Chapter 15 Raghav
Raghav
The milk boils over before I can switch off the gas.
Bad luck they say. Fuck bad luck! I don’t care.
How much worse can things get? The hissing milk on the stove doesn’t scare me.
I don’t care, I don’t care. I lower the flame, add two spoons of sugar, a bit of ginger and finally, the tea leaves.
The smell of ginger slowly overtakes the sour, burnt milk.
It needs time. Everything needs time now.
I catch my reflection in the mirror. It irritably asks me the same question again.
Tell me what happens next? How long are you going to drag this thing out?
Nothing happens next. That’s my answer. I will make this tea, drink it.
It’s Sunday. I will binge on something I’ve already watched. That’s it.
Aditi’s still in bed. Pretending to be. There’s always that quiet shuffle from the other room.
And then, quietude again. She sleeps in fits and starts.
By the time she walks in, the tea is ready in two steel cups.
We broke the mugs two months ago during a stupid fight about detergent.
Never replaced them. We had a long-drawn-out argument about whose fault it was—the one who kept it close to the edge?
Or the one who turned without looking and knocked it over?
Since the jury is still out on that one, new mugs haven’t come in.
Or I haven’t brought in new mugs. Aditi doesn’t have any money. She’s a freeloader.
That explains the Aeropostale T-shirt she’s wearing.
It’s eight years old and I’d put it aside to be used as a mop.
She told me that it was a near crime to throw away that T-shirt.
When I showed her the gaping hole, she put it across herself and demonstrated that if she wore it, the hole would be around her thigh and thus inconsequential.
It was the fourth T-shirt she had made me keep.
Now I have to see it every time it’s my turn to do the laundry.
We are both holding on to things.
‘I would have made the chai,’ she says, her voice still rough with sleep.
‘I like making it,’ I reply. ‘I like mine better.’
She peeks over my shoulder, grumbles. ‘But then you make the stove dirty. And I don’t like the burning smell.’
‘There are perks I get because I pay the rent,’ I say.
She rolls her eyes. ‘Keep showing off your money,’ she says. ‘I will move out next month.’
‘That’s what you said last month. And the month before that. I don’t need a two-bedroom. The only reason—’
She’s not listening to me any more. She picks up her cup and takes a sip. ‘It’s not good. You got the order wrong again. Yaar, why do you keep doing—’
‘I don’t like overboiled tea,’ I argue.
‘And yet you drink cup after cup at that gully shop,’ she says. ‘I think you do this on purpose. To annoy me.’
‘To drive you out of the house?’ I ask. ‘Could be one of the motives.’
She takes a sip and catches my gaze. ‘If you really wanted me out of the house,’ she says, her voice dropping low, ‘you would have gotten rid of me.’
I take a sip too.
‘You’ll do the laundry today?’ I ask. ‘If not, tell me now and I’ll do it. I don’t mind.’
‘No,’ she says, hands clasped around the cup. ‘I said I will, that means I will. This is the third time you have asked. I will do it, for sure.’
‘You say that about a lot of things, then I end up doing them. I don’t mind, but then you promise and don’t follow through. That’s what bothers me.’
‘The more you ask me, the more I don’t want to do it.’
Her phone lights up. She doesn’t check it.
Mine buzzes too. It’s the group we had made once: Tejal, Sumrit, Aditi and me.
‘Live for Us’, Sumrit had named it cheekily.
Humour is his go-to to deal with what happened.
I have lost count of the number of times he has finished meeting me by slapping my back and saying, ‘Don’t kill yourself, bhai.
’ Lately, Tejal has been doing that too.
Soon there will be more messages in that group. It’s been twelve months since that day.
I’ll reply to everyone with a simple: Same old, same old.
What else can they do? What’s happened, has happened. They will send the text and forget about it. Everyone has their own lives. Your grief has no place in anyone else’s life. If there’s anything to learn from all this, it’s that life goes on.
I get a message. It’s Shilpi asking, ‘You okay?’
And I reply, ‘Of course I am.’ I don’t drag her into this. How can I? How will she even get it? She can’t.
We sip our tea in a silence that isn’t peaceful.
‘You think it was painless?’ she asks suddenly, not looking at me.
She’s fixated on this—whether their end was quick, happy, painless. I truly believe—and want to believe—that they were vaporized. A strange word. But everything gone in a second: memories, consciousness, body. Vaporized. Along with several others. Like a light switched off without a warning.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I tell myself she died with the excitement of seeing me in her heart.’
‘Or sleepy,’ she says.
‘Maybe they were sleeping,’ I say.
