Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 11

Manik rubbed his hands together and dropped into his place on the carpet with the air of a man who had arranged something. Across the circle, Nandini caught the look he sent her and rolled her eyes so thoroughly that Navya had to bite her lip.

Two bowls came out. Navya brought the cold drink; Manik gave a bottle from his bag and poured a measure into one of them.

Nandini picked the bottle from the table and turned it over, frowning at the label. “What is this? I have never seen it. Is it new? Dii, I want to try it too.”

Manik took the bottle from her hands without looking up. “Not for children.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me perfectly, Miss Peanut.”

Around the circle, four people put their palms flat against their foreheads in almost perfect unison.

“They are never going to change,” said Aman, to the ceiling.

Priya got there before it could develop. “Angel, those drinks are not good for you. Leave them. They are for the boys.” Nandini nodded, politely, and gave a glare across the carpet as if it had a great deal of information on it.

“Priyu.” Aman held the bowl out to her with an expression of complete innocence. “Are you sure you would not like the special one?”

“Do you want to drink it, or shall I pour it down the sink?”

“I was only asking.”

“Keep it within limits. We are not alone in this flat” whispered Priya.

He nodded like a baby. and she looked away so that nobody would see her smile.

They were sitting in a rough circle — Priya, then Aman, then Navya, Cabeer, Manik, and Nandini, which put her directly on his left and which nobody appeared to have planned.

Aman spun the empty bottle. It went round twice and slowed and stopped facing Priya.

She thought for a moment. “Never have I ever hurt anyone.”

There was a general pause of the kind that always follows the first one, and then Manik reached for the bowl.

“You thought to be drinking the whole thing,” Nandini said, barely above a breath.

“Be quiet, peanut,” he said, at the same volume, and drank.

Nobody else heard a word of it. Cabeer, who was sitting on Manik’s other side and had heard all of it, reached over and pinched him hard on the arm, and Manik yelped loudly enough to bring the entire room round.

“What happened?” Priya was already half up.

Manik looked at Cabeer with murder in his eyes “Nothing at all. Carry on.”

He spun the bottle himself. It stopped on Cabeer, who leaned in with a smile that Manik had known for eleven years and had learned to dread.

“Watch this,” Cabeer murmured.

“Don’t.”

“Never have I ever,” said Cabeer, to the room, “walked into somebody.”

He laughed at his own joke for some time. Everybody else made a serious effort. And in the middle of it, two people reached for two different bowls at the same moment, and looked up, and found each other, and stayed there a second longer than either of them intended.

Cabeer spun again. It stopped on Manik — and Manik smiled at him with enormous warmth, and Cabeer understood that it was now his turn to suffer.

“Never have I ever,” said Manik, “confessed my feelings to the person I love.”

Cabeer put his face in his hands.

Priya drank. Nandini drank. The two of them looked at each other and laughed, and Nandini turned to her right with the pure, undisguised delight of a woman handed an opportunity.

“Navya. You have never confessed your feelings, have you. I think you should.”

Navya’s color vanished. She had told her exactly one thing on the flight from Mangalore, in a whisper, with her face turned to the window — and had made her swear, and had refused point-blank to do anything about it on the grounds that she had no idea whether he felt anything at all. Nandini had promised, on the spot, to help.

“Be quiet, Nandu. There is nothing to confess.”

Manik leaned onto Cabeer’s shoulder. “Look at her face. Look at it. I told you.”

“Manik. I am asking you nicely.”

Nandini had already moved on. “But dii,” she said sweetly, “you are very romantic, aren’t you.”

Priya went pink — and recovered, because she was Priya, and because her sister had made a tactical error. “It is entirely the other way round, angel. Shall I telephone Arjun?”

Nandini’s whole face lit up, and she ducked her head, and for one unguarded second she looked exactly like anyone else of twenty-three ought to look.

Cabeer glanced across the circle. So did Manik. Their eyes met for half a second.

“Who is Arjun?” said Cabeer, lightly.

“Nandini’s boyfriend,” said Priya. “He is in Mangalore.”

Manik looked at the carpet, then at the window, then at nothing at all. He got up, said something for about a minute, and walked out. The bathroom door shut harder than it needed to.

He put both hands on the basin and turned the tap on.

MANIK’S POV

What is wrong with me?

She has a boyfriend. Of course, she has a boyfriend. She is twenty-three and she is — that.

So why is there something sitting on my chest?

Two days. I have known her for two days, and she has been bad news from the first minute of it, and everything that touches her gets into me somewhere I cannot reach.

Not again. Not ever again. I decided that three years ago, and I have kept at it since.

You are a monster. That is the arrangement. Do not forget it in somebody’s hallway on a Sunday.

POV ENDS

He looked at himself in the mirror for a while without any expression at all, and then he went back in.

" Manik, are you okay? What happened suddenly? " asked Priya.

“Yes, I am fine,” he said pleasantly, sitting down. “Continue.” And he spun the bottle, and it stopped on Nandini.

Everybody in that circle believed him. Cabeer, who had been watching him since the moment he stood up, did not, and decided to say nothing until the game was over.

Nandini frowned in concentration. “Never have I ever cheated in an examination.”

Five people reached for their bowls.

She looked around at all of them, appalled. “Have all of you cheated?”

Priya nodded, entirely unrepentant. Aman shrugged. Navya was laughing too much to answer.

And for a moment Manik forgot himself and smiled at her — and then remembered, in the middle of the smile, what he had heard four minutes earlier, and put it away, and his face closed like a door in a draught.

Cabeer saw that too.

He picked up the bottle to spin it and glanced across the circle instead, at his oldest friend, who was staring at the carpet with his jaw set, and thought: something had gone wrong in the last ten minutes, and he had no idea it was showing.

“Right,” Cabeer said, out loud, to nobody in particular. “Whose turn is it? Nandini, you are not permitted to ask about examinations again, we have all been humiliated once.”

Everybody laughed, and the room came back, and the game went on.

Manik did not look up from the carpet for some time.