OS: Letters

Fandom: Bollywood - Bachna Ae Haseeno
Pairing: Raj/Gayatri
Setting: Gayatri's thought process while Raj is in India
 
It doesn’t take Gayatri very long to realise she gave the wrong answer. 10 short days, which seemed endless without texts or calls which she used to falsely protest were straddling the border between cute and obsessive due to their frequency. 10 days with routine monotony of classes, work and home. She tries to keep busy, but she keeps thinking about it.

He’d asked the question she never wanted to hear and she panicked.  Instead of thinking about the question carefully before giving her answer she gave the first answer in her head. The same answer she’s always given whenever the subject comes up. That answer’s always been right so far so she’s had no reason to question it before. But she is questioning it now. And that uncertainty tells her it was the wrong answer.

Never one to shy away from her mistakes, she calls him. First on his mobile and then at his apartment. The first doesn’t ring at all and the second never ceases. If he had heard her apology and rejected it she could have dealt with that. But his lack of an answering machine drives her to his home. She knocks and waits but the door remains shut. She entertains the possibility that he might be out; out with someone else. But she pushes the thought aside and tries again. Five nights in a row make her frustration grow. There are all these thoughts inside her head and she needs to get them out. She needs to tell him but how can she?

                              

A letter seems so quaint, so clichéd, so Victorian England. But her methods of communication are limited. He won’t answer his phone, he won’t see her and she suspects her emails have gone unopened and deleted immediately upon receipt. There’s always the possibility he’ll do the same with this letter but she hopes it will be more difficult for him. A letter is tangible, he’ll have to physically rip it and she hopes and even prays somewhat that he’ll be unable to.

Within days she regrets posting it under his door. It’s clear that he’s forgotten her. She was right, despite his grand promises of waiting forever and never giving up it’s obvious that he has. This indignation lasts almost two months before she swallows some of her pride. Two months without a phone call, an email or even a drunken text but still she hasn’t been able to forget him. Unlike him, it seems she will love him forever.

Her first letter seemed endless to her, she’d wanted to tell him everything about how she felt and how sorry she was for rejecting his proposal and yet she still had so much to say in her next. She keeps on sending the letters every week. Hoping that one day at least he’ll give in to a moment of weakness and respond. Some days she almost manages to convince herself that all she wants is acknowledgement of her letters but others she can’t escape the fact that she just wants him.  Life without marriage and without Raj can’t possibly compare to life with Raj, marriage and everything that goes along with it.