Half Torn Hearts Read online

  NOVONEEL CHAKRABORTY

  half torn hearts

  Have you destroyed y ourself for someone?

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  IN A NURSING HOME IN CUTTACK

  VOICE NOTE 1

  BOOK ONE

  VOICE NOTE 2

  VOICE NOTE 3

  VOICE NOTE 4

  VOICE NOTE 5

  VOICE NOTE 6

  VOICE NOTE 7

  VOICE NOTE 8

  BOOK TWO

  VOICE NOTE 9

  VOICE NOTE 10

  VOICE NOTE 11

  VOICE NOTE 12

  VOICE NOTE 13

  VOICE NOTE 14

  VOICE NOTE 15

  VOICE NOTE 16

  VOICE NOTE 17

  VOICE NOTE 18

  VOICE NOTE 19

  BOOK THREE

  VOICE NOTE 20

  VOICE NOTE 21

  VOICE NOTE 22

  VOICE NOTE 23

  VOICE NOTE 24

  VOICE NOTE 25

  VOICE NOTE 26

  VOICE NOTE 27

  VOICE NOTE 28

  VOICE NOTE 29

  VOICE NOTE 30

  VOICE NOTE 31

  VOICE NOTE 32

  VOICE NOTE 33

  VOICE NOTE 34

  VOICE NOTE 35

  BOOK FOUR

  VOICE NOTE 36

  VOICE NOTE 37

  VOICE NOTE 38

  VOICE NOTE 39

  VOICE NOTE 40

  VOICE NOTE 41

  VOICE NOTE 42

  VOICE NOTE 43

  BOOK FIVE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  HALF-TORN HEARTS

  Novoneel Chakraborty is the bestselling author of eleven romantic thriller novels, one short story collection, Cheaters, and a digital exclusive novella, Red Suits You. Four of his novels will soon be adapted into web series. The Forever series was listed among Times of India’s most stunning books of 2017; it was also featured among Amazon’s memorable books the same year. The two books remained on the bestseller list for ten weeks straight and Forever Is a Lie was one of the highest selling books of 2017 on Flipkart. While the third instalment in the Stranger trilogy, Forget Me Not, Stranger, debuted as the No. 1 bestseller across India, the second, All Yours, Stranger, ranked among the top five thrillers on Amazon India. Black Suits You also remained among the top five thrillers on Amazon for fifteen weeks. The Stranger trilogy has been translated into six languages, while Cheaters will soon be available in Hindi.

  Known for his twists, dark plots and strong female protagonists, Novoneel Chakraborty is also called the Sidney Sheldon of India by his readers. Apart from novels, Novoneel has written and developed several TV shows, such as Savdhaan India and Yeh Hai Aashiqui. He lives and works in Mumbai.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A Thing beyond Forever

  That Kiss in the Rain

  How about a Sin Tonight?

  Ex

  Black Suits You

  Cheaters

  The Best Couple Ever

  Stranger Trilogy

  Marry Me, Stranger

  All Yours, Stranger

  Forget Me Not, Stranger

  Forever Series

  Forever Is a Lie

  Forever Is True

  To,

  The Mountain. The Ocean. The Desert.

  Forever indebted,

  N.

  IN A NURSING HOME IN CUTTACK

  2018

  The nursing home was a small one. The patient’s disease was a serious one. She had acquired a rare skin disorder when she had gone to help cyclone victims in one of the coastal villages of eastern Odisha. It was a village that couldn’t be located on any map of India. The patient had no family. Not any more. Except for the girl sitting beside her.

  The girl sat stock-still at the same place from the time she admitted the patient to the nursing home, which was forty-eight hours ago. She murmured a prayer whenever she felt something calamitous was about to happen. Looking at the patient, the girl wondered why one failed to fathom the bond with someone until that person began slipping away. Did death sever the inner attachment to the near and dear as well? People who meant the world to us at one time, seemed like a distant memory at another. Our own reality changed its face, and a huge part of our life went into accepting that change.

  The girl didn’t realize when tears began rolling down her cheeks. She brushed them away impatiently. Why couldn’t things just remain the way they were? she wondered. She swallowed a lump realizing the futility of the question. Not every relationship is about flowing together forever. Sometimes, one just takes a little bit of the other person, surrenders a little bit of oneself to the other person and then continues flowing independently, sensing those acquired bits within oneself and cherishing them always.

  Soft, helpless moans broke into her musing and the girl quickly went over to the bed. She caressed her friend’s forehead. The moans grew a little louder.

  ‘Sister?’ the girl hollered. Nobody came. She walked out of the room and espied a nurse at the far end of the corridor. By the time they returned to the room, the whimpering had stopped. The nurse checked the pulse and then the heartbeat. And then shut the gawking eyes with her palm. The girl plonked down on the chair, knowing fully well what this meant. The nurse rushed out, saying, ‘Call the doctor. The patient in room number 9—Raisa Barua—is dead.’

  The girl in the room looked at the body. She felt strangely light but broken.

  VOICE NOTE 1

  Do banjaro ko jab pyaar hota hai,

  Unke dil mein thehrao nahi,

  Uffan hota hai.

