Chapter 2
Aditi
I can’t stay in this washroom stall for too long.
I could lie to Raghav—the nervous guy outside—and say I had an upset stomach.
But then he’d picture me on the toilet, sweating, eyes twitching.
Because that’s better than saying that I have trouble controlling my tears.
And then he would have to ask why out of politeness and it would get weird.
Just stop crying, Aditi! This is what you want!
I wipe my tears even as more threaten to flow.
I can’t cry for too long. In ninety minutes, Aman lands, and he’ll expect me to jump into his arms. I wonder if he’ll find me any heavier, considering my heart feels like lead at the moment.
I wipe my tears and leave the bathroom stall.
Outside, Raghav is waiting for me, two steaming plates of idlis in front of him.
I want to remind him that it was two hundred rupees, not a thousand, and that the chai he ordered earlier would have been enough.
Under normal circumstances, I would have cut off the conversation a long time ago.
But nothing about today is normal. I needed to talk to someone to stop thinking and he was there: polite, second-guessing if he should keep talking to me or go away respectfully—which are three golden rules of any man talking to a girl that he doesn’t know.
Also, I can’t ignore the fact that his fiancée and mine are on the same flight(!), and that he seems to be carrying the same nervousness that I am.
‘My stomach’s a bit upset,’ I tell him as I sit down.
‘Stress can do that to you.’
‘What? I’m not stressed!’
He looks at me as though he knows I’m lying.
‘Their flight’s delayed. Forty-five minutes,’ he tells me.
I turn to look at the arrivals board. Just behind it, I see rain pattering on the large glass walls of the airport.
He continues, ‘A few flights have already tried landing but ended up turning around.’
‘The rain’s not that much.’
‘Visibility’s pretty low,’ he says, checking his weather app. ‘Although they are saying it will clear up.’
He breaks off a small piece of idli, dips it in the sambhar first, then in the coconut chutney and puts it in his mouth. As he does, I notice the discoloured front tooth.
‘Your front tooth is a cap, right? It’s gotten a bit off-colour,’ I say and immediately regret it. Why? Why would I say this tooth’s off-colour? Am I slowly becoming him? Noticing teeth is his job, not mine.
He stops eating and meets my eye. ‘You’re a dentist?’
‘Just graduated my MBA, but my internship was in a chain of clinics like Clove Dental Clinic. Anyway,’ I say, ‘How did this happen?’
‘That’s not important.’
‘We have time to kill.’
‘I was punched in the face a few times,’ he says. ‘Lost the front tooth. Got a few chipped teeth at the back as well.’
‘Ouch.’
‘It wasn’t painful.’
‘You don’t have to be macho. It has to be painful.’
‘The root canal and the dentist visits were more painful,’ he says with a smile. I start to laugh, and he says with all seriousness. ‘No, really.’
‘C’mon, dentists just get bad PR for no reason,’ I say. ‘They aren’t that bad. Some of them are really nice.’
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Is your fiancé . . . a dentist?’
‘What? How did you guess?’
‘No one defends dentists. So, you met him at the internship?’
I nod, and the memory comes flooding back.
I had been so excited to stay with my maasi, mother’s sister, in Lucknow, my first time living away from home.
I had made plans to visit every corner of the city, to loiter in the streets, eat all the best food, and finally be myself—or maybe find myself, like people are supposed to do when they’re on their own and travelling.
Papa never believed in travel. Waste of money, he used to say.
Unless it was to the Vaishnodevi shrine, which we have been to a total of six times.
The Lucknow internship was my only twisted shot at solo travel.
But soon, I wasn’t alone. Within the first week of my two-month internship, Aman and I were eating lunch in the clinic together.
He would pull teeth out all morning while I presented and rejected marketing ideas.
Then, we would both order sandwiches from the same place.
Slowly, lunch meetings bled into mid-afternoon snack breaks and then strolls after work.
Soon, I was lying to my maasi, telling her I was meeting with ‘office friends’ on weekends and in the evenings.
