T HE THING ABOUT Indore was that it was an in-between city. Big enough to have malls and traffic lights, a university and even a couple of decent hotels, but not big enough for people to mind their own business. Anjali frowned at the anonymous letter in front of her before turning it over Sherlock Holmes style, to see if there was any clue that would help her identify the sender. Predictably, there was nothing. Lucky old Sherlock had been around at a time when people wrote anonymous letters on typewriters with a few extra-worn keys and on paper that was sold only in one shop in London. Nowadays, the poison-pen types had access to laser printers and reams of industrially-produced A4, and there was no way in hell she would be able to trace the writer.
‘You are married lady with child,’ the letter started off, the writer clearly being more focused on technical accuracy than grammar. ‘Conducting affair openly with Prof. Khatri is shameful and bad example to innocent students. Please mend ways or we will need to inform Dr Sharma, your most respected father. Prof. Khatri is immoral man not believing in the divine God and only ruination of reputation and good name is in front of you.’
‘Innocent students, my little left toe!’ Anjali muttered, tearing the sheet of paper across a few times and throwing it into the wastepaper bin under her desk. A few seconds later, she leaned down to retrieve the pieces of paper from the bin. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but she wouldn’t put it past one of her nosey colleagues to go through her trash. She shared a room with another woman professor who was a) not the trash-bin-scavenger type and b) was anyway on a long leave. Other people walked in and out at will.
‘Tore something up by mistake?’ a friendly voice asked, and Anjali looked up to see Prof. Deven Khatri, the alleged adulterer, atheist and immoral corrupter of innocent students standing at the door. He was tall and scholarly-looking and if not exactly handsome, still a pretty decent specimen of manhood. Anjali gazed at him speculatively. If it hadn’t been for the annoying moustache he cultivated and the fact that she was still not over her estranged husband, she could have actually been tempted by him.
Silently, she pieced the sheet back together and pushed it towards Deven. His brows puckered up as he went through the letter and then he gave a snort of laughter. ‘If only they knew,’ he said ruefully. Then he caught sight of her expression. ‘Is this bothering you?’
‘A little. Okay, quite a lot, actually. It isn’t the first letter I’ve had.’
Deven hesitated a little, ‘Were they all…’
‘…suggesting that I was having a rip-roaring affair with you? Yes.’ She kept her voice low, mindful of the sharp-eared students passing by the open door. ‘Actually, Deven, maybe you shouldn’t drop by so often. I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s giving people the wrong idea. What’s the point?’
The rueful expression deepened and he stood up. ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you at night, is that okay?’
‘I guess,’ Anjali said grumpily. Deven had proposed marriage on at least three previous occasions, ignoring the minor fact that she had a husband who was still alive and kicking.
‘I’ll see you around then,’ he said, and Anjali nodded without looking up. She had ten minutes before her next lecture, and she stuffed the pieces of paper into her purse while she pulled out her class notes to brush up.
Deven ran an impatient hand through his hair as he walked away. Anjali might be married and have a twelve-year-old kid, but she was still maddeningly attractive with her lovely Madonna face and full, curvy figure. That husband of hers was a fool, he thought savagely. To leave his young wife and daughter to go off to work in another country! No wonder their marriage was on the rocks. He’d have liked nothing better than to marry Anjali himself and settle down to happy domesticity with her, but she seemed constitutionally incapable of seeing his point of view.
Anjali was still a little perturbed when she stepped into her next class. As usual, the class was almost full—the college didn’t insist on more than fifty per cent attendance in each subject, but very few students missed Prof. Anjali Dubey’s lectures. Deven scowled as he passed her class a while later. His own classes were usually full as well, but that was because he inspired a very healthy respect among his students. Also, of course, because he dropped their grades for every class they bunked. Anjali’s classes were full because the girls openly admired her and copied her hairstyles, while the boys developed a sudden keen interest in Chemistry after having virtually ignored the subject all through their school years. Deven’s scowl worsened as he noticed a pimply young man in the last bench carefully drawing a sketch of Anjali in his notebook. It was a flattering, if somewhat disproportionate, representation especially in the chest area, and Deven had to repress a strong urge to lean in through an open window and smash the young Rembrandt’s head into his wooden desk.
