Part 29: Windows and Doors
Two days and still counting. He'd circled the entire floor twice already and in all probability she couldn't be hiding in the bathroom for this long. Well, if she was, then given that it was late afternoon, it certainly spelled trouble. Weekend was another story, but office hours gave him dauntless authority to call on her and yet she was nowhere to be found.
That evening when he went back home, his mail box presented him with his deliverance from the spiraling chaos that his head was: a letter in Geet's name was among his mails by mistake and he sought the elevator to get to her apartment with a near exasperating glee.
All of which lasted until, he saw Meera locking their apartment door with a ragged edginess to her moves. Her keys slipped in the process of twisting it inside the knob and he helped her to it.
"Is everything ok, Meera?" he handed the keys back to her while she breathed in short gasps and held one side of her head, her look that of frenzied panic.
"I don't know," she mumbled and corrected herself the next second, "No...MK...No..."
He held her arm for good measure, "What happened?" he asked suspecting it was a lovers tiff between Yash and her.
"Geet...Well, there is so much to be said," she braced herself against both his arms, "I need to find her first," she spoke in run-on sentences and her alarm set in him almost instantly, "She was in her room and I only left to take an office call. But, when I returned, she was gone...I need to make sure she is ok..."
"Why do you think there is cause for concern? Unless..." with abandon, he shook her gently, grabbing her full attention, "Unless there is something you aren't telling..."
"Its Dev," her hand smoothed over her forehead etched with worry, "her husband. The bas***d that he is broke up with her over email," Her hand slipped off of his hold as she jerked them with an animated exasperation, "Email...Can you believe it?"
"Did she tell you where she is going? Anything?" he asked.
"She couldn't even...", her voice broke off and pressed her palm to her forehead again as a stream of tears ran free over her one cheek, "It has completely broken her, MK. She didn't speak for most part of the day and the only time she did was sometime before the office call had come, telling me that she wanted to visit him"
For a moment, he closed his eyes then - or for an eternity - and felt without having seen her anguish, her tormenting collapse into oblivion and heard the screams that must have resounded in her silence.
"Where does he live?" his voice gave away his weariness forbearing the slow tumult that began inside him.
"Toronto," she spoke in haste.
Taking a deep breath, he dispelled in his head, his need to sit down. Just one breath so that he could try to talk himself of out of that plunge she was asking of him.
"There is no way she is taking a bus and she doesn't have a car here, which only leaves the airport," he said as he turned towards the elevator.
"Oh! MK...It could be any airline," Meera trailed along falling instep with him.
"Trust me, not that many," he pressed the elevator call button, "I will call my contacts in the airport," he said and took out his cell phone to dial a few numbers at random while his mind went through those motions without a thought or a feel of emotion and only an empty echo bouncing off his being: be safe my sweet fool, be safe until I find you...
***
And that echo faded into a tide of overwhelming relief when they found her seated in the nook of a pillar and a wall adjoining, next to an airlines ticket counter in the far end of that stretch. His friends in the TSA had assured him that the last flight to Toronto wasn't until another 1 hr and that all seats were taken with no one by her name in that charter or the previous flights that had taken off for Toronto. But, the assurance that was still distressing at best had left him peevish until they could find her, for there had been no telling till the instant he laid eyes on her, that she had been at the airport all along.
"Meera...", he heard her cry as if it didn't register to her at any level that they weren't supposed to be there.
She was seated on the floor with her legs folded underneath her and while he stood close, hidden by the bulk of the pillar, she didn't know he was there too.
Taking respite in the fact that she wasn't yet aware of his presence, he noticed her hands shake from constant shivers, her eyes shifting back and forth between Meera and the credit card she had clutched in her lap. Meera crouched down to her, "Meera, this card won't go through. It doesn't have the limit to take on 600 dollars...I don't have that much money for the ticket..."
He puffed an exhale out. For the first time in a long time, he took support from the pillar with a bang of his fist against it. Six hundred dollars. She needed six hundred dollars! That's it?
"Geet, are you crazy? You can't go there, now." Meera took her arms and shook her up, "Have you thought about what you will do if he doesn't let you see him? What next?"
"But, I just want to speak with him once, Meera. Will you not help?" the cadence in her voice shifted, a show of pleading that was hard to ignore even for the resolute Meera.
It was clear then that it wasn't just money that she required then.
"Of course" Meera softened on her, "Of course, but he won't pick up the phone"
"Then all the more reason for me to go and find him. Something must have happened, Meera. Understand! won't you please?"
To him it was obvious that Meera wouldn't see it both ways: her urging that was either the reasoning in her madness or the insanity that came with the dawning of any reality.
"I will take you," he said making his way towards her and showed himself to her, "I will drive you to Toronto..."
Despite her woebegone state , she would't look at him that knowing instant, she gave a small gasp of a sob and her eyes closed, cringing from a mortification, she needn't feel.
"No, Maan," her face turned away,"I don't think you should get into this. It is a bit..."
"Personal? Complicated" he scoffed, perhaps angered the most that she made him to be an outsider. "Aren't you just running ahead now?"
Her eyes flickered open, and even as she sat without meeting his gaze, he could tell she knew precisely what he'd meant with the last of his words.
