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Part 27: Pensieve IV
His finger mindlessly skimmed his chin while he stood facing his closet with his other hand firmly placed over his waist. The grey shirt was in view and gently twisted from side to side about the pivot of the hanger from which it was centered among his other good shirts.
There it was, her finger marks over the left side of the shirt and it once again disappeared as if it was hide and seek that it played with his line of sight just as his thoughts were.
"Maan baba...Can I take the laundry out?" Nakul asked and he shifted, his stance akimbo while he sighed aloud catching Nakul's attention as he did.
"Fine!" he removed the shirt and threw it into the pile of clothes to be washed.
Soon after Nakul left, he sat down by the window seat and picked up her letter. His gaze passed over her words, but nothing registered then as a flash of pictures from that evening instead rose to his memory: the sound of her bangles that had echoed from the empty walls of his house as she'd stirred the chocolate; the flutter of her lips when he'd cornered her by the refrigerator much to his own surprise; her constant care to keep the side of her waist covered; the tumble of her straight hair over her face that'd caused him to hold his breath for that beat, which was an unexpected response from him as was Anshu's act; his troubling reluctance that he'd sensed before he could let her hand go.
Above all, it was when she'd asked him if New York included him, that he'd begun to give any thought to what had heedlessly transpired on that swing.
Everything from that time seemed like a sepia toned photograph, the images burnished with an exaggerated glow of warmth. He didn't even remember everything then as he sat unseeing at the clip that she'd left forgetfully left behind on the swing. Or was that the part of him which refused to attach any bearing to that moment, in the thread of life?
The next instant, he stormed out of the room in a blur, calling to Nakul and threw open the laundry open door casting the poor man into a fit of tremble from the urgent agitation in his voice.
"Where are the shirts I gave you?" he muttered even as he sieved through the baskets and got hold of the one he was looking for.
"Umm!" he rubbed his forehead and paused awkwardly at the threshold, "Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," he placed a hand on Nakul's shoulder before he left the man still wide-eyed and cowering in a corner.
Well, there wasn't much he could do, when he stunned himself into such impulses at the most unexpected of times.
Taking the shirt back to his room, he smiled and threw it in a hanger, before he moved it to the least used section of the closet.
The things he did because of her...
Shaking his head, he smiled again before falling into bed for another long night that awaited to take him away from the reality that was slowly dawning upon him.
Mehndi Hai Rachne Wali
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