|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
|
A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma
Part Four — Marriage
They got married in the first week of November.
It was a court marriage — a civil registration at the district court on a Tuesday morning. Divya was there. Arjun’s friend Suresh was there. They wore normal clothes. There were no flowers, no music, no ceremony. Arjun had worn a clean pressed shirt — white, the best one he owned. Nandini wore a pale yellow salwar kameez that she had worn to a family event the previous year.
The whole thing took forty minutes.
Afterward they sat in a small restaurant near the court — the kind of place with plastic chairs and laminated menus — and ate dosas. Divya kept almost crying and then stopping herself. Suresh was eating enthusiastically and not thinking too hard about the implications.
“How do you feel?” Arjun asked her.
She thought about it honestly. “Scared. Happy. Mostly scared.”
“Same.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. He looked down at their hands and then up at her and smiled — a real smile, a tired one.
“We should call your parents,” Divya said.
“Not today,” Nandini said.
“Nandini—”
“Not today, Divya. Please.”
They had arranged a small rented room in Shivaji Nagar — a colony not far from Basant Nagar, quiet, affordable. One room with a small attached bathroom, a shared kitchen on the floor. The landlord was an older man who asked no questions and expected rent on the first of every month.
The room was small. There was a window that looked onto a narrow lane. There was one cupboard, a bed with a cotton mattress, a table and two plastic chairs, and a ceiling fan that made a sound like it was tired of living.
Nandini had brought one bag. She unpacked it slowly — some clothes, some books, a few things she had managed to carry out without her family noticing.
Arjun watched her arrange things on the small shelf above the window. He felt the weight of what they had done — not regret, but the full weight of it, pressing down.
“You can tell me if you hate it,” he said.
She looked at him. “I don’t hate it.”
“The fan is very loud.”
“The fan has character.”
He almost smiled. “We’ll get a better one eventually.”
“I know.”
Those first weeks were — they were real. That is the only word for it.
She had never cooked seriously before. In Mehta Villa there had always been a cook. Here she learned to boil rice and not burn the dal and how to make the one sabzi she actually knew — aloo with onions. She made it every day for a week until Arjun gently mentioned that he knew how to cook and could he please make something else.
They laughed about it. A real laugh, in the small kitchen, with the sound of the lane outside coming through the window.
He brought home groceries on his way back from work. He knew how to shop carefully — which market had the cheapest onions, which vegetable seller gave correct weight, where to buy rice in bulk. He didn’t make her feel bad about not knowing these things. He just showed her.
“My mother taught me,” he said once, measuring out rice. “She said a man who can cook will never be helpless.”
“She sounds practical.”
“She’s very practical.” A pause. “She doesn’t know yet. About us.”
“Are you worried about telling her?”
He thought about it. “She’ll understand. Eventually. My father—” He stopped. “My father will be hurt that I didn’t tell him. Not angry. Hurt.”
She was quiet.
“Your family?” he asked.
“My father will—” She put down the cup she was holding. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
There was an evening in the third week — a small, quiet evening — that she thought about often afterward.
The power went out. Load shedding. The whole lane was dark. They sat by the window with one candle that Arjun found in the cupboard and the light from it was yellow and unsteady and outside the lane was full of the sound of children playing because the darkness meant nothing to them.
He was telling her about a building he had seen once — a very old haveli in the city’s older quarter — and how the people who had built it had understood something about space that modern architects had lost. He was drawing on a page, just with a pen, rough shapes, showing her what he meant. He spoke with his hands. He was different when he talked about architecture — quieter and more confident at the same time.
She realized she was watching him more than the drawings.
“What?” he said, noticing.
“Nothing. You’re different when you talk about buildings.”
“Different how?”
“Like you forgot to be careful.”
He looked at her. The candle made the shadows move. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I guess I did.”
They had problems, of course.
Money was always present — not as a crisis every day, but as a background pressure. He had two salaries coming in — the data entry job and occasional work for Prakash uncle — but rent, food, his contribution to his parents, his father’s medicines — it was always careful. Always counting.
She had brought some money with her. Not much — her own savings, what she had in her account. He had not wanted to take it. They had argued about it — their first real argument, two weeks in.
“I have money, Arjun. Why won’t you let me use it?”
“Because we should be equal in this.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to carry everything yourself.”
“That’s not—” He stopped. “I’m not trying to be proud. I just—”
“You are being proud.”
A silence.
“A little,” he admitted.
“So stop.”
He looked at her. Then he nodded, slowly. “Okay.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. You’re right. I’ll stop.”
She had expected more resistance. The speed of his admission surprised her. “My father would have argued for an hour and then still not admitted it.”
“I’m not your father.”
“No,” she said. “You’re really not.”
Her family found her through Rohan.
Rohan had been watching quietly. He wasn’t a bad person — he was young and caught between love for his sister and loyalty to his father and pressure from both sides. He followed her one afternoon, and that was how they found the address.
Nandini came home from a nearby market to find her father’s car parked outside the building.
She stood on the lane for a moment. Then she went inside.
Her father was in the corridor. He had not gone into the room — the landlord had not let him — and he was standing there in his good clothes in the narrow corridor of a Shivaji Nagar chawl, and the look on his face was something she had never seen before.
“Come home,” he said.
“No.”
“Nandini—”
“Papa, I’m not coming home.”
Her father looked around the corridor — the peeling paint, the sounds from other flats, the smallness of it all — and she could see what he was seeing and she could see the anger rising.
“You have ruined—”
“Stop.” Her voice was harder than she expected. “Just stop. Please.”
“You think this is a life? This room? This—”
“Yes,” she said. “Actually yes.”
He looked at her like she was speaking a language he didn’t understand. Then he said, quietly and with a kind of finality that frightened her: “This isn’t over.”
He left.
You May like to Read
The Space Between Us – A Heartbreaking Romance About Love, Class Divide & Family Pressure (Part One)