Healing Hearts

CHAPTER ~ 16 — NEW BEGINNINGS

The night had changed something, though neither of them would have admitted it under oath.

Two people who had spent three days trying to take each other apart had ended it on separate floors of the same building, praying for one another — which is not a thing that happens between strangers, and is not a thing that either of them was prepared to look at directly.

And there was a great deal else waiting for that household. As of today, Murthy Industries belonged to three women who had never run anything, and the eldest of them had been awake for four hours thinking about it.

Priya’s alarm went at half past five, and she switched it off on two rings so that Aman could sleep.

She was easing his arm off her waist when it tightened, and she landed back on the pillow, and found him entirely awake and looking at her.

“You are up.”

“Hmm.”

He reached over and moved a strand of hair off her cheek, and when he spoke again his voice had lost the sleep in it.

“You have no idea how much I missed you,” he said. “Those six months were not months. And I know what you were carrying, and I am not comparing — but you were there, and I was here, and I could do nothing except answer the phone at one in the morning.”

“Aman—”

“Marry me, Priya.”

She looked at him.

“Not eventually. Not after the company is settled and after Nandini is better and after whatever else you are going to put in front of it. Marry me.”

Priya Murthy’s eyes filled, and she blinked back, and did what she always did with a thing too large to hold.

“So this is the proposal,” she said. “In bed. At half past five in the morning. Before I brushed my teeth.”

Aman sat bolt upright.

“I am confessing my feelings, and you are laughing at me.”

“I am not laughing—”

“You are the single greatest spoiler of moods in this country.” He was fully pouting now, which, for a thirty-four-year-old engineer, was an extraordinary sight. “Fine. Fine. I am going to take a shower.”

She got hold of him from behind before he could get off the bed, and put her forehead between his shoulder blades. “I was joking. Aman. I was joking.”

“Too late.”

“Aman.”

He removed her hands with tremendous dignity, walked into the bathroom, and shut the door — and if she had been able to see his face, she would have seen exactly what was on it.

She was tying her hair up when his voice came through the door.

“Priyu. Towel.”

She shook her head at the ceiling, fetched one from the cupboard, and knocked.

The door opened. He did not take the towel.

He took her wrist instead, and she was inside before she had finished saying his name.

“Aman—”

He kissed her, and it was not a joke, and there was nothing childish in it at all. She did not respond at first, out of pure indignation; and then she felt what was actually in it, and stopped being indignant, and put both hands into his hair.

When he let her go, she had to hold on to his shoulder to stay upright.

“I love you,” he said, against her temple. “Not because you are beautiful. Because your heart is.”

Priya, who had been the strongest person in every room she entered for six months and had cried on a bathroom floor in Mangalore where nobody could hear her, put her face into his neck and stayed there for a while.

“I don’t know what I have done to deserve you,” she said.

“Nothing. That is rather the point of it.”

He reached past her and turned the water off, wrapped a dry towel round her, and stepped back.

She raised her eyebrows. “That is all?”

“That is all,” said Aman, “for now. I have kept some things for the right moment. When both of us are ready, and not four hours before your first board meeting.” He kissed her forehead. “Stay here. I will bring your clothes.”

He went out.

Priya stood in her own bathroom in a towel and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment, and then began, entirely against her will, to smile.

She made breakfast the way she always made breakfast when she was frightened — far too much of it, and all at once, with Navya trying to help and being sent away twice.

Cabeer arrived at the table at half past seven, having stayed over, and had eaten two idlis before he said good morning to everyone.

“Where are the other two?” said Priya.

“Asleep,” said Cabeer and Navya, in perfect unison, and everybody laughed.

Aman came out with his laptop under his arm, still on a call, and mouthed something apologetic and sat down.

“Are you all right?” he said, when he had hung up.

“Perfectly,” said Priya.

Cabeer looked up from his plate. “Priya. Are you all right?”

“I said yes.”

The two men glanced at each other and let it go, and neither of them believed a word of it.

PRIYA’S POV

No.

I am going to walk into that building in ninety minutes and there will be one hundred and forty people in it who worked for Appa, and every one of them will look up.

He built it out of nothing over twenty-six years. He used to say — in front of guests, endlessly, to my absolute mortification — that one day I would run it better than he ever did.

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

I did not think I would be keeping it like this. I thought there would be forty years first. I thought he would be sitting in that chair being unbearable and correcting my figures.

I am thirty years old, and I do not know how to do this.

But there is nobody else. Nandini cannot, not yet. Navya is nineteen. So it is me, and it is today, and I am going to eat this breakfast and put on the blue saree and go.

Appa, if you are anywhere at all — sit at the back and do not say anything. Just be in the room.

POV ENDS

“Priya.”

She looked up. Aman had put his hand flat on the table beside hers, not touching it.

“They will all be looking at you,” he said. “You know that.”

“I know.”

“Let them. You have nothing to prove to any of them today. You only have to walk in and be the person who is standing there.” He picked up his cup. “And I will be in the car park until you tell me to go away.”

Priya Murthy looked at the man she was going to marry.

“You are not going to leave, are you,” she said.

“Not even once.”