Chapter Eleven
Mihika gave herself two weeks. She needed that long to do it right. She had watched enough things go wrong in her life to know that the difference between a plan that held and one that didn't was usually the two weeks someone had refused to give it.
The money first. Her own savings — the restaurant money she had kept in her personal account since before the marriage, the cushion she'd never touched, the number she checked on slow Tuesday mornings and found comfort in for reasons that had nothing to do with what she was going to use it for.
She moved it in three transfers, small enough to look like operational expenses, to an account she had opened in a bank branch in Saket on a Wednesday when she'd had an errand nearby.
She did not touch the joint household account.
She did not take a rupee that was not hers.
She called Deepak on a Thursday.
"I need a leave of absence," she said.
A pause. Deepak was not a man who reacted to things immediately; he processed. "How long?"
"I don't know yet."
Another pause. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," she said, and then, because Deepak had been with her since the beginning, because he had framed the reviews on the kitchen wall without being asked, because he deserved more than a clean lie: "I will be."
She heard him breathe. "The kitchen will be here," he said. "Go."
The flat she found through a listing website, using the new phone she'd bought with cash at a market stall in Connaught Place.
Two rooms, a separate bathroom, a kitchen the size of a generous cupboard, in a lane in Lajpat Nagar that backed onto a fabric market and had the self-sufficient noise of a neighbourhood that minded its own business.
The landlady was sixty-something, brisk, required three months' rent in advance and one reference, and did not appear to find it strange that a young woman wanted a flat under the name she provided and asked no further questions. Mihika liked her immediately.
She went back to the haveli and was normal for ten more days. She sat at dinner. She made chai. She went to Sattva for the last time and walked through it slowly, touching the door frames, breathing in the smell of the kitchen. She told herself she would come back to it. She believed this, mostly.
She watched Shivansh across the dinner table on the ninth day and let herself do it — let herself look at him the way she looked at him when he wasn't watching, fully, taking in the line of him, the grey eyes that had learned to find her in rooms, the hands that had learned to reach for her in the dark.
She looked at him and she felt the weight of what she was going to do, and she held the weight, and she did not look away.
He looked up and caught her looking.
She smiled, slightly.
He looked at her for a moment with the attentive quality she had learned to read, the thing behind his eyes that was always reading her. Then he looked back at his food.
She drank her water and breathed.
He will be all right, she told herself. He would be furious. He would be many things. But he was Shivansh Goenka, who had built an empire and controlled a territory and survived everything that had required surviving. He would be all right.
She was less certain she believed this than she was about the restaurant.
She packed on the night of the fourteenth day.
One bag. She had already decided this — one bag, the things that were undeniably hers. The grey salwar suit she wore on cold mornings. Two kurtas, the good one and the working one. The cardigan she'd bought herself in Rajasthan. Underclothes, two weeks' worth. Her toiletries.
Her grandmother's photograph, which she took from the wall where it had been since the third week of her marriage, the thing she had fought the first small battle of this house to keep there.
She looked at the windowsill.
Four herbs. The thyme, the rosemary, the second basil, and the one she'd had to look up — all bought by him, carried from a plant shop, placed on her desk with no note. She had planted them in the window box and watered them for six months and talked to them when no one was listening.
She took two. The thyme and the basil, the smallest, the ones she could wrap in cloth and fit alongside the photograph. She left the rosemary and the other one on the sill.
She stood for a moment looking at what remained on the windowsill. Then she looked at the room — his books, his desk, the shelf with the policy journals, the framed family photograph from when Manik was small and trying to look important. The armchair. The bed.
She turned away.
She had thought about a letter.
She sat down at the desk and she took a piece of paper and she wrote: Shivansh. She looked at the word for a moment. Then she wrote: I heard what your mother said. I know what this family will do. I cannot—
She tore it up.
She took another piece of paper. She wrote: I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I know you won't—
She read it back. She tore it up.
She sat for a while with the pen in her hand and the blank paper in front of her.
There were things she wanted to say. She was aware of them, present in her chest — things about the herbs and the armchair and the soup and come home anyway and the night in the Rajasthan hills when he had said yes looking at her and pretended he hadn't.
She wanted to say: I know there is something real here.
I know you felt it too. I am leaving because of what your mother will do to what I'm carrying, not because of what you have or haven't said.
She picked up the pen. She could not make the words behave.
Everything she wrote sounded like an accusation or an apology, and she did not want to leave him either of those things.
He was a man who dealt in precision. He would read what she wrote and find every gap in it, and she did not want to leave him a letter full of gaps.
She put the pen down.
She sat for another few minutes. Then she took both torn pieces of paper and folded them small and put them in her pocket to take with her, because she did not want to leave even her incomplete thoughts behind in this room.
She was done.
She turned off the desk lamp. She picked up her bag.
On the chair near the wardrobe, folded with the careful indifference of a man who put things down without thinking about them and happened to always put them neatly, was a kurta.
Dark blue. She had seen him fold it two weeks ago with the automatic efficiency of someone reaching for something else, and he'd put it there intending to move it later, and then it had sat there.
She walked past it.
She stopped.
She stood for a moment with her back to it.
Then she went back and picked it up. She stood there holding it — the fabric warm from the room, the faint smell of him that she was not going to think about — and she put it in the bag, in the inside pocket where she would not be able to see it, and she zipped the bag and she was done.
Three in the morning. The house breathed at this hour in its particular way — the cooling of the structure, the distant sound of the city, the shift of the night guard's route that left the side entrance unmonitored for exactly six minutes.
She had watched him for three nights to know this.
She went down the back stairs, through the kitchen, through the garden door.
The night air hit her face and she breathed it in — Delhi at three in the morning, the jasmine from the garden and the exhaust and the particular dusty warmth of a city that never entirely cooled.
She walked to the lane at the side of the property and she did not run, because running would attract notice and she had not planned this to attract notice.
She walked.
She did not look back at the house.
She had decided she would not, and she kept that.
She took an auto to the metro station, which was operating its limited night service, and she sat in the auto with her bag on her lap and her hand pressed flat against her stomach and she breathed. The city moved past the auto's open sides. She watched it without seeing it.
It is enough that you are choosing, she told herself. You are choosing for both of you. That is enough.
She was three months pregnant and alone and heading to a two-room flat in Lajpat Nagar, and she was not going to cry about it because she had made this decision with clear eyes and she was going to live in it with the same clarity.
She pressed her hand against her stomach.
It is enough.
She almost believed it.