Chapter 7: Chhaya

NANDINI — 2019

The restaurant was Chhaya's idea.

'We need to get out of this house,' she said on Saturday morning, standing in the kitchen in a T-shirt that said BITE ME in silver letters, her hair sticking up at angles that suggested either a restless night or a deliberate aesthetic choice. 'We've been reading dead women's diaries for twelve hours and I'm starting to feel like I'm in one. Feed me. Somewhere loud. Somewhere with alcohol.'

They went to Swaad, the Puneri thali place on Fergusson College Road that had been there since Nandini's childhood — the same cracked tile floor, the same steel plates, the same uncle behind the counter who remembered everyone's name and no one's order. The lunch crowd had not yet arrived and they got a corner table, which Chhaya claimed with the territorial confidence of a woman who had spent her adult life running a business in Goa's tourist district.

'Two thalis,' Chhaya told the waiter. 'Extra sol kadhi. And whatever beer you have that's cold.'

'We don't serve alcohol, madam.'

'Of course you don't. Pune. Fine — nimbu pani. With salt, not sugar. Nandini?'

'Same. But with sugar.'

'You and your sugar. Some things never change.' Chhaya leaned back and surveyed the room. 'God, this place. I haven't been here since — when was it? Your birthday? The one where your mother made us wear matching salwar kameez and I spilled rasam down the front and she looked at me like I'd committed a war crime.'

'That was my sixteenth. And she didn't make us wear matching anything. You chose to wear the same outfit as me because you thought it would be funny.'

'It was funny. Your mother's face was not.'

The thalis arrived — steel plates loaded with puran poli, aamti, zunka, bhakri, koshimbir, and a mound of rice that could have fed a small village. The sol kadhi was cold and pink, coconut-milk-and-kokum, the sourness cutting through the richness of the dal. Nandini ate with the concentration of someone who had not realised how hungry she was until food appeared. The bhakri was warm and rough against her fingers, the texture of stone-ground jowar, and the aamti had that particular Puneri sweetness — jaggery-laced, balanced with tamarind — that she had been trying to replicate in her own kitchen for months without success.

'This is incredible,' said Chhaya, her mouth full. 'I'd forgotten how good Pune food is. In Goa, everything is fish. Not that I'm complaining about fish — fish is wonderful — but sometimes you need a thali that makes you feel like your grandmother is feeding you.'

'That's exactly what Eela wrote about Hema's cooking. That it was like being fed by someone who loved you.'

'Your dead woman had good taste.' Chhaya wiped her fingers on a napkin and fixed Nandini with a look that was simultaneously casual and precise — the look of a woman who had been waiting for the right moment to say something and had decided that the right moment was now. 'So. Dev.'

'Not here.'

'Why not? No one's listening. And I think better when I'm eating.'

Nandini looked around. The restaurant was filling up — college students, families, a group of elderly men at a long table who were arguing about cricket with the passionate conviction of people who had been having the same argument for forty years. The noise level was rising. Chhaya was right — no one was listening.

'All right,' she said. 'What do you want to know?'

'Everything you didn't tell me last night. Start with how it began.'

So Nandini told her. The real version — not the sanitised one she had given her family, not the abbreviated one she had given Farhan, but the full, unedited, uncensored account of her affair with Devdas Rao, beginning with the night they met at a music launch in Mumbai and ending with the note on the pillow.

They had met in 1999. Nandini was thirty-one, married to Chirag for eight years, mother of Vikram (five) and Latika (three). She was in Mumbai for a cousin's wedding. Chirag had stayed home — he hated weddings, he said, though what he really hated was any social situation he could not control. She had gone to the music launch because the cousin's boyfriend was in the band, and because she was in Mumbai without Chirag for the first time in years, and because something in her — the Nandini part, the part that Chirag had been methodically erasing since the day they married — wanted to feel alive.

Dev was standing at the bar. He was not in the band. He was not with anyone. He was drinking whiskey and reading a book — actually reading, not pretending — and the book was Wuthering Heights, which was so improbable in that setting that she laughed, and the laugh made him look up, and the look was — she searched for the word and could not find one that was adequate — it was the look of a man who had been waiting for something without knowing what it was and had just found it.

