He turned his head and looked into her eyes.
“My father killed her.”
Amaal did not react. She stared into his eyes just as unflinchingly as he stared into hers.
“When I was four years old. He hit her so hard one day that she did not get up again.”
She did not react.
“He made a story that she fell off the ladder while climbing up to the roof and died.”
Blue eyes were unyielding.
“They lifted her arthi in front of me and I tried to jump and latch onto it.”
She still did not react.
“They made me carry her matka and see her antim sanskar.”
Nothing changed on her face.
“That is all I remember about her. That last day.”
Amaal kept staring at him.
“There has been no safe place in the world ever since.” Samar turned his head back up to the ceiling. “Death would have been the safest.”
“Then why did you jump out of the car?”
Samar turned his head again, the blue bright and piercing into his own.
“Because you saidFuck you.”
45. Know that if you are alive, there is definitely more to the story…
Know that if you are alive, there is definitely more to the story, Samar thought to himself as Amaal drove him home. After 70 days in the hospital, multiple graft surgeries and procedures and infections, he was finally let go with the promise of more visits. On the day he had opened his eyes in that hospital with his body covered in a white coffin, Samar had not expected he would see the sky again. But here he was, with the stubborn woman by his side who had stuffed a pillow between his chest and the seatbelt that she had fought and pulled over him.
Samar glanced down at the stuffing.
“Don’t give it your rude looks, it can’t feel anything.”
“This is ridiculous. I never wear seatbelts.”
“You will, now.”
Samar did not have the energy or the heart to tell her his dark thought — that if he had worn a seatbelt on that day, the ejection would have been that much later.
“You are driving my Innova like you own it.” She was doing a phenomenal job of handling a car she had vowed to never touch.
“Who has been taking it for rounds all these months?” She sassed. “Your engine would have died on you otherwise.”
I would have died too,but anyway.
She turned into Nehru Nagar and his building came into view. The bright morning sun and the life on the road outside felt surreal. She parked and got out just as he undid his seat belt and opened the door. The smell of dust, of sun, of the air was… surprisingly good.
“Come on.” She held her hand out, like she was ready to clasp his. Samar glanced at it and then at her face, eye squinting in the sun, sunglasses pushed into her hair, red, round mouth pouting in the heat and popping a smidge of that dimple. Samar was above many things, but humbled enough through his last weeks of physiotherapy to accept that he couldn’t walk without support.
He clapped his hand upon hers.
