Chapter 6: Sleepless

NANDINI — 2019

The dream changed on the eleventh night.

She was on the beach again — Gokarna, always Gokarna — but this time Dev was not standing at the waterline. He was sitting on the sand with his back to her, his shoulders hunched, and there was a child next to him. A girl. Small — three, perhaps four — with dark curls and wide-set eyes and the particular solemnity of a child who understood that something important was happening and had decided to be still for it. The girl was building a sandcastle. Dev was watching her. Neither of them looked at Nandini.

She tried to call out. No sound. She tried to walk. The sand held her. She watched her daughter — because it was her daughter, she knew this with the certainty of dreams, the certainty that dissolved on waking but left its residue like salt on skin — she watched Asha build her castle and she understood, with the devastating clarity that dreams reserved for truths the waking mind refused to face, that this was the life she had unmade. Not the miscarriage — that had been the body's decision, not hers. But the silence afterwards. The choosing not to tell Dev. The letting him believe that their affair had simply ended, that the note she left — it's better this way — was the whole story.

She woke at two-forty. The ceiling stared. Moti breathed at her ankles.

She lay still for twenty minutes, counting breaths, trying to slow the galloping thing in her chest that she knew was not a heart attack but felt like one. Then she gave up and went downstairs.

The kitchen was cold. February in Pune was not winter by any northern standard — no frost, no ice, no breath-clouds — but the old bungalow had stone floors and high ceilings and the particular talent for heat dissipation that heritage architecture excelled at. She wrapped her shawl tighter — wool, hand-woven, bought from a Kashmiri vendor at the Aundh market three months ago — and felt the rough fibres catch against the skin of her forearms. Moti appeared, as always. Bittu did not — the puppy slept like a creature that had been unplugged.

She made chai. The ritual was automatic now — water, leaves, cardamom, ginger, milk, too much sugar — and she let the routine carry her while her mind worked at the thing that had been building since the loft discovery three weeks ago.

Eela had given up her child. Eela had written fifteen birthday cards and never sent them. Eela had kept a christening robe and a school muffler and a silver rattle in a sealed crate in a hidden loft for decades. Eela had written, in 2017: the fear of being found out is worse than the finding out.

And Nandini had given up her truth. She had carried the knowledge of Asha — the pregnancy, the miscarriage, the grief — for fifteen years without telling the one person who had the right to know. She had told her family. She had told her friends. She had told Farhan, who had held her while she cried and said nothing because he understood that some confessions required only a witness, not a response. She had told everyone except Dev.

The parallel was so precise it felt orchestrated. As though Eela had arranged the house, the journals, the hidden boxes, not randomly but deliberately — a trail designed for one specific finder. A woman who would recognise herself in the story because the story was, in its essential shape, her own.

She carried the chai to the breakfast room. The French windows were black mirrors, reflecting her face back at her — fifty-one, the lines deeper than she expected, the grey at her temples more pronounced. She looked tired. She looked like a woman who had been fighting something for a very long time and was beginning to understand that the fight was not with an external enemy but with herself.

She opened the journal. Not the 2017 one — she had read that entry so many times that the words had lost their texture. Instead, she opened one from 1950, the year after whatever had happened between Eela and Billu to cause the break she had been reading about. The handwriting was different in these later journals — smaller, tighter, the forward lean more pronounced, as though the hand that held the pen was gripping harder. The entries were shorter. Less descriptive. The sketches — which in the earlier journals had been frequent and vivid — had disappeared entirely.

March 12th, 1950. Cannot sleep. The silence in this house is deafening. Hema brought me soup. She says I need to eat. She is right but I cannot taste anything. Even the chai tastes of nothing. I am a vessel emptied of its contents. What remains is the shape of what was.

Nandini read and re-read the entry. She understood the metaphor — not intellectually but physically. She had been that vessel. In the months after the miscarriage, before she had rebuilt herself into Nandini Deshmukh, functional wife and mother, she had felt exactly this: emptied. The shape of what was. A container with nothing inside it.

She put the journal down and picked up her phone. Two-fifty-eight in the morning. The screen's blue light hurt her eyes. She opened the browser and typed: Devdas Rao music journalist.

