Rewritten and update version of original story, published on 2024-11-05, link: Old version. Here I have added better character development to make the characters more unique and relatable.
Continued from previous blog - Link - Link
Present Day. The Psychotherapy Clinic. Moments later.
The word husband landed somewhere below his ribs.
Sanjay heard it. Processed it. And then did what he had spent years training himself to do i.e.; he held the surface.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. His voice came out measured, complete, entirely the wrong temperature for the moment.
He smiled. The smile arrived at his mouth and stopped there.
“I just got an emergency text. From work.” He was already reaching into his pocket, already performing the reading of a message that hadn’t come. “You carry on. I’m sorry and I have to go.”
Pooja watched him. Her eyes were steady and direct, the kind that didn’t waver even when they were noticing more than they were supposed to. She said nothing. She simply held his gaze for one beat longer than was comfortable, and then let him go.
He went quickly.
Married.
He breathed out once, deliberately, through his nose. His jaw had tightened at some point without his noticing. He released it.
If Pooja has moved on, he told himself, that is her life. You have yours.
He stood in the stairwell for another minute. Then he walked down and out to the parking lot and got into his car and sat in it without starting the engine.
He did not cry. Not here. Not in a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon.
He started the engine.
He made it as far as the signal at the third junction before his eyes went glassy.
He did not register this. He registered the signal turning green, and the car behind him honking, and his own hand moving on the gear. He drove the rest of the way home on the kind of autopilot that is its own form of grief, the kind where the body handles the mechanics because the mind has gone somewhere else entirely.
He let himself into his house and went directly to his room and sat on the edge of the bed.
His leg had begun to shake. Slightly. Rhythmically. He was not aware of it.
He sat like that for a while. Then he got up and stood in front of the mirror above his dresser. He looked at himself the way he sometimes did, not with dislike, not with satisfaction, but with a flat, neutral attention, as if he were looking at a problem he hadn’t solved but had learned to work around.
They have all moved on, he thought. Swati. Pooja. Both.
Then, with the particular logic of a man who has not yet understood the difference between craving and loving:
There are others.
He unlocked his phone. He scrolled through his contacts with his thumb, not quite knowing what he was looking for, until his thumb stopped on a name.
Pravallika.
He sat down on the bed again. Something loosened slightly in his chest. Not grief. More like the specific relief of a man who has remembered a door he has not yet tried.
He began to hum under his breath, without noticing he had started. A Telugu film song, something slow and almost plaintive. He stopped the moment he registered it, and looked up, and the room was empty. Only then did he keep humming.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Sanjay?”
Her voice was the same. This surprised him more than it should have. He hadn’t spoken to her in years. He had thought, for some reason he couldn’t justify, that she would sound different. That time would have made her more unfamiliar. But her voice was exactly what he remembered, and this loosened something in him that the crying had not reached.
“Pravalli,” he said, and the name came out with more ease than he’d intended.
There was a pause on her end. A pause he couldn’t read.
“I’m here,” she said finally. He spoke with the particular charm of a man who knows how to be charming and uses it the way other people use a coat — to keep the interior temperature stable. By the time the call ended, she had agreed to dinner. He had suggested Ohris. She had pretended to deliberate for a moment and then said yes, as if she had been considering something other than yes all along.
He set the phone down.
He sat there for a moment, very still. Then something shifted in his face — a smile that arrived from somewhere deeper than the usual one. It made him look younger. It lasted about four seconds and then it was gone, and he was already moving toward the wardrobe.
Several years ago. A bus stop at dusk.
The light was going pink and amber along the rooftops, and the last of the school buses had already left, and the stop was mostly empty except for her.
She was in a blue churidar. She was holding her bag in both hands in front of her with the specific patience of someone who was happy to be waiting, who considered waiting for this particular person a worthwhile use of an evening.
He came around the corner and she saw him and the easy happiness that moved across her face was completely genuine and not performed for anyone because she hadn’t known he was watching yet.
“Pravalli. Have you been waiting long? Am I late?”
She smiled. “It’s okay, Sanjay. I enjoy waiting for you. Not just now. Forever.”
He had thought, at seventeen, that this was a sweet thing to say. He had not known, at seventeen, that forever was a word people used when they were genuinely unaware of how much they were staking.
