Healing Hearts

Chapter ~ 15

She shut her eyes.

She did it before she had decided anything, the way you do when somebody puts a hand on the back of your neck and the whole of you agrees to it without consulting you, and for a moment there was nothing on that roof but the wind and two people standing much too close together.

Then Manik came back to himself.

He took his hand away as though the air between them had turned hot, put her at arm’s length, and turned to face the railing.

“Leave me alone,” he said.

Nandini opened her eyes.

It took her about two seconds to understand what she had just done, and the understanding arrived with a heat that started at her collarbone and went all the way up, and because she could not be furious with herself in front of him, she was furious with him instead.

“I don’t know what your problem is,” she said, and her voice came out unsteady. “I don’t know what has happened to you and, frankly, it is not my business. But I trust Arjun. I trust him more than anything in this world, and I trust what we have, and he will never break that.”

Manik did not turn round.

He smiled, though. She could see the edge of it against the light from the building opposite, and there was no warmth in it whatsoever.

She turned to go.

“Don’t trust too much, Nandini.”

She stopped at the top of the stairs.

“You will be hurt in ways that do not repair.” He was still facing out on the road. “And there is no such thing as love. There are only people wanting something. They are pleasant to you for exactly as long as it takes to get it, and then they are not, and by then you have handed over everything you had, and you are standing there holding nothing.”

He said it flatly, like a man reading out a rate of interest.

Nandini stood at the top of a staircase and could not think of one single thing to say to it.

So she went down.

Navya was asleep with the light still on and a book collapsed on her chest.

Nandini took the book, turned the lamp off, and went into the bathroom and shut the door, and ran the tap, and put her hands under the water and then her face, and then she sat down on the edge of the tub and cried without making any noise at all, because she had six months of practice at exactly that.

NANDINI’S POV

Arjun would never do that to me.

I need to say it and I need it to sound true. He would never. Two years. He came every single day for a month after the accident and sat in that dark room while I said nothing to him.

So why is my chest doing this?

Because of a sentence from a man I have known for three days. That is all it is. He said a thing designed to hurt, and it found somewhere soft, and it went in, and that is what he does. That is his entire craft.

Except he was not being cruel.

That is the part I cannot put down. He was not looking at me when he said it. He was looking out at the road, and he said the way you tell somebody the bridge is out.

You will be hurt in ways that do not repair.

Nobody says that about somebody else. That is a man reading out his own accounts.

Something had been done to him. Something enormous, and by somebody he trusted, or he would not have needed to build all this — the rudeness and the face and the way he leaves a room the instant anybody gets near him. You do not build a wall that high against a small thing.

And he is not a bad man. I had known that since the airport and I had refused to know it for three days. A bad man does not put you down flat and pull a blanket over you and then explain the rules to you in the dark. A bad man does not push a glass of water across a table without looking up.

Amma. Appa.

I miss you so much that some days I cannot get out of the chair. You would know what to do with all this. Amma, you would have taken one look at that boy on the terrace and known exactly what had happened to him, and you would have fed him, and he would have hated it, and he would have come back the next day.

Ayyappa — I do not know what was done to him. I do not want to know.

But please. Whatever it was. Take it off him.

POV ENDS

She came out ten minutes later with her face washed and sat by the window with her knees drawn up, the way she had sat every night for six months, and looked at the sky.

For the first time in half a year, she was not thinking about the river.

Two floors above her, a man stood at a railing for a long time after she had gone.

He had not moved when he heard the stairwell door, and he did not move now. Below him the road did what roads in that city do at eleven at night, and somewhere behind him his guitar was lying on the concrete where he had put it down.

He had told her the truth. That was the thing that would keep him awake. Not that he had been cruel to her — he had been cruel to a great many people in three years and had slept through all of it.

He had told her the exact truth as he understood it, out loud, to somebody, for the first time since it happened.

And she had stood at the top of a staircase and looked at him as though somebody had hurt him.

Nobody had looked at him like that in three years. He had made absolutely certain of it.

1,020 words.

I let his warning land flat and unemphatic — the way you tell somebody the bridge is out — because that’s what makes it credible to her, and it’s the line she works backwards from. Her prayer is now the mirror of Priya’s in Chapter 1: two women, on two nights, asking for the same man to be reached.

Continue for Ch16.