‘Aren’t we both in an optimistic mood?’ she asks and shakes her head. ‘Vulgar to be optimistic on a day like today.’ She turns, opens the refrigerator. ‘I’m making toast. You want?’
‘Only if you’re using the toaster.’
‘No,’ she replies. ‘Tawa.’
‘I don’t want ghee.’
‘I’ll use butter.’
‘What’s the point? You’ll put ghee anyway. Why add more?’ I tell her.
‘How much more weight will you lose?’ she scoffs.
‘Don’t be my mom.’
‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I’d have to be an asshole to be that.’ She then meets my eyes. ‘Look at you flinch. Right time to remind you she caused this too.’
She says that kind of thing often. Were they responsible?
Of course they were fucking responsible.
But was I too? I can’t keep palming off all the blame on them in the hope that it would make it easy.
She’s been doing that for the past year and it doesn’t seem to be working for her.
Despite eating strictly junk, she has lost weight.
She’s a far cry from when I met her—soft, baby-faced.
Now, I see the hard lines on her face. And it’s because despite blaming it on the world—the airline, Aman’s parents, her own parents, the pilots—she thinks she’s responsible too and spends some days without eating anything at all.
She takes the bread out. Checks the packet. ‘It’s expired.’
‘Throw it away, then.’
‘A couple of days don’t matter,’ she says, taking out two slices. ‘Anyway, all the germs will die in the heat.’
Just then, her phone rings. She checks the number and then takes the call. ‘Hey . . . yes . . . no . . . not today . . . can we do this tomorrow . . . or wait, day after . . . does that work . . . I understand, ma’am . . . but I’m sure it can wait . . . fine . . . bye.’
When she sees me looking at her, she shrugs and says, ‘What . . . I wasn’t going to join them.’
‘You will sit at home, instead?’ I say, trying my best not to raise my voice.
She gets these calls every few days. Always turns them down.
Says it’s about the money. I think it’s about something else.
If she starts working, it will mean she’s moved on.
And if she moves on, it means Aman is really gone.
Who will tell her drowning yourself in work is a sure shot way to shut up the voices in your head, even if it’s for a little while.
Her degree came last month. Couriered in a thick white envelope.
She slid it under a pile of books. Never opened it.
There’s a grey pouch in the bathroom cabinet.
She uses the toothbrush, the cream, and then puts them back inside like she’s always half-packed.
Like she needs to be ready, in case Aman comes back to take her away.
‘I’m not going to work for peanuts. Get up every day, dress up and go to their office every day? No way,’ she says. ‘And don’t look at me like that. You have work from home all week.’
‘Because I’m deathly productive at home.’
‘Strange choice of words,’ she says and adds, ‘Anyway, I have money coming in.’
I know what she means. We both know where it will come from if it does. It’s the only thing she can muster up the strength to do these days: to claim what she believes it rightfully hers.
‘Who knows—’ I start to say, but the words feel pointless.
She cuts me off, her voice suddenly sharp. ‘I know!’ she says. ‘I don’t care. I know what Aman and I were!’
My phone rings. This time, it’s the courier guy. At the door, a man in a pale blue shirt, holding a clipboard and a stack of envelopes.
‘Ms Aditi Gupta?’ he asks.
‘She’s inside.’
‘Signature?’
He hands me a thick brown envelope. Her name printed on it. In the corner—small, easy to miss—the airline’s logo. A cold dread washes over me. I walk back in.
‘What’s that?’ she asks, though her pale face shows she already knows.
I hold up the envelope. ‘From the airline.’
I place it on the table, between her cup and her phone. She doesn’t touch it. It sits on the table as if it’s radioactive. Her breathing has stopped.
‘Should I open it?’ I ask, my voice low.
She doesn’t respond. Her eyes are locked on the envelope, on the airline’s logo. She whispers, ‘Please open it.’
Inside is a long letter. I skim through it.
‘. . . as legal spouse of Mr Aman Sinha . . . compensation according . . . Montreal Convention, 1999 . . . form enclosed for bank details . . . processed within twenty-one working days . . . our condolences for your loss.’
I put the letter down on the table, the corporate jargon’s cruel. I have read many such letters for her, written many too. She looks up. Tears well up in her eyes, not falling yet, just shimmering. I don’t say anything. There is nothing to say.
The tears begin to fall. I walk up and take her in my arms, like I’ve done many times in the past year. Her body heaves into me.
She mumbles into my shoulder, ‘I don’t want it.’
I knew she didn’t want it.
And then, with tears coming down heavily, she keeps repeating it, her voice breaking with a raw, desperate agony, a mantra against the finality she can no longer deny, ‘I don’t want it . . . I don’t want it . . . I don’t want it . . .’