Not in the Script: An Ahaan & Aneet Collection

The Lost Year

Saiyaara is finally on Netflix, and I've already watched it like 20 times. The only downside of having it on OTT is that my hyperfixated brain starts picking apart the dates and timelines, which... yeah, not exactly on point. But hey, we move!

This chapter is inspired by a tweet from @/ishqbulawa on Twitter, where they posted a fanfic idea of Vaani's POV diary entry during the year she's gone and Krish is looking for her.

Happy reading!

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Vaani Batra — 

I write so that something stays: the shape of him; the sound of his walking; the places where our laughter landed. If I do not write, the rooms rearrange themselves and I wake to strangers in my skin. When you read this, remeber and know that I left because I loved him too fiercely to destroy him with my fickle mind.

Before I left
There is a song that sits heavy in my mouth, a last syllable I could not swallow. I wrote it in my diary with my shaking hands. I wrote it like a letter folded into melody. I thought I was being brave. I thought I was being wise. I thought – a thousand wrong nouns – that I was protecting him.

Memory is a cruel ledger. I kept tally of the moments I feared losing, not knowing which would be first. I knew, because the doctors had been careful with their words, that my name might become a stranger to me. I knew that the gestures that once fit us together like two halves might fray until they no longer fit at all. I remember thinking, one evening with the lights turned low, that love that kills the lover is not love at all.

I wrote "Saiyaara" because I could not speak the words I needed to say. Language failed the way the sky fails when it tries to keep lightning inside it. I wrote because writing is what I know how to do when the rest of me is untethering.

It was not a confession or a last-minute plea. It was a map. A map made of what I could give him without taking him with me. I wrote him a gift that could travel even if I could not.

The lines came like pages pulled out of an old drawer. I wrote thinking of all the small things thing with which he could rebuild bigger ones – the way our hands found each other in crowded rooms, the first time his lips touched mine, the awkward pride in how he guarded the fragile parts of me as if he always knew, they were only his to keep. I wrote thinking about the afternoons in the bunglow when rain kept us inside and we pretended the world had shrunk to the size of that single teacup between us.

But I wrote also the terrible, honest sentence: I will not be the stone tied to your feet. I cannot be the weight on the side of your life that pulls you down. You must rise. You must sing. I will not be the thing you mourn that takes the music from your soul.

When I wrote those last lines, my hand shook so much the ink bled, just as my heart bled.

I kissed the paper and closed the diary, because I am ashamed at what love does – it is at once selfless and selfish. I left the closed book on the piano with my medical bracelet. The last remnants of my identity.

And then I left. I left because I could see the crater I would make if I stayed, the way his grief would become his fuel and then his destruction. I could not let him love me into ruin.

Day 1 — Arrival
Manali smells like fresh snow and old prayers. The ashram gates were a simple arch of metal. The nuns who greeted me had hands callused from work and the tone of people who reassign small mercies to great inventories of need. They told me it was a place for women who needed to be sheltered. Sanctuary, they called it, as if safety could be served in a ceramic bowl. I liked the word. I liked the idea that a place could bend space enough for you to hide inside the tilt of its roof.