Adhithan's kitchen had a fairish sized poster of Chef Anthony Bourdain's quote.
It was a blown-up, black and white picture of Anthony Bourdain, with the text, 'When someone cooks for you, they are saying something. They are telling you about themselves: where they come from, who they are, what makes them happy.' written on it, brightly, and in a slightly, scattered handwriting.
Amrutha's shoulder crashed on the crooked doorway of Adhithan's well-kept kitchen, her eyes steadily shifted over to her brother's back, who was cooling her dose of filter coffee and pouring it in the cerulean blue, handbuilt, ceramic mug that she'd presented him when he moved into this house.
Retracing her steps back to the living room, she sat down at the wooden, antique swing. Adhithan followed her, his hands holding out two mugs filled with strongly brewed, frothy, filter coffees.
As he handed over her token in her hands, Amrutha's lips parted a bit to take in a trivial, testing sip, hesitantly.
Adhithan blew a waft of breath into his coffee, clearing the cap of froth, and took in his first sip.
"That poster on the wall," Amrutha started, slow and steady, "that's not your handwriting."
Adhithan peered up at Amrutha once. And lowered his attention to his coffee as if there was a punch about to land on his face. With that ominous silence weighing upon them, he finished taking the last sip of his coffee without giving out any verbal reply to his sister.
Amrutha's persistent, unsettling glare did not help him stay mum anymore, hence he broke the leery stillness, "that's by Ru..." by muttering low and soft, "Rumi."
She took in the final sip of her coffee in a swig. "Okay... so did you talk to her?"
"I did not tell her anything,"stating it with great reluctance, he added, "yet."
Amrutha leaned back at the iron chain of the swing, as she kept lulling her hands on the swell of her belly. "Okay?"
Adhithan, perceiving her unease to lean back, roused from the swing and ambled into the passage that ushered him to his modest bedroom, study, all-in-one room that was furnished with a bed on the floor right under a couple of wooden windows, with books about cooking, baking, and various artistries stacked up in the shelves adjacent to it.
He grabbed a pillow from the head side of his bed, and returned to Amrutha, who was looking out for him with an appeased smile.
"But she told me a lot of things," continuing with a shoddy smile, Adhithan propped up the pillow at her back, and helped her reposition herself on the smooth surface of the hickory brown swing. "She told me that she moved here before seven months, only to cope up with her father's demise."
Adhithan walked around Amrutha to get seated on the swing, with one leg folded, and the other one delicately sweeping his mosaic floor, pushing the swing smoothly.
"It has taken like several months for her to get her loan approved from a bank here, in Chennai," he narrated, carefully, so much that it made her astonish if he'd actually been there with Rumi, all along, "and even after four months of setting up her vet clinic, it hasn't started to take off very well, yet."
With an amused expression melding on her round face, her brows shot up, Amrutha probed, "Have you ever seen yourself while talking about her?"
Adhithan, dragging himself out of his pensiveness, lifted his face to her elated eyes. "What?"
Amrutha took in an extensive inhale, and sighed. "It is so evident that you like that rude girl—"
"Ammu, she is not a rude girl," he impeded, swiftly. "It's just that I call her that."
A petty, taunting laugh drifted off from Amrutha's lips. "Yeah, whatever. Why haven't you asked her out, yet?"
This was a slightly difficult question for him to answer, precisely, when she knew the answer, already.
Adhithan breathed out heavily. "You know it's not okay to ask her out without telling her about our family. I mean, it might be giving out too much information for others to just ask out for a casual date, but to me it doesn't seem okay," he explained, whatever has been going on, wrecking his heart, meddling with his fledgling love(!) life.
"But, Anna," Amrutha called him, her voice getting pertinently antsy, "I'd just tell you're a stupid if you keep waiting for right time to come to open up."
Adhithan reflected on what his sister had said, for a while, staring aimlessly, at the miniscule patterns etched on the mosaic floor, nevertheless his leg that dangled down to the floor hadn't stopped still, trying to keep the swing in motion.
The screech from the swinging iron chains weakened as the oscillation paced down. Adhithan, whose head was drooping, and his eyes narrowed with some introspection, rose up at Amrutha's voice.
"Anna, though we are born and raised into a privileged family, we have never been subjectively independent," she said, her voice starting to crack.
One who'd seen them wouldn't label it as toxic family, or emotional abuse, but those were the exact words Amrutha or Adhithan would tell, if someone asked them now.
"And it's not okay to be the puppets in the hands of our father or for that case anyone who manages our daily lives."
"You're right. It's not like I got bored of being a rich kid, and got out of the family, all of a sudden."
