Truly, Madly, Deeply- a Devakshi story.

Dev- the five lost years.

Out of my life!

It was night again, he realized as he happened to glance out of the window. He grimaced as he sat up straighter on his chair. He had again worked through the day driving himself hard, his new mantra was Prioritize everything. His team was already at the end of its tether, even though they discussed his current mood with sympathy, amongst themselves. Everyone understood his desire to work himself into oblivion everyday so he could get through his day as painlessly as possible. But as a boss he was impossible. And Tina found herself flooded by complaints about the boss's tyranny all day long. However being the loyal subordinate she was she acted like a meta-filter and only the most urgent ever found its way to him.

Dev hated nights now, feared the insomnia that even increased doses of sleep pills would not erase completely. Oh there was so much that Dev hated now. He hated coming back to the room where he had lived with her, he couldn't bear to look into the kitchen because he would always imagine she would be at the counter, absorbed in her notes.

 Of course his mother had quickly eradicated everything that could remind her son of his wife. All her clothes, her jewelry, her cosmetics, her pictures,everything had been removed one morning and in the evening he returned to his room, as it was, before he got married. But what could Ishwari know about the millions of memories that cut and stabbed his heart and soul every moment of the day. She was an old woman and thought that time, the great healer would help Dev get over his pain. She thought that with her patience and love, her son would soon go back to being the loving obedient son that he was. Little did she know her son, her Dev, was no longer there.

He had not accounted for the way her perfume remained embedded in the wardrobe he had shared with her, her bottle of lotion stuck in the back of the washroom cupboard, the notes she had made of his mother's recipes of food he liked, the bed where no matter how many times the bed sheet was changed, he could always smell her familiar smell. 

Just on the very day, he would think he had finally managed to bring back his thoughts under control, he would find one of her love notes, all the endearments she called him in private, written in her handwriting, tucked into his blazer pocket; or he would find the copy of Vikram Seth's love sonnets which they had been reading together, tucked under the bed; or he would find the romantic voice mails he sent to her when he was away outside Delhi and missing her; or the carefully dried flowers which he had proposed to her with, pressed between the pages of her medical tomes; or his handkerchief on which she had written an explicit love message in lipstick (as her revenge for embarrassing her in front of her parents), which had made him blush in the middle of a meeting; or the torn paper in which they had once listed every thing they hated about the other and saw that Sona had written only one word-"Nothing"- everything was torture for him.

Sona used to gift him something every month for their monthly anniversary and the pre-booked gift arrived for him, in time for their fifth month anniversary, only, by then she had already left him. He sat for ages with that paper-weight, a piece of petrified wood in brown, purple and blue overtones and yellow and green streaks, a million years old wood, from the forests of Java, now ecased in clear glass with his initials etched out in silver metal. He wanted to throw that paperweight away so that it would crash into a million pieces. But he could not, because he knew that was the last gift he would ever receive from her. She had taught him that every anniversary had a special gift linked to it and she had planned to gift him monthly anniversaries till the 100th month. He had laughed at her and also felt so entranced by how everything was so special for her, how special he was to her. The fifth anniversary gift was supposed to be wood. He also knew that this would have cost her entire salary to order. He asked her again in his mind, "Why did you leave me then? How did this turn to hate?"