knew how loud the words would sound in his ears.
Each word was a scream. He didn’t answer.
It’s the only thing I’ve felt, really felt, since the shooting.
He couldn’t say those words. Feeling out of control had scared him even more than the panic attack. The empty space in place of feelings was the most terrifying thing he’d ever experienced.
He was feeling things now. Here.
Feeling so much that it was like his emotions were actors hamming it up, auditioning for India’s attention.
“When did you feel like you had reappeared? When did those symptoms alleviate, the elevated heartbeat, the inability to move?” Her soup was boiling and she turned down the flame and put a lid on it.
“Only when Rico went out to announce that I wouldn’t be speaking.”
She didn’t respond. He really needed her to respond.
This felt strangely intimate, the kitchen filled with the scent of spices, the faint gurgling of boiling soup. He rifled through the basket of peapods, but they were all shelled.
India’s gaze lingered on his fingers digging at empty peapods. She knew there was more. She waited for him to find the courage to say it. He couldn’t.
“Is there anything else you need help with?” he asked, when he really wanted to ask if she let all her clients into her kitchen like this.
“Have you ever done pranayama?” she asked in the quietest voice, as though he’d spoken the turmoil he was feeling, as though she needed to ease him of it. “It’s yogic breathing.”
“I know what pranayama is.” Snapping the words made everything worse, so he evened out his tone. “Our grandmother does it every day. When I was young and visited her in Sripore, she’d make us kids sit down with her and do it every morning. After she moved here, we joined her for it on weekends.”
“Do you mind sitting down for some breathing with me?”
It was such an absurd question, made even more so by the formality of her tone and the fact that they had just shelled peas together, that he almost smiled. “Now?”
She almost smiled back. “I promise it’s nothing too woo-woo.”
“But it is a little woo-woo?”
“Just a little.” She went to the living area adjoining the kitchen and unrolled a couple of yoga mats stacked up in a corner.
She sat down on one and he sank down across from her on the other.
The artistic line of her spine made her look like she was floating. The way she held herself was a thing of beauty, everything about her was graceful, almost poetic.
Don’t think the next part.
He thought the next part. This was how she’d been even ten years younger. Completely in possession of herself. Her movements, her body, the way she treated you, there was a cohesiveness to her. Not a hint of the dissonance he saw in the world around him.
Sitting by her, Yash felt stiff and clunky. A legal brief next to a haiku.
She shifted until she was facing him. It was impossible not to be drawn into the circle of peace that emanated from her as she folded her hands together in her lap, one over the other as though she were hiding something precious between her palms.
“I want you to close your eyes.” She closed her own. Her spare but long lashes spiked up in all directions when they pressed against her smooth high cheeks. As soon as it was gone from sight he missed the warm brown of her eyes.
Something about the trust that let her sit there with her eyes closed was exactly what he needed to be able to let his own eyelids drop shut. “Okay.” Then he couldn’t help but open them again to make sure she didn’t open hers now that he’d admitted to closing his.
She didn’t. Her face was a lake of calm, not a line marring her soft forehead. He closed his eyes again.
“Okay.” Had she known he’d check and given him time to? “Do you mind breathing with me for a bit?”
He wanted to say five silly things about how they’d been breathing together for the past hour, but her voice was too soft and soothing for that. She was too wholly immersed in this. “Are we going to chant, ‘Om’?”
“Do you want to?” Her tone only made his attempt at lightening things feel like mockery.
“Let’s stick with what you were planning.”
“Good. Let’s breathe in for four breaths. Hold for four breaths and then breathe out for six.”
Sounded simple enough.
Before he knew it, a shimmering peace had spread