Falling into Place

by Sheryn Munir

  “I don’t want anything from you except your friendship. I don’t do relationships. You know that.”

  A lump had lodged itself in Sameen’s throat like an unwanted guest. “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  “Because I owe it to our friendship. I shouldn’t have taken off like that. We should have talked about it, you’re right, and worked things out together.”

  “Like I said before,” Sameen said, looking out of the window, “it’s a little late for that.” She stared at the street again, wondering whether coming here had been a mistake.

  “How’s…er…Rohan?” Tara asked, breaking the tense silence that was starting to engulf them.

  “I’m sure he’s well, wherever he is.”

  “You broke up?” Tara’s voice had an edge to it, making Sameen turn towards her. A frown of bewilderment was etched on her face.

  “Not exactly. We’re taking a break. Things had been getting a little difficult, but now they seem to be becoming clearer. I think it’s about time we talked.”

  “I’m glad. You two are good together.”

  “I don’t know… Maybe this is as good as it gets.”

  “Maybe.”

  They looked down at their coffee cups.

  “Sameen?”

  “Hm?”

  “Can I call you sometime? I know the cracks in our friendship will take time to heal, but could we try to start mending them as soon as possible?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I see.” Tara looked back down at her coffee.

  “I’m not sure you do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You might not want a relationship, but what I feel for you is too strong for me to be your friend. If I am around you, I will always want more. So it’s best for both of us if we stayed away from each other.”

  Tara’s eyebrows shot up. “Sameen…are you saying that you…you…”

  “That I had feelings for you? That I fell in love with you too? Yes, Tara, I was stupid enough to do that.”

  “But…” Tara began.

  “But what? Why I didn’t tell you?” Sameen’s laugh was sardonic. “Really? There are no buts anymore. We’ve both placed our cards on the table and made our moves. We have to respect the rules of the game.”

  A fist squeezed Sameen’s heart as Tara nodded through the tears that filled her eyes.

  Sameen looked away, picked up her bag, and stood. “Take care, Tara,” she said and walked out of the cafe.

  Only when the door shut behind her did Sameen let the tears come.

  “She said she fell in love with me.” Tara’s voice sounded hollow even to her own ears. “She fell in love with me. She said that.”

  Even though she was saying the words, they felt unreal to her. Each time she said them out aloud, or even thought them, they seemed to disintegrate in the air around her, like they were mocking her.

  Barkha exhaled noisily through her teeth. She crossed her legs up on her bed and settled in comfortably against a pile of cushions. “What are you going to do?”

  Perched at the other end of Barkha’s king-sized bed, Tara lay her forehead on the arm that she rested on her drawn-up knees. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Do you still love her?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And she loves you. I don’t see a problem here, Tara.” Barkha’s voice dripped with the sort of studied patience that only indicated she was feeling anything but.

  “Don’t you see?” Tara looked up. “It’s all so messed up. She’s going back to Rohan now.”

  Barkha held up a finger. “You said she’s going to talk to Rohan. To be fair, you don’t know what that means.”

  “What I do know is that she doesn’t want to be with me.” She let her head drop back on to her arm.

  She expected Barkha to respond, to say something, even to mouth some platitude. But there was only silence. The seconds stretched to about a minute, then the bed moved as Barkha got up. She heard the shuffle of Barkha’s slippers on the polished marble tiles. They went to the end of the room, then came back and stopped next to her. Tara raised her head.

  Barkha’s arms were crossed and she watched Tara with the sort of intense scrutiny one would give to an incomprehensible puzzle.

  “What?” Tara asked.

  “I don’t know if I should say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Exactly. I don’t know if I should say it.”

  “You’re going to give me the hairdryer treatment, right?”

  Barkha’s brow furrowed. “What treatment?”

  Tara shook her head. “I mean the way Alex Ferguson used to yell at his Manchester United team… Never mind. Just say it. You know you’re going to. Eventually. And I probably need to hear it.”

  Barkha stared at her for another few moments. “This is the only chance you’re going to get,” she said, her voice quiet.

  “Only chance for what?”

  “To get Sameen back.”

  “I told you, she doesn’t want to be with me.”

  “See, that’s the problem with you. You sit around on your high horse and make assumptions. You never actually do anything about the important things. You never ever tried with Sameen. You never told her what you really felt, you were never honest with her. You just jumped into a box and slammed the lid shut, and pretended that if you didn’t face what was going on, it would cease to exist.”

  “I—”

  “You say you loved her,” Barkha ploughed on, “that you still love her, but nothing you’ve done makes me believe that you actually do. You are in your thirties, but you’re letting some idiotic teenage romance and heartbreak decide the course of your life. What happened with you and Radhika wasn’t a template for all your future relationships, you know.

  “Look around you, Tara. Life happens—it happens to all of us—and we move on, and we adapt and change, and we do what it takes to make things work. It’s time you grew up and figured out some things about yourself and your life. It’s time to be honest with yourself and about what makes you happy.” Barkha’s voice was still calm. She didn’t seem angry or impatient as she usually was whenever she doled out life lessons to Tara. “Right now you are choosing misery.”

