Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 2

LONDON

4000 miles away, in a room where the curtains were also shut, another person was sitting in the dark.

It was a better room. That was the only real difference. A wide bed, a table lamp turned down as low as it would go, expensive things arranged by somebody paid to arrange them. Outside the window the sky was perfectly clear and the moon was up over the rooftops, and none of it got past the glass.

Whether there was more darkness in that room or inside the man lying in it would have been difficult to say.

Then he came awake all at once, sitting up with his heart going, the sheet soaked through, his hand out in front of him as though he were pushing something away.

3 years. It had come every night for 3 years, and he had still not learned to wake up quietly.

He got up and went into the bathroom and stood under the shower with his hands flat against the tiles until the water ran cold.

He came out an hour later, dried his hair badly, pulled on a T-shirt, and went out to the balcony and sat down in the one chair with his feet on the railing and looked at the sky.

He was 29 years old. Two albums, a tour that had sold out in 9 minutes, a face that turned up on the sides of buildings. Somewhere in this city at this moment there were people arguing about him on the internet with real feeling.

Manik Malhotra.

The papers had a word for him and they used it in every single piece: Difficult. Arrogant. Rude to a journalist in Delhi. Walked out of an interview in Bombay. Cold, unpleasant, impossible to work with.

None of it was untrue. That was the part nobody understood. He had built the thing himself, deliberately, over 3 years, brick by brick, and it worked exactly as designed — people took one look and decided they knew, and then they left him alone.

There is a limit to how much a person can be hurt before it stops registering. Manik had passed it a long way back. What remained was not numbness exactly. It was more like a house with all the doors locked from the inside by somebody who had thrown the keys away and then forgotten why.

But a face can lie for years and a heart cannot lie at all. It is too simple for that. Everything he had spent 3 years refusing to feel was still sitting in him, undisturbed, waiting, and the only thing that ever gave it away was his eyes — and he had learned to keep those moving.

3 people in the world had never once believed the act. Aman. Priya. And Cabeer.

His phone rang and he looked at the screen and something in his face loosened for the first time that night.

"Speak."

Said Manik.

"You've had the nightmare again."

Said Cabeer.

"I have not."

"Manik, you answer the phone in one of two voices, and this is the other one. Also it is 4 in the morning where you are and you sound like a man who has been standing in a shower."

Said Cabeer.

"Are you finished?"

"I have not started. Shall I tell you what I think? I think—"

"Fine. Yes. Same one."

Said Manik.

There was a small pause on the line, and when Cabeer spoke again the teasing had gone out of it.

"Are you all right?"

Said Cabeer.

"It is nothing new."

Said Manik.

"That is not what I asked."

"Cabeer."

"All right. All right."

Said Cabeer.

"Why did you call?"

Said Manik.

"To ask when you are coming to Mumbai. Priya is back tomorrow, and I have not seen your face in 11 months, and I am beginning to think you have been photoshopped onto those posters."

Said Cabeer.

Manik took his feet off the railing.

"Back from where? She has been gone 6 months."

Said Manik.

"Mangalore. Her parents — Manik, her mother and father passed away. 6 months ago. She has a younger sister there, and there is the family business, and she has been holding all of it together on her own since. She is bringing the sister to Mumbai with her now."

Said Cabeer.

"Whatt the f*ckkk??? She did not tell me."

Said Manik.

"You were in the middle of a tour."

"That is not a reason. Is she all right? How is she managing? What sister — she has never once mentioned a sister to me in 4 years—"

Said Manik.

"Slow down."

Said Cabeer.

"She is coping. She is tired and she is sad and she will be all right. And there are 2 sisters, in fact, and the reason she has never mentioned them to you is that you have never once asked her a personal question in 4 years, which is a separate conversation we will be having."

Said Cabeer.

Manik was quiet for a second.

"Fair."

Said Manik.

"Anyway. Extremely interested in the sister, I notice. Shall I have a word with the family? Get 2 weddings done at once and save on the hall?"

Said Cabeer.

"There it is. There is the reason I do not call you."

Said Manik.

"You called me last Thursday."

"Save your material for Navya. She is coming back too, isn't she? Go and inflict it on her."

