Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 12

Cabeer let the game run another two rounds and then stood up and announced that he was starving, which was not true.

“I am hungry too,” said Aman, promptly.

Priya looked at the pair of them and gave up on the evening’s dignity. “Fine. Come and eat, both of you.” She turned. “Manik, you as well. Eat something and then rest.”

“I’m not hungry.” Manik was already halfway to the corridor. “Headache. I’ll lie down for a bit. Carry on without me.”

“Manik—”

He was gone before she could finish, which she noticed, and which Cabeer noticed her noticing.

He shut the door of the spare room and hit the wall with the flat of his hand, once, hard enough to hurt.

MANIK’S POV

What is happening to me?

Is this jealousy? Is that what this is? Over. A girl I met on Friday, in an airport, who has been unbearable to me for two days.

Then explain it. Explain why her being in a room registers, and her leaving a room registers. Explain why I smile when she asks something so simple that everybody else laughs at her. Explain why I want to poke her every four minutes purely to see what she does.

Explain why I keep looking for the thing she is carrying. Because she is carrying something — I saw it on her face in that airport before she opened her mouth — and I have no business wanting to know what it is.

She is Priya’s sister. She has a boyfriend in Mangalore who calls her baby. She is nothing to do with me.

And Cabeer wants me to be pleasant to her. Cabeer wants me to sit her down and ask her about Navya, as though she and I are people who have conversations.

I decided this morning that I would stay away from her. I meant it at breakfast and I mean it now, and I will find another way to help Cabeer, because I am not going to spend the next month manufacturing reasons to be in rooms with that girl.

POV ENDS

“All right. What is going on?”

He had not heard the door.

“Why have you been strange since eight o’clock this evening?” Cabeer came in and shut it behind him. “Is it Neyonika? Has she called you?”

Manik turned round with his face arranged. “It isn’t Neyonika.”

“Ah,” said Cabeer, and something like satisfaction crossed his face. “Then I was right. It is Nandini.”

“Yes, well, she—” Manik stopped, three words in, and shut his eyes, and ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek in the way he did when he had lost a point. “Be quiet, Cabeer.”

Cabeer did not smile. He went further into the room and sat down on the arm of the chair, and when he spoke again all the teasing had gone out of him.

“Jokes aside. Tell me what is actually wrong.”

Manik was quiet for a long moment.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “I can’t be decent to her. I have tried it twice and both times something in me goes the other way and I say something I did not plan to say. And I do not know why.”

“You can be decent to her,” said Cabeer. “You are perfectly capable of it. You do not want to be.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It is not remotely the same thing, and you know it isn’t.” Cabeer looked at him steadily. “You are frightened. Not of her — of what happens to you if you stop. Because if you are decent to that girl for a week, something follows on from it, and you have decided in advance that you cannot survive, whatever that is.”

Manik said nothing at all.

“You are not a monster, Manik. You wear one. There is a difference, and everybody in that hall this evening knows it except you.” Cabeer stood up. “And I will tell you something else, and you can throw it back at me now and remember it in a year. One day somebody is going to take that thing off you. Not gently. They will get hold of it and pull it off and throw it somewhere you cannot reach, and there you will be, standing in the middle of a room like whatever you actually are.”

He stopped at the door.

“Your name means a jewel. Somebody chose it before any of this happened to you. I have always thought that was worth remembering.”

And he went out, and left the door open behind him.

Manik stood at the window for a long time.

Down in the road, a scooter went past and somebody’s television was audible through a wall, and above the buildings there were perhaps four stars visible through the light of the city.

A tear went down his face. He let it, because there was nobody to see, and then he wiped it off with the back of his hand as though it were an insult.

MANIK’S POV

You are right, Cabeer. That is the worst of it. You have been right about me since we were nineteen, and you have never once used it against me.

But it is not going to happen.

I know exactly what you are describing, because I have been that person. I was decent, once. I was so decent that it was funny. I trusted people the way you trust a chair — without checking, because why would you check — and it cost me everything I had inside four seconds in a hotel lobby.

Love does not soften you. That is the lie they sell. Love opens you, and once you are open you can be reached, and once you can be reached you belong to whoever gets there first.

I will not be reached again.

So no, Cabeer. Nobody is going to take this off me. I would rather be a man that people find difficult than a man who is standing in a lobby at twenty past one in the morning finding out what he is worth.

POV ENDS

He went into the bathroom and washed his face and stood with his hands on the basin for a while.

Outside in the hall, somebody laughed at something Aman had said, and Priya called down the corridor that the food was going cold, and a phone began to ring in the next room.