Page 60 of The Circle of Exile
“Where did you go?” He asked, unaffected. It made Iram think that if he could take this right now, maybe he could have taken that version of her too — become aloof just like this and let her be. Maybe he wouldn’t have been as devastated over her as he would have been over their babies.
“I… went to Rahim Chacha.”
“The last number you spoke to was Dev Kohli’s.”
His tone made her ashamed of that fact.
“You said — ‘I may need your help.’ He said, ‘Oh… whatever you need, Iram.’ Was it some code, because I spent an excruciating amount of time deciphering it. And he spent an ungodly number of reasons evading it.”
“It wasn’t a code. I had called him like I had called so many in my panic at home when my water broke. Maybe he recognised the desperation in my voice and spoke like that.”
“He recognises thedesperationin your voice,” Atharva scoffed. “Nice. What else? Did he send his car to escort you?”
“No! No!” She snapped to her feet. “No. I did not call him until that night, and that too for some… money.”
Atharva’s nostrils flared.
“How did you run?”
“I left my room and there was nobody outside.”
“Yathaarth was taken to Dr. Shankar’s NICU. I asked Shehzad to leave one guard for you and go. I asked Begumjaan to directly reach there. I asked everybody to focus their attention there because which husband would think that his postpartum wife with five-hour-old stitches would get up and leave him?”
“I did not know!” She screamed quietly at him.
“How did you leave the nursing home? The cameras didn’t track you after the first crossing signal outside.”
“It wasn’t emptied of patients. I changed and walked out like any other visitor.”
“So you had enough presence of mind to strategise a clean exit.”
“You are calling me a liar?”
“I didn’t call you anything,”
“But that’s what you meant!”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“You don’t know what it feels like!”
“Whatwhatfeels like?!”
“The bad…” she screwed her face. “The… that feeling. That feeling of losing touch with yourself. Like you are not you. It’s so bad. I still get bad thoughts, bad feeling. Especially at 9 in the morning every day, that time when I went into labour. I cannot sleep entire nights. I see something, hear something, and start feeling bad. And yes, while all of that is going on I can operate perfectly normally. My mind works just as usual. I am not lying. Yes, my mind worked enough that day to pack my postpartum bag, to evade the main corridor, to take the staff exit, to cross Saba and change my route the moment I knew I would be followed…”
“Wait a minute.”
She ran the back of her hand across her mouth.
“You ran into Saba?”
She hiccuped, nodding.
“Where?”
“Outside the nursing home. I ran one way, then turned the other when I had turned the corner.”
“And she did not follow you? Raise an alarm?”
