Chapter 17: The Star-Crossed Lovers

NANDINI — 2019

The copy of Wuthering Heights was in the study, on the top shelf, behind a row of encyclopaedias that no one had consulted since the invention of the internet.

Nandini found it by accident. She was clearing the shelf — part of the ongoing project to transform Eela's study from a mausoleum of paper into something resembling a functional room — and had been working methodically from left to right, sorting books into piles: keep, donate, undecided. The encyclopaedias went into the donate pile without ceremony. Behind them, pressed against the wall, was a single book.

It was old. The cover was cloth — deep green, faded to olive at the spine, with the title stamped in gold that had worn to a whisper. Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë. The edges of the pages were foxed. The binding was cracked but intact, held together by the stubbornness of Victorian bookmaking and what appeared to be a strip of masking tape that someone had applied with more urgency than skill.

She opened it. The frontispiece was inscribed in ink:

To E — my Cathy. From B — your Heathcliff.

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

Lohegaon, 1943

Nandini sat down on the floor. The dust of the shelf settled around her. Moti, who had been supervising the clearing from a strategic position by the door, came over and put her nose against the book, sniffed once, and withdrew — apparently satisfied that it was not food and therefore not interesting.

She turned the pages. The book was annotated — not in one hand but in two. Two different inks, two different styles. Eela's handwriting was there — the flowing, slightly looping script she knew from the journals — in blue ink, with notes in the margins that were sometimes analytical (Nelly is an unreliable narrator — she judges more than she observes) and sometimes personal (This passage makes me think of the hill above the cottage). The second hand was Billu's — the precise, controlled script from the letter, in black ink — with notes that were shorter, sharper, more provocative (Heathcliff is not a lover. He is an appetite) and occasionally addressed directly to Eela (You would forgive him, wouldn't you? You would forgive anyone. It's your worst quality and your best).

The annotations ran through the entire novel — a conversation conducted in margins over months, perhaps years. Two women reading the same book and writing to each other inside it, building a private language that existed only between the covers. The conversation was sometimes literary, sometimes philosophical, and sometimes — in flashes that made Nandini's chest tighten — nakedly emotional.

At the passage where Catherine declares I am Heathcliff, Eela had written: I understand this. Completely. Dangerously.

Billu had written beneath: You ARE this. That is what terrifies me.

And at the very end, after Lockwood's final visit to the graves, Eela had written — in handwriting that was shakier than the rest, as though it had been added much later, perhaps decades later: We were never Heathcliff and Catherine. They destroyed each other. We only destroyed ourselves.

Billu had not responded. The margin was empty. The silence, in that small white space, was the loudest thing Nandini had ever read.

*

She took the book to the breakfast room and spent the rest of the afternoon reading the annotations. Not the novel itself — she knew Wuthering Heights, had read it in college, had found it romantic at twenty and exhausting at thirty and devastating at fifty — but the conversation. The two women in the margins, talking to each other with an intimacy that the journals only hinted at.

The annotations revealed things the journals did not. Billu's wit — razor-sharp, genuinely funny, the humour of a woman who used laughter as both weapon and shield. Eela's tenderness — the way she responded to Billu's provocations not with matching sharpness but with a gentleness that disarmed. And the dynamic between them — Billu always pushing, Eela always yielding, the particular choreography of a relationship in which one person leads and the other follows and both of them know that the following is a choice, not a submission.

But the annotations also revealed something else. Between the pages — pressed flat, preserved by the weight of the book — were letters. Not the formal letters of the journals, not the devastating letter from 2010, but small notes. Scraps of paper. Torn corners. Messages passed between rooms, between beds, between two women who shared a wall and a war and a love that neither of them could say aloud.

E — Can't sleep. Your humming is driving me insane. In the best way. Come knock on my door if you're awake. — B

B — I'm always awake when you're awake. You know that. But if I come to your door, I won't leave. And we both know what that means. — E

E — I know what it means. Come anyway. — B

Nandini held the note in her hands. The paper was thin — wartime paper, the kind that tore easily, the kind you saved and reused because paper was rationed like everything else. The handwriting was young — both of them in their late teens, their scripts not yet settled into the versions Nandini knew from later journals. The ink was faded. The words were not.

She thought about Eela at eighteen, lying in a narrow bed in a military billet, listening to Billu hum through the wall. She thought about the courage required to write come anyway on a scrap of paper in 1942, in India, in a world where the love between two women was not merely forbidden but unthinkable. She thought about Eela's note — if I come to your door, I won't leave — and the devastating honesty of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and was afraid of wanting it.

She thought about her own note, left on Dev's pillow. It's better this way. Four words. The coward's version of Eela's honesty.

*

There were more letters. Dozens of them, pressed between pages throughout the book, each one a fragment of the conversation that the margins continued. Some were practical — Shift change at 0600, I'll save you toast — and some were playful — Dolly asked if you were wearing her lipstick. I said yes. She's furious. It was worth it — and some were so tender that reading them felt like trespassing.