In time-honoured teacher tradition, Anjali had decided to give herself a little break by giving the class a surprise quiz. After she had written the questions on the board, she sat at her desk and allowed her mind to wander. She didn’t even notice Deven walk past the class. The letter had bothered her even more than she had admitted to Deven. Not for the first time, she wished that her domestic circumstances were a little more conventional. A husband would have been a convenient prop to have around—ever since she and Sushil had separated, she had had people acting weird with her. The graffiti in the college men’s room featured her name many times over—coupled with a male colleague’s in a few places and in others, just reflecting someone’s sick fantasies. Thankfully no one had linked her with a student yet, but it was probably only a matter of time. It didn’t help that most of her female colleagues were disapproving matrons in their fifties who found Anjali’s bright-coloured churidar kurtas and tumbling curls an affront to their collective dignity.
‘Concentrate, Aarav,’ she told a student who was wriggling uncomfortably in his seat. The boys around him were grinning and nudging each other, and she frowned. She was pretty big on discipline; you had to be if you wanted to survive more than a day as a teacher in the Shantidurga College of Science and Commerce.
‘Sorry Ma’am,’ Aarav said, turning an agonized face up to her. He was a curly-haired, rather impish-looking kid, one of the youngest in the class. Usually, he had a bright grin plastered all over his face but today, he was contorting his face as if he was being tortured by the police.
‘Are you not well?’ Anjali asked, but before she could complete the question, Aarav had leapt to his feet, both hands clutching his rather childishly rounded backside. ‘Owww, sorry, ouch,’ was all he said, almost dancing next to his desk as he scrambled to get something out of his back pocket. ‘Owww,’ he said finally as he got a little bit of paper and something that looked like a little grey pebble out of his pocket and threw it in the aisle, twisting his body into weird contortions as his classmates dissolved into laughter.
Anjali sighed as soon as she saw the pebble. There was a student who tried this every year in spite of all the dire warnings issued by the Chemistry lab.
‘Sodium,’ she said as Aarav continued to clutch at his burnt bum. Going by his evident embarrassment, his trousers probably had a hole in them. ‘Aarav, do you have your Chemistry textbook with you?’
Aarav nodded nervously.
‘Great,’ she said smiling pleasantly at the students, most of whom had stopped giggling and were trying to gauge her mood.
‘Can someone tell me a few of the properties of sodium please?’
‘Atomic number 11,’ a bespectacled girl volunteered from the front row. ‘Soft metal, good conductor.’ She shot Aarav a quick glance. ‘And umm, highly reactive, Ma’am.’
‘So someone who decides to flick some from the lab and put it in his pocket would have to be pretty dumb, right?’ Aarav’s face fell immediately. ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d take it home and see what happened when I put it in water. The book says it’ll explode, but it didn’t look that dangerous. I’m really sorry, Ma’am…’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ Anjali said. ‘For you, because I’m now going to ask you to pick up that piece of sodium and take it back very carefully to the Chemistry lab, and apologise to the lab assistant for stealing it. I need to see a note from him confirming that you’ve put the stuff back and it’s now safely stored. Don’t come back without the note. Unfortunately you’ll miss the rest of the test and from what I can see, you’ve got two of the three questions you’ve attempted, wrong.’ The test counted towards their year-end grades, and it was a very subdued Aarav who carefully collected the piece of sodium and carried it off.
‘The rest of the class gets ten minutes extra on the test,’ she announced once he was out of the door. ‘And Mr Sisodia, you get minus twenty marks for cheating from Mr Tomar’s answer sheet.’ Having successfully defused the situation and gotten the class settled again, she went back to her desk. She had lost her chain of thought and giving up on introspection, she spent the rest of the class keeping an eagle eye on the kids so that they didn’t succumb to the very natural urge to peek into their neighbours’ answer sheets.
