Reyansh Carter
“Oh my god, stop,” Aisha finally breaks, taking the belan out of my mom’s hands.
She looks absolutely beautiful in this pink kurti.
My heart did a flip-flop inside my chest when I looked at her, coming out of the shower with her hair all drenched and her face void of everything. She looked ethereal.
She always does. She doesn’t even have to do anything. She just needs to exist in my vicinity, in my universe. I cursed myself as I realized how long I had gone without letting her know this.
I got so stuck in my feelings and how to communicate them that I gave up altogether, and now she is giving up on us.
But I won’t. She was the one holding our relationship together for so long, and now I will do it.
I will make her believe in love, in us again.
When I got her mother’s call last night, my throat tightened and I choked up Shame and regret took over me. Because I had promised her when I went to ask for her hand in marriage that I would never, ever hurt her child. And I did so in the most brutal way possible.
But to my surprise, she was way kinder to me than I think she should have been.
She should have cursed me and yelled at me.
But instead, she let me cry in front of her on the call.
She let me mourn my wife and my relationship before she asked me to get my shit together if I wanted to earn her daughter’s trust and love back.
“Reyansh,” she said my name louder this time, making me turn towards her finally. “Will you help?”
I look at her, standing utterly confused and done with both of our moms. It is actually cute, the way her face is contorted in that adorable frown.
“Yes,” I come back to my senses. “What were you saying? I zoned out.”
She narrows her eyes at me, and she doesn’t look as intimidating as she wants to. But who am I to tell her that?
“I was saying, can you please tell us what you would like to have for breakfast?” she says. “Because then we both also have to go to work, right?”
“I will have anything you make.” She quirks an eyebrow at that, amused at my request. Usually I throw a fit about what I want to eat. I know I need to fix that part of myself. I can’t be asking her to do stuff for me. She is my wife, after all. Not my cook.
“That’s a first,” she shrugs. “What we can do is we will not have Aloo Paratha for breakfast or something like oats. Let’s settle on eating upma.”
“Fine,” both of our moms sigh, giving in to her attempts.
“But I need my chai,” Maa says, and I just know what’s coming. I can practically see the words bubbling inside my wife.
“I will make it,” she says with a soft smile on her face. “Black tea for Reyansh?”
“Black tea?” Maa asks, surprised, and I pinch the bridge of my nose. There it is.
“Yes, he calls it chai.” She presses her lips together to stop herself from laughing. The fact that she finds my eating preference funny is amusing.
“Blasphemy.”
She laughs out loud at that because Maa’s Punjabi accent just made the word funnier than it is, and the sound of it reaches the deepest corners of my heart.
God, I missed it.
I will do anything to bring it back.
* * *
“Everything was delicious, Aisha,” my mom says.
While my mom is a typical British mum, her marriage with my desi dad made her fall in love with the cuisine and Indian traditions.
She still can’t handle the spice, but if Aisha made it, she will gladly eat every bit of it.
She loves her that much. She can’t stand seeing her in pain.
“Thank you,” Aisha smiles shyly. “I will get going. I have to go to the office today.”
“No, you don’t,” I say, taking the plates from her hands to keep them in the dishwasher. She already cooked for us.
Aisha has a habit of trying to take care of everyone around her.
While that is an admirable trait of hers, I don’t like it when she forgets herself while taking care of others.
After the demise of her father, she took it upon herself to take care of her mother, so it was already very hard for her to leave her all alone in India while she pursued her dreams in London.
She would constantly fret over how her mother would be managing all alone.
So, when we got together, I made sure she knew she wasn’t alone.
I wanted her to know that she didn’t have to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. I could do it for her.
It was hard at first—to convince her to let me step in.
She was scared that I would leave her all dependent on me, and then she wouldn’t be able to pick up the pieces of herself that I would shatter.
But I wanted her to know and understand that I was in this relationship for the long haul.
She was it for me. In this lifetime. In every universe, my soul would always search for her.
It already hurts to know that I made her feel as if I was going to break her apart after promising her that I would never do it.
“What do you mean?”
“It means that I called in at work for you and me and that we won’t be coming,” I say, looking straight in her eyes. Her eyes are enough to make any person feel welcomed and warm. “Both of our moms are here. We should spend time with them, shouldn’t we?”
She clenches her teeth. “Are you implying I don’t care about spending time with them? I wouldn’t be going to work if it weren’t important. Surely you would know, right? I am not the one who bails on family, after all.”
I know what she is saying. I totally understand what she is hinting at, and my heart constricts with guilt.
“I am not implying anything, Aisha. I know you value family time. I know you wouldn’t ever bail on us. I just want us to spend some time at home, all of us together. We have been neglecting each other and ourselves, and I don’t want that to happen anymore.”
My words are genuine and real, and the way her face relaxes shows that maybe I have made her understand that.
“Don’t be mad at him, Aisha,” Maa interrupted. “If you want to leave, you can go. We won’t mind, right Margot?”
“Absolutely,” Mom agreed. “Work comes first.”
“No, Mom,” Aisha replied, looking at me with eyes that were able to express everything her heart was feeling. If that was any indication, I had hurt her deeply. “Family comes first.”
* * *
“What do I do, Maa?” I asked Aisha’s mom when she was out of earshot, “I just don’t know how to get her to talk to me. If she won’t talk, how will I fix everything?”
She smiled at me. “Learn to read her silence, Reyansh. Sometimes silence speaks louder than words.”
I nodded. “There was a time when I could do that. I could read the look she would give me. Now it seems like no matter how much we talk, we aren’t able to understand each other. The distance between us just feels too much.”
“When you were courting Aisha, how did you manage to break through her walls? I know it must not have been easy. I mean, she was anti-men, and I had made sure she wouldn’t look at any guy.”
I chuckled, remembering the days when we were in college. It sure as hell wasn’t easy. But I knew I wanted her in my life, so I never gave up.
“It wasn’t easy for sure,” I tell her with a small smile. “She made me work for it, yes. But I knew she was what I needed, so I never gave up.”
“So why are you now? You love her, right?”
“I do.” A lone tear slips past my eyes. I have never cried for anyone in my entire life. I couldn’t give a fuck about who stayed in my life and who didn’t. But Aisha is different. If I lost her, I might as well lose myself.
“She is the only one I love, Maa.”
“Then bring back that old Reyansh she fell in love with. The one who was head over heels for her and wasn’t afraid to show it. The one who chased after her despite her attempts to push him away.”
Her words struck a chord.
She is right. If I wanted her back, I would have to bring my old self back. No matter how hard.
No matter what it took.