When I turn, I see Rabbani standing there, dragging a small carry-on suitcase and nothing else. That’s what youth allows you. A life without burden. You can just pack up and go anywhere.
‘She understands,’ I scold Rabbani.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ she brushes me away. ‘Give her to me. Come to bua, come to the best bua in the world!’
Gauravi shakes her head and clings to me. She mumbles to Rabbani, ‘Baba is the best, Baba is amazing.’
Rabbani rolls her eyes. ‘So, he’s doing that to you too.’
‘Three years is a good age to start the brainwashing,’ I tell Rabbani. ‘She has to know I’m the best she could have gotten. Which is also the truth.’
Rabbani nods and smiles. ‘I’m walking proof that it works. Dada is, indeed, the best.’
I still can’t get over how cute, how adorable my sister is. To think of her going around the world, unprotected, without me looking after her, fills my heart with dread. So what if she’s twenty-one? The sound of her age fills my mouth with ash. Iwould rather her be two. Rabbani takes Gauravi away from me anyway and nuzzles her nose into her stomach. Gauravi breaks into peals of laughter.
‘In a couple of years just this is not going to work,’ I warn Rabbani. ‘You got to spend time with her, make a relationship. This tickling business is too easy.’
Rabbani shrugs. ‘In a couple of years, she will be old enough to realize I’m the bua who brings the fanciest toys for her.’
‘Don’t show off,’ I kid her. ‘You haven’t even got your first salary yet.’
‘Hater,’ she says and then turns to Gauravi. ‘Your Baba is a hater. He’s just jealous that his twenty-one-year-old sister is going to earn twice as much as him.’
‘More than twice,’ I correct her, the new analyst at Deutsche Bank, recruited out of IIT Bombay this year, at a salary that made me question the legality of what she’s going to do there.
‘I was being respectful,’ quips Rabbani. ‘You’re going to be quite poor, Dada.’
‘If only we hadn’t spent so much on you,’ I respond. ‘Let go of some heavy compounding.’
She chuckles and then suddenly falls silent. ‘Dada?’
‘Yes?’
‘You going to be okay?’
‘I’m here, am I not?’
We check into the two-bedroom suite we have booked for ourselves.
Rabbani keeps Gauravi bouncing on her waist all through the lobby to our room. Gradually, everything seems to get a little heavier around me and slows me down. The air’s viscous with sadness. I drag my feet. But I know I have to do this. There’s no running away now.
As I start to unpack, the past starts to wrap its arms around me, threatening to suck me into its dark depths. My breaths become shallow and laboured. The hotel’s carpet might have changed, the colour of the walls is different, but it feels like the air’s still the same: soaked with memories, with the faint whispers of her voice and the joy I once had in my life. At once I realize that I might have underestimated its power and overestimated my strength to bear it. It feels like my heart’s in a vice and it’s getting crushed.
‘I will give you some time alone. We will see you at breakfast,’ Rabbani tells me.
‘Leave Gauravi, I will bring her. She—’
‘Get lost,’ says Rabbani. ‘She’s my child too.’
And before I can answer, Gauravi is running after Rabbani in the corridors, giggling and laughing.
And then, there’s silence.
Pin-drop silence.
There are only two ways of dealing with grief. A short-term solution: surround yourself with noise and busyness. A long-term solution: surround yourself with peace. I have always found the earlier option easier. After Mumma’s death, Gaurav’s... and...
I sit by the window and stare out. This room is where Aanchal must have stayed with Gaurav, with her parents all those years ago. When she was all of seventeen and won this in a lucky draw, when she met me, that wayward spoilt boy, whom she called her lucky charm, the one who checked her board results. Would she still call me lucky? Back in the day, this would have been two different rooms connected with a common door, but it’s a suite now. This view of the sea, the pool, is what they would have seen twenty years ago. It’s strange how some things change so drastically, while others remain stubbornly static. She told me multiple times the story of her awe at how the rich lived.
