Meethi was quiet. He would never understand her reasons. He never had and he never would. On the surface her life had been perfect but she had lived through it and knew how the undercurrents had trapped her and almost drowned her.
‘Why does it matter? I thought you would be relieved to be rid of me—an unwanted burden,’ she said miserably, the words forced out.
‘Did I ever make you feel unwanted or treat you like a burden?’ he demanded disbelievingly.
‘You left that day without speaking to me,’ Meethi whispered, her face white.
Veer stiffened. That last day had been burnt into Veer’s memory. He recalled the events clearly.
It had been two months after she had suffered the miscarriage. When six months pregnant, Meethi had tripped and fallen down the stairs, losing their baby. Two months of coping with gut-wrenching loss and seeing his vibrant wife turn pale and wraithlike, a shadow of herself.
After the miscarriage, Meethi had totally withdrawn into herself and become completely unresponsive. He had been at his wits’ end as to how to cope and had gone to consult a renowned doctor.
On his return he had found Meethi in the arms of his younger cousin, sobbing uncontrollably.
The sight of her wet cheeks and his cousin’s consoling hug had maddened him and something had snapped within him.
He had marched her to their suite of rooms and had turned on her, accusing her of behaving indecently, shunning all propriety and decorum.
Meethi, in turn, had retaliated, accusing him of being insensitive and unfeeling and, before he knew it, he had her in his arms and had begun kissing her hungrily and the fire between them had blazed gloriously as Meethi had kissed him back passionately. After months of abstinence, the feel of her in his arms and her soft encouraging cries had made him lose all control and the doctor’s orders that sex was off-limits had been forgotten by both of them. Tumbling her down onto the bed and egged on by her passionate kisses, he had taken her quickly, furiously.
But afterwards, as he looked at her lying spent in his arms, his shirt askew where she had tugged it off and her clothes torn when in his impatience he had ripped them, he had felt self-disgust overwhelm him.
He had behaved like an animal, intent on slaking his carnal pleasures, not even caring for the well-being of his sick wife. He always lost control whenever she was around and it had happened again.
Overwhelmed with guilt, he had left full of self-castigation for being so weak-willed where she was concerned. And that was the last time he had seen her.
He looked at Meethi now and some of his guilt returned. His behaviour had been despicable.
‘You said that you were going mad and you seemed totally disgusted!’ she said softly, reminding him. Something had died inside her that day when she had seen the disgust on his face. She had never felt so unwanted and useless in her life. She knew then that she would have to leave.
He froze in shock. Had she mistakenly thought that he was disgusted with her?
‘Was that why you ran away?’ he asked grimly.
‘You weren’t happy in our marriage,’ Meethi said, sadness colouring her voice.
She was pretending to have left out of concern for him. Accusing him of being the unhappy one in their marriage. Her duplicity fuelled his anger.
‘So, you are shifting the blame on to me now? You claim to have run away because I was unhappy, but if you really wanted to spare my feelings then why the charade of your death? Did you think I would be happy to hear that my wife had drowned?’ Veer replied.
‘I thought it would be better in the long run…’ Meethi said weakly.
‘Better for whom? You and that old man of yours?’ he said crushingly through bloodless lips. He had had enough of her lies and deception.
‘What old man?’ she asked with a look of incomprehension.
Meethi’s look served like a red rag to his anger. She was an actress beyond compare.
‘Stop acting the innocent! Did you think I wouldn’t come to know? You ran away because you didn’t want to stay married any more. You ran away to your teacher, didn’t you? I had always suspected you were infatuated with him and finally you decided to go to him!’ he said vehemently.
Meethi looked at him, stupefied. Did he really believe that she could have betrayed him with her guru?
As a child, Meethi had loved art and her work had caught the attention of Yogesh Hussein, a renowned artist who had begun tutoring her when she was ten. He’d claimed she had ‘unusual artistic talent’, and Meethi had revered him, looking up to him as another father figure. She was aghast and stunned at Veer’s insinuations.
‘I didn’t run off to be with him!’ she said tightly.
‘Why do you persist in lying? You ran from here straight to him. Didn’t you?’ Veer thundered.
His blood had boiled when the detective had reported that she had gone to Hussein’s house in Delhi and from there to his farmhouse, where she had stayed secretly for about three months before she had gone to Kolkata.
‘I went to him because there was no one else I could turn to,’ Meethi said heavily. Her baba had passed away and she had no other relatives she could go to.
Guruji had been shocked but supportive, and she had stayed with him for the first three months but Meethi had been terrified that Veer would trace her and so she had begged him to send her away somewhere else.
Veer felt as if she had slapped him. The unpalatable fact that his wife considered him ‘no one’ and had preferred to turn to another man and betray him stung his formidable pride.
‘So, even knowing that you had run away duplicitously, he abetted your perfidy? What sob story did you tell him? How did you justify your running away? Is this what he teaches his students? Or is it only you? Did he encourage you to run away?’ he said, words flying out of his mouth with ferocious precision.
‘He didn’t encourage me. In fact, he told me to talk to you but…’ Her voice tapered off.
Guruji had tried to convince her to talk to Veer and iron out their problems. He had even offered to talk to Veer himself but she had been so hysterical in her refusal that he had relented.
‘But you didn’t think my reputation was anything to care about. Family honour, propriety, decorum—all these are foreign words to you. They don’t matter to you at all,’ Veer thundered bitterly.
It had been difficult for him to accept that not only was Meethi alive but that she had meticulously planned her escape down to the smallest detail. She had wanted to leave him.
And she would have been successful at staying hidden if he hadn’t come across her painting at the exhibition.
His eyes grew cold and his face turned grim when he recalled how, a year after her supposed accident, he had gone to a painting exhibition organised by one of the charities he supported, featuring the works of Hussein.
As he’d walked around the exhibition one painting had made his blood run cold. He had stood, stunned, in front of the painting of a puppy sitting atop a car. The car was his Jaguar and the puppy was the one that Meethi had once dived to save as it had run in front of his car.
The painting didn’t bear any initials but he knew that no one apart from Meethi could have painted it. But when had she painted it? How could she have painted it? Questions had inundated his mind but a gut feeling bloomed inside him, filling him with the cold clarity that Meethi was alive.
When he’d asked the organisers about the painting they’d said that Hussein had donated the