“Then stay! Please. Stay.”
She shook her head, looking down. He stalked somewhere and came back to grip her chin, raising her face to his — “Take the keys.” He pressed the keys of the flat into her hand. “I will go. You stay. I will…”
“Samar.”
He stopped.
“I am going.” She said. “I am anyway going to Jammu next week. I will be there until summer. It doesn’t make a difference…”
“And when you return?”
“We’ll see.”
“And if I want to come to Jammu too? Stay there in your bungalow?”
She swallowed, and looked away.
“So, because I can’t give you what you need you leave?”
“Do not make this a bad break!” She snapped. “Don’t spit your poison at me.”
He ground his mouth shut. “This is not a break.” He spat from between closed lips.
She remained silent.
“Amaal.” He threatened, grabbing her waist. “This is not a break. You are shifting to Jammu because your work is there for the next few months. That’s it.”
“Whatever you make of it, but remember — I am not coming back to an environment like this.”
He recoiled. He stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.
“Thank you.” She finally let her breath relax.
“But you are not going anywhere until you fly to Jammu. I will move your things to the bedroom…”
“No.”
“Everything is as you said, this will happen like I want.”
“No, Sa…”
He turned and stalked away. “Did I ask you?”
50. Samar knew the stages of acceptance…
Samar knew the stages of acceptance in theory. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But he had practically been stuck on anger ever since Amaal had left him. He told himself every time that she had notlefthim, that she had just gone for work. But that was the four-year-old him consoling his adult self so that he wouldn’t go off the rails.
Samar knew he was falling into old patterns. Some that he had already discovered about himself, some that Amaal had pointed out and rightly so. He had bitten her head off then, too. Because it had thrown him into the deep end, into that memory of his mother that refused to go. If only he could forget it. If only he could move on. If only he could stop blaming the entire world but himself for what had gone wrong in his life again and again and bloody again.
Mummy, then Atharva, then Amaal.
His therapist, the one who had known about so much of his trauma from SFF and treated him then too, had helped him piece this pattern tighter. And because he was a doctor too, he knew it was clinical. Early maternal loss. Insecure anxious attachment. Unresolved grief. Attachment trauma with repetition patterns. He also knew the exercises, had completed a few with his therapist every fortnight. Writing letters to his mother. Thinking about her for fifteen minutes and then stopping cold. Writing down his fears of his safe place leaving, then reading them back.
Those exercises had helped. Until the next day, when his anger would come hurling back. How had Amaal left like that?! She brought him back to life and then turned her back?
He reached the gate of her Jammu bungalow and honked twice. The day watchman that she had thankfully agreed to without much of a fight came to open the gate. Samar hadn’t met him in person, but he was Faris’s pick. He saluted him, apparently informed about his arrival. Samar nodded, turning the wheel and speeding through the long driveway. The March afternoon looked heavy but felt cool. Holi was around the corner and things were slowing down. Maybe that was why Atharva had hosted this little dinner at his house. Samar was not even curious to find out what or why. He wasn’t as… dependent on Atharva anymore. Because he had transferred it all to Amaal. He needed to stop.
Samar parked the car outside the main door and took a deep breath. He was meeting her after 3 months. He didn’t want to meet her after so long with a frown. Samar shook his head, pulling the cuffs of his shirt down, then realised what he was doing. He stared at his covered wrists. He took another deep breath, then unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled the sleeves up. The scars were glinting in the sun, lathered in sunscreen.
