‘I have called the Urban Company guys,’ I tell her. ‘They will unpack stuff. We don’t have to move an inch.’

  ‘Cancel the guys,’ she says. ‘I need you for me tomorrow.’

  ‘Baby, we need a bed—’

  She interrupts me. ‘We will figure it out,’ her voice now a whisper.

  It’s intentional and it has the desired effect.

  I imagine her tucked inside her blanket on a soft hotel mattress. I instantly regret not checking into one too. I could be on a call with her, taking this ‘we will figure it out’ conversation to its conclusion. Then, we could both sleep clutching our phones, spent.

  ‘I will have to cut this conversation short here,’ I tell her. ‘This is the wrong place for a . . .’

  ‘For a . . .?’ she whispers impishly.

  ‘Just come here already.’

  ‘The weather gods are against us,’ she says. ‘Like everyone else is.’

  A few seconds of silence follow. Every time I read a book on grief and anger, they tell me not to fill these silences with words aimed at happiness. They tell me to sit with the loss and the grief. With time, they promise me, the sharp, jagged edges will blunt. But if they don’t, then? There are times I notice the lost look in her eyes, and she sees that I’m noticing it too—but it’s so often that we have stopped asking if we’re okay, instead we say it will be okay through nods and forced smiles. We tell each other that once it’s in the same physical space, we will be able to hold each other, and heal each other better. But what if she still feels that way? No, I can’t think like that.

  ‘It will be a good story to tell our kids,’ I say, falling once again into the trap of making it sound less worse than it is. ‘Of which we will have four.’

  She brightens up and says, ‘Or more, depending on how rich we get eventually.’

  ‘Very rich, of course,’ I say.

  ‘But if my breasts get too saggy, I will get—’

  ‘Can you stop putting the image of—’

  She interrupts. ‘Of my breasts. My hot breasts, Raghav.’

  ‘I’m cutting the phone now,’ I grumble. ‘Sleep. I will call you at four.’

  ‘Bye, baby,’ she says and cuts the call.

  I stare at my phone wallpaper for a bit—our picture at the Kamakhya temple. Our best picture and in some ways, also our worst. I remember holding her hand in this picture and telling myself, this is it, this is the girl I will spend the rest of my life with.

  But it was also the picture that started it all.

  The picture that was forwarded in all family groups on WhatsApp. The messages that flooded the groups float in front of my eyes. The ugly conjecture. The rot in everyone’s head lay bare. Cousins. Taayaji. Chachu. The Mamas. And the loudest voice of all, my mother’s. It was only a mumble delivered with a shake of her head, ‘The girls from the North-east are like this only.’

  I remember it all like it was yesterday.

  The screen times out.

  I turn back and there’s Aditi, already deep into her book.

  She glances up, waves and gestures for me to join her. I wait for my heart to settle before I trudge over to her.

  6

  Aditi

  ‘What are you reading?’ he asks while looking outside.

  I’m sure he’s thinking what I’m thinking. The rain’s completely stopped now, the floodwater of the road has receded. Couldn’t they have been here now?

  ‘Roman history. I mean, I’m failing to read anything to be honest,’ I tell him. ‘Usually, I can just lose myself in these books.’

  ‘History books?’

  ‘I wanted to be a historian once. Obsessed with dead people and their bad decisions. Despite being so aware of what a bad decision is, I have found myself in one.’

  His face scrunches into a frown. ‘We can’t think like that,’ he says. It seems like it’s directed to him as much as it’s directed to me. ‘This is going to be . . . the best decision of our lives.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, while being unsure.

  I can be unsure here but not in front of Aman. And I know he tries to hide his unsureness too. A few hours from now, we are going to be each other’s only family. Doubt will have no place in our lives.

  ‘So, your parents didn’t let you become a history professor? An archaeologist? That’s what you become after a degree in history?’ he asks, clearly to change the topic.

