Till the Last Breath . . . Read Online Free PDF

tell them. She went and sat next to her mom and held her hand. The doctor started to explain. The world blocked out.Her mind was blank. The denial of her parents, their shouts, their screams, their accusations against the incompetent doctor and the irresponsible hospital, their claims of their daughter being perfectly healthy—nothing registered in her brain. She had just one image seared on her retina.
    She was going to die, motionless on a hospital bed with a tube cut into her throat.

4
Kajal Khurana
    Kajal paced nervously in her hostel room. The news of Dushyant lying unconscious for three days had just reached her. It wasn’t the first time she had received such a call. When they were dating, she was used to going to the hospital, picking him up and cleaning up his shit. But the last such call was two years back. Today, she had suppressed the impulse to drop everything and visit him.
He wouldn’t want to see me
, she argued.
Do I want to see him?
Two years had passed since the last time they had talked.
    Kajal dialled the number.
    ‘Hello, GKL Hospital? Can I talk to the doctor of a patient admitted there? The name is Dushyant Roy.’
    ‘Hold on,’ the voice from the other side said. The waiting sound piped up.
    ‘Hello? This is Zarah Mirza.’
    Two summers before this one, Kajal was a second-year student and Dushyant was a year senior to her. It wasn’t until a few friends pointed it out that Kajal realized she was constantly being stared at by a senior. It was none other thanthe swearing, belligerent, infamous, drunkard of a senior with a penchant for getting into trouble—Dushyant Roy. Kajal hadn’t noticed his stealthy moves earlier, but slowly she started to spot him everywhere. She hadn’t made much of him earlier and thought of him as one of the many roadside ruffians from the mechanical department. Little did the rich daddy’s girl know that he was going to change her life forever. Forever began on the day Kajal was sitting idly in the library, looking blankly outside the window …
    Kajal looked at the open grounds of Delhi Technological University and felt disconnected. Two years had passed since she had started studying electronics engineering and felt more disillusioned with every day that passed. She wasn’t meant for Schrödinger equations and Fourier transforms, like many others studying with her. While many had resigned themselves to their fate as engineers for life, Kajal still believed she would be something more. At least she hoped. People with money can always do that—hope, change careers, do crazy expensive things, and call themselves travellers after buying travel packages to posh European countries and staying in beautiful resorts. Though Kajal had never been that type; she was just directionless.
    Her latest direction was to turn to writing. She had always been a voracious reader. From Sweet Valley High, the Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton when she was young, to David Baldacci, Dan Brown, Nicholas Sparks when she got older, to the heavier works of authors like Mohsin Hamid and V.S. Naipaul, she had read it all. She picked out a corner in the library and started to read from the page she had folded the day before. It was the latest book by Nicholas Sparks. Like every other girl, shehad spent countless nights crying to his books, even though she steadfastly maintained that she wasn’t into romance novels and that she had never been a fan of Indian authors and their amateurish love stories set in engineering colleges.
    ‘Hi,’ she heard a voice from behind her.
    She turned around to see the guy who had been following her around college for the last few days, standing just over her shoulder. Her first feeling was of revulsion. His hair was tousled carelessly, his clothes looked like he hadn’t changed in days and his four-day beard just looked annoying. He wasn’t that tall; maybe 5’10” or 5’11” or even taller, she couldn’t tell because he was well-built for his frame. She