The ExtraMarital – Part 1

Based on Real Events

It was March 2018, and as soon as I returned to my terrace room post lunch, my phone started ringing. The name read Surbhi Saxena. She informed me delightedly of her engagement ceremony next week. I was surprised by the news, it came out of nowhere, all of a sudden. I did not know what to say, so I simply wished her good luck, and asked her about her “to-be hubby”.

She told me in brief about her new relationship, how they met over Facebook, how their online friendship groomed into love over the past 6 months, and how they planned everything within a short span of time.

The reason behind my bewilderment at the revelation was that we had been in constant touch for a long time, we used to talk on call almost twice to thrice a week, and we had a long discussion just a night before regarding project work. Yet she thought of informing me only when marriage was finalized, in fact, she did not give any clue, though we had a sort of informal friendly relationship and I used to assume that we both were transparent about our personal lives.

Perhaps, I was mistaken.

Surbhi was a bright industrious working girl, 2 years junior to me at IIT Delhi, and a trainee at my previous workplace-an automobile company, just a year before. I had changed the company but we stayed in touch. I used to like her but had never conveyed my feelings.

She had passed her graduation just a year ago and I felt that it was too early for her to get married, nowadays most girls do marry after 25.

Her fiance, an engineer from IIT Guwahati, had been running a successful start-up for the past few years, and had bagged some prestigious awards for “concept and design” in his product category. He was about 9 years elder than Surbhi.

In all probability, Surbhi was over-impressed by the success story of Harsh Malhotra and gave her approval for marriage in a hurry when he proposed.

Conversations between Surbhi and me started decreasing with time. I became too reluctant to call, and she too would be busy with her fiance.

We used to talk only if it was a very urgent work-related matter or if she had any project-related query.

She got engaged the week after, and both got married in June 2019. I did not receive a call or invitation from her. I could discover the online marriage invitation card she had mailed to me in July, after her marriage, it had slipped into my spam folder, probably because she had sent them in bulk.

We had lost contact with each other completely, even before her marriage. We both moved on in our lives in our own different ways. My feelings remained with me, and I did not want to intrude into her new happy life as it would ooze out my emotions as well.

It was almost a year later, in July 2019, when I discovered a mail from her, enquiring about my well-being, health etc. Thoughtful for a few moments,I decided not to reply to her. I still felt that she had not been true to our friendship and revealed her love only after finalizing the marriage dates.

I received another mail next month, in August when I was preparing to leave for on-site work in the Middle East. She had asked me for my new contact number and the reason why I ignored her emails. I did not reply yet again. I marked her mail as spam for the first time.

After 4 months on-site posting, I returned to India by the end of December. I went to my hometown on a one-month leave. One fine day while cleaning my cupboard, I came across a photograph of Surbhi, hidden inside a folder. It reminded me of the emails that she had sent. I thought of checking my spam folder. It had more than 50 emails from her, it took me 3 hours to go through all the emails, the crisp of which was that she wanted to talk to me urgently. I could not get the reason behind it, but since it was already past 8 PM, and she was a married lady,I decided to call her the next morning.

The day after I had to accompany my family to the nearby village. We reached within an hour, and after making some excuse I gradually walked towards the fields, far away from the house so that I could talk to her in solitude. Around 11 AM I made a call to her number.

She was elated to the core hearing my voice, to my surprise, and her simple sweet ‘Hello’ had already let out the lava of emotions buried deep within my heart. It was both soothing and troubling to hear her voice. We had a very long conversation, each sharing about developments in our lives, how she forgot to call me before her marriage, about her new job, and how happy she had been in her marriage.I did not have much to speak, my life had not moved ahead an inch on a personal front since she left. Finally, we disconnected the call when both had nothing more to speak.

I started moving towards my house, preoccupied with thoughts of her. One phone call refreshed all the memories, of the time we had spent together.

I had hardly walked half a km, my phone rang again. It was Surbhi, crying out loudly this time. Unable to fathom what went wrong within moments, I tried to calm her unsuccessfully. I sat on a mud mound nearby and waited for some time for her to stop crying, I wanted to get her relieved emotionally, crying helps.

She started speaking about her life again, she said that she had lied about her happy married life in the previous call a few minutes back, she had been suffering terribly for the last few months, all the happiness in her life had vanished just a few months after marriage, she had been running all the finances of her household, financing the tuition fees of her brothers in-laws from her salary.

On enquiring about her husband’s business she informed me that the start-up failed within no time, investors had withdrawn he had gone almost bankrupt, and there were heavy loans to be repaid. Her husband had been venting out his frustration on her, she was being harassed mentally, sometimes physically out of mere frustration.

She also told me about her plans to separate and seek divorce and asked me for a way out.

I was not sure what to suggest, I needed some time to think, but in an attempt to console her, and prevent her marriage from breaking up, I told her that things would improve with time, she should act a little stronger, how the tough time would pass and things would better, and not to think of separation. I did not want her marriage to break up as a well-wisher.

Almost more than an hour into the conversation, I asked her permission to leave for lunch, and she sought assurance to keep in touch. I replied in the affirmative.

Now we would keep talking regularly, she used to call me every evening when she used to return from her office and would disconnect as soon as she would de-board her metro station. She had asked me not to call after 6 PM as her husband had been suspicious of her even without a reason and did not allow her to interact much even with her colleagues. I never used to call her, the onus to call used to lay on her at her time of convenience.

The developments in her personal life had been moving from bad to worse. As usual, not sure what to suggest, I would always keep her giving hope about how things would improve with time.

Nothing improved. Somewhere deep within I realized that I was giving her false hopes.

With the passage of time, I started receiving her calls less often, my vacation had ended as well.

A phase came when we had almost stopped talking to each other. She would mail me intermittently, but not sure of what to reply, what false hopes to give her again and again, I started ignoring the emails and auto-directed them to my spam folder.

A few months later, during a casual meeting with Rishita Banerjee, one of my friends who was a Social Sciences lecturer at JNU, I brought up the topic to seek her suggestions.

She reacted very angrily to knowing about my suggestions to Surbhi, for giving her false hopes of a bright future while she was suffering the toxic relationship every day, every moment.