Healing Hearts

CHAPTER ~ 20 — NANDINI HAPPENED

Cabeer waited until Manik had a mouthful of food and then nudged him.

“Let me eat. Stop it.”

“One question.”

“Ask, then,” said Manik, not looking up.

“When you arrived this evening. Were you looking for Nandini?”

Manik choked.

It was not a small choke. It brought the entire table round, and Cabeer immediately began rubbing his back with the tender concern of a man who has caused something and intends to enjoy it thoroughly.

Nandini, sitting on Manik’s other side, had a glass of water in his hand before she had thought about it.

He took it. Their fingers touched on the glass, and both of them registered it, and she took her hand away rather too quickly and became extremely interested in her plate with the colour rising up her neck.

Manik drank the entire glass in one go.

He was aware, distantly, that he was smiling. He was not aware, at that moment, of what it was going to cost him.

“Are you all right?” said Priya.

“Fine.” He cleared his throat. “It went down the wrong way.”

“What happened, suddenly?”

And Cabeer said, quite clearly, into the pause:

“Nandini.”

Manik, who had refilled the glass, sprayed most of it across the floor to his left.

Nandini choked on her food.

Four people stared at Cabeer.

“What?” said Priya.

“Cabeer.” Manik had gone in a color nobody had seen on him before. “What is wrong with you? What rubbish—”

Cabeer put his head back and laughed until he had to hold on to the table.

“Would you all let me finish,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I was saying thank you to Nandini. Because she gave him the water. Since we all know he will never say it himself, the man has not used the word ‘thank you’ since 2019.”

He looked round the table with enormous satisfaction.

“Wait. Wait. Did you all think, did you think I meant Nandini happened to Manik?”

Navya made a small strangled noise.

“That is genuinely the funniest thing I have heard all year. Nandini. And Manik. Have you seen the two of them? They have been at each other’s throats since the first minute.” He turned. “Go on, Manik. Tell them. Could you ever fall for a girl like Nandini?”

Manik put his napkin down very slowly.

“You want an answer,” he said. “Come here and I will give you one.”

Cabeer was already out of his chair.

They went round the table twice. Everybody else stayed exactly where they were and laughed, because there was something genuinely absurd about it, the same man who had been rubbing his friend’s back four minutes ago was now running for his life around the dining table with him.

“Catch me first,” said Cabeer, over his shoulder. “Then we can discuss letting go.”

“Both of you. Stop.” Priya stood up. “Sit down and eat.”

They stopped instantly, and went back to their places, making faces at each other like two boys of eleven.

Which is when Cabeer made his error, because he sat down first.

Manik had his arm behind his back before he had finished lowering himself into the chair.

“So what were you saying? You wanted an answer, didn’t you? Go on. Ask me again.”

Cabeer began to howl.

It was not a small howl. It was a theatre of the highest order, and it worked immediately. Manik let go and crouched beside the chair, entirely serious.

“Cabeer. Did I hurt you? Where—”

Cabeer was out of the chair and behind Priya inside two seconds.

“Priya. Priya, please save me. This monster is going to kill me, and I am far too young. There is so much I still have to do. I still have to, I still have to see N—”

He stopped.

He stopped exactly one syllable and everybody at that table saw him stop.

Manik straightened up and folded his arms, and his face arranged itself into an expression of the deepest, most sincere concern.

“You still have to what, Cabeer?”

“Nothing—”

“No, no. Tell us. We are your friends, after all.” He turned, radiating innocence. “Aren’t we, Priya?”

“Absolutely,” said Priya, who had understood none of it. “Cabeer, what is it? Is something worrying you? Say it.”

Cabeer looked at Manik with his entire soul in his eyes and Manik looked back at him with the serenity of a man holding all the cards.

But there was one other person at that table who had followed every step of it.

NANDINI’S POV

He is not being innocent.

Look at his mouth. There is something at the corner of it, and it has been there since Cabeer stopped talking. He knows exactly what Cabeer was about to say, and Cabeer knows he knows, and Cabeer is begging him with his face.

So there is something between those two that nobody else in this room has been told.

And it involves a name beginning with N.…It is not me. Obviously it is not me. Do not be ridiculous, Nandini.

I am going to find out what it is.

POV ENDS

She said nothing at all, and went on eating, and made a private note.

“What I mean,” said Cabeer, with the air of a man stepping off a ledge onto solid ground, “is that I still have to travel. New places. Eating in all of them. You know what I am like.”

Everybody laughed at that, because it was entirely true.

Manik smiled at his plate.

They had barely moved to the sofas when Priya’s phone rang.

She listened for ninety seconds, and her whole posture changed. “How long ago? — No. No, I will come now.”

“What is it?”

“The office. There is a problem with the Karad file and the client is on a flight at six.” She was already up. “I have to go in.”

“I’ll drive,” said Aman.

“I’m coming,” said Cabeer.

“So am I,” said Manik.

“No.” Aman put a hand on his shoulder as he passed. “Somebody stays. I am not leaving those two alone in this flat at midnight.”

Manik looked at him for a second, and then nodded, and sat back down.

He locked the door behind them and turned around, and Nandini was standing at the edge of the kitchen with a glass in her hand.

Neither of them said anything.

They looked at each other across a hall that suddenly had nobody else in it, and Manik opened his mouth, and she turned and went into her room and shut the door.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he let out a long breath and went to his own.

Behind the other door, Nandini put her back against the wood and closed her eyes.

They came back a little after two.

Manik opened the door before the bell ended, because he had been sitting in the hall waiting for it. Nandini came out of her room at the same moment, and Priya took one look at her and opened her arms.

“Dii, is everything all right?”

“Everything is sorted.” Priya smoothed her hair. “Why are you still awake?”

“How could I sleep? You were not here.”

Priya held her a second longer than she meant to, and kissed her forehead. “It is fine, angel. Go to bed.”

“We will do the office in the morning,” said Manik, from the door. “All three of you look finished. Go to sleep.”

“He is right.” Aman was already halfway down the corridor. “Tomorrow. Goodnight.”

The flat went dark.

Manik lay in the dark listening to Cabeer sleeping and did not get anywhere near it himself.

Two rooms away, Nandini turned over for the eleventh time, sat up, and gave in.

She pulled a stole round her shoulders and went out and up the stairs, because that was what she had done in Mangalore on nights like this, up to the terrace, ten minutes of walking, and then back down. It had never once worked, but she had done it for six months anyway.

It was past midnight. The building was asleep.

The nightmare had come back that week, and it had brought the rain with it, and there was nobody in this city she could say that to.