The envelope sits in the centre of the table like it’s not ours.

  We’re at a Chinese fast food joint that seems permanently stuck in the early 2000s. Basically, the best kind, ones you can trust. The red plastic chairs wobble every time I shift. The table is laminated with a wood print, and it’s chipped at the corners. Soy sauce stains are everywhere. Steam clouds the kitchen glass. A bell rings every few minutes. We, like Pavlovian dogs, look at the waiter. Everyone’s order looks the same, so we aren’t sure whose order it is until it reaches the table.

  I feel on edge.

  The ceiling fan ticks with each rotation. Someone has to start speaking or I will go mad, I think. I can’t get Megha’s mother’s eyes out of my mind. Or her father’s. But mostly, her brother’s. I mean, in all honesty, fuck grief. Why isn’t there a timeline for this? When will it lessen? When will it feel manageable? Look at me, cribbing. I just met her parents and look at me. But fuck them too, right? They didn’t love her enough to let her live her life.

  Our food comes to the table.

  It looks coloured and disgusting, and great at the same time.

  I look up at Aditi. Her arms are folded so tightly that her shoulders have inched up closer to her ears. Her eyes flick to the envelope again and again.

  Tejal, across from her, has started stabbing her noodles impatiently. Sumrit, next to me, has started eating already. Good that he has, or he would have started boring us with how he needs to put carbs in, or his muscles will waste away.

  Unfortunately, he still speaks, ‘Look . . . I think you can give this Naman guy a part of it. They are shit, I’m sure, they are shit, bro, but I mean . . . you will at least get him off your back.’

  Tejal puts her fork down. ‘What are you saying, Sumrit? Please just eat. You don’t know the story.’

  Even Tejal doesn’t know the entire story, but coming to Aditi’s defence is now a reflex for her. Sumrit would also help me hide a body, but Tejal would convince Aditi that murder’s acceptable. The story Tejal’s talking about, I know snatches of it—things Aditi let slip over the last year in moments of anger, sadness or exhaustion—and pieced together my version. But for Tejal and Sumrit, all they know is that Aman’s family are ‘bad people’ and don’t deserve the money. They’ve taken her word for it until now.

  Sumrit starts to argue, ‘Bro. I’m worried there are going to be more fights. People kill over this amount of money. Why not get rid of him? 20 lakh? 30 lakh? Is that a stupid idea?’

  ‘It’s not about the money, man,’ I say quietly. ‘It’s not that simple.’

  But Aditi looks up, her eyes locking on to Sumrit’s. Her face hardens.

  ‘No,’ she says, her voice quiet but clear. ‘It’s fine. You want to know why that’s a stupid idea?’

  Her voice trails. Sumrit looks at us, confused, unsure of what to say next.

  Aditi continues, ‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about Naman, about his parents. Then you can tell me whether they should get a single rupee or not.’

  She takes a breath, and then, piece by painful piece, she tells them:

  ‘He was always the good boy. The chirag of the family. The elder son,’ she begins, her voice low and flat. ‘Completed his studies on a loan and got a good job. And the minute he did, he took out more loans.’

  ‘For them?’ asks Tejal.

  ‘Why would he not? It’s family, right? You do these things for family, don’t you?’ she says. ‘Moved his parents, his brother, out to a better flat. He was just being a good son. He didn’t mind it. He worked and worked and worked so that he could give them whatever they pointed at.’

  ‘They were using him?’ asks Tejal, wanting to quickly establish that the family was evil.

  Aditi doesn’t take the bait. ‘And he kept working. It was what one does. But then . . . he fell in love with someone.’

  ‘The first wife?’ asks Sumrit.

  ‘You don’t say that!’ Tejal slaps Sumrit.

  Aditi doesn’t seem to be distracted by it. She says, ‘They turned on him. Love marriage would mean no dowry, nothing. They knew the girl would have power in the relationship. So they started full-on emotional blackmail, reminding him of everything they did for him, they kept poisoning him . . . all because he dared to fall in love.’

  ‘Kutte saale,’ says Tejal.

