RECAP Ishaani’s marriage to Aditya had been an arranged one but she had no complaints about that. Aditya had made her very happy and when Diya was born, their happiness grew. It was during her second pregnancy that she realized that her paradise was perhaps just make-believe, and that her husband was cheating on her. An upset Ishaani has a bus accident. CHAPTER 7 Sometimes one mistake can change your life, thought Aditya, putting away the dirty plates in the sink. He hadn’t ever been a womanizer, but yes, there had been one woman he had loved, and lost, before he married Ishaani. Sameena and he had come together during their graduate student years at Boston, but they had always known about the inevitable end. Her parents would never ever agree, and she didn’t want to break the faith they had bestowed on her when they’d agreed to send her abroad to study. When the time came, they had said their goodbyes as lovers and stayed in touch as friends. Aditya came back to India and took over the Calcutta office of his father’s construction company, and soon a suitable bride was found for him. He liked Ishaani when he first saw her and he slowly came to love her and the way she built her own little doll’s house. It touched him that she did those little things for him, that she grew flowers in front of their house, that they had this wonderful baby together. And yet, the memory of his first love had remained. The memory would have remained confined to some infrequently accessed recess of his mind, but Sameena walked into his office one day. Casually, as if she had all the rights, and although he told her everything about his life with Ishaani, that life seemed a different chapter which was in no way connected to the earlier chapter with Sameena. Now, as he walked up to his bedroom and lit a cigarette, he felt a little impatient with himself about how he had met Sameena again and again over the next months till it was no point trying to hide the fact that the old flame still burnt intensely. It was not as if he met her every day, but he met her whenever she came down from her Delhi office, which was often enough to make him feel like he was leading a dual existence. He knew he would have to stop this soon, but Ishaani moving away to her parents’ home made him put off that stop for a little later. With just a bit of convenient guilt, he became one of those men who claim to love both the wife and the other woman, swinging easily from the tranquility of one relationship to the excitement of the other. They started taking bigger risks and it was during one of those days that Ishaani had decided to spring a surprise on him, and found the surprise backfiring. To his credit, Aditya did not ever try to plead anything but guilty when Ishaani came to her senses in the hospital. She was critically wounded with multiple fractures and had lost a lot of blood by the time she was rushed into the ICU at the nearby SEVA hospital. As he rushed around, trying to get any possible medical facility ready for her, he was vaguely also aware that if she survived, he would have to face the accusing look in her eyes. Strangely enough, it was her life that was at risk and the baby within her was doing alright. As he paced the hospital corridors, as a million emotions enveloped his senses, as he prayed and cursed, he gradually became aware of something he had never felt so strongly earlier. It was Ishaani whom he loved, the mother of his child, the woman who had so easily thrown in her lot with him, fitting so well into his life... it was she whom he loved. He hoped that he would get a chance to say sorry to her, to do everything in his power to make her understand that the past was done with and the future could still be theirs. Ishaani pulled through and when she was discharged almost a month later, he wanted to bring her home and look after her. She insisted that it would be easier for her at her parents’, and so he spent as much time as he could with her out there. They didn’t discuss Sameena except once when he told her everything as honestly as he could, while trying to spare her the hurt. Ishaani listened, her face an expressionless mask, and Aditya knew that she must be feeling such great pain. A pain that she bottled up and tried to forget about most of the time, as she didn’t want little Diya to be more upset than she already was. She didn’t want to upset her parents either, nor did she feel that Aditya deserved the kind of pain she felt when she thought of what he had done to her. The pain that she felt made her feel so vulnerable. She realized that loving and trusting him so unconditionally had left her so exposed to hurt. She knew she couldn’t really walk out on him now, but she was so puzzled about how she could possibly spend the rest of her life with a man who had betrayed her trust. She wondered if she could still love him, share a bed and a home with him. Soon their second child came along and in the routine chores of diaper changing and nursing, she forgot her own woes. When she came back home with Diya and Abanti, she could see that Aditya was actually trying. She knew though, that even if she forgave him, their relationship would never be the same again. It is difficult to trust again after being betrayed.                           To be continued…