The Promise (21 page)

'Dad,' Shambhavi exclaimed and rushed to him to take over the wheelchair from the compounder, smiling at him broadly. 'I'm so happy you could come.'

'How could I not? It's my daughter's big day, after all,' her father beamed at her.

She bent over and kissed him on the cheek. 'You're the sweetest-the best daddy on the planet. Come, I'll show you my paintings, which you have already seen a zillion times, by the way.'

'But I sure do want to see them again. How many are therethirty?'

'Thirty-six. Mostly painted in the last three years. We had more, from earlier, but we thought these recent ones have more consumer appeal.'

'And why is that?' Mr Sen asked.

'Well, they are considerably more sophisticated than my older paintings and we have arranged them in a unique way too. You see, out of thirty-six, twenty-six were painted in the years 2008 and 2009. I was younger, carefree and so my paintings were colourful and, you know ... pretty? The remaining ten were painted in 2010, after I ... we got to know about your disease. They have a different, mature, angle to them. Use of darker colours too ...'

'Hmm.'

They kept silent, as she wheeled him from painting to painting, the colourful ones-the ones he had already seen. After they were done, she took him to the newer ones, the ones he had not seen before. She was a little nervous-she wanted him to like them. She hid her nervousness with words, and started blabbering about whatever was going on in her head when she was painting every painting.

When they got to the last painting of the exhibition, the tenth of the ten dark paintings, the last painting she had painted before more pressing worries stole her paintbrush away, she sighed and said, 'I still do not feel okay about selling these paintings, any of these thirty-six. I feel like they are a part of me.'

'I can understand what you mean. If you see these paintings through my eyes, you would see the change in you, as a person. Not just the big change from the twenty-six bright to the ten dark, but also the small changes, your growth as a person, as my child.' Mr Sen had tears in his eyes.

Shambhavi nodded. She knew what he meant. She was close to tears herself. She choked when she said, 'These paintings were never made to be sold. They were for me... one thing I truly loved doing...'

'You'll paint many more ...her father tried to console her.

'Many more, yes. And I will try not to get attached to them. I will learn to take it professionally. And it will be easier; I will know I am painting to sell. This just ... it breaks my heart to see these go...'

'Mine too. More than you will ever know.'

'But at least I will have my best piece with me always, hung on the study room wall,' Shambhavi smiled at the thought.

'Which one would that be?'

'Let me show you. It's here, but no one had any interest in buying it.'

'That's not possible. Your best piece and no takers? I do not believe it,' Mr Sen said. The pride he felt for his daughter's achievements made Shambhavi's heart swell in delight.

'You'd better believe it,' she wheeled him to the right corner of the hall, the one partially hidden by a makeshift partition. 'Because you really are not as handsome as you think you are. No one has any interest in buying a painting with your head on it.'

By that time, she had reached the partition. She wheeled him inside and turned him towards a portrait of him. It was a portrait painted roughly a year ago, a little after he was diagnosed with brain tumour. Behind his faint smile, it portrayed his worries, everything he had hidden behind a mask, and had not known that Shambhavi had seen. The man's worries, his fears, his strength and his crushing anguish-all of it was visible in the painting. The tears her father had been trying hard to hold back finally started to flow.

Shambhavi was right there with him-crying with him and wiping his tears at the same time. 'Happy birthday,' she whispered in his ears.

'If only ... I could put into words ... how proud you make me feel...'

That was all Shambhavi needed to hear. Months of hard work, to pay for his healthcare, juggling with the baby's care and her work, it all seemed worth it, in that one moment. The tears they had held back since he got diagnosed broke through. All the bottled-up frustration came out. The release felt good. Shambhavi was grateful to Mili, for partitioning the private area; they did not need to keep their emotions in check.

The exhibition had become a success for Shambhavi as soon as she had felt her father's approval, but the real figures were, more than anything, shocking. All her paintings were sold and she had orders for more than she could paint in three years' time. Some people were eager enough to offer to pay up the entire sum in advance, to get her to paint for them first.

Tutul suggested they organize another exhibition, for the rest of Shambhavi's pieces, but Shambhavi was not up for it. She did not want to be greedy. People had seen her best work and liked it. She was content. She did not want to take the chance of showing her lesser work and risking her newly formed reputation. People would expect better paintings from her than the random pieces she had painted as a teenager.