  Barkha’s words hurt, but Tara was at a point where she had no defences against them. Her shoulders drooped.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’ve spent all this time thinking I had no choice. It’s true that I don’t know for certain if Sameen is getting back with Rohan, but then, what have I ever done to make her believe she might have a future with me? I never even had the courage to tell her that I loved her until it was too late. For all she knows, I’ve never been interested and that kiss was a mistake. I never made her believe that she could choose me. I couldn’t even be a good friend to her.”

  “Exactly. Now that you seem to have finally stopped feeling sorry for yourself, what are you going to do?”

  Tara sighed. “I think I need to be honest with myself and with Sameen, and find the courage to face whatever that brings. And if she then slams the door in my face, at least I’ll know I tried”

  “Now we’re talking.” Barkha yanked Tara off the bed. “What are you sitting around for?” She shoved her towards the door. “Go get your girl!”

  Chapter 26

  Sameen’s phone vibrated in her purse, but she didn’t feel like answering it or even checking to see who was calling. Sitting on a bench outside the sub-registrar’s office at the district court, waiting for Shazia and Baljeet to be called inside, Sameen couldn’t help wondering if one day this was going to be her story too, marrying Rohan in an impersonal civil ceremony, where everyone was bored to death with all the waiting. The thought left her cold.

  The bench creaked as her brother, Danish, sat
next to her. “I never realized this would be so damn mind-numbing.” He had his eyes firmly fixed on his phone as he scrolled and clicked his way steadily through his Facebook feed. “I’m never doing it.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  “Your phone is ringing,” Danish pointed out. “Someone’s calling you.”

  “Thanks, genius.”

  “You’re welcome.” he said with a sickening-sweet smile.

  A hassled court official bustled out of a room with a file under her arm and called out, “Baljeet Singh Batra and Shazia Siddiqi.”

  A flurry of excitement ensued as Shazia and Baljeet’s party of family and friends—a motley crew of about a dozen—rearranged themselves. The court official ushered the couple, along with their witnesses, into the office, all the while trying to explain to the rest of them that they would just have to wait outside.

  Sameen extricated herself from the gaggle of relatives trying to argue their way inside and stepped out into the courtyard. It was a cool day—sunless thanks to the threatening rain. Her phone rang again and she fished it out.

  Tara’s name stared at her from the lock screen. Three missed calls.

  Sameen’s heart thudded. She stared at the screen till it gently faded to black once again.

  For weeks, she had hungered for Tara to call or even message. She hadn’t and, worse, all of Sameen’s calls and messages to her had gone unanswered. She had yearned to hear Tara’s voice, albeit as a poor substitute for seeing her in person. But after meeting her last weekend and clearing the air—although that was a completely unsuitable term for the heated and charged exchange they’d had at Matteo—Sameen was left feeling like she was drowning. The tangle of emotions roiled inside her, more turbulent and furious than before.

  After all this time of shutting her out, after Sameen had finally had the opportunity to tell Tara how she felt and that she wanted nothing more to do with her—even though saying that had felt as if she were tearing herself in two—Tara thought now was a good time to call? It was like poking a red-hot stake into the open, festering wound that was Sameen’s heart.

  “She’s bloody fucking unbelievable,” Sameen said under her breath.

  Yet all she wanted to do was call Tara back. A tiny part of her heart still filled with joy at the thought of hearing Tara’s voice.

  She pressed the power button again to light up the screen and stared at Tara’s name. It would be so easy to just call her and say, “Forget what I said. I’ll take anything, even friendship.”

  Her heart continued to race, and she had a sensation of being outside her own body, watching herself from a distance. She saw a youngish woman in her new blue salwar kameez, lost to the world, staring at her phone uncertainly, probably wondering whether to make a call. Around her, people milled, some hassled and worried; others drank tea from small earthen cups; some talked on the phone; lawyers, recognizable by their white bands, walked purposefully in and out of the building—

  Someone bumped into Sameen’s side, sending her stumbling into the wall and jerking her rudely back to reality.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  An apologetic elderly man was handing her phone back to her. She must have dropped it. “I’m so sorry. I tripped and I couldn’t stop myself and—”

  “It’s all right,” Sameen said. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I am.” She forced a smile. “Are you okay?” The files the old man had been carrying had scattered to the ground, loose papers falling out. She helped him gather them back together.

  With the files rescued and the man on his way, Sameen sat on the bench by the wall. She was much calmer thanks to the distraction, but she didn’t trust herself. She fished out her phone and dialled Milind.

  “Hi? All done?” His familiar voice took her stress level down another notch.

  “Not yet. Shazia and Baljeet have just gone in. Listen, Milind, I’m freaking out a little bit.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tara.” Her palms were getting sweaty. “She called…three times.”

  For a few moments Milind didn’t say anything. “Wow. Did you speak to her?”

  “No. I-I… No, I didn’t.

