Love Lasts Forever Read online

  Love lasts forever

  Vikrant Khanna

  A sailor by profession and a writer by passion, Vikrant has penned two novels before this. He lives in Delhi with his family. You can get in touch with him at vikrantkhanna.com

  Srishti Publishers& Distributors

  N-16, C. R. Park

  New Delhi 110 019

  [email protected]

  First published by

  Srishti Publishers & Distributors in 2014

  Copyright © Vikrant Khanna, 2014

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publishers.

  Typeset by Eshu Graphic

  Dedicated to my wife. Thank you for letting me write a book on this topic.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you friends and family for your love and support.

  Wify for patiently listening to the story and letting me write it.

  Purnima and Samreen for you feedback.

  Wasim for the wonderful cover.

  Team Srishti

  Swati and Rakesh of Brannia for the branding of my book.

  And lastly, thank you readers for picking up this book. I sincerely hope you enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  PART - 1

  1. TODAY, 25th June 2011

  Transiting Indian Ocean

  ‘And then what happened?’ I have never been so intrigued with someone else’s story. And that too, a love story of a fifty year old man.

  I glance at our Captain. Tears well up in his eyes and he finds it difficult to speak. He doesn’t reply and there is a morose look on his face. I notice a gentle quiver in his stance, and I understand. He hasn’t completed his story and tells me that the worse is still to come. What can be worse? I wonder. I mean getting a divorce from your childhood sweetheart just few months after marriage is tragic enough.

  Captain Shekhar is tall and sturdy built, but it is those broody eyes that demand all the attention. Until today I hadn’t known his plaintive love story and loss were shielded by them. For the last few days that I’ve known him his they were masked behind that dimpled smile which barely deserted his face.

  He looks fit for his age and is mostly bald with some hair left over the sides and back of his head. With his personality I can be sure he’d have been handsome in his youth.

  Pensively he looks ahead from our steaming ship Adriatic Wave toward a sight that is quintessential of a beautiful evening. The moon is full and over a million stars gleam from above us, shining and lending their luminosity to the late evening sky which is predominantly clear. The dark grey water below bathes in the ivory hue of the moon. There is a light breeze which adds to the serenity of the Indian Ocean.

  ‘Ronit, do you see something ahead on the horizon, perhaps fine on the starboard bow,’ Captain asks me, wiping his moist eyes, ‘a boat maybe?’ A stark hollowness has understandably crept in his voice.

  I pick up the binoculars and adjust my vision through them. Frankly I am so much caught up in his story that I am hardly interested.

  ‘No, sir,’ I reply nonchalantly, ‘probably a low altitude star.’ I was hardly looking.

  I want to know more, dwell deeper into his heart. I want to know why even after the divorce with his wife some three decades ago, he is still madly in love with her?

  I presume he is crazy, like all other ship Captains are, particularly at the age of fifty. After spending more than half of their life at sea, all these guys are left with is poignant thoughts. I mean how else can one love someone forever?

  And he hasn’t even seen her in the past thirty years.

  I am this ship’s first officer or chief mate as the Europeans like to call me, the first in command to my Captain. We are loaded with almost fifty thousand tons of crude oil loaded from ‘Reliance Jamnagar Marine Terminal’ located in the Gulf of Kutch in Sikka port in Gujarat. Our discharge port is Immingham in the United Kingdom – a two weeks voyage. But that never worries us; it is the transit through the ‘Gulf of Aden’ – a piracy infested area near Somalia - that scares the living daylights out of all seafarers.

  Now most of you would have just read about these stories in newspapers or probably watched them on TV, a reporter regurgitating the breaking news with the slightest of emotions about Indian seafarers being held captive by the pirates. But if you were here, with us on this ship, you would have started feeling the tremors right at the onset of the voyage.

  Here on the bridge – the place from where a ship is navigated – the atmosphere is pretty tense. I mean who would want to be under the captivity of these inhumane people for months or even years. Although personally, I don’t think I’ll mind too much. At least that would ensure I won’t see my wife Aisha for that long.

  Getting married was the worst decision of my life; to her, worse than worst. We were in love for seven years before making that horrible decision and since then our love has been nose diving in an abyss. And now I hate that bitch. Barely a month into our marriage and I could sense her true colours. It now seems to me that she only married me for my money. I have decided to divorce her after I complete my tour of three months here.

  With a shake of my head, I try concentrating on the job at hand, and ensure absolutely no suspicious boat hovers around our ship or approaches us. That could be them. I look at my Captain; he doesn’t look interested in talking anymore and is staring at the radar screen – to get an early warning of any approaching boat.

  ‘Do you see that Ronit,’ Captain says, pointing toward a white light which is barely visible over the horizon. ‘That is the same light I showed you some time back. It has come close to us now and I sense something fishy. That ship or whatever it is has been changing its speed frequently. I wonder what it is up to.’

  Yeah whatever!

