#lovenemidiots to lovers. even

[philtstone]

Aditha/nandini jacket

AFTER A MILLION YEARS I FINIALLY FINISHED THIS set in this verse and a prequel to the silly asides in this fic. a mix of book and movie canon as usual! for those who responded to my wip poll im sorry i ignored literally all of your votes and instead worked on "in which vandiyadevan is trapped in the toilet" but it ended up working out for everyone (me and the 2 mutuals reading this) so whos laughing NOW anyway apologies in advance for any cultural errors or general incoherency; its one in the morning and maya is in a different time zone. i had to google things! also none of this is serious. enjoy!

Evening is cooler than Nandini expected.

After the tumultuous heat of Poonghuzhali’s van, and the station, and the day, and the week — well, she did not anticipate shivering in the dark outside this dormitory. The leather motorcycle jacket she so pointedly wore in the blistering sun now, a week later, lies untouched beside her. They have had three stare-offs in the last twenty minutes, she and the jacket. She cannot bring herself to put it on; the idea leaves a queer feeling in her belly that she doesn’t care to examine. 

The dormitory itself is a relatively humble one, considering the wealth of its former occupant’s family. More a boy’s hostel than the kind of lodging the Cholas might secure for their most beloved child. Arunmozhi seems completely unbothered by the state of it. He grins widely at the orange toned walls, scuffed, and the low doors, slamming open and shut at intervals (though less now, so late into the night), and the general ruckus of the boys who greet them. They were all but cheering in welcome of their former dorm mate and his mismatched band of traveling companions, needing a place to avoid the authorities and – impossibly – his Uncles’ and her fathers’ spies, last minute. There was a lot of hugging that went around, at any rate. It’s not quite an elder siblingish relationship, Nandini thinks, though she is absurdly then struck by the question of whether the benign, chummy, kindly way Arunmozhi interacts with the younger boys is patterned after the way his own — that is to say, he has an older br — oooh.

Nandini does not want to think about it.

Just as well, because she’s many other, marginally less useless things to think of.

She is thinking of these things quite obsessively, in matter of fact. Scientific observation would suggest a verge on neuroticism. So it goes in Nandini’s head: oh, Lord, My Mother. She is Here. I’ve met Her. She is Alive after all, and so Beautiful, and so Fucking Weird. 

(The capitalizations are quite manifest in her own thoughts). 

If anyone else were to say the last she’d box them, but God it is true, and Nandini is nearly brought to happy tears by the realness of her mother’s strangeness. Her mother is exactly the same height as she. Her ears are not pierced. She favours her left leg, while Nandini favours neither, but when she walks she sways her hips in much the same way Nandini does when she is not thinking about it. She has hair which is nearly the same length and weight and texture, and it curls around the ears such that it must tickle – Nandini has much experience with this. Her mother’s fingers taper off as hers do; the nail beds are the same; her mother’s chin dimples against her neck in a way Nandini has always felt insecure about in herself. They have a mole in the same spot on their arm; Nandini’s left toe has a bunion near identical to the left toe of her mother; the bottom row of her mother’s teeth lay the same; her mother’s breasts are not very small, but not overly large either, and sit in the same position Nandini's do; her cheeks possess vestiges of the same roundness; her elbow wrinkles in the same way; her eyebrows are a bit unkempt in the middle, like Nandini’s were when she was a child and could not be bothered with their upkeep.

How strange it is! To see your own face so clearly in another. The slope of her nose — the curve of her mouth — the way her hair falls. Nandini wonders if this is what she will look like when she is old. She wonders if she is what her mother looked like when she was young. Surely the answer is yes. They are now inseparable in her mind, she and her mother, and it is overwhelming. She does not even need a father anymore; he has been axed from the equation. She has a mother. She knows her mother! 

And when she saw her mother for the first time, cheerfully led out of the very mundane, uninspired Thanjai local jail, her mother knew her. Nandini had stood, transfixed, as Mandakini had touched her gently on the cheek, just so, and began to cry quiet little tears that slipped down her cheeks like they were the simplest thing in the world for her to give, to feel, to shed.

Nandini has always hated crying. Real crying, anyway; she is an expert fake crier, as anyone successful in the world of Tamil soaps must be. But real crying is snotty and uncontrollable and undignified. 

Nandini thinks (she has been thinking all evening – it is really getting to be bad for her health) that is what makes her mother at once so unfamiliar, too.

There is so much tenderness in her face. Even without words (Nandini is so very good with words, honeyed and poisoned and flat and querulous, even, rarely, honest) her mother tells the world of her love. For her daughter (who craves it so badly); for Arunmozhi (who despite Nandini’s earliest assumptions seems to know he must earn it, however freely it is given); for simply living, it seems. Nandini cannot understand this last part. Life has been on whole pretty miserable, for her mother. What right does it have to her love? 