"Yeah. You had a reason. Your career was always a tug of war between the elders of the family and you," Amrutha pointed out, righteously, a knot tightening her throat, "while the rest of our cousins and I didn't know what to do in life, and started settling for the elders' propositions, you'd figured out what you really want to do at such an early age—and have always been stubborn about it."
Amrutha's eyes becoming glossy from the tears she'd bottled up, as Adhithan had noticed, he gasped, "You realize that talking about this might come off as totally callous and insensitive to someone who's lost her father, and living alone, right?"
"But there's a difference between having lost their father, and having one, living with him, and still feel like we've lost him, right?"
And that went straight into Adhithan's heart.
****
Rumi looked down at the street soaking up in foreboding silence, with depleted whizz of vehicles.
In her arms, wrapped up, cozily and protectively, was Google, stretching out her neck on Rumi's fingers. She'd been looking out for the squirrel on the tree that just held its branch in front of them, ever since both of them came to the spot.
Rumi had picked up Google from Adhithan's home that evening, when she returned from her clinic.
She'd been following it as a rule ever since he came back from that workshop he'd gone to for a couple of days.
Adhithan hadn't told her particularly anything about that day, and she'd been refraining herself from probing him.
They were not contesting as in who'd let go first, hence Rumi decided she'd tell him about her. Her family, why did she move to this city a little less than one year ago, and all.
To Rumi, whatever he was having to himself did not matter, for once. But it certainly held up an invisible, thin ambit between them that she didn't like very much.
For someone who'd been living alone, with just the weekly FaceTiming with her best friends from the previous city she was living in, this—having someone who felt like the visage of warmth, and light—was, well, buoyant.
Rumi sensed the leavings of heat from the day's sun smear and spread onto her back, when she'd lied down at her terrace. The floor was a tad bit dirty, rustic but she did not care. Because, above her was, stretching and the ever calming, flickering gobs of stars, and a half-lit, arc of the moon that looked like straight out of a kid's drawing notebook, that'd been erased over and over, with feeble leftovers of the erased portions, to be drawn into perfection.
When Adhithan climbed up to Rumi's terrace that night, she did not know he was going to tell her such news.
At the faint rustling of Adhithan's footsteps nearing her, she'd twisted her head to look towards the passage. She then patted the spot next to hers, just beside Google, who'd nestled herself into Rumi's arm for a nap, despite the rough flooring.
Adhithan sat down, at first, undid his long legs, veered back to lie down with her.
"Do you like gazing at the stars?" he asked, having his eyes etched on the skies.
"Skies, in general," Rumi muttered. "I am so glad there are no mosquitoes charging us."
She did not hear him say anything, except the chuckle that'd escaped his lips, probably wondering how a moony enquiry like talking about the stars had brought out an answer about the mosquitoes out of her smart, little mouth.
Still lying on his back, Adhithan flicked a quick glance at Rumi. "You know, the one you saw the other day..." he started, taking his eyes back to the skies, and feeling his heart thump foolishly.
Rumi gulped an empty throat, nudging down the weight she felt in there, at the direction their talk had bettered into. "Yeah?"
"The one you saw is my Uncle, and the one you didn't see is my Mother."
It was not rocket science to find out that the middle-aged man must be either Adhithan's father or an uncle.
"But why had they come in a Rolls Royce?" Her question came out expeditiously, in par with her heart's rhythm. And for the first time, after many years, her candor made it difficult for her to talk. She continued, in a relatively low, murmuring voice. "Considering that I've read about how you can take delivery of a Rolls Royce in eight months, if you contribute like twenty percentage of the car's price to the showroom, for not being heaped up by questions on you?"
Adhithan choked out on a hearty laugh, his words coming out in a deep rumble. "Now, who's Google here? Are we switching names or what?"
Rumi couldn't help an evocative smile. "I shouldn't have distracted you in the first place," she said, repentantly, "please continue, Sir Google."
Before he opened his mouth, Rumi overtook him with her words. "No questions will be asked, no judgements will be derived. I will just listen to you."
Adhithan felt a tug at his heart, at those words that just registered in his mind.
"Our family is involved in different businesses and known to have international transactions and deals." He realized he was half-assing this conversation, right at this moment. And Rumi did not push him into doing more.
"Okay?" she said, watching him from her corners of her eyes. She could now realize why did she feel familiar to his face, when they met for the first time.
"So we have always been brought up in a way that everything we did, everyone we met were in reliance with the future—that's taking over family business—that has multiple streams of it running."
Rumi inhaled sharply, to take in his words.
"And I don't know if I could label it as a family. I wouldn't say it's dysfunctional, because every family is dysfunctional in some little way."