Deven called her after dinner, just after Anjali had got her daughter into bed and was ready to go to bed herself. The conversation was a difficult one, made significantly more difficult because Anjali had to hide in the garden and whisper into the phone. Finding a suitable spot was as difficult as solving a problem in differential calculus because:
a)She had to be in a place where her father and daughter couldn’t hear her
b)She had to look gainfully employed if her incurably nosey neighbours peeked down from their terrace and saw her, and
c)Her phone needed to work, and there were very few spots in the garden with any signal.
She finally ended up wedged between the well and the concrete box that housed her tulsi plant, pretending to be doing stuff to the tulsi’s roots. The parapet of the well was cold and clammy behind her and she had to squat ungracefully to avoid getting green algae on her knees. Luckily, it wasn’t dark—her father insisted on keeping two bright halogen lights on all night to discourage burglars.
‘But Deven, we’re just friends!’ she said in exasperation. ‘I can’t marry you. I’ve told you this so many times, I don’t know how else I can make you understand!’
‘A good kick in the pants should do the job,’ a helpful male voice said an inch behind her ear. Anjali gave an undignified yelp and tumbled over, narrowly stopping her phone from falling into the well. Her heart rate had tripled and her eyes were wide with alarm as she scrambled to regain her balance; it didn’t help that the cemented area around the well was hopelessly slippery.
‘So sorry,’ the owner of the voice said, not sounding sorry at all as he held out a sinewy hand to help her up, his eyes dancing with amusement. Anjali glared at him from the ground, ignoring the outstretched hand.
‘Where’d you pop up from?’ she asked ungraciously, though her heart was doing an uneven little bhangra in her chest. She had thought her husband was in Saudi Arabia, and embarrassing as it was to be found skulking in the garden and talking to a boyfriend, a little voice in her head insisted that it served Sushil right.
‘Caught a flight, got here a few minutes ago,’ Sushil said, hunkering down next to her. He gestured towards her phone which was emitting worried sounds. ‘Do you want to tell lover-boy that you’re a bit tied up right now? Maybe he could make an appointment to talk to you later.’
He didn’t bother to keep his voice down and Anjali had a nasty feeling that Deven could hear every word. She made a face and picked up the phone. ‘Deven, something’s come up…I need to go.’
‘All right,’ Deven said, managing to sound dignified, wounded and possessive all at the same time. ‘I do hope everything’s all right.’
‘Everything’s fine,’ Anjali said, and cut the call. Scrambling to her feet, she brushed off the green stains on her salwar. ‘Sushil, why are you here? You should’ve told us you were coming. We might not have been at home, or we might have had people over…’
‘Or you might be making plans to marry lusty young college professors,’ Sushil said, shaking his head sorrowfully as he got to his feet in a single fluid movement. ‘You do know that polyandry’s illegal, right?’
‘We’re not together any longer,’ Anjali said, hating how defensive she sounded.
‘Right now, we’re not,’ he agreed. ‘But that’s exactly what I’m here to talk about.’
He had a familiar determined look on his face and Anjali said with foreboding, ‘Oh no. Sushil, we don’t want to get back together—remember how bad it was? Come on, let me get you something to eat, we can talk later when you’re not all fired up.’
She was able to keep him off the topic till he finished dinner, and then he started again. It wasn’t a totally unexpected onslaught. They had been separated for a while but had stayed in touch because of their daughter, Gayatri. For the last few months, the tone of Sushil’s e-mails had become more and more nostalgic. Anjali had put it down to probable girlfriend trouble—Sushil always started missing her when a relationship went wrong. This was the first time he had proposed getting back together though, and Anjali was finding it difficult to come up with reasons for refusing.
‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said for about the hundredth time.
Sushil sighed. It was a gusty sigh that seemed to imply that it wasn’t easy dealing with someone who was being childish and unreasonable, and Anjali felt a strong desire to slap him.
‘Anjali, how long are you going to live buried away in Indore? It was all right when we were kids and didn’t know any better. But there’s a big wide world out there…’ he gestured so that Anjali could see quite how big and wide it was. After a few seconds, he lowered his arms and went on. ‘And it is not just you, is it? You’re subjecting Gayatri to the same narrow, hide-bound childhood that we had when she can have so much more!’ Seeing Anjali’s steely expression falter a little, he pressed further to his advantage. ‘A better school, more facilities, the best private classes money can buy…’
‘And having to cover her face every time she steps out of doors,’ Anjali retorted. ‘That’s what the Middle East is like, however good the schools and the classes are. If that was what I wanted for my daughter, I can move to a village and have it right here in India. Save on the airfare too.’
