Every Time It Rains

by Nikita Singh

  Laila was frozen by the kitchen door. She couldn’t do this, not right now. She didn’t have the energy to. She could barely stay upright without holding on to the wall behind her for support. Her entire body grew warm as the events from the previous night replayed in her mind. She was so angry with him. Why did he have to go ahead and ruin everything just when she had begun to fall in love with him? And now she had to tell him that it was over when she didn’t even want to talk to him, something he should’ve known when she didn’t return his phone calls and messages.

  They kept looking at each other from across the bakery, never breaking their gaze, while customers moved around. Unable to take it anymore, Laila looked pointedly at JD and stomped to her office. He followed her wordlessly. Once inside, Laila turned around immediately, just as JD entered and closed the door behind him. They stood very close to each other in the cramped office, both breathing heavily. Laila’s face distorted as she bit down on her lower lip hard to keep it from trembling. She tried to contain all her emotions and her entire body shook with the effort. She was feeling so many things at the same time that she was at a loss for words to express anything at all. And in the end, nothing came out, so she simply stood there, glaring at JD, breathing desperately through her mouth.

  JD seemed to be having trouble finding words too. He stepped back and rested his body against the door he’d just closed, his hand still behind him on the doorknob. His chin slowly rose as he leaned his head back on the door, looking down at Laila. His nostrils flared with every breath he took. His fist was clenched by his side, his entire body stiff and unmoving as he stared at Laila.

  She could feel the anger emanate from his body and heat up the room. Under all of that anger, Laila could tell that there was hurt and confusion and distress, but she wasn’t doing so well herself. She tried to pace around in the tiny office desperately, two steps to the right and then back. She looked at the floor, then at him, out the window, then at him again. She caught sight of his bruised knuckle and her heart felt heavy in her chest. Then she remembered him swerving to avoid a fist and pull back to punch that man from last night, and her face grew hot.

  In the end, she stopped pacing and stood in front of him. They were inches away from each other, so close that Laila could feel JD’s troubled breath on her face. He pulled his head away from the door and bent forward, towards her. His forehead was almost touching hers, a hair’s breadth between them. But neither of them moved to close that distance. They stayed fixed where they were, looking at each other.

  When it became too painful for Laila, she closed her eyes. Suddenly, one second she felt him close to her and the next, he melted away. She felt the loud slam of the door reverberate through her more than she heard it, leaving her alone in a gust of air. A few tears escaped the corners of her closed eyes and she took a moment to embrace the pain that tore her heart apart.

  They hadn’t had to say anything. It was over—and they both knew it.

  Now that he was gone, she craved to hear his voice. The last time he’d spoken to her properly, giving her his full attention, was the night before, when they were outside the restaurant and he’d sung ‘Kabhi Kabhi’ to her. Laila felt a lump in her throat when she remembered that.

  In the next moment, she had wiped all traces of the tears off her face and was back in the kitchen, doing what she did best—pretend to be okay. It was fine, she was fine, and everything was fine. But this time, she couldn’t fool herself, not even for a minute. The next thing she knew, she had grabbed her bag and walked out of the bakery without a word to anyone. She drove home, but once she got there, she couldn’t get out of the car and go inside that empty house. She couldn’t go back to work because she didn’t trust herself to be able to hide her pain. She couldn’t go to Maahi because she knew her friend would freak out more than her. She really, desperately wanted to go to JD, but they’d just established that that was permanently out of question. So there was only one place left to go.

  Laila got out of the car, walked up to the house, cursed the creaking gate and ran up the front steps. It took her less than ten minutes to pack a suitcase of clothes and essentials. She couldn’t text or call Maahi, who would know something was wrong and would try to stop her. So Laila called herself a cab and left her car keys on the dining table for Maahi, along with a one-word note: Maa.

  Five hours later, she was in Patna, knocking on her grandparents’ door. When her nani saw her, her face lit up with joy, which immediately brought tears to Laila’s eyes. She hugged her grandma warmly, and let everything else go. She was with family now, and nothing else seemed important.

