The Girl of My Dreams

  DURJOY DATTA

  The Girl of my Dreams

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  Epilogue

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS

  Durjoy Datta was born in New Delhi, India, and completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book—Of Course I Love You!—was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels

  —Now That You’re Rich!; She Broke Up, I Didn’t!; Ohh Yes, I Am Single!; You Were My Crush; If

  It’s Not Forever; Till the Last Breath; Someone Like You; Hold My Hand; When Only Love

  Remains; World’s Best Boyfriend; Our Impossible Love—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India.

  Durjoy also has to his credit nine television shows and has written over a thousand episodes for television.

  Durjoy lives in Mumbai, loves dogs and is an active CrossFitter. For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1or Twitter (@durjoydatta).

  1

  It happens in an instant and yet everything seems to stretch out interminably.

  One moment I’m gazing at her, that pale white face half covered with hair as black as night itself is smiling at me, and the next I’m urging her to look at the road. The smiles on our faces die out. It’s too late. A taxi is rushing towards us, driving on the wrong side. She swerves the car to the right to avoid collision and heads towards the divider railing. The taxi too swerves to its right. She corrects course, but it’s too late. She slams on the brakes and the car makes a dying screech. Something breaks. She is thrown forward. There’s no seat belt to slow her down as her face smashes against the steering wheel and bends like a half-formed clay mask. Her face scrunches, her jawline contorts, her teeth are knocked out. Her eyes protrude inhumanly. Blood spurts. It feels like I can reach out and hold her face but my hands move slowly through the air.

  I hear my own ribs snap like dry twigs against the impact of the seat belt. A shooting pain rises in my chest when the seat belt pushes me back. The world spins outside the windshield. Once.

  Twice. She is still smiling at me, her face turned at an awkward angle from the neck, her lips cut and bloody. Suddenly, the car flips over the railing and slams into a truck on the opposite side of road. A deathly silence descends. Time freezes. Pieces of glass and tissue and teeth stay suspended mid-air, unmoving. Through the pain, I’m looking at her once-beautiful face, the face

  I fell in love with, now a chaos of blood, distended tissue, and shards of bone and broken teeth.

  I reach out for her face. It takes forever. And then a disquieting crunch fills the air. Metal against metal, bone against bone, bone against flesh, flesh against metal. I’m thrown backward and forward. My legs twist and tangle. Ligaments snap, bones break. A jagged piece of the metal enters my thigh and comes out from the other side where I can’t see it. Glass shatters and fragments lodge deep in my face. My skin singes from the heat. The burning smell of rubber engulfs us. Orange-red flames lick everything up. I try opening my eyes, now flooded with blood from my forehead. She’s being thrown like a rag doll inside the roll cage of the car. Her eyes are open and she’s looking at me. I look for signs of her but can only see my own gory reflection staring back. There’s no trace of life in those eyes. But she has a smile on her face. A cold, frozen, dead smile. A stray piece of metal pierces through my shoulder blade like a hot axe through butter and pins me to the seat. The car flips again and she’s thrown out of the windshield. I give her my battered hand but she’s out of sight. The car slams to the ground again. I snap out of the seat belt and slam against the roof of the car. I start to lose consciousness. I shout her name but only a whimper escapes my lips. Shreyasi . . .

  Daman woke up with a start. He had wet his bed again. Urine and sweat clung to his body and stank up the room. He shivered. His shoulders and thighs throbbed with pain. He ran his fingers over the deep gorge on his right shoulder; a pink scar had replaced where once was flesh. The alarm clock screeched in the background. With trembling fingers he switched it off. He rummaged

  the bedside drawer for his pills and swallowed them dry. Eighteen months had passed since the night of the accident but the nightmares hadn’t abated. The pills helped but only to an extent. He got up and washed himself. He changed the bedspread and threw the soiled one into the washing machine before his mother could notice. Out of habit, he punched ‘Shreyasi’ into the search engine of his phone. Many faces showed up but none of them seemed like the girl from his dreams. He closed the tabs. At least in today’s nightmare the girl was behind the wheel; she was dead because she was driving, not because of him. At the breakfast table, his mother noticed Daman’s discomfort. She asked, ‘Shopno dekhli abaar? (Saw that dream again?)’

  Daman nodded. ‘She drove. She died. I lived. Still can’t remember her face clearly,’ he said.

  ‘Are you taking your pills on time, Dada?’ asked Puchku, Daman’s younger sister.

  ‘Yes, Puchku . . .’

  ‘Don’t call me Puchku! My name’s Ritu, call me that.’

  ‘You’re Puchku, no matter how hard you try.’

  ‘Kintu oi me taa jeebit acche. That girl is still alive. You know that, right? I don’t know why you keep seeing these dreams,’ his mother said, her voice laced with bitterness.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Morning dreams indicate exactly the opposite of reality. Tor or shonge gaadite choda hi bhulhoyechhe. You shouldn’t have taken a lift from a girl you didn’t know. That was a mistake,’ said his mother, her voice quivering in anger, like it was only yesterday that Daman had taken a lift from a stranger who nearly drove him to death.

