Chapter 12 True love has a way of coming back… #2
Her head whirled to Atharva and he was so close. His nose was within touching distance of hers. His eyes were piercing into hers. Her mouth dropped open — “Janab as in… junior Janab.”
Grey eyes blinked. Amused or tender or something else? She couldn't decipher. Why couldn't she read him anymore?
With a pop, their son released her breast and lay back in the crook of her elbow, happily staring up at the ceiling, smacking his lips.
“That’s it?” Iram asked. “But I have more.”
A snort from beside her made her sit up.
“He had a bottle already an hour ago. This is his sleeping milk. He hardly tastes it… isn’t it, Dilbaro?” Atharva tickled his chin and lifted him up and over his shoulder. Iram stared as he rubbed three light circles on his back, then gave it a few firm pats. A gassy burp later, he was asleep.
“Just like that?” Her eyes widened.
Atharva smirked proudly — “He goes to sleep like me.”
“One moment there and then gone.”
His body tautened. Iram felt the bubble cocooning all of them burst as Atharva pulled out of the bed and padded to the cot at the foot of the bed.
He laid their son in there, dressed him quickly in a onesie and pulled a sheet over his tiny body.
He went to his cupboard and pulled on a clean night T-shirt over his day-old pants.
He then went behind the cot and began to wheel it.
“Where are you taking him?”
“I am going down to work. I’ll leave him with Begumjaan across in case he cries and wakes up.”
Iram sat up as if struck. She stared fixedly as he slowly pulled their door open and wheeled the cot out. Cold air touched her bare chest and she buttoned her kurti up. She heard the click of the door opposite theirs and ran to her open door.
“Atharva?”
He had already walked halfway down the corridor.
“Atharva!”
“Yes?” He turned. She wanted to scream at him but the silence of the night and Begumjaan sleeping in the room across, not to forget Yathaarth, stopped her.
“One minute,” she nudged her chin inside.
He took an about turn and marched back. She let him in, then closed the door.
Locked it. His eyes went to that action but he remained quiet.
She stared at him, willing him to say something.
Willing this courteous stranger to break.
He did not break. Her breaths slowly started to become pants.
Bad thoughts. Ready to invade. She pushed them back with the only weapon she found. Anger.
“What is your problem?”
His forehead tautened. That scar of his cheek stretched. But he still remained silent. That fuelled the fire inside her. She began to feel like herself. Her old self. Iram advanced on him — “What the hell is your problem with me?”
Silence.
“You are angry, and you have every right to be. But say it to my face! Be the man you always were and call it a spade!”
Staring of grey eyes.
“What happened? Scared I will leave again?”
“Fucking try.”
Her eyes widened.
“I am not going anywhere.”
His mouth stretched into a cruel smile — “I believe you. You have a better reason to stay.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
“I will not.”
“Ok,” he shrugged, walking around her to leave the room but she blocked his path.
“You think you can stop me?”
“So what do you want to do? Leave home before I wake up, come home at night, help me feed our son, see me cry, push him to Begumjaan’s room and then leave? For the rest of our lives?”
“I haven’t thought that far.”
His words were cruel. And yet she had never felt so alive to fight them.
“I am sorry,” she raged at him. “I am sorry I left you alone in all this! I did not know he survived! I did not know! In the OT they called out his time of death! 10.34. Time of death for Baby Boy Kaul,” she cried.
“10.34! I woke up and the nurse was telling me that Allah knows better. Nobody told me that my son lived! What was I to do?”
“Stay and see your husband who was on his way home!”
The wind was knocked out of her sails. She did not have an answer to that.
“Since we are on this topic right now, how did you manage to escape?” He crossed his arms across his chest. “And how were you planning to leave — not only the hospital but the country?”
“I did not want to leave the country!”
His cruel, knowing expression lost some of its colour.
“Where did you plan to go then?”
She found her knees weakening. Iram lowered herself on the edge of their bed.
“I did not plan to go anywhere… or, I can’t remember what I was thinking.
Except that… I wanted to escape that place and those onesies.
I…” she shut her eyes. “For long years I didn’t feel safe inside houses.
This time I didn’t feel safe inside my own mind!
This time, I couldn’t see myself in the mirror and recognise myself.
And it’s not some empty words. I mean it.
I looked at myself and did not know who I was.
I had a feeling like that now and then at nights but this time it was like…
it would never end. I was not the woman you were coming home to, Atharva,” she glanced up at him, stripping her last layer off.