  Apparently, her grandpa had taken her mother to meet one of his old colleagues, no doubt to show her off to his friends, so Laila had time to sit with her nani and not talk about anything she usually talked about. Work didn’t matter, her life in Delhi, her friends, her now ex-boyfriend, her career … it all seemed so far away as she listened to Nani’s stories about their distant relatives who were getting married, sending children abroad to study, having babies and every other good thing that was happening in the family. Maa arrived home with Nana a couple of hours later, surprised but overjoyed to find Laila there.

  ‘Arre, Laila!’ Nana exclaimed exuberantly. ‘Tum kab aayi? What a pleasant surprise!’

  ‘She didn’t even tell me!’ Maa said, pulling her daughter into a hug, which almost reduced Laila to tears again, but she held herself together. She might have been able to fool Nani into thinking they were just tears of happiness, but she wasn’t going to fool her mother. So as her eyes brimmed with tears, Laila blinked rapidly to make them disappear and held Maa a moment longer to buy more time. Maa pulled back and studied her face. ‘How long had you been planning this?’

  ‘Not very long,’ Laila said shortly, her throat tight.

  ‘Should I make some of your favourite pyaz pakoras?’ Nani asked animatedly. ‘You always liked those!’

  Before Laila had a chance to respond, Nana said, ‘I have a better idea! Why doesn’t Laila bake us some of her world-famous cookies?’

  ‘Why don’t we do both?’ Laila laughed.

  ‘That’s best!’ Nana agreed.

  Laila’s time with her family kept her from falling apart, but if she thought she was successfully pretending that everything was okay with her, she was mistaken. Over the next week, every time she laughed or even smiled, her eyes threatened to fill up. She couldn’t sit in one place and have a conversation with anyone for an extended period of time; she had to keep taking moments to herself to calm down, push back the emotions that were always at the brim, continuously rising. She couldn’t be happy without feeling sad. Surrounded by so much unconditional love, she couldn’t appreciate her blessings without feeling the sting of her loss.

  It was on Sunday, a week after she’d arrived in Patna that her mother brought up the subject of her unexpected visit. And inexplicably, as soon as Maa mentioned it, all of Laila’s anger and frustration shifted on to her mother. She was suddenly furious with her.

  ‘Why did you leave Papa? Why did you end it?’ she blurted out heatedly.

  They were in the balcony at the back of the house, where Laila had been sitting on an ancient swing and Maa had come out to dry clothes. Maa’s hands froze mid-air, and after a moment, retreated to her side. She dropped the kurti she was holding back into the bucket and returned Laila’s gaze. ‘I was wondering when you’d ask about that,’ she said simply.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that as a child, you asked me that question repeatedly, and the only answer I ever gave you was that it was in all of our best interests and that you would understand it one day when you grew up. But when you grew up, you never asked me about your father again,’ Maa said calmly.

  ‘So tell me now!’

  Maa walked over to her slowly and sat down next to her on the swing. She turned and looked at Laila squarely.

  ‘What?’ Laila said. She spoke bitterly, directing all
of her pent-up feelings at her mother. ‘Tell me what was so bad about the marriage that you couldn’t give him another chance? You denied me a father my whole life, because of what? What did he do that was so bad, so unforgivable? Did he cheat on you, is that it? Had an affair? Lied to you? And you left him for one mistake without considering forgiving him for the sake of your family, your daughter? Did you not even care enough to—’

  ‘Stop,’ Maa said quietly. ‘You’re looking for someone to blame, and you’re deliberately saying hurtful things to me and it’s not going to make you feel better. But the truth isn’t going to make you feel any better either.’

  ‘But I deserve to know it!’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you do.’

  Laila waited as she saw Maa hesitate. Her mother looked at the back door, and everywhere around her, before meeting Laila’s eye and saying gently but very clearly, ‘Your father was an alcoholic and when he was drunk, he was abusive.’

