There are moments when Anima is off guard and the memory of Siddharth sears her gut like a red-hot skewer. She has got off at Charni Road station and is in a cab that’s playing a tape of old film songs. Right now it is Mohammed Rafi’s song of lost love, ‘Din dhal jaaye haai . . .’ The days pass, the nights will not go. You do not come to me but your memory tortures me so. Anima wants to tell the driver to turn off the song but cannot. Rafi’s voice is deep and gruff with grief. He is not complaining. He is neither angry nor resentful. He is just pure pain and the acceptance of pain.

A whole gaggle of them saw Guide in the ramshackle Poonam cinema hall in Surgaon. Anima was fifteen and Siddharth seventeen. In the confusion of who was to sit where, they had found themselves next to each other. As the film unreeled, in the secrecy of the dark, Siddharth’s little finger had touched hers. Was it an accident? Her cheeks had burnt at the touch. A little later, his little finger had sought hers once again and, finding no resistance, had stayed, then tentatively hooked into hers. She had let it be. On the screen Dev Anand sat on the floor, leaning against a chair, abandoned, singing ‘Din dhal jaaye haai . . .’ about past times while Anima’s and Siddharth’s fingers were divining the possibilities of a future.

Anima wrenches herself away from her pain by listening to the song objectively. It speaks of only one kind of separation, but there are so many others—temporary and permanent, natural and man-made. Elaborate rituals have been evolved to help us endure the permanent separation of death. But there are no rituals to help us overcome the disappearance of a beloved father. Or to help us survive when a civilized divorce by mutual consent becomes painful fact.

Anima remembers Vaishali’s older sister Mridula. They were in a square room with yellow walls and grey file cabinets. The fans creaked high above them in drunken circles. Anima was there to give Mridula moral support. Mohan and Mridula sat next to each other, afraid to allow their eyes to meet. Mohan could not bear to see the sorrow on Mridula’s face. She still wanted him, but he wanted another. Mridula had decided to step out of his way with the generous thought that it was better for one to be unhappy than three. Mohan had found it difficult to accept her generosity. He hated being forced to feel guilty. He had tried very hard to blame her for what he was doing. But she had refused to take on the guilt he was trying to offload on her. Why talk of who was at fault and who wasn’t? He didn’t love her any more so she was offering him a divorce by mutual consent. Her self-respect had hurt him deeply.