After All This Time (3 page)

He still could not believe Shreela was getting married. Even though she was only three years younger than him, their relationship was more like that of a parent and child. He had always treated her as his baby. When she had first told him about Manav, Shourya had been sceptical. But after the initial feeling of disbelief that his baby sister had grown up wore off, he had agreed to meet Manav. Eventually, it was he who had broken the news to their parents and convinced them that Manav and Shreela belonged with each other. After that, their families had met, decisions were made and now, finally, it was time for the big event. He had taken four weeks’ leave from work so he could be at the wedding. To be honest, he did not really mind carting all those shoes for Shreela. She was his little sister, she was getting married, it was going to be the happiest day of her life—she could ask for his right arm and he would give it to her, gladly.

Shourya had called a cab service, and while he waited for it to arrive, he lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The bumpy texture had always bothered Deepti. Maybe it wasn’t as bad in Avik’s room; he had never noticed. Never thought he would find himself looking up at the texture of his ceiling and comparing it to his roommate’s to see what his ex-girlfriend thought of each of them. Her rejection did weird things to him. He found himself comparing himself to Avik all the time, as if it were a competition.

Ever since he had found out about Deepti and Avik, he had begun to look at Avik in a different light. Wondering what Deepti saw in him. Shourya and Avik were the same height, had gone to the same school, and lived in the same apartment. But Avik was a killer drummer. He had even been a part of the school band. There was an air of coolness about him, as if he didn’t care for whatever was going on.

Shourya hadn’t expected Avik to be as possessive of a girl as he was of Deepti. Maybe that was what Deepti liked about him. Perhaps Shourya had not been obsessive enough for her.

The cab arrived just then. In one swift motion, he got up and dragged his luggage out of the house. He was glad to be going away for a while. He desperately needed some time away from all of the messiness. Once in the cab, he sat back and closed his eyes. Maybe when he came back after his trip, things would be different. Maybe he would have forgotten some of the things he had been trying so hard to forget. Maybe he would be able to move on, to sleep at night. Maybe his hands wouldn’t tremble every time he thought of the days and the nights he had spent with Deepti, of loving someone so deeply and so fiercely that he had felt handicapped by it. Maybe when he returned, his life would no longer be as fucked up.

Lavanya walked down the narrow aisle and out of the airplane. Her legs shook and she felt the sweat bead down her spine, making her top stick to her back. She felt strangely cold and hot at the same time. While waiting to collect her luggage, she had half a mind to run back to New York. She undid her messy high bun and let her hair fall around her face, hiding as much of her pain as she could.

It was very early in the morning in India, but Lavanya was already feeling sleepy, thanks to the jet lag. Once she got her bags and heaved them on to a trolley, she decided to get a coffee. She convinced herself that she was not trying to delay meeting her parents, and that she really did need caffeine in her system in order to function.

But no matter how long she wandered around the airport, she could not put off leaving it indefinitely. She felt like she had nowhere else to go. After years, she had wanted to come home—the apartments she had rented over the years in a foreign country had never felt like home to her. She supposed she could go back, but she did not know what she would do there any more. It felt like she had nothing left there to go back to. She had practically destroyed her future at PSM, so her career, the one thing she had cared about, was lying on the floor in pieces. Besides, who in their right mind would go to an office to work for someone else and help them grow and make money when their days were numbered?

Get it together.
She finally pushed her luggage cart out through the gate, slowly but determinedly, and looked around. It was not hard to spot them. Her mother was smiling widely and waving at her in glee. When Lavanya waved back hesitantly, her mother covered her mouth with her hand, the crinkles around her eyes turning slightly downwards, just like her lips, Lavanya imagined, under the hand hiding them. Lavanya did not look at her father’s face, but she could see that he was standing right next to her mother, his arm resting lightly around her shoulder. She noticed the arm.

She pushed her cart around the barriers and reached them. Her mother had almost broken down by then. She shrieked, ‘Lavi!’ and rushed towards Lavanya, pulling her into a tight hug. Lavanya hugged her back, and could feel the sobs shake her mother’s body, so she just held her tighter. She had no words, and she herself was fretting about meeting her father.

‘Mom,’ Lavanya whispered.

‘It has been so long since I saw you . . .’ her mother sobbed. ‘My child.’

‘How have you been?’

Her mother did not respond to the question. Instead, she peppered Lavanya’s cheeks and forehead with kisses, holding her as if scared that she would run away again.

