Freakishly Faithful - Chapter 4 : From Dawn to Dusk

This next part is only somewhat based on facts. It has been recreated from bits and pieces of stuff Karan told me years ago. Since I wasn’t there when the following stuff happened, I have had to give it a largely fictional touch.

Part 4

Karan stood outside Akruti’s bedroom door, staring at the chipped off paint near the door knob. He was turning over in his mind everything Mo had said to him just a couple of hours earlier, and the look she had in her eyes when she let him into the apartment five minutes ago. Mo stood behind him, a few feet away. They said nothing. She just looked at him, and felt the pain of a lump in her throat. She liked Karan, she’d always thought he was a nice guy. And she was glad to see him now. It was all she could do to deal with the situation herself, and she didn’t know how much longer she could go on alone.

The silence was eerie, broken by the measured ticks of a wall clock hanging directly above the door where Karan stood. He was afraid to open the door, afraid of what he might see. He was suddenly aware of Mo’s presence just behind him. He could hear her breathing. He tried to concentrate on the faint whiff of the perfume she was wearing, as if his mind was shutting out the impending task by focussing on trifles. She put her hand on his shoulder and he shuddered. He looked back and saw tears in her eyes. “Please,” was all she could say.

Karan turned the knob and pushed the door back. As he stepped into the room, a wash of an acrid odour hit him like a pillow in the face. He froze, realising with horror that the stench was only too familiar. He hadn’t smoked hasish since he’d gone into rehab, but the memory takes its time to die out. The room was dimly lit, and was filled with the smoke of several joints. As his eyes focused in the gloom, he could discern a half eaten barbequed chicken pizza, several empty cigarette packs and a few photo albums littered all over the floor, and numerous empty bottles of alcohol. In the far corner of the room, next to a messy bed, sat a figure all huddled up. Her hands were wrapped around her knees which were drawn up to her body, and her head was on her knees, hiding her face from view. She was rocking restlessly, and her breathing was short and erratic.

Karan looked at Akruti, hardly able to believe that it was her. He knew her to be very tidy and hygienic, but the macabre atmosphere in the room suggested something very different. “So, what I’ve heard about her is true, then,” he thought, “She has gotten pretty fucked up.” He took a few steps towards her, and stopped at the sound of broken glass that crunched under his shoes. At the sound she looked up, and he saw her face for the first time in six months. Her eyeliner had streaked all over her cheeks with her tears, and her skin had taken on an anaemic whiteness, which made the contrast all the more gruesome. She gave him a chilling smile, and set her head on her knees once again.

“A… Akruti,” said Karan, hardly above a whisper. “What have you done to yourself? Why?”

For answer, she giggled like a school girl who’s noticed a boy’s trouser zipper open.

Karan found his voice. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you bloody crazy? People are worried sick about you. For God’s sake, look at yourself!” She stopped rocking, but kept her head down. Karan decided to take a more tender approach. “I can’t bear to see you like this Akruti. None of us can. We all care for you, ya. Come on, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself.”

“You care, huh?” she said without looking at him. “You seemed to care a lot more about her yesterday on that bench outside the canteen.” Karan remembered sitting on the katta outside the Symbi Food Court, laughing with MJ and holding her hand. He realised that Akruti must have seen him and MJ together. And it had been Valentine’s Day. Fuck!

“Does it feel good to hold her, Karan?” she went on. “Does she make you feel warm all over?”

“Don’t be like that, Akruti,” said Karan, “it’s not like that.”

“Oh, really? Then who is it, if it isn’t her,” her voice hardened. “Tell me, Karan. You can’t be alone, so who is it? Is it me?” He could hear her softly sobbing, but he felt powerless to stop it. His voice was dry, strained, “Nobody. There’s nobody, Akruti.”

“Why didn’t you call, Karan? For so many months, why didn’t you call?” she sobbed.

“What did you expect me to do, Akruti?” Karan cried out, “You treated me like shit! You knew how much you meant to me, yet you refused to be mine. In front of all my friends in the NCC canteen, you flung lemonade into my face. You embarrassed the fuck out of me that day. Did you expect me to come crawling back after that?”

Her sobs became uncontrollable now. Karan stopped; he realised that it wasn’t the best time for either of them to be reviving painful memories. He walked up to her and crouched. “Look,“ he said, “just forget all that. Right now you have to snap out of it. I…”

Suddenly Akruti lunged at Karan with a small pen-knife in her hand. The move took Karan completely by surprise, and before he could grab her hands, she had cut him on his chest. In a state of shock he held her hands tightly by the wrists for a few minutes. In the dimness, he saw a malevolence in her eyes, while she screamed, “You don’t love me, you love her!” When he came to his senses, he realised that she wasn’t putting up much of a fight, that she wasn’t trying to cut him with the knife anymore. He looked at her arms and saw all the places where she had cut herself. Her wrists were bandaged, and the wounds seemed to have reopened. “Drop it, “ he said, and the knife plinked onto the floor. The hate in her eyes was replaced by a look of utter remorse and she collapsed into his arms, weeping pitifully and continually saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

He held her to himself, and he felt like he was holding a complete stranger. This shivering, weeping maniac was not his Akruti, the one he had fallen so deeply in love with. But he knew she was in there somewhere, and that only he could get her out. He felt he knew what he had to do, even if he hated to bring himself to admit it. He had to be by her side, see her through this mess. There was no telling what she would do next.

He held her tighter and closed his eyes. “No,” he whispered, “I’m sorry.” But he realised he hadn’t spoken to her. In his heart, he knew that he had just apologised to MJ.