When only love remains

One

Avanti

She measures each step, small and deliberate, and looks at her watch hoping time would stretch out indefinitely, locking her in the moment. Delhi University buses, the U-Specials as they are called, screech to a halt at the bus stops nearby and kids pour out, chattering, shouting, complaining and cursing. Music and strained guitar riffs blare from her pink Skullcandy earphones and yet she can’t concentrate on Devrat’s painful, screeching voice. She makes a mental note to get those noise cancellation earphones at half-price from an online retailer. But they don’t come in fluorescent pink or orange. Then she thinks that maybe it’s not the earphones, and attributes the sound to the decrepit studio in Kolkata in which Devrat must have recorded his music.

‘The Endless Road’.

It’s her favorite Devrat song and she listens to it on a loop every few days, staring in the distance while she does so, imagining herself to be playing a complex, interesting woman in a movie. She often scribbles down the lyrics on the margins of the books and notebooks she uses, but the words seem empty without Devrat’s broken voice and his imperfect guitar riffs. Devrat never does covers of songs sung by others; all his songs are fresh compositions and most of them are recorded on cell phones. He has been uploading his videos for the last five years.

She reaches the gates of her college to collect the receipt of her admission in a correspondence course. It’s her third day in Delhi and she already doesn’t like it. Going back home to a reserved, stammering, and absent-minded father aren’t really her idea of fun.

Avanti can’t wait for her job to start at Indiago Airlines as a flight attendant. Attending college, taking down notes, running after college professors and getting notes photocopied was never her calling. She was too pretty to score well and be confined to a cubicle.

There was a time she wanted to go to Xavier’s in Mumbai or Symbiosis in Pune. Back in Dehradun, where she grew up with her grandmother, she had heard great things about both the institutes. She wanted to be the one who zips around in a little pink scooter with her face wrapped like a terrorist or take an auto at three in the morning without the fear of getting raped. Being in Delhi and staying with her father was the last thing she ever wanted to do. But her grandmother forced her to shift out of her house in Dehradun where she had lived for the last twelve years, to move in with her father.

‘He needs you,’ she had insisted and she can seldom turn her grandmother down. Avanti hadn’t seen her father in a decade. She had grown up with her grandmother in Dehradun after her mother died in an accident when she was really young.

She spots a few guys looking in her direction and she shrugs it off. She turns up the volume on her iPod and Devrat’s voice blares into her ears. Devrat, the reclusive young singer, has always been Avanti’s savior, right from the first song he uploaded.

Avanti had a troubled childhood. She was only three when her mother passed away, and all of five years when she was put into a girl’s boarding school, a place her unsuspecting grandmother thought would be safe for her. Little did her grandmother know what would happen? The first few months were the worst. Little and lonely Avanti would be woken up by Warden Aunty and taken to the back alley of the library, every night for weeks at an end. She would be stripped and touched all over, and she would cry, she would wail, and the warden would ask her to stay shut or she would be caned the next day. Avanti, scared and crying, would bear everything.