The night had already settled into its usual rhythm at Carpe Diem, Park Street—dim lights, glasses clinking, music dissolving into conversations that meant everything and nothing at once. I wasn’t alone, though solitude often sits beside me like a familiar ghost. Across the table sat Abhay Chaudhary, a man who had, over time, become both presence and paradox in my life.
Then my phone rang.
A video call. Unknown.
I answered.
A woman appeared—eyes swollen, voice trembling, her breath breaking between words. “I got molested by your boyfriend,” she said.
The sentence didn’t land immediately. It hovered, detached, like it belonged to someone else’s story.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I replied.
Before she could respond, Abhay leaned closer, curiosity sharpening his expression. I turned the screen toward him. “This is Abhay,” I told her. “He’s my living partner. Is he the one?”
She shook her head. “Not this one. The previous one.”
Previous.
The word echoed strangely, as if it were trying to unlock a door I couldn’t see.
Abhay insisted I continue the conversation. He has always been that way—probing, unafraid to peel back layers I would rather leave untouched. But there was one problem: I couldn’t recall what she was referring to. My past, at least parts of it, felt like a book with pages torn out—deliberately or otherwise.
I met Abhay one and a half years ago at The Lord and Baron, also on Park Street. I remember that night clearly, or at least more clearly than most things before it. I was nursing my drink when he waved at me, uninvited, unapologetic. An engineer by profession, he doesn’t live in Kolkata, though the city becomes his temporary anchor—and I, in some ways, become his. For reasons I choose not to disclose, he drifts in and out of my life, sometimes physically present, often virtually tethered.
I am, in a strange arrangement, both his landlady and his refuge.
The first conversation we had was anything but ordinary.
“What’s your name?” he had asked.
“Why is it your business?” I shot back.
He smiled—not dismissively, but knowingly. “Because I won’t abandon you like your boyfriend did.”
I showed him my thumb in response, unimpressed.
“Short-tempered,” he observed.
That caught my attention. Observation, when done right, is a form of intimacy.
“What do you want?” I asked him then.
His answer was as direct as it was unsettling. “I want you to fall on your knees for me.”
“A lady of decency doesn’t fall on her knees,” I replied.
“And a man of culture doesn’t let her regret her decisions,” he countered.
That was the beginning.
Not romance—never romance. Something else. A connection that didn’t ask for labels but thrived on tension. He was blunt, even crude at times, asking for things I refused to give. Yet, somewhere in that push and pull, a dynamic formed—unspoken, undefined. A strange balance of dominance and resistance, care and defiance.
I asked for something in return once. Not love, not promises—just care, assurance, a certain lifestyle of emotional steadiness. He agreed. And in his own way, he has kept that agreement.
But my past? That remained a void.
He has asked me countless times over the last year to tell him everything about myself. And every time, I failed—not because I was hiding, but because I genuinely couldn’t retrieve it. It was as if my heart had split long ago—half melted into something unrecognizable, the other half evaporated entirely.
So when Sreya appeared on that screen, crying, accusing someone I once knew, it should have shaken me.
Perhaps it did.
But not in the way she expected.
She urged me to file an FIR, to bring justice, to punish the man who had wronged her—and, allegedly, me. She wanted solidarity, outrage, action.
Instead, I found myself detached.
“I don’t report people,” I told her calmly. “I recognize patterns and move on.”
It wasn’t indifference. It was choice.
Everyone carries darkness. Some confront it, others bury it. I have chosen to bury mine—not out of weakness, but out of a refusal to let it dictate the course of my life. This is one life. And I refuse to spend it chasing retribution for things I can no longer even fully remember.
Her pain was real. I didn’t deny that.
But empathy does not always translate into participation.
“One must learn from it or suffer a lifetime,” I said before ending the call.
The line went silent.
So did the space between Abhay and me.
As we walked toward the exit, the noise of the pub fading behind us, I reached for his hand—not out of need, but out of acknowledgment. Of presence. Of reality.
He held it, then looked at me with an unfamiliar uncertainty.
“I thought I knew you the first day I met you,” he admitted. “But I don’t.”
I didn’t respond.
Because perhaps, neither do I.
.
Tiyasha Khanra
Picture Nick Victor
.