The robot vacuum gives up. I get up and put it back on charging.
‘It’s the other way,’ he says when he sees me struggle with it.
‘This thing won’t work unless we give it space to move around,’ I respond irritably. ‘We need to reorganize.’
‘You’re saying that?’
‘I’ve paid the rent,’ I say. ‘Which means I am an equal, contributing and currently annoyed member of this household.’
‘That’s a very suddenly annoyed member of the household,’ he says. ‘And I’m aware of your financial contribution. You have said this thrice in the past three days. Do you want to take down the landlord’s name from the door and put yours?’
He snaps back, and I feel a small, grim satisfaction. My needling always brings him back to life.
‘Should we at least unbox these?’ I say, with my voice dropping low. The eight boxes of Megha that she sneaked out of her house and sent to this house ahead of time.
‘That’s not my stuff. It’s Megha’s,’ he says, the familiar darkness coming over his face.
‘Didn’t you spend the last few months telling me that the money was mine? That everything theirs was ours? So all this... right here... is supposed to be a part of your life,’ I tell him. ‘It’s what she would have wanted, right? For her things to have a home here.’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘What do you mean you don’t know? This must be precious to her if she sent it, no?’
‘I guess.’
‘Should we open them?’
Strangely, he doesn’t argue.
‘Yes,’ he says.
A few minutes later, we’re on the floor of the living room. I slit the tape on the first box with a knife. For a moment, I feel like an intruder. As I do, I ask myself,why now?These boxes have been here for a year. He would dust them every now and then,and I never once asked him to open them. Is it because I feel a certain permanence in his life now? The day he told me he had renewed his lease shifted something in me. I always believed he had a better handle on the grief, that with his work-and-data-engineering-sized hammer, he was chipping away at it and didn’t need my help. But that evening, it felt like he needed me too. I look for reluctance on Raghav’s face but there isn’t any. Instead, he takes out a big, almost comical coffee mug from the box.
‘What?’ I ask, a smile breaking across my own face.
‘This mug,’ he says, holding it up. ‘I saw it in a store and told her it was childish... So, naturally, she bought it just to annoy me. Used it every single day. So many selfies I have of this.’
I watch him as he talks. For the first time, I see the man Megha loved, a person before the running away and the death. Not the annoying ghost who haunts our apartment, but a man with a history full of light and inside jokes. He pulls out more things—a faded Anuv Jain concert T-shirt, a framed photo of a stray dog—and tells me the story behind each one. He taps the photo of the dog. ‘She named him Chairman Meow,’ he says with a small shake of his head. ‘Just thought it was a great joke.’ At first, the recollections come with pauses. He loses himself in the story, starts looking into the distance, eyes glassy, but slowly he gets into a flow. It doesn’t even matter if I’m there or not. Every alternate second, the grief washes over and recedes from his face. For the first time, I feel he’s letting me in. For the first time, I feel like knowing him more. We go through her things. And from her things, emerges him. A boy in love. So strange.
But then, at the bottom of the second box, under a stack of books, he finds something I know he hasn’t seen before. His eyebrows scrunch in a frown as he holds them. A set of three matching notebooks with hard black covers. The mood in the room shifts. I watch as he picks one up and opens it.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
His whole body goes still. He flips a few pages, his eyes scanning the lines.
‘It’s her diaries,’ he says.
‘You didn’t know she wrote them?’
He looks up. His eyes are distant, suddenly. He gathers the three notebooks, holding them to his chest, and marches into his room, shutting the door behind him. I’m left alone in the sudden silence, surrounded by the ghosts of two lives. His pain triggers my own. It’s a chain reaction. It’s nonsensical, this sadness. It keeps finding ways to claw back into my life. Suddenly, I’m wondering if there were some words Aman had too that I don’t know of. No, none. No unknown diaries. No secret email IDs where he used to send stuff. Just silence. Raghav is so lucky. He has more to hear from Megha? What would I not give to have that? A diary. A page even.
I walk back to my room and pick up my phone. My thumb moves with a mind of its own, opening the photo gallery. To the screenshots folder. There aren’t many. We could not keep our chats. We had to delete them to be careful. But why would we keep the chats? We would be together for life. Who goes back and reads chats? Unless, of course, one of them dies. But there are some... only a few... and that’s my solace. I go through every one of the screenshots.
How banal and boring and everyday they are. But how lovely too, how amazing, how the absolute best thing in the world. Just telling each other how much we love each other multiple times a day. I go through all his chats: his work, his family, his pesky landlord... and then... I find it. It’s a picture he had sent me once and I had forgotten all about it. A picture of a hotel room with a private pool.
Aman:What would I not give to go here? Maybe for our honeymoon someday.
Me:Looks expensive.
