She looked at the other paintings.
There was one from the wedding. The temple, marigolds, and the fire between them during the ceremony.
Another one from the contract signing, her eyes defiant while her hand was captured on the frame, mid-signature.
Before the wedding, before the contract, there were others.
Her on the first day at the steel plant, camera lifted, the noise and heat of the factory floor all around her. She remembered that day. He had walked past her without a glance, and she had told herself it didn't matter, that she was nobody to him, just another name on a vendor list. In the painting, there was an irritated, defiant look on her face.
Her standing against the wall of the chief minister's office, camera lowered, trying to take up as little space as possible during a meeting so he wouldn’t notice her.
Her half hidden behind a pillar at an environmental event, camera raised, deliberately out of his line of sight. She had hidden on purpose that day. She had been certain, completely certain, that he hadn't seen her.
And then, the paintings stopped.
A stretch of bare wall. Older frames hanging on either side of it, but nothing in between. Dust marked the wall in a pattern that suggested something had once been there and had been removed, or that nothing had ever been hung there at all.
She stood in front of the gap for a long moment.
She didn't understand it yet. She only knew, the way she knew most things about him now, that it meant something.
On the other side of the gap, the paintings continued. Older. Different in feel.
A formal portrait, heavier in color, deep blues and silver, the palette of ceremony.
A girl in blue and silver.
She stopped.
She knew this painting before she fully understood what she was looking at. It was her on their engagement ceremony.
She remembered that day—the silence beside her, the three times she had tried to speak to him, and the three times he had said nothing, hadn't even turned his head.
She had told that story to Pooja once.He never looked at me. Not even once.
She looked at the canvas now.
The angle of her own chin. The shy, hopeful smile she had before she tried talking to him.
He had looked. Closely enough, and for long enough, to paint it afterward from memory.
All these years, she had remembered that day as proof he never noticed her.
She had used it as evidence that she had never mattered to him.
The painting made it impossible to hold onto.
He had looked. She simply hadn't known he was looking.
Further along, the paintings grew younger still.
A sixteen-year-old girl in a turban, laughing among a crowd at a racetrack, dust rising around her.
She remembered this day too, vaguely. The bull race at Devara, which she attended with her brother. The thrill of being somewhere she wasn't supposed to be, dressed as someone she wasn't.
She had recently told Sanjana about it.
She had never imagined that Bharat had attended the bull race too and had been near her at that time.