It’s okay, Mom, I’m here now.
The words were at the tip of Lavanya’s tongue, but she could not bring herself to say them. She was not going to be there for long . . . not even if she wanted to. Hiding the truth was one thing, but she did not want to lie to her mother. She stayed in the embrace for some time, because she was stalling having to greet her father, because her mother needed it and because no one had hugged her for more than three seconds in the past six years.

When her mother let her go at last, Lavanya took one step, just one step, towards her father. Placing an arm around his narrow waist, she leaned into him somewhat, and stayed there, half-hugging him for one second, before pulling back. She congratulated herself for managing that feat.

‘It’s good to see you,’ he murmured. She had not heard the deep baritone of his voice since she had left Delhi. She had called her mom occasionally to check up on her and how things were, but never once spoken to her father.

Lavanya nodded.

In the car, an awkward silence settled over them and no one spoke for the first five minutes. Lavanya sat in the rear seat so she would not have to be close to her father, who was driving. She looked out of the window, at the city,
her home
. This was the only place that she had ever called home, that had ever felt like home. The honking cars, two-wheelers trying to overtake everyone else, that too, from the wrong side, pedestrians crossing the streets haphazardly, with speeding vehicles driving right at them, screeching to a stop just millimetres from them. Nearly everyone was abusing everyone else. It was chaos.

New York had been a different kind of chaos. It had been organized—even though there were pedestrians everywhere, not waiting for the walk sign to tell them it was safe to cross roads, cabbies driving like mad men, newspaper stalls and halal carts on every street. But it was still quiet. There was a rush, but it was a silent rush; it showed in the way people walked—swiftly, taking big steps, single-mindedly heading towards their destination. People rarely bumped into each other on sidewalks, so there were no
excuse me
s or
I’m so sorry
s; they all knew where they were going, they were all used to the pace.

Here, in India, especially in Delhi, it was a contrast. It was loud. The first five minutes after Lavanya got on the road drove her crazy. So much honking. People were in a rush, yes, but only half of them. The other half was walking or driving leisurely as if taking a stroll through the park. There were abuses flying around. Ah. What a pleasure to get home to expletives in your mother tongue.

Once they crossed the Delhi Cantonment area, a place much quieter than most parts of Delhi, they found a roadblock ahead. Some politician was on tour, leaving behind traffic havoc in his wake. The hustle-bustle of the residential-cum-commercial neighbourhood, Karol Bagh, cheered Lavanya up. As they rounded a corner, they reached the Hanuman temple, with a 108-feet tall statue of the god standing proudly, watching over the city. His hands were folded at his chest, and between his feet lay the head of a demon he had defeated. Lavanya had passed that temple hundreds of times, drawing strength every time.

The silence in the car was killing her. Lavanya rolled down her window, feeling the morning sun on her face, mixed with the cool air. She closed her eyes for a minute and breathed in—it smelled of leaves and concrete, and dust and petroleum oil. She had missed the city. There was no place like New Delhi. She tied her hair back and stuck her head out of the window for a while longer until she started finding it difficult to breathe. She closed the window and rested her head back. Just when she began contemplating jumping out of the car, to escape the silence, her mom spoke up.

‘Really cold here, isn’t it?’

The one thing people talk about when they have nothing left to talk about—the weather.
It has come to this.
All Lavanya said was, ‘Yeah, it is quite cold.’

‘Though you are coming from New York, so this must not feel that cold to you.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Is it really cold there now?’ her mom turned back and asked.

Lavanya thought back to the last week that she had spent walking around the city in the dead of the night, laden with overcoats and thick scarves wrapped around her neck. She had always ended up feeling hot and sweaty inside all the winter wear from walking so much. ‘Yes, it was really cold there.’

Her mom nodded and turned halfway. She sat like that for a few moments, facing neither backwards nor ahead, maybe trying to think of something to say next, and then she turned forward, as if unable to think of anything.

The silence enveloped them all once again. It had been too long since they had been around each other. Too long since they had shared each other’s company, spoken to each other, lived with each other . . . loved each other. They had forgotten how to simply
be
in each other’s presence.

They had forgotten how to be a family.

Seeing her family home as her father drove in through the front gate shocked Lavanya. She somehow remembered it being much bigger than it was. Perhaps she had reconstructed her memories to make them greater, grander, more magical than the truth. But she did not feel that she had lived away from home long enough to have a warped memory of it, nor had she been so young when she left to have imagined it to be something it was not.

