Chapter 17: Toofan (The Storm)

The chaos arrived on December 26th, which was the day after Christmas and the day before Nandini's birthday, and it arrived in the form of Arundhati.

Not Arundhati herself — Arundhati was too strategic for that. She sent a lawyer. A lawyer named Advocate Deshpande, who arrived at the front door of the Sadashiv Peth flat at nine in the morning with a file of papers and the particular expression of a man who has been paid to deliver bad news and is neither sorry about the news nor the payment.

"Mrs. Deshmukh?"

"Yes."

"I represent Mrs. Arundhati Joshi. I have a legal notice regarding Mr. Chirag Joshi's assets, specifically the Koregaon Park flat, which is jointly held property. Mrs. Joshi is filing for divorce and is requesting immediate return of Mr. Joshi to the marital home for the purpose of asset division."

He held out the papers. Nandini took them — not because she wanted to, but because when a lawyer hands you papers, you take them, the way you take a prescription from a doctor or a receipt from a shop, because the taking is automatic and the reading comes after.

Chirag was in the kitchen. He'd heard — the walls were thin, sound carried, and Advocate Deshpande's voice was the voice of a man who had been trained to project in courtrooms and saw no reason to modulate in hallways.

"What is it?" Chirag asked, though his face said he already knew.

"Arundhati's filing for divorce. She wants you back in the flat for asset division."

"I'm not going back."

"You may not have a choice. This is a legal notice."

Chirag took the papers. Read them. The reading was fast — Chirag had spent forty years in business and could read legal documents the way most people read newspapers, with speed and suspicion and the particular attention of a man who knows that the important things in legal documents are not the things that are stated but the things that are implied.

"She's claiming the flat. The full flat. On grounds of desertion."

"You left."

"She locked me out!"

"The notice says you left voluntarily."

"The notice is lying."

"The notice is a legal document. It doesn't lie or tell the truth. It makes claims. And the claims have to be answered."

He sat down at the kitchen table. The table that had held therapy confessions and baby announcements and fellowship-of-grief chai and was now holding divorce papers, because this table was apparently the surface on which every significant event in Nandini's domestic life was going to occur, and at some point she was going to have to buy a bigger table.

"I need a lawyer," Chirag said.

"You need several things. A lawyer is one of them."

"What else?"

"You need to move out."

The words landed the way words land when they've been sitting in the back of someone's throat for weeks, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Nandini had not planned to say this — not today, not like this, not with Advocate Deshpande's papers still warm on the table. But the words were there, and the moment was there, and the combination of the two produced the sentence before she could edit it.

"Move out," Chirag repeated.

"Not because of Arundhati. Because of — because it's time. You've been here eight weeks. The therapy is working. The drinking has stopped. The letters are nearly done. And Vivek is home, and Bela is coming next week, and — Chirag, this house was always temporary. You know that."

"I know that."

"And the longer you stay, the harder it will be to leave. For both of us."

"Both of us?"

"Don't make me say it."

"Say what?"

"That I've gotten used to you being here. That having you at the breakfast table and watching you read the newspaper and hearing you wash your own cup — which, by the way, is still a miracle — has become normal. And I don't want it to become normal, because normal with you is dangerous. Normal with you is how it started last time. And I can't — I won't — do last time again."

The kitchen was quiet. Vivek, who had been in the living room and had heard everything because the flat was small and privacy was theoretical, appeared in the doorway.

"I can find a flat," Chirag said. "In Deccan. Near Dr. Kulkarni's office."

"That's practical."

"I've been told I should try being practical about things that aren't spreadsheets."

"Dr. Kulkarni?"

"Leela, actually."

*

The Arundhati situation escalated. Because Arundhati situations always escalated — it was the nature of the woman, the particular talent for turning a negotiation into a war and a war into a siege, the domestic equivalent of an arms race where the weapons were lawyers and the battlefield was property.

The flat in Koregaon Park was worth two crores. Chirag had paid for it. Arundhati's name was on the deed — added during the marriage, in the flush of what Chirag had mistaken for love and what was, in retrospect, the contractual phase of a relationship that had always been more transaction than partnership.

Arundhati's lawyer — not Advocate Deshpande, who was the notice-deliverer, but Advocate Mehta, who was the fighter — filed a claim for the full property on grounds that Chirag had deserted the marital home, that his absence constituted abandonment, and that under the circumstances Arundhati was entitled to the entirety of the shared assets.

Chirag's lawyer — recommended by Gauri, because Gauri's network extended to the legal profession the way her network extended to everything — filed a counter-claim pointing out that Arundhati had changed the locks, that Chirag had been ejected, and that desertion requires intent and intent requires a choice and Chirag had not chosen to leave. He'd been expelled.

The papers went back and forth. The lawyers talked. The situation festered.

And then Arundhati did the thing that Arundhati always did when legal channels were too slow: she went personal.

