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‘You uneducated fool!’
Making a big change is scary, but maybe now is the time? Could I, could I possibly consider finishing my degree? Undo a mistake?
‘You stupid woman, I should just fucking leave you and not look at you ever again.’
Can I dare to leave him?
‘I should leave you, marry someone with some brains and a working uterus. Not a good-for-nothing bitch like you.’
However big a jerk he might be, he is right. Whatever I might do, I will never be a mother.
And with that thought, her heart, which had just started to take brave steps, faltered again. Hers was doomed to be a childless life. Dr Jacob had been very clear – he could have a baby any time he wanted, it was she who could not.
A childless woman. That is what she was destined to be.
She stared at her empty arms and her heart broke again into a million little pieces for the baby that would never be hers.
8
At forty-seven, Atharv Jayakrishna, MD, would be the youngest recipient of the Alum of the Year Award in Indian Medical Institute’s 167 year history. He would begin his acceptance speech by describing his first memory of IMI back from the day he stepped into the college for the first time.
He would talk about the goosebumps he felt when, from his rickety auto-rickshaw, through the black iron gates, past the green lawns, he first set eyes on the imposing red-brick building of IMI.
He would choose to not talk about one thing from this scene. The one thing that was the reason this memory was so vividly alive in his head.
A girl. A girl in a light yellow salwar kurta walking ahead, alone, lugging a suitcase three times her size.
Atharv hesitated only a second before requesting the auto driver to stop the vehicle. ‘No matter how late you are running,’ his father used to say to him often, ‘there is always time for good manners.’
‘Hi, can I help you? Your suitcase seems very heavy,’ Atharv asked the girl. He hadn’t even glanced at her, so taken was he by the size of her suitcase.
The girl looked up, surprised. Atharv felt her eyes on his face and he looked at the girl. And he stilled.
He first noticed the delicate, perfectly shaped rose petal-like lips. Then the sharp little nose, and then the complexion that made him think of sunflowers in the snow. Even though it was scrunched up in the sun at the moment, this was, without any doubt, the most beautiful face he’d ever seen. The sort of face for which the earth could stop spinning, the waves stop heaving and the air stop flowing. For one mad minute, Atharv’s world flipped on itself.
And then it happened.
She brought her hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. And then her eyes opened wide enough for Atharv to see them properly.
And Atharv stared without blinking, without breathing.
The azure of the Mediterranean.
The blue of the cornflower.
The clarity of a cloudless sky.
Blue eyes that set that beautiful face on fire.
‘Um … thanks, I can manage,’ she said, smiling now.
‘I insist, please. Let me carry that holdall?’ Atharv asked, snapping back into the real world. Had he really, for one mad minute, lost himself in a girl’s beauty? The way he had only read of people doing?
‘Thanks,’ she said after a pause and handed her bag to him.
The two stared at each other for a moment.
‘First year MBBS and my name is Nili Verma,’ she said.
