Chapter 5: Andhera

I stopped sleeping on the first night and I did not start again.

This is not a metaphor. This is not the poetic insomnia of novels, the "I couldn't sleep" that actually means "I slept badly." I stopped sleeping. My body refused. My brain, which had been processing the loss of Manav with the particular obsessiveness of a machine that has encountered an error and that keeps running the same diagnostic over and over, refused to shut down. The diagnostic ran on a loop: What went wrong? What did I miss? What could I have done differently? Could I have been less intense? More intense? Less available? More distant? Was it the dal-chawal? Was it the running across the platform? Was it the three words I never said and the three words he never said and the three words that might have changed everything if someone had said them at the right time?

The loop did not stop. The loop ran through the night and into the morning and through the next night and into the next morning and the mornings began to blur with the nights because when you don't sleep the boundary between them dissolves, the darkness of 3 AM and the darkness of 9 PM becoming indistinguishable, time itself becoming a flat, featureless plane on which you lay and waited for something that did not come.

The first three days I did not leave my bed.

Maitreyi brought food. She stood in my doorway — the particular posture of a friend who was witnessing something she could not fix, the helpless stance of a person who had been trained by life to solve problems and who was confronted with a problem that had no solution. She brought rice and dal and curd and a banana and she placed them on my bedside table and she said, gently: "Eat something, Anu. Please."

I did not eat. The banana turned brown. The curd expired. The rice dried into a small, hard lump that looked like something archaeological. Maitreyi replaced the food every twelve hours with the particular devotion of a temple priest who maintained offerings even when the god was absent, the ritual observed regardless of outcome.

Jhanvi was different. Jhanvi stood in my doorway and cried. This was Jhanvi's response to most situations — tears, dramatic tears, the kind of tears that were not about the situation but about Jhanvi's response to the situation, the particular self-referential grief of a person who experienced other people's pain primarily through the lens of her own emotional capacity. "Oh Anu," she said, her voice thick with the particular Indian-woman wail that rose and fell like a siren. "Men are bastards. All of them. Every single one. Manav is a bastard. I knew it. I told you. Didn't I tell you?"

She had not told me. What she had told me was "He's okay. Not great, but okay." But Jhanvi's memory was creative, a revisionist historian who reshaped the past to support the present narrative, and the present narrative was that Jhanvi had seen through Manav from the beginning and that her warnings had gone unheeded.

I did not correct her. I did not have the energy to correct anyone. The energy that I had — the small, finite reserve that the human body maintained even in extremity, the emergency fund of life-force that kept the heart beating and the lungs expanding — that energy was entirely consumed by the loop. The diagnostic. The endless, pointless, excruciating replay of every moment with Manav, every text analysed, every look interpreted, every touch evaluated for authenticity, the entire five weeks disassembled and examined piece by piece like an engine that had stopped working and that the mechanic was trying to understand by laying every component on the floor and staring at them.

On the fourth day, I texted Nikhil. I told him I was sick. Fever, I said. Bad fever. The kind that needed a week. Nikhil responded with the particular concern of a man who was not concerned: Take care. Don't worry about the Johnson property, I'll handle it. He would not handle it. The Johnson property would remain unhandled until I returned, at which point Nikhil would explain, with confidence and detail, all the ways in which he had almost handled it and all the external factors that had prevented him from completing the handling.

I did not care. The Johnson property. The agency. Kamala-ma'am's targets. The entire professional infrastructure of my life — the thing that, until five weeks ago, had been the primary structure, the skeleton around which everything else hung — that infrastructure had become irrelevant. Not unimportant — irrelevant. The difference was significant. Unimportant meant "this matters less than other things." Irrelevant meant "this exists in a dimension I can no longer access." Manav's departure had moved me to a different dimension, a place where the normal rules of daily life — work, food, sleep, hygiene, social obligation — did not apply, a place where the only thing that was real was his absence and the pain of it.

The phone became my enemy and my obsession.

I checked it every four minutes. Not metaphorically — literally. I timed myself, once, out of the particular curiosity that surfaces even in despair, the analytical mind that refuses to stop analyzing even when the subject of analysis is your own destruction. Every four minutes, I picked up the phone, checked for messages, checked for missed calls, checked WhatsApp for the blue ticks that would mean he had read my messages, checked his last-seen timestamp for evidence that he was online, that he was alive, that he existed somewhere in the world with a phone in his hand and that the phone was not being used to contact me.

He had not replied to any of my messages. There were seven now. Seven messages that ranged from pleading (Please talk to me, I need to understand) to desperate (Manav I can't eat I can't sleep please at least tell me you're okay) to analytical (I've been thinking about what you said and I think we can work through this if we just talk properly) to the message I sent at 3 AM on Tuesday that I would later regret with the particular regret that only 3 AM messages produced: I love you. I don't care if you don't say it back. I love you and I will wait for you. However long it takes. I will be here.

