Crossing the Mirage:Passing Through Youth

“Oh, how pathetic you would've been!” Chandra said moved no end. “Accursed be the love that afflicted your life.”

“Oh, you don't realize that by cursing love you are cursing my lover,” she said, “I tell you though I was hurt and cut up with him, still I didn't curse him for I knew he had a heart of gold.”

“Thanks for showing me the trueness of love.”

“Well, with no way to hear his version and unable to dismiss Vasu's allegation,” she began recounting the poignant saga of her love. “it was a dilemma that wrenched my heart so much that I felt I had a stroke. How I wished all these years that better I had died that day, as I would've been saved of all that followed! Somehow, I can't make out how, a sense of revenge was born from my sense of helplessness and I was seized with the idea of hurting him by paying him back in the same coin.”

“Maybe it's in the nature of love that when scorned it becomes mundane to afflicts us in human ways.”

“Oh, it could be true though it never occurred to me,” she said stoically, “otherwise why did I do what I did. When Vasu proposed, I agreed out of spite but when he took me into his embrace, I felt neither hope nor any despair and not even spite for the one who spurned me, maybe having done the mischief it had left the scene, but when Vasu pressed for sex, I gave in as though to acquire a weapon to hurt my lover. What an irony! Whatever, I had no

reason to deny Vasu, as I had no desire left my lover, why I felt like I had lost interest in my life itself. Maybe to cement his position, Vasu never left my bed and I too didn't push him out of it as if I needed his sex to blunt my lover's romanticism that came to haunt me even though I remained stoic all the while.”

“Why blame Vasu for what he wrote there,” she continued after a pause. “When he was about to come home for the summer recess, I became nervous while being steady with Vasu and though I had surrendered to him, yet he was afraid of losing me to the one from whom he had snatched me. Well, Vasu planned to put everything into his ears the moment he landed and I knew he would be hurt but, surprisingly, I felt, I couldn't care less. But the day before he arrived, the thought of seeing him feel jilted wrenched my heart recalling how I had frustrated him once before.”