Page 215 of The Circle of Exile
The sun was mild, hanging low on the horizon in the distance. It flared up the last of its warmth into the sky. His wife sat with her head on his shoulder, a shawl shared between their shoulders. His son slept peacefully in her lap as a small fire burned in front of them.
“Did you go to sleep?” He asked.
“Mmmm…” her head rolled from his shoulder to his chest. He adjusted his position to let her rest there.
“This is beautiful,” Atharva murmured, knowing she was half-asleep and hardly registering his words.
“I had travelled the world and still called Kashmir heaven. The fact is as indisputable today as it was yesterday. But you have opened my perspectives to newer versions of heaven. I was the one who contested Kashmir’s physical beauty with its intellectual beauty once. Then forgot it myself. Skies, winds, waters, birds, trees… they settle in different combinations across this earth. Each beautiful in its own right. And yet where we settle with our people is where heaven begins to settle. It’s all here, myani zuv… It’s all here. Jannat and swarg. Nark and patal lok. In Mumbai and Delhi and PoK and London, in Jammu and Yorkshire and Shimla. Inside me. And inside you. It’s all here… And it’s taken me a lifetime to realise it that heaven and hell are whatImake of my life.”
“Our life.”
Atharva swallowed, craning his neck to meet her sleepy, half-closed eyes.
“I thought you had gone to sleep.”
“You keep talking…” she mumbled, a sweet smile on her mouth. He reached down and planted a kiss there.
“We forgot to get your guitar.”
“Next time,” he pressed a kiss to her temple.
“You are giving us so much time…”
“I am fortunate to get this time to give to you. If I was in Srinagar, I wouldn’t have been able to see all the ways Yathaarth’s phone says hello.”
She giggled. He kissed her again — “Or steal snacks from your stock. Or sit like this on a weekday with you both, in a place that is so different but so peaceful.”
“You have work. I see you working at nights.”
“There is work, myani zuv, but it’s mostly desk work, research, admin. And I like to work at nights to not spiral into negative thoughts again. That’s the most vulnerable time.”
“I know… mmmm…” she wiggled her arm. He reached out and slipped his hands under Yathaarth.
“What are you doing?”
“Give him to me, you have been holding him for a while now.”
Iram relented, and Atharva carefully brought his son into his arms. The boy was already tall for his age. Now he was outgrowing his arms. A year more and he would have to curl to fit in here. Atharva reached down and nuzzled his son’s hair. His face was so beautiful. He tried to see his mother there sometimes. And ended up seeing his father. If he searched for his father, his mother would make her presence felt.
“What are you thinking?”
“How surreal it is that we spend our entire life escaping our past and then search for it in our children.”
“They bring life full circle, isn’t it?”
“They do. You know, when I was coming for you to PoK, everybody tried to dissuade me from taking Yathaarth. But I had to bring him. I thought you wouldn’t come back just for me. I thought, if I had him, showed his face to you, maybe I would have a chance at convincing you to return. It was like waving my Bhagwad Gita to you, asking you to recognise it, feel it, and come back — if not for me then for it.”
Iram’s head lifted off his chest.
“I didn’t mean to dredge up old wounds, myani…”
“Not for your Bhagwad Gita, not for your son, not for anything else in the world,” she attested solemnly. “I always come back to you for you.”
His eyelids dropped. Sometimes she did make him shy away from the intensity of emotion she so easily unleashed.
“Hmmm… mmm mmm,” she hummed the song that they had played on repeat in the car on the way here, courtesy: their son. “Ke jee chaha, yahin… mmm hmmm… umar saari guzar ke…”
Atharva met her eyes and their smiles were identical, synchronised, as flared as the setting sun.
