Page 74 of The Circle of Exile
“Why was it so easy to leave me, Iram?”
“I left myself, Atharva.”
He stopped, teardrops making his vision a haze. He glanced at the back of her head tucked under his chin, on the surface of his chest. Her voice was as thin as his, the words vibrating straight into his heart.
“I left myself, did not have myself with me. Still don’t. But whatever little I could find, I brought it back to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
She pulled back, her hair a mess around her tear-stained face. And even in that state, her thumbs reached up to clean his eyes.
“I told you yesterday…”
“I didn’t understand even then.”
“Will you listen?”
When have I not?He thought. Then looking at her ready to bare herself, decided to do the same.
“When have I not?”
She swallowed.
“I have been feeling lost.”
“Right now?”
“Not right now. Since… a long time. It’s been worse after the delivery. That morning, I had this episode. It pushed me into labour. Or I don’t know what did. I need to have that conversation with Dr. Baig and Dr. Nabi. Ask those hard questions. But…” her teary lashes spiked up as her eyes bore into his. “Ever since I found out that I am not Abba’s, I have been losing myself little by little. In those months, when you were in Jammu, sometimes I would wake up at night, go to the bathroom, and not recognise myself in the mirror. I stopped putting on the light after a while to not get scared and spend the whole night restless.”
“You did not tell me.”
“I wasn’t able to understand it myself. And we were trying to pause, reconnect. You were worried about me, about the babies. I did not think this would last. So I kept fighting it alone, hoping once the babies came, it would go away.”
“It did not go away.”
“It became worse that morning after you left for Ladakh.”
“Because I threatened house arrest?”
“Don’t say it like that. You were right to be scared for us.”
“I did not say good things to you that day,” he confessed, looking down at his shoes. He had blacked out that night in order to go on. But now, after this, her confession of that morning, he couldn't help but wonder if his words had brought that on.
“Stop.”
He glanced up at her.
“Don’t go into guilt. I live there, and it is not a good place.”
“Tell me. Honestly. Was it because I told you that we are abandoning the search for your family?”
She blinked slowly, silent, lengthening his agony.
“I don’t know if there was a reason,” she admitted finally. “But you said something that day.”
“I said a lot of things that day.”
Her teary, tensed face broke into a chuckle. He felt his lips curl against every desperate emotion raging inside him. That they could make each other laugh even through this torturous hell was a win. Atharva breathed his first free breath in nine months. As Iram chuckled through her tears in front of him, with a whole ocean of grief still between them to cross, he knew that they would be ok. This watery chuckle was the prelude. They would be ok.