Nandini does not think she could ever love like that. 

She’s seated and steeped in these ruminations on the topmost step of the dusty concrete facing the dormitory courtyard; behind her must be the toilets, for there is a light on inside one of them, and in front of her is a small garden decorated with scraggly trees which housed the mango-stealing monkey who had earlier been tormenting the dorm’s inhabitants, and a little walking path. Earlier, in the dark, she saw Arunmozhi and her mother (her mother!) start off on a little walk along the path. She supposes it does make sense; they have not seen each other in a while, and he has explained to her how Mandakini saved him from that lake, and that rickshaw, and also his own slippery bathtub once in this very same dorm. They’re old pals: Nandini knew this going into the venture. He knows sign language and everything, and can communicate with her far better than Nandini can. So it makes sense that they must now catch each other up – she on why the police inspector was bribed to arrest her (this is still a little muddy) and he on his future career plans (vague) and current family business rescue plans (hairbrained and relying too much on the goodwill of Nandini herself, if she’s being honest). But watching them go, arm in arm, signing animatedly at one another left a strange ache in her heart. That was a while ago. Bits of the yard are illuminated by the light from one or two dorm windows, but on whole, it is past curfew, and therefore dark; Nandini is more or less alone with her thoughts and also the noise from the city beyond the wall. 

Being alone, she has spent the last thirty seconds staring sightlessly at some invisible point in front of her, eyes the size of saucers, spiraling.

“Erm – ahem.”

Nandini startles so badly her bangle-clad wrist nearly knocks into her own nose.

Aditha Karikalan has never been particularly tall. When they were teenagers there was a brief month where she had an inch on him. Right now, however, he stands above her such that she has to look up, and once more notice the fact that he does carry himself with a kind of dignified height. Which Nandini appreciates. Or did appreciate. Or – well, she is not sure. The last week has been quite a lot of everything. He wears a loose linen button down in a bright orange pattern open over a t-shirt, and a simple dhoti clumsily tied (she remembers the rare time he wore one in school, when they weren’t wearing their uniforms, she had helped him tie it), and sandals, and his wrists are sporting a nice fancy watch but they’re also covered in enough bead bracelets that, paired with his hair – unruly and wild and long as ever – he really does look far more the part of children’s camp counselor than first son of any kind of business mogul-cum-politician. 

Which Nandini appreciates. Or could appreciate. Or – well, she is not sure. A week ago, she would have very deliberately said, well, and what does a camp counselor make, anyway – I want to be a Bollywood actress, and glared him down out of spite. 

The last week really has been a lot of everything.

Anyway; she stares at him. Amidst her up-til-now very private spiraling.

Her mother her mother her mother her mother oh she is so known but so unknown oh they cannot love the same oh perhaps Nandini cannot love at all oh that must mean that must mean must it mean? that she, Nandini, well could she be broken is that what her mother sees surely she sees –

“I just – well. There’s the – the restroom is right there. So I’d come to …” And here Aditha stops his terribly uncomfortable and verging on comical awkward explanation, tilts his head – some immaterial spark of understanding happening in his sharp lovely eyes – and says, in an abortedly gruff tone that does very little to prevent what happens next,  “Nandini … are you – alright?”

Nandini, rather unexpectedly, begins blubbering. Loudly.

Her face crumples in on itself. Her shoulders hunch inward. Her nose gets snotty and her throat clogs up. And in general, she makes a very pathetic sort of hiccupy wailing noise, which she had not planned for.

“Shit,” says Aditha above her, after a moment of stunned silence. “Fuck, okay – Nandini? Well, you shouldn’t cry – come on, pull it together. The toilets are right there, look, someone’s even using them. Uh – well – alright, alright. It’s alright.”

None of his stammered, asinine condolences register much in Nandini’s ears. She is just very overwhelmed. It is only after a moment of her crying, sat on her rump outside the men’s toilets, that the stiff, chilly awkwardness of the night air changes, and there is a person quite suddenly beside her, and then not just beside her at all, but holding her – his arms carefully wrapped around her shoulders, his warm chest a perfect distance from her cheek, his large hands flattening clumsily over her back. Their knees bump together, and it isn’t very graceful at all – she refuses to move, so he must lean over ungainingly, and is probably quite uncomfortable doing it. 

Nandini cries into Aditha’s shoulder for five or ten minutes. He only pats her back stupidly once, at the start, and by the end of it, it is a proper embrace, and they are even rocking back and forth just a little.

It’s nice.

Presently, Nandini’s tears slow, and she registers the position she is in more properly. Whole-bodily, in fact. She had not expected that her body’s memory would slip back into this embrace so easily, and the realization is disquieting. She does not move, and Aditha does not move – she wonders if he is having the same panicked, wary thoughts – and so they sit in a stupid little impasse, hugging, for another two minutes. 

