Page 104 of Not Safe for Work
Even though I had no way of knowing if Neil’s father would even read the email, the act of sending it helped loosen the knot in my stomach a tiny bit.Now all you need to do is survive this launch day,a voice in my head instructed. Thankfully, the day moved fast—too fast. Meetings turned into presentations andpresentations turned into congratulations. The campaign went live to numbers that we could’ve never imagined. In fact, there was so much engagement that the website temporarily crashed.
When I left the office in the evening, despite everything that had happened, I was giddy with joy. I rode the high as I headed to the station to catch my usual train home, slipping back into the rhythm of Bombay evenings. I was on the platform, waiting for the Borivali Fast when my phone began to ring in the pocket of my cotton dress.
I almost dropped it when I saw who was calling.Neil.
I pressed it to my ear just as the train screeched into the platform and a wave of people rushed forward to board. ‘Neil, hello?’
‘Kavya, where are you?’ His voice sounded urgent.
‘Uh,’ I said as a woman nudged me from behind. ‘Lower Parel station?’
I could hear him breathing hard on the other end of the line.Was he running?‘Which compartment?’
‘Move your legs,’ someone barked at me. Hands pushed me along, even as I resisted and tried to turn and look back.He was here? At the station?The crowd folded around me like a tide, carrying me with it. ‘Ladies first class,’ I barely managed to say before I was swept up into the train by the swarm of women struggling to board behind me.
‘I’m coming,’ he breathed into the phone just as I saw his head bobbing up on the platform.
Despite my best attempts to walk back towards the entrance of the compartment, I was carried deeper and deeper inside. ‘I can’t get off,’ I said, panic rising into my voice.
‘Then I’ll come to you,’ he said just as the train lurched forward.Shit.He was still on the platform.
But then, through the bars of the train window, I saw him running—no, sprinting—along with the train,wayfaster thanKajol did inDDLJ, might I add. I watched helplessly as he dodged commuters on the platform and got closer and closer to me. And then in one impossibly smooth move, he grabbed the door handles and hopped onto the footboard of the ladies first-class compartment.
A chorus of aunties let out gasps of horror.
‘Neil!’ I yelled into the phone. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ he panted. I could hear a woman screaming at him to get off, and another one reasoning that the train had already left the station so they’d have to wait until the next stop to chuck him out.
I craned my neck, trying to find him through the sea of people. ‘Why are you here? I thought you were avoiding me,’ I said, trying and failing to get closer to him. ‘I called so many times …’
‘I know,’ he said, still somewhere at the far end, his eyes scanning the crowd until they finally landed on me. ‘I wasn’t avoiding you. I was at this silent Vipassana thing with my mom all week. No phones allowed. No talking. It was hell. I couldn’t even complain about it, that’s how rough it was.’
Something in my chest shifted as my heart sprang back to life.He hadn’t been ignoring me. He hadn’t disappeared. He’d just been offline. And now he was here, in front of me.Slowly, as the women realized what was happening, they started parting to let him through. He walked towards me slowly, still holding the phone to his ear. ‘The first thing I saw when I got out this afternoon was an email from my dad … thatyouhad sent.’
Uh oh. Had I messed up?‘I … I’m sorry, Neil. I should’ve just found a way to send it to you.’
I saw him shaking his head, a smile working its way onto his lips. ‘No, Kavya. He forwarded it to me … along with a cheque for my startup.’
‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see some aunties pointing at us and whispering to each other. A young girl was openly filming us. Another was leaning on the edge of her seat to catch our words. But I couldn’t have cared less if they’d been launching rotten tomatoes at us. Because Neil washere. We both lowered our phones as he finally reached me. His hair was a mess and his shirt was damp with sweat, but I’d never seen a more beautiful sight.
‘That letter didn’t sound like it was written by someone who hated my guts,’ he said as he searched my face for a clue. ‘Or is that just my blind optimism?’
A laugh that sounded more like a whimper broke out of me. ‘I don’t hate you … okay maybe I did for a bit, but that was when I thought you’d sold me out to HR and destroyed my career because I didn’t say I liked you back …’ The words were tumbling out breathlessly. ‘... and then it turned out to be Tanya and I hated myself for doubting you and I kept calling and calling and I just needed to tell you—’
The rest of the sentence dissolved in my mouth as he lifted one hand and cupped my face. ‘Hey, I’m here now.’ His thumb stroked my cheek gently. ‘And I’m listening.’
Him and eighty other ladies, apparently, because the entire compartment fell silent. The only thing you could hear was the train rattling on the tracks beneath us.
I filled my lungs with air. I was going to need it. ‘I don’t even know where to start. When I first met you, I swear to God, I thought you were the most annoying person on the planet. You were smug and entitled and, quite frankly, a bit of a manchild—’
‘Ouch,’ he said, but I went on, ignoring him.
‘I spent many days imagining strangling you in a million different ways.’ The girl who had been filming us was shifting her weight uncomfortably, like she wasn’t sure if this was going to turn out to be the viral moment she’d imagined in her head.‘But then … things began to change. Somewhere between the blackmailing and the bickering, the early mornings and the late nights … I started to see beyond this dumb front you put up.’