  ‘But Aman didn’t budge. Like a stupid boy, he thought he could fix everything. Got married, got the girl home, but what do you think happened? The marriage was doomed from the beginning. The girl didn’t allow herself to be bullied,’ narrates Aditi, and her gaze shifts to the noodles on her plate. ‘From here the timeline gets unclear. Who decided first? Did the girl decide she wanted to leave? Or did the family just decide they wanted to make her leave, at any cost? It doesn’t matter. She left. It left him a shell of a man. He was shaken, sad, depressed. He went about his life like that for five long years, and his parents . . . they didn’t care. They were just blind to his depression. As long as the salary was coming in, right?’

  Her voice falters for a moment.

  ‘And that’s when we met. At the clinic. I felt sorry for him because I could see he was the nicest person for everyone else, but himself. That’s when I told him to take therapy. He started doing it, and he was actually feeling better,’ she says, her eyes little pools of tears.

  From here, I know the story better.

  ‘But his family found out,’ she says, a bitter edge in her tone. ‘About the therapy, about me. And all hell broke loose. They told him he was falling into the same trap as before. Losing his heart to a slut—whatever they could call me to make him think he was crazy. They called my home.’

  ‘Why are all these fucking people all the same? Call home, call home. Fucking horrible,’ Tejal rails.

  Aditi looks at me. ‘That’s when all those things happened . . . the pushing, the slapping . . . the threats . . .’

  Sumrit just stares, his earlier stance completely changing in real time.

  ‘But love found its way,’ she says quietly. ‘He hid it from them, and slowly, he realized that the trap . . . the trap was his family. That’s when he decided to leave them . . . but they got to know. That’s when the second round started . . . and we decided we would start over . . . without our families.’

  She’s hurting, I can see that. I want to reach out, hold her hand, but why? Why now? It would be weird. She can handle it. Of course, she can handle it.

  Sumrit lets out a long, slow breath. ‘Okay,’ he says softly. ‘I get it now, bro. He deserves nothing. My idea was stupid. I’m sorry, bro.’

  Tejal swears under her breath. ‘To be honest? They can go to hell.’

  I look at the envelope. ‘You should do whatever the fuck you want to do with it,’ I say. My voice sounds harsher than I intended. ‘Burn it. Frame it. Mail it back. Keep it. Doesn’t matter. Your grief. Your decision.’

  Tejal smirks. ‘Okay, full support mode. This is your family. You were his family. He chose you. That’s what matters.’

  ‘If you’re spending it on us,’ says Sumrit. ‘I need a new weightlifting belt, bro. Those things are expensive.’

  Tejal slaps Sumrit on the arm and Aditi lets out a small chuckle.

  Tejal continues, ‘You cash the cheque. And first things first, I think you should pay his rent.’

  I let out a real laugh. ‘True, I support that,’ I say.

  Aditi rolls her eyes. It’s tiny, but it feels like light cracking through a door.

  Tejal jabs her fork in the air. ‘And if you’re spending money now, maybe get your own place. Get out of Raghav’s hair.’ Then she turns to look at me. ‘Hey? It’s been a year, right? Isn’t your lease expiring—?’

  ‘No,’ I say, the words come out sharply. ‘I mean . . . he gave me a grace period.’

  ‘Great, then,’ says Tejal. ‘Both of you can start looking for new places. A fresh start, right?’ Then she clutches Aditi’s hand. ‘And I will help you decorate your new apartment! It will be so much fun!’

  A beat of silence. The world suddenly seems a bit dimmer. Out of my hair? New apartment?

  Aditi laughs.

  And I . . .

  I feel something in me pull tight.

  I don’t want her to leave. I don’t say any of it, of course. I don’t want to make it worse.

  The rest of the conversation shifts. I don’t register any of it. I can’t stop thinking of the house being empty. I eat my noodles but they taste like ash. Once we pay the bill, we step outside. The heat wraps around us like a fever. Or maybe I’m getting one. These days, it’s hard to tell.

  We drop Tejal and Sumrit off first.

  In the car, parked in front of our building with the engine off, the night hums around us. I’m still sitting in the car, still replaying Aditi’s laughter in my mind when I find her hand on mine.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Aditi says, her voice low. ‘I’m not moving out.’

