PART 5
THREE YEARS LATER
Daksh Dey
I can feel the heavy pull of memory as we step through the imposing entrance of the Westlife Hotel in the Andamans.
It’s been twenty years and yet the lobby seems new.
It’s clear it has been torn up and rebuilt over the years.
I’m second in line for the check-in. Gauravi is squirming in my arms, her cute little fingers reaching out to grab the glimmering chandelier overhead.
‘Stupid kids have no depth perception,’ I hear a voice say.
When I turn, I see Rabbani standing there, dragging a small carry-on suitcase and nothing else. That’s what youth allows you. A life without burden. You can just pack up and go anywhere.
‘She understands,’ I scold Rabbani.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ she brushes me away. ‘Give her to me. Come to bua, come to the best bua in the world!’
Gauravi shakes her head and clings to me. She mumbles to Rabbani, ‘Baba is the best, Baba is amazing.’
Rabbani rolls her eyes. ‘So, he’s doing that to you too.’
‘Three years is a good age to start the brainwashing,’ I tell Rabbani. ‘She has to know I’m the best she could have gotten. Which is also the truth.’
Rabbani nods and smiles. ‘I’m walking proof that it works. Dada is, indeed, the best.’
I still can’t get over how cute, how adorable my sister is.
To think of her going around the world, unprotected, without me looking after her, fills my heart with dread.
So what if she’s twenty-one? The sound of her age fills my mouth with ash.
I would rather her be two. Rabbani takes Gauravi away from me anyway and nuzzles her nose into her stomach. Gauravi breaks into peals of laughter.
‘In a couple of years just this is not going to work,’ I warn Rabbani. ‘You got to spend time with her, make a relationship. This tickling business is too easy.’
Rabbani shrugs. ‘In a couple of years, she will be old enough to realize I’m the bua who brings the fanciest toys for her.’
‘Don’t show off,’ I kid her. ‘You haven’t even got your first salary yet.’
‘Hater,’ she says and then turns to Gauravi. ‘Your Baba is a hater. He’s just jealous that his twenty-one-year-old sister is going to earn twice as much as him.’
‘More than twice,’ I correct her, the new analyst at Deutsche Bank, recruited out of IIT Bombay this year, at a salary that made me question the legality of what she’s going to do there.
‘I was being respectful,’ quips Rabbani. ‘You’re going to be quite poor, Dada.’
‘If only we hadn’t spent so much on you,’ I respond. ‘Let go of some heavy compounding.’
She chuckles and then suddenly falls silent. ‘Dada?’
‘Yes?’
‘You going to be okay?’
‘I’m here, am I not?’
We check into the two-bedroom suite we have booked for ourselves.
Rabbani keeps Gauravi bouncing on her waist all through the lobby to our room. Gradually, everything seems to get a little heavier around me and slows me down. The air’s viscous with sadness. I drag my feet. But I know I have to do this. There’s no running away now.
As I start to unpack, the past starts to wrap its arms around me, threatening to suck me into its dark depths.
My breaths become shallow and laboured. The hotel’s carpet might have changed, the colour of the walls is different, but it feels like the air’s still the same: soaked with memories, with the faint whispers of her voice and the joy I once had in my life.
At once I realize that I might have underestimated its power and overestimated my strength to bear it.
It feels like my heart’s in a vice and it’s getting crushed.
‘I will give you some time alone. We will see you at breakfast,’ Rabbani tells me.
‘Leave Gauravi, I will bring her. She—’
‘Get lost,’ says Rabbani. ‘She’s my child too.’
And before I can answer, Gauravi is running after Rabbani in the corridors, giggling and laughing.
And then, there’s silence.
Pin-drop silence.
There are only two ways of dealing with grief. A short-term solution: surround yourself with noise and busyness. A long-term solution: surround yourself with peace. I have always found the earlier option easier. After Mumma’s death, Gaurav’s . . . and . . .
I sit by the window and stare out. This room is where Aanchal must have stayed with Gaurav, with her parents all those years ago.
When she was all of seventeen and won this in a lucky draw, when she met me, that wayward spoilt boy, whom she called her lucky charm, the one who checked her board results.
Would she still call me lucky? Back in the day, this would have been two different rooms connected with a common door, but it’s a suite now.
This view of the sea, the pool, is what they would have seen twenty years ago.
It’s strange how some things change so drastically, while others remain stubbornly static.
She told me multiple times the story of her awe at how the rich lived.
