Tejal holds my hand, ‘It’s about him. Don’t blame yourself. You can’t stay broken so he can feel whole.’
‘No,’ I say, trying to find that straw of truth I can hold on to and stay afloat on.
‘You leave. He needs to fix himself rather than look at you to fix him, and then get frustrated that there isn’t anything to fix.’
‘There isn’t anything to fix?’ I ask.
Tejal’s caught off guard. ‘I mean . . . of course, you’re not . . . you know . . . you have healed a bit, you know . . . no one’s forgetting Aman . . .’ Her voice trails off.
I look around the empty room again. It’s lonely. It also looks like the only way forward.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I lie. I’ve already decided.
35
Raghav
The email is open on her laptop screen, a glowing rectangle of betrayal in the dim light of the living room.
Had I seen it coming? No. But should I have? Absolutely.
Maybe she was right. I don’t know everything.
On the laptop is an open email of a draft rental contract.
I read it, obviously. And the move-in date is just three weeks away, neatly coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the day our world ended and our strange, shared life began. All good things come to an end, and I can’t even call this a good thing. I am certain she’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Not her specifically, but what brought her into my life.
I should be thankful.
But it makes me furious. My first instinct is to smash the laptop against the wall. To scream. To confront her with the evidence of her desertion. Say stuff like,I knew this would happen, I told you so,et cetera, et cetera.
But a strange, cold calm settles over me instead. It’s a familiar feeling. The one without hope. Me losing my shit would mean I had some hope, and I remember how stupid hope is. I just stand there, reading the words, learning where she will move. It’s a twenty-minute drive away. You don’t think twenty minutes is a lot, but it is. Slowly, traffic increases, construction starts, and the twenty-minute drive is suddenly forty and then one hour, and before you know it, you’re seeing them once a month and then less than that. And why would she even want to see me?She has made it plenty clear that I’m all but a burden to her. I have served my part of the relationship and I am no use to her any more.
It’s okay. She’s leaving me. Worse things have happened.
Which is not to say something doesn’t crack in me. Something does. Another fracture. Something comes undone. Something irreversible. That’s one of the biggest surprises life throws at you. You think you can’t be broken any more. But life finds out those little unbroken pieces of you and smashes them.
When she walks back in from the kitchen, a glass of water in her hand, she sees me standing there. She freezes, her eyes darting from my face to the laptop screen. I see the panic flash in her eyes, the guilt on her face. She knows that I know.
‘It’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘This is what life is. People move on. Expecting anything other than that from you would be unfair.’
I just turn and walk back to my room. Let her wonder what I think, what I don’t. Maybe she won’t think about it all. She will just call Kunal, talk about it for a minute, and then they will start congratulating themselves about what a great job they are doing of finding love for people.
Inside, Shilpi’s sitting with the brochures of all the schools she could move to. The shift’s not as easy as we thought it would be. When a video like that goes viral, if you’re in it, you think the entire world is talking about it, when only a few people are. I won’t lie that I enjoyed his embarrassment. Some people at the office asked how I was doing, seeing that I was a little animated in the video, and I brushed it away. They probably think I am ashamed, but it’s the opposite; I am quite pleased with the video. A perfect documentation of the asshole that he is, and a vindication of me leaving him and his wife.
But there were also times I thought about all the Hindi movies where with humiliation also came a heart attack. And then my mind used to race to possibilities of him being paralysed for life.What would I have to do then? Take care of a father I hate? Be a shoulder to a mother I don’t really like any more? What would that life look like? Or just pretend to be nice, take the rest of their money, bundle them up and run away? Because who cares, right? Will I visit him in the hospital, paralysed and shit, and whisper ‘fuck you’ in his ears?
All I know now is that I have Shilpi to take care of. She’s still naive, she’s still young. Although I have no illusions that she will grow up and the world will twist her as well. I don’t expect us to be like we are right now. She will be a stranger too. But for now, I need to get her to a school.
‘We will need to fake an NOC,’ I say. ‘And you will have to move to a lower-rated school.’
‘Hmm.’
‘It will be better for you. Be the richest kid in class than average,’ I tell her. ‘Will be better for you. Check your phone.’
She picks up her phone.
I continue, ‘I have sent you a list of schools you can get into with the right amount of donation.’