Too late, she realised that she had played right into Sushil’s hands. A broad smile spread across his handsome face, and he said slowly, ‘Oh didn’t I tell you? I’ve moved back to India.’ He saw her expression change and immediately went on. ‘I’m in Mumbai. Come on, Anjali, we’ve lived apart for so long… I know we’ve had issues, but we can put those behind and start again. Think about it, at least for Gayatri’s sake, if not for us.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Anjali promised. ‘Now go to bed. Dad sleeps very lightly nowadays. If he hears us talking this late, he’ll get upset.’
‘It’ll be just like old times then,’ Sushil said before he could stop himself. Anjali had always been his ideal of the perfect woman and he was more than ready to get back with her. He bent his head and brushed a light kiss across her lush lips, smiling slightly as she quivered in response, ‘I’ve missed you,’ he whispered against her mouth.
‘I’ve missed you too,’ Anjali said, using her last ounce of self-control to step back and away from him. ‘A little. Now go to bed before we wake everyone up. I can’t believe you landed up in the middle of the night like this without giving me any warning.’
He gave her a lopsided little grin and said, ‘I couldn’t wait to see you.’
‘I’m suitably flattered,’ she said drily. ‘Goodnight!’ And before he could say anything else, she turned and ran into her bedroom.
It was an easy decision on the face of it. Anjali was tired of living in Indore and being at the beck and call of her rather autocratic father, and the thought of living with Sushil again was terribly tempting. He had aged well, she thought as she lay awake staring at the ceiling later at night. When she had first met him he was seventeen, tall and lanky with a shock of unruly hair and a smile that made her insides go all squirmy. They dated clandestinely for a few years, and when they were out of college, they told their parents that they were getting married.
According to her father, their marriage was doomed to fail. ‘Too young,’ he grunted. ‘The fellow doesn’t even have a proper job.’
It had taken Sushil less than a month to land a ‘proper job’, and for the first few years of their marriage they’d been blissfully happy. Sure they’d had to live with Sushil’s mom and she had some pretty annoying habits; expecting Anjali to wear a sari whenever she stepped outside the house was one. Having a bhajan CD on at top volume all through the day, always the same one, was another. But all in all, she was a nice enough mother-in-law and her amazing cooking skills made up for having Anup Jalota blaring into your ears all day long. Then Gayatri was born and Sushil decided that an entry-level engineering job in a fibre optics company wasn’t enough for a man with a family to support. He took a job with a company in Saudi Arabia without even discussing it with Anjali properly. Or rather, they’d discussed it. Anjali had said no and that she didn’t want to go there. He had gone ahead and taken the job anyway.
‘Selfish and money-minded,’ was what Anjali’s father had said then, but she had defended Sushil hotly. ‘You can go join him after the baby is a little older,’ Sushil’s mother had said, giving her a comfortable smile. But a few months later, Sushil’s mother was dead—a sudden stroke followed by a heart attack. All those parathas and bowls of gajar halwa had led to her being hopelessly overweight and her arteries were apparently so clogged that it was a miracle she had stayed alive this long. Anjali had actually been more affected than Sushil. Her own mother had died when she was in her teens, and Mrs Dubey had been an invaluable source of strength when Gayatri was born.
Maybe that was when she should have joined Sushil, Anjali thought, tossing restlessly in bed. Except that Sushil had no longer seemed keen about it and her father had told her that there was no way he was letting her go to Saudi Arabia. So she had moved back to the house she had grown up in, and her daughter became the focus of her life. A year later, Sushil and she had a big show-down, during which he insisted that either she moved to Saudi or they separate. She had chosen separation and since then they’d never discussed the possibility of getting back together. Perhaps it could work, she thought drowsily. They were both older now and, hopefully, wiser and she was tired of living alone. Also, she missed having a man in her life… Turning over, she snuggled into her pillow as her eyes drifted shut.