When she walked into the hall, all she could relate to was its basic structure, the shape and the general area. She remembered tall pillars and the chandelier, but everything else was new to her—the colour and texture of the walls, the tiny lights on the ceiling, the curtains, the vases, the centre table. She did not recognize any of that. Too much had changed.

The threadbare brown sofa with elephants embroidered on it was missing, and had been replaced with what looked like a plush leather couch. The carpet, though, was the same that she had seen the last time she was home.

As she went further inside, to the kitchen, the hallway, the bedrooms, she could swear they had been bigger back then. Somehow they had all grown smaller, over time, as if shrinking with age. Yet somehow, they seemed
younger
, more beautiful than ever. Lavanya was fascinated.

She had not expected to feel happy on coming home. She had wanted to come here just as an escape from her ‘real’ life. But when she stepped inside her room, she actually smiled. The slight movement of those muscles felt almost alien to her face.

‘Lavi! Are you hungry? What do you want to eat?’ her mother called from the kitchen.

Lavanya came back downstairs, only then realizing that she was starving; it was dinner time in New York. ‘What do we have?’

Noticing the first glimmer of genuine interest in Lavanya, her mom felt relieved and somewhat excited. ‘Let’s see—I’ve made bhaji, I can heat up some pavs—’

‘Say no more, Mother!’ Lavanya raised her hand dramatically.

Her mom laughed. ‘But I have also made chhole and samosas for you!’

‘I told you it was going to be a waste of time. You did not need to make anything else. Lavi loves pav-bhaji,’ her father interjected good-naturedly.

‘I know—you were right. You know your daughter very well—’

‘I will also have a samosa,’ Lavanya said quickly, cutting her mom off once again.

It was followed by a brief silence.

‘I’ll heat one up for you. I wanted to cook all of your favourite dishes. God knows what you have been eating over there. You have come back after so many years . . .’

‘I have been eating healthy, Mom. You don’t have to worry.’

‘What healthy! Look at you! You’re all bones, you’ve lost so much weight.’

‘I was always like this,’ Lavanya muttered. What were moms without their you-have-become-so-thin dialogues?

‘She was. She has always been skinny,’ her father said.

‘But she was a teenager then, now she is a grown woman!’ her mom said and then added softly, ‘God, it has been too many years.’

Lavanya decided to concentrate on all the yummy food on the table in front of her. The guilt for staying away could wait. When her mom served the first piece of warm pav and Lavanya took the first bite of the spicy and buttery bhaji, she forgot all her reasons for having left home. Her mom was an excellent cook. Lavanya knew everyone thought that about their mom, but her mother actually was the best cook in the world. She enjoyed cooking so much, and prepared everything with so much love and effort, paying attention to every last detail, that her food was never any less than the best.

Lavanya ate like she had not eaten in weeks, relishing every bite. ‘This is so delicious, Mom!’ she exclaimed between bites.

Her mother’s face lit up with a warm glow, as if from within. She liked nothing more than feeding her family. Cooking was her way of showing love. She rarely indulged in physical displays of affection. ‘Do you want some more? Take another samosa.’ Before Lavanya could say anything, she had placed one on her plate.

‘I’m full till here, Mom!’ Lavanya protested, pointing to her neck.

‘You’ve become too thin, Lavi. I don’t like this.’

So Lavanya ate, and ate some more till her mom was satisfied. Her father did not say anything else throughout breakfast; he ate in silence.

‘Mom, you’re barely eating yourself. And you have lost weight too! You need food more than I do!’ Lavanya said, only then noticing how thin her mother had become. Her face was no longer round; her cheekbones were more prominent now.

‘Oh, I needed to. I did not want to stay a fat woman always!’ her mom retorted.

‘You weren’t fat!’ Lavanya and her father said together.

They looked at each other in reflex, but Lavanya quickly glanced away. When she looked down at her plate, she did not see what was on it. What she saw instead was the grey in her father’s sideburns, the once black-and-white stubble that was now almost completely white, his thin lips that closed together to form a straight line, the expression on his face when he looked at her.

‘Oh, I was. We all know that,’ her mom said, not noticing anything amiss.

‘No, you weren’t,’ Lavanya said, waiting for a second before speaking.

Shortly after, she went upstairs to her bedroom with her mom, who showed her where everything was, while Lavanya stood by, feeling like a guest in her own home. But she did not have the energy to care. Her eyelids were barely staying open. She yawned loudly as she climbed under her comforter and her mom closed the curtains.

‘Good night,’ Lavanya muttered as her head touched the pillow. ‘Or morning, whatever.’