Dedicated to the special members who left comments for “Taste like Home”. This is just for you all ❤️
Hi all! This is a one-shot for Dua and Vikrant, born from the simple fact that Addy’s Vikrant never got to have this , so I wanted to give him the version where he does.
This very light hearted OS is a continuation of my #ManVik story, with Dua “Tastes Like Home” .
——————————————————
Mannat left at six, dressed in the green silk she’d been saving for exactly this kind of night , a culinary council event that mattered too much to skip and she left with a face that said trusted him. Actually she was scared for him.
“She’s fed. She’ll want to try the mashed banana again around eight , just a couple of spoons, don’t force it if she makes that face. Diapers are in the second drawer, not the first, I moved them yesterday. If she cries for more than ten minutes straight, it’s probably gas, don’t panic.”
“I don’t panic.”
“Vikrant.”
“I have run a kitchen through a fire alarm going off mid-service. I can handle one baby.”
She kissed Dua’s head, kissed him on the cheek almost as an afterthought, and was gone in a scent of jasmine
He turned around. Dua, six months old, dressed in the white onesie covered in little hearts that Mannat had picked specifically because it made her look, in her words, “like a Valentine’s card that could also destroy you,” was propped in her little chair, looking at him with the same flat, assessing stare he gave underperforming vendors.
He’d done all of it before, technically. Diapers, feeding, the bath - he’d been present for every single one, hands right there alongside Mannat’s or his dadi’s, learning by watching, occasionally trusted with a small piece of it while someone more capable supervised. But there had always been someone more capable in the room. Tonight there was no one. Just him, and her, and hours before Mannat came home.
“It’s just us,” he told her. “Don’t tell your mother I said this, but I’ve plated for two hundred covers on a bad night. This is nothing.”
Dua considered this claim, blew a wet, indifferent raspberry at him, and began to cry.
It was not the ordinary crying. It was the specific, escalating, full-body outrage of a small person who had, in the last few weeks, started noticing when her mother left a room — and minded it for the first time in her short life. Mannat had warned him this might start happening around now, this sudden, fierce attachment that hadn’t been there even a month ago. He hadn’t quite believed her until this exact moment. Vikrant picked her up the way he picked her up hundred times, one hand under her head, and somehow it looked entirely different today — too careful, too stiff, like he was carrying something that might go off.
“Okay. Okay. What is it. Talk to me the way you talk to your grandmother, you’re very expressive with her.”
Dua did not want to talk to him the way she talked to her grandmother. Dua wanted to be heard across three pin codes.
He checked the diaper first, because that felt like the kind of problem he could actually solve . It took him considerably longer than it should have. The tabs went on the wrong way twice. He read the little cartoon diagram on the packaging with the grave concentration. Dua stopped crying just to watch him struggle, her outrage briefly overridden by curiosity, her whole face tracking his hands the way she’d started tracking anything that moved, waiting to see what would happen if she reached for it.
“Don’t look at me like that. You have no idea how hard this actually is with you being all red crying ”
She did not appear convinced. But the diaper, eventually, went on correctly, and for exactly ninety seconds there was peace.
Bath came after, splashy and half-successful, and once she was toweled off and back on the play mat, Dua rolled herself onto her stomach with the sudden, determined effort she brought to everything lately, pushed up on her forearms, and reached for the edge of the mat like she meant to go somewhere — not crawling yet, not quite, just rocking forward on her hands and knees with the frustrated concentration of someone who knew, in theory, that motion was possible and hadn’t yet worked out the mechanics of it.
“Not yet,” Vikrant told her, sliding a folded towel just out of her reach so he had an excuse to watch her try. “Give it a few weeks.
Getting a onesie back onto her after the bath turned into its own small war. She had apparently decided, somewhere between the towel and the dresser, that clothes were an insult she would not be tolerating tonight, and she arched her back when the fabric came near her.
“It’s just a onesie. You wear one every single day of your life.”
She did not care about precedent. One arm went in, and the other became a full negotiation, small fists closing tight and refusing to unclench, her whole body twisting sideways on the changing mat like she’d genuinely rather stay naked and cold than cooperate with him on this particular point
“There.” He held her up, dressed, defeated but victorious. “That was not a fair fight and you know it.
Dua did not appear to feel she’d lost.
The banana went better than he expected and worse than he hoped. He’d warmed it,tested it against his own wrist the way he’d seen her do, and sat across her high chair with the small spoon like he was presenting a tasting menu to a food critic who could not yet speak but communicated displeasure with extraordinary clarity.