The results appeared instantly. Dev had a website — sparse, outdated, the kind of website built by someone who understood that the internet existed but had no particular enthusiasm for participating in it. There was a bio: Devdas "Dev" Rao. Music journalist, critic, and occasional broadcaster. Based in Coorg, Karnataka. Formerly of Mumbai, where he spent fifteen years writing about music for publications that no longer exist. A photo showed a man in his mid-fifties — thinner than she remembered, the hair greyer, the face more lined, but unmistakably Dev. He was standing on what appeared to be a coffee plantation, wearing a flannel shirt and an expression that suggested the photographer had interrupted something more interesting.

She stared at the photo for a long time. She could feel the pull — that specific gravitational tug that certain faces exerted on certain people, the physics of desire that did not diminish with time or distance or the accumulated weight of twenty years of silence. He looked good. He looked like himself, only more so — the edges sharper, the centre more solid, the quiet intensity that had attracted her in the first place now settled into something that looked like permanence.

She closed the browser. Opened it again. Closed it.

The jackal called from beyond the garden wall. A single cry — short, sharp, almost interrogative, as though it were asking a question and expecting an answer. Moti lifted her head. Her ears rotated. She did not bark.

Nandini put the phone down. She would not contact Dev tonight. She would not contact Dev tomorrow. She would read more of Eela's journals and she would understand what had happened between Eela and Billu and she would use that understanding to decide what she owed Dev and what she owed herself and whether those two debts were reconcilable.

But the phone sat there, glowing faintly, and Dev's face was behind the screen, and the jackal called again, and she thought about Eela writing birthday cards for a child she had given away, and she thought about the note she had left on Dev's pillow in that flat in Mumbai — it's better this way — and she knew, with the same certainty that the dream had carried, that it was not better. It had never been better. It had only been easier, and easier was not the same thing.

*

Chhaya called at nine in the morning. Nandini was in the garden, pulling weeds from the border bed that Farhan had planted with marigolds and jasmine in an attempt to replicate what he remembered of Eela's garden. The soil was cold and damp between her fingers. The smell of the marigolds — pungent, medicinal, the smell of temple offerings and festival garlands — rose around her as she disturbed the roots.

'Nandini Kulkarni,' said the voice. No hello. No pleasantries. 'I got your number from my mother, who got it from god knows where. You left a message at the old house asking about me. What do you want?'

The directness was so Chhaya that Nandini almost laughed. Twenty years of silence and the woman opened with what do you want as though they had spoken yesterday.

'Chhaya. I can't believe — how are you?'

'Alive. Divorced. Living in Goa. Running a tattoo parlour, which my mother considers only slightly more respectable than prostitution. Your turn.'

'Alive. Divorced. Living in Pune. Making achaar from a dead woman's recipes.'

A pause. Then Chhaya laughed — that hoarse, barking laugh that Nandini had not heard in two decades and that hit her now with the force of a physical blow, triggering a cascade of memories so vivid that she had to sit down on the garden bench. Chhaya laughing in the back row of the cinema. Chhaya laughing on the bus to Lonavala. Chhaya laughing in the bathroom of that club in Mumbai, both of them seventeen, both of them drunk for the first time, Chhaya's eyeliner smudged and her hair wild and her T-shirt — a band T-shirt, black, with a screen-printed image of a guitarist mid-leap — soaked with beer that someone had spilled on her.

'You sound exactly the same,' Nandini said.

'I'm fatter. And louder. And I have a seventeen-year-old daughter named Meera who thinks I'm insane. But essentially, yes. The same.' Another pause, longer this time. When Chhaya spoke again, the bravado was thinner. 'Nandini. Why now? It's been twenty years.'

'I know.'

'You dropped me. After Mumbai. After everything. You just — vanished. You married Chirag and moved to that flat in Kothrud and you stopped answering my calls and you stopped coming to Goa and you just — left. Without explaining.'

The words landed like stones. Each one accurate. Each one deserved. Nandini felt the weight of them settle into her chest, pressing against her lungs, making each breath an effort. She had done exactly what Chhaya described. She had dropped her best friend — her fierce, loyal, inappropriate, wonderful best friend — because Chirag had asked her to, and because she had been too weak or too afraid or too convinced that marriage required the amputation of everything that had come before.