It’s getting to the point where she is noticing his cologne, so Nandini decides it is high time to pull herself together; she sits up, wiping at the snot on her face, and pretends her stomach is not in knots. A lopsided roll of toilet paper materializes in front of her nose. Oh – Aditha is holding it. She eyes it like a ticking bomb. It’s a bit squashed, like it was in his pocket. He must have brought it with him, earlier, which means he really did mean to use the bathroom, which means he hadn’t actually sought her out – 

Had he? He’s still holding her, sort of, and Nandini is terribly disoriented to realize that it is not an abhorrent sort of feeling, as she has very deliberately imagined it would be in the past, when hosting her more elaborate and vindictive daydreams in which she supposed they might reunite, not because she missed him badly but because she nursed ongoing fantasies of holy vengeance; all of those ended with her dumping a bucket of slop over his head. Instead, she has stopped feeling a decent measure of her earlier anxiety, and is breathing more normally now, and the rapidity of her thoughts have veered away from the breakneck pace of before. 

That could just be the crying. Her brother used to say that a tender weeping was good for one’s spirit. 

Nandini’s lip wobbles again; she misses Nambi, and is overwhelmed with a trickling feeling of shame – hadn’t she just left him, for so many months, and ignored all his overly-formal emails? 

The idea of emails makes her remember she has not sent a mildly threatening missive (subject line: I Know You Know Something About Mandakini Nolastname) from her ghost account to Sundura Chola in a while, and then that makes her think, well, it’s pointless now – her stalwart ally Arnunmozhi won’t have any reason to give her gently reproachful looks re: her long term haunting of his invalid father anymore – she’s found her mother – and then she is re-visited, very strongly, at once, by the dual reality of oh God her mother and oh God, Aditha is holding me.

Fuck, she needs to blow her nose.

“Here,” comes Aditha’s low voice, as though he’s read her mind. Which of course he hasn’t. But still. He tears off a piece of the toilet paper for her. Nandini trembles, and does not know whether she ought to lean in closer, or pull away entirely. She can feel his heartbeat against her shoulder, and while Nandini does not have a lot of experience with the biological sciences, it is beating rather more quickly than the average human heart ought to be.

“Oh,” she says, taking the tissue on autopilot. She dabs at her face, which must surely be smeared in kajol by now, and then her nose, which is probably ugly and red.

Good thing it’s so late at night.

After she’s done, because there doesn’t seem anything better to do – the alternative is getting up and fleeing, and Nandini is not a coward – she turns and stares at him.

Aditha clears his throat and scuffs one foot into the dirt at their feet, but he doesn’t look away. He’s grown a beard. She noticed this first thing last week. He never had one before.

“It’s just,” Nandini says, again on autopilot, “-- my mother.”

Ah, her mother. Poonghuzhali had demonstrated a very rare bout of tearful emotion and Arunmozhi his by now expected kindly friendship; Vandiyadevan had slipped her extra clementines after his grocery run and even Kundavai had been looking at her more gently than usual all afternoon. 

Until now, Aditha had been avoiding her. At her words his expression flickers, oddly, a shade of genuine concern colouring his face, before settling into something not quite effortless in its knowing but careful and gentle. She’d forgotten that he could look at her like that. It’s different now, just a little bit. The Look from before was more boyish, and the look now has a kind of sadness to it that makes it feel more real. Maybe it’s the beard. Unease fills her chest again, tenses up her hands. What must he be thinking? Why did he go about all day avoiding her? Alright, so she has also been avoiding him – all week now, to be sure – but – but –

“It must be really strange,” he says suddenly. His voice is deeper than before but not by much. She has not noticed this until right now, because they are sitting so closely and he is speaking quite softly. “Finding – finding someone who is so like you, all of a sudden.”

Whatever was on the verge of backflipping in the pit of Nandini’s stomach sours. Her chin trembles; she looks away. “I suppose.”

“Can’t really prepare for it, I guess.”

She sniffs. “I’ve been looking for months,” she says, more pointedly than perhaps she means. Looking does not equal preparation; the person she was in that Sri Lankan library was not entirely well, let alone prepared. Nandini is woman enough to acknowledge this. To herself, anyway. 

“It’s – it’s funny really,” he continues, deliberately gruff again, but not with the awkwardness of before; it’s more sincere now, roughened with honesty, yet in a way that is entirely oblivious to Nandini’s chin wobbles, “I can’t really understand what she’s saying half the time,” he rubs at his knee with one free hand, “but you know what I’ll tell you – I don’t think – well, I’ve never seen anyone with the same sort of sweetness in their face.” 