  I look ahead. ‘Wasn’t worried. Who cares?’

  She turns to me. Her expression is soft. Tired. Honest.

  ‘Did you renew the lease already?’

  I look at her and nod. ‘I didn’t know where else to go . . . Is she decorating your—’

  She cuts me off. ‘I wouldn’t know where to go as well.’

  I don’t answer. We head upstairs.

  Home. Family. Whatever shape that takes now.

  22

  Aditi

  I hear the rhythmic hum of the robot vacuum bumping against the leg of the sofa.

  It’s the new one. I bought this one. Though it works fine, it doesn’t work fine. I’m pretending to fix my CV, but for the last hour, I’ve just been scrolling through my phone, my thumb moving in a lazy, repetitive arc. It’s a drug. I have numbed myself so much with my scrolling that I would have to seriously re-evaluate my life if I didn’t have my phone.

  Raghav is on the balcony, nursing a cup of coffee. He has to go to the office in a bit. I see this every day—the dragging of his feet, the weary way he puts his shirt on, the dread before getting into the lift. His office is really taking its toll on him. He’s been out there for a while, staring at the hazy Gurugram skyline. He has wished for a pandemic twice this week. And he too has updated his CV. He has only one—and only one—criterion: that the company should have the option to work from home. But the job market is shit, it has been for the last year as I found out first-hand.

  In these mornings, we orbit each other in this two-bedroom apartment like planets, held in place by the gravity of a shared catastrophe, but neither can come close and help the other. There’s nowhere else we would rather be and can be. Sad, but it also works.

  The robot vacuum gives up. I get up and put it back on charging.

  ‘It’s the other way,’ he says when he sees me struggle with it.

  ‘This thing won’t work unless we give it space to move around,’ I respond irritably. ‘We need to reorganize.’

  ‘You’re saying that?’

  ‘I’ve paid the rent,’ I say. ‘Which means I am an equal, contributing and currently annoyed member of this household.’

  ‘That’s a very suddenly annoyed member of the household,’ he says. ‘And I’m aware of your financial contribution. You have said this thrice in the past three days. Do you want to take down the landlord’s name from the door and put yours?’

  He snaps back, and I feel a small, grim satisfaction. My needling always brings him back to life.

  ‘Should we at least unbox these?’ I say, with my voice dropping low. The eight boxes of Megha that she sneaked out of her house and sent to this house ahead of time.

  ‘That’s not my stuff. It’s Megha’s,’ he says, the familiar darkness coming over his face.

  ‘Didn’t you spend the last few months telling me that the money was mine? That everything theirs was ours? So all this . . . right here . . . is supposed to be a part of your life,’ I tell him. ‘It’s what she would have wanted, right? For her things to have a home here.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know? This must be precious to her if she sent it, no?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Should we open them?’

  Strangely, he doesn’t argue.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  A few minutes later, we’re on the floor of the living room. I slit the tape on the first box with a knife. For a moment, I feel like an intruder. As I do, I ask myself, why now? These boxes have been here for a year. He would dust them every now and then, and I never once asked him to open them. Is it because I feel a certain permanence in his life now? The day he told me he had renewed his lease shifted something in me. I always believed he had a better handle on the grief, that with his work-and-data-engineering-sized hammer, he was chipping away at it and didn’t need my help. But that evening, it felt like he needed me too. I look for reluctance on Raghav’s face but there isn’t any. Instead, he takes out a big, almost comical coffee mug from the box.

  ‘What?’ I ask, a smile breaking across my own face.

  ‘This mug,’ he says, holding it up. ‘I saw it in a store and told her it was childish . . . So, naturally, she bought it just to annoy me. Used it every single day. So many selfies I have of this.’