Rumi couldn't control the urge to ask, despite her word about not asking questions. "How would you label it then?"
His reply came out in a lightning instant, when she had thought he'd take his own time to seek a word. "Unbearable. Excruciating. Prejudiced."
"Is there a question mark behind every word?"
"No. There's a period."
"Okay."
Adhithan, as if triggered by her monosyllabic reply, gave her a brief glance. "To be seen from the outside—"
"I don't want to see from the outside. Tell me what you feel."
"Fine. There's a lot of stuff that keep going on and on inside the family. From subversive affairs, drug dealings, murders that come out as suicides, drug addiction, infidelity, and whatnot. We have been conditioned in a way that if we come to know about any of these, all we can do is pretend we don't know any of it. So when I was in my adolescence, I wanted to get away from my family as soon as possible. I didn't want to live with them, get stagnated, and trapped, which I have always felt growing up in such a family."
"Okay?"
"So when I finished schooling I was firm, and confident that I didn't want to get into the tangle of family business, and ruin my own life and mask my own face with lies of smiles that I have watched my parents do, growing up. It's like a procedure—their way of living life, I mean—join this school, that's prestigious, fly abroad and join the university because that's what elitists like us would do, come back and marry certain someone, who's also been raised the same way I was, take care of the family business, produce children to grow up in same chain as yours."
Rumi nodded, slowly, attentively.
"We were not seen as kids, but as products, who'd produce more products, who'd give birth to more products. So when I wanted to join culinary school, my father opposed but did not deny, totally, because who was educating for the sake of my welfare. Everything concerned to us was because of the family's welfare—or rather the business's welfare."
Rumi hadn't known him for a long time, but she, surely, could empathize how he'd have felt growing up in such a way.
Adhithan sighed, as if he'd gotten bored telling his story. "Long story short, I moved out of my house when my father, the other elders of the family, and I ended up having a heated argument about how I'd be a shame to their clan, and their reverence in the society if I'd not take up their business."
Feeling discomfort upon lying on her back for a supposedly long time, Rumi tossed to his side, propping on her elbows on the rough floor, to plant her face in it.
"We've been fiercely private about our personal lives, anyway," Adhithan said, having Rumi look at him, fixedly, from her palm, "—Amrutha, and I. My uncle and mother were here the other day to talk into me—more like brainwashing me to get back to home, their business, into the trap from which I could never set myself free, again."
"And your father?"
Adhithan's dry chuckle replied first, followed by his words. "Do you think he's someone who'd come down to his disrespectful son, asking him to come back home?"
"Right. It will never happen."
"I got written out of my will, today."
And just like that his words came crashing on Rumi's head. She sat up in an abrupt motion.
Adhithan, still laid down on his back, took both of his hands to clasp behind his head. "You heard it right. I no more inherit the assets of my huge-ass, elite, snobbish family. Whenever I'd said I wanted to do what I love, that was their ultimate weapon. I don't think I had anything to lose if I am out of their will, anyway," he murmured, casually. "Who wants a Rolls Royce, when I can take my Google to dog parks, and walkies as she wishes."
Google, who'd waken from her nap, seemed to perk at the word she'd heard as she rose to her paws.
Unclasping his hands, Adhithan lifted her and put her on his chest. Google snuggled into the warmth of his chest, as his largish palm smoothened her head and her floppy ears. "There's a lot of pets in that house, but we are not allowed to play with them to our heart's content, or take care of them. Being in such a family is just an illusion of having everything, but in reality I'd been straining myself with so much mental and emotional agony. For a long time in my childhood, I'd had a thought that I was the wrong person. And I was a disobedient child. After growing up, I realized it's their way of programming us that we don't flee out of their reign. I can't live a life disappointing myself for the sake pleasing someone by flourishing the family business."
A long after Adhithan had told her everything, none of them spoke a word.
Rumi kept staring at her skies above her, wrapping her arms around her knees, hugging herself. For once, it felt liberating because now, she knew everything about him, just like he did about her—the curtain that'd been wavering between them had fallen down.
Fathoming Adhithan had slipped into peaceful sleep under the melancholic breeze of her terrace, she poked his arm. "Hey. Hello. Google boy, go home."
Adhithan awoke, rubbing his eyes with his palm. "I should go home. Good night," he announced, rising to his feet, leaving Google on hers.
"Yes, you should. Good night." Rumi smiled neatly. "Hey, I forgot your homework."
"What is it?" he asked, taking small steps towards the exit of the terrace.
"You should text me everyday!" Rumi bit her lower lip to contain the smile, "In Tamil."
Adhithan's weak, sleepy steps paused, and for once, he laughed a bit. "Such innovative homework. Much wow. I'd love to do it."