Seven messages. Zero replies. Seven bottles thrown into an ocean that was not listening.

By the end of the first week, Maitreyi escalated.

She sat on my bed — not in the doorway this time, but on the actual bed, the particular territorial assertion of a friend who had decided that gentleness was no longer working and that proximity was required. She sat and she took my phone out of my hand — physically took it, the way you took a knife from a child — and she placed it on the other side of the room.

"Anu," she said. "Listen to me."

I looked at her. Or I looked in her direction — my eyes were open but the looking had become passive, the particular gaze of a person who was receiving visual information without processing it, the eyes functioning as cameras rather than as instruments of engagement.

"You haven't eaten properly in six days. You haven't showered. You haven't left this bed. You have sent that man seven messages that he has not answered. You are not going to work. And you are scaring me."

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine. Anu, what you are doing is not grieving. Grieving is healthy. Grieving is the normal, human response to loss. What you are doing is — " she searched for the word, the particular pause of a person who wanted to say something accurately rather than dramatically — "what you are doing is disappearing. You are disappearing into the loss. And I need you to stop."

"I can't stop thinking about him, Mai."

"I know. But you can stop starving. You can stop lying in the dark. You can eat a parantha and take a shower and sit on the balcony and let the sun hit your face for fifteen minutes. These are small things. These are the things that keep you human while your heart is broken. If you stop doing these things, Anu — if you stop eating and sleeping and moving — the heartbreak won't kill you but the disappearing will."

I heard her. I heard the words and I understood the words and I even agreed with the words, in the abstract way that a drowning person agreed that swimming was a good idea — yes, theoretically, swimming was the correct response, but the water was too deep and the limbs were too heavy and the surface was too far away and the effort required to reach it felt, from down here in the dark, impossibly disproportionate to the reward.

"One thing," Maitreyi said. "Do one thing. Eat one parantha. I'll make it. Gobi parantha. Your favourite. With achaar. Just one."

She went to the kitchen. I heard the sounds — the rolling pin on the chakla, the dough being pressed, the tawa heating, the particular sizzle of parantha meeting hot metal, the sounds of Indian domesticity, the sounds of care expressed through wheat flour and ghee and the labour of a woman who could not heal your heart but who could feed your body and who believed, with the particular Indian faith in food as medicine, that feeding was a form of healing.

She brought the parantha. It was perfect — golden, flaky, the ghee gleaming, the gobi filling visible at the edges, the achaar on the side, red and sharp and alive. The smell hit me — the first thing I had properly smelled in days, the olfactory system reactivating after a week of shutdown, the smell of ghee and roasted flour and the particular spice of gobi parantha that was the smell of every Indian kitchen, every Indian grandmother, every Indian morning that had ever been worth waking up for.

I ate. One parantha. Then half of another, because Maitreyi had made two and because the first one had reminded my body that it was, in fact, still alive and that alive bodies required fuel. The food landed in my empty stomach with the particular weight of sustenance after starvation, the physical relief of something solid in a body that had been running on emptiness.

"Good," Maitreyi said. She didn't smile. She didn't celebrate. She acknowledged the act with the clinical satisfaction of a medic who had stabilized a patient but who understood that stabilization was not recovery. "Tomorrow you shower. Day after, you go outside. We do this in steps."

I looked at her. My best friend. The woman who made biryani as diplomacy and parantha as medicine. The woman who was sitting on my bed at 10 PM on a weeknight, feeding me with the particular determination of a person who had decided that I was going to survive this whether I wanted to or not.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked. Not because I didn't know — I knew, it was love, the non-romantic love, the love that Indian women gave each other in the spaces between the romantic love that the world celebrated, the unglamorous, persistent, parantha-making love that saved lives while the world wrote poems about the other kind.

"Because you would do it for me," she said simply. "And because you're my person, Anu. And my person is not allowed to disappear."

I cried then. Not the controlled crying of the previous days — the silent, continuous seepage of tears that happened when the body was too tired for sobs. This was real crying. The full, ugly, loud crying that Indian women did when the dam broke — the wailing, the snot, the shaking, the particular sound that came from somewhere deeper than the chest, somewhere in the gut, the primal sound of a human being who was in pain and who was, for the first time in a week, allowing another person to witness it.

Maitreyi held me. She held me and she rocked me and she said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because the thing about heartbreak was that it could not be solved with words, it could only be survived with presence, and presence was what Maitreyi gave me — her body next to mine, her arms around me, the warmth of a person who was choosing to be in the darkness with me rather than standing at the edge of it and telling me to come out.

The darkness was still there. The loop was still running. The phone was still silent. Manav was still gone.

But I had eaten a parantha. And someone was holding me. And these two things — food and presence, the oldest medicines in the world — these two things were the first thread of a rope that I would eventually use to climb out.

Eventually. Not yet. For now, the darkness was deep and the rope was thin and the climbing had not yet begun.

But the thread existed. And the thread was Maitreyi.