Chapter 3: The Neem Tree

She told him everything. Not just the neem tree — though the neem tree was where it started. The courtyard in Mysore. Her grandparents' house — the old house on Saraswathipuram Road with the red oxide floors and the tulsi plant and the swing on the verandah where her grandfather read the Deccan Herald every morning with the methodical attention of a retired headmaster who believed that newspapers were sacred texts. The neem tree was in the back courtyard, near the well that no one used anymore, and seven-year-old Meera had been sitting under it reading a Tinkle comic — Suppandi, the specific issue where Suppandi joins a cricket team — when the lightning hit.

"The sound," she said. Under the table. In the dark. Arjun's shoulder warm against hers. "You know how people describe thunder as a crash or a boom? It wasn't that. It was a crack. Like the sky was a bone and something snapped it. And then the tree — the neem tree, which was older than the house, older than my grandparents — split. Down the middle. Like someone had taken an axe to it. Half the tree fell into the courtyard and half fell into the neighbour's compound and the Tinkle comic was under the half that fell and I was not."

"You were okay?"

"Physically. Completely fine. Not a scratch. My grandmother came running out and she was crying and she picked me up and I could smell the neem — you know that smell? The sharp, medicinal, green smell? The split tree was bleeding sap and the smell was everywhere and my grandmother was holding me and I could feel her heart beating through her cotton sari and I thought: the sky can reach down and break things. The sky can break anything it wants."

"You were seven."

"I was seven. And I learned a lesson that no amount of therapy has unlearned: the sky is not safe. Thunder means the sky is angry. Lightning means the sky is reaching. And if you're under a tree or on a street or anywhere that isn't under something solid, you're a target."

"Forty-three thousand rupees."

"Forty-three thousand rupees. My therapist — Dr. Kamala, she's in Jayanagar, she has a Labrador named Freud who sits in the sessions — she says the phobia is rooted in a single traumatic episode and that with cognitive behavioural therapy and gradual exposure—"

Thunder. The loudest yet. The Coffee Loft shook — the cups on the shelves rattled, the mosaic floor vibrated. Meera's sentence dissolved into a sound that was not a word but was the pure, involuntary vocalisation of terror: a gasp that became a whimper that became silence as she pressed her face into her knees and stopped breathing.

Arjun's arm. Around her shoulders. Not tentative — deliberate. The deliberate, warm, steady wrap of a man who had decided that the woman next to him needed an anchor and who had made himself available for the role without asking permission because some things did not require permission, they required action.

"Breathe," he said. His voice was close — his mouth near her ear, his breath warm, the single word cutting through the thunder the way his Mysore Morning cut through a bad morning. "In. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out."

She breathed. His rhythm. In. Hold. Out. The thunder continued but the breathing was closer than the thunder, the arm was warmer than the fear, and somewhere between the third breath and the seventh she found the narrow, fragile corridor between panic and control that Dr. Kamala had spent eighteen months trying to show her and that a barista had found in thirty seconds.

"How did you know to do that?" she asked, when she could speak again.

"My mother has panic attacks. Since my father left. I've been doing this since I was twelve."

"Your mother—"

"She's okay. She's in Dharwad. She runs a tailoring shop. She panics on Dussehra because my father left on Dussehra and the firecrackers sound like — well. You understand."

"I understand."

They sat. Under the table. The storm continuing. Two people who understood fear — not the theoretical, intellectual understanding of a psychology textbook, but the lived, embodied, seven-years-old-and-twelve-years-old understanding of fear that had shaped their nervous systems and that no amount of money spent in therapy rooms in Jayanagar could fully undo.

"Arjun?"

"Yeah?"

"This is the longest conversation we've ever had."

"It is."

"I've been coming here for four months."

"Four months and six days."

She looked up. In the dark. His face was a shape — angles and shadows, the fall of hair across his forehead. But his voice was a light.

"You counted?"

"I'm a barista. I notice regulars. Especially the ones who read terrible romance novels and know obscure facts about Pune property law."

"That's not—"

"It's a little bit of flirting. I'm not good at it. I'm better at coffee."

"You're good at this."

"At sitting under tables during storms?"

"At making me breathe."

The thunder rolled. Meera did not flinch. Not because the fear was gone — the fear was still there, the neem tree was always there, the sky was always breakable. But the arm was there too. And the breathing. And the voice. And the four months and six days.