I stare at my phone wallpaper for a bit—our picture at the Kamakhya temple. Our best picture and in some ways, also our worst. I remember holding her hand in this picture and telling myself,this is it, this is the girl I will spend the rest of my life with.
But it was also the picture that started it all.
The picture that was forwarded in all family groups on WhatsApp. The messages that flooded the groups float in front of my eyes. The ugly conjecture. The rot in everyone’s head lay bare. Cousins.Taayaji.Chachu. TheMamas. And the loudest voice of all, my mother’s. It was only a mumble delivered with a shake of her head, ‘The girls from the North-east are like this only.’
I remember it all like it was yesterday.
The screen times out.
I turn back and there’s Aditi, already deep into her book.
She glances up, waves and gestures for me to join her. I wait for my heart to settle before I trudge over to her.
6
Aditi
‘What are you reading?’ he asks while looking outside.
I’m sure he’s thinking what I’m thinking. The rain’s completely stopped now, the floodwater of the road has receded. Couldn’t they have been here now?
‘Roman history. I mean, I’m failing to read anything to be honest,’ I tell him. ‘Usually, I can just lose myself in these books.’
‘History books?’
‘I wanted to be a historian once. Obsessed with dead people and their bad decisions. Despite being so aware of what a bad decision is, I have found myself in one.’
His face scrunches into a frown. ‘We can’t think like that,’ he says. It seems like it’s directed to him as much as it’s directed to me. ‘This is going to be... the best decision of our lives.’
‘Sure,’ I say, while being unsure.
I can be unsure here but not in front of Aman. And I know he tries to hide his unsureness too. A few hours from now, we are going to be each other’s only family. Doubt will have no place in our lives.
‘So, your parents didn’t let you become a history professor? An archaeologist? That’s what you become after a degree in history?’ he asks, clearly to change the topic.
‘After doing a history course, you become a drain to your parents,’ I say. ‘The joke’s on me because to them, I still am.’
‘You have siblings?’
‘An elder sister, an elder brother,’ I answer him, my thoughts racing to the folded letter on my bed. The bed that my sister and I shared for twenty-five years before she got married and though I had been excited to have the room all to myself, I just found myself lonely. ‘You?’
‘I have a younger sister—’
‘NO.’
The word comes out as a gasp.
‘What?’ he asks.
And then I see them. Outside. Through the glass. Just beyond the Costa Coffee counter. My entire stomach drops like it’s been unplugged from my body.
Didi, my elder sister.
Didi’s husband.
AndBhaiya, my elder brother... even through the toughened glass, I can see the unbridled fury in his eyes. Of all the battles he could have picked in the world, he has picked this. His fists are clenched and he’s stomping around.That restless, angry energy I have seen directed at others—the customers, the shop, the vendors, the car wash guy, Gupta Ji who lost the battle for the parking space last month—is now directed at me.
They are going to drag me home.Home?They are going to take away my phone, lock me up. Maa’s going to cry outside, Didi’s going to saydidn’t we tell you this would happen?, Papa will refuse to address me directly and Bhaiya... I don’t know what he will do. What he’s going on about now, what he did when he first got to know of Aman, I could never have predicted.
