Chapter 3 — What Five Years Does

KabirHe had told Priya about the pact four months ago.Not immediately — not when they first got serious, not when she had moved her things into his apartment in Pune, not even when he'd proposed in February on the terrace of her parents' house in Bhopal, under a sky so full of stars it had seemed excessive. He had told her in June, on a quiet Sunday, when she'd asked — gently, with the directness that was one of the things he loved most about her — whether there was anything she should know before the wedding planning began.He had told her about Rishikesh. About three days in October, five years ago. About a girl at a window table with a dog-eared book and a quality of attention that had rearranged something in him and then been set aside, deliberately, because the pact required it and because life had happened the way life happened regardless of pacts.He had told her about October fourteenth.Priya had listened without interrupting. When he finished, she had been quiet for a moment and then she had said: "Are you going to go?""Only if you—""I'm asking if you want to go," she said. Not accusing. Genuinely asking.He had looked at her — this woman he had chosen, who had chosen him, who fought fair and laughed loudly and had opinions about everything and was right about most of them — and he had said: "I think I need to. To — close it properly. To show up and see what's actually there, as opposed to what five years of not looking has made it into.""Then we go," Priya said. "Together."He had tried to talk her out of it. Not because he didn't want her there — he did, he always did, she made every room easier — but because it seemed like something she shouldn't have to do. Sitting with the woman her fiancé had made a romantic pact with at twenty-two."I'm not doing it for you," Priya had said. "I'm doing it for me. I want to meet her. I want to look at both of you in the same room and know what's real and what's just a story you've been telling yourself for five years." She paused. "And I think she deserves to know too. That you chose. She should see the choosing."This was the quality he had fallen in love with. The ability to look at a hard thing and walk toward it.Now he was sitting in Shiv Café across from Aanya Sharma, who looked — different. Not the way time made people different. Different in a way he couldn't specify. There was something careful about her in a way that hadn't been there at twenty-two. Something she was managing.He knew her face. That was the thing he had not been prepared for — that five years of no contact had not faded the specific vocabulary of her expressions. She was doing the thing she did when she was being strong on purpose: her chin slightly lifted, her hands around the cup in that particular way, a steadiness in her eyes that was not natural but was very good.She was working hard at being fine.He sat with this.He thought: she came here alone. She came here and she's doing this alone and she's being extraordinary about it.He thought: she's carrying something.He didn't know what. But he knew her, or he had known her, and the quality of what she was managing was too large for the situation. The situation was hard. But what she was managing was harder than the situation.He filed this and let her talk about his work, and he talked, and across the café Priya examined the painting with genuine attention and gave them the space she had decided to give them, which was another thing he loved about her — she had decided, and she held her decisions.* * *