Healing Hearts

CHAPTER ~ 17 — THE FIRST DAY

“Why are you carrying all of it alone?” said Aman. “Priyu. We are all here.”

Priya turned her cup round on the table without drinking anything. “For how long, though? You have a business. Cabeer has a business. I am not going to make my responsibilities into everybody else’s.”

“Are your responsibilities not ours?” He put his hand flat beside hers. “Navya and Nandini are my sisters too. Sisters are not a burden — that is not a thing that exists.”

“Aman—”

“Let me finish, because I have thought about this for two weeks and I would like to get it out in one piece.” He counted it off. “Cabeer and I will sit in with you for as long as it takes. Not doing it for you — beside you, until you know the shape of it. And you will know it faster than you think, because you already know most of it, and you do not believe you do.”

“And the girls?”

“Both enrolled. Distance MBA — the material comes to them, they go in only for examinations. Two years, and then you have two more people in that building who share your surname and your father’s temper.” He shrugged. “It seemed sensible.”

Priya stared at him. “You have answered every single question I have.”

Cabeer put down his spoon and applauded slowly. “Aman rocked. Priya shocked.”

“You,” said Priya, pointing, “are eating my idlis.”

But she turned back to Aman, and her voice changed. “Thank you. I don’t know what I would have done.”

“That’s settled, then,” said Cabeer. “What about those two?”

“Let them sleep.”

“It’s nearly eight.”

“Cabeer.” Priya said quietly. “I have not seen either of them sleep like that. Not once. They have both had more than enough of whatever it is they have had. Let them have this.”

Nobody argued with that.

“Navya is staying back,” Priya went on, “so she is here if anything happens—”

“And if anything happens, she calls me,” said Aman. “I have made a group for all six of us. If somebody cannot get through to one of us, they can put it in there and the rest will see it.”

“That is a good idea.”

“I have those occasionally.”

Priya stood up. “I am going to get ready. I refuse to be late on my own first day.”

Cabeer clapped again. “There she is. A Hitler boss, in the making, before nine in the morning.”

Half an hour later, she came out in her formal with her hair pinned up, and stopped in the hall in front of the photographs.

They had been taken at somebody’s wedding four years earlier. Her father had his hand on Ishita’s shoulder and was laughing at something outside the frame, and Ishita was looking at him rather than the camera.

Priya’s eyes filled.

PRIYA’S POV

Papa. Ishimaa.

I am going to walk into your building this morning and sit in your chair, and I would give anything at all for one of you to be in the room.

You used to say it to guests. Every time, without fail — one day this one will run it better than I did — and I used to want the floor to open. I would give a great deal to hear you say it once more, badly, in front of people.

I did not think it would come like this. I thought there would be years first. I thought I would learn it from you slowly and complain about it constantly.

Ishimaa, I made you a promise the day I left for college. That I would make you both proud, that I would not waste one day of it, and that I would never break your trust.

I have not forgotten any part of it.

I am frightened. That is all. There are one hundred and forty people in that building who worked for Appa and every one of them will look up when I walk in, and some of them will think she is thirty years old and she is not him.

They will be right. I am not.

Give me your blessings. Sit at the back and say nothing. Only be in the room.

POV ENDS

She wiped her face with the side of her thumb and turned round, and Aman was standing in the doorway, and had been there some time.

“All set, boss lady?”

“Hopefully.”

He crossed the hall and put his hands on either side of her face. “I am there,” he said, and kissed her forehead.

She was at the door when she stopped. “One minute. I have not checked on Nandu.”

“Priya, we are already—”

But she had gone.

She stood over her sister for a moment. Nandini was flat out with one arm above her head, entirely gone. Priya smoothed the hair off her forehead, kissed her there, and went to the other room and put her head round the door, and found Manik asleep in his front with a pillow over his head.

She looked at the two of them, one room apart, and did not let herself finish the thought.

Then she went to work.

Manik woke at ten and sat up so fast the room tilted.

Priya’s first day. Nine o’clock. She would have left an hour ago.

He was halfway down the corridor before it occurred to him that he had no idea which room he was looking into, and by then he was already in the doorway of the wrong one.

Nandini was asleep with the sun coming across the bed, and she was frowning — because the light was on her face, because there was a strand of hair caught across her cheek, because whatever she was dreaming was not restful.

He should have gone.

He took two steps sideways instead, until his shoulder came between the window and her face, and stood there.

The frown went.

Manik Malhotra stood in a stranger’s bedroom at ten o’clock in the morning acting as a curtain, and did not move for some time.

Then he leaned down, put the hair behind her ear, and walked out very fast.

In his own room he shut the door, went to the window, closed his eyes, and opened them with something dangerous in them.

MANIK’S POV

Explain that.

Go on. Explain what just happened, out loud, in a sentence a grown man could say to another grown man.

You stood between a window and a sleeping girl so that she would not frown.

She has a boyfriend. She thinks you are a monster and she is not wrong. You told her on a roof last night that love does not exist, and you meant every word, and you have believed it for three years.

And this morning you stood in a doorway like a piece of furniture because her face went tight in the sun.

Whatever this is, put it down. Now, while it is still small enough to put down.

POV ENDS

He went to get ready, and told himself he was going to Priya’s office because it was Priya’s first day.