  ‘After doing a history course, you become a drain to your parents,’ I say. ‘The joke’s on me because to them, I still am.’

  ‘You have siblings?’

  ‘An elder sister, an elder brother,’ I answer him, my thoughts racing to the folded letter on my bed. The bed that my sister and I shared for twenty-five years before she got married and though I had been excited to have the room all to myself, I just found myself lonely. ‘You?’

  ‘I have a younger sister—’

  ‘NO.’

  The word comes out as a gasp.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  And then I see them. Outside. Through the glass. Just beyond the Costa Coffee counter. My entire stomach drops like it’s been unplugged from my body.

  Didi, my elder sister.

  Didi’s husband.

  And Bhaiya, my elder brother . . . even through the toughened glass, I can see the unbridled fury in his eyes. Of all the battles he could have picked in the world, he has picked this. His fists are clenched and he’s stomping around. That restless, angry energy I have seen directed at others—the customers, the shop, the vendors, the car wash guy, Gupta Ji who lost the battle for the parking space last month—is now directed at me.

  They are going to drag me home. Home? They are going to take away my phone, lock me up. Maa’s going to cry outside, Didi’s going to say didn’t we tell you this would happen?, Papa will refuse to address me directly and Bhaiya . . . I don’t know what he will do. What he’s going on about now, what he did when he first got to know of Aman, I could never have predicted.

  My fingers tremble.

  ‘Hey? Hey?’ says Raghav. ‘What’s happening?

  I watch them storming from one end to another. I blink and they are still there. Searching. They are scanning signs, flashing their tickets at the staff.

  ‘They’re here,’ I whisper. ‘They read it.’

  I want to get up and run, but my feet are bolted to the floor, my eyes stuck on them. Didi’s doing that thing she does when she’s nervous—chewing her bottom lip and pretending she isn’t. Her husband looks annoyed. How dare he come looking for me?

  ‘Who’s here? What did who read?’ he asks. ‘. . . the letter? Where are they?’

  And then, his eyes follow mine and he spots them.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ I mumble.

  He looks around too. ‘Umm . . . can’t you . . . what . . . wait . . . washroom? Go hide in the washroom? I will call you when they leave. Go to the disabled washroom . . . they might not check that.’

  ‘What if they—’

  He looks around. The walls seem to be collapsing. I feel like I’m losing balance, when he holds me.

  ‘That’s our only option,’ he says, his voice mirroring my panic.

  Tears spring to my eyes, our.

  ‘You need to go,’ he firmly says to me.

  I turn and run. I don’t look back. I push the door, lock myself into the stall, sit down on the closed toilet seat. I curl into myself. My hands are trembling. I try to breathe, but it’s like someone has stepped on my chest. What will they do that’s not been done before? How worse will they make my life? Why did we not hide our relationship better? My sister once said she’d jump off a terrace if I ever ‘embarrassed the family’. My jiju, brother-in-law? He’s the literal embodiment of the worst traits in a person. Five minutes pass by. Or an hour. I have no way of telling. I put my ear to the door, but I can’t hear anything.

  The door latched shut, I wait.

  And then, I hear his voice. It’s Raghav. I put my ear to the door again. I only hear snatches of conversation.

  ‘Yes, yes . . . the pivot is a little clunky . . . check the second sheet . . . I’m just going to the washroom . . . I will call you back . . .’

  And then, I see the handle twist. It’s locked.

  ‘. . . no, no . . . nothing . . . just the door is locked . . .’

  Shit. Now, I get it. I quickly unlatch the door. He walks in casually and closes the door shut.

  ‘They are outside,’ he whispers. ‘They checked the men’s, the women’s, and they were coming this way . . .’

  I nod. I know I can’t say a word, or I will disintegrate into tears. We stay there for a long time. We don’t talk. After a while, Raghav gets up to look outside. He opens the door ever so slightly, then a little more, and then steps out and closes the door again. A minute passes by, and then another. And then he pushes open the door.