'I know,' she said again. 'I'm sorry. I have no excuse.'

'I don't want an excuse. I want the truth.'

So Nandini told her. She told her about Chirag — the control, the isolation, the slow dismantling of her identity piece by piece until there was nothing left but a woman who ironed shirts and made dinner and did not recognise herself in mirrors. She told her about the divorce — the relief, the terror, the two-room flat in Kothrud. She told her about the house in Koregaon Park and Eela and the journals and the business.

And she told her about Dev.

The silence on the other end lasted so long that Nandini checked the phone to make sure the call was still connected.

'You were pregnant,' Chhaya said finally. Her voice was flat. Controlled. The voice of a woman who was processing something enormous and refusing to let it overwhelm her. 'You were pregnant with Dev's baby and you didn't tell me.'

'I didn't tell anyone. I didn't tell Dev.'

'He doesn't know?'

'No.'

'Nandini.' Chhaya's voice cracked. For a moment — just a moment — the armour slipped and something raw showed through, the hurt of a woman who had been shut out of her best friend's worst moment. Then the armour returned. 'All right. Okay. Here's what's going to happen. I'm coming to Pune. I'm coming next weekend. We're going to sit in your dead woman's breakfast room and you're going to tell me everything — everything, Nandini, from the beginning — and then we're going to figure out what to do about Dev. Together. Like we should have done twenty fucking years ago.'

Nandini closed her eyes. The marigold smell was overwhelming now — sweet and sharp and alive. A bee moved through the jasmine beside the bench, its drone low and steady. She could feel the sun on her face, weak but present, the particular February sun of Pune that promised warmth without delivering it.

'Okay,' she said.

'And Nandini?'

'Yes?'

'Don't you dare disappear on me again.'

*

The week between the phone call and Chhaya's arrival was the most productive of Nandini's life.

She threw herself into work — the food safety certification came through on Tuesday, which meant the commercial kitchen in Hadapsar was officially theirs. Nikhil and Kavita spent two days cleaning and organising the space while Nandini handled the paperwork and made seventeen phone calls to suppliers. The first batch of Eela's mango achaar was scheduled for the following week. The organic shop in Kalyani Nagar had doubled their order. A food blogger in Mumbai had written about them — someone had sent her a jar, she had loved it, and now her thirty thousand followers were asking where to buy it.

'We're going to need more mangoes,' said Kavita, studying the order sheet with the focused intensity of a twenty-year-old who had discovered a talent she did not know she possessed.

'We're going to need more everything,' said Nikhil. 'Including sleep. I haven't slept properly since this certification came through.'

'Join the club,' said Nandini.

But the sleeplessness had changed. It was no longer the hollow, aimless wakefulness of grief and guilt. It was the buzzing, purposeful insomnia of a mind that was working on something — multiple somethings, actually, all of them tangled together like threads in a loom. The business. Eela's journals. Chhaya's imminent arrival. And Dev — always Dev, hovering at the edge of every thought, his face on the website, his name in her phone's search history, the question of him unanswered and, for now, unanswerable.

She read Eela's journals every night. The story was becoming clearer — not in a linear way, because Eela's journals were not linear, but in the way that a photograph developed in a darkroom, the image emerging slowly from the chemical bath, details sharpening one by one until the whole picture snapped into focus. She understood now that Billu was not merely a friend. She understood that the arrangement — Rajan living with Billu and Tarun — had not been a simple act of wartime pragmatism but something much more complicated, driven by forces that Eela herself seemed unable or unwilling to name.

And she understood — with growing certainty, with the particular recognition of a woman who had lived inside a controlling relationship and knew its architecture — that Billu's love for Eela was not separate from Billu's desire to control her. That the fierce protectiveness, the taking charge, the "I'll handle everything" — that these were not just the actions of a devoted friend but the strategies of a woman who needed to be needed, who could not love without possessing, who gave everything and demanded everything in return.

