It takes me the better part of an hour to send Gaurav away for the wedding. The unslept, tired nurses are thankful the last person from the wedding party is out of their hair and not telling them how to do their job. The head nurse connects the Wi-Fi on my iPad and I click on the Zoom link shared by Gaurav for the wedding.
The nurse laughs and then hooks a new IV drip into my cannula. ‘If they are coming, tell them to come here with some sweets, okay?’
There’s finally some movement on the Zoom screen. The first few guests reach the mandap and start to appraise the setting, nodding, appreciating the niceness of it all. Then, Aditya’s friends stumble in drunk and high; I can hear them yelling for snacks. They take pictures, throwing peace signs in the air, leaving the elderly onlookers offended.
I miss being there.
A few minutes later, the pandit appears on the scene and starts to arrange all the sweets andsamagrineeded to get Vanita married to Aditya. Aditya’s a nice guy, I noticed that.There are some people whom you see and then think, yeah, these guys fit together like a glove. That’s the vibe I get from Vanita and Aditya.
Quite the opposite of what I felt during the brief time I dated Aanchal. Things between us were always meant to be torturous, tumultuous and extreme. From the second I saw her in Mumbai, four years after the Andamans, I knew she was all I wanted.
From the moment we exited the washroom of that hotel in Mumbai, having made love for the first time, I knew my heart, my soul, everything I had was no longer mine. But she crushed my heart, turned me down, said she wasn’t ready. On the way to the airport, I tried to make her understand the depth of my feelings for her as if it were something I could explain in the first place. I recalled each surge in the pulse of my heart, every moment my breath faltered, and every time just the thought of her face calmed me throughout the years. She told me later that my confession had scared her because I looked ‘too sincere’. How can you be insincere about love? Love is the realest thing there is.
When she stepped out of the taxi, she was ready to giveusa shot.
I missed her from the moment she disappeared for the security check at the airport. I wanted to Hulk-out, tear the airport apart, keep her from going away from me, breathe in the same air as hers. When her flight took off, I felt an unbearable physical pain shooting through my body. We had promised we would meet again, but it still broke my heart. Delhi didn’t seem like a two-hour flight away. Instead, it seemed like centuries and alternate realities separated us. In the forty-three days we were together, I was in a haze of inexplicable joy. When I talked to her, it felt as if I was talking not only to the love of my life but also to my therapist, my best friend, a little adorable puppy, anold, wise person, a giggling baby, all mashed up. When we made love, or as she liked to say it, when we fucked, the world seemed to disintegrate and splinter, like we were the singularity from which new worlds are created. Her naked body was my favourite thing in the world. She told me it was mine to take.
Many times during the day I would stop and examine this gooey feeling in my heart, and wonder what it was doing there, making me feel warm and fuzzy all day long. Then it would strike me: because I was with Aanchal. People argue honeymoon periods are heady, but I knew this was more. I wasn’t so much drawn to the excitement of the newness, but the possibility of spending the rest of our lives together. I must have lived a thousand futures together. I was the Doctor Strange of love stories, sifting through every possible future for us, bending time and will. We could take a billion paths together; some would absolutely crush us, but even then, they would be paths taken together.
And then, it all came crumbling down.
Aanchal likes to paint me as a pro-life traditionalist who would make women bear children against their choice. Maybe that’s how she sleeps better at night. But she couldn’t understand that no one, literally no guy she would ever meet, not even she, knew more intimately what it was like to raise a child than me. I had lived it, day in, day out, as a nineteen-year-old. All I had asked her for was nine months. Nine months to carry the child, to give it life, and then she could hand it over to me. Even if she birthed the child, gave the cute one wrapped up in cloth in my hands, and pranced away to the airport in her hospital gown to live a life on her own terms, I wouldn’t have minded in the slightest.
But she couldn’t sacrifice those nine months.
