Monsoon Hearts

Chapter 6: Storms and Revelations

The monsoon returned with vengeance that evening, as if nature itself were responding to the emotional storm building inside the cottage. Meera found Arjun on the veranda, painting by lamplight while rain hammered the roof above them.

“Your grandmother never married,” she said without preamble, the letters still clutched in her hands.

Arjun looked up from his canvas. “No, she didn’t.”

“But she was in love. For forty years, she was in love with someone she couldn’t have.”

“She told you about Rajesh?” There was no surprise in his voice.

“She told you?” Meera felt oddly betrayed. “She never said a word to me about any of this.”

“She said you weren’t ready to understand that kind of love yet. That you were still learning the difference between love and safety.”

The words hit like a physical blow. “She talked about my marriage?”

“She worried about you,” Arjun said gently. “Said you’d built a beautiful life that didn’t quite fit.”

Meera sank into the chair beside him, the letters falling to her lap. “I don’t understand any of this. Why keep his letters all these years? Why never tell me she’d loved someone? Why bring you here, why—” She gestured helplessly at the space between them. “What am I supposed to do with all of this?”

“Maybe the question isn’t what you’re supposed to do,” Arjun said, setting down his brush. “Maybe it’s what you want to do.”

“I don’t know what I want.” The admission came out as a whisper. “I’ve spent so long being what other people needed me to be. The dutiful daughter, the proper wife, the knowledgeable curator. I don’t know who I am when I’m not performing one of those roles.”

Lightning flashed across the mountains, illuminating their faces in stark black and white. In that moment, Meera saw something in Arjun’s eyes that made her pulse quicken—the same raw honesty she’d witnessed in his midnight rain dance.

“You want to know what I see when I look at you?” he said quietly. “I see someone who’s been holding her breath for years, waiting for permission to exhale.”

Before she could lose her nerve, Meera leaned across the space between their chairs and kissed him. It was clumsy, desperate, tasting of rain and possibility. For a moment, he didn’t respond, and she thought she’d made a terrible mistake. Then his hand found the back of her neck, and he was kissing her back with an intensity that made her dizzy.

When they broke apart, both breathing hard, the storm seemed to pause around them.

“Meera,” he said, her name like a prayer. “Are you sure about this?”

She thought of Marcus, probably reading in their London flat, not wondering where she was or when she might return. She thought of Nani, keeping forty years of love letters from a man she could never have. She thought of the woman in Arjun’s painting, longing personified, trapped behind glass.

“I’m not sure about anything,” she said honestly. “But I want to find out.”