  ‘Maa, leave it now,’ said Puchku.

  ‘Yes, of course, I will leave it. But you don’t know what we went through because of that girl,’ grumbled Maa.

  Daman’s parents had spent the subsequent six months anxiously waiting for him to wake up after the accident; another three when he was treated for debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder

  (PTSD). If it were up to his mother, the girl would have been long dead, just like in Daman’s nightmares. But the girl had escaped unscathed and had left the country since. Daman had never met her before (or after) the bloody night of the accident. He didn’t know where she was from, what she did, or how he came to be in her car or what they talked about during that short, fateful drive. He hadn’t even managed to edge out the fuzzy remembrance of her face. The paleness of her skin, that haunting smile, those dead eyes were all he remembered of her—the rest of
the details always mutated between two nightmares. Everything apart from her name had been wiped clean off his memories. Post his accident, he had been diagnosed with dissociative amnesia (though he preferred the name psychogenic amnesia because it was much cooler) which totally wipes out the memories of traumatic incidents leaving memories before or after the incident intact; it’s the brain’s coping mechanism. The condition had buried his memories of incidents leading to the traumatic accident in his subconscious. There was a blank where a sepia-coloured reel of his trip to Goa should have been. Only a name remained. It seemed like a cruel joke. He remembered making plans with his college friends, getting on that flight, checking into the hotel but everything else . . . poof . . . the next thing he remembered was being woken up and ushered into physical therapy. ‘It wasn’t a mistake,’ said Daman.

  He looked at his watch. He was late. Avni, his girlfriend, had already left three texts on his phone. She wondered if he was okay because he hadn’t texted her since morning. Despite seeing her for the last eight months, Daman hadn’t told her about Shreyasi or the nightmares. What’s the point? he always thought, it’s not like I know her, she’s only a shadow. He finished his breakfast hurriedly and left. On the way out, he saw a few envelopes jutting out from their apartment’s letter box. As he flipped through the credit card bills, telephone bill, amongst others, he noticed that all of them had been carefully slit open, their contents read and then put back in, as is. He put all the envelopes back inside the box except the one with the logo of Bookhound Publishers India emblazoned on it. On his way out, he lodged a complaint with the watchman of the society knowing full well that just like before, no action would be taken against his pesky, nosy neighbours. In the cab, he opened the envelope. Inside it was a letter welcoming Daman Roy to Bookhound

  Publishers’ line-up of authors. He smiled, read it twice and slipped it back inside the envelope.

  And that’s when he noticed a deep red lipstick mark on the envelope.

  Like someone had kissed it.

  2

  Not for the first time, an argument had broken out in a coffee shop in South Extension, Delhi.

  Daman leant back in his chair and shook his head in disappointment. Their coffees had turned cold.

  There were only a few people around, most of them were languorous with sleep. The grumbling voices of Daman and Avni didn’t reach their ears while they waited for their takeaway cappuccino and latte.

  ‘Can’t you see my point?’ asked Avni.

  ‘There’s nothing to argue about. I am quitting. I need to concentrate on my writing,’ answered

  Daman. He lit a cigarette and puffed on it hungrily.

  ‘But you—’

  ‘No, I can’t. It drives me crazy when I want to write and instead I’m staring at blueprints of a power plant. I can’t do it any more.’

  Avni had the words and arguments ready before she agreed to meet today but they crumbled in the wake of Daman’s all-consuming obsession of seeing his name on a novel. She had spent nights losing sleep over Daman’s maddening decision to leave a promising job to pursue a career in writing but now she sensed it was a lost battle. She leant forward and held Daman’s hand.

  ‘If that’s what you want to do, I will be with you,’ she said. ‘In happiness and in madness, I will be with you.’

  A hint of a smile crept up on Daman’s face and he clasped Avni’s hand. ‘I knew you will come around,’ he said. His eyes glimmered with hope and foolish dreams as he talked breathlessly there on. ‘I will sign the contract in a couple of days. Jayanti Raghunath is going to be my editor. She’s a bit of a bitch but she’s phenomenal, the best in the business. She’s the one behind all the bestselling books you see in the market.’

  Avni nodded dutifully. She knew nothing of writers and writing till she met Daman eight months ago and had fallen witlessly in love with him. Having grown up in a family of chartered accountants and bankers and moneylenders, both money and keeping an account of money was what her life centred on. Sports, arts and other creative pursuits were for the deranged, synonyms for gambling, signs of the weak and the delusional. What were the odds of a writer succeeding? Or a painter becoming famous and appreciated? With numbers, you’re certain.

  Her parents knew of Daman as a mechanical engineer from Delhi Technological University working in Siemens Power and Engineering Limited as a design engineer, not as a wannabe writer who had a book contract waiting for him. Even the words felt strange as she would roll them over her tongue: ‘My boyfriend is a writer. Yes, that’s what he does full time. No, it’s not a hobby.

  That’s all he does. He writes stories for a living.’ The only writers with careers were journalists who wrote for newspapers, not novelists with foolhardy dreams of churning out bestsellers.

