“Dad, do you really want to do this?” says Ram over the phone.
“Answer him. He cares for you, he’s our son!” says Meenu, as if she can hear him.
“Ram, you are worrying for no reason. I can do it,” I try to convince him. I am in shape and I have done this a hundred times, even once last year. It’s just like all those times.
I hear Meenu tapping her foot lightly on the carpet.
“No, it is not like all those times,” Ram shoots back.
I don’t fall for the bait of a long discussion. I simply restate my point. I will be fine.
After the call, I retire to the bedroom for a good night’s sleep.
“You have all your things ready for the morning, right?” asks Meenu.
On my desk by the computer in the living room, I have neatly arranged everything that’s needed at sunrise: the old Timex digital watch, a few packs of jelly beans, energy gels, and the subway pass.
“What about your good luck charm?” she says.
As if I have ever forgotten…
The next morning, in the third mile, I check my pace with the Timex; I am running at a steady ten minutes per mile.
“You are doing great,” says Meenu, my good luck charm. She’s running by my side in her sky-blue shorts and grey tank top. The early morning sun shines on her dark hair through the gaps in the tree cover along Riverway Avenue.
I hear her pounding the road in her New Balance shoes. I gave them to her last March on the occasion of our fiftieth wedding anniversary.
This is a city that has always cherished its runs, come rain, snow, or shine. Days such as this are luxuries that make the New England cold seem tolerable.
“The weather couldn’t be better,” Meenu’s all smiles as she paces along the curve in the road.
Yes, I agree.
“Run, people, run!” shouts a small boy, cheering from the sidewalk. The red turtleneck sweater on him has the “Go Sox” slogan. A tall man lifts him up in one motion and seats him on top of his shoulders.
“Faster, you old man, faster,” the boy shouts further in full gusto.
People around laugh at his innocent chant directed at me. Some runners behind me shout back, booing at him.
“What a lovely boy!” says Meenu. “And the way he loves sitting tall.”
I know what she means.
Ram had been just like that boy; he loved being seated on top of anyone with a pair of shoulders.
The first time we had visited my parents in Bombay after Ram was born, he was already six. Everyone in my parents’ apartment complex – the watchman, the neighbors, and the laborers working on an adjacent construction site – were victims of his chubby smile and his tiny wish to be perched on top of their shoulders.
“Young man, you will not get away with this,” Meenu would chide Ram, afraid that he would get used to the pampering. Much to her displeasure, my father would tour the streets of the busy Zhaveri Bazaar with Ram on his shoulders. He would buy him kulfi ice creams and cotton candy, telling the amused vendors, “Bhai, this is my grandson, coming all the way from Am-ree-ka.” Chewing on the candy, Ram would survey the bald landscape on my father’s oval head, tapping it occasionally as if he was practicing a new rhythm on a percussion instrument.
“You are running out of sync,” Meenu says, pointing out an aberration in my usual running rhythm. I quickly correct it, breathing in sync with my footsteps.
Inhale One Two. Exhale Three Four.
How well she notices every single detail! Meet my wife, an expert on running technique, my running partner, my life. See the poise rooted in years of hardcore workouts!
It was not until I had finished grad school and taken up an academic position that Meenu started feeling bored sitting idle at home. It was the first year of our marriage, the first year of her stay in Boston. In the evenings when I left for running, she’d said she felt alone. “Ma says I should shadow you all the time,” she said one evening while we ate spicy lentil soup and yogurt rice over dinner. She would call her home in Bangalore every Sunday and talk with everyone in her family. Whenever I answered the calls from Bangalore, my mother-in-law would politely ask casual things about life in Boston. Has it snowed already? Does Meenu cope well? Should we send you more mango pickle?
As I washed my hands after dinner, Meenu stood by my side. “I used to run in my high school,” she had said. I wondered why I hadn’t known about her running experience. I had taken her to the Cambridge Galleria Mall that weekend and bought her the running gear that she needed to brace herself against the winter.
For our first run together, we tried the length of the Longfellow Bridge. A local train had blazed past us across the Charles River. “I think we should do this more often,” she said, panting for breath when we reached Boylston Street. There, as I drew her into my sweaty arms, I knew I had found the good luck charm of my life.
Meenu soon read about running from books that she had borrowed from the Boston Public Library. She narrated snippets of the recently published studies on running. “We should try a walk-run,” she said one day after reading an article by Jeff Galloway. This running coach from the South suggested walking for two-minute intervals every now and then in a long run.