  There was a stunned silence that followed her mother’s declaration. Laila looked away, unable to bear meeting her mother’s gaze. All these years, she had blamed Maa for everything that had ever gone wrong in her life—it all boiled down to her mother deciding to leave her father and separating the family. Over the years, Laila had also wondered if there was a possibility that her father had been abusive, along with a hundred different excuses she had thought of to justify the divorce. But somehow, it had always been easier to blame Maa than find out the truth.

  Laila stared into her lap, where her hands lay clutched together tightly. She felt furious at her father, she felt terrible for her mother, but more than anything else, she felt ashamed of herself.

  Maa continued evenly, ‘It wasn’t always like that. I was married off when I was only nineteen and I had your father’s family’s support, which was good enough for me in the beginning. I lived in their joint family, where they supported me through my BA, which was very liberal of them at that time, considering the kind of community we were living in. Your father worked in a town a few hours away, so he only came home once a week. But then I became pregnant with you, and he decided we needed to live together. I had to drop out of college and move to another town. It was a hard adjustment for me in the in the beginning, living away from my own family, but then you came along, and I suddenly had everything I needed. A few years later, your father lost his job and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find another one. I suggested we go back to his family, but he was too proud to consider it. And then, he began drinking and venting his anger on me.’

  ‘Maa…’

  ‘It’s okay, beta. It doesn’t hurt to talk about it anymore. There was nothing more to it. I thought about going to his family. They were good people, but I wasn’t sure they would accept a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter over their son. I couldn’t go back to my own parents because back in those days, a married daughter returning to her maternal home with a child …’ Maa shook her head. ‘So you and I, we started over.’

  Laila found it hard to speak, and she knew an apology just wasn’t enough, but she had to say it. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve always … I’ve been so mean, so cruel to you…’

  But Maa simply laughed. ‘Ah, I’ve never paid attention to any of that nonsense. I knew you never meant a word of it, and I couldn’t blame you even if you did, because I was the reason you didn’t know the truth. I was happy to be your punching bag, at least as long as it made you happy!’

  ‘Maa, please. Don’t say that! I feel horrible about behaving like that…’

  ‘Okay, I won’t say that, if you tell me what you were trying to blame me for this time,’ Maa said simply. She was inspecting Laila closely, a warm smile on her face. ‘You think I don’t know what’s going on? Every time something goes wrong, you turn to me to put the blame on instead of dealing with it. And this … you coming here, it’s exactly like that night with Abhishek.’

  Laila’s sucked in air. She defended him automatically. ‘That was nothing.’

  ‘It wasn’t nothing. Something was wrong, otherwise you wouldn’t have come to me that late at night just to sleep over. And left the next morning with him before I even had a chance to ask you anything.’

  Laila looked at her mother with a pained expression on her face. There was no point telling her. It might make Laila feel better to get it off her chest, but the amount of pain it would cause her mother … No, she thought firmly. She wasn’t going to burden Maa with her past too.

  ‘It’s okay—you don’t have to tell me,’ Maa said. She was still watching Laila closely. ‘But just as long as you’re not making the same mistake again…’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Laila asked.

  ‘With Abhishek—now I’m not saying you didn’t love him, but apart from that—you also had a point to prove. You wanted to prove to me that love existed and you could do a better job at it than me. And perhaps to prove that point, somewhere along the way, you overlooked some signs that were right in front of you. I’m only saying that don’t do that again. Whatever you came here to blame me for, I’m happy to take the blame, but don’t live your life in the fear of failure. I didn’t know what was happening that night you came over, but I certainly knew after he got into an accident and there were bruises all over your body, bruises that didn’t look like ones caused by a car. Maybe I’m completely wrong here in saying this—and forgive me if I am—but I think that you excused some of his behaviour, some warning signs, because of how badly you needed the marriage to work in your own head.’

  And now, maybe she was punishing JD and herself for something that Abhishek did all those years ago. Now the point that she had to prove was to herself—that no sort of physical abuse was justifiable, under any circumstances, ever. No matter how deeply depressed she had been, or what her state of mind had been like, but over time, that’s the one thing she had believed in. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe there were exceptions. Laila gulped. ‘I don’t blame you for anything, Maa.’

