When Only Love Remains Read Online Free PDF Page B

crying child, and one day she would have just left. Their conversations are yet to move out from virtual space. She has given her father the benefit of the doubt. After all, he must still feel guilty about what happened to Avanti’s mother, who died in a freak accident while returning from work. It was a year after she ran from his house with their three-year-old daughter in tow. All this wouldn’t have happened if her father had a normal job. Like if he was an engineer. Or a bank manager. She wonders if her father had a stammer since childhood or if he developed it later.
    She locks the door behind her as she leaves and makes sure the keys go under the mat and not in her handbag. She is not a big keys person and loses them at an astonishing rate. The road outside her apartment is like an F1 track with cars whizzing past her, leaving behind billowing smoke. There goes my make-up, she thinks. After much haggling she gets into an auto which will take her to the headquarters of the building of Indiago Airlines.
    The auto ride is long and tiring. There are a million cars travelling in the same direction and none of them has more than a single passenger. ‘People should be forced to car pool or this city will burst pretty soon!’ she mutters.
    ‘ Bas yahin —here,’ she says to the auto driver as she gets off at Nehru Place, where in the huge glass building adjacent to the sprawling five star hotel, Vasant Intercontinental, is the office of Indiago Airlines. The only airlines that flies to New York. Twice a day. Also Dubai. And Phuket. And Rio. ‘This will be awesome!’ she tells herself.
    Then she takes a deep breath and a smile breaks out on her face. ‘It’s going to be good. You’re pretty and you’re smart. You don’t have to be tense,’ she tells herself. But just to spoil it all, it’s Shekhar calling on her cell phone. She takes the battery out of the cell and keeps it in the bag. She closes her eyes and hums a song by Devrat, her drug, and pastes a smile on her face.
    An hour later, she is sitting in a huge hall filling up an employment form with around a hundred other new flight attendants, all pretty and young. Everyone around her is decked up like they are in a club with a James Bond theme. No one has a hair out of place. Avanti, even though she was dead sure she looked gorgeous in the morning, is not so sure anymore. Even the guys have clear, flawless skin and bright pink lips. ‘Kill them,’ Avanti thinks. She’s all for metrosexuality but this is just gay. She looks at a boy with a charming smile and slippery smooth skin. SO GAY. Not even legal now. Section 377 or something.
    The hall was the target segment for fairness creams, body lotion, bleaching agents and every cosmetic aimed to help people become fairer and more Caucasian. From the brief conversations she has had with a few girls, she gets to know that the majority of them were aspiring models and soap opera actors but couldn’t manage the struggle it entailed. Names of big television personas, fashion choreographers and photographers are dropped like they are old friends and soon, they are showing each other their portfolio pictures in shimmery dresses and dark lipsticks.
    Flight attendants don’t really need to be attractive but it helps if they are. When you’re caged in a steel box thirty-five thousand feet above the ground with no escape routes, a pretty face can be the only calming factor.
    Landing this job wasn’t easy by any means. For the hundred-odd seats open for fresh applicants, there were a hundred thousand applications, making it tougher than getting into the IITs or the IIMs! Go figure.
    ‘Hi, do you have an extra pen?’ the guy sitting in the front row asks. She had noticed him stealing glances at her ever since they took their places. Or maybe he was just looking at everyone.
    ‘Yes,’ she says and hands over a ball pen. He turns around and faces her, throwing her a little off balance.
    ‘It’s a tough form to