‘Please don’t, Raghu.’
We turned to our food again. And now, it seemed she ate frantically just so she didn’t have to talk to me. Things had changed between us. I could feel it, I could read it on her face, and I feel foolish to have held what seem now to be archaic ideas about love. I had held Brahmi’s hand, I had embraced her, she had kept her head on my shoulder and cried and I had done the same but that didn’t bind us for life, no matter how I wished it would. She could change as a person and so could I. And it was possible for us to like someone else. And it would be wrong for anyone to judge a person who finds himself or herself incapable of loving the person he or she once loved. The laughable rules might still apply to me—because what if it is possible that I would ever feel even a shred of what I feel for her—but they don’t to anyone else. And having said that, I’m judging and cursing her for not being the same person who used to be in love with me. The look in her eyes was empty, her smiles fake, her hugs snug but cold, and even though only a table separated us, it was like we had never met.
I had lost Brahmi.
It was just a matter of time now before she would be sucked into her new world, her new life, and I would keep holding on to my defunct ideas and my incomplete love story. When she left for Gurgaon again she told me that she might come to see me the next day.
‘Tomorrow . . .’ she said.
I nodded. I had already started waiting.
25 December 1999
Six hours in the balcony earned me nothing but scorn from Maa–Baba.
I refused to accompany Maa to Boudi’s doctors’ visits—one to her own doctor and one to Maa’s. Then I refused to join Maa–Baba and Dada–Boudi for dinner which wasn’t devoid of drama either. Boudi wanted to cook, which didn’t go down well with Maa for reasons I’m not sure of. Did she think it would loosen her grip on the family kitchen? Was it because of Boudi’s religion? Or was it just concern over her pregnancy? At the end of it, Maa won, mothers always do, and cooked an elaborate fare which tasted like dirt.
I should stop waiting for Brahmi. What am I still doing in the balcony?
But there’s someone who’s waiting alongside me; only for her, I assume, it’s a bit of a celebration. Richa Mittal. She’s still there crouched at the corner of her balcony, like she has been since morning. By evening, her eyes filled up with love and despair and anger.
Just like mine.
Also, Merry Christmas.
26 December 1999
The day started off well. I was successfully weaning myself off her.
I waited for her only for three hours, after which I busied myself with homework and household chores. Maa came to me while I was struggling with a permutation–combination word problem and said, ‘You’re a strong boy, my shona.’
‘I am,’ I said.
And I was strong. There were chunks of time I wasn’t thinking of her at all, till the time the phone rang in the afternoon and I rushed to get it, hoping it was her. The receiver almost fell from my hands before I could put it to my ear. No one spoke. I wondered if it was Brahmi who couldn’t muster up the courage to talk to me after having left me in a lurch.
Dada–Boudi and Maa–Baba went to a Chinese restaurant in the evening.
‘I need to be with Mina,’ I told Maa and excused myself from the family dinner.
I dropped in at Didimaa’s place, endured her screeching taunts about the devil in Boudi’s womb and how my Maa, the demon, would carve it out, played with and fed Mina, and left for Brahmi’s Tauji–Taiji’s house. The labourers were pulling the scaffolding apart. If Brahmi was on the other side of the window it would have been impossible to reach her now. The distance, the jump, the fall—all of it would have been fatal.
Her Tauji–Taiji were surprised to see me but unlike other times they weren’t baying for my blood. It seemed like the money they were getting from Brahmi had satiated them. They had probably assumed I was behind her visit to them last week.
‘I just want to know the name of the company she works in,’ I asked them.
There were surprised I didn’t know.
I was not invited in. I was asked to wait and the door closed on my face. A few minutes later, they gave me a slip of paper with the company name, phone number and address on it.
‘Tell her we miss her,’ they said before I left.
From there I went to the closest PCO and dialled the number of the company. The receptionist asked me if I knew the person I was calling for.
‘I know her,’ I said.
The call was transferred to her desk. The phone rang but no one answered. I asked the receptionist to try again. She did it, with no effect.
‘You should call after an hour. She is not at her desk.’
