Ravi and Abha had known each other for three years—they’d been seeing each other for the last two. They’d met at a book launch in Delhi. Her book launch. He had gone along with his then girlfriend, a reporter with a TV channel. Abha wore a blue Fabindia kurta and sat signing copies of her book, A Lost Childhood: Twelve Stories of Abuse, a stern expression on her face. In fact, it was the sternness that had appealed to Ravi, fresh with an MBA from an Australian university, and now working for a cosmetics company. Abha was intuitive, outspoken, always willing to lay into the Indian middle-class. The antipathy was crucial to her identity. On their first date she informed him that she liked to keep her nails short and neat. On the second, they fucked. ‘Please be gentle with me,’ she had said to him in a wailing voice, ‘I’m just a simple, small town girl.’

Opposites attract they say, but in this case it didn’t work out. Over the two years they had been living in, Abha had had blackouts, seizures, fainting fits, crying fits, panic attacks. She had disappeared from the house for days after a fight only to return home a week later, still hysterical but reasonably healthy. Ravi developed a bald patch and spent all his time arranging empty Red Riband halves in straight lines under the kitchen sink. He was sacked for reeking of alcohol at work. He became capricious, irritable, maudlin; he coughed, retched, threw up phlegm, walked the streets whispering into imaginary handsets.

This time when Abha disappeared after a fight, Ravi decided to disappear as well. He came to Dehra Dun and found himself a dormitory. It was a town he had been to school in, and where his mother still lived. One day, he called Abha in Delhi on a whim. To his surprise he got her. She was back in front of the TV, eating Haldiram’s Nutcrackers and watching Ekta Kapoor’s nasty soaps. She wanted to know where he was. Then she told him about a prize she had been recently awarded—she was off to Paris in a month’s time. Ravi mumbled his congratulations. Then, suddenly, Abha’s voice sounded distracted. ‘Abhishek Bachchan is on Koffee with Karan,’ Abha said, ‘let me just call you back.’

Ravi sat in his room pressing digits on his mobile phone. He didn’t like waiting. He tore a page out of a small pad and wrote a note to his mother. ‘Hi Ma. All is well. Been very busy working though I am thinking of changing jobs. Abha and I are also planning to have our first baby. We’ll both come to Dehra one of these weekends. Do take care, Ravi.’