Page 203 of The Circle of Exile
“Purposelessness. Like I wake up and there is light but it is not for me. Like I start the car and don’t know where to take it for a second. Sometimes I sit outside with the engine idling, trying to remember the road. It’s a few seconds, but it spoils the entire day.” He turned in her lap, his face hiding inside her stomach and arms coming to circle her waist. “I cannot take us back home, myani zuv.”
She inhaled sharply. He wasn't crying, he wasn't sobbing. But his hold on her was his lament. It was cutting her worse than if he had cried. Iram curled over him, holding his head in her arms.
“I don’t know what to do. I never not knew what to do. Even when I left SFF,” his muffled words began to flow easier in the fabric of her kurti. “I am a man living in a fraction of my capabilities and nothing makes sense anymore. Not leaving the house, not coming back. Because this is not our home.”
She drank the ball of her saliva and slowly pushed him to his back. He took a deep breath, his eyes not leaving hers.
“This house might not belong to us, this town and this state might not have our roots. Butus —you, me, Arth, Shiva, Dani, Noora… we have made a home here.”
“I want to be grateful for that. And I am, don’t get me wrong. You have workedsomeotherworldly magic in this house, Iram. So much so that Amaal felt this was Srinagar when she came.”
“Your grandfather music helps,” she scratched his stubbly cheek, making him chuckle. A long moment of silence passed. They gazed up at the meteor shower, now slower, as if it was dying down too.
“Do we inherit fates, myani zuv?”
“What do you mean?”
They kept staring up at the sky.
“When Pundits were chased away from their homes, my grandfather somehow cheated his fate and got to stay. Did I inherit his fate instead?”
Such doomsday words did not suit Atharva. And Iram embraced this side of him too. A little too tight. Her forehead rested on his, her nose in his hair. She inhaled — praying to inhale all the dark sucking him down, hoping to inhale all the hopelessness shackling him. It wasn't possible to wake up tomorrow with a new purpose, nor was it possible to find the next step in such haze. But the spirit, Atharva’s never-say-die spirit… that was possible to find again.
“You did not say.”
“Hmm?” She pulled back up.
“You were going to say something that you said I will not believe.”
Iram let her lips curl into a semblance of a smile.
“Are you ready?” She joked.
“Oh just say it,” he drawled, in that instinctive British tone which was so patent to him in stray moments like these. It made her laugh. And it made him look at her happier.
“You are not a weak man.”
“I know that.”
Her smile widened.
“You are the strongest man there is.”
He did not respond.
“You step up to do things that nobody else dares to. You visualise a world that nobody else can. You live in that world before anybody else would. And you do that without asking or expecting anything for yourself.”
He remained quiet.
“You said you would believe me, Atharva.”
His mouth compressed but his eyes were amused.
“I would have said this even if you were not my husband.”
“There is no world in which I would not have been your husband.”
Her face stretched — in a blush and a smile and a grin. The said husband was coming back already.
