THE NEIGHBOURHOOD ROMANCE

Chapter 16

Chapter – 16

            The London office of Skyhawk Airlines was busy with the meetings to finalise the deals. But among all these official challenges, Aryan was facing another challenge in his heart. The challenge of his happiness. The dumb man couldn’t understand that what was the reason behind the turmoil going inside him? He was unable to concentrate on any of the works he had himself assigned to. He was too much disturbed, as Pakhi had left him. He didn’t know how to explain her that he needed her. Finally unable to take the pressure too much he stopped for the day and left for his apartment.

He took a shower and put on the TV to hear the news headlines. In between all the business news, there was particularly a news that attracted his attention. The news was of a cultural show held in Mumbai, a fundraiser for the children suffering due to cancer. The people who went to see the show praised the writer of the romantic drama. It was put on by Romantic Veil. Pakhi SinhaRoy was indeed talented whose writing was now taking the national stage. Aryan put off the TV; it was making him remember the empty space in his heart. He compared the two different worlds from which they belonged. Pakhi; the ever-imaginative girl, and Aryan; always struggling in the harsh reality. Two persons being poles apart yet felt that they were linked soul to soul. As he kept on thinking, he got more and more confused about how to get out of these maze.

            To divert his mind Aryan took out some business magazines from his suitcase and a small book fell from the bundle. He had taken the book from Pakhi’s room. The book of Romeo and Juliet. The story he had mocked throughout his life, but was the only one love story he had read. He had read it three times and yet couldn’t understand the meaning. Pakhi had marked her favourite lines with a red pen. He opened the book read the lines again and again. And this time he understood the meanings through his own memorable times spent with Pakhi.

“Did my heart love till now? For swear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.” It made him remember the first night he made love to Pakhi.“My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy.” True, Pakhi used to hate him and regarded him as her enemy, but still she had fallen in love with him and that love he knew was unconditional.“For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Some love stories never got the desired end but still it created epic. Love was something that could never be created, it just happened. And that’s when Aryan realised and got the way out of the unexplained maze of his head. He was also unconditionally in love with the bird. He smiled and laughed, for he had never thought that the answer to his turmoil would be solved by reading a love story. The stories that he once loathed, had now solved the biggest crisis of his life. It was love. There was no other name for this feeling. Yes! Pakhi was the girl for whom he could go to the extent just like Romeo.

            He took out his phone and was about to call Pakhi when Tina’s name flashed on his phone screen, “Aryan, I need to talk to you.” Tina’s voice sounded tensed. His forever cheerful sister was tensed? What was going on? “Tina, what happened?” he asked. “There is a news for you,” she said.

“Come to the point Tina, what is it?”

“Fine! You want me to come to the point, well here is it – Pakhi is getting married.” He couldn’t believe his ears. For one moment he thought his sister must be joking but the tension in Tina’s voice was saying something else. When he didn’t utter a single word she got irritated and shouted over the phone, “You screwed everything! Now stay in London and get a new girl, for the one girl who loved you, not because of your bank balances and ever expanding assets, but because she found her true lover in you, will now be leaving you forever.” The ‘leaving’ word jerked him back from his shock, “Tina, listen, you have to do something to call off this wedding.”