Kapil left. He turned and walked away, a tired friend heading home after a long journey, leaving me standing in the wreckage of a world he had just demolished with a handful of words.
She asked you to forget her.
The sentence didn't just hang in the air. It displaced it. It created a vacuum, a perfect, soundless pocket of space where I stood. The evening sounds of Guduvancheri—the distant rumble of a train, the chirping of crickets in the overgrown reeds by the lake, the faint sizzle from the beef stall—all of it faded into a dull, irrelevant hum. My ears were filled with a high-pitched ringing, the sound of a system overload, the sound of my own heart flatlining.
I looked down at the greasy newspaper still clutched in my right hand. A smear of chili sauce looked like a bloody fingerprint on the Tamil script. My fingers were numb. My whole body was numb. It was the mind's final, desperate act of mercy: a full-system shutdown to protect the circuits from a surge they could not possibly handle.
The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the sky was a bruised palette of deep purple and a dying, angry orange. The lake, which had been a shimmering sheet of gold just minutes before, was now a dark, inscrutable mirror, reflecting the bruised sky back at itself. It looked cold. It looked deep.
I stood there for a full minute. Maybe five. Time had lost all meaning. I was a statue, a monument to the exact moment a boy's hope had finally, irrevocably died. My mind, in a state of shock, tried to process the command. Forget her. It was an absurd, impossible instruction. How do you forget a person who has become a fundamental part of your own mental architecture? It was like being asked to forget the color blue. It was like being told to forget how to breathe.
Parveen was not just a collection of memories; she was the lens through which I had viewed the world for the better part of a decade. She was the echo in my thoughts, the sarcastic counterpoint to my own seriousness. Forgetting her wouldn't just be removing a file from my brain; it would require a complete system wipe, a factory reset of my entire personality.
The numbness began to recede, and what rushed in to fill the void was a pain so vast and so absolute it felt physical. It was a crushing weight on my chest, a white-hot poker in my gut. My knees felt weak. I had to get out of there. I had to move. Standing still was to be consumed by it.
I dropped the newspaper. I turned and walked towards my scooter, each step a clumsy, disconnected movement. I was a puppet whose strings had just been cut.
I got on the scooter. The worn plastic of the seat felt alien beneath me. I put the key in the ignition, my hand moving with a strange, robotic detachment. I was watching myself from a great distance, a character in a sad, pathetic movie.
I twisted the key. The engine sputtered to life, its familiar, tinny roar suddenly sounding monstrously loud in the new, fragile silence of my world. I gripped the handlebars, my knuckles white.
And as I touched the accelerator, as the scooter lurched forward, it happened.
The thought wasn't a whisper. It was a scream, a klaxon blaring in the control room of my mind.
I am going to die.
It wasn't a suicidal ideation. It was a statement of fact. A sudden, terrifying certainty that my body was about to give out, that my heart was going to explode, that the world was going to end right here, right now, on this dusty road.
My vision tunneled. The streetlights on the periphery blurred into long, distorted streaks of yellow. A wave of dizziness washed over me, so powerful I thought I was going to fall. My chest tightened, a steel band constricting around my lungs, squeezing the air out. I couldn't breathe. I was gasping, but no air was getting in.
My hands, slick with a cold sweat, started to tremble uncontrollably. The scooter wobbled beneath me, a dangerous, unstable thing. The world was tilting, spinning, a nauseating kaleidoscope of light and shadow. This is it. A heart attack. An aneurysm. This is how it ends.
I slammed on the brakes. The scooter skidded to a halt, the back tire kicking up a cloud of dust. I ripped the key from the ignition and stumbled off the bike, my legs like jelly. I leaned against a concrete wall, my head pressed against the cool, rough surface, and gasped for air like a drowning man.
Panic. This was a panic attack. My mind knew the word, but the knowledge was useless. My body was convinced it was dying, and it had dragged my consciousness along for the terrifying, final ride. I slid down the wall, my back scraping against the concrete, and sat on the dusty pavement, my head between my knees, trying to force air into my traitorous lungs.
I didn't want to die. Not like this. The sheer, animal terror of the panic attack was a brutal, clarifying force. The quiet, peaceful allure of oblivion I had imagined on the rooftop months ago was a lie. This was the reality of the body fighting for its life, and it was ugly, and it was terrifying.
After a few eternal minutes, the wave began to recede. My breathing slowed from frantic gasps to ragged, shaky breaths. The steel band around my chest loosened its grip. The world stopped spinning. I was left trembling, drenched in sweat, and utterly, completely hollowed out.