'Wuthering Heights?' she said. 'At a music launch?'

'I review the music,' he said. 'The book is for the gaps between songs. The gaps are usually more interesting.'

They talked for three hours. He was funny in the way that quiet people were sometimes funny — not performing but observing, finding the absurdity in things and pointing it out with a precision that made her see the world differently. He was from Dharwad originally, had studied journalism in Mumbai, written for music magazines that paid nothing and demanded everything. He lived in a one-room flat in Bandra that he described as "a storage unit with ambitions." He was thirty-three. He was not married. He was not, as far as she could tell, attached to anyone.

He walked her back to her cousin's flat at midnight. At the door, he said: 'I'd like to see you again. Tomorrow, if possible. The day after, if not. The day after that, if necessary. I'm prepared to wait, but I'd prefer not to.'

She saw him the next day. And the day after. And for three weeks, she kept finding reasons to stay in Mumbai — the cousin needed help, the wedding had complications, there was a textile exhibition she wanted to see — and every excuse was transparent and every excuse was accepted by Chirag, who was probably relieved to have the house to himself.

The affair lasted four months. Four months of train journeys between Pune and Mumbai, of stolen weekends, of a small hotel in Colaba where the sheets smelled of jasmine and the ceiling fan made a clicking sound that she could still hear if she closed her eyes. Four months of feeling like herself — the self she had been before Chirag, before the children, before the careful, cautious, diminished woman she had become.

And then the pregnancy.

'I found out on a Monday,' she told Chhaya. 'I went to the doctor on Tuesday. By Wednesday, I knew I couldn't keep it — not because I didn't want it, but because keeping it would have meant telling Chirag, and telling Chirag would have meant — everything. The children. The house. The marriage. Everything would have burned.'

'So you decided to end it?'

'I decided to go back to Pune and think. I was going to tell Dev on the weekend. But on Thursday night, I started bleeding.' Her voice was steady. She had told this story before — to her family, to Farhan, to herself in the dark hours of the morning — and the telling had worn the edges smooth, the way water wore stone. The pain was still there but it was contained, a geological feature rather than an open wound. 'I lost the baby on Friday morning. In the bathroom of that hotel in Colaba. Alone.'

Chhaya's hand found hers across the table. The rings — eight of them, silver, each one different — pressed against Nandini's knuckles. The grip was tight. Not fierce, like Billu's grip in the journals, but present. Insistent. The grip of a woman who wanted you to know she was there and had no intention of letting go.

'And then you left,' Chhaya said.

'I left a note. "It's better this way." I packed my bag and took the train to Pune and I never went back. I never called him. I never wrote. I just — vanished. Like a coward.'

'Like a woman in pain.'

'Same thing, sometimes.'

The thali plates were empty. The sol kadhi glasses were drained to the pink residue. Around them, the restaurant hummed with conversation and the clatter of steel on steel and the particular Saturday-afternoon energy of a city that was simultaneously ancient and young. A child at the next table was dismantling a papad with the systematic thoroughness of a tiny engineer. His mother watched with the particular exhaustion of someone who had given up trying to impose order on chaos.

'Eela did the same thing,' Nandini said. 'With Billu. She left without explaining. She took the coward's way out.'

'You keep calling it cowardice. I call it survival. You did what you had to do to keep yourself intact. So did Eela. The question isn't whether you were brave enough — you weren't, and that's fine, nobody is — the question is whether you're brave enough now.'

Nandini looked at her friend. Chhaya's eyes — dark, fierce, red-rimmed from last night's late hour — held hers with an intensity that reminded her, absurdly, of Eela's description of Billu. She did not merely listen; she absorbed. Chhaya was absorbing her. Taking in the whole of it — the affair, the miscarriage, the silence, the guilt — and metabolising it into something that Nandini could use.

'I'll give you his number,' Chhaya said. 'But not today. Today, you eat. Tonight, you read your dead woman's diaries. Tomorrow —' she shrugged, the silver rings catching the light. 'Tomorrow is for being brave.'