She wrote this thought in the margin of a journal — Billu loves like Chirag loved: completely, and at a cost — and then crossed it out, because the comparison was not quite right. Chirag had loved her the way a collector loves a painting — for display, for possession, for the satisfaction of ownership. Billu loved Eela the way a fire loves wood — consuming, transformative, unable to exist without destroying what it fed on.

Friday evening. Chhaya arrived.

She came in a taxi from the station, carrying a single bag and wearing an expression that was simultaneously fierce and terrified. She was, as promised, fatter — broader in the shoulders, fuller in the face — and her hair was cropped short and dyed a colour that existed nowhere in nature. She wore silver rings on eight of her ten fingers and a nose ring that caught the light. She looked magnificent.

They stood in the doorway and looked at each other.

'You look the same,' said Chhaya. 'Thinner. Sadder. But the same.'

'You look like you set fire to your hair and then decided you liked it.'

Chhaya's face broke open. The laugh — that hoarse, barking, devastating laugh — filled the hallway and Moti barked and Bittu launched herself at Chhaya's legs and Kavita appeared from the kitchen with a plate of something and Farhan opened his front door to see what the noise was, and for a moment the house was full of sound and motion and the particular chaos that happened when someone you loved came back into your life after a long absence.

They hugged. Chhaya's arms were strong around her — stronger than she remembered, the grip of a woman who had spent twenty years building a life with her hands. She smelled of coconut oil and cigarettes and the particular salt-tang of someone who lived near the sea.

'I've missed you,' Nandini said into her shoulder.

'Shut up. Don't make me cry. I don't cry. It ruins the ink.'

They sat in the breakfast room until two in the morning. Chai and Shrewsbury biscuits and two decades of catching up, told in the overlapping, interrupting, circling way of women who had once been able to finish each other's sentences and were discovering that they still could. Chhaya told her about the divorce (quick, brutal, no regrets), about Meera (brilliant, angry, exactly like Chhaya at that age), about the tattoo parlour in Goa (thriving, full of backpackers and locals, the best decision she had ever made). Nandini told her about Chirag (the slow suffocation, the awakening, the escape), about the house (Eela's conditions, the journals, the mystery), about Farhan (gentle, kind, paint-stained, next door).

And she told her about Dev. Again. In full this time — the affair in Mumbai, the intensity of it, the pregnancy, the miscarriage at ten weeks, the note on the pillow, the silence that followed. Chhaya listened without interrupting, which was so unlike her that Nandini kept pausing to check she was still conscious.

'Have you told him yet?' Chhaya asked when she finished.

'No.'

'Are you going to?'

'I think I have to. Eela's journals — they're showing me what happens when you don't. When you keep secrets for decades. When the fear of being found out becomes worse than the finding out.'

Chhaya picked up her phone from the table. 'What's his name again?'

'Devdas Rao. But Chhaya, I'm not ready to—'

'Relax. I'm not calling him. I'm looking him up.' She tapped at the screen. 'Devdas Rao, music journalist, Coorg. Found him.' She stared at the screen for a moment. Then she looked up with an expression that Nandini could not read. 'Nandini.'

'What?'

'I know him.'

'What?'

'I know Dev. He did a piece on the Goa music scene two years ago. Came into the shop for a tattoo — a small one, on his wrist. A musical note. We talked for hours. He's — he's a good man, Nandini. Quiet. Sad, I thought at the time, though I couldn't tell you why. Very good taste in music.' She put the phone down. 'He talked about someone. A woman from his past. He didn't say a name but — well. I think it was you.'

The room was very quiet. Moti was asleep. Bittu was asleep. The house settled around them — teak contracting, pipes cooling, the breath of an old building releasing the warmth of the day. Outside, the garden was dark. The neem tree stood against the sky like a sentinel.

'I have his email,' said Chhaya. 'I have his phone number. When you're ready, I'll give them to you. Not before. I'm not going to push you. But Nandini — you need to do this. Not for Dev. For you.'

Nandini looked at the photograph on the table — the one from the box, Eela and Billu and Rajesh and Tarun, all of them young and laughing and unaware of everything that was coming. She thought about Eela's fifteen birthday cards, written and never sent. She thought about the note she had left on Dev's pillow. She thought about the shape of what was.

'I know,' she said. 'I know I do.'