Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 4

MUMBAI — TERMINAL 2

The impact knocked the phone clean out of his hand.

Nandini registered the shoulder, then the loss of the floor, and shut her eyes hard because she was certain she was going down onto polished marble in front of the entire terminal — and then an arm went round her and held, and she did not fall at all.

She opened her eyes.

He was looking straight down at her from about eight inches away, and the first thing she noticed, before anything else, was that his eyes were bloodshot. Not from crying, necessarily. From not sleeping, for a very long time, the way she had not slept.

She knew that look. She saw it in a mirror every morning.

Underneath it there was something else, something enormous and carefully held down, and she recognised that too, and could not have said why.

And she was, for about four seconds, entirely safe. That was the part she could not explain afterwards, and did not try to. Somebody had a hand flat between her shoulder blades and the floor was not going to be allowed to happen, and it had been six months since anything in the world had felt like that.

MANIK’S POV

Something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong. A woman walked into me in an airport. This happens roughly four hundred times a day in this country.

Then why has everything gone quiet.

She is not — she is looking at me. People do not look at me any more, they look at whether it is me. This one has not blinked once and she has no idea who I am and there is something in her face that I have seen somewhere before.

She is exhausted. She is so tired that her face has stopped bothering to hide it.

Let go of her.

Let go of her right now.

POV ENDS

He set her upright and took his hands off her as though she had turned hot, stepped back, and looked at the floor for a moment.

Nandini’s own thoughts arrived all at once and appalled her. She had not thought about Arjun for four entire seconds. She had not thought about anything.

She was still working out what to be ashamed of when the man in front of her started shouting.

“Are you blind?”

Said Manik.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you not look where you are walking? Do they not teach that? If your eyes do not work, buy glasses — and look at this, look at it, my phone is in three pieces because of you.”

Said Manik.

Nandini Murthy had been spoken to gently by everybody in her life for six months. Carefully. In the voice people use around a person they think might break.

Something in her chest came loose.

“You are absolutely right.”

Said Nandini.

“I do need glasses. And you need a brain, which is going to be considerably harder to arrange. You were staring at that phone from thirty feet away. I watched you do it. And now it is in three pieces, and honestly, this is the best thing that has happened to you all week — now you might have to look at something real.”

There was a pause of about a second.

“Miss Peanut.”

Said Manik.

“…What?”

“You heard. And I require a brain, do I? Marvellous. Excellent point, very well made. Do you have the faintest idea what that phone cost?”

Said Manik.

“Do not call me a peanut.”

Said Nandini.

“Then walk on the correct side of a corridor.”

“I am not a peanut. I am of completely normal height. You are the freak of nature here — you are practically scaffolding — Mr. Eiffel Tower—”

Said Nandini, and hit him on the chest with the flat of her hand.

He caught her wrist.

He did it without thinking and regretted it immediately, because the moment his hand closed she stopped struggling, and they were suddenly standing much too close in the middle of an international airport, and both of them went completely silent.

Neither of them stepped back.

“Stop it.”

Said Manik.

“Or?”

Said Nandini.

“Or I will find a way to stop you.”

Said Manik.

He heard it come out of his own mouth and could not entirely believe it, and Nandini went scarlet from the collarbone up and pulled her hand free.

“You are unwell. You need medical attention.”

Said Nandini.

“Probably.”

Said Manik.

He moved sideways into her path — not touching her, simply standing in the way, entirely too close.

“You have destroyed my phone and insulted my intelligence. What are you going to do about it?”

Said Manik.

“Move.”

Said Nandini.

“In a moment.”

Said Manik.

He looked at her for slightly longer than he had any business doing. Then something behind his face closed, and the whole temperature of him dropped, and he stepped back.

“Do not walk into me again, Miss Peanut. Ever. Goodbye.”

Said Manik.

Nandini pushed past him hard enough to knock his bag off his shoulder.

“Entirely mutual, Mr. Eiffel Tower. I hope I never see your face again as long as I live. And it will not be good for you either.”

Said Nandini.

She walked away muttering. He walked the other way muttering. Neither of them looked back, which both of them would have denied wanting to.

Two people who had not been properly awake in a very long time had just spent ninety seconds shouting at a complete stranger with total conviction, and had both, for the length of that argument, entirely forgotten to be sad.

Neither of them noticed that. It is the sort of thing you only see much later.

They thought that was the end of it.

It was not remotely the end of it, and the man walking away towards the taxi rank with a broken phone and a bag over one shoulder was Manik Malhotra.