  I am least interested really. It has been just a couple of weeks since I joined this ship and I can still not get over my wife’s taunts. Where did all the love disappear? Perhaps my school friend Joe was right by dissuading me not to get married. ‘Men and women are not meant to co-exist,’ he’d reiterate. I always thought that was a quote from some Hollywood flick, but never figured out which one. Now only after our marriage have I found sense in that line.

  I see Captain panicking a bit as he wobbles about his toes, pacing up and down the bridge. I look ahead. There are two lights on either side of the ship – port and starboard in marine terminology. Both the lights are bright now as opposed to the faint aspect a while earlier. And they are close to us, pretty close. Baffled, I look at my Captain who himself appears vexed. I can bet he has the same question in his head as I have, ‘From where the hell did this second boat appear?’ There is something terribly fishy happening now. I shun away the thoughts of Aisha.

  ‘Hey Ronit! This boat on our left!’ Captain says, pointing toward it in an uncharacteristic shriek. ‘It has just lit their light. It was dark all this while. What are these people up to?’

  He scampers outside to the bridge wings to get a better picture.

  I am up on my feet now. Both the boats are just about two nautical miles from us. Captain comes running inside shouting Emergency and raises the alarm. He orders hard-a-starboard to turn the ship to the extreme right, away from the boats. But as soon as he says that, we watch in horror as both the boats ahead suddenly come close to us, and the next moment are alongside. The pirates employ
ed their age old technique of boarding ships. Two boats are tied with thick hawsers or rope that is underwater so the navigating officer on the ship has absolutely no clue about their collusion, and when the ship touches the hawser, automatically with the ship’s momentum, the hawser is pushed ahead and the two boats come alongside.

  It is game over for us now. It’s a macabre sight to see the pirates launching hooks and rope ladders up our ships’ railings and in minutes there are more than a dozen of them onboard.

  Two minutes later, three armed pirates enter the bridge and place a gun on Captain’s forehead.

  ‘Your ship is hijacked Captain,’ the taller of the three pirates sneers.

  2. GRADUATION DAY

  February 2004, Mumbai

  It was a splendid morning in Mumbai – clear blue skies, crisp sunshine, and a gentle breeze. The day felt even better as after almost a year of rigorous training our batch was finally passing out. The crazy schedule - getting up at four every morning, doing PT exercise in those embarrassing white shorts that flexed our scrotum, and then working and studying till eleven every night - was finally getting over. We were thrilled to say the least.

  T.S. Rahaman, our pre-sea training institute, is located at the head of the navigational channel of Mumbai Harbour, on the mainland of Nhava. It boasts of a twenty- two acre lush green and beautiful campus with a sea front on the north west of Nhava. Every day in the past one year, we had regretted our decision of joining merchant navy. The proverbial ‘Life at sea is tough’ had made sense to us now.

  As we woke up in the morning in our measly room, both of us – Joe and I – had a wide smile on our face, actually, Joe Singh and I.

  I’d always found it very outlandish for a Sikh to be named Joe. Despite that, right since our school days, I’d been referring him as Joe Singh. I always thought it was more fun that way.

  Joe Singh is sturdy built, dark, and I always thought being a surd, he is sort of handsome. From the early days that I’d known him, he’d always been easy going and carried himself with aplomb. Friends for more than a decade, we’d first met in a school in Delhi. Joe Singh’s uncle was a Captain, earned loads of money, travelled the world, and bought properties in Mumbai every year. It was pretty much then both of us had made an irrevocable decision of joining navy.

  And after spending a year, we learnt, like us, money was the primary reason that drove all others in our batch to this profession.

  Our batch boasted of one hundred and twenty cadets. Needless to say all of us were very excited today. We would finally begin our career with our pre-sea certificates that would guarantee us a place on a ship. And that’s when our wages would start. On this note, I quite liked my job. I mean, no other profession offers salaries to eighteen year olds, and that too, in American dollars.

  ‘Finally,’ Joe Singh gasped. ‘We’ll be out of here. I’m going to buy a cell phone for myself from my first salary.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said, ironing my uniform.

  Our door squeaked open. It was Priyank Bhatia - our neighbour and class monitor.

  ‘Hurry guys, Shukla ji is waiting for the fall-in.’

  His characteristic cackle irritated the hell out of us. What sort of a guy has a name ‘Priyank’? He was much better off with an ‘a’ at the end of his name. He anyway was a woman trapped in a man’s body. Our entire batch, along with the seniors loved pulling his leg, and well, I hate to admit, ogling at him. His rhetoric, voice, gait, stance, and every damn organ of his body screamed femininity. Fair, soft and spotless skinned, he was like an oasis in a desert full of boys. In the last one year we’d perhaps seen just about half a dozen women in our campus and they were no match to Priyanka’s beauty.

  Which explains the attraction toward her, I mean him.

  ‘Yes darling, we’ll be there in a while,’ Joe Singh said with a flying kiss, thrusting his lips toward him.

  Priyanka pouted his lips, brandished his arm, and hurriedly moved on to the other rooms. He did take his job of a class monitor damn seriously.

  ‘Oh thank God,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad we’ll be out of this shitty place today. I’m longing for the sight of a beautiful woman. It’s been ages now.’

