I couldn't sleep, as I rested against the pillow and even as I tossed the memory of her hands falling off his face remained with me. Their helplessness lingered in my conscious as an echo and I couldn't tell why it hurt. Was it hurt at all?
When I grew restless and as it took on the fervor of a burning ache, I reached for my phone and called him.
"Tell me everything there is to know about Prithvi and Mitra." I said when he answered his phone skipping the norms of greeting that went with a phone conversation.
"I'm working." Was his blunt answer, "And its midnight." He didn't sound angry, but it was obvious he was avoiding the subject.
"You can always take a break, Shiv." I tried to sound as pouty as I could and I pictured him shaking his head.
"What is with you and these midnight calls? Can't you do your snooping about people during the day?" The humor was back in his tone.
"I can't entirely be sure that you are just avoiding the subject. Or if you truly seem to have a problem talking with me at this time?"
He didn't respond for a while and I held my breath in anticipation for the time he didn't. "There is no point playing cupid now and it's the last thing they need when it's all water under the bridge."
"I can't put a finger on it," I said and I was honest about it. "I feel I have become a part of something after having witnessed their little tete-a-tete. I cannot help myself anymore."
"Damn right you will," he yelled and his anger that blast out of the receiver made me cringe. "And you will stay out of it."
Shit! He didn't need to know that, I told myself as I bit my lip.
"Now, don't you give me marching orders collector saab." I mustered to fight him off. "You can practice that on your tame subjects of Jaitsar."
He was silent and I sensed he was upset from the lashing that was uncalled for. Or so, I thought until I learnt of the details that had brought out that side of him - out of concern for me.
"Shiv," I said in a conciliatory tone, "I just need to know that everyone had given their mighty best to not see a day like today."
"And what might that be?"
Though I felt the sarcasm cut me, I chose to ignore it. "Don't ask me and you know what I'm talking about..."
"Do you know what happens of unrequited love?" he said after a long second.
"It fades?"
"No, just the opposite. It gains bearing inside you if not let go at the right time. There is so much weight around it that it becomes a block between you and all else."
He sighed before he added, "for lack of a better phrase, it's like a drawn out foreplay and that is what is luring you to them. Or..." he didn't go on and instead ended saying, "Just forget it."
"You seem to have figured it all, haven't you?" Now he had me in a fit for thinking he had me all figured out. I didn't tell him that, but sure enough gave him a piece of my mind. "I certainly didn't expect you to debase what they have by putting it in a sexual context. It was anything but that. The charm is certainly there, I won't deny it, when they seem so unattainable to each other. Do give me credit when I say it's not lust or just attraction."
"Of course!" he exclaimed taking offense. "As I said, it was for a lack of better phrase." Another pause and I heard his voice soften, clearly laced with something along the lines of distress. "Anandi, there are too many elements involved in their story and powerful ones at that. I wouldn't knowingly put you in the path of danger when you seem to think it's only a puzzle you are trying to solve. The truth is it isn't one."
"Fine!" I gave up and settled for a lesser subject that wouldn't make him hold guard. "Just tell me how you knew Prithvi."
"You are a stubborn one, Anandi." He said and I heard him relax. "Prithvi's father was the local thasiladar. They had been recently transferred from Athirapally. He was the new boy in school and so, he was also the outcast for a while. Bring in the factor that he is a southie and you know what happens then. Fist fights, mud rolls, telling on each other and then the obvious fight for class rank, class monitor etc."
"I cannot imagine you getting into a fist fight, Shiv." There was a laugh in my voice.
"Well, I didn't exactly have 31 years of wisdom then, only thirteen or fourteen and you should know that is not much when your body is just beginning to show your new strength. Getting into a fight was one way to cover up your own insecurities - of keeping appearances. We were just dirty little rascals, like the movie."
"True that, although I doubt even Daadisa will accept this image of you. To her, you are the Ramji of Jaitsar after all," I said not quite wanting to make that diversion. Speaking about his childhood had loosened him to share without omission - at least that is what I thought then - and I didn't want to lose it.
"Hey! Ram is only nine heads short of Raavan. And for all you know the nine minds are still inside one."
"Oh! Please." I was close to blowing him a raspberry when the streak he was referring to could only be anything but dark. "I will take up that debate with you another night. Not today. I don't want to distract you from what you were telling..."
"By 11th grade all that changed," he began once again. "We started preparing for our boards together and then the college entrance preps. Quite obviously, he aced IIT-JEE and I didn't. I went to Pilani instead. He moved to Delhi then. We lost touch for the first one year or so, but he came back to Udaipur every chance he got from the second year onward."
That change in pattern, got me curious. "Why?" I asked.
"It wasn't Mitra, if that is what you were thinking," he aptly caught what I had alluded to. "It was his roommate Maan he was running from. Apparently, he was a Punjabi who had fallen in love with his mentor's daughter in Chennai and drove Prithvi mad asking him to teach Tamil. According to Prithvi, he couldn't stop bringing her name up every chance he got: Geethika this, Geethika that. And you know how he gets testy when you talk while he is painting."