  ‘It’s okay even if you do. I know that over the years, you’ve hated me several times. But every time that happened, I just reminded myself how much more you would hate me if I’d stayed with your father. It wasn’t uncommon in that time for husbands to be abusive, and I wasn’t always brave. I was weak and terrified, but I stayed with him as he continued to get drunk, pick fights and emotionally and physically …’ Maa shook her head in indignation. ‘But the first time he raised a hand on my three-year-old child, I knew that was the last he was seeing of us.’

  Laila didn’t have any words left. She couldn’t apologize. It would be weightless, useless, of no consequence. She fell sideways into her mother’s lap and clutched her around the knees. Maa pushed back hair from Laila’s face and patted her head nonchalantly, as if Laila was being overdramatic, and they hadn’t just shared the deepest heart to heart.

  Maa’s voice was choked as she said, ‘What happened with Abhishek … it destroyed you. But he’s dead and you’re alive. I just want you never to lose hope or live in fear.’

  Laila nodded in her lap.

  ‘You’re my daughter,’ Maa stroked her hair and said. ‘Hopeful and fearless.’

  20

  TOO LATE

  Laila waved a final goodbye as she walked in through the airport doors in Patna. She turned around once more to find Maa, Nana and Nani all still standing there, waving at her. She motioned them to leave, turned around and walked inside with a heaviness in her stomach. Their goodbyes had lasted forever—first at home and then at the airport. Her bag was filled with the sweets Nani had made for her, thinking about which tightened Laila’s throat, along with the thought of what was waiting for her in Delhi.

  If her life were a romantic comedy, Laila would’ve jumped on the next plane, landed in front of JD’s door, accepted that she’d been stupid and begged him to take her back. But real life didn’t work that way. She had real, serious emotional issues she was struggling with and would probably always struggle with. She had burned all bridges with JD, not given him a
chance or presented her side of the story. He was furious with her and no one got over something like that just by showing up at the other person’s door. Besides, she didn’t even know where JD lived, or what his door even looked like.

  Laila knew it wasn’t JD’s fault. Deep down, she had always known what he had done wasn’t the same as Abhishek. However, she also couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure that this wasn’t a red flag, or an indicator of some kind, hinting at possible abusive behaviour. Hopeful and fearless—that’s what her mother wished for her, but all Laila could wonder was why couldn’t JD just walk away without punishing those men physically? Or in his moment of rage, how could he not have realized that he had hurt her too?

  While it was unfair to compare his behaviour to Abhishek’s, she still wondered what Abhishek’s behaviour had meant in the first place. The first time he had hit her, he had been so sad immediately afterward. He’d looked at what he had done, panicked, confused, furious with himself, terrified that Laila would leave him. He’d fallen to his knees and begged and pleaded her to forgive him. It was easy to take one incident and hold it against another person for the rest of their lives, to let it define the way you saw them and hate them for it. But this was Abhishek, the person who she had known more closely that anyone else, and that one action went against everything she had ever known about him. In a matter of seconds, she’d questioned everything she thought she knew. And if she could somehow erase those few seconds, pretend it never happened, things would be so much simpler.

  Or so she had thought when she’d forgiven him and they’d put the incident behind them. And then it had happened again, so much worse than the first time. It just wasn’t forgivable. Hitting someone once was one thing, beating them repeatedly and raping them was a whole other issue. No matter what his state of mind, that action could not be justified.

  Laila picked up her suitcase from the baggage carousel and set it on the floor. She pulled it behind her and walked out of the airport, thinking about what her mother had told her about her father. Maa’s circumstances had been very different. She had been living in a small town with her husband, who was the sole breadwinner of the household. She wasn’t a graduate, had a baby and nowhere else to go. She had taken the abuse for as long as she could, only putting an end to it when he hurt Laila. Then the house was no longer safe for her child, and she had no choice but to leave.