Chapter 22 Aditi
Aditi
I hear the rhythmic hum of the robot vacuum bumping against the leg of the sofa.
It’s the new one. I bought this one. Though it works fine, it doesn’t work fine.
I’m pretending to fix my CV, but for the last hour, I’ve just been scrolling through my phone, my thumb moving in a lazy, repetitive arc.
It’s a drug. I have numbed myself so much with my scrolling that I would have to seriously re-evaluate my life if I didn’t have my phone.
Raghav is on the balcony, nursing a cup of coffee.
He has to go to the office in a bit. I see this every day—the dragging of his feet, the weary way he puts his shirt on, the dread before getting into the lift.
His office is really taking its toll on him.
He’s been out there for a while, staring at the hazy Gurugram skyline.
He has wished for a pandemic twice this week.
And he too has updated his CV. He has only one—and only one—criterion: that the company should have the option to work from home.
But the job market is shit, it has been for the last year as I found out first-hand.
In these mornings, we orbit each other in this two-bedroom apartment like planets, held in place by the gravity of a shared catastrophe, but neither can come close and help the other. There’s nowhere else we would rather be and can be. Sad, but it also works.
The robot vacuum gives up. I get up and put it back on charging.
‘It’s the other way,’ he says when he sees me struggle with it.
‘This thing won’t work unless we give it space to move around,’ I respond irritably. ‘We need to reorganize.’
‘You’re saying that?’
‘I’ve paid the rent,’ I say. ‘Which means I am an equal, contributing and currently annoyed member of this household.’
‘That’s a very suddenly annoyed member of the household,’ he says. ‘And I’m aware of your financial contribution. You have said this thrice in the past three days. Do you want to take down the landlord’s name from the door and put yours?’
He snaps back, and I feel a small, grim satisfaction. My needling always brings him back to life.
‘Should we at least unbox these?’ I say, with my voice dropping low. The eight boxes of Megha that she sneaked out of her house and sent to this house ahead of time.
‘That’s not my stuff. It’s Megha’s,’ he says, the familiar darkness coming over his face.
‘Didn’t you spend the last few months telling me that the money was mine? That everything theirs was ours? So all this . . . right here . . . is supposed to be a part of your life,’ I tell him. ‘It’s what she would have wanted, right? For her things to have a home here.’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘What do you mean you don’t know? This must be precious to her if she sent it, no?’
‘I guess.’
‘Should we open them?’
Strangely, he doesn’t argue.
‘Yes,’ he says.
A few minutes later, we’re on the floor of the living room.
I slit the tape on the first box with a knife.
For a moment, I feel like an intruder. As I do, I ask myself, why now?
These boxes have been here for a year. He would dust them every now and then, and I never once asked him to open them.
Is it because I feel a certain permanence in his life now?
The day he told me he had renewed his lease shifted something in me.
I always believed he had a better handle on the grief, that with his work-and-data-engineering-sized hammer, he was chipping away at it and didn’t need my help.
But that evening, it felt like he needed me too.
I look for reluctance on Raghav’s face but there isn’t any.
Instead, he takes out a big, almost comical coffee mug from the box.
‘What?’ I ask, a smile breaking across my own face.
‘This mug,’ he says, holding it up. ‘I saw it in a store and told her it was childish . . . So, naturally, she bought it just to annoy me. Used it every single day. So many selfies I have of this.’
I watch him as he talks. For the first time, I see the man Megha loved, a person before the running away and the death.
Not the annoying ghost who haunts our apartment, but a man with a history full of light and inside jokes.
He pulls out more things—a faded Anuv Jain concert T-shirt, a framed photo of a stray dog—and tells me the story behind each one.
He taps the photo of the dog. ‘She named him Chairman Meow,’ he says with a small shake of his head.
‘Just thought it was a great joke.’ At first, the recollections come with pauses.
He loses himself in the story, starts looking into the distance, eyes glassy, but slowly he gets into a flow.
It doesn’t even matter if I’m there or not.
Every alternate second, the grief washes over and recedes from his face.
For the first time, I feel he’s letting me in.
For the first time, I feel like knowing him more.
We go through her things. And from her things, emerges him. A boy in love. So strange.
But then, at the bottom of the second box, under a stack of books, he finds something I know he hasn’t seen before. His eyebrows scrunch in a frown as he holds them. A set of three matching notebooks with hard black covers. The mood in the room shifts. I watch as he picks one up and opens it.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
His whole body goes still. He flips a few pages, his eyes scanning the lines.
‘It’s her diaries,’ he says.
‘You didn’t know she wrote them?’
He looks up. His eyes are distant, suddenly.
He gathers the three notebooks, holding them to his chest, and marches into his room, shutting the door behind him.
I’m left alone in the sudden silence, surrounded by the ghosts of two lives.
His pain triggers my own. It’s a chain reaction.
