The Last Love Letter

Chapter 3

Akash, we need a new strategy to impress our client. The last two proposals you made were rejected. This is our final chance. We can’t afford to lose this contract.’

Raichand Kapadia, his boss, spoke slowly, deliberately, barely audible. Fifty years old, Raichand had been running Prime Focus Advertising Agency for the last twenty years. He had hired Akash when Akash was in his final year of college. Short and plump, Raichand was a quiet man with a reputation for being a great observer of life, and a closet poet, who was witty and smart. Today, however, he seemed dishevelled. His hair seemed a little out of place and his tie was way too loose.

‘Sir, I have been working on a new concept. It should be ready in a week, tops.’

Raichand was on his feet. ‘A week? They want it by tomorrow, Akash. I reminded you two days ago, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’

Raichand sat down again and pointed to the chair on the other side of his large desk. Akash, who had been standing so far, sat down too. ‘Listen, Akash, I’m sorry for your loss, but it’s been a year. You should recover faster. Nisha would have wanted you to do better at your job, don’t you think?’

Akash looked up, nodded, and left the room. The mention of his wife’s name had made him uncomfortable. What has she got to do with it?

Akash got back to his desk and plunged into action. When he looked up a few hours later, he realized that he should have left for home an hour ago. He picked up his keys and ran to his car.
Sara was in the ground-floor apartment of the landlord, where, at that time of the day, their domestic help, an old man, was the only person present. Akash could tell that she had cried, but by the time he saw her, she had stopped crying and was looking out of the window. The old man stared at her from his chair not far away.

Akash knew the old man was a harmless octogenarian who had lost his ability to speak due to old age, which had also impaired his vision. The landlord—a cheerful Sardar named Lakhwinder Singh, or Lucky, as everyone, including Akash, called him—said that the old man had been with them for the past sixty years, and though he was too old to work, he was allowed to stay, as he had no family of his own. Forty-year-old Lucky, who lived alone because he had lost his mother and father in a plane crash, was the old man’s only family.

When he picked Sara up and thanked the old man, Sara didn’t hug him back. It took the entire afternoon—telling her stories, talking to her and making her faces—to make her look at him as she usually did. Finally, around 8, when they were watching a cartoon show together on television, she laughed, and he knew everything was okay again. He’d been successful in turning her around this time, but what if it happened again?

He ran their daily routine in his mind. His boss allowed him two hours off in the afternoon so he had enough time to get back home, be present when Sara arrived by bus, prepare her lunch and put her to bed for an afternoon nap before heading back to office. In the evening, Akash got home just after 5 every day, but to compensate, he worked the missed hours from home.

‘Now, what do you want to eat, Sara?’

She looked up briefly, declared ‘pizza and ice cream’ with a smile, and went back to watching the cartoon.

That evening, Akash ordered Sara’s favourite pizza and stepped out of the apartment to visit the shop at the end of the street to buy her favourite ice cream as soon as they’d finished the pizza.

An hour later, when she was tucked in bed, well fed and deep in sleep, Akash looked at the picture of Nisha that hung over the bed and smiled in relief. Then he took out the letter and read it a few times before losing himself to sleep too, his palm resting on Sara’s hair.

When Akash woke up, it wasn’t on account of his alarm clock. It was due to fear. He flung the blanket to one side, switched the lights on and peered at the wall clock. It was 4 in the morning. He switched his laptop on and, as it was booting, walked across the hall to the kitchen and prepared himself some black coffee.

The coffee calmed him down a bit and he started to work. It took him three hours to gather his notes and ideas, and give them a final shape, just in time to wake Sara up for school.
His mother was away at an ashram in Haridwar, and he missed her support at this crucial time. But he knew that his mother had had it very rough these last ten years due to his father’s ill health. His father had passed away two years ago, and she still needed to stabilize herself. He couldn’t think of burdening his mother with his own problems. Sara had been his and Nisha’s responsibility, and now that Nisha was gone, she was his responsibility.

When Raichand studied his plan later that morning in office, he smiled and said, ‘I think this will work. I still feel it lacks something, but I know you’ve worked very hard on it, so let’s give it a shot.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

That afternoon, the clients visited the office, and Akash was encouraged by the way they reacted to his presentation. But when they called an hour after leaving, they’d decided not to use it.

'It’s a good strategy, Mr Akash, but after some thought, we think it won’t work for us at the moment. It lacks vitality. We’re sorry.’

Prime Focus Advertising Agency lost a major client that day, someone who had been with them for ten years and was one of their main sources of revenue.
His boss left office without a word to anyone, and Akash wondered what to do next, his eyes on the clock as the time approached for him to leave for home and be with Sara.

#truelove #romance #kulpreetyadav #lovestories #singleparent