“Let bygones be bygones,” he said coming closer to me as I stood benumbed. "Let's make it up.‟
Maybe pulled by guilt, I stepped back involuntarily, leaving him dejected.
“It's late anyway,” I said as if clarifying my rebuff.
“It's never late in love,” he said trying to hold me.
“I don't love you any more,” I said resignedly, “and I'm not worthy of your love anymore.”
Oh, how it wrenched me seeing his face turn ashen.
“I know you;re cut up with me,” he said, trying to persuade me, “Believe me, it was just a crush on her, and nothing more than that.”
“Maybe, but I've given myself to Vasu,” I said helplessly, "and so I'll marry him.”
“Why do you hurt yourself to spite me,” he said in agony.
“When I was in love with you,” I said reminiscently, “I loved myself. You can't even imagine how I imagined my life then. Now that I don't love you, I don't even love myself and I've no interest left in life to bother about my fate. Nothing matters to me anymore and I know nothing would change my attitude to life. Well, I've lost all, once and for all, and that is what is there to my life now, believe it or not, but it's true.‟
“I'm sorry Prema,” he said in pain, and left in anguish as I was hell-bent on pushing myself into a life of nothingness.
Chandra was lost thinking that Prema and Sathya have an uncommon feel of love beyond even its own impulse but as she began crying inconsolably, he was compelled to hold her in a manner of offering his shoulder for her to cry over.
“Oh, if only I had not spurned him, maybe, I would've shed enough tears in his embrace to let him wipe out my past with them,” she said as she withdrew herself from Chandra's hold. “But it was not to be and what else could he have done as I closed my heart to him even as he craved to get back into it? You don't know how I cursed myself that day for having undone myself that I couldn't ethically accept his love, which had been the goal of my life. I hated Vasu and I hated myself more so and I was tempted even to go back to him, but how could I, after having fouled my soul and polluted my body? I fell down in my own esteem, and suffered in Vasu's embrace ever since. And so I became frigid to the charms of life thereafter.”