Read Stories Of Young Love for Free Online Page B

be
getting back to work since you are perfectly fine.” I rose to go
and said sternly, “I will remember this joke and hold it against
you for a while”.
    “Stay, stay,” he
said, “I really need your help. You are my only friend.”
    “Fuck off.” But I
sat down, curious to know what he had got himself into. And
how.
    “You remember the
blog?”
    “Of course.” My
fear was beginning to come true. “But I don’t remember you writing
about her. In fact, I thought you pointedly left her out of your
reminiscences.”
    “No, old chap, I
wrote about her. Only, I didn’t mail you the link, knowing that you
never cared to visit it anyway. And I didn’t share it like the
other posts either. It was very much a public post, only I didn’t
announce it like the others.”
    “That’s not true,”
I said, “I did follow the blog but not after you stopped posting to
it regularly. You must have written about Zeba after that.”
    He nodded in
affirmation. “On her birthday in October. You remember the date,
don’t you?” He said it in a mocking tone but this time I cast my
eyes down guiltily. Could he have known, could he sense my jealousy
now?
    “No, I don’t,” I
lied, “she was your girlfriend”.
    “Yes, of course. I
forgot.”
    Why this sarcasm?
Was he accusing me now? I looked at him angrily but he remained
silent for a while.
    “You said, you
posted a piece about her on her birthday,” I prodded him.
    “Yes, I did. But
she didn’t see it till several days later. It was my mistake. I was
just being my foolish self-important self, counting on her to visit
the blog every day, even on her birthday, as if she wouldn’t have a
party to go to, a husband and friends flattering her, children
occupying her time...”
    He sounded so
bitter, I knew he had forgotten about whatever he meant to
insinuate about me and Zeba.
    “What was it
supposed to be, this piece about her? A gift, or a bait to ruin her
happiness? I don’t remember you posting about me on my
birthday.”
    “I was testing my
power over her,” he said, and for once I had no difficulty in
believing him. It had been a game, a hunt.
    “Did she write to
you when she read the piece? How did you come to know she had read
it?” I said, waiting for his blog to open on my phone. I wanted to
read this piece, this bait he had cast. What would induce a firm
woman like Zeba to forgive Adil everything and come running to meet
him. How had he weakened her? I wanted to know how a loser like
Adil had accomplished what I would have never dared to do.
    “No, she didn’t
tell me. I just knew. The tracker. You remember Sameer Sir?”
    So that was it,
just as I had feared. He had mapped Zeba, but how? There are at
least a dozen of our common friends in London. How did he know it
was her?
    I just shook my
head to show I did not understand.
    It was past
midnight and he rose to brew more coffee. “You want some?”
    “Sure,” I
said.
    I read his post
about Zeba. He had written it carefully, picking bland words
deliberately, as if to tell the world: “I love her very much but I
don’t want you to know this”. He had not painted her glowingly like
the others but truthfully as only someone who knew her better than
the others could have.
    The smell of warm
coffee filled the room and I wondered how long the night would be.
It was getting close to my out-time, and in a little while I would
feel the need to sleep but we were probably in for a long
coffee-fuelled vigil.
    “You didn’t tell
me how you knew it was Zeba and not any of our other friends in
London?”
    “I had her street
address, and it matched with the one the tracker pulled up. Surely,
two of our batch mates don’t live on the same street in London. And
anyway, the proof is coming here, to meet me over breakfast a day
from now.” The knife of jealously turned a full circle in my
heart.
    “But the street
address. Who gave it to you?”
    “Just Google for
Alvi Meats, isn’t that her husband’s family