“You’re not convinced.”
“Maybe he wasn’t just saying it. Maybe he really thinks I’m totally fucked.”
“Stop it, Sunil.” Kavita hobbled over the pebbles and held his shoulders, firm. “You’re not fucked.” She waited for a sign of recognition. “You’re not. People come back from these sorts of setbacks all the time. You need to cut yourself some slack, okay? And be patient. It’ll happen. We’ll get there.”
His dark eyes were soft and dull. “You’re so naïve, Little One.”
“Not so naïve, Sunil. And not so little anymore, either. I’m right about this. You have to trust me. Things are already working themselves out. Can’t you see that?” He shrugged out of her grasp. Inch by inch, she felt him retreating inward. “You know everything’s going to be okay, right?”
He stared at the horizon with a firm look, clear and resolute. “I know,” he said. A few long moments passed. “Come on, let’s head back.”
She stuffed her hands into her pockets and followed him. Then she felt it—the rakhi.
Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out the bracelet made of crimson thread she has been carrying since then. It was her gift to Sunil for Raksha Bandhan, brother-sister day. The day they reaffirmed their bond, their promise to protect each other. Normally, while she tied a rakhi to Sunil’s wrist, their mother would retell the old story of the mythical twins, Yami, the goddess of the sacred river Yamuna, and Yama, the God of Death. How Yami had tied a rakhi to Yama’s wrist thus making him immortal. Yama, touched by his sister’s gesture, had declared any brother who received a rakhi from their sister would be blessed with long life.
“I thought you gave that to him,” Nirav says.
Kavita twists the bracelet around her forefinger so tightly that her florid fingertip pulses in unison with her heart. “I meant to after his appointment, but with everything going on, it kept slipping my mind. Then at the lighthouse, things got so tense, the timing didn’t feel right.” Her throat aches. “I thought I’d get another chance.” She twists the bracelet around her fingertip once more, focusing on the heat and the pressure, which feels only right to her, feels like the least of what she deserves. “Maybe if I had given it to him, he would have remembered us. He would have known he wasn’t alone.” In his darkest moment, he might have glimpsed the thin red thread and remembered how much she loved him. She thinks of Yama and Yami, and the sacred bond between brother and sister. “I didn’t protect him like I was supposed to.”
“You were with him all the time.”
Kavita thinks this is how people must feel in confession. “Not all the time.”
On the ride home, Sunil began to withdraw. Kavita had never seen him retreat so deeply inside himself. The look of preoccupation on his face was startling, impenetrable. The hopefulness she had felt as they left the doctor’s office vanished. Terror took its place. Her gut told her in hammer-like knocks that something was very wrong.
When they got home, Kavita knew she had to do something. Sunil went down to his bedroom without a word. She watched him go and waited for the click of his door. Then she unpocketed her cell phone, sickened by what she was about to do. One day she hoped he would understand. But her cell was dead. She had forgotten to charge it the night before. She hated to take her eyes off the front door, ordered herself to be quick, as she rushed to the kitchen for the cordless, but it wasn’t in its dock, nor was it in her father’s room, or her mother’s, or the dining room. At last, she found it tucked into one corner of the couch. All of her searching had amounted to half a minute. As she dialled 9-1-1, she slipped out the front door so no one would hear her talk to the police. The operator had just come on the line, when Kavita noticed the empty space in the driveway, where Sunil’s car was usually parked. For a moment, she stood motionless, her mind slow to absorb the immensity of the situation, a computer unable to process an overwhelming amount of data.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, chilled.
She felt kneeless.
“I took my eyes off of him for less than a minute and he slipped away.” Even as she hears herself mutter these words, they don’t seem real. But they are. She sees herself running to the corner of their street, then the next, her eyes desperately reaching along the cracked pavement, in search of Sunil’s sky-blue sedan, and not finding it. In an instant, the geography of their small world mushroomed to an ungraspable size. Where did he go? How was she ever going to find him?
“You couldn’t have known he would take off,” Nirav says.
“I should have taken his car keys.” Why hadn’t she thought to take his car keys? Stupid. Stupid. Careless.
“His appointments had been arranged, for goodness sake. Anyone would’ve let their guard down a little.”
Yes, that was it. She had let her guard down. Because they had left the doctor’s office on the same page, but then something changed, only she hadn’t known how hazardous the change would turn out to be. “I think it must’ve been the doctor’s note.”
“What about it?”
“Sunil mentioned it when we were at the marina. He was trying to put on a brave face, but I could tell he was devastated by what the doctor had written.”
“What did the note say?”
“That he was completely debilitated.”
“Anyone would take that to heart.”
“I think he took it more than to heart. I think he took it as a sentence. Something he could never overcome.”
Nirav lowers his brow.
“I told him to forget about the note,” Kavita explains. “I said it wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was that he get better. And he would, in time. I told him everything was going to be all right. He said he knew.” She remembers the look in his eye, distant, resigned. “But now, I think we were talking about different things.” Why, why couldn’t she tell what she was seeing then? “I think he had been weighing his options, and after our conversation, he made his choice.”
