Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 13

In the hall, Aman and Navya had commandeered the dining table and were arguing about something that had started as football and become, by degrees, about Navya’s driving. Cabeer came out of the corridor and sat down between them and took a side immediately, and it was the wrong one, and Navya threw a napkin at him.

In the kitchen doorway Priya was laying out plates and Nandini was carrying them through, and halfway across the room her phone rang in her back pocket.

She looked at the screen and her whole face changed.

Priya saw it happen. She said nothing at all — only raised her eyebrows once, and made a small movement of her chin towards the corridor, which meant go on, take it, and Nandini went pink and went.

She turned into the spare room because it was the nearest door with nobody behind it, and she did not notice that the bathroom light was on.

“So that is it, then,” said Arjun. “People go to Mumbai and forget the rest of us entirely.”

“Stop it. As if I could.”

“I am only saying. Two days, no phone call.”

“There has been no time. There has genuinely been no time — there are people here, dii’s friends, and jiju, and we have been unpacking since Friday.”

“All right, all right.” She could hear him smiling. “How are you, though? Are you settled?”

“Almost.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “It is a Sunday. Everybody is here. They have been playing some game where you have to admit things, and I lost immediately, because apparently I am the only person alive who has never cheated in an examination.”

Arjun laughed at that. “That is the most Nandini sentence I have ever heard.”

“Are you eating properly?” she said. “You are not. I can hear it.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Nandini.”

“I am. Priya dii stands over me.” She wound the edge of the bedsheet round her finger. “When are you coming? Properly, I mean, not soon. Give me a date.”

“Soon.”

“Arjun.”

“Soon, baby. I promise.”

She let that go, because she always did. “I miss you. I want you here.”

“Do not miss me too much.”

“I love you,” she said. “You know that, don’t you.”

“More than you,” he said. “And I do.”

Priya’s voice came down the corridor calling everybody for dinner, and Nandini said goodbye twice the way people do, and hung up, and sat for a second with the phone in both hands and a smile still on her face.

Then a door clicked open behind her.

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Manik came out of the bathroom, saw her, and turned straight for the door without a word.

Which is precisely why she got the wrong end of it.

“You were listening.”

He stopped.

“You were standing in there listening to me talking to my boyfriend.” She was on her feet now. “Do you have no manners at all?”

Manik turned round, and for once the expression on his face was entirely genuine, and it was disbelief. “Are you serious? I was in the bathroom. I have been in the bathroom for ten minutes. You walked into a room I was already in and started making a phone call in it.”

“You could have said something—”

“I am the least interested person in this building in your conversation with your boyfriend.”

“Do not,” said Nandini, and her finger came up, “say one word about Arjun.”

He came closer. That was a mistake, and both of them knew it was a mistake, and neither of them stopped it happening. He took hold of the hand that was pointing at him and moved it aside and did not let go of it.

“Or what?” he said, quietly.

She had an answer. She had it fully assembled, and she opened her mouth, and it did not arrive.

“Or—”

He was near enough that she could feel him breathing. He reached up and moved a strand of wet hair off her cheek and put it behind her ear, and she closed her eyes because her body did it without asking her, and for a moment neither of them moved at all.

Then he let go of her hand and stepped back.

“Don’t trust too much,” he said. “You get hurt that way.”

And he was out of the room before she could put together a single word.

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Nandini sat down on the bed rather harder than she meant to.

NANDINI’S POV

Ayyappa. What is happening to me.

Two days. Twice now I have been standing in a room with that man and lost the ability to finish a sentence, and both times I was the one who was angry when it started.

And I was on the phone. I was on the phone with Arjun four minutes ago and I said I love you and I meant it, and then I stood in this room and let a stranger put my hair behind my ear and I closed my eyes.

If Arjun had seen that. If anybody had seen that.

What is wrong with me.

And what did he mean. Don’t trust too much. Trust whom? Arjun? Why would he say that about somebody he has never met, somebody he heard for ninety seconds through a door?

He does not know Arjun. He does not know anything about him. It was a cruel thing to say and he said it to be cruel, because that is the entire content of that man.

So why has it stayed. Why am I sitting on a bed at nine o’clock at night thinking about a sentence instead of going out for dinner.

Stop thinking about him, Nandini. Start there. Stop thinking about him at all.

POV ENDS

She wiped her hands down her kurta, and stood, and went out to the table, where five people were arguing about who had put too much salt in something and nobody looked up.

Manik was already in his chair with a plate in front of him, talking to Aman about nothing.

He did not look at her once for the rest of the evening.

Which she noticed, and was extremely annoyed to have noticed.

1,090 words.

Two deliberate choices in that one. Arjun’s soon gets said twice and dodged both times, which is a seed rather than a scene — the reader will remember it later without having been told to. And Manik’s warning is left ambiguous on purpose: Nandini reads it as being about Arjun, but he is talking about himself, and neither of them can see the other’s version.

Continue for Ch14.