Some days she talked about running philosophy, curling her tresses. An article in the Boston Globe said your life unfolds in front of your eyes when you subject yourself to extreme pain in exercises such as running. Those were the days when long-distance running caught the attention of physiologists and psychologists alike. Unlike the case of the long walk, someone had said there comes a moment of truth in the long run.
“A moment of truth eventually, you see,” Meenu added, intriguing me with her word play.
A short while after the rotary past Franklin Park, a huge electronic display tells us seven miles have been covered so far in today’s long run.
“Haven’t we come a long way since our first seven steps together?" Meenu asks. I sense a tone of casual disbelief, but that hardly sustains my attention.
I see Meenu and me circling a pile of burning wood seven times. The wood flames high, causing a lot of smoke. The Hindu priests at our wedding chant in Sanskrit, “Mangalyam tantunaanena mamajeevana hetuna, Kanthe badhnami Subhage sanjeeva sharadah shatam.” I translate the incantation, while tying a sacred thread around her neck.
For my long life, I tie this thread, O auspicious one, may we live a happy life of 100 years.
Meenu looks burdened by the weight of the nine-yard silk sari that her mother had bought from Kanchipuram. My bride tries hard to stifle her yawns half-way through the elaborate Vedic rituals of the wedding. She makes a fan out of the loose end of her sari to get some air. The smoke from the fire clouds her eyes. In the moment that she rubs her eyes to clear the smoke, my beautiful bride forces a weak smile at me.
Meenu looks just as beautiful even now as I see her on Arborway Avenue from the corner of my eye, struggling to catch up with her pace. I feel my knees hurting badly, my feet almost crumbling from repeatedly pounding the hard road surface. But still, I can’t miss noticing an air of grace about her that defies age.
Is this my Meenu? I wonder.
I woke up this morning at 5:00 am when the alarm clock had unwound itself in a shrill pitch. I ate a quarter of a banana an hour before the race. In the closet, Meenu’s running shorts and tank top were neatly folded. I buried my face into them for a long time. They did not smell like they had before. I felt the fabric of the tank top; it felt different from that of her silk saris. Her New Balance shoes lay on the carpet by her side of the bed, looking ready for a run.
A group of students in Harvard sweatshirts had been on the T in our ride from Park Station to Fenway Park. Some of them sipped coffee from Starbucks mugs, discussing strategies for running the Early Fall Boston Half-Marathon. The race was scheduled to start at 8.00 am on the north side of Roberto Clemente Field Park where Park Drive curved long.
“You are running today, Sir?” asked a young man, for which I nodded a yes.
“My Yasso runs averaged at 3 minutes,” said another to his neighbor.
Meenu turned to me. “Three minutes for a Yasso run means three hours for a marathon. So he will finish today somewhere around one and a half hour.”
Good for him.
Meenu had included the Yasso workout in our running plans, since that was a close indicator of race day performance. “Simple. Say you run five sets of a 800-meter run; find the average number of minutes you run per set. That number is pretty close to the number of hours you will run a marathon,” Meenu had explained to me one evening while she fried gulab jamuns in sugar syrup, reading from recipes her mother had sent her from Bangalore.
My current Yasso runs average at 4:30 minutes, which means I can run a marathon in 4:30 hours, and today’s half-marathon in 2:15 hours. These times are much slower than my peak performances in the past. My best timing for a marathon was 3:05 hours in New York ’71. Over 24 years, my running average per mile has been at 8:50 minutes, with a standard deviation bounded at half a minute.
You rarely find a runner who is not particular about the numbers. Add to that the fact that I am a hardcore statistician; I have always been obsessed with them.
Each week after an assortment of planned workouts (hills, Yassos, intervals, fartleks, long runs, easy runs), Meenu entered our times, mileage, and pace in a ruled logbook. She carefully piled a series of logbooks on the floor by her desk in the living room. She never held a day-job, collecting the running data was her passion. I would sometimes go over the logbooks, seeing for trends, areas we could improve on, projections and such, and she would be keen to latch on to any insights I would present.
We have run in road races over a thousand times now. Sometimes we ran together all the way. Sometimes, like during last fall, I joined her in the last mile of a 10,000 meter-race so that she could just keep up with me and complete the gruelling run. Most often, running was a bridge for us to social life, our source of sharing - like when we ran for a charity, sometimes with families of my academic colleagues or students in my research group. Sometimes we ran with running buddies Meenu knew from local cross country clubs.