  I watch him as he talks. For the first time, I see the man Megha loved, a person before the running away and the death. Not the annoying ghost who haunts our apartment, but a man with a history full of light and inside jokes. He pulls out more things—a faded Anuv Jain concert T-shirt, a framed photo of a stray dog—and tells me the story behind each one. He taps the photo of the dog. ‘She named him Chairman Meow,’ he says with a small shake of his head. ‘Just thought it was a great joke.’ At first, the recollections come with pauses. He loses himself in the story, starts looking into the distance, eyes glassy, but slowly he gets into a flow. It doesn’t even matter if I’m there or not. Every alternate second, the grief washes over and recedes from his face. For the first time, I feel he’s letting me in. For the first time, I feel like knowing him more. We go through her things. And from her things, emerges him. A boy in love. So strange.

  But then, at the bottom of the second box, under a stack of books, he finds something I know he hasn’t seen before. His eyebrows scrunch in a frown as he holds them. A set of three matching notebooks with hard black covers. The mood in the room shifts. I watch as he picks one up and opens it.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask.

  His whole body goes still. He flips a few pages, his eyes scanning the lines.

  ‘It’s her diaries,’ he says.

  ‘You didn’t know she wrote them?’

  He looks up. His eyes are distant, suddenly. He gathers the three notebooks, holding them to his chest, and marches into his room, shutting the door behind him. I’m left alone in the sudden silence, surrounded by the ghosts of two lives. His pain triggers my own. It’s a chain reaction. It’s nonsensical, this sadness. It keeps finding ways to claw back into my life. Suddenly, I’m wondering if there were some words Aman had too that I don’t know of. No, none. No unknown diaries. No secret email IDs where he used to send stuff. Just silence. Raghav is so lucky. He has more to hear from Megha? What would I not give to have that? A diary. A page even.

  I walk back to my room and pick up my phone. My thumb moves with a mind of its own, opening the photo gallery. To the screenshots folder. There aren’t many. We could not keep our chats. We had to delete them to be careful. But why would we keep the chats? We would be together for life. Who goes back and reads chats? Unless, of course, one of them dies. But there are some . . . only a few . . . and that’s my solace. I go through every one of the screenshots.

  How banal and boring and everyday they are. But how lovely too, how amazing, how the absolute best thing in the world. Just telling each other how much we love each other multiple times a day. I go through all his chats: his work, his family, his pesky landlord . . . and then . . . I find it. It’s a picture he had sent me once and I had forgotten all about it. A picture of a hotel room with a private pool.

  Aman: What would I not give to go here? Maybe for our honeymoon someday.

  Me: Looks expensive.

  I don’t even remember this. How much of us have I forgotten already? How much will I forget in a year’s time? I look at the picture . . . and reverse image search it.

  Ritz Carlton Bali.

  I was right. It’s expensive. But then, I feel something in my chest. A stupid, quiet, tender wish. When I open my laptop, my fingers move quickly. Flight aggregators. Destination: Denpasar. How much will it cost? Nothing. Nothing compared to what I have now.

  Just then, I hear a noise outside. When I walk out, I find Raghav in the kitchen. He must have come out of his room at some point. The apartment smells like chillies and tadka from the dal he’s making. He’s staring out the window, but I know he’s not seeing the view.

  ‘I think I’m going to book something,’ I say.

  He’s at the sink, but he turns, his movements slow. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Tickets. Bali. Both of us.’

  He stops. ‘What?’

  ‘Bali,’ I repeat. ‘Aman wanted to go. It never happened.’

  Now he’s looking at me, really looking, a strange expression on his face. ‘You will book . . . flights?’ he says. ‘For us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why Bali?’ His eyes bore into me.

  ‘Because he wanted to go.’

  He lets out that dry, humourless laugh. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because look at us,’ he says, his voice laced with bitterness. ‘How incredibly sad is it that they aren’t here, and we are going to Bali? Why? Why are we going? Because you have money suddenly?’

  I try to let it slip off me. He’s annoying, but not cruel. For now, I forgive him because he has just found her diaries and is a little off-colour.

  Before I can say anything, he asks, ‘What will they say?’

  ‘Who?’ I say and it strikes me, ‘What? Megha’s parents? That door is closed, Raghav. And please don’t make me sound like I’m chasing a sunset. I’m trying not to go mad. I don’t have fucking diaries to read. Maybe this will . . . bring me peace? Who knows what the fuck will give me peace? Can’t I try?’