‘We have the worst luck in the world, but I love you,’ he says as easily as he once did. Like he would say it and it wouldn’t turn my insides into mush. ‘There’s nothing that’s going to change that. If all that’s happened to me, to us, hasn’t changed it, what more can possibly happen?’
‘I don’t love you, Daksh.’
‘You always have,’ he says. ‘There are times we have disliked each other far more than we have loved each other, but we were always in love.’
‘You’re not going to Maa,’ I warn him. ‘She’s still...’
And then, I check myself. She’s still what? Hurt? Does she harbour intense resentment due to what occurred? The quickanswer to that is no. It doesn’t take a therapist to ascertain that. But what she feels about Daksh is still a throw of the dice. I don’t want to take a chance on that. I don’t want to undo years of healing over being selfish about wanting to be with him.
I want to be with him.
That’s all I really want.
How utterly predictable, trite, boring, unoriginal of me. After seeing the world, jumping professions and cities, navigating trauma, knowing both poverty and money, this is what I end up with.
‘Don’t go,’ I warn him. ‘I will tell her when I think it’s okay. You’re doing this without my consent.’
‘Don’t throw that word around just like that,’ he mocks. ‘I’m meeting her because I love her and I need to mend that relationship too.’
‘Daksh—’
‘You’re breaking up.’
‘I’m not,’ I protest.
‘I can’t hear you, Aanchal.’
‘YOU. CAN.’
Click.
8.
Daksh Dey
The highway to Dehradun stretches before us. The road is new and yet the asphalt is melting in places and the car bumps over them. I grip the steering wheel, my knuckles white.
‘Relax, Dada. The steering wheel isn’t your enemy,’ Rabbani says, her eyes glued to her phone screen, scrolling through her social media feed, her thumb moving with the speed and precision of a concert pianist.
‘I’m doing nothing.’
‘Pretty cool in faking your confidence in front of Aanchal though, Dada,’ she says.
‘I wasn’t faking it,’ I lie.
‘You were pretty nervous.’
‘I’m not nervous, just . . . pensive,’ I say.
‘Sounds like another word for nervous to me.’
Every time she has a quip ready for me, I feel a pang—of missing the old Rabbani, the little baby who used to spend hours nestled in my lap, who would invariably crawl towards my feet no matter where I was in the house, who used to bawl out every time I didn’t let her poke her eye out with a fork, with whom I coloured countless sheets of paper in bustling restaurants, tied her shoelaces, ironed her clothes, whom I taught to read and write, to whom I explained what photosynthesis was and how to spell it, and for whom I traced the Indian rivers on the map, taught how to use log tables, stood outside her exam centres and tried to ascertain if her results were making her nervous. Where does time go? Why are the days so long and the years so short? I was nineteen, and it’s been fourteen years, but the years don’t make sense to me. It doesn’t feel like I have lived eighteen years and yet, here she is, sitting next to me, an eighteen-year-old herself.
‘You’ve grown up, Rabbani,’ I mumble.
She rolls her eyes. ‘Dada, you’re so dramatic, so extra.’
‘For a few things in life, you should be extra. Your generation will grow up not feeling anything for anything. Everything is basic.’
