. I have tried to decode everything that's there in the diary and made notes on a sheet of paper. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with the major parts there but all the tiny critical parts are missing. No city, no names, no address, no phone numbers. It looks like someone is playing with me. The question keep troubling me.
  My mind create s this mental image of a guy madly in love with a very pretty girl. It feels so picture perfect. But as I feel the burnt edges of the diary, I feel unsettled. His hands were blown off from this diary. Somehow, I have assumed that this diary is about a guy who doesn't get his girl and that's why he carried it around. It makes perfect sense. If he was still with the girl when the blast took place, why would he keep the diary with him when he is out somewhere? But I have to consider both possibilities. What if both of them died together? Could it be that? What if this was their last remembrance they left behind? Of all the people, I get the diary.
   I Google news result of the Chandni Chowk blasts. The death count is rising. It's now one twenty seven dead and fifty seven injured. Initially, there were three hospitals that all the blast victims were transferred to. I call up the first hospital. I pose as someone from the media and take down the names of twenty three people who had died there. After the third hospital, I realized it's futile.
   'Can you give me the names?' I ask from the disinterested guy on the other side of the phone.
  There should have been twenty nine names listed in the third hospital. He gives me three names.
   'The rest? Twenty nine more people should be on the list. I call all the hospitals and have got just ninety eight names,' I say.
'People get transferred to different hospital within hours of when they get here. Some of them are reported, some of them are not,' he answers.
   I pester him to give me more details but he says he can't help me. Overeager and scared relatives transfer patients to better, private hospitals as soon as possible. So, the number of people dead is reported on an estimate basis. I hang up, fuming, not knowing what to do next. The tease was thrilling, but now, it's annoying. I want to know who the fuck this RD is. I am pretty sure he is dead, but I want it in writing.
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