  Woh manzilein nahi,

  Ek dusre mein safar dhundte hain.

  Jiska modh khud ko chubhe,

  Aisi raah chunte hain.

  Dard ko ek adatan nasha batate hain.

  Kareeb aa jaaye,

  Toh dabe paer nikal jaate hain,

  Faasle badh jaayen,

  Toh toofan ki tarah wapas aate hain.

  Dusre ke diye zakhm ko,

  Apni khuraak banake jeete hai.

  Yaadon se kuch lena dena nahi inka.

  Yeh lamhon mein khilte hain,

  Lamhon mein murjhate hain.

  Kabhi saath mein, kabhi bichadhke,

  Nai sarhadon ki talaash mein,

  Woh na poore idhar ke, na udhar ke hote hain.

  Do banjaro ko jab pyaar hota hai,

  Unke kismet mein rehna nahi,

  Sehna hota hai.

  Once done writing, she signed it: Tushara. She took a picture of it with her mobile phone and sent it to her fiancé.

  He immediately called her up.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ Shanay said.

  She knew he wouldn’t have understood anything. He wasn’t the kind who understood the nuances of words. What amused her was that every time she sent him her poems, couplets or lines, he always responded earnestly, with those two words ‘it’s wonderful!’

  ‘Thanks. Did you check the link I WhatsApp-ed you?’ she asked, sounding, as usual, detached even though she had sent him a link to something intimate.

  Sitting on the swing in the balcony of her thirteenth floor flat in South City, Kolkata, she had her wireless earpiece plugged into her ears. Far away,
in the cloudy twilight sky, she could see the blinking lights of two aeroplanes at opposite ends of the horizon. Although it seemed to her that they were on a certain collision course, they passed each other uneventfully. A faint ironical smile touched her face. She closed her diary as she heard him say, ‘I did. It’s sexy.’ Shanay put his car back on gear as the traffic signal on MG Road in Bengaluru turned green.

  ‘I’m going to wear it for you when we meet next,’ she said.

  Shanay instantly visualized her in the black lingerie featured in her WhatsApp-ed link. The firm thighs, the natural curves . . . would she look sexier than the lingerie model in the website? he wondered.

  ‘I hope you’re not kidding?’ he said.

  ‘Why would I? I’m okay with your plan.’

  ‘Sure. By the way, I just learnt from a source that I may get nominated this year for the Business Right Now awards.’

  ‘Congratulations! Reach home safely now. I’ll wait for you on FaceTime,’ she said as she hung up. No mushy muahs or cheesy baby-I-love-yous. Like always, he thought.

  Shanay Bansal belonged to a fifth-generation business family based in Kolkata with roots in Bikaner, Rajasthan. After getting an MBA from Stanford University nobody in his family was surprised when he announced that he wanted to add an online business venture to their portfolio: click2buy.com. Life was all about work and more work, in his bachelor pad in Bengaluru, until his parents introduced him to the girl they had chosen as their prospective daughter-in-law. A small roka ceremony took place. The wedding was scheduled to be held seven months later.

  Although he had met her a few times and telephoned her on a daily basis, if someone asked him to describe her, he would fumble for the right words. He often sensed a strange coldness about her—a coldness that effectively held him at bay. At first he thought she was shy, then assumed she was an introvert. But later, he could tell she was neither of those. Her icy aloofness fascinated him so much so that over time he became secretly obsessed with her. It was as if she was detached to every attachment. It was only recently that Shanay felt bold enough to go beyond discussing the obvious and shared a naughty plan with her on a FaceTime session one night.

  ‘Shouldn’t we get to know each other better?’ he had asked hesitantly, putting his plan into action. Till then, Shanay had only had one girlfriend. In Class VIII, he had befriended Nisha Jalan. His incorrigible shyness made Nisha dump him after they passed the tenth boards. He couldn’t bear the pain of his break up.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘What if you come over to Bengaluru one weekend? We don’t have to tell anyone anything.’

  Silence. ‘I’m not sure if that’s a good idea,’ she said.

  Shanay was disappointed but he didn’t push her again. Her sudden confirmation to the plan this evening, therefore, came as a surprise.

  Shanay closed the door of his flat and flopped down on one of his beanbags in the living room, clutching his iPad. He immediately started checking all the Kolkata–Bengaluru flights for the specific day on a travel website. As the page loaded, his phone buzzed with a WhatsApp message. He tapped on the notification. It opened to a voice note from a number not saved in his contact list. Frowning slightly, he tapped on the voice note. A girl’s voice spoke:

  Hi Shanay,

  I know who you are. I know where you work. I know where you live. I know who you are going to marry. In short, I know everything about you.

  There’s a reason why I’m reaching out to you. But please don’t be scared. I’m harmless and not even important so you don’t really have to know who I am. Not for the time being. If names matter to you a lot, you can call me Lavisha.

  What I’m going to tell you is a story, all right? But it’s not my story. Someone close to me narrated it to me with a promise that I wouldn’t share it with anyone ever. But with this voice note I’m going to break the promise because if I don’t break this promise then several other important promises will never be fulfilled.