Her zigzagged journey along the mess of tacks and string has brought her here. This is the answer to the enormous WHY. But is this really The Answer? Will she ever really know Sunil’s reasons? She wants to ask him. Hear his beautiful voice. But she can’t. Because he’s gone. Forever. How can he be gone, forever? He has always been there, her whole life. What is life, even, without him? She doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want this life. She wants the one they had, together. Wants another chance to make things right. She knows better now. Knows what to do. Please, dear God, wake her up. Let this be a dream, and let it be over.
Kavita begins to shake. Fault lines cover her like veins. She feels close to breaking.
“People always say once they’ve made up their minds, they seem at peace but that’s bullshit.” The person who sat beside her in the backseat was unrecognizable. He wasn’t her Sunil, her gentle brother. Now she understands why: his face was a portrait of inner war.
“The last time I saw him was when he went to take a nap. I didn’t even get a chance to give him a kiss. Mostly, I remember the back of his head as he went downstairs. That’s it.” A nothing moment.
Nirav wraps his arm around her back. “You loved him more than anyone, Kavita. And he knew that.”
“But it wasn’t enough.”
Lifting her gaze to the night sky, Kavita lets the ache seep in. As she stares at the gaps between the stars, she asks him: Where are you? Are you safe? Are you at peace now? Did you see how we searched for you? To us, you died today. But only because we were the last to know. How naïve she was to think the police would visit them with good news. But she had. So had her parents. When one of the officers said they had found Sunil, the joy she felt, the relief she saw shining in her parents’ eyes, at last, not tears of dread, but tears of celebration. The nightmare was over. They had found him. How naïve she was to not let the officer finish his sentence. Yes, they had found him. That is, they had found
his body. What remained of it. They were so sorry.
With those simple words, their world detonated, and fell apart around them—a private apocalypse.
“Come on,” Nirav says. He rises to his feet and reaches out one hand. “It’s time to go inside. Long days ahead.”
A day longer than this one? Nirav helps her to her feet, and holds her around the waist as they walk up the driveway, a sharp pang through her belly as they cross Sunil’s empty parking spot. They are halfway to the house, when she realizes it is no longer her home. If the house is anything now, it is a keepsake box robbed of treasure, a music box without a song, a shell that forgot the sound of the ocean. Without Sunil to give it a warm, beating heart, what was once home has now become nothing more than a painful memory of what home used to be.
When she finally makes it to bed, still dressed in her clothes, Kavita cocoons the duvet around her, and gives her body of stone to the mattress. A black lake of exhaustion seals itself around her. At last, she closes her aching eyes to this awful day, expecting that when she opens them again, she will be greeted by the white glow of the hereafter, and Sunil’s beautiful face.
2.
HELL ISN’T FIRE. It’s waiting. It’s the ticking of a clock. An incessant metronome that lasts for ten days. Every dash of sound, a measurement, like a step, that marks the distance between the last time you saw your loved one and wherever they are now.
Ten days of rationalizing where he might be. Of searching those places and not finding him. Of calling the police station for updates and getting nothing. Of calling everyone he knows but no one knows where he is. Of pacing. Of having hope, losing it, and then gathering up what’s left, like a barrier of sand that gets smaller and smaller every time you give into your subterranean fears and wash it away a little more with your private weeping. Of telling yourself stories to keep your loved one alive, the stories, a tattered safety net that loosely holds what remains of your sanity. Of watching your mother cry. Of praying.
On and on it goes, that broken highway line of time and sound, until the moment the ticking abruptly stops. Which coincides with the moment you realize you were wrong about the meaning of hell. That there is a hell worse than waiting.
And that hell is occupied by people like you, the wretched, whom have nothing left to wait for.
3.
THE NEXT MORNING, Kavita wakes in bed with a sharp throb needling the right side of her head. With slow blinks she clears away the cobwebs of sleep. Her eyes feel bulbous, as though reacting to an antigen. For an insular moment, she wonders why.
Then all at once, she remembers.
Sunil.
A rush of grief pins her down, heavy and fast. She hides her face with her hands, ashamed.
Sometime later, she resurfaces. Fills and empties her lungs slowly. Opens her repentant eyes. As she rubs the wet sleep away, she tries to summon up her dreams, but her memory is opaque. She went to bed wishing for dreams of him. She wanted to see his body move and hear his deep voice and touch him. She wanted to know: Was he okay?
Instead, she dreamed the same dream as she had since his disappearance. A dream full of motion but getting nowhere, like the futility of running on a treadmill. Always running, running, running through lifeless suburban streets she does not recognize, under the glare of an aggressive sun. Always panting, panting, panting in tandem with her heavy-heeled footsteps. Always searching for Sunil but never finding him.
But he has been found.
He is lying on a morgue slab somewhere in Montréal, with a coroner who is cutting and probing his decayed remains, identifying his body using dental records, and determining the cause of his death. Still, she dreamed of searching as if at some level she couldn’t quite accept that it was time to stop. Perhaps her mind had gotten used to the way she and her parents had kept Sunil alive in their fictions. Hope is hard thing to give up.
