Chapter 15 — The Other Side

Two years later.Kaveri was a person with opinions.This was the thing that surprised Aanya most — not the love, which she had expected and which had arrived with the force of something geological, reshaping the landscape permanently. The love was what she had expected. The opinions were not.Kaveri was two years old and she had opinions about which cup was the correct cup, about the specific song required for the walk to the park, about the placement of objects on the coffee table, about the injustice of naptime, about the relative merits of her two stuffed elephants. She communicated these opinions with the full force of a person who had not yet learned that the world did not always rearrange itself to her preferences."She's you," Devika said, watching Kaveri negotiate the placement of a book on the shelf with the concentration of a logistics professional. "She's entirely you.""She has his ears," Aanya said."She has his ears and she has your entire personality," Devika said. "God help everyone."Aanya laughed.* * *Kabir came to Delhi once a month.Not always — sometimes twice, sometimes a longer gap depending on the project he was running. But once a month was the rhythm they had found, the rhythm that worked for Kaveri, who was beginning to know his face and reach for him with the specific trust of a child who had learned that this person showed up.It was not a simple thing. It was never a simple thing. There were months when the logistics were hard and the emotional weight of the arrangement required more from all three of them than was comfortable. There were conversations that Aanya and Kabir had to have about money, about decisions, about what Kaveri would be told and when, that were hard in the specific way of conversations between two people who had been something to each other and were now something else, navigating the permanent fact of a third person.Priya came sometimes.Not always — she had her own reading of what was needed and she was careful with it. But sometimes she came, and those visits had a quality that Aanya had not anticipated: something that was moving, incrementally, toward a thing she did not yet have a name for. Not friendship, exactly — not yet, possibly not ever. But something in that direction. Something that had at its foundation the mutual recognition of two people who had looked at each other in Shiv Café and told the truth."She asked me how I was doing," Aanya told Devika, after one such visit. "Not as a pleasantry. She actually asked.""What did you say?""I said I was figuring it out." She looked at Kaveri, who was explaining something at length to the larger of the two stuffed elephants. "She said: me too."* * *On the second anniversary of Rishikesh, Aanya sat at the window of her Delhi apartment with her morning chai and watched the street and thought about pacts.She thought about twenty-two, and a ghat, and the specific October light that turned things the colour of memory. She thought about what she had wanted then — to do something old-fashioned and absolute, to not be the exchange-numbers-and-fade version, to honor the specific weight of those three days.She thought: the pact worked. Not the way she had imagined it. Not the version where they show up and he is free and they find out what it becomes.But the pact had always been about completing something. About showing up. About not letting the thing become a story you told yourself about what could have been. About walking into the actual room and seeing the actual truth.She had done that.The actual truth was: he had become someone who loved a very good person. And she had become someone who was raising a daughter with the best of both of them in her. And Priya had become something unexpected — a presence in the story that complicated it and also, in the complicating, made it more honest.None of this was what she had imagined at twenty-two on the steps of the ghat.All of it was real.Kaveri appeared at the kitchen door with the smaller elephant and a very specific intention regarding the morning."Amma," she said. "Chai.""Chai is for grown-ups," Aanya said."Chai," Kaveri said, with the particular conviction of a person for whom the argument had been presented and the argument was: chai.Aanya looked at her daughter — two years old, large ears, the full force of an opinion about everything, an entire life ahead of her that would be complicated and full and hers.She thought: I am on the other side of goodbye.She thought: this is what is on the other side. Not what I planned. What is.She picked up her daughter. Kaveri grabbed the chai cup with one hand and the elephant with the other, and Aanya let her hold the cup because choosing your battles was a thing you learned, and outside the Delhi morning was doing its loud, exhaust-scented, glorious morning thing.She thought: I promised him I would be happy.She thought: I am.Not the uncomplicated kind.The real kind.The kind built from what actually happened rather than what was planned.Which was, she was learning, the only kind that lasted.