Said Manik.

The line went completely silent.

"That is — there is nothing there. We are friends. She is a friend."

Said Cabeer.

"Certainly."

Said Manik.

"We are."

"Absolutely. You are friends, and I have 2 horns growing out of my head."

Said Manik.

"Enjoy yourself. There will come a day when I get to do this to you, and I am going to take my time over it."

Said Cabeer.

Manik laughed. It surprised him, hearing it.

"Seriously, though. If you like her, tell her."

Said Manik.

"It is not that simple."

Said Cabeer.

"It is exactly that simple. It is the simplest thing there is. People make it complicated afterwards."

"I do not know what she thinks. And she is entirely mad. And if I get it wrong, Priya will remove my head from my body, because that is her sister and you have seen what she is like about those girls."

Said Cabeer.

"So Cabeer Dhawan is frightened."

Said Manik.

"Cabeer Dhawan is being sensible."

"I am coming. And when I am there we will find out what Navya thinks, and you can leave Priya to me."

Said Manik.

"When?"

Said Cabeer.

"Soon."

He went downstairs still half smiling, and the smile lasted until the front door opened.

Neyonika Malhotra came in the way she came into every room, without hurrying, taking off her earrings as she walked, and Manik turned towards the side door and kept going.

"You think you can walk past me."

Said Neyonika.

He stopped. He turned around with the expression he kept specifically for her, which was pleasant and entirely empty.

"No. I am not stupid enough to think it. I simply do it."

Said Manik.

"Do not forget that I am your mother."

Said Neyonika.

"Congratulations on the discovery. 29 years is quick work."

Said Manik.

"Manik—"

"Ours has never been that kind of arrangement and you know it perfectly well. It is a transaction. It always has been. So tell me what you want, or let me leave, because I have things to do that are considerably more interesting than this."

Said Manik.

"I want you to join the business. Properly. This year. And I want you to stop with this singing."

Said Neyonika.

Manik laughed once, without any humour at all.

"You are genuinely funny sometimes. I do not think you know it."

Said Manik.

"Hear this clearly, because I am only saying it once more. The music is not a phase and it is not a hobby and it is not a tantrum. It is the only thing in my life that is mine. I will never leave it. And you will stop interfering."

Said Manik.

He said it quietly, which was worse, and for a moment his mother did not answer.

"And what do you imagine you are, Manik? You are a failure. Have you forgotten 3 years ago? Do you think that if you shout at me the truth will rearrange itself? It will not, my son."

Said Neyonika.

And she went up the stairs.

He stood in the hall for a long time after she had gone.

Three years ago.

That was all it took. 4 words and he was back there — and the terrible part was that it did not begin with the bad night. It began before. It began with a version of himself that had been happy, and stupid with it, and had walked around this world assuming that the people who said they loved him were telling the truth.

He remembered that boy quite clearly. He had liked him.

Then the rest arrived, the way it always did, and something in his face changed, and he went upstairs and shut the door.

He picked up the guitar and started playing without deciding to, hard and badly, with his eyes shut. He had not cried in 3 years — not at the hospital, not afterwards, not once in front of a single human being — and he cried now, alone, with a locked door and his hands still moving on the strings, because there are things that will not come out as words and have to come out some other way.

He was still not sure, afterwards, at exactly what point he stood up and broke it.

He drank half a bottle of something. standing at the cupboard, and threw the bottle, and sat down on the floor against the bed and stayed there.

3 hours later he was showered, dressed, and putting things into a bag.

He had booked a flight. He had not told his mother, or his manager, or the label, or the two people who had a concert in Manchester in 11 days that he had not yet cancelled.

He wanted to be with the people who had never once needed him to be anything.

So that was Manik Malhotra.

Not a man in pain, exactly. A man who had rearranged himself around it so completely that he no longer knew where he ended and it began — wearing the monster because the monster was cheaper than being reachable, and grieving privately, and stopping every time he heard a certain kind of silence on a phone line.

Never entirely believe a person's smile. Mornings are easy. Ask the nights.

He had decided, some years ago and with total conviction, that love was not a thing that was going to happen to him again.

There is one thing about that kind of decision, though.

It is never actually yours to make.