E — I watched you today in the Filter Room. You were moving the markers across the table and the light was behind you and your hair was falling out of its pins and I thought: if I could draw this moment, I would spend the rest of my life trying to get it right. I can't draw. But I can tell you. You were beautiful. Not the way flowers are beautiful — arranged, temporary. The way rivers are beautiful. Moving. Alive. Essential. — B

B — You can't say things like that and then pretend nothing happened at breakfast. You sat across from me and ate your toast and talked about the weather and I wanted to scream. Don't you understand what you do to me? — E

E — I understand perfectly. I do it on purpose. It's the only power I have over you, and I intend to use it ruthlessly. — B

Nandini put the letters down. Her hands were trembling — not from cold or caffeine but from the particular vibration of a woman who had stumbled onto something enormous, something that reframed everything she thought she knew about Eela and Billu and the story she had been reading in the journals.

The journals told the story of a friendship. A complicated, intense, ultimately destructive friendship between two women who loved each other too much and too possessively. The letters told a different story. The letters told the story of a love affair — passionate, physical, mutual — that had existed alongside the friendship like a river running underground, invisible on the surface but shaping the landscape above.

She called Chhaya.

'You need to come back,' she said. 'I've found something.'

'What kind of something?'

'Love letters. Between Eela and Billu. Hidden in a copy of Wuthering Heights.'

Silence. Then: 'I'll be on the next train.'

*

Chhaya arrived on Friday evening, smelling of the sea and cigarettes and the particular frenetic energy of a woman who had cancelled three appointments and rearranged her daughter's schedule in order to catch a train to Pune on four hours' notice.

'Show me,' she said, before she had even put her bag down.

They sat in the breakfast room. Nandini spread the letters across the table — carefully, handling them with the particular reverence of a woman who understood that these scraps of paper were irreplaceable, that they were the only physical evidence of a love that had existed in secret for seventy-seven years. Chhaya read them in silence. Her face — usually animated, expressive, a face that broadcast every emotion at maximum volume — was still.

When she finished, she looked up. Her eyes were bright.

'They were lovers,' she said.

'Yes.'

'During the war.'

'And after. Some of these are from Lonavala — the cottage period. Look at this one.'

She handed Chhaya a note that was longer than the others, written on proper letter paper rather than wartime scraps:

Dearest E — Rajan is asleep. Tarun is at the signals unit. The cottage is quiet except for the rain. I am sitting at the kitchen table writing to you even though you are in the next room, because some things are easier to write than to say, and this is one of them. I love you. Not as a friend. Not as a sister. Not as whatever polite, containable word society offers for what we are. I love you the way I love breathing — involuntarily, constantly, with the awareness that stopping would kill me. Come to the kitchen. The chai is ready. I've added too much sugar, the way you like it. — B

Chhaya put the letter down. She pressed her fingers against her eyes. When she removed them, her eyelashes were wet.

'Eela never told anyone,' Nandini said. 'Not in the journals. The journals describe Billu as a friend. An intense friend. A possessive friend. But never a lover. She never wrote the word. She never named it.'

'Because she couldn't. Not then. Not in those years. You couldn't write that down, Nandini — not in a journal that someone might find, not in a country where it was illegal, not in a world where naming it would have destroyed everything. The book was the only safe place. A novel about impossible love, annotated by two women who were living one.'

They sat in silence for a moment. The breakfast room was warm — March evening, the windows open to the garden, the smell of jasmine and the distant sound of traffic on the lane. Moti was asleep under the table. Bittu was asleep on top of the table, which was not allowed but which no one had the energy to enforce.

'What do I do with this?' Nandini asked.

'What do you mean?'

'These letters. This book. This story. Do I keep them? Do I — I don't know — tell someone? Rajan? He should know. He should know that the woman who raised him and the woman who gave birth to him loved each other. Not just as friends. As — everything.'

Chhaya considered. She had a way of thinking that was visible — her jaw working, her eyes narrowing, the gears turning behind her face with an almost audible click. 'You take the book to Rajan,' she said. 'And the letters. And the journals. All of it. You give him the whole story — not the edited version, not the polite version, the whole thing. And you let him decide what to do with it.'

'But I haven't found Rajan yet. I don't even know if—'

'You have his address. Billu's letter gave it to you — Eela's journal, the one from 2010. Fourteen, Sahyadri Apartments, Kothrud. You've been carrying it around for weeks. You've been finding excuses not to go.'

Nandini opened her mouth to deny it. Closed it. Chhaya was right. She had known Rajan's address since she read Billu's letter in the journal. She had memorised it the way she memorised everything connected to this story — involuntarily, completely, the words burned into her brain like a brand. And she had not gone because going meant the story would end, and she was not ready for it to end, because the story — Eela's story, Billu's story, the story of two women who loved each other in a world that would not let them — had become, somewhere along the way, her own.

'Next week,' she said.

'Tomorrow,' said Chhaya.

'Next week.'

'Tomorrow, Nandini. Or I swear on my daughter's head, I will go myself and I will knock on his door and I will say: hello, I'm a tattoo artist from Goa with a nose ring and a bad attitude, and I have your mother's love letters. Do you really want that?'

Nandini looked at her friend. Chhaya looked back. The nose ring glinted. The eight silver rings caught the light. The expression on her face was the expression of a woman who had spent her entire life dragging reluctant people toward the things they were afraid of, and who had no intention of stopping now.

'Fine,' said Nandini. 'Tomorrow.'

'That's my girl.'