Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 7

MUMBAI

“Look what your temper has done.”

Said Nandini.

“We are locked in a room. That is entirely your doing. You are a monster and your temper causes trouble for you, and now it has started causing trouble for me. Are you satisfied, Mr. Eiffel Tower?”

She turned to walk away and took one step.

He caught her wrist and pulled, and she came round and into him and stopped hard against his chest, and neither of them had planned any part of that.

His hand was at her waist. She could feel him breathing.

She started to say something, and he shook his head and put a finger against her lips, and Nandini Murthy — who had been the calmest person in every room she had entered for twenty-three years — found that she had entirely run out of words.

He looked at her for a second too long.

Then something arrived behind his eyes and shut, and his hand tightened.

“Keep the lecture.”

Said Manik.

“And yes. I am a monster. Which is exactly why you should stay away from me.”

“Let go of me Manik. You are hurting me. ”

Said Nandini.

He let go, and stepped back, and put the width of the room between them.

“And it was because of me, was it. Wonderful. It was because of you. Every part of it. Now stay away.”

Said Manik.

“You are unwell.”

Said Nandini.

“The only thing Manik Malhotra knows how to do is be angry. That is it. That is the whole range. Shouting at people who have not done anything to him.”

He closed his eyes.

Then he crossed the room, took her by both arms and pulled her round to face him, and said, very quietly:

“Yes. You are right. Shouting is the only thing I can do. I have never been able to be gentle in my life.”

Said Manik.

And Nandini stopped.

Because the words were one thing and the eyes were another thing entirely, and the two of them did not match at all, and she was close enough to see it.

“No.”

Said Nandini.

“You are lying.”

Every scrap of colour went out of Manik Malhotra’s face.

He let go of her arms as though he had been burned. He did not look at her. He walked into the bathroom and shut the door hard enough to rattle the frame.

IN THE HALL

Priya came back down the corridor smiling and Aman stood straight up off the sofa.

“Why are you smiling? Where are they? What have you done with them?”

Said Aman.

.

“Sit down. All of you.”

Said Priya.

She told them.

There was a moment of complete silence.

“You locked them in a room.”

Said Cabeer.

“Yes.”

“You locked them in a room, and you did not tell me first. Priya. I could have put a camera in there. We could have watched it from here.”

Said Cabeer.

Everybody laughed, and Priya threw a cushion at him, and then she sat down and went quiet for a moment.

“I am serious, though. I have never once seen Nandini like that.”

Said Priya.

“Ten years. Ten years I have known that girl, and she is the calmest person in any room she is in. She does not raise her voice. She did not raise her voice at the funeral.”

Said Priya.

“And she has been in this city for four hours, and she has shouted at a man twice.”

Said Aman.

“And Manik does not lose control. Ever. He does not lose it with his own mother, and I have watched that woman work on him for years, and he sits there like

a stone.”

Said Priya.

“With her, he lost it in nine seconds.”

Said

They sat with that.

“They were genuinely about to go for each other.”

Said Aman.

“They were. And I do not know what it means, and I am not sure if I want to.”

Said Priya.

“I only hope they do not start again.”

Said Navya.

Nobody had an answer for that, so they let it be.

IN THE BATHROOM

MANIK’S POV

What is wrong with me?

I have splashed water on my face three times and my hands are still not steady.

Be accurate about this, because if you lie to yourself now you will be lying to yourself for a year. At the airport it was not her fault. She was looking at the signs. I was looking at a screen. I knew that at the time and I shouted at her anyway.

Why.

Because for four seconds she was in my arms and I felt better than I have felt in three years, and that is not a thing I am willing to have happened, and the fastest way to stop it happening was to make her hate me.

That is the whole mechanism. I have been doing it to everybody since I was twenty-six and it has never once failed.

And her eyes. She looked at me with a face that had been crying so much it had stopped going down, and I recognised it. That is the problem. I looked at a complete stranger and thought — there you are.

And now she has looked straight at me and said, You are lying in a bedroom, four hours after meeting me, and nobody has managed that in three years. Not Priya. Not Aman. Not Cabeer, and Cabeer has been trying since we were nineteen.

She is Priya’s sister. Which makes her—

No. Not that. She is not that, and I am not going to pretend she is.

Stay away from her. That is the entire plan. Stay away from her, and be unbearable to her whenever staying away is not available.

POV ENDS

IN THE ROOM

NANDINI’S POV

That man is impossible.

Cold one minute, shouting the next, and then that — whatever that was — where he said a cruel thing about himself and his eyes said the exact opposite, and I heard the second one instead of the first.

I have known him for four hours.

At the airport, before any of it, when I looked up — his eyes were bloodshot and there was something behind them, and I remember thinking that if I looked properly I would go under and not come back up.

And he caught me and I was not frightened. That is the part I cannot put anywhere. I have been frightened of everything . Stairs. The rain. Sleeping. And a total stranger put an arm round me in an airport and for four seconds I was not carrying anything.

Then he opened his mouth and ruined it.

Why does he do it? What did I ever do to him?

And why am I so completely certain — with no evidence, none at all — that the version of himself he is showing everybody is not the true one.

Ayyappa, this man is going to drive me mad.

Stay away from him. That is all. Stay away.

POV ENDS

He came out ten minutes later.

She was on the bed, sitting up against the headboard with her legs folded under her, and she was asleep.

Not properly. Badly, at an angle, in the way people fall asleep who have not been sleeping — the way somebody goes under when the body simply takes the decision away from them. Her head was tipped over on one shoulder. She was frowning.

Manik stood in the middle of the room and looked at her for rather a long time.

Twenty minutes ago she had called him a monster and meant it.

Ten minutes ago she had said two words that had sent him into a bathroom to hold on to a sink.

And now she was asleep sitting upright in a stranger’s bedroom in a city she had arrived in that morning, frowning in her sleep like somebody being argued with.

He should have sat down on the sofa. He was entirely aware that he should have sat down on the sofa.

He crossed the room instead.