"Not really." I drawled. It was a minor detail, although one he'd overlooked. "You just have to watch for the right moment he is moving in and out of his trance. Actually, it's the only time he talks. At other times, he is testy as you said."
He was quiet for a second and I prompted him to continue.
"That and the fact he loved Udaipur art." This time he didn't need the encouragement to go on and I knew he had fallen into the flow. "He was just as gifted and familiar with miniatures and period art as he was with contemporary. But of course, he is something else when he does a contemporary."
"I know." I assented and that added another reprieve in our exchange before he continued.
"We were done with our engineering. By then, he had already given his CAT and had secured admission with IIM-B. I was planning to get out of the country for a while, so I looked into London and its surroundings. With some luck, I got into LSE and moved there shortly. We were in touch and then we were not - those periods alternated. Come third semester I was driven into shock when he dropped me a one liner that he was quitting B-school to join Delhi University. Not as a student, but as a teaching aid."
"Oh! That explains it..." And I silently cussed for interrupting him again.
"What does?"
"Nothing. Did you talk to him? Try to convince him to go back?" I spoke in a hurry before I could put ideas into his head that I had talked to Mitra.
"It was already too late. It was only when we got to talk over phone, he told me about his father's death. Though his father's pension was enough to run the house hold, he wasn't convinced. The TA pay wasn't much by any standards, but he said besides the security, he was glad it let him to do what he liked. His mother went back to Athirapally, their family home, while he continued to work in Delhi and that is when he met..." he held off finishing his sentence.
After a deathly quiet moment, he said, "you are a clever one too, Anandi. You knew that there was no telling about Prithvi without bringing in Mitra."
"Oops! Caught red handed." I smiled bashful.
"Mitra was one of his students." I could nearly hear the regret in his tone for taking this route and I smiled like a child granted her prayer, eager and pleased. "I can't tell if he wouldn't have fallen for Mitra had he known about her earlier on," he said almost wistfully, "but I can't stop wishing for it. She is a blue blood, as you might already know, with a network of family connections running through central and state. Her father was everything they portrayed in the movies - conceited, hot headed, controlling, image conscious and a traditional bas***d who prided their social strata, clan, caste and all that shit."
"So, they fought against her dad?" Lord! I thought, what drama real life was.
"Not that I know of. I cannot speak for the time I wasn't in the picture for the two years I was in London. But, when I came back, he was already gone beyond any saving."
He clearly couldn't have meant he was beyond saving and I prodded further, aiming to correct. "He gave her up just like that? I mean..."
He cut me off before I could give shape to my thoughts. "It's not like they dated or there had been a proposal. It was all understood."
"Shiv, you are not making sense at all. How could they be all this..." After seeing the person he'd become at the sight of her, it didn't tally in my head that he'd given her up without a fight.
"Anandi," he drawled with frustration, "you are forgetting that for the time she'd been in the university, like every rich parent, her father had let her be the wild child with the illusion of freedom, though he had her in his leash just the same. She had been behind him. Not him. To my knowledge, he had never once acknowledged what they had. I didn't know what kept her going despite his dismissals or rude behavior, but I can imagine it to be the general obsession with tragic, sullen and brooding male leads you women seem to have."
"Not all women." That was about the time, I shifted my phone and started drawing in the book closest to me.
"At least, she was," he contested. "How do you otherwise explain the fact she hasn't give up on him after all of these years?"
"If Prithvi never proposed, then why does he blame her?" Our conversation had gotten to the point of being instantaneous that the questions came easy as well.
"He doesn't, Anandi. I don't think anyone can be blamed here." He was silent with contemplation. "They were young and with the kind of family portfolio she comes with, you don't stand a chance against it. He knew that much. This is not the movies and that is what I have been trying to tell you. When her father came to get her back home, he already had a plan - he got her engaged without losing time, only she thought she could fight her way out of it for the next three years. She failed too. Now, she is the daughter-in-law of the cabinet minister's son. No doubt, he is in line to be the next party leader."
Married?
"No!" I cried. "You have got it all wrong. She cannot be married. You didn't see them today. She...she called him baby..." I had become incoherent by then and I got the real intent behind his words when he'd said they were beyond help. Suddenly, I didn't want him to go on. I didn't want to hear more of their story and I wished that I could forget everything I had heard so far. And everything in my chest ached with a heaviness that I was aware wouldn't disappear for a while.
"If you loved someone the way she does, then you would use such endearments too. Not that I need to tell you, but you don't truly ever stop loving anyone. You only start learning to love new things. New people."
There was a tear in my eye and I got to it before it could roll down my cheek. "Whose side are you really on, Shiv? You seem to be taken by her." I managed to say.
He gave a throaty laugh at that. "I'm on my side, Anandi and no one else's - the side that knows the means to keep us all sane."
"That is no answer at all," I protested. "If you were a good friend to him, then you wouldn't let him be like this - a stagnate. After hearing all this, I don't understand why he would even work at their palace hotel?"
"So, now you see why I called this a drawn out foreplay." He was excited as if he'd proved his opinion in the way of my own questioning. "That is how they have been part of each other's lives for as long as I have remembered."
