‘I will save you,’ I said, desperately.
‘Will you? Like you’re saving yourself?’ she said, a tear streaking down her cheek. ‘Don’t you see it? We are doomed, the hopes we had clung to, gone, our own brothers deceived us. We can’t run away from it. Don’t I know what you’re waiting for?’
‘What?’
‘For Boudi’s child, are you not?’ she asked. She got up, not getting a response. ‘That’s why, you should go your own way, as I should mine. We will only want to drag out the inevitable, hope that one of us will save the other. It will all eventually come to naught, Raghu.’
I held her hand.
‘You still love me, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Can I ask you for something? Can you wait for me?’
I told her of the visions I had had when I had just begun to know her—of the two of us with slashed wrists, fingers entwined, on the top of the building. I knew it was unfair for me to tell her to wait; Brahmi couldn’t have lived in that house any more. There’s only one other place she could have lived—in the flat where Dada died. The lease was for a year and Baba wasn’t ready to let go of the apartment yet. The police and the landlord had been sufficiently paid in money and in tears to hold on to Dada’s tomb. Grief is a powerful thing. We have all been there—Maa, Baba, Boudi and I. The kitchen and the living room is wrecked, blackened with soot, walls half-broken, the blood washed off, but the bedroom is surprisingly untouched. The flat has no running water or electricity but it’s a house. Brahmi said she would have her bag ready tomorrow.
17 March 2000
Maa is like an evil hamster in the wheel. She finds ways to hurt Boudi and then cries and apologizes to her. Boudi who has no one else to cry with always forgives her. Sometimes she finds succour in me. Only yesterday, Maa found the marriage certificate of Boudi and Dada in the almirah and set fire to it. Boudi cried when she found out but Maa cried harder.
Every time I step out of the house, leaving Boudi behind, I feel guilty. But I have to.
For the last four days, Brahmi has been living in Dada’s old flat. Vedant hasn’t and I believe won’t come looking for her because she had left him a threatening letter.
From a part of her savings she bought a little kerosene stove where she cooks all three meals, even snacks.
‘If these are going to be my last few days, I’d rather live like a queen,’ she said the first day when I pointed to the packets of chips and biscuits lying around.
‘Quite a palace you have,’ I had remarked.
And today she said, ‘It is not far from it. It feels like home. I feel safe here.’
‘Ironical,’ I said.
‘Because I have you here. I feel safe. I feel wanted. I feel loved. When you leave everything behind and come here and spend time with me, I feel nice. In love. Look at you blush,’ she said.
I felt the same about her despite the memories this flat held. Dada’s words came forth in my head, when he had suggested we go to the same places and create more memories to overwrite the old ones. That’s what Brahmi was doing. Not overwriting them but at least filling the blanks with happy memories.
‘Thank you,’ she said, holding my hand.
‘I am doing it as much for me as for you,’ I told her.
And why not? Only yesterday, I told Maa–Baba I would stay at Rishab’s place and went to Dada’s house instead. We spent the entire night talking. It was light by the time we had wrested our old life back. The same little room, the darkness, the quietude and the candle between the two of us.
Unlike then, now we know time’s running out so we don’t hold back on words. We tell each other we love each other more freely, without feeling shy, we hold each other’s hand more tightly, we clutch each other with more authority, exercise more control over each other. In the afternoons, we sneak out of the building and walk around parks like an old couple. We laugh and we joke and we wonder what lies on the other side of death.
She still hasn’t told me how and why her parents died or why she hid it from me and I haven’t probed. If these were going to be the last few days of our lives, I would rather spend them smiling. What scares me now is the time I’m not with Brahmi, when she’s all alone in that blackened house, sitting in the darkness with just herself, waiting for me.
20 March 2000
Like every morning I woke up early to maintain the charade that I was still going to school. Only today, I woke up a little too early and overheard Maa–Baba talk. Usually there’s nothing more than silent sobs but today was different.
‘Don’t worry. She will have to do what we want her to do,’ said Baba.
‘Are you sure? Zubeida is not any other girl. She’s wily. She trapped my son. She’s smart. She can do anything,’ said Maa.
‘How long will she fight us? She will have to give up, won’t she?’ said Baba.