‘You didn’t tell me Papa was here!’ Gayatri sounded more surprised than annoyed, and Anjali smiled as she looked up. Twelve years old, with long flowing hair and a piquant little face, Gayatri was the most perfect child she had ever seen. Anjali kept telling herself that she was hopelessly biased, but lots of people seemed to agree with her.
In some ways, Gayatri was like Sushil—as single-minded and driven, but the drive came tempered with a particularly sweet nature and an ability to charm the socks off the crankiest adult. Even her grandfather wasn’t exempt.
Sushil stood up and pulled his daughter into his arms. Gayatri hugged him back enthusiastically. In spite of his long absences and estrangement from his wife, he was an excellent father and Gayatri adored him.
‘How long are you here for?’ she demanded. ‘A day? A week? Did Mom tell you about the drawing competition I won?’
‘A few days,’ Sushil said. ‘And yes, she told me, and she showed me the drawing as well. What was it supposed to be, the Abominable Snowman?’
Gayatri gave him a fake punch in the arm. ‘It’s a drawing of you !’ she said. ‘The theme was “My Awesome Dad”. Though if you thought it was a picture of a Yeti, I don’t know…maybe I should have called it “My Shortsighted Dad”, or “My Really Ugly Dad-Who-Looks-Like-a-Yeti”.’
‘Don’t be cheeky,’ Anjali said automatically, but she was smiling. Evidently encouraged by the smile, Gayatri asked, ‘So can I bunk school today?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Sushil and Anjali said together. ‘But Nanaji says I don’t learn anything worthwhile there, and I’ve seen Daddy after so long… Pleeeaaase?’
Sushil looked at Anjali and she hesitated a little before making up her mind. She had to go to work herself, and it wouldn’t hurt Sushil to know that he couldn’t walk into their lives unannounced and expect them to drop everything.
‘I think you’d better go,’ she said gently. ‘But tell you what, you can skip Sanskrit tuition and come home directly after school. I’ll speak to Mrs Singh.’
Anjali’s father came into the kitchen and frowned as he heard the last part of the sentence. He didn’t say anything though, but he gave Sushil a curt nod before sitting down at the large breakfast table.
‘Poha?’ Anjali asked her father nervously.
‘Yes,’ he said, peering at the large bowl in the centre of the table. ‘Is that coconut in it?’
Gayatri came around the table and gave him an exuberant hug—she was in a wonderful mood and didn’t care who knew it.
‘Yep, it’s coconut,’ she said. ‘And don’t say it’s bad for your heart. There’s barely one gram of it in there.’
Anjali had spent her entire life in complete awe of her father and watching her daughter expertly twist him around her little finger was an ongoing revelation. He was smiling reluctantly now, as Gayatri ladled the poha onto his plate.
‘I’m off to school now,’ she announced. ‘Don’t fight when I’m away, okay people?’
‘Have you done your homework?’ Anjali asked. ‘What about that word list?’
‘I have it by heart,’ Gayatri said smugly. ‘Ask me something.’
‘Onomatopoeia,’ Anjali said promptly.
Gayatri’s brow puckered up, and she spelt it out slowly but correctly.
‘Good,’ Anjali’s father said. ‘Do you know what it means?’
‘Umm, something to do with the way words sound?’
‘Look it up in the dictionary,’ Anjali said. Gayatri made a face. ‘Mom, tell me, no, please? Dad?’
‘It means a person who pees on a mat,’ Sushil said. ‘On-a-mat-pee-er.’
Gayatri giggled but Anjali glared at Sushil. Her father grunted. It was the sort of grunt that seemed to express his opinion of Sushil’s intellectual capabilities, and Anjali winced. It was probably natural for Dr Mishra to be judgemental at his age, but it certainly didn’t make for easy conversation around him.
Sushil got to his feet as soon as Gayatri left. ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit,’ he said. ‘Got a few people to meet, and there’s some stuff I need to sort out at the bank.’ ‘Aren’t you leaving for college?’ Dr Sharma asked half an hour later as it finally dawned on him that Anjali was still puttering around in the kitchen. She shook her head. ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Sushil’s moving to Mumbai and he wants Gayatri and me to move there with him.’