Sometimes we simply went on a Jeff Galloway walk-run around the river. During the two-minute walks, we held hands.
I slow down my pace and walk to the drink station at the eighth mile. I feel twinges and aches all over my knees and elbows. I sip Gatorade and water paper cups handed out by the young volunteers. Meenu is pacing a few yards ahead of me; her pace not a bit like one that needs any respite.
I had latched on to running right from my college days in Calcutta, where I had been a young recruit in the local athletics charter. One season when the inter-collegiate competitions got postponed due to impending degree examinations, my father called me home for the New Year. Instead of Bombay, he wanted me to catch a train to Bangalore. I assumed there must be some festivity planned there. I paid my respects, touching his feet, when he received me at the Bangalore station. I was pleasantly surprised when he casually mentioned the plan for the day. I was going to see a girl, seeking her hand in marriage.
“Meenakshi, can you sing a song for us?” my mother asks the seventeen-year-old girl who appears overly shy, overly quiet. Meenu has not looked at me even once during the fifteen minutes I have been sitting there. On the charpoy in front of me, I see a vase of red roses that smell fresh. A headline on the front page of The Times of India newspaper placed by the vase reads “US President Eisenhower’s Po” – I can’t see the rest of the headline thanks to a steel tumbler of steaming filtered coffee placed there on the newspaper. The coffee seems hot and I am thinking whether or not to drink it; I do not want to spill even a drop of it over my new Nehru jacket. The silence of this setting marks most of the memory of the first time I saw her.
Meenu dispels the silence and my fears the very moment she engages in a sweet rendition of a popular classical song on Lord Rama, a Hindu God famous for his flawless character. The raaga used in the song is catchy and I try hard to pinpoint its name. It has been used in a recent movie song too. “Kadana Kuthoohalam,” Meenu says, looking in my direction. She has charmingly large eyes, befitting her name, Meenakshi - the one with fish-like eyes. The raaga Kadana Kuthoohalam literally means the eagerness to move; I know that much. The clarity of Meenu’s diction impresses my mother, who approves the alliance instantly.
An eagerness to move propels me now up the small hill beyond Jamaica Pond, at the end of the eighth mile of our long run. A grey feather spins in the breeze from Olmstead Park and falls on Meenu’s face. She picks it up and blows it into the breeze, as gently as it came her way.
The little of the banana I ate in the morning now seems hardly enough. I feel dried up even as I chew on a jelly bean every mile and suck on the energy gels every other. A sharp pain radiates from my left shoulder and I wonder if the rest of the race is within my capacity. Meenu is still pacing ahead at ease. Breaking into a series of butt-kicks with my heels, I stretch out in short leaps just to keep up with her.
Ram is our only child. We had named him after Lord Rama, the one with a flawless character. The chubby toddler turned into a teenager and then a father in a matter of years that now seem like seconds. Ram took up academia like me and kept himself busy between his work and Tara, our granddaughter who is now a senior at Wellesley. Though a part of me wants him to be here with me, I wonder if he would take the trouble of coming all the way to this corner of Boston. He seemed unduly worried about me yesterday.
Hoards of runners had thronged at the start line this morning to run the Boston Half-Marathon. The asphalt on Park Drive shook with a hellish fury the instant the opening gunshot was fired. There were dull thuds, loud thuds, short strides, long strides, brisk walks, slow walks, bent knees, straight knees, sturdy legs, daddy long legs. There were easy paces, race paces, and my pace.
There were hoards of runners. Some seemed mentally prepared. Some did not. There were can I do it? runners, bring it on, I say! runners, I have nothing to prove runners, runners feeling lonely, runners feeling lonely in their groups, runners who smiled in pain, or just bore it silently like a cross, runners who relived their lives in the stretch of the course, runners who just ran plain blank, runners who complained their husbands drank too much coffee, or their wives took over the remote.
There were elite runners, runners on wheels, runners with metal inserts in their hips and hamstrings, runners who’d slept well the previous night, others who’d rolled over on their beds restlessly, runners who’d trained for months in the summer and before, runners who ran just for the heck of it, runners who would persist till the end, runners who would give up, later crying why me? into the dark, and runners who waved their hands like movie stars at Bostonians on the sidewalks – the Bostonians that cheered for their gladiators on the 13.1 mile arena.
In the ninth mile, a man running a few yards ahead of us in a Dana Farber Cancer Foundation suit slows down like he can’t take it anymore. He stops running and manages a loud cheer for a teenager blasting ahead.
