‘Was that why you ran away?’ he asked grimly.
‘You weren’t happy in our marriage,’ Meethi said, sadness colouring her voice.
She was pretending to have left out of concern for him. Accusing him of being the unhappy one in their marriage. Her duplicity fuelled his anger.
‘So, you are shifting the blame on to me now? You claim to have run away because I was unhappy, but if you really wanted to spare my feelings then why the charade of your death? Did you think I would be happy to hear that my wife had drowned?’ Veer replied.
‘I thought it would be better in the long run…’ Meethi said weakly.
‘Better for whom? You and that old man of yours?’ he said crushingly through bloodless lips. He had had enough of her lies and deception.
‘What old man?’ she asked with a look of incomprehension.
Meethi’s look served like a red rag to his anger. She was an actress beyond compare.
‘Stop acting the innocent! Did you think I wouldn’t come to know? You ran away because you didn’t want to stay married any more. You ran away to your teacher, didn’t you? I had always suspected you were infatuated with him and finally you decided to go to him!’ he said vehemently.
Meethi looked at him, stupefied. Did he really believe that she could have betrayed him with her guru?
As a child, Meethi had loved art and her work had caught the attention of Yogesh Hussein, a renowned artist who had begun tutoring her when she was ten. He’d claimed she had ‘unusual artistic talent’, and Meethi had revered him, looking up to him as another father figure. She was aghast and stunned at Veer’s insinuations.
‘I didn’t run off to be with him!’ she said tightly.
‘Why do you persist in lying? You ran from here straight to him. Didn’t you?’ Veer thundered.
His blood had boiled when the detective had reported that she had gone to Hussein’s house in Delhi and from there to his farmhouse, where she had stayed secretly for about three months before she had gone to Kolkata.
‘I went to him because there was no one else I could turn to,’ Meethi said heavily. Her baba had passed away and she had no other relatives she could go to.
Guruji had been shocked but supportive, and she had stayed with him for the first three months but Meethi had been terrified that Veer would trace her and so she had begged him to send her away somewhere else.
Veer felt as if she had slapped him. The unpalatable fact that his wife considered him ‘no one’ and had preferred to turn to another man and betray him stung his formidable pride.
‘So, even knowing that you had run away duplicitously, he abetted your perfidy? What sob story did you tell him? How did you justify your running away? Is this what he teaches his students? Or is it only you? Did he encourage you to run away?’ he said, words flying out of his mouth with ferocious precision.
‘He didn’t encourage me. In fact, he told me to talk to you but…’ Her voice tapered off.
Guruji had tried to convince her to talk to Veer and iron out their problems. He had even offered to talk to Veer himself but she had been so hysterical in her refusal that he had relented.
‘But you didn’t think my reputation was anything to care about. Family honour, propriety, decorum—all these are foreign words to you. They don’t matter to you at all,’ Veer thundered bitterly.
It had been difficult for him to accept that not only was Meethi alive but that she had meticulously planned her escape down to the smallest detail. She had wanted to leave him.
And she would have been successful at staying hidden if he hadn’t come across her painting at the exhibition.
His eyes grew cold and his face turned grim when he recalled how, a year after her supposed accident, he had gone to a painting exhibition organised by one of the charities he supported, featuring the works of Hussein.
As he’d walked around the exhibition one painting had made his blood run cold. He had stood, stunned, in front of the painting of a puppy sitting atop a car. The car was his Jaguar and the puppy was the one that Meethi had once dived to save as it had run in front of his car.
The painting didn’t bear any initials but he knew that no one apart from Meethi could have painted it. But when had she painted it? How could she have painted it? Questions had inundated his mind but a gut feeling bloomed inside him, filling him with the cold clarity that Meethi was alive.
When he’d asked the organisers about the painting they’d said that Hussein had donated the entire collection of paintings to the charity. He had immediately tried to contact Hussein but discovered, to his frustration, that the man was untraceable. He had visited his office, his house and even his farmhouse, but he seemed to have vanished.
The renowned artist had always exhibited a soft spot for Meethi and he had called Veer a couple of times after their wedding, trying to persuade him to send her abroad for her degree. Veer hadn’t liked the other man’s possessive tone when he’d spoken of Meethi and had kept putting off his request. He hadn’t mentioned anything to Meethi because she adored her guruji and blindly followed what he said. And Veer had always felt irritated and, though he didn’t admit it, slightly jealous.
And so, his suspicions thoroughly roused, Veer had hired the services of a private detective to trace Meethi.
As he’d waited for the detective’s report, questions had plagued him. Why had Meethi fooled him? Why had she feigned her death? What had she hoped to gain? Had it been a sign of her wilful immaturity? Or was there a deeper reason behind her disappearance? Was the reason connected to Hussein?
It took the detective more than a year to gather clues and put them together and then some more months to trace Meethi’s exact whereabouts. She had been in hiding for a full three years before the detective ferreted out her current address, a cottage in Santiniketan, near Kolkatta. And his report confirmed Veer’s worst fears. She had run off to Hussein.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Meethi protested.
‘Then what was the reason for this deception? And if Hussein was so concerned about you, why didn’t he come and talk to me? I tried to contact him and left innumerable messages at his house but he had disappeared!’
‘Why did you try to contact him?’ Meethi asked hesitantly. How had Veer discovered her deception? She knew that Guruji would not have contacted him because he knew how adamant she had been about not returning to Veer. But why hadn’t Guruji mentioned anything to her about Veer trying to contact him?
‘Because I saw your painting of the puppy,’ he said searingly.
So that was what led him to her. But how could he have seen the painting? It was with Guruji. After she went to live at his farmhouse, Guruji had compelled her to begin painting again. And, once she began, it had been the only thing that had kept her sane and afloat, saving her from drowning in a morass of despair. She had poured out her anguish on canvas and it had helped her achieve a sense of closure. But she had painted mostly abstracts or figures that in no way revealed her identity. The painting of the puppy was, in fact,
