Breath caught in my throat as I heard that. I could not keep my eyes fixed on the table and looked up at him. His pain and distress was plain to see.

“I don’t know if she was right. I never ordered the DNA test. I didn’t ask for divorce again. But the confrontation freed her from any need to even pretend. Everyone soon knew me for a cuckold. You have not known this high society, Sarah. You have no idea how vitriolic it could be. I had given up on my happiness. But I was worried about Anaya. It would affect her as she grew up. Then one day, about a year back, a solution presented itself. Sunita left of her own accord. Just a note that she was leaving and that I should not look for her. You can’t imagine my relief at that. I had no intention of looking for her. I just let her parents know so that I would not get into trouble, wrapped up my life at Bangalore, bought this plantation and settled down here. Ananya was not used to her mother being around anyway. She didn’t ask about her for long. I was no longer thinking about divorce, marring again or any of it. I just let things be. Anaya’s welfare was still at the top of my mind and that’s why I wanted someone… You know the rest of it.

“I was mad in love, Sarah. I should never have kept all of this from you. I would have needed to wait a year or two before I could apply for divorce on the grounds of desertion.

“No!” I snapped, in as loud a voice, as my starved body allowed.

“Sarah, please! I know you think divorce is a sin. But… But can’t you see the situation? Do I have no right to be happy? Must the villains win and innocent suffer to prove their faith?”

“I need to eat and sleep,” Tortured though he was, he did not insist on carrying on the conversation when he heard that. He ran to the kitchen himself, and brought back some rice and vegetables, hastily arranged on a plate.  Eating was difficult. I alternately felt like crying and throwing up. But I kept at it. I was going to need my strength for what I must do next. It won’t do to make decisions with a hungry body and feverish mind.

He escorted me back to my room. “Sleep well and don’t worry about anything, Sarah. Please give me one more chance and I promise I will set it all right. If you want to stay elsewhere until then, I promise I will arrange for that. I…”

“You need to sleep as well. Please go back to your room and don’t wait for me here. Please?”

“Whatever you say.”

He wanted to kiss me, but I turned away before he could act. I knew what an exercise in self-control it must have been for him to not grab me, pull me to him and attack my lips. But he exercised that control.  As I turned to close the door, I took one long look at him. It would stay imprinted in my heart forever.

—

I was angry at him, mad angry. He knew what principles I abided by. He knew them very well; he had made me to say them out loud several times with his annoying, pushy ways. Then he deliberately deceived me, never letting on how marrying him would make me a sinner in God’s and my own eyes.

But try as I might my anger did not result in loathing. My love, and now even pity – because he had suffered and no one could deny that – were the triumphant emotions. Staying on was easy to justify. Must the villains win and innocent suffer, he had asked in that forceful, convincing manner of his.

But I had to go away. If the notions of right and wrong were mutable to suit our personal situations, their entire point was gone.  To be good, we had to do the right thing even when it was most painful for us.  To keep revising the definitions of right and wrong for the sake of our comforts was a manifestation of our weakness, our aversion to the sufferings we must accept.

I would have liked to make him understand this before leaving. But I knew my limitations. I wasn’t going to succeed with him in an argument that would challenge his passion. So, painful as it was to me, even more painful as it would be to him when he found out, I must slip away before dawn, before he could do anything to make me stay. He will be devastated, but he must seek his peace with God. There were wrongs that we mere humans could not set right. We neither had the right, nor the ability to do so.

—

Protim

I had not had a wink of sleep, but I stayed in my room until dawn, to honor her wishes. I wished she would fight with me, admonish me for leading her astray, even claim to hate me. Any of that would have been better than the ominous silence she had treated me with. Any of that would be revealed a little bit more about what was going on in her head than artificially composed demeanor. It didn’t help that her yes showed nothing but love and pity. And yet, she seemed to have built this impregnable wall around her.

At the first sign of morning light, I camped up at her door again. All was still. She must have been exhausted. I decided to let her sleep as long as she needed to. I paced up and down the corridor near her door, driving myself insane by trying to practice all possible ways in which I would ask for her forgiveness and beg her to give me a chance to set this right.

“Daddy!” Ananya appearing there brought me out of my trance.

“Annie! What happened?”

“Aren’t you and Sarah Auntie coming for breakfast?”

“What time is it?” I suddenly looked around and realized the sun was well up in the sky. I must have been pacing for three or four hours.

“I am hungry.”

“Ask Kaveri Auntie to feed you, Annie. I will be eat a little later.”

“Where is Sarah Auntie?”

“Sleeping. Why?”

“She doesn’t sleep in this late.”

“She was tired, Annie. You have your breakfast now. Go.”

But I was as alarmed as Annie on realizing just how late it was. After Annie disappeared out of my sight, I gently pushed the door. It was unlocked. Sarah often left it unlocked, so that part didn’t really worry me. However, as soon as I entered the room, I could see that the bed was not slept in. The bathroom door was ajar and there was no one in there. I threw open her cupboard. All her clothes – no – everything I had ever bought her was lying there. But not the dresses she had come here with. I took a desperate look around the room.

She was gone!