The Clingy Fiancee

Chapter Four

Everyone was dressed in white, and for some reason, I had to, too. I could see the tear streaked faces of his parents, as they kept staring at his picture and kept sobbing. For some reason, a lot of people seemed to be crying around here – Neil’s friends, parents, a few of his colleagues, some other family members, and even my parents were crying.

Mehak was holding my hand as we entered the house Neil had spent his childhood in, and she was wearing white, too, just like I was. Didn’t we all wear white when someone died? It was a symbolism to give the soul peace, right? But who had died? There was no corpse lying here, there was no proof to validate anyone’s death.

Neil was not dead. His friends just didn’t put in enough effort to find him.

My hands were itching to tear off the garland that hung perfectly on Neil's framed picture. I want to tear away each little petal of those Marigold flowers that seemed to be f*****g everywhere. I wanted to scream loudly, I was so furious.

Neil did not die!

What was wrong with the people around me? He had just been Bungee jumping for God’s sake. It was something he did all the time – he just never got enough of the adrenaline rush. He had done so many life-risking activities, extreme sports, and he had come back fine and uninjured every time. Similarly, nothing was different this time, too.

Neil had been fine. Perhaps he had been rescued, too. But his friends were too lazy to find him. They just guessed that he wouldn’t be able to survive falling from such a height and then they believed he was dead.

He did not fall from a height. I know, no matter how distracted he had been, he always knew the safety and precautionary measures he was supposed to take. Hell, I had had so many adventures with him and in none of them did I find him being careless about a single thing.

But these friends of his, who had accompanied him to his business trip to Russia, seemed to not know him well enough. They did not know that he knew how to survive.

“You look positively pissed, Myra. Please, don’t be like that. People are mourning here –”

“Well, they are mourning for no reason, Mehak. Why doesn’t anyone believe me when I say that he is not dead?” I hissed at her.

“Perhaps, it is because you are sounding like a crazed woman right now. I mean, he went to Sochi Skypark, Myra, and do you know the height he had jumped from? It is six hundred fifty feet! No one is going to believe that he had survived that.” She hissed right back at me.

“Well, I do believe that he made it out alive.” I said, firmly.

“Well, then look at his parents – look how miserable they are right now; they lost their only son. If you are not going to give up on this stubborn insistence of yours, then find their son and bring him back home!” Mehak said, and was immediately shaken when she saw the glint in my eye.

“And that’s exactly what I’m going to do, Mehak. I am going to find him and bring him back.”

*******************************************

Saying and doing, definitely were two different things. While on one hand I had silently promised myself that I would find him while I held his mother’s hand in mine, I knew that there were a lot of things that I needed to sort in my own life before I went out on search for him.

I had to make arrangements for my job, I had to get out of the depressed haze I had pushed myself in the past few months and also I had to keep an eye on various places where I thought Neil would try to make contact before creating any suspicions.

Avoiding my father had become easy and difficult at the same time. He was now suggesting me to move on and find a man quickly before he himself arranged my marriage because I was 'of age'. It wasn’t that he had forgotten his favourite prodigal boy, it was just that now getting me married had become more of a dignity issue than something out of concern; a logic that was difficult for me to understand.

It had been six months since the day I had walked out of the penthouse that Neil and I had shared when we were together. And I was back here again, today, for a reason I did not understand. Entering the house again, it had felt like I had never moved out. It was still the same – the walls still had our framed photos together, our room was just the same, and the things that I had left behind were still there, strewn all across the room as if I had been there and made a mess.

I was still wondering why he hadn’t thrown my things out while I moved all of that stuff in the store room. I wanted this house to be a blank canvas the moment I found him and brought him back again. For some unknown reason, I wanted to give him the feeling of starting a new life all over again because after his funeral, it would be like coming back from the dead for the other people.

But there were two things that I still found missing. One of them was my engagement ring, and I was sure that he had probably thrown it away or donated it to someone else. The other thing was a pendant that he had gifted me on our first date. It didn’t have any material value to it, only sentimental, so it didn’t make sense if he had donated it to anyone.

Six months, and now everything was final. I would take the flight somewhere around midnight and once I reached there, I would immediately start searching for places he could have had possibly taken shelter in.

There was another thought that made my heart clench whenever I thought about it. Ishan had told me that Neil had been stressed the entire week they were in Russia. He called out for me, repeatedly, in his sleep, and the day he went Bungee Jumping, he had tried calling and reaching out to me gazillion times. My phone, at that time, was switched off and he could never reach me.

It was one of the reasons why they had concluded that I was the one who had left him.

I felt a tear trickle down my cheek as I looked down at the handsome face of my ex-fiancé. His brown eyes were smiling warmly at me when the picture was taken, and there was flush to his cheeks. His dark hair was messed up, and his trimmed beard made him look even more handsome. He had an arm wrapped around my waist, and I looked happier than I had been in the past six months. It was a picture that had been taken just a week before he had proposed me.

I searched deeply in that photo to see if there were any hints showing that Neil was slowly growing apart from me, but I found none.

All I could see was two people madly in love with each other.

Everything had been so perfect, everything was going so smoothly, and then this one disaster came along that ruined everything.

Maybe, if I hadn’t asked him the question that day, we would have been together today, happily married. Maybe it was really just cold feet that made him believe whatever Ananya had said, and then made him say all those things.

I missed him so much. The past four months had been so difficult because rather than forgetting him, I was more focused on finding him, reminding myself of him time and again. It was painful; knowing that when he would come back, I would, once again, become the shattered and rejected Myra.

And then, there was a part of me that was scared to even imagine the possibility of him actually being dead.

Through all of this insanity, only Mehak was supporting me, and for that, I was eternally grateful to that woman. I knew even she thought I was insane, and she too, was supporting me only because she wanted my mind to calm down. She wanted me to accept the truth and move on, and she knew that tracking him down was the only way I could do that.

Few hours later, I had boarded the flight, my nerves fluttering as I realized that I was finally going to search for the love of my life, and I was bound to meet so many disappointments in the way.

I just hoped I wasn’t too late. It had been four months since that accident and a lot could have happened since then.

A lot.