For a minute, Anjali thought he hadn’t heard her, and she was about to repeat the sentence when he said, ‘Yes, I thought it was something like that.’ He fell silent, staring into space and Anjali noticed with a slight sense of shock how tired he looked.
‘You should go,’ he said, and she looked at him in surprise.
‘I thought you’d be against the idea!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m undecided myself.’
‘It’s the best thing for Gayatri,’ he said. ‘And even for you. You’re still young, living like this with your father and daughter. It isn’t good for you. I know you’re very careful, but sooner or later… you’re only human, after all.’
It took her a few seconds to understand what he was saying, and then her face flamed up in embarrassment. Okay, so there had been some gossip about her and Deven, but she hadn’t realised it had reached her father. Or at least, nothing serious enough for her father to accuse her of being ripe for an affair, and an indiscreet one at that.
‘It’ll be good for Gayatri,’ she said. ‘But what about you? Would you want to come to Mumbai with us, or…’ It had been Sushil’s suggestion that they rent a flat near theirs, perhaps in the same apartment complex, for her father. Given that the two men had never got along, it was a very generous gesture and it had tilted the scales in favour of moving.
But her father was already shaking his head. ‘I’ll be fine on my own,’ he said. ‘And if I need help, Arvind is only a couple of houses down the road.’
Arvind was Anjali’s brother. When he married, he moved into his own house. Privately, Anjali thought it was the only reason he was still on talking terms with his father and still married to his wife, but a lot of people felt it was odd for him to live separately.
Odd or not, Anjali felt very thankful that Arvind hadn’t moved out of Indore. Her father was an old curmudgeon, but she was very fond of him, and leaving him alone with no family around would be unthinkable.
Sushil’s face lit up when Anjali told him. ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘When can you move?’
‘I’ll complete this semester’s classes and we can move immediately after that,’ she said. ‘And we’ll have to figure out a school for Gayatri, won’t we?’
‘We’ll have to tell her first,’ Sushil said. They were alone in the house—Prof. Dubey had headed off to a friend’s place for a game of chess, and Sushil was standing very close to her now, so close that she could feel his breath stirring her hair.
‘She’ll be thrilled,’ Anjali said, trying to sound as brisk and practical as she possibly could, though she was very conscious of Sushil’s nearness. It had been several years since they’d last touched, and all kinds of horrid little practicalities shoved themselves into her mind. She hadn’t turned the gas off, her legs weren’t waxed, and while she was wearing a new kameez, her innerwear was ancient and had been chosen for strictly practical purposes. Sushil’s hands were on her arms now, his fingers gently caressing the sensitive spot inside her elbow.
‘Are you thrilled?’ he murmured close to her ear, and Anjali wriggled away. ‘Stop it,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘I’m in the middle of making lunch and Gayatri will be home from school any minute now.’
‘We have an hour before she gets home,’ Sushil said, his lazy smile crinkling up the corners of his eyes. ‘Turn off the gas, and let’s go to bed.’
The approach was so blunt that Anjali gaped at him in dismay. It was almost three years since they’d last slept together, and her first reaction was to wonder if she still knew what to do. Sushil leaned across her and turned a knob to put the gas stove off. Then he bent down and kissed her swiftly, his lips comfortably familiar and wildly exciting all at the same time. His voice was a little rough when he finally lifted his head.
‘Which room?’ he asked, and Anjali’s protests died on her lips as she looked up at him. Sushil’s eyes were his most attractive feature—deep-set and fringed with short, thick eyelashes, they could focus on you to the exclusion of everyone else in the world. Right now, they had the slightly glazed look that she remembered from earlier lovemaking sessions. His hands were already wandering over her body, and the last little shreds of doubt in Anjali’s mind dissolved as he began to nuzzle the nape of her neck. He might have been a crap husband in many ways, but Sushil had always been phenomenal in bed. Agreeing to give their marriage another shot and then acting coy about sex would be a bit like paying for a five-course buffet dinner and refusing to touch the dessert.
