One
Vikrant
The Last Day
‘You’re really doing this?’ Anika asked, her voice rough with unshed tears. ‘You’re really leaving?’
I couldn’t answer. Just continued tossing things in my battered suitcase. At this point, it was all I could do to not howl. I picked something from the cupboard and placed it next to my running shoes in the suitcase.
‘That’s mine,’ my wife said.
I blindly looked at the item I’d packed. It was a tee shirt, torn at the hem. Splattered with cream paint. The howl threatened to come up again. Because I remembered, exactly, how the paint had gotten there.
On a rare, mutually free weekend, we decided to paint the ceiling of our bedroom a neutral cream. It was pouring cats and dogs in Mumbai and the air conditioner had stopped working. We listened to Natalie Imbruglia, the whole time.
I scraped and sanded for two hours, then Anika had worn scandalously short shorts and this tee-shirt and climbed on the step ladder.
I had watched her in fascination like she was Queen Mumtaaz, and the bedroom ceiling was the Taj Mahal.
I was always fascinated by her. That was the problem. Fascination was unrealistic. Impossible to live up to in real life.
Anika wasn’t fascinated with me anymore. If she had ever been.
‘Vik,’ Anika spoke again.
I grabbed the tee-shirt and threw it back into the cupboard. The howl of misery and lost love continued to simmer at the back of my throat.
‘Sorry,’ I said, in a low voice.
‘For what?’ My wife asked. Like she really meant it.
I looked up at the ceiling. The cream paint was peeling at the edges, because of leakage and seepage problems with their upstairs neighbor. And the landlord had asked me to wait for a year before doing any repairs, since another monsoon season was imminent.
I wasn’t going to be able to give it a year.
‘The rent is paid for till August.’ I locked the overflowing suitcase. The muscles in my wrist protested at the added pressure. The physical therapist had told me to stop using excessive force in my right hand, after the last visit.
‘The utilities are automated in the app. But I will keep checking in between and paying them anyway, so you don’t have to worry about it.’
‘I can pay the damn utilities on my own!’ Anika snapped. ‘I have the app on my phone. And with the new promotion, I can save up and take care of these things.’
‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I’ve heard of nothing but your new promotion for months now.’
I turned around and looked at the love of my life, dressed in crisp blue scrubs, a staple of all medical staff at the hospital where we both worked.
Usually, scrubs were meant to be shapeless, sexless even. But the scrubs did nothing to hide her innate curves, or the long, lean length of her legs, a product of intensive running.
Anika’s waist-length hair was in a severe plait, so not a hair escaped to frame her stunning face. The only concession she made to femininity was the thick line of kohl she’d applied around her golden-brown, almond-shaped eyes.
Desire hit me, inconvenient and consuming. Unrequited.
I couldn’t want this woman anymore.
Now, hurt and old grief moved through Anika’s expressive eyes.
‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I know you hate it that I got promoted. That I am not just Dr. Anika Chakraborty, MBBS anymore. I’m Dr. Anika Chakraborty, MD in pediatric surgery. It kills you that I was able to manage the internship at the hospital and pass my exams too, doesn’t it?’
My jaw tightened, as an instant denial sprang to my lips. But I swallowed it down because she wasn’t fully wrong. She just was wrong about the why of it all.
‘I don’t think we have to discuss this again, do you?’
‘No,’ Anika said bitterly. ‘No, we freaking don’t. I’m sure your mom will love that I’m finally out of your life for good.’
My eyes flashed. ‘Don’t you dare bring my mom into this, Anika. She isn’t responsible for what happened to us.’
‘No,’ Anika shot back. ‘She isn’t.’ There was a pregnant pause before she continued with all the venom, I knew she carried in her heart. ‘But she didn’t help things either, Vik. And I’ll take care of rent and the utilities and everything from now on. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.’
‘You’re my wife.’ The words were a declaration.
A curse. My curse that lived like slow-killing poison in my blood.
They made Anika pause in the act of unwinding her gorgeous jet-black hair.
I clenched my fists as I saw it, as I’d always seen it a million times.
Anika undressing was erotic and sensual because she was so uninhibited, so unselfconscious about it all. She claimed it came from having lived in boarding schools all her life, but I suspected it had more to do with who she was on the inside.
Unfettered. Free.
I came from an ordinary, middle-class, small-town family with conservative parents. The first time I had to take a shower in the common bathroom at the medical college in Mumbai, I’d almost gotten on the bus straight back home. As it was, the seniors had ragged me mercilessly for wearing tightey-whiteys.
Unwillingly, my eyes went to the sexy, silk boxers I’d packed along with the rest of my stuff. They were Anika’s doing. She’d said she preferred me feeling like she was touching me all day long.
She was insane like that.
I kissed her senseless, when she told me that after gifting them last Valentine’s Day. Then she’d actually touched m e and then there was no more talking. Only loving.
God, how I wished I could turn back time and go back to that moment and tell her I loved her, I loved only her. I had since the first time she’d sat next to me in Basic Anatomy class and forgotten her goddamn textbook, that I didn’t give a fuck what promotion she got…
In fact, I could do it even now. Couldn’t I? Hope, that fickle bastard, sprang through my veins, cutting through the poison. Of course, I could fix it. Of course…
‘Anika,’ I began rustily, pathetically eager.
‘Well, the lawyer said I’m your wife for six months only because we wanted to try counseling,’ Anika observed coolly. ‘And he was clever enough to get the judge to agree to remote couples’ counseling so you could go be a saint in the village and I could continue working here. So, it’s only a technicality at this point, isn’t it?’
How cold she sounded. How unfeeling.
She continued unbraiding her hair, averting her face from me. But her voice was cool, pitiless.
And I remembered what the hope had made me forget for a minute…we’d hurt each other too much. Been through hell. There was no going back now. This is what we were. This is what we’d become.
Strangers.
‘I’m not trying to be a saint,’ I protested. Like I had a million times. ‘I just think…’
‘I know. I KNOW!’ She threw the scrunchie holding her braid together on the floor. ‘And it doesn’t matter anymore.’ She took a deep, sniffling breath, which did interesting things to her scrub top.
‘I’m going out now. I’ll stay with Anu tonight. You can leave your keys on the table.’
The cold statements hit worse than a punch. ‘You won’t even come to see me off?’ I asked, hurt beyond belief.
Anika finally looked up at me. And two years of misery and torture and the sheer horror of watching the person you love become a hollow shell of themselves, were revealed in that look. There was also anger and recrimination in that look, but she wasn’t alone in that.
The only thing missing in that look was tenderness. Affection. Goofiness.
‘What’s the point, Vikrant?’
Then Anika picked up her heavy backpack, slung her hospital ID around her neck, and walked away.
Leaving me more alone than ever.