  Every story has a beginning somewhere—perhaps even a prequel. The great thing about old stories is that they almost always provide a startling new insight with staggering implications that cast an entirely different light on one’s perception of the sequel.

  Why am I narrating someone else’s story to you, out of the blue, and that too anonymously? That’s because if you listen to this story carefully and play your part well, you could perhaps change its ending. Right now you’re wondering why you should bother to listen or pay heed to this voice note and the rest of the voice notes that will follow until my story is complete. My answer to that would be one simple word: HOPE. You are someone’s only hope to steer this story towards an end that may not be a happy one, may not be a justified one, may not even be a right one, but it will be an end that will pave the way for new beginnings. Please bear with me and grant me your patience for now; patience to listen to the voice notes until I’m done narrating them.

  I know you’re a busy person. But this voice note and the subsequent ones are really more important to you than to me. The more you know about the story, the more will you be compelled to decide the ending of that story. Please do listen to all the voice notes. Pay heed to whatever I say and try to understand whatever I couldn’t articulate because sometimes I won’t find the correct words to express matters of the heart.

  Before I end tonight’s instalment of voice notes, let me ask you a question: do you truly believe the one who lives with you is the only one who was made for you? What if—just, what if—within one’s inner world there is another reality in which one lives with someone else? Don’t we all have such parallel universes within ourselves? So, to whom does the person truly belong—the one with whom one lives in this physical world or the person with whom one shares the inner realm?

  As Shanay finished listening to the voice note, not knowing what to make of it, another one popped up from the same number. He texted back: who is this? He called the number. But there was no response. He checked on TruCaller. The name read: Lavi.

  Shanay stared at the new notification as it blinked on his phone. Out of sheer curiosity, he tapped on it.

  Little did he know that a story was waiting to unfold, in which he would unwittingly play an important character.

  BOOK ONE

  VOICE NOTE 2

  Raisa and Nirmaan,

  Guwahati, 1996.

  There was a mango tree behind the boundary wall of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officers’ quarters in the Christian Basti area.

  The tree was a great attraction for the eight-year-old boys in the vicinity. That summer, there appeared a mango on a branch that was tantalizingly beyond their reach. No amount of stone-hurling or stick-beating could bring it down. One day, Yash, the naughtiest of the lot, scaled the boundary wall and stretched as far as he could to reach that coveted mango. When it was mere inches away from his fingers, he suddenly howled in pain and hurriedly jumped off the wall, and seemed to be itching all over. When they took Yash to his mother, they realized that the boundary wall was infested with caterpillars. From the very next day, the boys started playing elsewhere, on a stretch of land in the campus where sand and bricks were stacked for an under-construction project.

  An eight-year-old girl usually sat near the row of bricks that held the sand pile in place, amusing herself by scribbling on the sand. Her boyish haircut made her face appear bigger than it actually was. Her sparkling eyes indicated a sharp mind. She was dusky and wore shorts with half-sleeved shirts. She would arrive sharp at four o’clock in the afternoon and leave at 6.30 p.m. She would always dampen the sand with water from a bottle that she carried and then draw impressions on it with a stick. When the boys shifted base, they thought she was one of them—a boy.

  ‘Wanna play frisbee with us?’ asked one of the boys.

  Before she could respond, his brother ran up to him and said, ‘He won’t. Don’t you remember what mummy told us? He’s a stupid child.’ He trampled on her sand arabesque and ran away w
ith his brother.

  She saw them whisper something to the other boys. They immediately pulled faces at her. But there was one boy who didn’t grimace.

  From the next day onwards, the little girl brought with her not just a bottle of water but also a desire to watch that boy playing with the rest. He did glance at her once or twice but she couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t hold her gaze as she did his. Another thing that the little girl noticed about the boy was that after the others called it a day—at six in the evening—he would linger to throw a stone at the mango tree before leaving.

  One evening, after his playtime was over, the boy returned to the apartment where he lived with his parents. He was taken aback to see a mango on his doorstep, the very

  same one that he had been eyeing for quite some time now. He heard someone speak from behind, ‘This is for you. Thank you for not making a face at me.’

  Startled by her sudden appearance, Nirmaan hastily rang the doorbell. He couldn’t quite understand what the girl meant by ‘making a face’ and it made him all the more nervous. When his mother opened the door, he quickly picked up the mango and gave it to her.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ Mrs Bose asked.

  ‘She gave it to me,’ Nirmaan said, pointing to the girl.

  Mrs Bose eyed the girl, ‘Is she your new friend?’

  With a quick, sideways glance at the girl, Nirmaan nodded at his mother. She smiled at her, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Raisa Barua,’ the girl answered diffidently.

  ‘Such a lovely name,’ Mrs Bose said and raised an eyebrow at Nirmaan, ‘Won’t you invite your friend in?’

  With a nervous smile, Nirmaan reached for Raisa’s hand and led her into his home.

  Mrs Bose cut the mango in half and gave each child one half. It had a mouthwatering fragrance and tasted delicious.

  ‘How did you know that I’m a girl?’ she asked as she sucked on the mango pulp.

  Nirmaan paused eating momentarily, pondering the query, ‘How did you know that I’m a boy?’