The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma

Chapter 9: Devika Comes to Mumbai

Shivaji Park — Mumbai — March 2021

Devika Iyer was twenty-seven and looked like her father — same wide forehead, same quiet eyes — and she arrived at the Shivaji Park flat on a Saturday morning with a small bag and an expression Meera recognised as her own: the face she made when she was feeling something very large and processing it at a speed the face could not keep up with.

Arjun was not there. Meera had asked him not to be, for this first meeting. She needed to be her daughter's mother alone, without the complication of his presence.

They sat at the kitchen table. Devika drank tea and said nothing for the first ten minutes. Meera let her.

Devika: "How long has this been?"

Meera: "We met in 2019. The — what we have now — since the lockdown."

Devika: "You didn't tell me."

Meera: "I told you in November 2019. When it was just beginning."

Devika: "You told me you had 'met someone.' You didn't tell me this."

Meera: "No."

Devika: "Why not?"

Meera: "Because I knew what your reaction would be and I wanted to know what it was first before I— before I had to defend it."

Devika turned her cup in her hands. Her mother's gesture, exactly.

Devika: "Amma, he's twenty-two."

Meera: "Yes."

Devika: "He's five years younger than me."

Meera: "Yes."

Devika: "Do you understand how that is for me? To try to—" she stopped. "What do I call him? What do I—"

Meera: "You call him Arjun. That's his name."

Devika: "Amma. I'm not— I'm not angry the way Prakash Mama is angry. I'm not going to threaten you. But I need you to hear me. I grew up watching you and Appa. I know what a marriage is. I know what it costs and what it gives. And I look at this and I think—"

Meera: "What do you think?"

Devika: "I think you are lonely. I think seven years is a long time. I think when someone looks at you the way he probably looks at you — a young man, attentive, interested — I think after seven years of being alone that feels like—"

Meera: "Stop."

Devika: "Let me finish."

Meera: "You're going to say it feels like love but it's actually loneliness. Don't say that to me. I'm fifty years old. I know the difference."

Devika: "Do you? Are you sure?"

Meera: "Devika. He is the person who made me want to build something again. Not a building. Myself. Something in myself I had closed after your father died. He opened it. Not because he's young. Because of who he is. If he were fifty-two I would feel the same. I know this."

Devika looked at her mother. There was something in Meera's face that Devika had not seen in nine years. Since the year before Krishnan died, before the illness started, before the long erosion. Something bright and frightened and real.

She sat with that.

Devika: "I want to meet him."

Meera: "He'll come tomorrow."

Devika: "Not with you there. Alone. I want to talk to him alone."

Meera considered this.

Meera: "All right."

~ ~ ~

Arjun met Devika at a café in Dadar, a Sunday afternoon. She was already there when he arrived, which he suspected was deliberate — she had wanted to watch him walk in, to see how he moved in a space before he knew she was watching.

He sat down.

Devika: "I'll be honest with you. My mother is the most important person in my life and you are a stranger."

Arjun: "I understand."

Devika: "What do you want from her?"

Arjun: "To be with her. To spend time with her. To—"

Devika: "No. I mean what do you want from this? In ten years. When you're thirty-two and she's sixty. When your friends are marrying women your age and having children and she's— older. What do you want then?"

Arjun: "The same thing I want now."

Devika: "You can't know that."

Arjun: "You're right. I can't promise the future. Neither could your father when he married your mother."

A pause.

Devika: "Don't bring my father into this."

Arjun: "I'm not using him against you. I'm saying that love doesn't come with guarantees. No one's does."

Devika: "There's a difference. My parents were the same age. They grew old together. You are going to — if this goes where I think it's going — you are going to watch her become old. You'll be forty and she'll be seventy. That's—"

Arjun: "I know."

Devika: "Do you understand what that means? Practically? Physically?"

Arjun: "I've thought about it."

Devika: "You've thought about it but you haven't lived it. There's a difference."

Arjun: "You're right. But I'm asking you to consider the alternative. Your mother has been alone for nine years. She was alone in that flat during the lockdown. She was alone when your father died and she put herself back together and built her career again and she has been alone since. Is that what you want for her? Because it's the 'correct' thing?"

Devika looked out the window of the café. Dadar Sunday afternoon moved outside: families, couples, the eternal Mumbai crowd.

Devika: "If you hurt her—"

Arjun: "I know."

Devika: "If you leave her when things get hard—"

Arjun: "I won't."

Devika: "You say that at twenty-two."

Arjun: "I say it every year I'm with her. That's the only way anyone can say it."

She looked at him for a long moment. He met her look.

Devika: "Order something. I haven't eaten."

They ate lunch. They talked. By the end of it, nothing was resolved, but something had moved — the way things move when two people have been honest with each other in a difficult conversation and survived it.

She did not say she approved. She said, at the end, standing on the pavement outside: 'Take care of her. That's all I'm asking.'

He said: 'I will.'

She believed him enough.

To be Continued .......................