Chapter 4: The Things We Say When We Are Not Saying Anything
Three days passed.
She did not hear from him.
This was fine.
This was expected.
This was, in fact, exactly what she had wanted when she drove away from the Malik house with the dupatta on the passenger seat and the white kameez revelation doing something she refused to name in the back of her mind.
Distance was sensible.
Distance was what two people did when they were not sure what they were doing and needed the clarity that only came from not standing in someone’s kitchen at 8:15 at night, learning why they became who they became.
She was very good at distance.
She had always been very good at distance.
On the second day, her colleague Sana asked her over lunch if she was alright.
Zara said she was fine.
Sana said she had asked the same question three times in a row to a patient and was looking at her phone between rounds, which was not something Zara did.
Zara said she was not looking at her phone.
She had been looking at her phone.
Not waiting for anything specific.
Just looking.
On the third day, she made a decision.
She was going to call her mother, have a calm and adult conversation, and explain that while the evening had been perfectly pleasant, she did not think this was going to go anywhere, and it would be kinder to everyone to say so now rather than later.
She picked up the phone.
She put it down.
She picked it up again.
Her mother answered on the second ring, which meant she had been holding the phone.
“I was going to call you,” her mother said.
“Ammi,” Zara said carefully.
“His mother called again,” her mother said.
Zara closed her eyes.
“She says Ahsan has asked for your number.”
The hospital corridor outside her office was its usual self.
Busy and loud and full of the particular urgent energy of a place where things mattered.
Zara watched a trolley move past her window.
“He has not asked me if he can give it,” her mother said, with the particular tone of a woman who had not become a mother of Zara without learning exactly when to say something and when to let silence do the work.
“He should have asked me first,” Zara said.
“Yes,” her mother said.
“That is the correct thing to do.”
“Yes,” her mother said again.
“Tell her yes,” Zara said.
She hung up before her mother could say anything that would make the situation worse by making it feel better.
He texted that evening.
Not a call.
A text.
Which told her something about him she had not expected.
That he understood the difference between a call, which required an answer in real time, and a text, which gave her the space to decide whether and how and when to respond.
The text said: I have been thinking about what you said. About your grandmother and the doctor.
That was all.
No, how are you?
No hope this is okay.
No elaborate preamble designed to make the message seem smaller than it was.
Just the thing he had been thinking.
Said directly.
She sat with it for longer than she should have.
Then she typed: Most people hear that story and say something kind about it. You are the first person who said it was a good reason.
She sent it before she could edit it into something safer.
His reply came four minutes later.
Most people hear things and respond to what they want the story to mean. You told me what it actually meant. That deserved an actual answer.
She read it twice.
Then a third time.
Then she put the phone face down on the table and went to make tea, which she did not particularly want because she needed something to do with her hands.
This was the problem with Ahsan Malik.
He said things that landed somewhere specific.
Not in the general vicinity of meaning.
Somewhere specific.
Like he had looked at the thing she said and found the exact centre of it.
She was a doctor.
She understood the anatomy of a conversation.
She knew when someone was listening and when someone was waiting.
He was listening.
She was not entirely sure what to do with a man who listened.
They texted for three hours that night.
Not continuously.
In the unhurried way of two people who have things to do and lives that exist independently of each other but who keep returning to the same conversation because it has something in it that other conversations do not.
He asked about her work, and she told him things she did not usually tell people, not the impressive things, the difficult ones, the patient she had lost in her second year of residency that she still thought about on certain kinds of quiet evenings.
She asked about London, and he told her about the first year, which had been the loneliness he had not expected from a city that loud, and the way he had walked everywhere because walking was the only thing that made a new place feel like it belonged to him.
By eleven, she was sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard and her tea cold on the nightstand.
His last message said: You should sleep. You have rounds at 8.
She stared at that.
She had mentioned rounds at 8 in passing two hours ago.
He had remembered.
She typed: How do you know I have not already cancelled them.
His reply: You have not cancelled them.
She smiled.
Not the polite smile of a sitting room.
Not the controlled smile her mother had counted from across the room.
The real one.
The one she gave to very few things and even fewer people.
She put the phone down.
She lay in the dark for a while.
She thought about the first evening and the grey dupatta and how certain she had been, sitting across from him in the Malik sitting room with her cold tea and her one-hour plan, that this was going to be nothing.
She thought about what nothing had become in nine days.
She did not know what to call it yet.
She was not sure she needed to.
She just knew that tomorrow she would wake up and go to the hospital and do her rounds, and somewhere in the middle of the day her phone would buzz and she would feel something she had not felt in a long time.
Something that sat quietly in the chest.
Something that did not announce itself.
Something that simply was.
She was asleep before she could decide whether that was wonderful or terrifying.
It was, of course, both.
End of Chapter 4
Chapter 5 is coming soon. Subscribe to 786 Web Stories so you do not miss the moment Zara starts noticing things about Ahsan she cannot unfeel.
Start from the beginning with Chapter 1 or catch up with Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.