Guilt pulls at her insides, as though an anchor hooked to her soul. She has never been so aware of gravity, never so dragged by an emotion.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to him. “I’m so sorry, my Bear.”
Turning to look at the empty space beside her, she wonders where her husband is. Last night, she dropped into such a sleep, such a coma of exhaustion, she had not felt him leave the bed that morning.
Just then, she hears noise coming from the kitchen, the distant sound of muffled voices. She wants to stay in bed. Close her eyes and sleep, maybe forever. But there’s work to do.
She finds her parents and Nirav sitting around the table in silence. Cups of ginger tea and barely nibbled toast in front of them. Balls of crumpled tissues scattered beside their plates like sad paper flowers.
“Morning,” she says as she takes a seat beside Nirav. She stares at Sunil’s empty chair across from her, the titanic vacancy in their lives now. Her breath hitches for a moment. She tries to untangle her expression.
“Fancy a brew, love?” asks Nirav.
“Please.”
While he busies himself with the tea, she inspects her parents’ faces. Have they lost weight while sleeping?
“Here we are.” Nirav places a steaming cup in front of her. “A cuppa me best brew, strong and sweet, just the way you likes it, love,” he says in the Cockney accent he uses when trying to coax a laugh out of her.
For his sake, she forces a smile, then wraps her hands around her sunflower-yellow mug Sunil gave her for her twenty-fifth birthday last year. In her mind, she hears his deep voice: I saw the colour and thought of you. Yellow like sunshine. Suddenly she has no taste for tea.
Although no one has voiced it yet, she knows they must be thinking it.
“We need to tell people,” she says. “While we wait for the death certificate, we need to start making plans.”
“I still can’t believe it,” her father says. “How can we tell people what doesn’t seem real?”
“I don’t know.” A beat. “But we have to.”
“He was supposed to scatter my ashes, not the other way around,” says her mother. “What parent ever thinks about planning their child’s funeral?”
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. I can make the calls. Should I start with the temple?”
Her mother stares at the table, blank.
“Mom?”
“Back in India, a pandit once told me that people who take their lives are sent to the lowest level of hell. In their next lives, they have a lowly birth.”
“It isn’t true, Mom. You can’t think of that now. It doesn’t help.”
“No pandit,” her mother mutters. “And if we have to tell them something, we will say that he died in a car accident.”
“But that isn’t what happened.”
“It’s what we will tell them.”
“But Mom—”
“It’s nobody’s business.”
“If Sunil died of cancer we wouldn’t be hiding it.”
“No one judges people who die of cancer.”
“People will understand.”
“How do you know?”
Kavita pauses, briefly. “I guess I don’t.”
Her mother arches her eyebrows as if to say, exactly.
“What difference does it make what we tell them?” her father interjects. “It won’t bring back my boy.” He holds his forehead. “My baby.…”
Staring across the table, Kavita watches her parents, their slumped bodies and pained faces, aware of the broken pieces floating inside them, tearing at them with jagged edges, because her body holds the same broken pieces, too. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” Leaning back on her chair, she rubs a line up and down her forehead, wishing for insight. “Whatever you want, that’s what we’ll do.” It is her job to get them through this ordeal without causing any more harm than has been caused already.
“A private cremation,” her mother continu
es as she dabs her cheeks. “The next day, we will have a memorial here. We will bring my beta home.” Her chin quivers, uncontrollably. “He has been away from us for too long already.” Her mother clamps her eyes shut, as she slowly shakes her head from side to side, in disbelief of their reality, and of the plans she has been forced to make, tear after tear dropping into her lap without a sound.
Kavita has witnessed her mother cry many times in the last ten days, and it is awful every time, but at least during the days of Sunil’s disappearance, there was always hope to stop them. Now there is nothing but this awful reality to face. There is nothing but her mother’s tears and the bleak knowledge that Kavita will never be able to make what has gone terribly wrong, right again. Helplessly, she tells them, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.” But of course, it won’t.
After compiling a list of people Kavita will have to call, her mother goes to lie down and her father goes to sit in the backyard, as though with Sunil’s death the last stitch holding them together has snapped and at last they are free to fall away from each other. But Kavita can’t think about her parents’ failing marriage now. There’s still too much work to do.
She scans her list again. Writes a note reminding herself to call the police inspector to find out when Sunil’s body will be transported to Ottawa. Scribbles another reminder about calling her office to arrange bereavement leave for the rest of the week. After that, she will use up her sick days and unused vacation, which should buy her another month. Once that runs out, she will have to reassess. What else? she thinks. What does she know about funeral planning? Frustrated, she pushes the list away and decides to check on Nirav. She finds him in her bedroom, already dressed in work clothes, packing up his things.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“I’m going to work.”
“I could use your help today. There are a lot of calls to make.”
“I don’t even know a quarter of the people on that list.”
“Well, remember to call your family, okay?”
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