"That's not a medical textbook."
Sai closed her eyes, counting backwards from ten in her mind to keep from snapping at her husband. Over the past seven months of their marriage, she hadn't grown accustomed to her husband's oscillating behaviour. At once he could look at her and be warm, soft, kind and at other moments he froze before her as if a wall of ice stood between them. His coldness had become more of his adopted demeanour since she'd started college. So his comment, though said in a passing light tone on her one relaxed Sunday afternoon, was unnecessary.
"And?" Sai wasn't going to argue, but she wasn't above giving him a petty nondirect answer either.
She heard him sigh beside her, and then he plucked the novel from her hands, his laughter colouring the air around her.
"Virat Sir!" she admonished him, frustration seeping through her tone as she stood.
"Sai!" he mocked her, and she saw that his eyes were light.
He was smiling at her and examining her book, his smile twisted into a quizzical grin.
"Tum romance novel parr rahi ho?" he queried, peering into the pages of her novel.
Her catlike reflexes were fast, and her hand shot out before he could read more than he was meant to.
"If you must know," she started, turning away from him to sit by the window, "I'm studying."
Virat's laughter was not the response she had been hoping for, and she nearly threw the pen in her hand at his face.
"What could you possibly be studying in a romance novel?" he asked through his chuckles, grasping at his ribs to keep still.
"Love," Sai answered simply, biting out the word as if it was poison on her tongue.
At once Virat's laughter died and he looked at Sai who now sat at the windowsill, anger marring her face. It had been seven months from the day he'd brought her to his home, seven months to the day he had promised to take care of her, and seven months to the day he hadn't known would damn him. Sunlight filtered through the window behind her and her dark hair looked golden in the light. Virat was tempted, as he had been for a long time, to touch her.
"Why are you attempting to study love?" he said softly, his voice betraying the storm inside his head.
Sai shook her head, frustrated and humiliated. She must have known how this would play out, but she had always been incapable of lying. Especially to Virat. When she had asked Aniket about his new girlfriend, he had been unabashedly honest with her. He'd shared his feelings, what love could do, what love was to him, and why above all it meant so much. And Sai, throughout it all, had no idea what he meant. Sai had always been so busy being loved by her father and earning her academic accomplishments, she had never thought about love. The time she would have spent discovering it now, she had promised herself to a man who only viewed their relationship as a mark on his badge. She had spent that afternoon angry at herself, angry at how she had been denied her choices and the promise that tied her to a hollow relationship.
So, she decided to do what she always did. She wanted to learn. Learn what it meant to be in love, how it could feel and if Aniket was right. Sai looked up then, her eyes hesitantly searching Virat. He looked as confused as she felt, and she wanted him to go away. She knew he had been in love, she knew that perhaps in many ways he still wrestled with it. Pakhi was a name that lingered in their every interaction, even if Virat no longer so much as looked at her. It did not matter that he paid her no heed, what mattered was that he had been in love with her. And Sai, who had not known, had walked into their world without meaning too.
"Because Aniket sai-"
"Aniket?"
Was it her imagination or had the atmosphere in their room changed?
Virat stilled before her, his voice once again betraying him. Aniket, Aniket, Aniket. He had been told, several times by both Sai and the insipid boy, that nothing was amiss. That in the end, Aniket was just someone who enjoyed Sai's company. But it had been three months since they'd become friends, and three months since every mention of Aniket drove Virat insane. Virat had tried, had done his utmost to contain the increasingly obvious anger he felt at the mere mention of Aniket.
But it had been the moment he'd seen Sai smiling in Aniket's arms that had nearly ruined him. Virat was a simple man, at least he thought he was. Sai had turned his world upside down, and then in many ways right side up. He had forgotten so much of himself, and Sai had brought it all out of him, little by little. Her rose-coloured way of looking at the world, made him forget that he dealt with hard criminals every day. Sai had made it possible for him to walk through the door of his home, and leave everything behind to just be by her.
Even when the world began to shift for him as he saw her, Sai remained steadfast for him. Her obliviousness to his internal storm had been both a blessing and a curse. She had not known, could never anticipate, that the man who had asked her to have no expectations of him, was now bending backwards just to see her smile. Virat had lost himself. When he was home, he followed her as if pulled by her gravity. What had started as a way to protect her from his family's neverending taunts, had become a habit, had become nothing less than an obsessive compulsion. As if he needed to be aware of her at all times.
And yet, Sai's obliviousness to his affliction had saved him from any accusations or frustrated glares. He was moving about in his madness alone and untouched, unsullied by her awareness.
Virat took a deep breath, steadying the envy that wrapped around his throat.
"What did Aniket say?" he asked, his voice more high pitched than he'd intended, and suddenly he felt like a shy schoolboy instead of a grown, capable man.
Sai furrowed her brows, wondering what was wrong with him, but realizing once again it must have been one of his famous moods.
"Nothing. He said nothing. We were talking and we got on the topic of love. And he told me what it felt like for him, and then I wanted to know. So now here I am," she explained, speaking quickly to get the conversation over with.
Virat could no longer hold himself, he walked to where she sat, carefully placing himself on the other end of the windowsill. He watched her with careful, heavy-lidded eyes. Then, slowly, nearly cursing himself as he did so, he placed his open palm on her bent knee. As always she felt warm, as always he felt the muscles underneath his palm relax in response to him, as if her body knew his touch was safe. The sensation unfurled something primal inside him, and his fingers tightened slightly around her dress.
Heat spread through him and he wondered what he must look like to her. A girl of nineteen, who no doubt had only seen love in movies, had never known it as intimately as he had. As he now did. Did he look like a madman, his laborious breathing giving him away? He closed his eyes then and leaned his head back against the window, the cool sensation of the glass singing on his skin.
