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‘Did you go to the doctor?’
‘I am at the hospital.’
‘So late at night?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What happened? Are you sick?’
‘No, health’s fine. I told you, no!’
‘Then what are you doing at the hospital so late at night?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Sudha, tell me what happened.’
‘I had to abort. The doctor told me that if I carried the baby, the complications would increase.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Today.’
Neither of them could speak after this. Chandar felt he had finally left home now. He went into his room without eating anything. Back home, Sudha kept looking for Chandar for a long time in her own bed. She had lied to free him. She actually wanted him to find his passion and live for it. She kept crying about her lie the entire night. Chandar spent the night crying too. They had shared the entire world’s sadness among themselves that day. Nights that are spent crying result in something different the next morning.
The moment he woke up the next morning, Chandar asked Pummy to cook something for him; he felt super hungry. She neither asked him about the previous night, nor did Chandar tell her.
When someone passes away, we start behaving normally in the hope that soon everything will become normal if we keep acting like it is. A lot of bruises leave scars so that we don’t forget our mistakes. One should correct them but never erase them. Mistakes are those roads that guide us where we go wrong.
Work on Musafir Café had started in full swing. Chandar had started going trekking. He still had a year’s savings left to take care of his expenses. He had started to read all the books he had bought and then kept aside.
Ten Years Later
‘Do you know whom we should spend our lives with?’
‘With whom?’
‘When we were kids, we often hid a little bit of sunlight coming from the corner of a window, in a matchbox. You would have done it too, I am sure.’
‘Yeah, but how does that relate to spending lives?’
‘So the day you find someone who believes that your matchbox still has that sunlight without opening it, don’t think twice. Just spend your life with that person.’
‘What if I don’t find someone like that?’
‘Then what?’
‘What if I don’t find someone like that?’
‘Then just open your matchbox and taste a little bit of that good ol’ sunlight.’
Ten Years Later: Mussoorie
The world had changed faster than it should have in the past ten years. Musafir Café was now one of Mussoorie’s most popular tourist haunts. Pummy and Chandar both ran the café together. The waiter, who had been there for years, still worked there.
The café looked exactly like its layout. There were a few tables downstairs and a few mattresses. On one wall, there were photos of hundreds of tourists with Pummy and Chandar; these people had visited the café over the years. One wall had nothing but hundreds of books. The upper section had five rooms and Chandar and Pummy lived in the two-room flat. Sitting in the balcony outside, they would talk about the most random things in the world. No one knows if whatever was between them could be classified as love in any of the books ever written, but yes, they were used to each other. They earned enough from the café to go for a month-long vacation anywhere in the world, one trip at a time. For them, the world wasn’t just abroad, it included India and its villages too. For them, the world meant as much outside as it did inside. That one month solely belonged to them. Neither did Pummy ask for any details of that one month, nor did Chandar. His family often visited Mussoorie for vacation. They had finally accepted that making them ‘understand’ was not going to work out. When Chandar’s mother visited the last time, she had even joked about it. She asked, ‘Why do you only get such girls who don’t want to get married?’
Every Sunday, Chandar mixed up the stories of Harry Potter and the Panchatantra and narrated them to children. All those who visited Musafir Café thought Chandar and Pummy were married. If anyone asked them about it, they would just shrug it off with a laugh.
