Chapter 10: Peecha

The morning after Manav came back, he left again.

Not dramatically — not the door-closing, car-accelerating departure of the breakup. This departure was soft, domestic, the kind of leaving that couples did: he woke, he showered, he drank the chai I made, he kissed me — on the lips this time, the promotion restored — and he said he had to get back to Mumbai, a Monday meeting he needed to prepare for, the Shatabdi at noon.

"I'll call you tonight," he said.

He called. He called every night that week. The pattern resumed — texts, voice notes, the Wednesday call. The architecture rebuilt, brick by brick, the familiar structure rising from the rubble. For two weeks, the world was whole again. Manav came to Pune on the weekend, we ate at Vaishali, we walked through Koregaon Park, we lay in my bed and talked about the things that people talked about when they were trying to build a future: where should we live eventually, Mumbai or Pune, did I want children someday, what did retirement look like, the particular Indian conversation about life-planning that was simultaneously romantic and pragmatic, the conversation that said "I see a future with you" while also saying "let's discuss the financial logistics."

And then — the third week — the texts shortened. The Wednesday call didn't come. The Friday text said: Can't make it this weekend. Will explain.

The cycle.

The Prosecutor had predicted this with the particular smugness of a voice that did not want to be right but that was right, the voice that said I told you, I told you, the pattern is the pattern, the man is the man, the leaving is the leaving regardless of how many times the returning precedes it.

I did not spiral the way I had spiralled the first time. The first time, the breakup had been an earthquake — unexpected, total, the ground opening beneath my feet. This time, the ground had already opened once and I had learned, in the falling, that the ground was not reliable, that the ground was Manav's commitment and Manav's commitment was not ground but water — it held you only while the conditions were right, and when the conditions changed, you sank.

But I did something worse than spiral. I followed.

It started with Google Maps. His flat was in Bandra — he had told me the address during one of our early conversations, the address offered casually, the way you offered information that you believed was safe because the person receiving it was trustworthy. The address was in my phone. The address was a pin on a map. The pin was a forty-five-minute flight away, or a three-hour train, or a four-hour drive.

I drove.

On a Saturday morning, when Manav had cancelled the weekend visit and I was sitting in my flat with the voices arguing — the Prosecutor presenting new evidence, the Defender running out of counterarguments, the Committee suggesting I find a nice Brahmin boy from Nashik — on that Saturday morning, I got in my car and I drove to Mumbai.

I did not plan this. I did not pack a bag or tell Maitreyi or schedule the drive as a conscious, deliberate action. The driving happened the way the Instagram-checking happened — compulsively, without the consent of the rational mind, the body executing a program that the conscious self had not written. I was sitting on my bed and then I was in my car and then I was on the Expressway and the Lonavala tunnel was behind me and Mumbai's skyline was ahead and the voices were, for the first time in weeks, unified: all of them saying what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing.

I did not know what I was doing. Or rather — I knew what I was doing but I could not admit what I was doing because admitting it would require the use of a word that I was not ready to use, a word that the Prosecutor whispered and the Defender rejected and the Committee was horrified by and the Narrator said flatly, without judgment:

She is stalking him.

Stalking. The word that belonged to crime documentaries and restraining orders and the particular vocabulary of pathology. The word that described a behaviour that was not love but the malfunction of love, the love that had metastasized, the love that had stopped being about the other person and had become about the need, the compulsion, the inability to exist without information about the other person's existence.

I was not dangerous. I was not violent. I was not the kind of stalker who left threatening notes or slashed tires or appeared at windows in the dark. I was the other kind — the kind that the world did not recognize as a stalker because the world's image of stalking was male and aggressive and the reality of my stalking was female and desperate and quiet. I drove to Mumbai and I parked on his street and I sat in my car and I watched his building. That was all. I watched.

His building was in a lane off Linking Road — a typical Bandra building, six floors, the paint fading, the balconies cluttered with the particular accumulation of Indian domestic life: drying clothes, potted plants, a bicycle that someone had brought upstairs because the parking was not safe. His flat was on the fourth floor. I knew this because he had told me. I could see the window — the one with the curtains that he had described as "the colour of a headache," maroon-brown, the particular curtain colour that landlords chose because it hid stains and absorbed dignity in equal measure.

