PART 2 #9
Who am I fooling? We aren’t married. Being married and being something like married are two entirely different things. Say what you will, but signing that piece of paper, walking around the sacred fire—it’s not nothing.
She catches me, like she always used to. ‘It’s not the same, Daksh, you know that. And I’m warning you, get married, okay?’
‘I will.’
‘When?’ Her voice is a little stern this time.
‘I mean, that’s up to us. We will take our time.’
‘Is it up to you though, Daksh?’ she commands, and then in a softer tone continues, ‘Of course, it’s up to you. But think about what you asked me to do all those years ago.’
I give her a blank look, pretending not to know what she’s talking about. I don’t know why I do that. Maybe not to have the conversation we are about to have.
‘You wanted me to be sure when I was barely twenty-two. You’re thirty now and you want to take your time? That’s convenient.’
‘I’m not thirty.’
‘You look thirty,’ she grumbles.
‘What?’
‘It just came out,’ she says. ‘You look twenty-five at best. And I hate it that you still look so cute.’
‘I was going for handsome.’
‘You know you’re handsome. But you’re cute, too. That’s just annoying. You won the genetic lottery.’
‘You’re talking about a genetic lottery? Look at you,’ I say. ‘By the way, you traded up. You have Saket. He’s something. More than something.’
‘Saket and you, you guys are on different scales of handsomeness. And stop making me look shallow. I don’t have folders with scales and boy faces in front of them,’ she says. ‘And how did we get sidetracked?’
‘Because I wanted us to,’ I confess.
‘I was twenty-two when you asked me to marry you, Daksh. Twenty-two,’ she taps her finger on the table to emphasize her point, wasting no time in circling back to the topic. ‘You gave me no time to decide. And threw it all away because I couldn’t make a decision.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You said that we could figure out . . . What?’
She looks at me, her eyes widening with surprise. I never apologized to her for what I did to her. It strikes us both at the same time.
‘Did you just apologize to—’
‘I did,’ I say.
Silence.
It looms large between us, expanding to fill every corner of the room.
My apology comes out too weak, too abrupt, too incidental.
No matter the care I put into my words, the gentleness in my gaze, the sincerity in my tone, the number of words I use—my apology seems destined to be inadequate. It’s a bandage over a wound too deep.
I continue, ‘I’m sorry. What I asked of you was unfair. What I did was unfair. I can see that now.’
The words seem to deflate her. From her initial poised stance, back arched and eyes sharp, she now reclines into her chair, her gaze getting softer.
‘You can’t just apologize to me like that.’
‘I know I should have called,’ I say. ‘But I didn’t think it mattered to you. You seemed to have moved on. I think it was just easier to let things be.’
She takes a deep breath.
‘You’re right, it didn’t matter.’
Another silence descends. She locks her eyes with mine. I can hear my heart thump.
‘But, Daksh, my decision changed me. What happened between us, changed me.’ She pushes the plate to me. ‘I can’t have it any more.’
As if on cue, the waiter brings another plate. Before I can say no to him, Aanchal butts in.
‘Let him keep it, you know you’re going to eat them both.’
I nod and the waiter walks away.
‘You wanted to get married to me after less than three months of dating, Daksh,’ she says in a small voice. ‘And now you say that you think you were wrong?’
‘You were pregnant. To me it seemed like a logical thing to do,’ I say.
Her eyes radiate hurt. ‘You realized it too late, didn’t you?’
‘I was too much in love with you. Too much in love with the future I saw with you. I couldn’t see anything else. To the Daksh of that time, it was the only natural progression of things. I’m sorry I put you through it. I’m sorry I put you through the person I was.’
‘I’m sorry too, Daksh.’
‘You don’t have to say that.’
‘But I do.’
‘You did what anyone else would have done. Twenty-two is no age to get married, have a kid. Not, at least, where you came from.’
‘I didn’t have to do what everyone else would have done. Couldn’t I have taken a different route?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Couldn’t I have done what you suggested? Maybe things would have been the same, better, who knows?’ she says.
Drawing the plate back to herself, she languidly twirls a few noodles on her fork, gathering her thoughts for what’s to come.
I give her space, time; something I hadn’t done when she first shared her pregnancy news.
Back then, I was at her feet, imploring her, begging her to choose marriage, motherhood, things too daunting for a twenty-one-year-old.
And when she reached her decision and I reached mine, everything shattered.
