Chapter 27
I got my first offer two weeks after I sent out feelers. The money was good; it could pay for that holiday I wanted to take my dad on, but I was unsure of how the place functioned. I would be the features editor and report to an associate editor, whom I didn’t know, not even by reputation.
I would be managing a raw team in a city where I would be starting from scratch. It would take me years. Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital, was so removed from Bengaluru culturally that I could’ve relocated to Moscow.
I parked my car in Andrew’s basement and messaged him. I told him that I wanted to see him. I waited until he replied, which, as always, was immediately, even before I rang his doorbell.
Andrew opened the door, wearing his welcoming smile. His red shorts, which I remembered from our trip to Coonoor, were partially hidden by the door, and his left hand waved me in.
I focused on the room. It was bright; he had drawn the curtains.
He did that for a couple of hours each day to let the sun in.
His fragrance was all over the sitting area.
Did he dunk it on himself the moment he woke up or was it just before I entered?
I placed my bag down carefully and sat next to it.
We hadn’t said a word to each other, but the smile had disappeared from his face.
I had been avoiding him in office these last few days, which he had noticed but hadn’t brought up.
‘I’m quitting,’ I said after squeezing out every strain of emotion that threatened to tinge my declaration in ambiguity.
Andrew’s brow shot up. ‘Those messages–’
‘Have nothing to do with my decision.’ I completed the sentence for him.
Andrew was seated at the end of the long divan at the head of which I sat. I could tell he was uncomfortable. I rested my back against the only arm it had. He shifted to the leather sofa and dropped his elbows on his knees.
I told him I was moving to Mumbai in three months; that was the notice period. I was joining the online portal ‘The Full Story’. I would put in my papers at Morning Herald in the next half hour, hopefully. I had already typed out the six-line letter. It was sitting in my drafts.
‘Why?’ he asked. If I wasn’t putting in my papers because of Pooja’s messages, then what was it? He wanted the reason.
Andrew stood up and crossed his arms. His bare legs looked like they belonged to an athlete, but I don’t think Andrew had stepped into a pair of sports shoes since he left college.
How can I ever trust you? ‘As features editor,’ I said.
‘If you want a promotion, don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of that.’ His eyes were dark, unlike the room we were seated in.
A sliver of a shiver went down my spine, erupting in my core.
I wanted to punch his pea-sized, narcissistic heart.
He thought I was chasing a title that he could toss at me like an extra biscuit?
That I would leave my mother’s home, my father, my dearest friend, the city I loved, a job I valued, for a position. A danged label.
How had I ever thought this man knew me, got me?
I stood up slowly. I’d be damned if I was going to let him tower over me. I had worn heels. I felt like Beyoncé with a day job.
A steely calm dropped over me. I exhaled. I smiled. I did all those things I had practised.
‘Actually,’ I said, my voice, a cool spring drift, ‘it’s the money. They’ve doubled what I’m getting here.’ I couldn’t even say Morning Herald, not that he noticed.
‘We’ll match that.’ He was so quick with his offer that it came back to me as I finished my sentence.
I walked the breadth of the room, stopping at the wood-panelled glass doors that led to the balcony.
They were closed as I assumed they were most days at this hour as he prepared to leave for office.
A coffee mug sat on the bar counter and beside it was a crime thriller, which was bookmarked at the halfway point.
‘What do you regret, Andrew?’ I didn’t need a gun; I had already shot myself.
‘Meena.’
‘What about the Meena episode do you regret?’
‘My biggest mistake.’
Why couldn’t I just hear the man? He was speaking clearly; he had done that over and over again. He regretted the Meena episode of his life for what it had done to HIM, for the havoc she had caused in HIS life. In that period, I was incidental.
‘It’s for the better.’ My voice was hopelessly frayed. ‘The split.’
‘I returned home to know my family’s past, to find you…’ His voice shook.
‘And you thought I’d be waiting?’ Bookmarked at where you disappeared.
He exhaled.
‘Eight years, Andrew. Eight years.’ And that wasn’t even the point.
‘We’ve moved past that,’ Andrew said.
I wanted to laugh.
