Chapter 19 #2
“The world is crumbling, Iram.”
“I’m here to hold it up with you.”
“But are you?”
“I am here. I cannot be anywhere else but here.”
Silence. Only the occasional shudder of his breath, the hiccuping of his trailing sobs.
“Hayat.”
She stilled.
“They asked me to give her a name and I called her Hayat.”
“For the life she gave her brother?”
“I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that she deserved that life.”
“I am sorry I couldn’t make it happen.”
He sat up, gasping and rubbing his hands down his face. Reddened grey eyes pierced into hers — “You heard Dr. Baig. It wasn’t on you. Couldn’t be. If at all it started… it started with me. Your stresses that day were not yours alone.”
Iram stared at him — “And if I tell you that they weren’t yours either?”
He chuckled bitterly, pinching the bridge of his nose clean of tears. “How are we going to come out of this loop, Iram?”
“You know,” she leaned in on his shoulder and scrubbed the remainder of his tears off his cheek, the bristles of his stubble hard on her palms. “I read somewhere that a man lost in a jungle will always circle back to the place where he feels the safest. Guilt is where we feel the safest. No?”
He nodded. As long as they remained in guilt, they could live in the past.
“In my better moments, I have been thinking. How it is always so easy to circle back to my old habits. Of escaping, of shutting down, of going into survival mode. And for you to take the hits on yourself, take somebody leaving as them leaving you. The remainders of our histories still burn somewhere within us, Atharva. And we feel the safest there.”
The back of his hand rubbed the tear tracks on her jaw, his broken eyes shining with affection too.
How was it that they were able to experience and project such a strange mix of emotions onto each other?
How was their grief soul-sucking but then a light moment also life-giving?
Whichever god made it possible, she thanked him with every fibre of her being.
That even this misery she got to bear with him. Nobody but him.
“Once you had said that you wouldn’t accept happiness if it came without me,” Iram reminded him. He nodded, gaze trained on clearing her cheek of drying tears.
“I thank god that I get to bear my every misery with you.”
His gaze finally rose and met hers. Their eyes held.
Words ceased to be. Losses of their lives were uncountable.
Even if they managed to sit one day and count them all, they were unbearable.
Individually. Together, they had managed to shoulder them this far.
With new grief added onto those, and their souls strengthened after this storm, she was now more convinced than ever that they would succeed in not only bearing them but continue walking with them. Maybe even running again someday.
“You want to walk out of this jungle with me, myani zuv?” He held his hand out to her.
She did not have to think even for a second before her hand gave itself to his.
His fingers tightened around hers, like they had that first time under the handcart, like they had outside her father’s house, just before walking her to their marriage altar.
“It’s scary if we don’t find our way out,” Iram warned, having navigated the routes out of the maze of her mind and circled back a few times.
“We’ll be together.”
The baby monitor speaker blew up with a tiny squeak. Their heads fell together, laughing.
“He’s got good timing,” Iram curved her arm around his neck, pressing her face into the crook of his jaw. Old Spice and sleep and tears.
“He’s got great timing,” Atharva’s mouth pressed into the top of her head.
“Do you forgive me?” She pushed back.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Still.”
“Yes. Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“Forgotten?” Atharva asked. “Not our… not her…”
“Hayat,” Iram helped. She saw it in his hesitant eyes, as if he had nobody to share that name with. As if he had only ever referred to her as his daughter and not Hayat. As if she was the only one he could do it with.
“Hayat,” he pronounced. Two syllables, one breath, as dear to them as the sound of Yathaarth.
“I mean to say, all this… this mess of our life. Your past, Nagar, your family, what happened there. What we lost again and again, the people we became while it happened. All of it — ready to forget it and move on?”
“I am ready to forget everything except Hayat and move on, Atharva.”
Iram could see it, the sound of their daughter’s name bringing so much heartbreak but even more joy to his face. As if now, four months after her birth, she was really coming into existence.
“She gave life to Yathaarth,” Iram enunciated. “She is in Yathaarth.”
His head fell, his elbows on his knees, hands falling too. “I think it was…”
Goosebumps erupted all over her body.
“Yamma.”
Atharva nodded.
“I dreamt about her… some weeks later. You know I never dream. But there it was. It wasn’t imagined.
She had said it to me once. I was in 10th.
My prelims were on and she had gone out to the market.
One hour passed and she didn’t come. I stopped studying and started checking from all the windows.
She didn’t come, and I began to panic. I went down the building and asked our watchman.
He said there had been a protest planned and somebody had thrown tear gas to make them think the army was here.
It had turned into a stampede and 144 was issued.
I didn’t know any of this. I tried to go to the market but he stopped me.
He sent the other watchman and asked me to return home.
Two hours passed and Mama didn’t come. The TV wasn’t showing any news.
I was going to call Baba. And then she came through the door.
Vegetable bags and purse and looking exactly as she had left,” Atharva gasped, as if he was there, waiting for her with the door opening.
“I was so angry at her, I told her she was never going out again and then broke into tears. I was so awkward and embarrassed and ready to storm into my room. But she caught me and held me tight and laughed. I was so angry but she held me tight. One of those rare times she hugged me like that. ‘I am not going anywhere until I see your children.’ That’s what she told me, laughing, understanding my fears, the words I did not spell. ”
Atharva’s head rose and he stared straight into her eyes — “Now look how she saw Arth, gave him safe in my hands and left.”
Iram pulled his head close and breathed. His breathing synced with hers too. Their tears flowed down the bridges of their noses, mingling with one another.
“She came back to you, Atharva.”
His throat worked a swallow.
“You are not left behind, you are the man to whom we come back. To whom we always keep coming back.” Because that’s the only place we belong.
He embraced her, pulling her flush, so tight that she would get absorbed into him again. She was ready for it again.