  ‘Didn’t you just see Priyanka?’ snapped Joe Singh.

  Half an hour later we queued up in the fall-in. I completely abhorred the idea. It was basically making all the cadets stand in a line like donkeys and a head count was taken to ensure no one was missing. And if at all someone was missing, you know, may be due to a drink too many last night or a fitful sleep, he had to run the entire length of the campus thrice. That was three kilometers times three, making it a mighty nine kilometers.

  Today, however, each one of us had turned up on time for the fall-in. After all, it was the last of our life.

  After the fall-in, we proceeded to a bigger ground where the passing out ceremony was planned amidst huge pomp and show. With over fifteen acres of space, the ground could easily accommodate the families of all the cadets, our instructors, and professors. We were made to stand in three groups, with each group comprising of four rows of ten cadets each. In front of us, our families sat and scoured the three groups in search of their lone donkey.

  The ceremony began with the dean giving an incumbent speech that was outright boring and horrendous. I mean, come on, you don’t scare the cadets who haven’t been out at sea by talking about storms and hurricanes that gulp the entire ship within minutes, or blabbering about some nonsensical ghost stories on ships that you experienced, or talk about pirates hijacking ships. All ten minutes that our dean spoke was meant to discourage us from joining shipping. The sixty- something dean invoked a certain amount of terror in our minds that was needless. We would anyway be leaving our families and country for months together. As if that wasn’t terror enough. Nevertheless, all of us applauded as the dean left, more out of relief than appreciation.

  The ceremony continued with speeches from three more Captains who were the dean’s protégés. It was nothing else but another fifteen minutes of sulking under the sun in ‘attention’ position. Our instructor Shukla ji who stood ahead of us between the three groups didn’t even have the courtesy to call for a ‘stand at ease’ position.

  I glanced at Joe Singh who appeared equally spent and forlorn and all others except, of course, Priyanka. He had a bright smile on his face, a smile that was synonymous with pride and honour. I wondered why? Everyone who came here, no matter how lame, would manage to graduate with flying colours. Then why the whole dramatic nod and flattery to every customary sentence churned out by our Captains?

  Priyanka had been the most pretentious person I’d known in my entire life. Also, he always had to be the best and excel in whatever he did, perhaps, to make up for his feminine image. Then be that in studies, completing his assignments, finishing his meals, waking up in the morning, reporting for the fall-in, and the list was endless. He had this relentless urge to be ahead of everyone which was one of the reasons all of us hated him. The smug look on his face on the day of results was another. And as if that wasn’t reason enough, he’d top in all the subjects in all the exams.

  Obviously, for being on all fours, genuflecting to all our professors and instructors got him to that position. But nobody gave two hoots about scoring ranks here; all we wanted was that elusive pre-sea certificate that would guarantee us a job on a ship. Ranks never really mattered, but this basic sense always eluded Priyanka.

  After the applause that marked the end of all the odious speeches, it was time for the rankings. Top five among us would be given a ‘Certificate of Merit’ which had no value or meaning. I could sense from a distance Priyanka’s head rise a few notches in anticipation of the first prize. A victorious smile unleashed from his face even before the announcement of the results. He appeared so sure he’d get it. I hate to admit but even I was sure about it and so were all others in our batch. He cocked his head toward his family on his right and their hands were already together. I could faintly see in
the distance his parents and probably his sister.

  As expected, his name was announced as topper of the 2004 batch. A huge round of applause filled the ground and his sister or whoever she was, frisked all over her seat. I felt like killing the bitch.

  He marched toward the makeshift stage where the dean waited to honour his wisest donkey. Shukla ji began his rant at the top of his voice – ‘Left, right, left; left, right, left.’ Priyanka’s over-exaggerated, over-enthusiastic, over-dramatic march unleashed a smile on our face. Seriously dude, get a life!

  And just the next very moment, I heard a huge guffaw of laughter. I looked ahead in the direction of our pretty batch mate and it was the best sight in the world. Priyanka was lying on the ground after tumbling flat on his face. Some people came forward to assist him. I couldn’t see his face though, but his crisp white uniform (that once was) was smeared with mud and was a velvety brown colour. His sister’s hands were over her mouth in disbelief. Slowly, Priyanka got up on his feet, and uncomfortably wobbled his way toward the stage.

  And that, unquestionably, had to be the most delightful moment of my entire stay here in the past one year.

  Over lunch, I met Joe Singh’s and some of my other batch mates’ parents. Joe Singh nodded toward Priyanka who was busy gorging on his food with his family, just few benches across us in the huge dining hall. He seemed to be in hurry; he had to come first after all. We high-fived at the sight of his hair and uniform that were in complete disarray.

  ‘Come Ronit, let’s have some fun.’ He strode off toward our pretty batch mate.

  ‘Sure, I love fun.’ I padded behind him.

  Looking back the past one year, I’d come to realize that I loved fun, especially when it involved Priyanka. Just few days after we’d joined this institute, everyone had developed an aversion for him, which is what provoked all of us to harass her, I mean him.