Break Up Sid

If you ever ask any of your close girl friends in isolation about her thoughts on girls being hypocrites in general, I’m sure she’ll agree. There are certain conditions that you need to ensure are in a perfect state of existence before you engage her into such a discussion.

Firstly, you have to ensure that she is the only person with you within a radius of 100 feet from where you engage in such non-feminist practices. Secondly, you have to have a good history of break ups, where you’ve been “dumped” by your ex-girlfriends every single time. If you, as a guy, have ever been the heartless heartbreaker, don’t let her know. Thirdly, keep dropping in words that sound similar to the names of all the girls whom she hates. That’s called reaching her sub-conscious mind to make her agree with all the hatred that you wish to express towards the woman-kind.

I say that from experience. As a guy who has been forced by woman-kind to keep changing the woman he wishes to love forever, all that I state henceforth earns the status of being pretty authentic.

If you’re someone who’s gone through a couple of heartbreaks that have had a major contribution in making you look like Himesh Reshammiya, there’s a fifty percent chance that you go through the period of being dumped by one girl to liking another, the way I do.

You got dumped by the person who had once begged for a promise from you to never-ever leave her. You got dumped by the same girl who loved you for loving all those things about her that she didn’t love enough in herself. She could never imagine anyone being as responsible and caring as you. But she eventually grew out of feeling that way. “Feeling” was soon the word that she hated but still held close. She couldn’t tell why she “felt” the way she did; or she couldn’t tell why she actually “didn’t feel” the way she thought she always would. She figured that there was no on-off switch; you either feel or you don’t. She broke the news to you and broke your heart. And then, you were back in the place where you found yourself before you had met her.

You spend the first two weeks trying to convince yourself that she will be sitting at home, crying her eyes out, waking up to a wet patch on her pillow every morning, and then one fine day will send you a message telling you about how much she loves you. You imagine yourself being a tough guy and not letting her have you back in her life in an instant. You prepare a mental speech that runs across a sheet of thin air that you picture as a light cloud invisible to others. You think about all the things that you’ll say to her before you take her back, that’ll make her shed a few more tears. You think and think till your phone beeps with a message.

She doesn’t have the balls to talk to you in person, so she messages you. Well, she obviously doesn’t have the balls, or she’d have been the one dumped. Her text tries to exhibit a heartful of maturity and concern, stating how she knows that it’s difficult for people to stay friends after they break up, but she will always be there for you. The message makes you realize that the teardrops that you expected to fall from her eyes, which would have wiped off the long string of words that you had prepared yourself to pronounce were probably not what her body could force her to produce. Instead, you shed enough tears to ink another speech, which you wish to give her in a voice that changes from a tone of anger to despair. But no matter how much you wish to make that happen, the only audience that you find to your speech is yourself. You say it enough times in your head to learn it by heart. And the anger grows.

Soon, your friends come to lend shoulders for you to cry on. They ask you to be brave and keep a happy face in front of the person who no longer radiates back your love. They make you realize in just a week of your break up about the extent of their dislike towards your ex. They’ll tell you how they always knew that she would break your heart. You defend her at first, since you can’t help but love her. You tell them how no one understands her better than you do and it may not have been an easy decision for her, but they just shake their heads in pity and secretly pray that you never patch up with her. Wouldn’t it be a huge socially strategic mistake on their part to tell you about their dislike for her, if you actually end up reconciling with your ex?

You try not to let yourself be alone. Loneliness makes you think of all the times that you kissed her and the way she smiled after that, saying that she loved you, addressing you with a secret pet-name. You think if all those smiles were genuine. You question all the times that she cried because she said she missed you. You think about all the times when you stopped yourself from texting a pretty girl you met once at an odd event, who kept sending you a string of fifty text messages in a day, more than half of which ended with a semicolon followed by a round bracket. You think about all of this and more. You think more than you said she did, and cry on your pillow till your biological clock loses track of the time and your wet eyelids begin to stick to each other. Being alone makes you pick up that damned phone and text her something casual like “Hey, what’s up?” It is so casual that deciding on putting an emote after the question mark takes you more time than the Delhi Metro takes to travel from Anand Vihar ISBT to Dwarka Sector 9. She takes her own sweet time to reply to the text. A good seven minutes. Seven minutes!! You take longer to reply back. You decide on taking twenty minutes, but can’t stop yourself from typing in another four rounds of the second’s needle.

