"Adieu Om Sharma" - gestured Om with a salute on the name plate on the gate. Of course he did not know what next ...............
========================================================================
Love is a very strange thing, I don't even know if it can be called a thing - sometimes love is the destiny and like every thing destined it does come to you someday or the other. People still fail to recognize it and live their life in oblivion.
Not with Simi; 8 long years and she had not forgotten someone's eyes which at times looked so torturous. Soon after Omi had left, Rahul had told him very casually - "Thank you Simi, you made my life so easy all over again and I am sorry I had to use you to get Omi out of my life. I love your company but I don't love you. Please let me know if you want to keep a casual relationship, nothing serious though. I can hang out with you one complete day whenever you want, however you want. You are always on my safe side". This was her 21st birthday - one year exactly when Omi had left.
Simi, in the midst of her placement season, was devastated with this revelation. She didn't know what to do, just knew that all her love and feelings had just been mocked and conspired against. Rahul had also sent him some burnt paintings signed, "with love" from Rahul. It has Omi's name written on the paintings. Simi, then just knew that she had lost her Rahul, the heartthrob of the college to some other new girl on the block.
Simi remembered, she wanted to blast at Rahul, but somehow in the placement frenzy and her sadness, she just kept quite. The day when she finally got placed into a top MNC, she chose not to celebrate but just be in her room and her eyes fell on the envelope - with love Rahul. The sketches inside were exact replica of her moods in the last few years - one of them had captured her moist eyes in library while the other had her smile perfectly portrayed. Simi looked at herself in the mirror and back at the sketches. She felt good. She flipped through all the copies and each of them had increased the curvature of her lips.
She filed all of them in a file and stood near her balcony, the weather which was slightly cloudy and gloomy since morning, had started to drizzle. She loved rains and for the first time in the last month, she felt like smiling again.
"8 years and still so fresh in my memory .........." and the thoughts were interrupted by the phone call. Another assignment; life had been crazy since she started writing about Indian architecture. Her work experience and love for ancient and modern Indian architectures had made her pursue this career and she was doing exceedingly well at it.
She had to pack her bags and move to a tourist spot called "preetanchal", the latest heartthrob of north India, developed in the last 10 years. She had to cover the latest architectures in the region for her cover story. While packing her bags she thought to herself - strange name for a relatively modern and upcoming tourist vacation. It meant - the mountain of love, that's all she knew.