She likes to argue that she was not ready for a relationship, but I know that’s nonsense. I hadn’t conjured up the love I feltfor her in those forty-three days. She loved me. She stayed up nights, wrote me letters, sent me video confessions of her love. I could feel her love in the touch of her fingers, in the look in her eyes, in the way she lit up when we met, in the tremble of her voice, in the nimbleness of her gait. She might have raised walls around us a million miles high, but I know that caged within those walls was a heart that beat for me. I could hear it pump even beyond her fortified walls of career, ambition, future.
Was that all untrue then? Of course not.
She took a selfish decision.
Because that’s what she is—a girl with no sense of sacrifice and who holds on to her own happiness like Gollum screeching ‘My precious’! Did she not know what I thought about children? About my history with Rabbani and how caring for her had saved me and given me purpose?
After I dumped her, I thought I would lose my way. Jagath and Zeenath sure thought I would. So did Baba.
I was saved by the unlikeliest person: Aanchal’s annoying little brother.
Gaurav, and his parents, think I saved him from the weight of his decision to quit everything and take up gaming full-time. On the contrary, it was Gaurav who saved me. Watching him play video games is, and always has been, one of my greatest joys. I have watched him play with an aggressiveness, a concentration and dexterity unmatched by anyone. His spatial awareness, his reflexes, are once in an era. Aanchal once asked him why he had to share his earnings with me. After all, he was the one with the talent. He could make it big on his own. And she was right. Gaurav doesn’t need me. It was just dumb luck that I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I clawed in and I built a life on his back.
When I break out of my reverie, I see on the screen that a crowd has gathered in the mandap, and it’s aglow with thesacred fire burning brightly. And in the crowd, I spot her. Dressed in a sparkling pink lehenga that hangs alluringly just below her waist, her hair cascading in dramatic curls over her shoulders, while a glitteringtiklidangles from her forehead. Every time she moves to shower rose petals on Aditya and Vanita, my eyes flit to her bare midriff and I wonder what it would be like to touch her again. I shove that thought out of my mind. I don’t know if it’s the drugs in my system, but my entire body feels alive thinking of her. Every time I look at her, I feel reduced to my most basic of evolutionary biology. To find something beautiful, because not all beauty is conditioning—Aanchal is beautiful by any standard.
When the camera pans, I see Vanita and Aditya walking towards the mandap. The camera follows the two. They keep stealing loving glances at each other as they walk. They are showered with petals, Aditya’s friends are hooting in the background, and Aanchal’s piercing whistle penetrates through the loud cheers. Encouraged by the aunties near her, she slips in two fingers and whistles harder.
When they sit, the light of the ceremonial fire lights up their faces. Their happiness is so complete, so pure, so palpable, I can feel its warmth all the way in this cold hospital room. The pandit starts to chant. The Sanskrit verses are unintelligible, but I can feel their power seep into the air around me. Two souls getting intertwined forever, their lives now one. It’s the beginning of something magical. In a person’s life, can there be a decision more powerful, more courageous, than deciding to share your life with someone? If the world is a stage as people like to say, then you’re an actor, and the one you’re married to is your audience, your cheerleader, your director, your co-actor, the reason why you exist. We like to pretend careers and personal milestones are important, but we forget it’s all make-believe. Would the world be a better place with twenty-minute deliveriesof daal-khichdi? Or would it be better if all of us found someone who loves us and accepts us truly as their own?
Vanita and Aditya’s happiness feels bittersweet for me. When I look past them, I see Aanchal again. And for a moment, it looks like she’s looking straight at me. Of course, she’s not. The camera has just caught her. But she doesn’t look away. Her gaze lingers as if she can look through the lens, the mysterious Internet waves and the pixels of the tablet, and then straight at me.
In the forty-three days I had spent with her all those years ago, I had learnt to recognize each of her expressions, and this one was unmistakable.
This is one of love, longing or regret.
Or all three.
16.
Aanchal Madan
It’s beautiful. It’s just so beautiful.