“Frieda, that’s my girl, run baby!”
My conscience is jolted, like I am in an earthquake.
It’s been years since I heard someone say that name.
When I sat alone at home, or when Meenu silently folded clothes from the dryer, it haunted me. I still remember the smell of the clothes, the fabric softener that felt like fresh rain.
It all happened because of a mid-life crisis, I had told myself. But some part of me
never seemed to be convinced.
“What’s on your mind?” Meenu would ask, and I would not answer, silently flipping the pages of a book I had with me just in case.
You make stupid mistakes in your life. You move on. You have an eagerness to move ahead. Some of the mistakes slip out through the crevices of your faltering memory, lucky you.
But some get stuck like a gecko on a rough wall.
It all happened thirty years back, when Ram left for Stanford. My career went smoothly. No challenges surfaced. Meenu got more serious about the running, with nothing else in her focus; our child was settled well with course work.
There was this structure Meenu brought to everything she laid her hands on, be it the ruled logbooks, her timed runs, or her house-keeping. There was nothing that could stray from the expected path, the running plan that she developed after years of training.
“You are missing on the mileage,” she would say, setting goals for my running.
But the goals were always the same. There was nothing new. You ran around the same frozen river each time, the river melted later, and you ran again. With the same woman by your side. The same woman that you saw every waking moment of your life.
No frills. No thrills.
What was I missing?
Actually, I wasn’t missing anything at all.
But then I hadn’t known.
In late June of ’76, when India had entered its second year of emergency rule under Indira Gandhi, a lure of freshness entered my life in the form of Frieda. I was on a sabbatical for two summers, working as an adjunct research scholar in a university in Germany. Frieda was a doctoral fellow there, assisting me in teaching short courses for summer credit.
I can’t recollect what exactly Frieda and I talked about over the two years I had known her. Or if she gave me some peace or joy that her name stood for. I can’t recollect if it’s her youth or the passion we shared for the world of numbers that made her constant company so refreshing for me. I can’t recollect the number of times we had sex, or what sustained us for that long.
“How is everything?” Meenu had asked me over the phone one evening. She called my apartment at the university residential quarters.
Frieda was with me at that very moment in my arms. She had come over to set a final and one thing had led to another.
“Ram needs some money. Don’t worry, it’s all taken care of, I guessed you were busy. So I sent it myself...,” Meenu continued while I quickly held a finger on my lips, hushing Frieda.
“What are you thinking so much about? What’s on your mind?” Meenu asked, ending a silence that still rings in my ears. “You seem to be busy. I will call you on Saturday,” she said before ending the call. I imagined she was sitting at her desk in the living room of our home in Boston, tapping her foot lightly on the carpet.
Sleep over it, Frieda had constantly said. It was just a no-strings-attached fling for her.
But the silence that had cast its spell shortly afterwards saw her leave without uttering a word, unsettled by the guilt that my eyes must have betrayed.
I never saw her again.
That silence still rings in my ears.
“Fenway to your right. You guys looking great,” shouts a lanky state trooper in a sing-song fashion that wakes me up to the three-mile remainder of the race.
“O boy, the eagerness to move. To move on,” remarks Meenu.
During one Thanksgiving weekend, Meenu had clung to that thought like life. We were watching televised recordings of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, when I picked up a call from Ram. He said he was getting a divorce from his wife. I did not know how to react. I did not know what could have gone horribly wrong between him and my daughter-in-law whom he had himself chosen and deeply loved at one point.
“I am fighting for parental rights. My lawyer says the case tilts strongly in my favor. I will get to keep Tara till she’s 18. Don’t tell Tara anything about this,” Ram said. Tara, our five-year-old granddaughter, was oblivious to the drama that would gradually unveil itself in the years to come; at that time, she was just enjoying her vacation at our place.
Meenu said she hadn’t seen this coming for Ram. Divorce was unknown to our households, in either of the lineages, hers or mine. “How did he sound over the phone? Is he okay.. ? What will happen to Tara? How can she not see her mother at all?” Her questions stacked up.
A day later, Ram came by. He bared the facts for us, the legalities and such. He seemed to be in his usual sunny self, with no pain or hurt showing. I knew it was not the right time to probe into what had gone horribly wrong. I just wanted him to know we were there for him.
“If only I had got you married to that fine girl from Kanchipuram,” Meenu lamented. “What’s wrong with arranged marriages, anyway? Do they lack in love?” She spoke in a hesitant tone.