‘And you’re getting married within one or two years of meeting him?’ Raghav breaks into my thoughts.
That question pricks me. But he doesn’t deserve my anger because he doesn’t know my story. So I say, ‘Two years is a long time. I would have married him the day I met him.’
‘Same,’ he says with a wide smile. ‘I knew it, too. But I was in the eighth standard and it was the 1850s or I would have too.’
That makes me giggle. Not every day do you meet someone who believes in the stupidity of love and not swipes. ‘What do you do?’
The question literally seems to take the wind out of him. His sigh was never-ending.
‘Data engineering for an EdTech firm,’ he says.
‘So, what exactly?’
‘I build machine learning models to predict which student gives up when. Then I help marketing sell them hope right before they do.’
‘You don’t like your job?’ I ask him.
‘I like the people I work with. I like my salary. I like what I can afford,’ he says. ‘Job’s not my life.’
And then, his eyes flit towards the arrivals board. His face falls. ‘Delayed by another thirty.’
I turn to look at the arrivals board. A cascading change of graphics announces the delays. I pick up my phone and send a text to Aman, reminding him that I love him, that I miss him, and it’s rude that he’s not barging into the cockpit and demanding that the plane be landed, no matter the weather.
When I look up, he’s smiling at me.
‘What?’
‘You were smiling while texting someone who won’t get that text,’ he says.
I roll my eyes. ‘But imagine switching on the phone and getting so many? What could be better?’
‘If I land and get so many texts, it would give me instant anxiety that something’s gone wrong.’
I smile at his naivety, but then again, what does he know about what’s happened.
‘Whatever could have gone wrong has already gone wrong,’ I say.
‘As in?’
Before I can brush it away, he’s looking around at the murmur. Everyone’s staring at the board again. The flight’s delayed by another thirty. He slumps back into his chair, and now his eyes are back at me.
‘What has gone wrong?’ he says.
‘Nothing?’
‘Didn’t you just say that something has?’
I want to nip this in the bud, but his eyes are focused on me.
It’s the first time I notice them. These are what I imagine a therapist’s eyes might look like—deep, inviting, tricking you into spilling all that’s inside of you.
I don’t want to say anything, but the words seem to form into sentences on their own and leave my mouth.
‘My parents don’t like Aman,’ I tell this random stranger. ‘I left my house this morning.’
‘Left as in?’
‘Left as in, I won’t be going back. I wrote them a letter.’
Growing up, eloping and starting a new life somewhere sounded romantic, heroic even, freeing.
But it feels like being shackled to a boulder, every step heavier than the last. I wrote them a letter?
Even now, it seems almost comical. Running away from the house you grew up in, leaving the parents that raised you, because you found a guy cute and kind?
It makes no sense and yet it was the only thing to do.
He looks at me for a bit as if trying to figure out if he should continue this conversation. I want him to. I can’t be in my head for now. I think he knows because he nods and then asks, ‘Why?’
‘He’s . . . older,’ I say. And then add what is a truth about him but somehow doesn’t feel true, ‘. . . and divorced.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘And him?’
‘Thirty.’
‘That’s not too much. I thought you would say forty.’
‘I wish my parents understood.’
‘When did he get divorced?’
‘Five years ago. He was married for just a year. And yet . . .’
He shakes his head. ‘You might bring them the most perfect person to ever exist, but if your parents don’t want you to find love on your own, they will always find something to point out.’
Now, I get it.
‘Yours is going to be a love marriage, too?’ I ask him.
He nods.
‘And your parents don’t like her?’ I ask.
‘I don’t care any more,’ he answers.
‘What? You have moved out?’ I squeal, noticing the similarity, but I see his frown now. ‘I mean, of course, that’s sad but you’ve got to admit that’s some coincidence, right?’
He’s about to speak but suddenly light flashes around us, followed by the loud crash of thunder, and the electricity is knocked out for a second.
‘That was . . .’
The arrivals board blinks to life. It runs through the initial screens and the flight details slowly fill up. I scan to look for Aman’s.
LKO-DEL – Flight diverted.