Chapter 23: Choice

-Archi-

@-Archi-

The content of this story belongs strictly to the author, -Archi-. Any unwarranted use/copy of it is not encouraged and is strictly prohibited.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Choice

“So why did you really come?” Khushi asked, as soon as they were seated in the car, driving away from the Raizada Mansion.

Arnav looked at her, confused. “I told you, the driver took an emergency leave and you can’t drive.”

“You really expect me to believe that?”

“What’s there not to believe?”

“Well, hate to agree with NK here, but there were a lot of cars present tonight with a lot of drivers. One of them could have easily dropped me off.”

Arnav smirked. “Oh, so your issue is with all the jokes being passed around on our account.”

“No of course not,” Khushi replied. To be honest, the jokes were what put her unease upon hearing Lavanya openly question their marriage, to rest. 

“Then what?” Arnav probed. “Because I honestly thought you would be grateful that I rescued you from my over dramatic family.”

“Your family is alright… well, most of them anyway.”

He snorted. “Out with it Dr. Gupta… who are we gossiping about?”

“It’s not gossip. I’m just curious – why does NK call you Nannav?”

Arnav rolled his eyes. “I couldn’t pronounce the  ‘Ar’ sound when I was a kid… so naturally, NK is not going to let me forget that until my grave.”

“You couldn’t say Arnav?” Khushi asked, a small smile playing at her lips. She found she could imagine him as a stuttering two-year old quite easily. 

“There were a lot of things I couldn’t say actually,” Arnav answered. “I was quite a failure as a kid.”

“Kids are not failures. Everybody learns at their own pace, it’s not your fault. Besides, you managed to do quite well for yourself.”

“Yeah, but I could have been better.”

Khushi didn’t know what to say to that. She found more and more that Arnav unnecessarily held himself deeply responsible for a lot of things, the reason for which she was yet to find. Although she was an open book to him, he definitely wasn’t, to her. He fiercely guarded his secrets. And no matter how much she wished to know about them, she knew better than to simply ask.  

“Did you know that your sister knows way too much about your life?” she said after a few minutes. 

“Which one? Lavanya?”

“For the moment, yeah. I don’t know and probably don’t want to know how much Anjali knows.”

Arnav laughed, not even slightly upset or scared of what his sisters may have revealed to her. It was almost surreal to see him so carefree around his family. 

“Why? What did Lavu say to you?” he asked. 

“She thinks you are an idiot-”

“ –so do I, about her –”

“And that everyone thinks that we are not real… as in real like a husband and a wife.”

Arnav simply smiled, and kept his eyes trained on the road, which was deserted owing to the late hour. 

“So?” Khushi pressed when she understood she wasn’t going to get an answer. 

“So what?”

“So why does she think that?”

“Because we are not… a real husband and wife.”

Khushi rolled her eyes. “Well obviously! But how does she know that? Did you tell her?”

“I don’t need to.”

“So what then?”

Arnav shrugged. “There is nothing to explain here… she is my best friend. She is the first person I told when I started dating my first girlfriend. She is the one I go to when I am pissed off or happy, usually in that order. I would be stupid to think that she didn’t notice what kind of a relationship you and I share.”

Khushi nodded, seeing the affection in his eyes. No wonder his sisters loved him. “You do know that she is crazy though, right?”

“You don’t even know the half of it,” he replied, laughing. “But she means well… genuinely that is.”

“I have no doubts about that,” Khushi said, who had warmed up to Lavanya’s attitude over the last month. “But don’t you think she told the rest of the family about us? Because how can they all think that you and I don’t....?”

“They don’t all think like that,” he answered, unperturbed with her questions. “Just my Mom, Dad and Di… and it’s not because of Lavu.”

“Then who?”

He took a deep breath, hesitating. 

“What?”

“You sleep on the couch.”

“So?”

“A real husband and wife as you put it, don’t sleep in separate rooms.”

Khushi didn’t follow the point he was making. “Yes, I know. But we sleep in separate rooms in our apartment, not when we visit your family.”

“Oh, so that’s why you sleep on the couch?”

Khushi was now aghast and slightly irritated. “Am I missing something? And since when do you have a problem with me sleeping on the sofa? Isn’t that the whole point of this cover-up? We pretend to be husband and wife, not actually be husband and wife?!”

“I don’t have a problem with where you sleep Khushi, but I certainly don’t see why you have to sleep on the couch when there is a much more comfortable bed available.”

“So you want me to sleep on the bed? With you? Everyday?”

Arnav sighed. They had arrived at their building, where the valet was waiting for them to descend the car. “I don’t wantyou to do anything, I am just saying you can sleep on the bed… I had just assumed that you liked sleeping on the sofa all this time.”

Khushi racked her brain. All she could recollect was his cold glares from the early days of their marriage, which used to make her wish the earth would just open and swallow her up whole. What else was she supposed to assume of his stony silence? If he was okay with sharing the same bed, couldn’t he have just said so? 

A dim bell rang somewhere. He had said it. Not once, but twice. On the day after karva chauth, when they were hammering out the fine details of their deal, he said, quite clearly “the bed is not so bad to sleep on you know”. The second time had been in her dimly lit bedroom in the Gupta Manor, when he had said, “the bed is big enough for both of us”.

