working lift had just gone down. I could have taken the stairs and caught him in time but, after a long day, I didn’t have tjie energy to do that. I came back to my room, irritated by his audacity. Dumping the notebooks and the slip with his phone number in the dustbin, I sat on the bed, a little unsettled, I can’t let someone I just met get the better of me, I thought, shaking my head. I switched off the lights and lay down. I had to catch an early-morning flight to Mumbai the next day and had a four-hour window of sleep. I couldn’t wait to reach home. However, I couldn’t stop thinking about my encounter with the mysterious Madhav, Who was this guy? The words ‘Dumraon’, ‘Stephen’s’ and ‘Delhi’ floated around in my head. Questions popped up: What the hell is a half-girlfriend? And why do l have a dead girl’s journals in my room? Eyes wide open, l lay in bed, staring at the little flashing red light from the smoke detector on the ceiling, The journals bothered me. Sure, they lay in the dustbin. However, something about those torn pages, the dead person and her half-boyfriend, or whoever he was, intrigued me. Don’t go there, I thought, but my mind screamed down its own suggestion: Read just one page. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said out loud. But thirty minutes later, I switched on the lights in my room, fished out the journals from the dustbin and opened the first volume. Most pages were too damaged to read. I tried to make sense of what I could. The first page dated back nine years to 1 November 2002. Riya had written about her fifteenth birthday. One mere page, I kept thinking. I flipped through the pages as I tried to find another readable one. 1 read one more section, and then another. Three hours later, I had read whatever could be read in the entire set. The room phone rang at 5 a.m., startling me. ‘Your wake-up call, sir,’ the hotel operator said. ‘I am awake, thank you,’ I said, as I’d never slept at all. I called Jet Airways.
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