Part 25: House call
Aashi picked up the dupatta from the laundry bin and threw it into the suitcase. "You haven't done the laundry yet?"
"No" Geet answered, her voice caught somewhere in the hollow of her throat.
"But you had time to put up a Christmas tree and arrange gifts underneath it?" Geet sure did sense a censure there.
"Can we please not talk about it?" She switched sides on the pillow wanting to face away from Aashi.
She heard Aashi mutter something under her breath and the sounding of receding footsteps. A few minutes later, she found her back in the room and plop down next to her.
"W..he..r..e" Aashi's words were garbled as she tried to speak and Geet again twisted around to indulge her curiosity.
"Where did you get so many Eclairs from?" Aashi asked, and her eyes drifted down to the small gold bag on her lap.
"That's not yours..." She pulled the chocolate bag - the one she'd gotten for Maan and forgotten to hand him on Christmas - and placed it on the night stand next to her. Strangely, Aashi didn't fight her and lazily chewed on the hard caramel, making faces - perhaps to reach the sticky bits that were stuck to her teeth.
Closing her eyes, she let the silence flow through her. Listening to her own breath drift in and out of her body brought unknowing relief then. She didn't dare move an inch to any side for she suddenly felt a strange apprehension that the illusion of comfort would fade if she gave in to any movement. Like it was a flutter of a bird she was holding in before it could fly afar and leave her desolate and painfully awake if she would shift her focus away.
But then she was soon feeling awake when she lifted her head upon hearing the door bell ring.
"Who do you think it is?" She heard the unmistakeable taunt in Aashi's tone and wanted to paid no heed. But, how could she not...
Against moving at once, she buried her head under the pillow and pressed her palms from over the pillow to her ears. To drown out any little sound that would have made it to her head otherwise. The drone of silence again felt like a lull. However, she couldn't trust Aashi to handle whoever it was calling on them that late at night. She knew it wouldn't be
him. It must be Maan or the concierge...She devoutly hoped it was the latter.
When she entered the living room, she was slightly taken back to see Aashi speaking on the phone instead of the buzzer.
"Yeah...I know..." Aashi said now, nodding in a way that spoke of a reluctance to freely speak at length in her presence.
"Just tell her I will call her" And she snapped the phone shut, even as her words would have reached the caller. That arbitrary strain in Aashi's motions didn't seem to be arbitrary at all and her eyes narrowed as she studied Aashi closer.
Before she could reach a conclusion, the buzzer rang again and Geet, merely inches away from the buzzer, held the SPEAK button down to answer the call.
"Yes..." She said, only to be greeted by the sputter of silence.
And then it occurred to her who it could be...
Aashi quickly pushed her aside and took over, kneading the SPEAK button clumsily before she could start talking again "I told you so...I can't let you in..."
"Would you just open the door all right?" She finally heard
him speak after a few seconds, his tone mildly wrapped in frustration.
"I can't...I don't think she would like to see you" It seemed that Aashi knew more of the right kind of responses than she could manage. Again, she needed to draw in a deep breath, and she did so, her head lolling back with the closing of her eyes. Without another word or an instruction to Aashi, she went to sit by the couch. It appeared she didn't know what she wanted then. A showdown or the warmth of the silence. But with the pounding of her head that was just beginning to start, she didn't know such indrawn attention would do any good to her. And so she sat, partly listening to the brother sister conversation she hadn't heard in a while, hoping there wouldn't be more of that, where all this was coming from.
"This is not a joke Aashi...I mean she came running out of the room where 100 other people were there. I need to know if anyone instigated..."
"For starters" Aashi instantly cut in, "Lets start with you..."
"Me?" He shot at her bitterly, "I wasn't even there..."
"Like you don't know what I'm talking about..."
"Lets not..." He paused and she could absorb his disrupted breathing wafting through the speaker. "Can you just put her onli..."
Aashi sure felt jumpy, Geet noticed, as she didn't let him finish almost every time. "You have keys, don't you?" She retorted, "I mean to the front door, so why don't you come up yourself and ask her to come online. I can't be your middle man...or woman"
When there was no response for a long beat, she lifted her eyes to Aashi, who was studying her with an anxiousness that betrayed her displeasure. Though it behooved her to keep her best friend's misery at bay, she could also see the sister who wanted to let her brother in. And she felt incapacitated to respond to that silent plea, like she was no longer vested with the power to make decisions about her own life. Her eyes drifted down absently and she stared at the table unseeingly, her eyes fixed and lifeless.
She didn't turn to watch Aashi walk away when Aashi's phone buzzed again. Perhaps it was only time before even Aashi would walk out of her life...
It was ages or minutes, she could never tell. But when Aashi came running back from the bedroom, she almost fell out of the couch having attempted to doze off for a while, with her head supported over the plush arm of the couch.
"What happened?" She found herself asking upon feeling a grey pool of fear fill her stomach, the sharp formless instinct arising untraceable in her mind.
Aashi clutched the door and slammed it open with a thud, still making her feet follow the other while she tried to catch her breath, "I saw..." Aashi said fast, moving in a blur and the shock in her oice now tinted with the echo from the hallway, "He punched him...Bhaiya punched him..."
Edited by 6thElement - 13 years ago
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