Nikhil and I had been dating for two years in school before we moved to Delhi for college. Initially, everything was pretty as a picture, even though we were both in different colleges. But slowly, he started to distance himself from me. This change was very weird for me because in this new city I was hoping to have him by my side, as a friend and a lover. One day, we had planned to go out on a date but he called and cancelled three hours before we were supposed to meet. The reason? He had to study. I didn’t argue about this but in the evening when I was heading back home, I saw him…with another girl!
I knew this girl. She was his classmate and he had introduced us to each other before. However, the fact that he had cancelled on me to study and now he was taking a stroll with this girl made me really hurt. Seething in anger, I confronted him about this later that night and that is when he confessed. He told me that he actually liked that girl, and they had been seeing each other for a month and he would like to break up with me.
The next three months of my life were tough. I found myself alone, without any real friends. I used to spend most of my time in my PG, sulking and crying. What Nikhil did to me was unbelievable. After all the time we’d spent together, this is how he decided to end things. The worst part was since we shared a campus, I would often see the two of them sitting in a rickshaw together or at a coffee shop. So I stepped out only when I really needed to, trying to avoid this situation altogether.
Then one night, Nikhil called me. He started off with small talk before saying, ‘I really did not want things to turn out this way. I’m really sorry’. That was enough to bring tears to my eyes… ‘I don’t believe you did this to me, Nikhil. After everything, you left me alone just when I needed you’, I replied. ‘Listen… I really miss you. You know I do. I really want to be friends with you again and move past this. Please let’s meet once’. I considered asking him to back off and never talk to me again but something inside me made me say yes to his request. Maybe I still needed to see him, to see if I could ever get closure. So, we decided to meet. My tears hadn’t even dried up yet when my phone rang again, it was an unknown number, I picked up.
‘Hi. This is Riya. Nikhil’s girlfriend.’ came the voice from the other side. I could feel the blood pumping faster in my veins. What was happening? My ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend was calling me?!
‘Yes?’, I asked.
‘I don’t understand why you’re calling Nikhil up and asking him to meet you. Don’t you understand that the two of you are over?’ she said.
‘I’m sorry what? I am calling him?’ There were so many things going in my head at that moment but most of all, I wanted to plant a huge slap right across her face.
‘Yes. You need to understand when it’s time to move on and in case you don’t, I’m telling you now that it’s time you leave us alone’. And with that, she hung up the phone. I was feeling a multitude of emotions at that time. I was angry, I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream! I could not believe that this new girl had the audacity to say all those things to me. I sat there for five minutes before I decided, I was not going to take this sitting down. So, I called her back.
‘Yeah?’ she said after picking up.
‘Hi. I am Sonali. Nikhil’s ex-girlfriend. In case you’ve been believing the lies your boyfriend is telling you, I want you to know that I did not call him. Neither did I ask him to meet me. I have my call log to prove that. So maybe, you should take this up with him. And while you’re at it, tell him that if either you or he ever try to contact me again, things will not be as clean’. And with that, I hung up and switched off my phone. It was a weird kind of liberation. I cried for a while before I started watching Two And A Half Men again and kept watching till late in the night.
The next morning when I woke up, I had four unread messages from Nikhil, all of them stating how selfish I was for telling his girlfriend about him calling, how I had ruined any friendship that they could have. I read each and every word with a calming numbness before deleting them all.
I did not just attend all my classes that day but decided to hang around and make new friends. I guess sometimes you just can’t tell how people will change, maybe they don’t know it themselves. So the best you can do is to know when to give a second chance and when to end the chapter.
*Names changed to protect privacy
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