Chapter 1 : The Painting
“Are you fond of M. F. Hussain paintings?” – popped up on Kunal’s phone.
He was just taking a quick lunch break, in between his patients when the message appeared out of nowhere from Smita, his batchmate from MDS, but that was just the superficial introduction to her in his life.
“We got one of his titles from the series Gaja Gamini’ Smita continued.
The question felt random, almost amusingly domestic for two people who once knew each other through the intensity of youth and heartbreak. He smiled as he sat with his packed lunch for the day, rice and paneer bhurji and some salad.
A lot of thoughts were crossing his mind when he and replied casually — “Honestly? Not aware enough to be fond. But of course, he’s legendary.”
She sent a photo of the painting placed centrally on a table from her house in Bangalore. The painter’s signature was on the bottom left of the painting. Faint yellow LED light shining on the painting from above. The table was neatly arranged with smaller pieces of décor — a reed diffuser, a doughnut-shaped flower vase with artificial flowers, a couple of candles, a key carelessly left beside them, and a remote, probably for the lights.
Somewhere in the back of his head Kunal had a faint picture of the rest of the house. A house Smita had shifted to a few months back with her husband and her less than a year-old daughter.
“I started reading about paintings and started understanding most of it during my post-partum break after delivering Sharanya last year. I bought this one 2 weeks ago from a gallery here in Bangalore.” she continued.
From there the conversation wandered naturally to how expensive the painting was and then, somewhere in between ordinary words, the past quietly entered the room.
“How are you?” she asked.
“I’m good… The usual,” he replied.
“And how’s your poetry? Being an orthodontist? And a lost but satisfied lover?”
He laughed when he read that line. It sounded exactly like her — observant, teasing, emotionally precise without trying too hard.
“Tough juggle indeed.”
For years they had spoken only in fragments. Birthday wishes. Replies to stories. Sometimes work, patients’ cases, referrals across cities… Small polite bridges stretched carefully over a history neither of them fully touched anymore. But today something had shifted. Maybe time had softened them. Maybe healing had. Or maybe enough life had happened that they no longer needed to defend themselves from the truth.
“The draft of the second part of my debut poetry book is lying around for months. But I’m unable to sit with it. Work, travel and stuff”
” You will figure it out. It’s tough but commendable. You need to be in that mind space too”
She shared a photo of her holding her daughter, “To be honest, motherhood and post-partum has been so so beautiful for me, that it’s changed me to be more giving, and for better. I just wanted to share this photo with you. It’s very personal but I feel you deserve to see it… Anyway, thanks for listening! “
Kunal stared at the photo for a while. Smita in a black tee, holding her daughter wearing a pink dress with white polka dots. She had her mother’s eyes and her nose and looked cute as a button…
“It is personal indeed,” he replied, courteously more than emotionally, somewhere still laughing at the fate of their story.
A story that had once consumed three years of their lives while they navigated the rough waters of postgraduate training, secret hotel rooms, shared playlists, academic exhaustion, and a love no one around them fully knew existed.
“I’m happy to see how beautifully you have blossomed into this role in life! And thanks for finding that space in me to share all this! “
“Thanks for always being that friend”
“I’m glad we have reached where we are today,” he eventually typed. “You and me.”
“Yes,” she replied instantly. “I was never doubtful of that. Because as two mature adults we had it in us despite our past. It was tough but not something I didn’t foresee when I got married.”
Kunal wrote: “Yeah, it took me a lot of time and effort to get over the relationship with you. But it also shaped me into the person I’m today in many ways… “
Smita replied “wouldn’t say it was any different for me”
“Really? Because somewhere a part of me thought you weren’t affected as much as I did and somewhere I had this silent grievance against you for a long time! ” Kunal typed with a pinch in his heart.
“That’s not true at all, I struggled a lot, but I chose to swallow it. Forgive me for making you angry! ” She said.
“I was never really angry. I was just too broken and too hurt and in a lot of pain! I hit my lowest low for years after years of thinking I had moved on from you! “
“I was hurt too. A lot of me was taken up by you! “
He stared at the screen longer than he should have. The clinic around him faded into background noise as old memories rose with uncomfortable clarity. There are some conversations you spend years avoiding because you know they carry the power to undo carefully constructed versions of the past. Conversations that threaten to reopen grief you have only recently learned to survive.
And before he could stop himself, the question he had carried silently for years slipped out almost
“Why did you let go?”
to be continued…