"What do you want to know?" he whispered, his eyes opening to find her again. His hand still buried in the folds of her dress.
Sai smiled, cocking her head at her husband.
"He told me you would know. He told me to ask you," she said lightly, her words puncturing his lungs.
Virat remembered the day he had confronted Aniket on Sai's dance competition, the way Aniket had looked at him. The way Aniket continued to watch him every time he came to pick Sai up from college. Aniket had seen right through him, as a man he had recognized something inside Virat.
Virat snorted, shaking his head in disbelief. "Then ask." It was a command, but soft and yielding, barely above a whisper.
Sai closed her book, and Virat prided himself in her unadulterated attention. Sai had a way of centring him like no one else. Sai Joshi could make you believe you were the centre of the universe if she so much as looked at you with her warm, brown eyes. It undid Virat every time, unnerved him.
She leaned close, and Virat could smell the vanilla on her skin. He wanted to drown in the scent.
"What does it feel like? Is it like the movies where everything starts in slow motion? Does your heartbeat really fast? Do you stop sleeping?" she asked excitedly, hands gesturing as she did.
Virat bit his lip, watching her carefully. How could he explain to her that it was all these things and none of them? That love for him had been a slow-building storm. That when he was with her all he felt was the contradiction of calm from her presence, but a jittering nervousness from his own maddening brain. That his heart only ever beat in her presence, that he was unaware of it altogether until he saw her. How could he possibly explain that he only ever slept soundly when he was turned towards her, the knowledge that she was so close even if her heart was beyond his reach. How could he tell her that love was finding peace, that when he stepped through the threshold of his home after a long, labouring day, her smile dulled his pain. That she had, in every sense of the word, become his home.
"Sukoon," he spoke softly, wanting so much to trace the sharp angle of her cheek under his thumb.
"Love is none of those things, or maybe it's all of them. But for me, it's only ever been peace," he explained, praying to every god there ever was that Sai could not see him for what he was in this moment.
A man, hopeless, desperate and aching in love.
Sai nodded as if what he'd said made the most sense to her.
"I like that," she replied, her voice soft and whimsical. "I like that love feels like that."
It's not all peace, he thought. It was an ache he could no longer walk away from. It was the damning knowledge that his wife would walk away from him as soon as he had helped fulfill her dreams. It was the dull throbbing in his chest when he thought about every moment he sat this close to Sai knowing she would never look at him in the way he hoped. He had damned himself when he'd married her, promising himself that he could never belong to her. He had been so very wrong. He had created the confines of their marriage so well, had crafted the boundaries so carefully, that Sai would never see him as more than her kind benefactor.
Sai could feel the pain radiating off of Virat. In the seven months, she had been married to him, she could not predict his moods but she could read them, and his ache was palpable. He was restraining himself, looking at her with eyes that held an abyss of truths. Guilt wracked through her, and she wanted to tell him that it would only be four more years. Four more years and she would walk away, four more years and he would have his freedom back, four more years and he would find his sukoon again in someone of his own choosing. Virat sat with his eyes closed, his forehead marred by the wrinkles of strain.
Compelled to quell his ache she reached forward with her small hand and traced the small hills that had laid arms on his forehead.
Virat nearly hissed, his wife's cold and unbearable touch sending his skin into a feverish spin. His hand nearly shot out to grip her wrist and push her away from him, but he was a man who had become accustomed to self-induced torture. Her agonizingly slow fingers traced his brow, and then carefully she cupped his cheek. Her warm palm laid against the hollow of his cheek, her thumb tracing his cheekbone, just as he'd wanted to do mere moments before.
He wanted to stop the world on its axis just for this moment. He wanted Sai to never stop holding him. He wanted, he wanted, he wanted. Virat leaned into her touch, his hair tickling the back of her hand.
"You'll find peace again," she promised, her voice determined.
Virat wanted to laugh at her, at this promise that she was making that she could no longer fathom the consequences of. He could no sooner hold her to this than she would be capable of staying with him. Peace meant her presence, and her presence meant betraying her freedom.
"Don't make promises you can't keep," he said, defeated and exhausted. The madness in him nearly pushed him to turn his face slightly, so that his lips rested on the inside of her palms. He wanted to place a kiss, a memory, something to show that he had stained her as much as she had stained him.
Sai felt the warmth of the sun pouring through the window behind them both. If he could not believe her, it did not matter, she would believe it enough for both of them. She would bring him his peace again.
"I promise," she whispered, smiling again.
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A/N: I wanted to write a OS that basically encompasses my hope for the show. I firmly believe that Virat should be the one to fall first, with Sai oblivious but full of a guilt her own. To place a man like Virat in a relationship with a woman like Sai, who unarms every part of him, and asking him to not fall in love is impossible. But Sai, who in many ways is a child, and in so many ways wise beyond her years, filled with the guilt of ripping her favourite person from the person she believes he loves is nothing less than a recipe for well-done ANGST. Sai is not wholly aware of Pakhi and Virat's relationship, but I think when the moment comes, if it is written maturely, we can see her internal struggle. Her belief that, although not her fault, her presence has changed the route of Virat's happiness, juxtaposed by Virat's very obvious journey in love with her. Virat who will do anything just to be by Sai's side, and Sai who is working hard to not only fulfill her own dreams but bring Virat's dream back to him as well, not in the form of Pakhi (which is impossible) but in the idea that if she leaves he can now CHOOSE his love. I think the despair can be done beautifully, building to an explosive confession. But alas, the writers of this show are too stuck on noncreativity. BUT PLEASE ENJOY.
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