*

They walked back to Koregaon Park through the late afternoon. The streets were busy — auto-rickshaws weaving through traffic, vendors selling sugarcane juice and roasted corn, a man on a bicycle carrying what appeared to be an entire sofa strapped to the back rack. The air smelled of exhaust and frying oil and the particular dusty sweetness of February in Pune — not quite winter, not quite spring, the season of transition.

Chhaya walked with the confident stride of a woman who expected the world to make way for her, and it did. People stepped aside. Auto-rickshaws swerved. A dog that had been lying in the middle of the pavement lifted its head, considered Chhaya's approach, and moved.

'I forgot to tell you something,' Chhaya said as they turned into the lane. 'About Dev.'

'What?'

'When I met him in Goa — the tattoo, the music piece — we went for a drink afterwards. He'd had a few beers. He got — not drunk, exactly, but loose. And he said something I've never forgotten. He said: "I fell in love once. Properly. The kind that changes the chemical composition of your blood. She left a note that said it was better this way and I've spent twenty years trying to understand what she meant."'

Nandini stopped walking. The lane was narrow, shaded by old trees — gulmohar, not yet in bloom — and the light filtered through the leaves in patterns that shifted with the breeze. She could feel her pulse in her throat.

'He said that?'

'Those exact words. "The chemical composition of your blood." I remember because I thought — who talks like that? A poet? A madman? And then I thought — no. A man who's still in love.'

They stood in the lane for a long moment. A bicycle bell rang somewhere. A crow landed on the wall above them and watched with the detached curiosity of a creature that had seen everything and was no longer impressed by any of it.

'I need to see him,' Nandini said.

'I know you do.'

'Not yet. Not until I understand — I need to finish Eela's story first. I need to understand what happened between her and Billu. I need to know how it ends before I can start my own.'

Chhaya nodded. She did not argue. She understood — in the way that only the oldest friends understood — that some decisions could not be rushed, that some stories needed to be read to the end before the reader could act, and that the woman standing beside her in this shaded lane was not stalling but preparing.

'Take your time,' Chhaya said. 'But not too much of it. Dev's not going anywhere — I can tell you that much. He's been waiting twenty years. He can wait a few more weeks. But Nandini —' she touched her arm, a brief pressure, fingertips to bare skin, warm and firm — 'don't make him wait forever. That's not fair to either of you.'

They walked the rest of the way in silence. At the gate, Farhan was in his garden, painting. He waved. Chhaya waved back with an enthusiasm that suggested she had already decided to like him, which — knowing Chhaya — was both a compliment and a warning.

'He's cute,' Chhaya whispered. 'In a paint-stained, dragged-through-a-hedge sort of way.'

'That's exactly what my mother said.'

'Your mother and I have always had the same taste. Terrible, but consistent.'

They went inside. Moti and Bittu performed their welcome ritual — Moti with dignified restraint, Bittu with full-body lunacy. Kavita was in the kitchen, making chai. Vikram was in the sitting room, doing something on his laptop that he closed when they entered.

'You've been out all day,' he said, not looking up.

'We've been eating our feelings,' said Chhaya. 'It's a valid coping mechanism. Ask any therapist.'

Vikram glanced at her, then at Nandini, then back at his laptop. 'I like her,' he said.

'Everyone does,' said Chhaya. 'It's a burden.'

Nandini stood in the hallway of her house — Eela's house, still Eela's in ways she was only beginning to understand — and watched her best friend charm her son, and she felt something shift inside her. Not a resolution — she was not ready for that. But a loosening. The particular easing of a knot that had been tied so tightly for so long that she had forgotten it was there.

She went to the breakfast room. Opened a journal. Read.

And outside, in the darkening garden, the jackal — their jackal, the one she had been watching since the monsoon, the one she had feared was dead — appeared at the gap in the wall. It paused. It looked at the house. Then it slipped through into the garden and trotted across the lawn and disappeared into the scrub beneath the neem tree.

Nandini saw it from the corner of her eye and smiled.

Welcome back, she thought. Both of you.