‘What did you do?’
‘Why do you assume I did something?’
She laughs. And despite the pain, her laughter fills me up with joy. It’s not even a balm for my heartbreak. A balm’s ineffective. Her laugh is like open-heart surgery, like installing a pacemaker, as if my pain’s non-existent, a memory. Her laugh reminds me of a question I have been asked often by others who don’t read fiction, why do I waste time with it? Since they won’t read, I want them to meet Aanchal instead and realize what power art holds. Is my judgement of her through the narrow lens of what I consider beautiful and arty? Yes. But do I care? No. I want to keep looking at her.
She says, ‘It’s just that, whenever I think of a rich guy, it just feels like they can’t be in the right. Okay, what did she do?’
‘It was me.’
‘Knew it.’
‘She was hiding our relationship from her parents,’ I explain. ‘Like you are. But one day, I think I just felt a lot of love for her, and I posted a picture of us online. She lost it completely. And then, she stopped talking to me. In my defence, it was for just a couple of minutes and then I took it off. There was no caption too.’
She looks at me.
‘C’mon. It was for just a couple of minutes! Okay, whatever. We are not talking about that any more. I’m sure she will come around. No one saw that picture. She can’t make it that big of a deal.’
The instructor waves at us from a distance, asking us to slow down—it’s a tricky passage. I navigate through with my mind elsewhere.
‘Daksh?’ she says.
‘Was it bad?’
‘What?’
‘When your mother got pregnant? Was it bad in school? You must have been like sixteen, seventeen?’
She’s the first person who has asked me that. Most people just can’t get over the fact that my parents had a kid in their
mid-forties.
‘The range of their jokes was impressive. Really cruel, hurtful stuff. I was ashamed till I realized my parents were different but in a good way.’
‘How did you handle the bullying?’
‘That part was easy. I told those boys that their mothers were untouched by their fathers, their vaginas were slowly drying up and their only resort was delivery men taking their mothers in stairwells while their fathers were at work.’
‘In my school, they would have opened up your skull with hockey sticks.’
I hold out my arms to show her the thirteen stitches on the right, seven on the left.
‘Weren’t you angry with your parents?’ she asks.
Our kayaks float idly and bump into each other under the overhang of the mangroves. I’m miles away from the school, from my college, and even from Rabbani. No one can ever know what I say here, to her. Something I haven’t allowed to tell even myself.
‘Should I tell you what I want to tell you?’
She doesn’t answer. It’s the safest place I can share this. She has no connection to my world.
‘For all those nine months Mumma carried her, I prayed for Mumma to have a miscarriage. I wished for death,’ I confess.
‘Okay.’
‘Mumma was already old when she had her, so it was a real probability. And not just when she was a foetus, just a wiggly little thing in an ultrasound, but into the last few weeks too—when she was a complete child, with arms, and legs, a beating heart, movement, anger, hunger—I wished she would die. Right until the moment of her birth, I wished for Mumma’s umbilical cord to strangle her.’
My breath becomes heavy, like a viscous fluid in my windpipe.
In a small voice, I continue. ‘Just saying these words out loud feels like someone’s jammed their arm down my throat and is crushing my heart.’