  She could almost hear Milind thinking. “So,” he said after another few seconds of silence, “did you want to?”

  Sameen sighed. Now that he’d put his finger on the problem so accurately, it was difficult not to face facts.

  “I don’t know… I feel I can’t deal with this now. Not after our talk, you know. What if she calls again?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to speak to her?”

  I do want to speak to her. More than anything else.

  She might as well have said that out loud, because Milind, without waiting for a response, continued. “Okay, listen, don’t stress about it now.”

  “What do I do if she calls again?”

  Sameen wasn’t unaware of how the tables had been turned. This time she was the one ignoring Tara’s calls. But this is different, she tried to reason with herself. I have told her not to contact me.

  “You can block her or switch off your phone or keep talking to me,” Milind said. “Shall I come and get you?”

  Somehow that mundane question made something snap back in place for Sameen. “No, of course not. I’ll be fine. I just panicked for a moment.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Milind.”

  “Anytime.”

  Tara’s chair creaked as she leaned back and stretched her arms over her head. She yawned and rubbed her eyes. Lack of sleep plus too many hours staring at the computer was not a good combination.

  Her eyes strayed to her phone, lying face down next to her monitor. It was on silent mode, a new tactic these past few days to stop herself going crazy wondering if Sameen would call back or reply to her texts.

  Not that this didn’t drive her nuts in a completely different way—the anticipation and the endless waiting before she would let herself check her phone again. She glanced at the time on her desktop. Another fifteen minutes before she was “permitted” to check, but then, she’d finished her story and submitted it well before time, so she was allowed a pass.

  She reached for the handset, turned it over. And her heart sank. Again.

  Before she could think about it, she pulled up Sameen’s contact information and dialled. It rang once, then a recorded voice told her the number was busy. She was pretty sure that meant Sameen had blocked her.

  She lobbed the phone on to her desk and pushed her chair backwards to reach for the bottle of water behind her. Through the opening of her cubicle, she could see Barkha, Mike, and a couple of others out on the balcony, taking a smoke break. She wondered what comfort smokers found in their ciggies. Perhaps she needed a drag of whatever poison was in them to incinerate her knotted insides and blow them out with the smoke. Maybe then she would stop hurting.

  Stop being a drama queen, Tara scolded herself. She picked up her phone again and scrolled through her contacts list. For a few seconds she stared at the number she had searched for. Then she got up and headed into the ladies’, where she locked herself in a stall. She took a deep breath and pressed the dial icon.

  “Hello?” It was the clipped, impersonal tone of someone who had answered their phone automatically, without looking at the caller’s name.

  Tara’s throat was dry and she found herself unable to speak.

  “Hello?” Milind’s voice said again.

  “Er, hi, Milind.” Tara paused. “It’s Tara.”

  This time the silence was from Milind’s end. “Oh. Um, hi. What do you want?”

  He didn’t say it unkindly, but it cut Tara to the core. She swallowed, trying to get her heart down to where it belonged. “I…er… Sorry, is this a bad time?”

  “Hang on.” Some shuf
fling and muted voices came from the background. There was a creak, probably a door shutting, and then silence. Finally, Milind spoke again. “Yeah.”

  Tara cleared her throat. “I’ve, er, been calling…trying to get in touch with Sameen, but she’s not been… I haven’t been able to speak to her. Just wanted to check she’s okay.”

  “Why?” Milind asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Why are you trying to get in touch with Sameen?”

  “Oh. I-I wanted to speak to her.”

  “Tara, isn’t it clear she doesn’t want to speak to you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I thought she told you that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  “I just need to talk to her…to explain.”

  “Explain what?”

  “That…” Tara squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to find the right words. “I never knew,” her voice was almost a whisper, “that she had feelings for me too.”

  “You would have known if you’d had the decen—” Milind stopped and sighed. “If you hadn’t pulled away.”

  She leaned back against the bathroom door. “I should have never done that. I was wrong, Milind. Please, I need to talk to her, just once.”

  “I can give her a message,” Milind said, “but I can’t guarantee she’ll speak to you.”

  “Please, can’t you ask her to call me? I know she’ll listen to you.”

  “Tara, I…” Milind exhaled loudly. “Listen, it’s all very well for me to tell her to call you, but give me one good reason why she should. Tell me why, after you’ve hurt her, after you left her in the lurch, and weren’t there when she really needed you.”

  Tara’s throat hurt with the size of the lump lodged in it. “Because I love her too.”

  “That’s not enough,” said Milind. “At least it’s not enough for you to say it. If you really loved her, you wouldn’t have abandoned her or shut her out like you did. Actually, Tara, I’m sorry, but I can’t pass on your message. I don’t want to play any part in you putting my friend through the wringer. I don’t want to see her hurt in this way again. I’m afraid I don’t see any reason she should talk to you. Nothing in your actions over the past weeks convinces me that you are deserving of Sameen. If you want to contact her, you won’t be doing it through me. I have to go now. Take care.”