"Looks like its either I'm leading and you are falling behind. Or you are too ahead of me and I'm left trailing after you...I think, we should walk alongside each other..."
At first, Meera helped her to her feet, but when her feet gave beneath her, he stepped closer and held her by one elbow and the other arm.
"You might think I'm acting on my impulse...", she said as her silent tears spilled into her cheeks and finally, raised her eyes to him then, an anticipation for his approval surfaced in her features, from having concluded he would only dismiss it as a crazed idea.
"So what?", he said as if he'd read her, sounding so unlike him that she clasped his hand tighter to assure herself he was really there, "I don't think anyone can prepare for life's many situations, especially for one like this...There is perhaps no right or wrong way to deal with it when you are hurting this bad..."
"I'm not...", she rejected him forthright, her eyes angry even, "But...I...", she doubled over and braced herself against the pillar behind her as if she felt her insides crumble to ash the next instant, "I don't know what this is...I just don't know Maan...I only want to speak to him."
"Why won't he let me speak to him?" she said in a dithering whisper which shook her body with that frail desperation and in his grip, he felt her tremors; he took in the dishevelment of her office clothes that closely matched the state of her mind, the tears that constantly misted her eyes, the throat that convulsed from her requests and her feet that was in a constant buckle as though she was in mid-air with only him for a mast.
In that turn when he pulled her to go with him, he caught his breath, just when Meera ran up ahead of him and came to a stop directly in front of him.
"MK, this is crazy,"she said shaking her head, "Driving to Toronto? Its what 8 -9 hrs from here..."
"And your point, Meera?" he said with a shake of his head, now that he too was being drawn into the whirlpool of her madness or the reason in it.
"We will try and reach him tomorrow," Meera looked at him and then averted her eyes to her. "If it doesn't work tomorrow, then we will call him after he comes back from Mexico..." her voice coming out as an urgent appeal, like they both needed saving.
"What if its too late by then? There are some regrets in life that you can never outlive, Meera," he placed a hand on her shoulder to calm her down and held her eyes with the same firmness that had come into him, "The remorse from having given up too soon always catches up to you. How much of trying is too much? Or how much is too less? Its not for us to decide. I would rather, she tries and sees the outcome for herself now, than live with that regret following the rest of her life as one with her shadows..."
"Ok!", her forehead puckered as if she still had her doubts, but he knew she was only stalling, "but what if she doesn't stop with going to Toronto?"
"Why? Aren't we there to keep her in check?" he countered decisively, "You are coming with us"
It was required even, that he take Meera with him, for all could use more than one throw rope when they were swirling so dangerously close to a sinkhole.
Obtaining their ingress through the evening crowd, he called Yash and asked him to retrieve their passports from home and meet them half-way up the highway that would take them north.
With less than meager reinforcements for the night, they began their drive with hardly a word or two exchanged between Meera - who'd turned passive aggressive overnight - and him. Earlier, an assumed cordiality is what Meera must have perceived between Geet and him, but no doubt, he'd proven that what they shared was so much more. Only, he cared little to nothing for what Meera made them to be.
For the hold-up they faced at tolls until they reached upstate New York and for the repose they needed at the service areas for bathroom breaks, he made up for the delays at the high speed zones that came thereafter. It was unavoidable that his eyes sought her out from time to time when she'd taken the passenger seat and Meera had shuffled behind in the coupe. He wouldn't touch her hand, or coerce her into a conversation, notwithstanding his proximity.
Two desolates, as she had called them, however, it appeared she was slipping from his company too, her eyes fixed at a distance that was neither near nor far, almost depressingly drawn into a state where the co-ordinates of space and time no longer existed for her.
Once they crossed the border, he entered the address Meera gave him and the GPS guided them to their destination after another hour's drive. As they drove through what must be familiar sights to her, she still seemed as if she was obscured by the haze of her maelstrom.
It was 2.00 AM when they came to a full-stop by her street corner and Meera took a few minutes before she addressed her. "Geet, we are here. What are you waiting for?"
Getting out of the car she took a few steps towards a house diagonally across from where they'd halted.
At her pace, it appeared she might never cross that threshold and at some point during that crossing, with her head upturned towards a far window, her knees fell to the ground. While Meera struggled with the seat belts in the back seat of the coupe, he rushed to her side within seconds.
"Are you ok?" he asked as he hunkered down, observing her eyes were a glaze of tears and something else: a finality in the course of her hopelessness, a pained estrangement.
"Maan," she caught his wrist with a whimper, crushing his fingers in her balled hand, "Please...Would you be mad at me if I ask that we go back?" An inflamed fear rose in her eyes as though it was them, not her, who had brought her back to banishment.
It was a full second before he could shirk off his incredulity. "No," he shook his head, "but are you sure, Geet?"
"Yes..." she said pointing a quivering hand at a shut window; her mouth trembling from a remembered desertion, she returned her gaze to him, "I lived my last five years at that window. I don't think I can do that anymore..."
May be it was the closed window. Or it was a door that had opened, but she wanted a leave from where they were. A permanent leave from the only place that could have shaped that unrelenting resolve.
Edited by 6th.Element - 12 years ago
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