Have been getting your messages since last night. It would be great if you sent them to me from ICQ coz then I can immediately reply from my mobile. ICQ allows that. My ICQ number is 165053476. Sandy’s coming?? He’ll come to Calcutta for sure, right? Yipee!

My birthday was surprisingly quite nice . . . I woke up gloomy and wanted to forget that I have just three years before I hit thirty. Had a good cry and listened to Smashing Pumpkins. But I was not allowed to forget it at all.

Javed sent me flowers and planned a surprise cake-and-candle affair in the evening. I wasn’t expecting that at all so it was rather nice.

What are you doing today?

Ciao,

A.

Then, the email that came in reply to Angad’s pleas for a reunion:

I’ve told you again and again I have a new life here. I have left everything from last year behind. Things change and keep changing.

In the last two months I have met someone who has helped me regain my will to live and I have come to depend on him enormously.

I have learnt a great deal about myself and my needs. The more I understand and face up to the kind of person I am the more I realize that what we had is over. We cannot and will not be able to regain what we had; the consequences of that can only be as devastating as they were last year. I cannot afford to take another risk.

My youth is tied up with yours; it always will be. Nothing can touch that. As adults we have become two separate people who cannot fulfil each other’s needs.

I guess something has changed in you to want decisions like this now but please let this be very clear—nothing has changed for me. I am secure in my world in Calcutta . . . my job, my friends, and I do not want it to change.

I once dreamed of a family that you and I would create. Of a small house, of aspirations realized in love and in work, of peace in each other’s arms. But life is a bitter pill to swallow and sometimes things do not work out the way we would like them to.

This dream of mine is broken, Angad, and I do not have the faith to begin it again.

Angad read until the lines went all watery and disappeared from the page. He could read no more. The lights were going out in his head. When the booze finished he threw the bottle into the middle of the road and watched it smash. The noise brought the dogs out. They growled at him; he growled back. One mangy, brown-and-white specimen decided to follow him. Angad chucked the letters on the road and watched them being dragged along in a truck’s slipstream.