Chapter Fourteen
Ansh had grey eyes.
This was the first thing Mihika had seen, in the chaos of the delivery room, the first thing that had cut through the exhaustion and the noise and the particular overwhelm of that morning — not his face, not his size, not the astonishing reality of him outside her body at last. His eyes.
Grey and unfocused and looking at the light with the solemn bewilderment of someone who had arrived in a place very different from the one they'd been in before.
She had pressed her mouth to his forehead and said nothing. There was nothing sufficient.
Two months later, she was still not used to the eyes.
She was feeding him in the chair by the window — the one she'd bought from the furniture market three lanes over, repaired the leg herself with wood glue and a clamp, covered with a cushion in a blue fabric that matched nothing else in the flat and which she liked for exactly that reason.
It was early morning, the lane outside working through its first hour of noise: the fabric vendors uncovering their stalls, the chai wallah's pressure cooker, a child on a bicycle ringing the bell for the pleasure of it.
The particular music of a neighbourhood that had no interest in being quiet.
Ansh ate with the focused concentration he brought to everything.
She looked at his face — the nose that she had been told, by Mrs. Batra and by Priya and by the nurse at the clinic, was hers, but the eyes, the exact winter-grey of the eyes — and she felt the familiar tightening in her throat that arrived every time without asking permission.
"You look like him," she said.
Ansh had no comment.
"I'm not sure yet if that's going to be a problem," she said.
He finished eating and she lifted him to her shoulder and patted his back and looked at the window. The thyme on the ledge had recovered from the cold of the previous month and was putting out new growth. The basil was, as always, thriving.
The flat was small and she had made it hers in the way she made things hers — not by filling it, but by placing things with intention.
Her grandmother's photograph above the desk, the same nail she'd put it on in two other rooms. The printed feeding schedule she'd made herself in the second week, because Ansh had opinions about timing and she had found it useful to record them.
A small shelf of books — the three she'd brought and four she'd bought from the secondhand market on Sundays.
A drawing on the wall beside the window, done on cardstock by Mrs. Batra's granddaughter Rani, who had appointed herself Ansh's official artistic chronicler: his face, in crayon, somewhat impressionistic but recognizable.
She had built this. Hand over hand, the way she built everything.
She was not the same woman who had sat at a Goenka dinner table and folded her hands in her lap.
She was not the same woman who had watched her grandmother's photograph moved from a wall and had replaced it quietly and said nothing larger.
She had been through a pregnancy alone and a delivery with only Mrs. Batra's company and two months of the relentless, uncharted territory of new motherhood, and she had come out the other side of all of it knowing something about herself that she had perhaps always known but had not yet had the occasion to test: she was difficult to break.
Mihika knew he was looking for her. She had known it since the beginning.
She had been careful — careful in the way of a woman who had grown up at the edge of a world where disappearing was a skill that some people needed, where Mahendra Dhawan had occasionally needed things to stay unfound and had made sure his household understood the principles.
She had applied those principles. New phone, new bank account, cash where possible, the catering work under a name that didn't trace.
She had not contacted her family. She had not contacted Manik, which had been the hardest — she had composed the message to him a dozen times and deleted it, because Manik loved her and would not be able to keep it from Shivansh, and she could not ask him to.
She had been hidden for ten months.
She let herself think it, in the early morning quiet with Ansh at her shoulder and the lane coming to life outside: it might hold. Another month, two months. Long enough to establish something more permanent, to get back to Sattva or something like it, to stand on ground that was entirely hers.
She let herself think it.
The doorbell rang.
She looked at Ansh. He looked at her. She settled him on her hip and went to the door and checked the peephole.
Mrs. Batra's granddaughter — Rani, seventeen, who was frequently sent on errands with the slightly put-upon efficiency of a teenager performing a service she regarded as beneath her talents.
She was holding a packet of milk and looking at the door with the patient expression of someone accustomed to waiting.
Mihika exhaled.
She unlatched the door and opened it.
"Didi, Nani said this came with your—"
Mihika was not listening.
She was looking at the end of the corridor.
He was standing at the end of the corridor in a plain white shirt, the kind he wore on days that were not for public appearances, and he was looking at her.
Just looking, from the far end of the corridor, with those grey eyes that were the same eyes currently regarding the world from her shoulder, with his arms at his sides and the stillness that she had spent twelve months learning and ten months trying to unlive.
Shivansh had found her.
She had known this would happen — rationally, in the abstract, she had known — but the knowing had not prepared her for the actuality of him at the end of this corridor, in this neighbourhood, this far inside the life she had built without him.
He looked different. Leaner, the cheekbones sharper.
Something around his eyes that was new — not soft exactly, but raw, like a surface that had been weathered rather than machined.
The stillness he carried had shifted its quality.
She had known his stillness as control, as the management of power.
This was something else. The stillness of a man who had been running very hard and had, at this exact moment, stopped.
He was looking at her.
Then his eyes dropped.
To Ansh.
The world stopped moving.
Rani was still standing there. Mihika became aware of this at some point — the girl's polite confusion, the milk packet, the ordinary errand interrupted by something she couldn't read.
Mihika said, "Thank you, Rani," and took the packet with a steadiness she did not feel, and Rani looked at the man at the end of the corridor and looked at Mihika and decided, with the excellent instincts of someone who had grown up in a building of other people's business, to go back downstairs.
Her footsteps faded.
The corridor was quiet.
Mihika stood in her doorway with Ansh on her hip and looked at her husband at the end of the corridor.
She did not close the door.