  ‘They are gone,’ he says.

  ‘Thank—’

  The tears come before I can complete the word.

  7

  Aditi

  The coffee shop is the last to shut down.

  I don’t know why I expected everything to be open all night. The store workers need to get back to their families too. The fear has led to sadness and now I wonder what mine’s doing. I have not answered their calls. So, are they calling all my friends? Will they wait till the morning?

  It only strikes me now that a lot of my ‘friends’ will know that I have run away from home. It’s always been tough for them to pick a side. Should they validate my relationship with a thirty-year-old? Or should they side with my family? They thought it was a phase, that I would get over him. They saw me crying and bawling and they empathized, but once college ended with most of them scrambling for jobs that didn’t exist, my troubles were forgotten by everyone. Everyone except Tejal. They would have called her first. And she would have told them that we haven’t spoken in three months. She hated my family with a vengeance, always thought they were cruel and controlling even when I didn’t, but she also thought I shouldn’t be in love with Aman, this wasn’t the time, and he wasn’t the person.

  No matter what I said to her, nothing made a difference.

  When I finally told her what I was going to do, she came down on me heavily.

  ‘He’s going to drag you down,’ she told me.

  So, I was forced to remind her that her boyfriend was unemployed and lazy and lived off his parents’ money. That he didn’t need time to ‘figure’ things out, he was just a loser. And that he wasn’t an ‘attentive’ boyfriend, he just had nothing else to do.

  ‘You’re going too far,’ she had warned me before she told me that my relationship would crash and burn and I would regret marrying a man who was clearly shady on account of dating someone so young.

  Our friendship never recovered from that.

  Strange how friendships get weighed down by the complications of relationships. Strange when friendships are the only relationships where everything is supposed to be expected. Remember the movies? Friends help hide the body. But the lover goes to the police and recreates the murder for them. All in the name of sacrifice. The real sacrifice is implicating yourself in the murder, too, by hiding it.

  I want to call her. Aman keeps telling me I should and argues that Tejal doesn’t know him the way I do, and so I should forgive Tejal, but I can’t bring myself to make the call.

  I look around and mops are being dipped into dirty buckets, sleepy cashiers are counting money before depositing it into cash boxes. The airport has entered its post-midnight personality—half ghost town, half refugee camp.

  I can feel my eyelids getting heavy. Sleep defeats the best of men. I have learnt this from the movies. Criminals are kept awake for hours, and being awake is torture enough for them to confess to crimes they did or didn’t commit. What would I not do to get into my bed right now! But that would be such a tragic end to my love story.

  ‘Can we go out? Eat something warm?’ I ask, to stave off the feeling. The feeling of wanting to get back to my own house, my own bed.

  Raghav checks his phone.

  ‘There’s a place five minutes away, walking. Open till 1.’

  Raghav and I walk out into the wet night. The rain’s an occasional drizzle. The roadside eatery looks better than it did in the picture Raghav showed me. We order parathas and chai. We eat standing under the thin metal sheet and tarpaulin awning, occasional drops hitting our arms. We’re silent for a while, just chewing and listening to the world.

  ‘So, how long have you been dating?’ I ask him.

  He takes a bit of time to answer the question. ‘On and off? Forever. Started in school, but her brother found out. He was in the same school.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Beat me up,’ he says. ‘They changed her school.’

  I stop mid-bite. ‘Brothers,’ I say.

  ‘Yours?’ he asks.

  I nod, but I don’t go into the details. The three days he had me locked up in my room when he first found out about it. For three days, I heard my parents, Bhaiya, Didi and sometimes Jiju talk about it in the living room. Occasionally, one of them would come and ask me if I would stop talking to Aman. After stupidly defying them for a day, I said I would. But they didn’t believe me. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had just told them Aman was a fling and nothing else. That I would erase him from my memory and then continued everything in secret. I would have been more discreet, hid him better. They would have slapped me, thought of me as a slut, but Bhaiya would have eventually forgiven me. Or not. I don’t know any more. I used to tell Aman that the first person I tell about him would be Bhaiya, that he might understand. How wrong I was!

