When Only Love Remains

by Durjoy Datta

  Today, Karishma and Sumit are in the hospital, and they are sitting next to Devrat’s bed. Karishma has been crying for the past hour that she’s here. Sumit’s trying to maintain a brave front.

  ‘You haven’t left the hospital since the time he got admitted?’ Sumit asks.

  ‘No,’ answers Avanti. ‘I can’t leave him like this.’

  ‘What do the doctors say?’ Sumit asks Avanti.

  ‘They have asked us to wait.’

  ‘Is he in pain?’ asks Karishma. Her nose runs, and Avanti passes a tissue box to her.

  ‘No, he can’t feel a thing,’ answers Avanti.

  ‘This is typical, Devrat.’ Sumit’s eyes have welled up. ‘He puts everyone’s life on hold. Every fucking time, this bastard does this.’ Tears streak down Sumit’s face. ‘Keeping us in a limbo, making us wait between hope and sadness, torturing us, making us miss him. Such an asshole.’ Sumit breaks down completely. ‘Excuse me.’ Sumit leaves the room.

  ‘Typical Devrat,’ mutters Avanti in her breath and thinks how true it is. ‘Sumit is right, Karishma. Remember the time between his first song and the next?’

  Karishma shakes her head.

  ‘Fifty-three days.’

  Karishma and Sumit spend another couple of hours by Devrat’s side. They are going back by that night’s flight.

  ‘We have something for you,’ says Sumit. And a couple of ward boys come to the room with Devrat’s old guitar, the first one he had ever used in a performance. ‘This is—’

  ‘I know,’ says Avanti. ‘This is the first guitar Devrat ever used in a live performance. It was a college in Siliguri, wasn’t it?’

  Sumit nods. ‘It was his first performance. They just paid for his travel and lodging. I went with him and the video you must have seen on his page? I captured it,’ says Sumit with pride.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Avanti. ‘Because that video was one of the million reasons I fell in love with him.’

  ‘I remember how nervous he was before the event. He kept calling me and asking me to pray for him,’ adds Karishma.

  ‘He looked so nervous when he went up on the stage,’ recalls Avanti. ‘He almost stumbled and fell over. No one in the crowd knew who he was and they had started booing him. I could see him sweat. He was SCARED! But then he started to play and the girls started cheering him on. I cried the first time I saw the video.’

  ‘Why did you cry?’ asks Karishma.

  ‘He looked so cute and lost on that stage, like a lost puppy,’ says Avanti fondly.

  Sumit points towards the watch. It’s time for them to go. Karishma takes Avanti’s hand into hers and tells her, ‘Devrat really loves you.’ Sumit nods.

  ‘I know that. He’s my puppy. He can’t do without me. I know he’s going to wake up. It’s just a long nap.’

  Sumit and Karishma ask Avanti to be strong and hang in there. Karishma kisses Devrat on his cheek and Sumit shakes Devrat’s limp hand. Though they are smiling, the sadness in the room is overwhelming. All three of them are thinking about it but no one says it aloud. More than a best of luck wish, the kiss and the hand shake is a last good bye.

  They leave the hospital, not with hope, but with the feeling that they might have seen the last of Devrat, their friend, the prodigy, the puppy.

  Avanti sees them off at the gate of the building and comes back to Devrat’s room. She takes the guitar out of its box and keeps it on her lap. Who says he’s dying? She touches the fret board and she feels a certain electricity grip her, the same kind that gripped her every time Devrat touched her.

  She sits near Devrat and takes his hand into hers, ‘You’re still alive, and I know you’re listening. So listen to this, I’m going to wait till you wake up and tell me that you love me.’

  Twenty-Six

  It’s been 118 days now, and in two days, it will be four months that Devrat would be sleeping, and it will be four months since Avanti stepped out of the hospital.

  But with time, she has made quite a few friends in the hospital. The times when Avanti’s not crying, or taking care of Devrat, she’s talking to people, and she never runs out of words. A hunter will hunt, and Avanti, well, she was born to talk.