I watched the window. For three hours. The curtains did not move. No light came on or off. No shadow crossed the window. The flat was either empty or the person inside was not near the window. Three hours of watching nothing and the nothing was — and I say this with the particular clarity that comes only in retrospect, when you are sitting in a courtroom and a lawyer is asking you to account for your actions — the nothing was simultaneously excruciating and necessary. Excruciating because nothing was what I feared: his absence from his own flat on a Saturday, the absence that meant he was somewhere else, with someone else, doing something that did not include me. Necessary because the watching was the only action available to me that was not passivity, that was not sitting in Kothrud waiting for a text that might not come, that was at least the motion of doing something even if the something was insane.

At 2 PM, the door of the building opened. Manav came out.

My heart — the organ that had been battered and repaired and battered again — my heart did something violent. Not a flutter. A detonation. The particular cardiac response of seeing the person you loved when the person did not know you were watching, the response that was not excitement but terror, the terror of the spy who has been staring at a building for hours and who suddenly sees the target and who realizes, in the seeing, that the watching has been real, that the obsession has produced a physical presence, that the gap between thinking about someone and physically following them has been crossed.

He was not alone.

A woman walked out behind him. Short, dark hair, a yellow kurti. She was smiling. He was smiling. They walked together — not holding hands, not touching, but together, the particular together of two people who were comfortable with each other, who had a shared destination, who moved in the synchronized way that bodies moved when they had been in proximity often enough to develop a rhythm.

I did not breathe. The air in the car became solid — thick, unbreathable, the particular suffocation of a person whose worst fear was being confirmed in real-time, the fear that had been a hypothesis and that was now data, the data that the Prosecutor received with vindication and the Defender received with collapse and the Committee received with a collective we told you so that echoed through my skull like a temple bell.

They walked down the lane. They turned left onto Linking Road. They disappeared into the Saturday afternoon crowd — the Bandra crowd, the particular cosmopolitan chaos of a neighbourhood in which every second person was someone's someone and the streets were full of couples and friends and families and the living proof that the world was populated by people who had what I did not: companionship, connection, the thing that I had driven three hours and forty-seven minutes to stalk because I could not have it through normal means.

I sat in the car. I sat for an hour after they disappeared. The engine was off. The windows were up. The April heat was building inside the car — the particular heat of a closed vehicle in Indian summer, the heat that was not gradual but aggressive, that pressed against the skin and the lungs and the consciousness, the heat that would, if you sat in it long enough, kill you.

I did not want to die. I want to be clear about that — at this point, in this car, on this street, I did not want to die. What I wanted was to not feel. I wanted the heat to melt the feeling out of me, to burn away the love and the obsession and the voices and the particular, unbearable knowledge that Manav was walking down Linking Road with a woman in a yellow kurti and that the walking was casual and the smiling was easy and that the thing I had been fighting for — his return, his presence, his love — the thing was not mine and perhaps had never been mine and perhaps had always been, from the beginning, a temporary arrangement that he had entered knowing it was temporary and that I had entered believing it was permanent.

I drove back to Pune. The Expressway. The tunnel. The ghats. The particular drive that I would make — I did not know this yet — many more times, the route that would become as familiar as the walk from my bedroom to the kitchen, the route that was not a drive but a compulsion, the physical manifestation of a mental illness that I did not yet recognize as mental illness because mental illness was something that happened to other people, to people who were weak, to people who were not Ananya Sharma who sold properties and ate dosa at Vaishali and had friends who made paranthas and who was, by every external measure, fine.

I was not fine. I was very, very far from fine. And the distance between where I was and where fine was — that distance was growing, and the driving was not closing it but widening it, every kilometre between Pune and Mumbai a kilometre deeper into the particular geography of obsession, the map of a mind that had lost its way and that was using a compass that pointed not toward north but toward a man.

I did not tell Maitreyi about the drive. I did not tell anyone. The secret was the first secret — the first brick in a wall that I was building between myself and the people who loved me, the wall that obsession required because obsession could not survive in the light of other people's concern, the way mould could not survive in sunlight. The obsession needed darkness. The obsession needed isolation. The obsession needed the particular privacy of a woman who was destroying herself and who needed to do it without witnesses.

I parked the car at home. I went upstairs. Maitreyi was on the balcony.

"Where were you?" she asked.

"Drove to Lonavala. Needed some air."

The lie came easily. The ease of it frightened me more than the drive.