Present. Sanjay’s building. The Uber parking lot.
He had shaved. He had taken a long shower, the kind that takes longer than necessary, and had dressed in the shirt he saved for occasions that mattered. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw a man who looked like someone who had his life together.
He stood straighter.
He booked the Uber.
He sat in the back and closed his eyes, and the city moved around him, and the memories moved with it.
Several years ago. Her birthday.
“Sanjay, you look so handsome today. What’s the occasion?”
“It’s your birthday, Pravalli. I had to look my best.”
She had laughed and that sudden, slightly-surprised laugh of hers, as if she hadn’t been planning to find it funny, as if joy kept catching her off-guard. She had taken his hand. She had played with the hem of her sleeve with her other hand, winding and unwinding it, a small private gesture he had noticed back then without understanding what it meant.
“Awww. So sweet, baby.”
He had kissed her. Several times. They were teenagers who had found each other early, and for a season that felt long at the time, it had been enough.
He had not known, then, that he would end it.
His phone buzzed.
“Sanjay, I’ve just left home. I’ll be there soon.”
“See you soon, Pravalli,” he said, and the warmth in his voice was genuine in the way that warmth could be genuine and still be incomplete.
He looked out the window as the city moved past. He was almost there.
Several years ago. A different evening.
The conversation had started over something small. It always did.
“Sanjay, why were you sexting that girl?”
He had not lied. He had never, even then, been someone who lied outright. He had said what he thought was the honest thing: “She was attractive. It was just texts. We haven’t actually done anything.”
He had genuinely believed this made it fine.
“Am I not enough for you?” Pravallika had said. Her voice had dropped — softer, slower, no performance in it, just the person underneath. The register she kept only for him. “We’ve shared everything except—”
“Pravalli, it’s too early to commit to one person forever. I’m still a teenager.”
He remembered the way her face had gone very still. A frozen brightness and her expression intact, her eyes falling slightly behind it. He had not known what it meant at the time. He had read it as anger. He had not understood that it was something arriving at her that she hadn’t seen coming.
“Sanjay, you are making me crazy.”
“I think it’s time for a break. If I realise my feelings again, I’ll get in touch.”
What followed, he did not think about. He had deleted her number that evening. He had not looked back, or not for long, and he had filed the whole thing under we were very young and moved forward.
It had not occurred to him, until recently, that the filing was something he did. That it was something worth examining.
Present. The Ohris elevator.
The doors opened onto the hotel lobby. From somewhere further inside, a couple’s argument floated through and voices rising and falling over something that had probably started three subjects ago. Sanjay stepped out, straightened his collar, and walked toward the elevator that led to the rooftop restaurant.
He stepped in.
He pressed the button for the top floor.
The elevator moved up. And in the four seconds before it stopped, something shifted in his chest and not quite the shakiness of genuine emotion, but something adjacent to it. Something that felt like the memory of what it had cost her.
The doors opened.
He stepped out. He stood on the threshold of the restaurant entrance, the city spread out below the terrace, the evening air still warm. He could already see the tables, the candlelight, the quiet Friday-evening buzz of people who were exactly where they meant to be.
He reached for his phone.
He called her before he walked in.
Her voice came through on the second ring. “Sanjay? Are you here?”
He turned slightly away from the entrance. His right thumb pressed into his left palm, hard, once, and released.
“Pravalli, our system just crashed. Complete emergency. I just got a call, I have to get to office immediately. I’m really sorry.”
The silence on the other end lasted about three seconds.
“It’s okay, Sanjay,” she said. “We can meet next time.”
Her voice was even. Warm, even. The kind of warmth that didn’t waver, didn’t press, didn’t give him anything to push against.
He hung up. He turned and walked back toward the elevator, his stride easy, his face composed, his jaw very slightly tight.
The rooftop restaurant. The same moment.
Pravallika had seen him.
She had kept her face entirely still while she answered the call. She had kept her voice even and warm and unthreatening. She had given him the easiest possible exit. She set her phone down on the table.
“At least he’s still nervous to face me,” she said to herself, quietly, in the register she kept for things she meant but would never perform.
The candlelight on the table moved in the slight evening breeze.
“Maybe it’s time I should help him.”
<<< To be Continued >>>