  ‘Are you back to adhering to your 10,000 words a day quota?’ Avanti’s Nani asks over the phone.

  ‘Stop making fun of me, Nani.’

  ‘I’m just saying, shona. The world is a better place when you talk. Remember when you were little and we used to go to birthday parties of your friends? We just used to make you stand in the middle and you used to keep talking and entertaining all of us. God, Avanti, could you talk!’

  ‘Nani,’ Avanti blushes. ‘I don’t talk that much, too.’

  ‘Don’t try to fool me now.’

  ‘Okay, fine,’ says Avanti.

  ‘Nani? When are you coming?’ asks Avanti.

  ‘Soon, beta. You know, naa, how far it is and I can’t travel,’ sighs Nani.

  ‘. . .’

  ‘How’s Devrat?’

  ‘Still the same.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Avanti. I’m sure he will wake up soon. No boy can ignore you for so long,’ says her Nani and Avanti feels like crying again.

  ‘I will talk to you later, Nani. I miss you.’

  ‘I miss you, too, shona.’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘. . .’

  She disconnects the call. Avanti cries a little. It’s routine now. Later, she washes Devrat’s body with a sponge with the help of Devrat’s mother. His mother leaves to take a bath herself, after which she goes for a bath, too, then comes and sits next to Devrat.

  ‘It’s going to be four months, Devrat. I don’t like this at all,’ mumbles Avanti. ‘And I know you want me to be strong and wait for you, and I’m trying, but there are days that I think I just can’t take it. I’m sorry, Devrat but I have felt suicidal as well, and I would be lying if I say I haven’t thought about it. Now, don’t be angry about it.’ She holds Devrat’s hand. ‘Who else would I tell this to? Devrat, please be with me. Please. I still need you, puppy. I need you to tell me that you will love me. There are days I still tremble and cry and I miss you. Don’t do this to me, Devrat. Please. I’m literally begging you, Devrat. Please come back.’ She’s sobbing on Devrat’s hand. ‘Please say something, Devrat. For heaven’s sake, please say something.’

  After pleading with him and after Devrat doesn’t respond, Avanti leaves for her early morning walk through the premises of the hospital; everyone knows her by now and they wave at her and she waves back at them. Earlier they used to find her a little cuckoo, a girlfriend who lost it after her boyfriend turned into vegetable after an accident, but slowly people have warmed up to her. Their lives light up when Avanti meets them and talks to them for hours at an end. Things they can’t tell anyone else, they go and tell Avanti. And though Avanti can’t really solve their problems, she does lend an ear to them, and that’s often half the solution.

  She knows that the ward boy, Ramesh, from the labour room, is in love with a girl who works in the pantry; she’s the one who knows that the senior nurse in the paediatrics department is three weeks pregnant with her second child and so on.

  ‘Namaste, didi,’ the canteen boy salutes Avanti. He’s clearing plates off a table.

  ‘How are you? Still going to school?’

  ‘No, didi. They kicked me out again.’

  ‘So what will you do now?’

  ‘I will sneak in again!’ quips the boy, his gap-toothed smile on display.

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ Avanti winks at him.

  She sits on the chair next to the window in the hospital canteen. The canteen boy gets Avanti her early morning chai with two biscuits he knows she won’t eat. She pays the boy the money but he refuses it saying that Somraj won’t accept it.

  ‘Somraj ke liye nahi hai, tere liye hai (It’s
not for Somraj, it’s for you).’

  The boy smiles again.

  Somraj heads the canteen department of the seven-storey hospital. ‘How are you today?’ shouts Somraj from behind the counter.

  ‘Same as yesterday, bhaiya.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Do you want to eat something else?’ asks Somraj and Avanti refuses. A few days back, Avanti’s father had taught Somraj how to brew a perfect cup of tea, just the way Avanti likes it. And since then, the tea has become a raging favourite amongst the hospital staff.

