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When I walked back to the dining room, I saw Isha standing by the door. She had heard everything.
“Eavesdropping?” I teased gently.
“Yes,” she admitted. “You shouldn’t have said that to her, Veer. I don’t want to come between you and your mother.”
“You’re not. She is. You’re not responsible for my mother’s behaviour, Isha. We all have to face the consequences of our actions.”
She shrugged lightly.
“Well, it’s only for a year. Although I bet she’ll keep reminding you for the rest of your life that she always knew the daughter of Mayur Trikhera was a bad choice for the illustrious Jadhwal family.”
I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t getting rid of me so easily, but I knew there was no point in wasting my words. She’d find out soon enough.
I didn’t know why it irritated me to hear her talk about the expiry date of our marriage. I hadn’t wanted to get married in the first place. But the idea of marrying Isha filled me with a strange peace when it should have frightened me. I had never thought I’d ever have a shot at a relationship with her. Dheer ’s betrayal of Diya always stood between us like a giant wall I could never surmount. But now that wall was gone. The main reason for my animosity towards Isha was gone.
And now that I didn’t have to force myself to hate her and her family, I found a very different emotion lurking under the hate. It was something that drew me to her again and again over the past nine years. It was the emotion that didn’t allow me to have a serious relationship with any other woman because no one could ever match up to Isha. It was the emotion that kept me obsessed with her when I knew I had no chance of being with her.
I didn’t want to examine it too closely or even give it a name because it was terrifying. Right now, I was barely able to acknowledge that I was allowed to speak to her without snarling. That I was allowed to lose myself in her big brown eyes without feeling guilty.
So I forced myself to ignore the gauntlet she’d just thrown down and gesture towards the door.
“Diya’s waiting to meet us. I’ll be in the car.”
She nodded and headed upstairs to get ready.
When we set off for the hospital, I noticed that Isha was carrying a couple of snack boxes with her.
“What’s that?” I asked curiously.
“My breakfast. An omelette sandwich and some cut fruit,” she replied, but I noticed she did not attempt to open the boxes.
I wanted to remind her to eat it, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything yet because I didn’t want her to associate food with nagging. Isha was an adult. I had to trust that she’d eat when she felt hungry.
So I pulled out my phone and began to check my emails. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she opened one of her snack boxes and began to eat. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed with pleasure that she had eaten all the fruit it contained.
“It doesn’t happen all the time,” she said softly. “Just sometimes when I’m very stressed, I find it difficult to eat because there are all these negative thoughts associated with food. I’m working on it, though.”
“Do you mind talking about it?”
“I don’t enjoy it, but talking about it takes away the stigma around eating disorders, so ask what you want.”
“When did it first start?”
Isha shrugged in reply.
“I’ve always been on some sort of diet, as far as I can remember. Dadi Sa had all sorts of restrictions on my food because she was determined to make me fit into the mould of a typical princess. I had to be weighed every Monday morning, and my weight decided the diet for the week. If I was heavier on a Monday, she’d practically starve me all week, and when the scale showed a considerable loss, I’d binge on food and gain it all back again. The yo-yo dieting almost destroyed my body,” she said bitterly.
I tamped down on the fury that swept through me at the thought of a little girl being tortured like that.
“Why didn’t your parents put a stop to it?”
“Ma did her best but she was too weak to fight the combined might of Baba and Dadi Sa, who were both very critical of my weight.”
I turned to her in confusion.
“Isha, I’ve known you for most of your life, and I can honestly say that you’ve never been obese. So what were they so critical about?”
“It’s not about being obese, Veer. They wanted me to be skinny, while I was always at least ten to fifteen kilos over that. And more than that, it was about control. They wanted to control every aspect of my life, even to the point of controlling every morsel of food that went into my mouth. I think it made them furious to hear me voice an opinion of my own. They wanted Ma and me to be like the furniture. Ornamental, but essentially lifeless. Baba and Dadi Sa felt like they were the main characters in their world, which meant that the side characters like Ma and I weren’t supposed to have a voice. We were allowed to exist, but only in the dark corners of their world, and we had to be grateful for whatever existence they allowed us.”
