Too Close, Yet Too Far

Chapter 5

After a few seconds of shock, he shakes himself into reality and realizes that it is not Tanya but just a kid with grey eyes.  The kid was looking up at him in awe, the savior who they said had given them food and bought them clothes.  The man who was the reason he got chocolates after every meal.

And Jaden moved back to his home in Delhi.  But this time he wasn't alone; he had taken the kid with him.  Apart from the charity, he started to spend his days teaching young James, and watching him grow.  A son.  For once, Jaden was a happy middle-aged man and one rainy evening, like many others of its kind, he found himself thinking  of the past.  And the memory of that shocking Tuesday afternoon barged in all of a sudden.  That sudden urge to speak to people we hadn't given so much as a thought in a while, paid him a visit too and he collected Layah's phone number from a mutual friend he knew from college.   After a long conversation, they decided to meet.  And soon enough, she was back in Delhi and the two friends had a second meeting.

"Do you want to know something that would break you? Or leave it at that and be happy?" Layah asked after a while.  That was the thing with Layah.  She always believed that people ought to know.

Deciding that he had gone through enough by then and that he could handle whatever Layah was about to tell him, Jaden asked her to continue.

"It's too much to hear at once but since you would like to know I'll tell you.  Everything was perfect but life decided to test her again.  Tanya was pregnant and she wanted the baby even though she knew it would be a huge toll on her.  Her illness worsened and it turned out that her husband Ryan was a fraud who was after her money and he left her when she was pregnant with their daughter.

"As she struggled to survive and I was not in a good financial condition myself, I advised her to contact you.  Now I realize how absurd that was but I forced her then.  She told me that it wouldn't be right to do so and was angry with me.  Due to this, she stopped contacting me though I tried a lot.  It was two years later that we met in US.  And…."

"What? Continue," urged Jaden as anger boiled up inside him.  That bastard of a man.

"Well, the reason I left quickly was that her doctor who I know through a mutual friend had texted me saying that her condition was critical.  Before I could reach Mumbai, she had….."

Jaden felt something cold go down his spine.  He clutched the sides of his chair and gaped at Layah.  So when they had had the reunion, she was - he gulped the word.

"But I had talked to her neighbors in Delhi.  They told me she had moved to Mumbai with Ryan," he said when he finally found his voice.

"She never returned to Delhi after her parents' deaths and didn't have contact with her neighbors," said Layah.  "I couldn't even attend her funeral.  That was when my mom was undergoing a treatment in US….", she added after a pause.  It seemed more like she said that to herself and not to Jaden.

"Where's her daughter now?" asked Jaden.

"Died soon after her birth.  I came to know only on her second death anniversary through the doctor's Facebook post.  That was after Tanya also had….  I couldn't even be of help when her daughter…."  The sentence ended in sobs.  And this time too, she sounded like it was herself she was talking to.  In the silence that followed, she picked up a pen and scribbled on a torn bit of paper, her thoughts chugging somewhere far away.  "Tiara." So that was the name.  Her daughter's.

Jaden's thoughts ran wild.  He wanted to do something.  Anything.  For Tanya.  But where was she?  What good would it do? He tried to block his thoughts and patted Layah with every bit of effort he could muster.  It's alright to mourn the dead but it's more important to comfort the living.

Jaden tried hard to understand that he was not destined to have his life entwined with hers.  With this realization, Layah and Jaden returned to their own lives.  Nobody could figure out who found it harder - one was consumed by regret, the other by loss.

Layah took him to the graveyard of the church near Tanya's home in Mumbai.  Thank God the apartment was in her name, thought Jaden, otherwise she would have been homeless in this busy city when the bastard left her.
And they kneel in front of the two graves - one big and the other too small for one to believe that someone that young had died.  And for once in his life, he spent more than 15 minutes with her.

Heart full of spite for Ryan, Jaden settles with James, back in their home in Delhi, the old house ringing with James' laughter and excited talks.  He spent the rest of his life as the father to a son he never had. 

And every year, Jaden visited the graveyard with James who had only vaguely heard about an aunt and a kid who would have been his friend if she was alive.  A kid with whom he had shared his mother's womb.

~ THE END ~