Now, she lifts her gaze to mine, and says, ‘The things you wanted were weird. A little romantic, true, but still weird. No boy at twenty-four wants a family.’
‘I understand that now. I was a different person then.’
‘You had no career, you were living in a one-room kitchen and you had so many responsibilities. Another kid? Me? We would have dragged each other down,’ she says softly.
I nod. ‘I don’t blame you any more for not wanting it. You had worked your entire life to make things easier for yourself.’
‘Logically, I made sense. I was in the right. I kept screaming at you that I was right,’ she says, and her voice trails.
When our gazes lock, every moment we’ve shared flickers before my eyes. This is the first time we have had a civil conversation in five years.
‘But now I wonder, Daksh, is it all that weird?’ she says. ‘And for you, it must have been the most natural thing ever. Was it all that unfair for you to ask what you did?’
‘We change our mind about things,’ I concede. ‘That’s just how things are.’
She looks down at her nails and scratches the gel off them. ‘You derived your purpose from family. Now I feel that wasn’t too crazy an idea. In fact, it’s the most well-accepted one.’
I don’t know how to react.
‘Sometimes I think, what if.’
She waits for me to say something. I can’t blame it on her, not any more. Not after the way I had behaved all those years ago.
‘You took the right decision, Aanchal. I was the one who spoiled it all. I should never have left.’
She smiles wryly. ‘You loved too much. It was insane. I don’t know if it was because you were young, but it was something. You were one great love story.’
‘And this guy?’
‘Saket.’
‘Saket, right.’
‘He could be my life. Just like Amruta is yours,’ she says.
‘Where was all the maturity when we needed it?’ I muse, remembering our vocal showdowns, the tears, the breaking of hearts, and the feeling that we would never be happy again.
‘You wouldn’t have been you had you been mature, Daksh. You wouldn’t have been worth falling in love with. If I had to be changed by someone’s love, I would pick you a thousand times.’
‘So, when are you guys getting married?’
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that question? It’s been, what, two years since you’ve been engaged?’
‘There are a lot of moving parts,’ I explain. ‘Her kids, Rabbani, Baba.’
‘This is your dream. You love swimming in complexity. That’s your thing, Daksh.’
Just then, the waiter approaches and lingers near our table, staring at our plates and then at us, subtly suggesting it’s time to leave if we’ve finished.
We pay the bill and make our way out.
11.
Aanchal Madan
I don’t know what it is about Daksh, but it’s annoying to the bone that he seems to grow more attractive every time I see him, and our tenuous link never completely severs.
At eighteen, he had a boyish attractiveness that threw me off-guard.
Everything he said seemed flirtatious. The attention he paid to me was heady, addictive and nothing I had ever felt before.
At twenty-two, he was at his lowest, barely scraping enough will and energy to last through the day.
He had no money, no house to speak of, and an entire family to take care of, and yet when he met me, the enthusiasm in his eyes and his touch thrilled me to bits.
Even now on some nights, I wake up to the feverish dream of him taking me in the bathroom of the hotel in Mumbai when I had gone there for an office convention.
When I met him at twenty-five, three years after I broke his heart, he still burned with the pain.
And so did I. And that kind of made him mine.
It’s been two years now that he has been with Amruta.
Their podcast is brilliant, but hearing them together also pinches my heart.
‘I can drop you home,’ he says with a kind smile that has always lit up my days whenever he has thrown them my way.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘My rental is parked there.’
He leads the way. I follow him quietly. Inside my heart, a storm rages.
I can tell Saket the bare facts and he would understand.
He loves me, or whatever his definition of love is.
He would get it. Or even if he doesn’t, he will say he gets it and not probe further.
He knows all that there is to know about Daksh, he has heard the podcast, he has seen Amruta, and he’s marked the entire situation as manageable.
Do I deserve him? Maybe not. Will I love him with all my heart if we are together?
I will have to. I can’t make the mistake of loving someone at half-speed again.
I wish someone had told me this before. Love requires complete devotion. That’s the only way to do it.
‘There it is,’ he says and points to a bike in the parking lot.
‘That’s safe?’ I ask him.
‘I rode it here, seemed pretty safe,’ he answers.
He takes off the helmet from the handlebar and tosses it to me.
‘Don’t be a hero,’ I tell him.
‘I will buy one from the next red light,’ he says with a smile.