However, her bubble burst when she noticed that he didn’t want to spend time alone with her. When she confronted him, he came out and told her that he was gay. “I was just a girlfriend to show to the world,” Jaitley says.

Too young to comprehend what this entailed, Jaitley’s health took a hit and she started suffering from the eating disorder, bulimia. “I was so madly in love with him that I used to pray to God to change him. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t love me the way I loved him. My health started failing. I would stuff my face with food and then induce vomits to purge myself. Then I became anorexic,” she says.

Things came to a head when her boyfriend got violent with her. “After one-and-a-half years, the relationship had run its course. But I was unable to leave him. But when the relationship turned abusive I put an end to it,” Jaitley adds.

But the two reconnected after a few years when he apologised for getting violent, and they became friends. “By this time, he was openly gay. But he wasn’t in a happy space. He was in an abusive relationship, was a victim of gay bashing and was yearning for acceptance from his family members who were pressurising him to get married. Ultimately he destroyed himself because of all this stress and died so young,” she says.

His death after a heart attack left a deep impact on Jaitley and that’s when she decided to “voice my voice”, as she says. Her educationist grandmother who works with the United Nations also urged her to use her celebrity status to speak up for the cause of the LGBT community.

... contd.