Maybe it was the burden of his family’s complicated past or that time in his life when he was alone and splashing around with no shore in sight or that he was simply lust-sided. He just didn’t get what his tone-deaf rumba had done to me.
‘Why?’ he asked.
I wondered if this was the reporter in him or the lawyer, armed with that right to question. Even if it was lawless.
‘It doesn’t feel the same any more, and at times, I get the feeling it’s the same for you.’
‘What doesn’t feel the same? You’re holding back, not always, sometimes. I can see that.’
That he had ignored the second half of the sentence wasn’t lost on me. The wary prosecutor.
I turned so that I could face him. Andrew’s hands were knotted across his chest, his knuckles were white. I met his gaze.
‘I don’t think I can feel for you or anyone else what I once felt for you…
It covered the earth and the seas; it scaled the mountains and kissed the skies.
’ I paused. What I didn’t say was, There was no place for doubt.
‘This, what we shared these last months, would’ve been enough with anyone else. With you, I want everything.’
‘Myraah!’ He was shaking his head. ‘I hold back at times, too, you’re right,’ he said, taking a step towards me. ‘I wrecked what we had.’
Among other things, I thought.
‘What is everything?’ he asked, after forever and a day.
The accomplished Mr Brown didn’t know; he needed me to decode it.
‘We had it once.’ The way we were.
‘The only way we can put that behind us is if we work together.’
‘You took something out of me and gave it away. I can’t get it back,’ I said and stopped to take a breath.
I was not pausing for time but to swallow the words I wanted to say to him.
Only you can get it back. Only you, Andrew.
‘I told you earlier that I wouldn’t have understood Meena and you even if it was love, but if I had to lose you to anything, it might as well have been love… ’
‘Is Meena more important than me?’
This was Andrew throwing everything he had at me.
Reporters do that when they fear a story that they had pictured as the page one lead was suddenly going nowhere.
Then you tossed everything, including the kitchen sink, at the object of your attention, hoping to get the response that would make your report.
Take it out of the dustbin and restore it to a place just below the masthead.
‘Nobody is more important than you, nobody was. Outside of my mother, that is.’
‘Are you punishing me?’
‘It’s everything to do with Meena, and yet nothing to do with her. It’s right here,’ I said, pointing at my heart.
Andrew shook his head. His eyes were moist.
‘I tried, Andrew… I tried because I wanted it, needed it.’
‘Slowly,’ he said, taking my hands in his, ‘step by step, we’ll make it happen. We need to give it time.’ I let the warmth of his fragrance envelop me for a full moment.
‘As much as I wish it is, it’s not an exercise, Andrew. You either feel it or you don’t. The politics of love…’
‘What’s missing?’ His breath was spiced with confusion.
‘Us, like we were. Myra and Andrew, just kids with hearts. Nothing was wrong with us, Andrew. There wasn’t even a hint of a crack.’
‘You’re making a mistake. You’re giving up on us for something so small.’
That did it. The dam burst. Tears tipped down my cheeks. I was sobbing, but I wanted to scream, It’s not small; it’s what I feel for you. It’s everything I am. EVERYTHING.
He was kissing my tears, drop by drop, tasting them. An old ache and a new anger.
His fingers were in my hair; mine were stroking the back of his neck.
‘A mistake,’ I said as his lips took mine in a hypnotic embrace I wholly returned. It wasn’t the mistake, it was the complete lack of empathy.
I wanted to break away from this man, but I couldn’t. My fingers were on his shirt… This is why I had to change cities.
His fingers were underneath my top, which he had freed from the waistband of my trousers, and were stroking my bare back in an up-and-down motion. I shifted into him, feeling his hardness. I was kissing his chest. Little wisps of love.
Andrew unhooked my strapless bra, and the only reason it didn’t hit the floor was because we were breathing each other. He pulled me closer, and I did the same.
An alarm went off in my bag; it came as a warning. I pulled back and fastened my bra.
I picked up my bag and walked to the front door.
‘Myraah,’ he called.
I don’t know why I turned. It was a reaction perhaps.
He was at the entrance to his bedroom, his shorts askew on his spare frame.
My eyes shifted from him to the bar counter. I took four steps into the room and swung my bag at the coffee mug. It went crashing to the floor along with the crime thriller that was now divested of its marking.