  ‘What is the book going to be about?’ asked Avni.

  He took a long drag of his cigarette. ‘Shreyasi.’

  Avni’s brows knitted. ‘Why do you keep using that name?’ she asked, her voice bitter.

  ‘I just like the name,’ answered Daman.

  Avni forced a smile on her face. I hate that name. ‘And the guy’s name in the book? You will use yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Jayanti says I should use mine. Right now it sounds a little narcissistic.’ He paused before continuing, ‘But there’s no running away from it. That’s why they signed me on, isn’t it? Jayanti says I should stitch the posts on my social media accounts, including my blog, into a coherent story.

  I already have a readership, so it will help the book sell when it hits the bookshops.’

  ‘If you use your name with Shreyasi’s, readers will think Shreyasi is a real person,’ argued

  Avni.

  ‘How does that matter? The book will have a fiction disclaimer,’ answered Daman.

  Avni had not met Jayanti Raghunath but she loathed how much trust Daman placed in her. It was she who filled Daman’s head with notions of having his name on the spine of a book, being on the bestsellers’ lists, signing copies by the dozen, and being shortlisted for literary prizes with cash components that wouldn’t even pay for a month’s groceries. A few weeks back Daman had come back dizzy with excitement after his meeting with Jayanti Raghunath, 32, Executive Editor,

  Bookhound Publishers, the biggest English-language publisher in India. She had called him to an opulent five-star property and had blown him away with technical jargon, marketing terms and the sophistication of her publishing team. They made him feel big, important, talented, wanted.

  Daman was but an amateur scribbler when Jayanti had spotted him on the Internet. He used to write short stories about an eponymously named boy Daman and a girl named Shreyasi on

  Facebook, Tumblr, Wattpad, his blog and wherever he could find readers.

  Avni had stumbled on these short pieces of fiction when she followed Daman’s social media profiles on the Internet after their first long conversation. She must have fallen in love with him because she felt envy pierce her heart like a rusted dagger and lodge itself there. The stories felt real. She thought Shreyasi was a real person, an ex-girlfriend, a crush, or worse still, a current girlfriend. She had stopped talking to him for a few days till he clarified.

  ‘She’s fictional, she exists only in my head. I use my name because it helps me visualize things better,’ he had said.

  ‘So there’s no Shreyasi?’

  ‘No, of course not. Not in my life at least,’ he had assured her. ‘I just like the name.’

  ‘Are you sure? Writers are liars, my friends always say. They make up stories for a living,’ she had said with a smile.

  Daman had laughed it away.

  But as they started seeing each other more often she had hoped Daman would start using her name and not Shreyasi. But it didn’t happen. The imaginary mistress, Shreyasi, stayed in his stories. She never uttered a word though. What could she have said? Shreyasi was fiction, made- up, while she was real. It was her hand Daman held, it was her body that Daman embraced, and
it was she who he said he was in love with. I’m the ONE, not Shreyasi, she would convince herself.

  Some of his online readers knew Shreyasi was fictional, while others thought it was more of a memoir, real incidents and stories with a smattering of fiction. Avni and Daman had cut a pastry to celebrate the first time one of Daman’s stories went viral and was shared over a thousand times.

  Avni had suffered that day. Daman had noticed it, because a few days later he’d written a story with the female lead’s name as Avni. She had been ecstatic but her happiness soon turned to ashes in her mouth. The comments were harsh. No one wanted to read about this new character, Avni.

  They wanted Shreyasi back. They had rejected Avni.

  Why? Why? Why Shreyasi and not me? She’s not real! I’m real! Avni had thought bitterly.

  Though Daman deleted the comments, she often lay in bed recalling the words, WE WANT

  SHREYASI, and cried herself to sleep. In time Avni learnt to live with it.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  Avni broke out of her reverie. She hadn’t been listening. ‘Umm. It’s terrific. I’m so happy. So when are you going to tell your parents?’

  Daman frowned. ‘Never if I can help it. You know how my dad gets. He wants me to suffer at a job I hate for the next thirty years.’

  ‘Have you decided on a title yet?’

  Daman grinned widely. He flicked his cigarette away and leant into her. ‘The Girl of My

  Dreams,’ he said. ‘That’s the name of the first book in the series.’

  ‘There will be more than one?’

  ‘Jayanti thinks it will be good to capitalize on the characters I have already created. She wants to change a few things but I don’t think I will let her. Moreover, Shreyasi as a character is perfect.’

  No, she’s not! thought Avni hotly. She’s your mistress, that’s what she is. But she said nothing to him.

  A little later, Daman excused himself to go to the washroom. Her eyes followed him. Just as he went in, Avni noticed a girl at the far end of the coffee shop staring at the closed door of the men’s washroom. A few seconds passed but the girl was still unblinkingly staring at the door. An eerie feeling gripped Avni’s heart. The girl was looking at the door and mumbling something, as if she talking to it. ‘Daman,’ Avni heard the name escape the girl’s lips. Avni wasn’t sure at first.