“What baloney! Who are you fooling? What love exists here?” our son said, raising his
voice – something the flawless Lord Rama had never done to his parents.
He was attacking us with words we had never taught him.
“You don’t even put up a charade to show your marriage works. I sometimes think you grudgingly suffer under this roof like you are bound by some shackles. You call them life-long vows. My foot! For the last seven years since I returned from Stanford, you haven’t even run together – the only one thing I remember you guys enjoyed doing as a couple. At least I made a decision to stop the charade in my life. No more of these life-long vows and woes for me.”
We listened to him quietly and didn’t answer him back. Meenu stared at the piles of running logbooks on the floor of the living room. I felt the hurt in her eyes.
The lack of any reaction from us bugged Ram for a while. His once-chubby face gradually took on a shade of regret of someone who thought he had spoken a little too much.
But by the end of the Thanks-giving holiday, he appeared like a man lost in love, defeated and depressed.
No life in his eyes, none at all.
After a lot of effort, we made him get his act together. I drove with him and Tara to Providence, helped them move into a duplex close to Brown. I offered him the money he needed.
A disgusting stench from my armpits brings me back to the half-marathon. The stench drives me out of my mind, making me almost puke. I can’t see any milestones near by. The running gets on my nerves. My clothes chafe madly the skin on my thighs and chest. A couple of nasty blisters mushroom on my left thigh.
The pain doesn’t stop my train of memories. That evening when I had gone back home from Ram’s new house in Providence, Meenu was sitting at her desk in the living room.
“That wretch, how could she leave him for another man? Look at what she has brought on us.. He looked so pale, my Ram,” she said, cupping her mouth with her right palm. “He is just a child, he doesn’t know what he’s getting into. What will happen when the little girl grows up, finds her way, and moves out? Can he live all alone.. ? Silly, he talks about our running. We can’t run all the time; I know you opted out of it. People’s interests change over the years. Can’t he see we still have each other, through thick and thin?”
I looked into her moist eyes, registering her take on our marriage. “We have to move
on. We have to be there for him,” Meenu said. “But tell me, was there one instance when we suffered because of our wedding vows? Don’t we always understand and trust each other?"
A cold shiver trickled down my spine. The hangover from Germany haunted me all the more.
Meenu then turned on the cassette player for a renowned singer’s soft rendition of the Kadana Kuthoohalam. When the tape ran over, neither of us flipped the cassette to the other side. As she tapped her foot lightly on the floor, I flipped through the pages of a run logbook I had in hand.
I just hoped she wasn’t looking in my direction, at my face that convulsed in shame
and guilt like silly-putty.
The next day the sun shone bright. I told her, “Maybe we should try one of those Jeff Galloway walk-runs.” Which we did, in silence, around the river. When we stopped to walk the two minutes, we held hands. The river seemed calm and forgiving.
“Here we go, only a mile left,” says Meenu, racing ahead of me into the last fragment of the Boston Half-Marathon. I feel a blister on my left thigh pop open, oozing out pus onto my sweaty skin. At least a fifty yards ahead of me, Meenu runs at a steady pace and seems elusively beyond my reach.
In the loneliness of dark nights, I would bury my face for a long time in her silk saris, and her shorts and tank top. They would not smell like fresh rain. By Meenu’s desk, the piles of running logbooks would look neatly arranged. I would make myself some gulab jamuns referring to the recipes her mother had sent from Bangalore. But I wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t feel like it. I would just sit at my desk silently in the living room flipping the pages of random books.
With only a mile left in the half-marathon, I slowly move on. Near the drink station at the twelfth mile, the pain in my left shoulder flares up in full intensity. It feels like the shoulder can fall off its socket any time. I almost choke in the pain. Two vigilant volunteers rush forward and pour cans of ice-cold water over my shoulder. The pain temporarily subsides. Now my legs feel like wooden logs. Heavy to carry, heavy to move. A sharp pain radiates in my lower back, like someone riddled countless bullets into it. I strap an ice-pack onto my shoulder and suck on to energy gels. I start jogging lightly and try to build on my pace to catch up with Meenu. I feel my pulse raising high and my heart hanging on the verge of an explosion.
“Meenu, I have to... Tell you... Something,” I blurt out in broken words and heavy breaths when I get close to her.
I blurt out everything in an impulse.