I move away from the window and take out the little taped container.
I call the reception and check where the breakfast buffet is.
As I walk towards it, my head starts to spin.
Every corner of the hotel seems to whisper Aanchal’s name, reminding me of her laughter, her whispers, her sighs, her nervousness, her happiness.
It feels like she’s still here, lingering just out of sight, just beyond my grasp.
Rabbani and Gauravi are tucked away at a corner table, diligently scooping spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt from tiny cups.
While Gauravi is a mirror image of Aanchal, her movements, her mannerisms, are all unmistakably Rabbani.
Upon spotting me, they wave synchronously—it’s uncanny, as if their motor neurons were interlinked.
I join them.
I can’t look away from the empty cups of strawberry yogurt, the same flavour Rabbani used to love as a kid. I feel an unexpected smile tug at my lips. It’s the small things, the tiny threads of the past that keep pulling me back.
I force myself to eat.
Once Gauravi is done, I take her out of the high chair and let her run about.
There’s no screen-time rule for Gauravi.
Not because of her, but because of me. Handing over my phone or iPad would start a slippery slope.
Showering her with attention is what anchors me in the present, something I can’t afford to lose.
‘You look like shit, Dada,’ says Rabbani as she ladles poha into my plate. ‘You need to take better care of yourself.’
‘I’m fitter than most thirty-seven-year-olds,’ I argue. ‘Even kids your age.’
‘I’m talking about what’s inside, Dada.’
‘Don’t be over-smart.’
‘Everything tells us that I’m smarter than you,’ she quips. ‘Even if I try to be dumb, I will be smarter than you.’
‘Just eat.’
We sit together in silence, slowly picking at our food.
Our eyes flit to Gauravi every so often, as she bounds around the room, bumping into furniture and giggling.
It’s still hard for me to fully comprehend that Rabbani is a mature twenty-one-year-old woman.
There’s an instinctive part of me that yearns to scoop her up in my arms and toss her into the air as I used to.
The feeling Gauravi and Rabbani elicit in me—of them being babies of mine—doesn’t leave me.
A little later, Gauravi tires and climbs into my lap.
‘Do you want to go to the beach?’ I ask Gauravi.
‘Beach!’ she squeals.
Arm in arm, we three start walking towards the beach. The weather is pleasant, with a soft breeze gently caressing our faces, contrary to what our Weather app said: thunderstorm. Gauravi snuggles into me, her tiny nose nuzzling into the crook of my neck.
Stepping on to the sand, a tidal wave of memories crashes over me. I’m swept up in the sands of time, and for a moment, it feels as though Gaurav and Aanchal might come around the bend and stroll towards us, their whispers and chuckles drifting through the air.
I remember the beach being a lot quieter.
But memory is a strange thing. It keeps shifting and morphing with time and from where you’re looking at it and what you have become.
The version of me that came to this beach doesn’t exist any more.
An eighteen-year-old who was angry with a girl for not replying to his texts. My entire life was about just that.
I put Gauravi down and she digs her fingers inside the sand, examining the texture.
‘If only she was as selfish as she was when I first met her,’ I tell Rabbani, barely being able to keep my voice from cracking. ‘Selfish down to her last bone. That could have worked out in everyone’s favour.’
‘Her selfishness wasn’t a choice,’ Rabbani replies softly.
‘I get that,’ I say. ‘It helps to be angry at times.’
‘You’re angry most of the time, Dada.’
‘Should I not be?’ I retort, my voice a brittle, angry whisper.
I deserve to be angry. I deserve to be furious.
The last words I ever spoke to Aanchal as I looked at her ashen face, her laboured breaths in the ICU, struggling to stay alive, were, ‘Thank you.’
I thanked her for giving me a child, as if that’s what I wanted from her.
How ridiculous is that? I remember her soft eyes, her lingering touch.
I couldn’t place the emotion when she gently closed her eyes, but now I can’t help but think it was relief.
She said, ‘I love you.’ I didn’t even say, ‘I love you too.’ I just fucking thanked her, turned and went to check if Gauravi was doing okay. That’s how Aanchal saw me.
‘You had no idea things would end up like this, Dada.’
‘But I should have, yes?’ I retort.
Aanchal played her odds. When she changed hospitals midway, she told us she didn’t like the previous one, that the doctor made her uncomfortable. It was a pretence, a lie to fool me, to hide the risks that came with the pregnancy.