However, his voice soon grew tight with pain. "Ever since, he quit his job at the university soon after she left, she has been his agent behind the scenes through someone or the other. She would get him commissions for a theater, gallery or something. He pretends not to know of her involvement, but who is he kidding? And to-date he has only declined a few, that too only because of commitments he'd managed to get on his own."
Lord! I couldn't tell if I had to be sorry that they hadn't put it all behind them. Or happy that there was still such kind of love that endured past the ordeals in this world. At the moment, I was only glad they had gone back to their lives being themselves. If not whole, then with the pieces that still made them functional.
"And its time you give up." He insisted firmly after a brief pause. "They don't meet to bicker over lost love every day. Today was a slip. It was only bound to happen when they haven't come within inches of each other in years."
"Then the deals?" There were still too many questions unanswered and my mind hinged on the one that was too blatant to be ignored. "How does she manage to get him to agree? Doesn't anyone in her family get suspi..." Without doubt it dawned me.
"It's you...isn't it?" I shook my head in disbelief. "You are the one who have been playing messenger all along. Keeping tabs on them."
And it all fell together for me. "Keeping them separate, but also keeping them close by telling them just what they need to know about the other; without getting them too curious to the extent of wanting to break rules. All that smart act about not knowing if Prithvi was still in Udaipur was a total scam you were pulling on me."
He didn't speak for some time and I thought if my rattle had closed him up altogether. "It's a double edged sword, really," he said as if his voice came from a different place now. "When I came back from London, I could hardly recognize him. He'd stopped painting and you have no idea what that could do to him. You don't need to be on drugs to go through that kind of withdrawal and pain. Any kind of passion taken from you would do that. At first, I thought it was his art then I later realized it was her. She had fused herself into that other world he went to and when she left, he couldn't recognize it any more. Reality was too bland for him and the dual loss pushed him to the brink of insanity."
"In some ways, I had done that to him myself," he added as an after-thought.
"What do you mean?" I enquired.
"Nothing. I believe it will suffice to say, I knew how to redeem myself. I still remember the day I had dragged him out of his apartment to the corridor. To bleach him with the sunlight that he hadn't seen in weeks. I kicked him. Punched him to provoke a fight, to show myself that he still had life in him worth reviving. That rascal wouldn't lift a finger. I never thought I would have to beat a man to death to pull him out of it."
There was more than pain in his voice and I didn't know what it was, but I was certain it had cut him like a drawn out blade. "Shiv,I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I'm not. It was the best fight of my life. I took him everywhere after that." I heard the pride rise in his voice. "Even to my IAS prep classes and eventually, I convinced him to move into my home too. He camped in the same room you are in now."
"Want me to tell you something about the irony of life?" he was laughing freely and yet his voice was distant, as if with the recollection, he too had moved back in time. Young and free and yet, restrained in equal measure by the weight of his words. "He would lie on the couch all day like a bum, while I would walk up and down the room with my books and he would still go to the mock test and clear it. I mean, he didn't even want to be in civil services for godsakes. I was jealous as hell of that bas***d then, but internally I was just glad he wasn't hiding his light under his bushel anymore. Then her phone call came about an assignment for a small gallery. He slowly got back to painting and it made him a better man. When he heard the long story short that she was happy, he got back to normalcy and the rest is history as you know it."
I had no words by then and knew just as much that he was drained by their story. It was like that block - the one he'd mentioned in the beginning - was tied to him too and now, to me by the association of having heard it all.
"I don't know who had gone weak then," he said with such heavy contemplation that I feared a confession was in order. "Was it I or him or her? But, I had already started feeding their habit to stay informed of the other. I can't say I regret it and I won't explain myself if it ever comes to that."
"Hey! Isn't everything fair in love and war," I said without cheer and hoped I sounded like I had meant it. In truth, my thoughts were half way down discerning the mess they had gotten into.
When he didn't respond, I said, "Thank you!"
It was a few more seconds before he spoke again. "Trust me, I went light on his monstrosities. He can be a cruel bas***d if he wants to be one."
"No, Shiv." I said after a moment of repose. "I wasn't thanking you for what you had shared about Prithvi. Or Mitra for that matter."
"I'm not sur..." he dropped the subject without argument once he reckoned what he'd give away - a part of himself he'd talked about in the way of a subtext - in an incidental revelation. His tone hardened with a warning. "Well, suit yourself, but stay clear of them. She is married and you don't want to sully her reputation after having kept it up for all these years. Go to bed little miss curious. I still have a bunch of files to look over." And we hung up after that long call.
Like any unfinished love story, my heart ached for them. Even more so for something else I couldn't spell: a haunting that was only beginning to raise a disquiet in me. I ran his narration too many times in my mind, pondering where it had fallen apart and if there had been a thing or two at all, that could have been crafted differently.
That night, when I put down my phone and got back to gleaning at the innumerous doodles I had traced on the last pages of my book, a particular shading caught my eyes. The thick outline made it clear that I had gone over the word again and again as I had been in conversation with him.
Of course, in the line of many firsts, I had written his name.
Unawares and may be with a hint of knowing, I had written his name.
That night, I didn't sleep. I didn't know it was one of the many sleepless nights that were to follow.
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