She showed up. At the house. At Nandini's house. On December 30th, at four in the afternoon, wearing a salwar kameez that cost more than the kitchen table and carrying a handbag that cost more than the kitchen.

Nandini opened the door. The two women looked at each other — the first wife and the second wife, the woman who'd been left and the woman who'd done the leaving (or rather, the locking-out, which was leaving by proxy). They'd never met. In the seven years of Chirag's second marriage, Nandini and Arundhati had existed in parallel — aware of each other, curious about each other, but separated by the particular protocol of divorced-and-remarried families where the first wife and the second wife occupy different dimensions of the same man's life.

"Mrs. Deshmukh."

"Mrs. Joshi."

"I need to speak with my husband."

"He's not here. He's at his therapist."

"His therapist." The word was pronounced with the particular disdain of a woman who believes that therapy is for the weak and that strong people manage their problems with willpower and expensive handbags. "How convenient."

"It's not convenient. It's necessary."

"I need to speak with him."

"Leave a number. He'll call you."

"I'd rather wait."

"This is my house. You don't wait in my house."

The standoff was the standoff of two women who are, for different reasons and in different ways, connected to the same man and are now standing on opposite sides of a doorstep negotiating the terms of that connection. Arundhati was taller. Nandini was sturdier. Arundhati had the handbag. Nandini had the doorframe. In a contest of wills, the woman with the doorframe always wins.

"Fine," Arundhati said. "Tell him I came. Tell him the offer is fifty-fifty on the flat. He takes his half, I take mine. Clean. No court."

"I'll tell him."

"And tell him one more thing."

"What?"

"Tell him I know about the letters. About Ujwala. About all of it. Leela told me."

The name hit Nandini like cold water. Not because Arundhati knew — people knew things, information moved, families leaked — but because Leela had told her. Leela, who had gone to Mumbai to stop being the bridge, had apparently built one more bridge before leaving.

"Leela told you."

"Leela told me because Leela is worried about her father and Leela doesn't know who else to talk to and Leela — despite everything — is a good girl who loves her parents, all three of them, and who thought that maybe if I understood what Chirag was going through, I'd be less—"

"Less what?"

"Less angry."

"Are you? Less angry?"

Arundhati was quiet. The quiet was unexpected — Arundhati was not a quiet woman, she was a woman who filled silence the way she filled rooms, with presence and volume and the particular energy of a person who has been performing confidence for so long that the performance has become the personality.

"No," she said. "I'm not less angry. I'm — differently angry. I was angry because he's a selfish, controlling, dismissive man who treats women like furniture. And now I'm angry because he's a selfish, controlling, dismissive man who treats women like furniture AND he drove his first wife to drown in a river. The anger hasn't decreased. It's just gotten — deeper."

"Arundhati."

"What?"

"He's getting help."

"Good for him. The help doesn't pay my mortgage."

She left. The expensive salwar kameez, the expensive handbag, the expensive anger. She got into a car that was parked in the lane — an Audi, which confirmed Nandini's suspicion that the financial situation was more complicated than the legal papers suggested, because women who drive Audis don't need fifty percent of a Koregaon Park flat unless the Audi is leased and the life behind it is more precarious than the chrome suggests.

Nandini closed the door. Stood in the hallway. Breathed.

Farhan appeared at the back gate. He'd heard — of course he'd heard, the walls were thin and Arundhati's voice carried and Farhan had been in his studio with the window open.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine."

"I'm — managing."

"There's that word again. Managing."

He came inside. Made chai. The role reversal was — Nandini noticed it, filed it, appreciated it with the particular gratitude of a woman who has been making chai for everyone else and is now being made chai by someone else. He made it too milky. She didn't say so.

"Chirag needs to move out," she said, holding the too-milky chai.

"I know."

"And the Arundhati thing needs to be resolved."

"Also know."

"And Leela told Arundhati about Ujwala."

"I heard."

"Everything I say, you already know."

"I pay attention." He sat across from her. "What do you need?"

"I need—" She stopped. The question — what do you need? — was the question everyone kept asking. Gauri asked it. Farhan asked it. Leela, in her voice notes from Mumbai, asked it. And the answer was always the same, and the sameness was the problem.

"I need everyone to stop needing me for five minutes."

"Done. Five minutes starting now."

He sat. She sat. The chai cooled. The five minutes passed. No one knocked. No one called. No one arrived with legal papers or emotional confessions or pregnancy announcements or gallery exhibitions or 7:15 texts. Five minutes of nothing. Five minutes of quiet in a kitchen that had been anything but quiet for eight weeks.

"That was good," she said.

"We can do it again tomorrow."

"Same time?"

"Same time. Five minutes. No needing."

"Deal."

She finished the chai. Too milky. But made with love, which was the only seasoning that mattered, and which forgave the milk ratio entirely.