  ‘You kept in touch with Megha?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head. ‘We didn’t talk for a while. School ended, and she moved to Lucknow. Got into college, dated someone else.’

  Even while saying this, his face falls.

  ‘Did the brother find out about the other boy too?’

  Raghav shakes his head. ‘They broke up. I was keeping tabs, of course. So I reached out to her. It took time but . . . we got back.’

  ‘Did you date anyone after she changed schools?’

  He stares at the steam rising from his chai. ‘No, never felt like it.’

  ‘So you kept waiting for her?’

  He nods. ‘With her, it was . . . love at first sight. And the feeling never went away. I just wanted her.’

  ‘Then, you must have been crushed when she was dating that other person?’

  He nods. ‘But it didn’t make a difference. I knew it would end. It was a matter of time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I saw their pictures,’ he answers. ‘They didn’t seem in love.’

  ‘You could tell that from the pictures?’

  ‘Of course, I could,’ he says. ‘She never stopped being in love with me. At least that’s what I told myself. I had to. It was unbearable otherwise.’

  ‘You are a romantic,’ I remark.

  ‘So are you, are you not? You’re running away.’

  ‘I mean . . . maybe,’ I say.

  Such a strange word: romantic. To violently cut off your family for the sake of love is said to be romantic. To die for each other, that’s romantic. The word belies what it’s used for.

  ‘You kept texting him when he was on a flight,’ he says. ‘But you didn’t tell Aman your family showed up?’

  ‘It’ll just stress him out.’

  He looks up. ‘But it happened. It’s a big thing. When Aman lands, your brother will still be looking for you.’

  ‘Exactly, it’s a big thing,’ I say. ‘So why dump it on him? He was already worried. He doesn’t need to know every single minutiae of this mess.’

  ‘It’s not about dumping. It’s just . . . shouldn’t he know?’

  ‘Why? So he panics while he’s in another city? How will that help?’

  Raghav shakes his head. ‘Because he’s your guy? Isn’t that what this whole thing is? Being like . . . there for each other in moments like these?’

  His voice is steady. Not angry. Just . . . disappointed. And I’m bothered that he’s disappointed. Why does he care? Why do I care that he cares? When will I stop caring what others think of Aman? Of me? Of us?

  I feel my own voice rising. ‘But . . . if I can make life easier for him . . . why wouldn’t I? Things I can handle, I handle. I don’t want to burden him. He has enough going on.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘There are things you don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘I mean, I’m sure there is—’

  ‘Please, you don’t know the complete story, Raghav,’ I grumble, and the words come out sharper than I intend them to be.

  But it has the desired effect. He’s about to say something, maybe apologize, but the rain starts to pelt down faster.

  ‘Sure,’ he says finally, but the silence that follows is stiff.

  Like neither of us fully agrees with the other, but we don’t want to fight any more. And I don’t want to tell Raghav the entire story. I don’t want to tell anyone. I used to, and it evokes pity and I don’t want to start my life with pity.

  ‘We should go,’ I mutter.

  The walk back is quiet. The guard lets us in with a nod. Inside, people are sleeping on benches, using bags as pillows. Raghav sits on one end of a bench. I sit on the other.

  We don’t speak.

  8

  Raghav

  The stiff silence between us stretches out, thick and heavy inside the near-empty airport. It’s made worse by the deadness of the night. The only sounds are the low hum of the ventilation system, the rhythmic snoring of others, the muted chatter of news reports on the television playing at the lowest volume, the patter of the rain.

  Aditi is on one end of the bench, resting her head on her bag, her eyes closed, trying to sleep, but I know she’s antsy. I’m on the other side, trying to find ways to apologize. Why did I have to meddle? After a few minutes, I clear my throat, the sound unnaturally loud in the quietness of the night.