Fortunately, everything had gone well till then and her life was as back on track as it could get. She had the money issue taken care of, at least. She planned to get a private nurse for her father at the earliest and shift him back home. All his medical support would need to be shifted too, and the overall cost would be more than what she paid to keep him at the hospital. Even though he did not say it, she knew he wanted to come back home. Nobody wants to die in a hospital. And what he had been doing was waiting for death in a hospital.

They knew he was not getting better, that he would not be okay and come back home to a normal life. And Shambhavi understood his desire to be come back home. After the success of the exhibition, she had the resources to make that happen. She wanted it done at the earliest.

That night, she found it difficult to fall asleep. She was excited about breaking the good news to her dad the next day. She was thrilled about living under the same roof with him again. It was going to be perfect-she would not need to rush to and fro from the hospital to home three times every day. She looked forward to having two relaxed, blissful months of painting, with her dad next to her, living in the same home. They would be a proper family again. And once the baby arrives, the family would become larger.

She ran her palms lovingly over her belly, caressing the baby underneath the skin there. She could not wait for it to be born. She saw its images in the form of sonograms every week. She did not know how much longer her father would survive. Sooner or later, the tumour was going to take his life. The future did not look very bright. Her baby was the only thing she had to look forward to, when she thought of her future.

Getting back on your feet, it has a limit, after which we can't take it anymore and your knees buckle up for one final time.

he woke up in cold sweat. He had left her. She kept shouting, calling his name, trying to make him stop, to come back to her, but he did not turn around. He kept walking away from her ... She followed him, but could not keep up with his speed. The tall muscular frame kept getting further from her. She breathed heavily, struggling to reach him, but she could not. She had a baby inside her, a baby that grew by the second and kept getting bigger ... a baby he had put inside her. She shrieked, panicking, as she saw him get further away, turn into a small speck and disappear. No amount of screaming brought him back.

She sat up on her bed and tried to calm her spooked nerves. She did not understand why she still dreamt of him, after all this time. She massaged her stomach, whispering to the disturbed child. She had scared the baby, who was now twirling and kicking.

'Shh ... it's okay. Mumma's here. Everything is okay ...'

The baby kept kicking.

'I'm so sorry ... Mumma's sorry. She didn't mean to wake you up ... Go back to sleep ... It's okay...'

She kept cooing, running a soothing palm over her belly all the while. She could feel the distress of her baby, who kept moving. She murmured assurances and tried to calm herself as well as the child. After sometime, the baby went back to sleep, but Shambhavi kept running her palm over her stomach.

'Why did you have to go, Arjun?' she whispered sadly, in the dark night, where there was no one to listen to her. Those were the moments she chose to cry-in the death of the nights. That way, she kept her friends and father from worrying about her and let out her emotions at the same time.

She had been doing this ever since he had left. Slowly, the frequency had decreased, but the nightmares which used to haunt her dreams were still there, changing forms, but very much there. She wished they would end. But a part of her hoped they would not. The distressing nightmares were the only times she felt close to Arjun, and felt like she could still stop him from leaving. He never stopped, but she tried every time. It gave her some kind of a false assurance that he was still there in her life.

She hated him. But she also loved him. She did not know which one she did more.

Tutul used to keep Shambhavi updated about what was going on with Arjun. The information was not useful-it was always the same. He was never seen around the factory, and they told her that he was out of the country for some business. She got to hear rumours about Arjun shifting his head office to Mumbai and getting wasted drinking, but after a while, even such fictional, invented stories stopped.

Eventually, Tutul completed her job at The Green Meadow and had no contact with anyone at DE from then onwards. Shambhavi missed the imaginary stories about Arjun. They were lies, but at least people were talking about him; he still existed for the world. But once even that stopped, she felt a crushing helplessness. Some nights, she just could not push herself to sleep; she became so restless for him. Had she not been pregnant, she would have taken sleeping pills. But then, had she not been pregnant, he would not have left her, in the first place.

She sometimes wished she had just aborted the baby and not told Arjun about it ever. Or the baby had not entered their lives at all. She wondered where they would have been, had that happened. But every time such thoughts came in, she felt guilty; she felt like she was betraying her child.