Monsoon Hearts

Chapter 9: The Heart’s True Season

Marcus left the next morning, accepting a ride to the station from one of Arjun’s friends rather than enduring another emotional goodbye. Meera watched his taxi disappear down the mountain road and felt not relief, exactly, but a strange lightness, as if she’d been carrying a weight she’d forgotten she was bearing.

“Any regrets?” Arjun asked, slipping his arms around her from behind.

“About Marcus? No. About the way I handled things? Plenty.” She leaned back against his chest. “I should have been brave enough to end it honestly, years ago.”

“Maybe you needed to come here first. Maybe you needed to find out who you were before you could figure out what you wanted.”

They spent the next weeks settling into a routine that felt both domestic and dreamlike. Meera worked on cataloguing Nani’s possessions, deciding what to keep, what to donate, what to ship back to London for the life she was slowly dismantling from a distance. Arjun painted and maintained the house, teaching her the practical skills of hill living—how to clear gutters before the rains, how to keep the generator running when the power went out, how to coax vegetables from the mountain soil.

In the evenings, they talked. About art and literature, about travel and dreams, about the peculiar intimacy of sharing space with someone whose rhythms complemented your own. Arjun told her about his childhood in Rajasthan, about parents who’d wanted him to be an engineer and the slow, painful process of choosing art over their expectations. Meera talked about the pressure of being the perfect daughter, the perfect wife, and how exhausting it was to always be performing a version of yourself for other people’s comfort.

“Do you think this is real?” she asked one night as they lay in bed listening to another storm approach. “Or are we just two people rebounding from our respective disappointments?”

“Does it matter?” he said. “Can’t something be both real and a rebound? Can’t healing and love exist in the same space?”

It was such a Arjun response—thoughtful, refusing to accept false binaries. Meera was learning that he approached everything this way, whether it was mixing colors on his palette or navigating the complex emotions of their situation.

But their bubble of contentment couldn’t last indefinitely. One morning, Meera received a call from her mother in Mumbai.

“I’ve been talking to Marcus,” her mother said without preamble. “He told me about the divorce.”

Meera’s stomach clenched. “Mama—”

“He also told me you’re staying in Nani’s cottage with some artist. Are you having some kind of breakdown, beta? Because if you are, we can get you help. But throwing away a perfectly good marriage for some mountain romance—”

“It wasn’t a perfectly good marriage,” Meera interrupted. “It was a perfectly adequate marriage that was slowly suffocating both of us.”

“Marriage isn’t about passion, Meera. It’s about partnership, about building something stable together.”

“Maybe for you and Papa. But I need more than stability. I need to feel alive.”

The conversation continued in circles, her mother’s traditional expectations colliding with Meera’s newfound understanding of what she wanted from life. Finally, her mother played her trump card.

“What about children? You’re thirty-two, beta. If you want a family, you can’t keep starting over every few years.”

The question hit harder than Meera expected. She and Marcus had talked about children in abstract terms, always “someday” but never now. With Arjun, the subject hadn’t even come up.

After hanging up, she found him in his studio, working on a new piece—a woman’s silhouette against a window, but this time the glass was clear, the view beyond bright with possibility.

“My mother wants to know what our five-year plan is,” she said, trying for lightness.

Arjun set down his brush, studying her face. “And what did you tell her?”

“That I’m figuring out what I want one day at a time.”

“And are you? Figuring it out?”

Meera looked around the studio, at the paintings that captured rain and emotion with equal skill, at the man who’d somehow become essential to her happiness in the space of a few weeks.

“I want to stay here,” she said. “I want to help you turn this place into something beautiful. I want to wake up every morning listening to the mountains wake up. I want to learn to paint, to grow things, to live more honestly than I ever have before.”

“And children?” he asked quietly.

“Do you want children?”

“I want whatever life we build together to feel complete,” he said carefully. “If that includes children, wonderful. If it doesn’t, I’m happy with just us.”

It was the perfect answer and also completely inadequate. Meera realized she was asking him to solve questions she hadn’t even fully formed yet.