He stared down at her, silent.
“You wanted your children, and even those I did not have for you. I did not have myself to give you. I saw myself drown you and nothing made more sense than to go away. Anywhere. My home had burnt, and this time I had set fire to it with my own hands.”
“Where did you go?” He asked, unaffected. It made Iram think that if he could take this right now, maybe he could have taken that version of her too — become aloof just like this and let her be. Maybe he wouldn’t have been as devastated over her as he would have been over their babies.
“I… went to Rahim Chacha.”
“The last number you spoke to was Dev Kohli’s.”
His tone made her ashamed of that fact.
“You said — ‘I may need your help.’ He said, ‘Oh… whatever you need, Iram.’ Was it some code, because I spent an excruciating amount of time deciphering it. And he spent an ungodly number of reasons evading it.”
“It wasn’t a code. I had called him like I had called so many in my panic at home when my water broke. Maybe he recognised the desperation in my voice and spoke like that.”
“He recognises the desperation in your voice,” Atharva scoffed. “Nice. What else? Did he send his car to escort you?”
“No! No!” She snapped to her feet. “No. I did not call him until that night, and that too for some… money.”
Atharva’s nostrils flared.
“How did you run?”
“I left my room and there was nobody outside.”
“Yathaarth was taken to Dr. Shankar’s NICU.
I asked Shehzad to leave one guard for you and go.
I asked Begumjaan to directly reach there.
I asked everybody to focus their attention there because which husband would think that his postpartum wife with five-hour-old stitches would get up and leave him? ”
“I did not know!” She screamed quietly at him.
“How did you leave the nursing home? The cameras didn’t track you after the first crossing signal outside.”
“It wasn’t emptied of patients. I changed and walked out like any other visitor.”
“So you had enough presence of mind to strategise a clean exit.”
“You are calling me a liar?”
“I didn’t call you anything,”
“But that’s what you meant!”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“You don’t know what it feels like!”
“What what feels like?!”
“The bad…” she screwed her face. “The… that feeling. That feeling of losing touch with yourself. Like you are not you. It’s so bad.
I still get bad thoughts, bad feeling. Especially at 9 in the morning every day, that time when I went into labour.
I cannot sleep entire nights. I see something, hear something, and start feeling bad.
And yes, while all of that is going on I can operate perfectly normally.
My mind works just as usual. I am not lying.
Yes, my mind worked enough that day to pack my postpartum bag, to evade the main corridor, to take the staff exit, to cross Saba and change my route the moment I knew I would be followed… ”
“Wait a minute.”
She ran the back of her hand across her mouth.
“You ran into Saba?”
She hiccuped, nodding.
“Where?”
“Outside the nursing home. I ran one way, then turned the other when I had turned the corner.”
“And she did not follow you? Raise an alarm?”
“She tried to hold my arm but I kept running. I thought Shehzad or somebody would come behind me, I kept looking back, nobody did.”
Atharva’s face hardened, if that was even possible.
“She did not follow you?”
“No.”
He crossed the space to their door, unlocked it and left the room, clicking it shut behind him.
Just like that — one second there and the next, gone.
Iram stared at the closed door. Her body was beginning to wilt.
She walked to the bedside and drank down the glass of water.
She glanced at the clock. It was just past 11.
She wouldn’t feel sleepy even if her eyes were droopy.
Exhaustion was a real, living thing inside her.
She opened the window and stuck her face out in the cold autumn wind. It was freezing. The smell of wet pine and banked fire of the guards assailed her nostrils. She exhaled through her mouth. Breathed in through her nose, breathed out through her mouth.
“Janab is leaving,” a holler sounded. Iram recoiled. A security guard ran from under their bedroom window around the house. Leaving? Where?
Iram whirled and rushed out of the room.
She took the steps to the attic, fast and frantic.
She threw the door open, breathing in the stale air until her hands had reached for the small window and pushed it wide.
It opened out to the front of the house and she stared in horror.
Atharva’s convoy was ready. He was striding out of the house in his work pants and home T-shirt, pulling on a coat, Altaf beside him.
He pushed inside the car door held open for him and the moment his door was snapped shut, the convoy flew out of the porch.
Like a serpent with shiny fangs and tails, the line of cars wound through the stretch of road leaving their house through the tangle of jungle and to the main gate.
And from there, Iram couldn’t see anything anymore.
He was gone. No ‘I am leaving,’ no ‘goodbye,’ no ‘I’ll be back.’