My mother had been wary of Meena. Meena had come home a few times over the years, for juice or biscuits or just a sit-down. She always brought tons of snacks with her but partook of nothing from my mother’s kitchen. Chhaya came calling a couple of years later, swinging her hands. She devoured everything that was placed before her. Mummy loved feeding guests.
I didn’t want to weigh the revelations of that evening, see if the pieces of our friendship fit, consider the what and why of my romance, search for answers in the rubble. It was all too much.
So, Meena and Andrew had an affair? My knees wobbled.
Meena hadn’t admitted to the affair. She had only alluded to it. She was drunk, she was my oldest friend. Was I being fair?
They had a relationship. An affection, an attachment. No one gifts stuff like that for a lark, not even Meena Iyer.
We were friends, we always were. Even when the two of you were dating.
Meena had called their relationship a ‘friendship’, an uber-modern expression for an affair (not my proudest eureka moment). My breath caught in my throat, and my feet struggled to move. Did this appalling sequence (whatever it was) play out after Andrew had left Bengaluru, or were they in touch when he was here?
What had he told her?
Did they discuss me?
I didn’t want to go back to that moment when Andrew told me he loved me. He was in me, and his eyes held mine. He hadn’t repeated those three words again. Not to me.
My legs broke into an unkind pace precipitously, my arms kept with the tempo, and my mind raced back and forth. I was ignoring what I didn’t want to deal with: Andrew’s part in the mess. It felt like a rhinoceros was sitting on my heart.
Meena’s actions had defeated me. But as close a friend as she was, Andrew was the soul connection. His part in the act had destroyed me.
Images of Andrew – what he had come to mean to me in those two years – flashed before my eyes. My hand was on my chest, and I felt the emptiness I had carried within me for eight long years. The emotion, its intensity and depth, was similar to what I felt for my mother. I’d have given my life for Amma, stood between her and that drunk driver if I could’ve saved her…
That’s why I had hoped Andrew would push back his ticket, even though it was I who had told him to go. That’s why I thought he’d understand when I didn’t pick up hiscalls. And that’s exactly why I had to block him out of my mind and get on with the business of living when he didn’t respond to my calls or messages.
Andrew had tried to get in touch with me as soon as he got a telephone connection, which was the day he landed in the United States. He called and messaged incessantly for about 10 days. After a couple of weeks, a month maybe, he mailed, asking why I was reading his messages and not replying.
I wasn’t thinking of Andrew, or anyone actually, at that point. My head was a dark cloud. After a couple of months, when I tried to get in touch with Andrew, by calling on the same number, I got no response.
Why hadn’t he replied to my messages? I had sent him two lengthy ones, putting myself out there.
I had tapped Meena in the hope of getting through to Andrew. She knew we had been seeing each other and how into him I was. At first, she casually let slip that they had bumped into each other, then she dissuaded me from messaging or calling, saying if he wanted to get in touch, he’d have done it.
At that time, the loss of my mother had dulled the sting of Andrew not bothering to reply to my messages. It was forgotten even… almost. Despite all that I missed and yearned for in that relationship, the cruel finality of my mother’s death was what I was dealing with. Losing a parent, in the way I had, in a matter of moments, was like a half-done amputation. It was a shock at first. The pain was for later, for life.
Had I let her braid my hair that morning, she may have been running with me now…
After a year or so, when I started work, my father and I learnt to live again. I got myself into a routine. I had newresponsibilities. I wondered about Andrew, but it wasn’t so much the betrayal as I knew it then, but rather about how he was doing. I dwelt on our time together, the places we’d been to, the paths we had walked.
Now, eight years on, I was almost engaged to Ravi. He was the man I was going to marry, whenever we decided to get married. But there was this dull ache, a door half-closed. A wound that refused to heal. Andrew and Meena. And now, bare-chested Andrew and a roll of cloth. Love in the time of polka dots.
Chapter 11
There was this sagging sensation in the pit of my stomach.
What had I forgotten? My coin pouch kept coming to mind. I reached for it as soon as I got into the office, even though I had no use for it this day or most days. I don’t know why I’ve employed this little pocket I’ve never quite committed to. I stretched for it again later in the afternoon and felt it full and bulging, held together by a metal clasp.
That’s when I heard the knock. A firm rap. Just audible. My neck snapped back in recognition.
I had shut my cabin door. I only do that when I’m ‘breaking stones’, as Sudha and I call the writing process. It’s hard labour. The closed door was my DND sign, not that these hints work in a newspaper office where everything is about here and now. The deadline was yesterday.
It was Wednesday, and I had a full day. I had come in early to finish my story and start work on the pages. That means going to war for advertisement positions, which, most of the time, is extreme, one way or the other. No one taught these marketing chaps ‘balance’, not their neighbourhood schools and definitely not thoseinstitutions from where they secured those big-ticket degrees. Editorial–ad department face-offs are as old as the caste system and as new as brand battles. They don’t die. It’s all about the moolah for them. Don’t get me wrong. We like money, we know how to enjoy it, we can run tutorials on that, but our world spins on an axis of mind over material. We tolerate them; they wish we didn’t exist.
After that verbal tug-of-war played out across three floors, which could go on for hours, I had to sit with the paginators and plan the layout.
Andrew and the chief reporter, Dinesh Reddy, were at the door. I had no choice but to wave them in.
