It was the longest journey she had ever been on – from Bombay to London via two countries, followed by a short stopover where they decided that Abhimanyu’s body just could not take another plane journey, and so they boarded a ship to America. It took them three days to cross the Atlantic and reach New York City. The lovers would have surely noticed how majestic the Ocean Liner was if they hadn’t been so preoccupied with their circumstances. Meera barely noticed the electric energy of the Big Apple, the blinding lights of Times Square, the imposing eighteenth-century church spires rubbing shoulders with the twentieth-century skyscrapers. They didn’t see the enterprising street peddlers zipping through the streets, faster than the stalled cars, selling their wares. Some of these pushcarts would later become global behemoths with brands raking millions across the world.

To Meera, New York was to be contained within the two-mile stretch along Central Park, from the Pierre Hotel, where Ranjit Singh had booked her a room, to Mount Sinai Hospital. To her, New York in the summer of 1948 was about learning the names of a dozen corticosteroids, and the exact times each needed to be administered to Abhimanyu. Or figuring out the heavy New York drawls of the doctors and nurses attending to him, and buttressing the administrators to sneak in an extra hour beyond the allocated visiting time, and then rushing back to her hotel. It was about mastering the right pace in order to get through the busy revolving doors of the Pierre just to catch a few hours of restless sleep before returning to Abhimanyu to make sure she did not miss a single crucial minute with him. ‘It’s not even 6 a.m., Meera, don’t worry about me so much,’ Abhimanyu would chide her mildly. ‘Have you done your riyaz?’ That could wait, she would insist, staying beside him every waking minute, to humour, console and encourage him instead. She was optimistic on the outside and worried to death on the inside, uncertain whether the treatment was working. When the prince slept, Meera would look outside the window to take in the serene view of Central Park. Meditating almost, like Moses on the biblical Mount Sinai, she waited for a word or a sign from god – anything at all – about her lover’s future and her future, their future, together. Outside, life went on, and the lush green park began to change colour as autumn, or fall, as the Americans would say, set in.

*

Months of excruciatingly slow progress and setbacks went by and there was still no clear verdict on Abhimanyu’s condition. The surgeons would cut him up with plans to ameliorate his injury, only to find damaged nerve fibers deeper in that had to be attended to first. Meera’s dedication through the first two surgeries only aggravated Abhimanyu – in addition to his injury, he was weighed down by the cruel secret he had kept from her. He imagined telling Meera about Uday Singh’s demand a thousand times over in his mind, and he knew that there was no way to make those words sound better; no way to blunt the edges of his betrayal of the promises he’d made to her. In his drugged up state between surgeries, he would dream about Meera weeping, or flying into a rage, or worse, simply being indifferent when he would tell her that they could not have a future together. Each time he would wake up, he’d wish that Meera would act differently. But how should she have reacted? He had no answer to that question.