"Were we very good friends?" And even if Misha is asking this question she knows already knows there is much more, she knows from the way it felt when she saw him, from the way she screamed his name when he went away, from the way he did not leave her mind, she knows from the way he looked at her, as if she broke his heart. She did. And she hates herself.
"You were not friends Misha, you both were...." her grandmother's eyes shine, and the fire in the hearth cackles alongside Misha's heart, "You both were so little and so in love." And her grandmother smiles and Misha already knows, but even then it stops her heart and makes it hard to breath. It's the sudden silence in the mountains, a spring fountain, the wind that smells of trees and the cicadas that suddenly buzz loud in your ears, it's the kind of turn the heart takes, when there is no ending.
And Misha sees a light in her grandmother's grey eyes when she says, "You both knew each other since you were three, and you played with each other all the time. Inseparable you were." She points at the sash windows of the living room, at the view of the mountains covered in snow, at the snow bursting through sky. "He used to live near that mountain, God you both were on my head all the time. Gem give me this, Gem give me that, Gem look."
Misha's heart gets stuck on the words used to.
Her grandmother nods to herself and then she sniffles a little again, "I had to tell him that your parents were not planning to come to India soon. He just asked me to talk to you once, and I kept lying to him, making excuses. And even then he kept coming for two years, two years." She speaks as if she is exhaling a breath that she kept inside for a thousand year.
And Misha lets herself think about his face at last, because now there is no stopping point, and her eyes close, and unstoppable tears shed and she thinks about his eyes like a pot of gold in a deep black jar, his nose like the mountains she loved to look so much, his skin like sun and his lips so pink and beautiful and him, and she forgives her heart for feeling something when she looked at him, standing in that Mack Weldon hat, and that blue fleece jacket, for the unstoppable way she deviated toward him even when she was in relationship with Darshit. For the way, her eyes kept moving towards his hair that was so curly, so messy and so brown beautiful that her hand itched to touch it. She lets herself accept the flutter she felt when his hand met hers. And she lets, lets, lets. "He stopped coming after that?" she whispers and her eyes open in a haze of tears, and she knows she doesn't blame him that he did.
"I told him to." Her grandmother says and touches Mitzi head, Misha gulps and looks at her grandmother's black nails on Mitzi grey fur, at the same time Mitzi looks up at Misha with her red eyes, and mews, and for the very first time when Misha tries to touch her little grey nose, the cat lets her, eyeing her warily.
There's a silence in the room, just small little movements of life that always stays, always breathe. Misha hears the howl of the winds from outside, the chiming of the bells, the quite of the cabin, the quite of her grandmother, herself and Mitzi, as if the whole world is thinking. She thinks of Aakash coming every other day to her grandmother's cabin, asking about her when she stopped thinking about him, forgot him. "What did you say to him?"
"I told him that you were going to be in Australia until you complete your high school, and he should stop asking about you because it hurt you." Her grandmother meets her eyes, her pink wrinkled face wet, "I am sorry," she clears her throat. "I knew that he would only agree on your name and he nodded his head and said, I know she will come back, she will never break her promise with me, I will wait. He didn't come after that, just wrote me once when he moved away from here."
I know she will come back. She will never break her promise with me. Wrote me once when he moved away from here.
Her brain is so smudgy she feels like the painting, that has been destroyed, and thinking about the painting makes her think about the most important part, I hate Christmas, I wish it would never happen. "He said he hated Christmas. Did something happen on Christmas, and Gem," this is the most difficult part, the question she was avoiding until now, "why we went to Australia, why wasn't I allowed to talk with him Gem?"
Her grandmother escapes her eyes, and turns away to the hearth.
"Gem?" she asks again.
Her grandmother stays quiet for a long time, and Misha feels her hand clamp, and her heart speed. She thinks she is sweating, and she needs a glass of water, but she can't move.
Especially when her grandmother says, "He hates Christmas because it happened on Christmas day." Her grandmother turns to her and looks at her as if she is trying to recall, trying to gauge any recognition on Misha's face. "You both were right there," she points to the brown old dining table which her grandfather made, the old dining table was covered in kitsch, fake petals of wood in different colours, a bowl of potpourri, even the plates were in different colours and Misha thinks, how could she not notice the signs. "It was a Christmas morning, and you both were in your own little world. I was baking plum cake for you in the Kitchen and I could hear your giggling, you two were decorating the Christmas tree and I heard Mitzi screeching suddenly and the cabin door was left opened by chance, you two didn't hear it open, and your father barged into the room and saw you two kissing."
Misha's heart thumps, kissing.
"He obviously warned me that he didn't want you two celebrating the Christmas together, and then he saw you both Kissing and it was my fault."
Misha's head wraps around the word, and her head pushes the image of Aakash standing in front of the green metal gate, her heart accelerates when she imagines his pink lips coming closer to hers. She shakes her head, "What do you mean by he didn't want us to celebrate the Christmas together?"
Her grandmother considers a long time before speaking, and when she does Misha knows it's a strike to her chest. "Your mother," her grandmother quails, "she had a best friend, a very old best friend."
Misha imagines her mother with inky black hair, and eyes as same as Misha's, but something more sure and detached in them, she pictures her mother walking perfectly poised and slow, like some model featured in Cosmo magazine, sees her mother travelling in pantsuits, coming from airport to and fro for her opening restaurants in Delhi and thinks about some best friend, if she ever mentioned someone, and she can't imagine one.
"But she..."
Her grandmother shakes her head sagely, "You did." She bends and picks the box of candies and offers it to Misha again.
Misha steels herself and picks one.
Her grandmother smiles softly in encouragement, "So it's a long story....., your mother had a best friend, just like you. Your mother went to school with him, spent her whole childhood with him and then sadly," she made the same 'taaaa' sound which Misha made, "she had to go to Australia with her parents, where she met your father, my son and got married." [ro1]
Misha nods, the last part she knew. Her father was overseas for his college studies, when he met her mother, and they fell in love and after their post graduation they married.
"But nobody knows," Her grandmother says, and Misha's eyes become wide "She came to find a man several times, a man she loved."