For an instant, it feels like a weight has been released from my shoulders. A weight that has always pulled me down, making me feel miserable for ages.
My outburst has put the bouts of denial and indecision to rest. I have been utterly selfish. How would she able to take this?
I feel only worse, I feel the weight crushing me closer, inch by inch, to the ground.
Meenakshi doesn’t react to what I say. She doesn’t turn to look at me. She silently leaps ahead, forcing herself into long strides. She follows the long curve of the Park Drive and soon fades away from the range of my vision.
A sense of numbness prevails over me. I just run. I can’t think of anything.
A group of young women in BU and Amnesty International T-shirts strike a bronze bell on the sidewalk. “Save Darfur, stop the genocide,” they screech at the top of their voices, forwarding their noble agenda.
Their screeching returns me to the moment; a sudden wave of panic overwhelms me. I dread I am close to hitting the wall, the ultimate tragedy of any long-distance running. You can’t run, can’t walk, can’t sit, can’t stand. Your muscles completely succumb to the fatigue. The forces of nature make you limbless. Make you feel buried alive in hard cement from head to toe.
As the finish line comes closer, my run assumes a snail-pace. It is anti-climactic at best. I feel like quitting and calling it a medical emergency. I don’t find a portable toilet around. I feel my bladder can’t hold it anymore, it could burst anytime. My left shoulder erupts back into wrenching pain, the ice-pack not helping. It feels like someone ripped open the socket joint in my shoulder with a crowbar.
Thrust into the extremes of pain, I now see images of Meenu in the nine-yard sari, Meenu calling me in Germany, and Meenu running with me in her sky-blue shorts and grey tank top, a light smile escaping her lips. I see Ram playing on my father’s bald head. I see myself seated in front of a seventeen- year-old Meenu and sipping filtered coffee. I see images of our runs, the ways we moved on. The storms we sailed through. Or at least tried.
All in the long run of our life.
I see the places we left, the people we missed.
I see the mistakes I made and the hurts I caused.
I see a gecko regaining its grip on a rough wall..
When, finally, I cross the finish line, I feel no elation, no pride.
The dignity of the pain humbles me. A spell of silence deafens for me the cheer from the crowds.
I even don’t care about my run time. For once in my life, I am not particular about the numbers anymore.
I see two familiar silhouettes approaching me from a parking lot on Brookline Avenue.
“The traffic on I-90 was a mess; we should have come here earlier,” Ram says in a sorry tone. He drove all the way from Providence to see me. So you did it, his eyes seem to say. He bends forward to touch my feet, bowing his oval balding head that resembles my father’s. I stop him midway giving him a bear hug.
“Look who came along to worship you,” he says, pointing at my grand-daughter.
Tara looks up to me, into my bloodshot eyes, and says, “I love you, Grandpa. Grandma would have been really proud of you today.” I nod understandingly and break down into sobs.
Meenakshi had died silently in the night on a Friday last year, a week after our fiftieth wedding anniversary. They said she suffered a fatal cardiac arrest in her sleep. The next morning, only I woke up. I found the running logbooks neatly piled by her desk in the living room. Her silk saris, and her running shorts and tank top were neatly folded in her closet. The fabric of the tank top felt different from that of the silk saris. They all smelled of fresh rain like when she had folded them from the dryer. In the bedroom, I found her New Balance running shoes on the carpet on her side of the bed. Her clothes do not smell like fresh rain anymore. Sometimes, I find it hard to recall that smell. Her New Balance running shoes still lie in the bedroom and look ready for a run.
It’s been six months since her death.
She had died before I could tell her. Before I could decide between easing my pain versus hers.
In the evening, as Ram and Tara head back to Providence, Meenu resurfaces from my memory, sitting at her desk in the living room. She reflects the same age-defying grace that I had noticed this morning while she ran the half-marathon by my side. I only hope my memory of her doesn’t fade away with time.
She doesn’t remind me she is my lucky charm. Neither does she advise me about running or other things. She doesn’t say anything.
I try to look her in the eye. But I just can’t.
I make myself some gulab jamuns referring to the recipes her mother had sent from Bangalore. Like I have always done when feeling lonely in these six months since her death.
But, I don’t eat. Don’t feel like it.
I sit at my desk by the computer in the living room, with an ice pack strapped onto my left shoulder. As she taps her foot lightly on the carpet, I silently flip the pages of a random book.
I wish I knew if she would forgive me some day.
I know my Meenu would.
***************** T H E ***** E N D *****************