“As what,” croaks Nandini.

He looks at her strangely. Nightlife honks and buzzes past the dorm walls, cocooning them. “As you,” he says, like she is being stupid.

Nandini flushes deep from within. No – he must be lying. Hadn’t he called her a poisonous witch just last week? 

She supposes he must have meant that, but she knows Aditha well, and she knows when he is lying, even now – she has come to know, through many a painful altercation (the witch thing, and also she has threatened to kill him a few times) – and she resolves that whatever he meant last week, right now, he is also being honest. She feels somewhat dizzy. The urge to bolt is real. He, too, is looking a bit terrified, like maybe he did not exactly plan to say that in so many words, or maybe he had but now that it is out in the open he’s realizing it sounds a lot more – a lot more – than anticipated. 

“Have you really watched my show?” Nandini blurts out, more loudly than she means to. 

If Aditha’s eyes were wide already, they widen even further in alarm. This was a tidbit Vandiyadevan gave away two days ago; she thinks Aditha has still not forgiven him. He stammers,

“It was the only thing on TV,” with very little bravado. But then, before Nandini’s chest can deflate, as though shaking himself he says, more resolutely, “well, what was I supposed to do? That one scene of yours went viral on Twitter and the aunties at camp – who know very little about acting, may I add – just repeated what they read, blah blah blah like twittering little quails, but I am an educated person, Nandini, and a role model for children, and I have to investigate my news for myself –”

“Thank you for the tissue,” Nandini interrupts, because if she keeps her mouth occupied, then maybe that will quell its urge to spread into a large smile – maybe even emit a hysteric giggle or two – as if it’s forgotten that she only went into dead-end television acting in the first place because of the Veera Pandiyan scandal –

How much of that was really Aditha’s fault, though?

Nandini’s heart thumps rapidly. Now she’s really being crazy. Think of your mother again, girl. Go back to blubbering or something. Aditha blinks at her a few times. The light is pretty dim (they are lit from behind), but just enough that she can see the flush on his neck and ears. Have they been this close the whole time? 

“You – you were shivering when I got here,” he manages, instead of answering. “It’s kind of cold, isn’t it?”

Nandini is not shivering now. In fact, the place where his arm is still held against her back is so warm she thinks she could doze off in contentment just leaned up against him, if not for the fact that her stomach is doing gymnastics beneath the crop of her top. She nods anyway.

“I will be fine.”

“You should wear your jacket,” he says, roughly.

Nandini blinks. “Oh – no, I can’t. That’s yours.”

She isn’t looking for a reaction, per se; the words just sort of come out. She can very well see the bob of his throat, though, and the slight inhale he takes – his chest moves against her shoulder – before he says,

“Come on, Nandu, it was a gift.”

Nandini is overcome by a very strong urge to scream. Or swoon. If she had ever had reasons for wanting to kill him, she’s forgotten them just now. In fact it is very easy to forget the existence of everything around them – her lingering fragility about her mother, or the fact that they are right out in the wide open air, and there’s the real possibility that Kundavai of all bloody people will interrupt them. All these are things entirely immaterial, because unbidden her hand has moved up to press gently against Aditha’s chest, and she can clearly feel the rough pad of his thumb against the bare skin of her back, and they really are sitting so very close – a puff of his breath brushes against her cheek – and her heart goes thump thump thump thump so loudly she can’t really hear anything else.

His eyes have dropped to her mouth. “Nandini, love …” he starts, in a murmured, involuntary whisper.

Nandini tilts her head so very slightly closer …

Bang! 

If it is possible for two people to jump a foot apart while still being seated, Nandini and Aditha achieve this. Behind them, in the spilling light of the open bathroom door, lounges the person of Vandiyadevan, who is doing a very bad job at putting on suave and chill airs. Faintly, there is the sound of a toilet flushing behind him.

“No one could have guessed how badly this door sticks, eh?” he says loudly, holding up a roll of paper not unsimilar to Aditha’s. He tries and fails to adjust his footing, stumbling sideways a little into the door frame and then giving them both the finger guns. “Well! Beautiful night. Don’t mind me, carry on!”

“Vandiyadevan,” Aditha’s voice filters into her ears distantly, like it is coming from very far away. “How – long … have you been in there?”

“I was using the facilities! What, can’t a man take a piss after a long day’s honest espionage –? Ayyo! Wait, no, I promise I’m leaving!”

“That’s not the – we weren’t doing anything –!” Nandini hears Aditha splutter out in a strangled yell.

Which is just as well, too, because by the time he has turned back around, she is already gone, bangles clinking as she flees, scrambled away to hide behind the dark corner of the building’s edge, where stands frozen and with her eyes squeezed shut, while her errant, traitorous heart tries its damndest to beat right out of her chest.