Chapter 251: Chapter 251 – A Husband’s Nightmare

The railway station smelled like chai and diesel and the particular human density of a platform at six-thirty in the evening.

Vikram stood on Platform 4 with his hands in his pockets and the square outline of a sandwich box pressing against his jacket from the inside where he had been keeping it warm like it was something alive.

This was a terrible idea.

He had known it was a terrible idea from the moment he had conceived it, at approximately two-seventeen in the afternoon while standing in front of the small convenience counter near his office and holding a single red rose that cost eighty-five rupees and feeling, with the complete clarity of a man who was being honest with himself, that the rose was not him. That the rose was what someone proposed with in a film. That he had never once been the person in a film.

He had put the rose back.

He had looked at the shelves.

He had picked up the sandwich.

The specific logic of it had seemed airtight at two-seventeen PM: ’she always eats the chicken sandwich from this counter when she has a long commute. She always eats it on Platform 4 while waiting for the 7:05. She will be hungry. I will be there. I will give her the thing she actually needs instead of a thing that is symbolic of something.’

It was now six-forty-nine.

He was on Platform 4.

Meera was visible from thirty meters away — the familiar shape of her, the practical kurta, her bag slung over one shoulder, her hair in the specific bun that meant she had been at the office since early and was not interested in performing effort anymore. She was looking at her phone.

He walked toward her.

He stopped in front of her.

She looked up.

“’Vikram.’” The standard, regular quality of his name in her mouth. The name of someone she saw at work sometimes, whose existence was fine, nothing wrong with it.

He took the sandwich out of his jacket.

He held it out.

She looked at it.

He said, “’Will you marry me.’”

The platform went quiet around them in the specific way that platforms go quiet when the people on them realize that something is happening that wasn’t in anyone’s schedule. Heads turning. The slow, peripheral, human magnetism of other people’s business.

Meera looked at the sandwich.

She looked at him.

She said, “’…No.’”

The silence.

The specific silence of someone who had said a thing and the word had left and was now in the air between them and could not be retrieved.

Vikram stood there.

With the sandwich.

“’No,’” she said again. Not cruel. Not laughing. Just — the flat, honest, reflexive answer of someone who had been genuinely surprised and had answered with the first true thing.

Someone on the platform laughed. A small, quickly-suppressed laugh. The laugh of a person who had looked over and seen a man holding a sandwich and a woman saying no.

The heat on his face.

He stood there with it.

He looked at the sandwich in his outstretched hand and thought several things in rapid sequence, none of which were suitable for saying aloud.

And then Meera’s face changed.

It changed the way faces change when they have done the thing that cannot be undone and have looked at the face of the person they did it to and found the face doing something that made the doing of it land differently.

She looked around the platform.

At the people looking.

She looked back at him.

“’Oh, god,’” she said, quietly. The low, slightly horrified quality of someone who had been honest at the wrong moment.

She took the sandwich.

“’I’ll eat it,’” she said.

The resigned, practical, the-least-I-can-do-is-eat-it quality of someone trying to do damage control through the consumption of a food item.

He blinked.

“’You’ll—’”

“’I’ll eat it.’” She had already pulled the tab of the packaging. The practical, committed motion of someone who had made a decision and was executing it. “’People are staring. This is—’” She looked at the platform. At the faces. “’—this is a lot to do to someone on Platform 4.’”

He started to smile.

He could feel it happening and he couldn’t stop it, the specific smile of a man who had been rejected and was watching the person who rejected him eat the rejection in order to manage the social fallout.

“’You’re going to eat it out of pity,’” he said.

“’I’m going to eat it because I’m hungry and you bought it,’” she said, without looking at him. She took a bite.

He watched her.

The platform had mostly returned to its own business. Mostly.

She chewed.

She took a second bite.

And then she started coughing.

The immediate, caught-wrong quality of it — the cough of someone who had taken a bite too large or at the wrong angle, the involuntary, escalating quality of it as the first cough did not clear the issue and a second one followed.

“’Wait—’” He turned immediately. “’Wait, I’ll get—’”

He was already moving toward the platform shop, three stalls down, the shelf of water bottles visible from here. The urgency of it, the instinct of six years reduced to its base components — ’she is coughing, get water, go.’

He pushed through to the shop.

Grabbed a bottle.

Turned back.

The platform was the same platform.

The same chai smell. The same diesel. The same late-evening light that made everything amber and slightly cinematic whether you wanted it to be or not.

But Meera was not standing where he had left her.

He looked.

He found her.

He found her the way you find something in a dream — not by searching but by the dream delivering the image directly, without the intermediate step of looking, the image simply arriving in front of him because that was the dream’s intention.

She was on her knees.

On Platform 4.

In front of everyone.

Her kurta was — not there. Her hair was — out of the bun, down, someone’s hand holding it from above in the specific grip that is not holding but directing. Her hand. Her right hand. On her belly. The round, full, pregnant swell of it — ’five months’, his brain said, that was not right, that was not how the proposal had gone, she had not been pregnant at the proposal—

Raven.

Standing above her.

The man’s thighs on both sides of her face in the specific, architectural way of last night’s hospital room, the grip of his fist in her dark hair, the forward thrust of his hips at the exact, steady pace of something that was not in a hurry.

Her left hand.

Between her own thighs.

The dress was — not there. She was — and her thighs, where the fabric should have been, there was nothing, there was the visible wetness of her, the inner thighs of a woman who had been kneeling on a platform floor long enough for it to be running down, the slow drip of it collecting on the concrete below her knee.

The cough sounds she had been making.

Were now:

“Glkk— glkkh— glkhhh— Unnhghh…T-too thic…k.”

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