‘Dad and I wanted to check something with you,’ Anjali said when Gayatri got back from school. Gayatri looked up at them enquiringly. ‘If it’s about swimming lessons, I still want to learn,’ she said.
‘Well, we can talk about swimming lessons as well,’ Sushil said, tweaking her plaits. ‘But it was something a little more serious.’
‘Swimming is serious,’ she said. ‘But anyway, shoot.’
‘How do you feel about moving to Mumbai?’ Sushil asked. ‘I’m back in India now, and I’ve rented a place in an apartment complex that incidentally has a fabulous swimming pool.’
Gayatri stared at him. ‘Move to Mumbai?’ she asked, and her evident dismay made Sushil’s heart clench in his chest. He should have come back to India years ago and spent more time with Gayatri when she was growing up. One regretful thought chased another through his brain, but he tried not to let any of it show as he said gently, ‘Yes, you can take some time and think about it. Ask us any questions that you want…’
‘But what about Mum?’ Gayatri asked, her eyes darting between the two of them. ‘Where will she be?’
Sushil looked surprised. ‘She’d move as well, of course.’ Then, as he saw a look of relief spread over her little face, he said gently, ‘I wouldn’t try to take you away from her, sweetheart. I want all of us to live together again, like a proper family.’
Gayatri, for the first time in her short life, appeared to be at a loss for words, and Anjali stepped in. ‘You loved Mumbai when we went there for a holiday, didn’t you? I’m sure you’ll like living there.’
She nodded, but she was clearly torn. She had dreamed of her parents getting back together, but she hadn’t expected it to really happen, and definitely not all of a sudden like this. When she imagined it, she had always thought Sushil would come back to Indore.
‘What about my friends?’ she asked suddenly. ‘And Nanaji? Will he come with us?’ In spite of being as tall as Anjali, she looked suddenly so lost and child-like that Anjali put her arms around her as she began explaining why Gayatri’s grandfather wasn’t coming along.
It was probably the thought that she could still come back to Indore for holidays and that the house she had grown up in, would be as it always was, that made Gayatri reconcile to leaving her grandfather behind. Sushil stayed silent throughout the conversation. He didn’t dislike Anjali’s father, but the two men were very different and it never failed to amaze Sushil that his daughter was so close to her grandad. ‘It’s like watching a kitten cuddle up to a grizzly,’ he muttered once Gayatri was out of the room. ‘And your dad’s just bad. I actually saw him smile four times today. Must be a world record.’
‘Stop it,’ Anjali said automatically, but her mind was far away. Now that the decision was taken, there was one person she definitely needed to tell before the news spread.
‘Have you thought it through?’ Deven asked her quietly when he came around to meet her a few days later. ‘You weren’t happy earlier. How do you know things will work this time around?’
‘It’s the best thing for Gayatri,’ Anjali said. ‘I’m sorry Deven. I let you get the wrong idea, but the thing is, even if I wasn’t going back to Sushil it would never have worked between us.’
‘I realise that now,’ Deven said. He was gentlemanly enough not to say that he’d have realised it a lot earlier if Anjali hadn’t strung him along, but she couldn’t help feeling horribly guilty all the same. It had been mainly vanity that had made her do it. Vanity and the desire to prove to herself that she could manage without Sushil—she couldn’t feel proud of either emotion, and was heartily relieved when Deven finally got up to leave.
‘I’ll stay in touch,’ Anjali promised as she saw him to the door, knowing fully well that she wouldn’t. She heaved a little sigh of relief as she shut the door. Seeing Deven in her home had finally driven in the fact that she had been crazy to even consider hooking up with him. He was the kind of man her father would have chosen for her—maybe that was why her subconscious had done its best to con her into falling for him. It hadn’t quite succeeded, and now that Sushil was back, she couldn’t imagine herself with anyone else.
Dear Papa,
I’m so happy we’re shifting to Mumbai. I’m looking forward to seeing you again. But I’ll miss Nanaji and my friends, especially my best friend Ananya.
Mummy told me that your flat is in Bandra. I forgot to ask you—can you see the sea from the windows?
Love,
Gayatri