Could it really be that she had misunderstood his words on those two occasions and had wrongly assumed that she was unwelcome in his room?

Taking her silence as the end of their conversation, Arnav got down from the car and handed over the keys to the valet. She had no choice but to follow him to the elevators. 

“Why are you bringing this up now?” she asked quietly. 

“Because you brought it up.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you wanted to know how my family knows we are pretending with this marriage thing. And it’s because you sleep on the couch and not in the room with me.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question! How would they know-”

“Lata.”

It took Khushi a moment to process that. “What?”

“Lata worked for my mother for ten years before she started working for me, and that too on my mother’s insistence.”

Khushi was dumbfounded. By the time she found her voice, they were inside the apartment. 

“So you are telling me that Lata, your housekeeper, gives daily updates to your mother about what you and me are doing?”

“Well not daily, but more or less… yeah”

“And it didn’t occur to you, even once in the last four months, to mention this to me?!”

“What’s the big deal? I thought you knew why Lata was here every day-”

“The big deal,” she stressed, trying to reign in her frustration. “Is that I must look like the world’s biggest hypocrite, lying to your family about how happy we are when they all know that we don’t even sleep in the same room!”

Arnav sighed. “They don’t think you are the hypocrite.”

“They don’t?”

“No... they think I am.”

Khushi didn’t see that coming “What? Why-”

“Do we really have to do this now?” he interrupted, exasperated. “You have a shift at 6 a.m. tomorrow and I have to be at the airport by 7.”

“Why are you going to the airport? And yes, we are doing it now.”

“I am going to London for a week.”

“You are going to London?” she repeated blankly, seriously getting tired of receiving so many jolts in one night. “And you didn’t think it was important to tell me?”

“What’s there to tell? It’s just a yearly visit to our office. Papa is still too weak to travel, so naturally I have to go in his place.”

Khushi didn’t know how he could be so calm about the matter. Was he really oblivious to a simple code of conduct or was she being overly nosy? 

“Let me get this straight Arnav, you are going out of the country for a week and as your…” she broke off, words falling short. 

He looked at her expectantly. “Yes?”

Khushi clasped her hands, undecided on how to continue. She had meant to say wife, but she wasn’t that. So then if she wasn’t his spouse, what was she? A friend? Had they become friends? He definitely was to her. But was she to him?

“Okay,” she finally said in surrender. “As your roommate, next time you go somewhere, I have to be informed… preferably a few days beforehand and not seven hours before you board the plane. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

“So why does your family think you’re a hypocrite?”

He once again hesitated. 

“Arnav,” Khushi said, her shoulders falling in exhaustion. She didn’t have much energy left. “I am foreign to your family. I need to know about them so that I don’t make a stupid mistake and put our agreement in jeopardy.”

Arnav took a deep breath. “I don’t know the circumstances for which you agreed to our marriage… I’d guess that it wasn’t voluntary.”

“It wasn’t,” she agreed, not understanding what he was trying to say.

“Well… It was for me.”

Silence followed his words. 

“What?” she croaked, hoping that she had heard him wrong. 

“I had a choice in our marriage.”

“You chose to get married to me?” Khushi asked blankly. “Like consciously, with full understanding of what you were getting into?”

“Yes.”

Khushi felt as if she was seeing him for the first time, as if the man she had made peace with in the last one month was not the same one standing in front her. 

“So…” she said, trying desperately to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Why… why did you…”

Words failed her. 

But Arnav seemed to understand, for he nervously shuffled his feet before answering. 

“I don’t know…,” he admitted with honesty. “I just know that I could’ve said no if I really wanted to… but I didn’t. And by the time I realized it was wrong, that this wasn’t going to work out, it was too late.”

Khushi didn’t know what to make of that confession. All this time she had assumed that he was forced to be in this relationship just like her, that he too had an unreasonable father with unreasonable demands, and yet there he stood, telling her quite calmly that he chose to marry her, that he willingly decided to make her his wife and then subject her to all the misery in the world. Did he even realize what he was telling her?  

“But… but that day in the car,” she said, still in disbelief. “When you were dropping me at the hospital…you said this marriage was forced on both of us-”

“I had just meant that we were backed into an unfortunate situation-”

“Only because you changed your mind about me.”

His eyes were pleading with hers. “Don’t take it the wrong way,” he whispered. 

“Then what is the right way?”

“It doesn’t change anything-”

“If it helps you sleep better, then sure go ahead and believe that,” she replied, icily. 

Arnav simply looked at her, perhaps out of words to offer comfort. It was very rare for them to be on the opposite ends of a situation, and Khushi hated every bit of it, but she couldn’t just ignore it like him and pretend that everything was okay in the world. 

It was in his nature to ignore problems, but not in hers. 

“Your shift starts at 6 a.m. tomorrow,” he finally said. “You should get some sleep. I will drop you off on my way to the airport.”

“You don’t have to.”

He didn’t respond, watching her face with caution. Then turning away, he walked towards the bedroom, ready to call it a night. He stopped just at the door and said:

“I know you are upset, but if you are sleeping on the sofa because of me, then don’t. The bed is yours as much as mine.”

And with that he walked inside, making sure to leave the bedroom door wide open. But Khushi curled up on the sofa, wishing she could just un-hear everything she was told.

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