I couldn't go home. I couldn't get back on that scooter. There was only one place my feet would take me. I stood up on unsteady legs and started walking back the way I had come. Back to the lake.
I didn't sit on a bench. I walked right to the water's edge, to a spot where the muddy bank gave way to a small, flat patch of stone. I sat down, my legs dangling just above the dark, murky water. It was almost 7:30 PM. The last vestiges of light were gone from the sky, and the moon, a pale, sickly crescent, had risen. Its weak light cast a shimmering, silver path across the black surface of the lake.
Across the water, I could see the lights of the flyover, cars and trucks moving like fireflies in the distance. To my left, the railway station was a blaze of white light, the occasional announcement a distorted, ghostly sound carried across the water. The world was alive with movement and purpose. And I was a single, motionless point of absolute despair.
I sat there, and I began the exercise. The one she had commanded of me. I began the act of forgetting.
I tried to picture her face, to summon the memory of her smile, and then to actively push it away. To delete the file. But the mind doesn't work like that. The harder I pushed, the more vivid the image became. I could see the exact way her eyes crinkled at the corners when she genuinely laughed. I could see the small scar above her left eyebrow from a childhood fall. Forgetting wasn't a deletion. It was an act of violence against my own memory, and my memory was fighting back.
So I tried a different tactic. I would let the memories come, but I would try to strip them of their meaning.
Eighth grade. Her poking me in the ribs. "What's the matter, huh?" It wasn't the start of a decade-long connection. It was just a girl being annoying to a boy. Nothing more.
Twelfth grade. Her laughing at my jokes on a video call. It wasn't a moment of pure, unadulterated joy. It was just two bored teenagers killing time during a pandemic. It meant nothing.
The workshop. The feeling of being an old couple. It wasn't a glimpse into a beautiful alternate reality. It was a brief, awkward reunion between two people who had grown apart. The feeling was a lie, a projection of my own desperate hope.
I went through it all, every significant moment, every shared secret, every inside joke, and I systematically murdered it. I took the vibrant, colorful tapestry of our shared history and I bleached it, draining it of all emotion, all significance, until it was just a collection of gray, meaningless data points.
And when I was done, I felt… nothing. Just a vast, silent, echoing emptiness. I had succeeded. I had killed the story. I had honored her request. I had forgotten her. And in doing so, I had forgotten myself. Because every one of those memories, every one of those moments, was a brick in the foundation of the person I had become. And I had just pulled them all out, one by one.
I wanted to die. Not in the panicked, terrified way I had on the scooter. This was a quiet, rational desire. A calm, reasoned conclusion. The pain of living in this new, hollowed-out reality was a prospect I could not bear. My story was over. The protagonist had been erased. All that was left was to close the book.
But I just sat there. I sat there for an hour, watching the moon's reflection tremble on the water. My body, the same stubborn, traitorous body that had refused to jump off the roof, refused to move now. It just sat, and it breathed. In and out. A slow, steady rhythm. The dumb, biological machine, insisting on its own function, even after the operator had abandoned his post.
It was almost 8:30 PM when I finally stood up. My legs were stiff, my back ached. The profound, existential despair had receded, not replaced by hope, but by a profound, bottomless exhaustion. I was too tired to feel pain. I was too tired to feel anything.
I walked back to my scooter. This time, there was no panic. There was nothing. I was a shell, an automaton going through the motions. I drove home, my movements precise and careful, my mind a perfect, silent blank.
I walked into my house. The smell of my mother's cooking filled the air. The sound of the TV was a dull murmur from the living room.
"Arjun? Is that you?" my mom called out. "Come, dinner is ready."
I walked into the kitchen. The plate was already on the table. Rice, sambar, a vegetable curry. It was food. Fuel. Nothing more.
I sat down and I ate. I chewed and I swallowed. I could not taste it.
My mother watched me, her brow furrowed with a concern she couldn't articulate. "Are you okay? You look pale."
"Tired," I said. The word was a reflex. My one and only line in this new, terrible play. "Long day with Kapil."
She nodded, but she didn't look convinced.
I finished my plate. I washed it in the sink. I walked to my room. I closed the door. I changed my clothes. I got into bed. I turned off the light.
I didn't cry. I didn't think. I just lay there, in the darkness, feeling the weight of the blanket on my body.
My heart would give out, I had thought by the lake. But it hadn't. It was still there, in my chest, stubbornly, stupidly, beating. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The dumb, relentless engine of a life I no longer wanted to live.
And then, for the first time in a very long time, there was nothing. Just the darkness. And the quiet. And I slept.