Monsoon Hearts

Chapter 4: The Artist Truth

Morning brought clarity to more than just the weather. The rain had softened to a gentle drizzle, and the mountains emerged from their silver veils like sleeping giants awakening. Meera found Arjun in the kitchen, making breakfast with the focused intensity she was beginning to recognize as his default state.

“You’re up early,” he said without turning around. “Though I suppose London time has you confused.”

“I saw you last night,” she said, then immediately regretted her directness. “In the rain, I mean. Through the window.”

He paused in his stirring of what smelled like kheer. “Ah. That must have looked strange.”

“It looked…” she searched for the word, “…honest.”

This made him turn, wooden spoon still in hand. “Honest?”

“Like you weren’t performing for anyone. Just being.” She accepted the bowl he offered her, noting how their fingers brushed in the transfer. “I don’t think I remember the last time I did anything that honest.”

“What would that look like for you?”

The question hung between them as they ate in comfortable silence. What would honesty look like? Admitting that she’d married Marcus not for love but for the security of his world? Confessing that she’d spent five years in galleries and museums feeling like a fraud, waiting for someone to discover she was just a girl from the hills who had learned to speak their language?

Or would honesty be staying here in this cottage where the walls seemed to breathe with memory and possibility?

“Can I see your work?” she asked instead.

Arjun’s studio occupied what had once been the cottage’s largest bedroom. Canvas stretched on makeshift easels, paint tubes scattered across every surface, brushes standing at attention in glass jars filled with turpentine and water. But it was the paintings themselves that made Meera’s breath catch.

They were all of rain. Not just landscapes caught in storms, but portraits of people transformed by monsoons. A woman dancing with her sari clinging to her skin, joy radiating from every brushstroke. Children playing in puddles, their laughter almost audible in the way he’d captured the splash of water. An elderly man sitting on a veranda much like Nani’s, tears mixing with raindrops on his cheeks.

“They’re extraordinary,” Meera whispered, moving from painting to painting. “The emotion you’ve captured—it’s like you can see what the rain means to people.”

“Rain changes everything,” Arjun said quietly. “It washes away pretense. Shows us who we really are underneath all our careful constructions.”

She stopped in front of a half-finished canvas—a woman with familiar features standing at a window, rain streaming down the glass. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, not the carefully styled chignon Meera maintained in London. Her expression was… longing. Raw and unguarded.

“Is this…?”

“Your grandmother described you so many times, I felt like I knew you before you arrived.” His voice was carefully neutral. “She said you had sad eyes that hadn’t figured out what they were sad about yet.”

Meera touched her own face unconsciously. “She always saw too much.”

“Artists tend to,” Arjun said, and there was something almost apologetic in his tone. “We can’t help but look beneath the surface.”