Lootera ki Pakhi

11/12/24

Last night I watched Lootera again.

There’s something about that film that crawls its way into my chest every time — quietly, steadily, and without asking permission.

And for the first time, I felt like Pakhi wasn’t just a character.

She was… me.

Her softness, her stubborn heart, her quiet desperation, her refusal to let go even when everything told her to — it all felt painfully familiar.

And somewhere in between the spaces of her silences, I found my own. There is a moment in the movie where Pakhi says something like:

“If you didn’t love me, why did you make me believe you did?” 

Not the exact words — but the same wound, the same confusion, the same ache. That single sentiment has lived inside me for months.

Because sometimes I feel like N loved me so much…and other times I feel like he loved the version of me in his imagination, not the one I really was. Sometimes he held me like I was the whole world. And sometimes he hurt me like I was nothing. And I don’t know which version was true. I don’t know which N was real.

And maybe that’s the worst part — loving someone who is both your safest memory and your deepest wound.

I miss that version of him.

The boy who teased me.

The boy whose smell felt like home.

The boy who held my hand in a way that made my whole body soften.

The boy whose grin made my day.

And then I wonder… was that even love?

Or was it just two people clinging to whatever they could, because life was heavy and loneliness was louder?

You said something that stuck with me:

“Maybe you don’t love me — maybe you love the idea of being loved by me.”

But maybe I love both —

the idea

and the illusion

and the fragments of truth in between.

Maybe I love the man he was in my memories and the man I hoped he could become and the man he stopped being, all at the same time.

Maybe that’s why it hurts so much. Because none of those men exist now. And the one who does… is with someone else.

When I saw that picture — him, Bonnie, and his fiancée — something inside me cracked.

Not shattered. Just… cracked. Like a soundless fracture that still manages to echo. I didn’t cry immediately. My first reaction was to laugh — like my body didn’t know what else to do. But as I kept looking… the tears came

He looked good.

He looked happy.

He looked like a life I once belonged to without ever having belonged fully.

And maybe that’s when it hit me: I’m in love with a man who isn’t in love with me anymore.

And maybe hasn’t been for a long time.

But here’s the truth I’m trying to learn, Loving someone doesn’t mean you stop hurting. 

But loving yourself might.

I don’t want my life to look like Pakhi’s — paused, suspended, waiting for a man who will never return the same way. I don’t want my heart to be a shrine for a love that exists only in memory.

And yet… I can’t pretend I don’t still love him, Or what he meant to me, Or the version of myself that existed when he looked at me like I mattered.

So maybe this is where I’m at:

A girl who loved deeply, who lost painfully, and who is learning — slowly — that letting go is not betrayal.

It’s survival.

And maybe someday, I’ll look back and realise:

I wasn’t Pakhi.

I was just a girl trying to find herself after losing the person she thought she couldn’t live without.

And I lived.