Your friends ask you about your day, and you get shouted at on telling them that you texted “her”. Phrases with words like “get over”, “learn to accept”, “forget”, “b*tch”, “many more nice girls in the world” are recited by each member of your friends’ gang like a Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, which everyone from your maid’s daughter to your dadi knows by heart.

You don’t go online because every time that you do, you end up seeing updates from her facebook page popping up on your home feed. You decide to keep her on your friend list but never visit her facebook page again. You don’t delete the pictures that you got clicked with her off your profile because that would clearly show the bitterness. You’re no longer a teenager, and you show that to the world by keeping all those pictures intact. That’s how you project that you’re mature and can let go, while your body behaves in total contradiction and refuses to push the little morsels of food down your food-pipe for almost a month.

In an attempt to keep yourself busy and avoid bumping into updates from her life on the internet, you seek solace in watching TV shows. Looking at characters from your favorite sitcoms gorging on tubs of ice cream post break up make you wonder why your body is mean enough to not make you desire such things any more. Post break up weight loss is something you relate to more. Rom-coms with happy endings make you cry. Bollywood love songs make you cry. You sheepishly run to the bathroom and cry on the floor. You cry like Ranbir Kapoor in the video of Tujhe Bhula Diya, the only difference being that he cries in a swanky car in a foreign locale while you cry sitting at the place where you spotted a spider the previous week, and where your nose alarms you of an empty packet of Odonil.

Another girl who had been hitting on you through the time that you were in a relationship, now texts you every day in an attempt to win your attention with her concern. She watches Jab We Met during the day and tries to win your heart by making you curse your ex-girlfriend in the most creatively formed combinations of two words, the first either being the Hindi for mother or sister. She forgets that Shahid and Kareena didn’t really stick together in real life after the movie released, but she holds on to a ray of hope, waiting for her Bollywood story to kick off with you being her hero.

You decide to never contact your ex again and start telling your friends that you’ve gotten over it. The speech for your ex always remains fresh in your head though. You never know when karma may play its part and you may need it. Ironically, you end up crying on days following the days when you tell your friends that you have long gotten over the break up. You always keep lines like “I have forgiven, but I haven’t forgotten” ready for use. They’re like hand grenades with their pins taken out. They’re ready to be thrown any minute like in a military video game. Soon, everyone around you gets over you using those lines.

You feel that you’ve lost your charm. You feel that the only reason for people to be fond of you is your kindness and good nature. You equate yourself to the state of an over-ripe banana, which is too gooey to be enjoyed in its original physical state. You have to extract all the goodness that remains inside by churning it in cold milk and turning it into a banana shake. Your brain tells you that you will never be able to get yourself a girl as nice as you originally thought your ex-girlfriend to be. All the pretty girls who you meet are either too boring or too immature to be dated.

But you slowly start making friends with a girl, who you start talking to at night when all the lights in the house are switched off. You talk to her in a whisper and tell her all the pain that your ex-girlfriend put you through. You tell her that you can never love another girl again. And in another week, you start thinking of all the ways in which you can get to know if the new lady likes you. Soon, even before you realize, all the time that went in mentally re-reciting the speech that you wrote for your ex, goes in texting this new nice girl. Her stories of heartbreak make you build on a connection, and you finally see yourself falling in love again.

A new love story begins, and immediately from the day that you get into a relationship with the new lady of your life, all the speeches that remained ready in your head vanish off without a trace. The time that you spent with your ex seems like too small a chapter of your life. Something that you cried about for months seems like a trivial story of a broken toy from your childhood. Suddenly, all that summarizes your past relationship from that moment onwards is “I was too immature at that time.”

You fall from being in love to the bottom of a heartbreak and then rise to the top of the wheel again. It’s like a circle that goes round and round. It’s both sweet and sour to taste. Well, if that’s how I also define a Jalebi, isn’t your life the same?

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