It’s nonsensical, this sadness. It keeps finding ways to claw back into my life.
Suddenly, I’m wondering if there were some words Aman had too that I don’t know of.
No, none. No unknown diaries. No secret email IDs where he used to send stuff.
Just silence. Raghav is so lucky. He has more to hear from Megha?
What would I not give to have that? A diary. A page even.
I walk back to my room and pick up my phone.
My thumb moves with a mind of its own, opening the photo gallery.
To the screenshots folder. There aren’t many.
We could not keep our chats. We had to delete them to be careful.
But why would we keep the chats? We would be together for life.
Who goes back and reads chats? Unless, of course, one of them dies.
But there are some . . . only a few . . .
and that’s my solace. I go through every one of the screenshots.
How banal and boring and everyday they are.
But how lovely too, how amazing, how the absolute best thing in the world.
Just telling each other how much we love each other multiple times a day.
I go through all his chats: his work, his family, his pesky landlord .
. . and then . . . I find it. It’s a picture he had sent me once and I had forgotten all about it.
A picture of a hotel room with a private pool.
Aman: What would I not give to go here? Maybe for our honeymoon someday.
Me: Looks expensive.
I don’t even remember this. How much of us have I forgotten already? How much will I forget in a year’s time? I look at the picture . . . and reverse image search it.
Ritz Carlton Bali.
I was right. It’s expensive. But then, I feel something in my chest. A stupid, quiet, tender wish. When I open my laptop, my fingers move quickly. Flight aggregators. Destination: Denpasar. How much will it cost? Nothing. Nothing compared to what I have now.
Just then, I hear a noise outside. When I walk out, I find Raghav in the kitchen. He must have come out of his room at some point. The apartment smells like chillies and tadka from the dal he’s making. He’s staring out the window, but I know he’s not seeing the view.
‘I think I’m going to book something,’ I say.
He’s at the sink, but he turns, his movements slow. ‘Hmm?’
‘Tickets. Bali. Both of us.’
He stops. ‘What?’
‘Bali,’ I repeat. ‘Aman wanted to go. It never happened.’
Now he’s looking at me, really looking, a strange expression on his face. ‘You will book . . . flights?’ he says. ‘For us?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why Bali?’ His eyes bore into me.
‘Because he wanted to go.’
He lets out that dry, humourless laugh. ‘We can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because look at us,’ he says, his voice laced with bitterness. ‘How incredibly sad is it that they aren’t here, and we are going to Bali? Why? Why are we going? Because you have money suddenly?’
I try to let it slip off me. He’s annoying, but not cruel. For now, I forgive him because he has just found her diaries and is a little off-colour.
Before I can say anything, he asks, ‘What will they say?’
‘Who?’ I say and it strikes me, ‘What? Megha’s parents?
That door is closed, Raghav. And please don’t make me sound like I’m chasing a sunset.
I’m trying not to go mad. I don’t have fucking diaries to read.
Maybe this will . . . bring me peace? Who knows what the fuck will give me peace? Can’t I try?’
‘Quite a convenient way to get peace, isn’t it?’ he retorts.
‘You of all people know it’s not that simple.’
He leans against the counter, arms folded. ‘This is running. We won’t find anything there. No peace, no closure, nothing. We will just miss them more.’
‘So what? We need to try,’ I snap back. ‘You want to punish yourself forever? I know I don’t. I want to see if I can be normal. If it’s possible to carry some happiness with all the sadness we carry.’
He’s quiet. Angry-quiet. He shakes his head, a look of finality on his face.
‘No,’ he says, his voice low and firm. ‘We’re not going, Aditi. It’s a terrible idea.’
He turns his back on me and focuses on the dal, a clear dismissal. The argument is over.
I stand there for a moment, stunned into silence.
Then I walk back to my room and shut the door.
The rejection stings more than I expected.
Did I do something wrong? Was I being selfish?
Of course I was. What if I saw the screenshot and didn’t have the money?
Would I have checked the tickets? No. I curl up on my bed, the excitement I felt just minutes ago turns into shame.
I scroll and scroll till I fall asleep and late that night, there’s a soft knock on my door. I don’t answer. The door opens a crack anyway. It’s Raghav. He doesn’t look at me, just stares at a point on the wall above my head.
‘Fine,’ he says.
I sit up. ‘Fine what?’
‘We’re going,’ he says, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion. ‘To Bali.’
I wipe drool off my mouth. ‘What? Why? What changed your mind?’
His eyes finally meet mine, but they’re unreadable. Guarded.
‘Is it something you read?’ I ask, my mind immediately going to the diaries. ‘In her diary?’
A long pause hangs between us.
‘No,’ he says, but the denial is too quick. ‘Let’s just . . . go.’
And before I can say anything else, he closes the door, leaving me alone with a decision I don’t understand.