He scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper and kept it on
the table.'If you are ever in Dumraon and need anything, let me know.
It's unlikely you will ever come, but still...' He stood up, instantly
dwarfing me, and walked to the door. *
'Madhav,' I called out after him, 'you forgot the journals. Please
take them with you.'
'I told you I don't need them.'
'So why are you leaving them here?'
'Because I can't throw them away. You can.'
Before I could answer, he stepped out, shut the door and left. It
took me a few Seconds to realize what had happened.
I picked up the journals and ran out of the room, but the sole working lift had just gone down. I could have taken the stairs and
caught him in time but, after a long day, I didn't have tjie energy to do
that.
I came back to my room, irritated by his audacity. Dumping the
notebooks and the slip with his phone number in the dustbin, I sat on
the bed, a little unsettled, I can't let someone I just met get the better
of me, I thought, shaking my head. I switched off the lights and lay
down. I had to catch an early-morning flight to Mumbai the next day
and had a four-hour window of sleep. I couldn't wait to reach home.
However, I couldn't stop thinking about my encounter with the
mysterious Madhav, Who was this guy? The words 'Dumraon'
,
'Stephen's' and 'Delhi'floated around in my head. Questions popped
up: What the hell is a half-girlfriend? And why do l have a dead girl's
journals in my room?
Eyes wide open, l lay in bed, staring at the little flashing red light
from the smoke detector on the ceiling, The journals bothered me.
Sure, they lay in the dustbin. However, something about those torn
pages, the dead person and her half-boyfriend, or whoever he was,
intrigued me. Don't go there, I thought, but my mind screamed down
its own suggestion: Read just one page.
'Don't even think about it,
'I said out loud. But thirty minutes later,
I switched on the lights in my room, fished out the journals from the
dustbin and opened the first volume. Most pages were too damaged to
read. I tried to make sense of what I could.
The first page dated back nine years to 1 November 2002. Riya had
written about her fifteenth birthday. One mere page, I kept thinking. I
flipped through the pages as I tried to find another readable one. 1
read one more section, and then another. Three hours later, I had read
whatever could be read in the entire set.
The room phone rang at 5 a.m., startling me.
'Your wake-up call, sir,
'the hotel operator said.
'I am awake, thank you,
'I said, as I'd never slept at all. I called Jet
Airways.