The first spoonful, Dua accepted with mild suspicion.The second, she considered for a long moment and then turned her face sideways with the theatrical disgust of someone rejecting a dish sent back to the kitchen.
She reached for the spoon herself, mostly landing her whole fist in the bowl — she’d taken to doing that lately, passing whatever she could grab from one hand to the other with fierce, deliberate focus, and by the end of it there was more banana on her own face, on her onsie,on his shirt and somehow on the ceiling fan than had gone anywhere near her mouth. He looked at the wreckage of his once-white shirt and started laughing.
“You are just a bit much today “ told her, wiping her cheek with the corner of a cloth and removing the onsie off of her.
Dua, satisfied with the chaos she’d created, smiled at him for the first time all evening , the wide, gummy, entirely unearned smile Something in his chest, which had spent the better part of the evening braced for disaster, simply gave up and went soft instead.
Milk came next, and that, at least, went smoother than he’d braced for. He warmed the bottle the way Mannat had shown him wrist-test first, and settled Dua into the crook of his arm, tipping the bottle . She took to it readily enough, small hands coming up to rest against the bottle like she meant to hold it herself, her eyelids drooping, her whole body going loose and heavy against him in a way that made his own shoulders finally unclench.
For a full, blissful minute, he genuinely believed it was over. Her eyes had closed. The bottle had slipped sideways, forgotten, and her breathing had gone slow and even against his chest.
Then, with no warning at all, her eyes snapped back open, and she pushed herself upright against him, twisting around and eyed the play mat across the room like it had personally called her name. Before he could do anything about it she was down on the carpet, up on her hands and knees again.
“No. No, absolutely not again , not tonight.” He was up off the couch before he’d finished the sentence, scooping her up mid crawl .
Dua, delighted with herself made it clear through pure force of squirming that the day’s war was not, in fact, over.
He caught it somewhere in the middle of all that squirming — the exact flat, unbothered look she gave him each time he told her no, that particular expression of I have heard you, and I remain entirely unimpressed by your argument. He’d seen that look somewhere before. He’d seen it in mirrors, in kitchen windows at the end of a long service, in every photograph anyone had ever taken of him mid-negotiation. It wasn’t Mannat’s look at all, not really. It was his.
“You’re doing my face,” he told her, equal parts delighted and unsettled. “That’s my face. I invented that face.”
Dua, unmoved by the accusation, continued attempting to escape his arms.
He set her back down on the mat, mostly to see what she’d do, and said it with as much gravity as he could manage.
“Dua Vikrant Saluja”- it’s sleep time, and that is FINAL.
She looked up at him — one long stare she’d been giving him all evening and then, without any further ceremony, turned around and tried very hard to crawl off straight off in the opposite direction, exactly the way he would have ended a conversation he’d already decided wasn’t worth finishing.
“Oh Hello “ He stared after her, torn between laughing and taking it as a personal insult.
By eleven she was fighting sleep the way she fought everything — loudly. He tried the crib. She protested. He tried walking her around the flat . She protested that.
Eventually, without entirely deciding to, he sat down on the couch, pulled his shirt collar open, and laid her against his bare chest the way the hospital nurse had shown Mannat and him once, months ago, when she was born and neither of them had completely understood a single word being said to them because they were not sure how to keep this tiny human alive themselves.
Skin against skin. Her small, furious weight settling, degree by degree, into something quieter.
He felt her breathing change first — the ragged, hiccupping breaths evening out into something slow and even — before he understood what was actually happening. Her whole tiny body, still faintly warm from the bath, pressed flush against him, one fist curled loosely near his collarbone like she meant to hold onto him and had simply run out of energy partway through the decision.
He didn’t move. He barely breathed, in case breathing counted as a disturbance. The home was quiet in the particular way it only ever was at this hour, and he sat there with his daughter finally, fully asleep on his chest, and felt something settle in him
When Mannat came home just before midnight, heels already in her hand, she found them like that — Vikrant asleep sitting up, head tipped back against the couch cushion, one hand splayed protectively across Dua’s tiny back, and Dua herself dead to the world against him, a faint smear of dried banana on the corner of her mouth.
Mannat stood in the doorway for a long moment, not moving, just looking, memorizing it the way she memorized a dish she never wanted to lose the recipe for.
~Lex
Haven For Her
Current Affairs
443