  Somraj gets back to work. She sips on her tea, looking outside, at the cars coming in, patients being walked in, or wheeled in, some in wheelchairs, others on stretchers. She looks away to prevent herself from thinking about Devrat and how he must have been brought in. She wonders if he was in his senses when he was admitted, if he was thinking of her and what it would make her go through, if hers was the last face he saw.

  Her love is selfish, it always has been. Devrat has been in a coma for almost four months now and it’s getting to a place where it would have a permanent effect on Devrat’s brain. He could lose a part or his entire memory. That thought scared Avanti. He would learn to accept his parents as his parents, but would he fall in love with her again? Would he love her as much as he used to before the accident? What if he doesn’t? She blocks those thoughts out.

  Over time, she has made a scrapbook, slowly and steadily piecing together their twelve months together, with the remnants of what she found—text messages, pictures, mails exchanged, boarding passes, bills of restaurants, recharge coupons, dried flowers . . . she wishes Devrat would look at all that and be hers again.

  ‘Avanti?’ someone taps her shoulder.

  Avanti jerks up to see who it is. ‘Huh?’

  It’s her grandmother. What? She’s frailer than Avanti remembers her. For the past four months she has talked to her every day, and she’s the only one who hasn’t tried to force her to go back home.

  ‘But I just talked to you in the morning and you said you couldn’t travel,’ Avanti tells her grandmother as she buries herself in her arms. Her grandmother has always had a mortal fear of the railways and airlines, the metro and the like.

  ‘I wanted to see you. And you were with me on the flight. I saw you in the flight attendants. And I know why you wanted to be one,’ says her grandmother.

  ‘And why is that?’ says Avanti, happy and crying in her grandmother’s arms. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. You’re actually here. I missed you so much!’ She takes her grandmother’s wrinkled face in her hands and starts to kiss her everywhere.

  ‘You’re kind, Avanti. And your father insisted that I should come and I couldn’t say no.’

  Avanti’s crying in her grandmother’s arms. Sitting in the canteen, she talks for hours and then she goes to sleep. When she gets up with a start, it’s already afternoon.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘It’s okay, Avanti. Devrat is still sleeping.’

  ‘We need to go upstairs,’ says Avanti.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ says her grandmother. Avanti holds her Nani’s hand and they start to walk towards the lift lobby. She fills up a small form, never letting go of her grandma’s hand, and gets a visitor’s pass for Nani who hangs it around her neck. Avanti looks at her grandmother, the same person in whose arms she had grown up, who is now holding on to her like a toddler with a school badge hanging from her neck. ‘You look like a nursery student.’ Her grandmother flashes her toothless smile.

  They walk into a lift. ‘I’m excited,’ says her grandmother.

  Avanti looks at her and her grandmother adds, ‘I want to see who you picked. I asked a few kids in the locality to show me his pictures on the computer. He’s smart-looking. But I always wanted to see him in real life.’ She rubs Avanti’s hand, she doesn’t know whether to smile at this or cry.

  ‘But he’s sleeping,’ frowns Avanti.

  ‘I will not disturb him,’ her grandmother replies.

  They leave the lift behind. Devrat’s parents stand up as they see them walking towards them. Rajiv, Avanti’s father, touches her grandmother’s feet and she hugs him. He introduces her to Devrat’s parents and her grandmother tells them that they have a beautiful son. And then she asks Avanti to make her meet Devrat. Her grandmother’s smiles and her demeanour are infectious, for she’s a little too naughty for her age, but then who knows how old she really is. She could be two hundred for all she knows.

  ‘He’s inside,’ says Avanti.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They open the door. Four months and Avanti has still not become used to the sight of the room, of the drips and the beeping sounds, the white bedsheets, and the metal bed. The room is light brown and white, and it fails in its attempt to be inviting and soothing. It’s still a room where people come to die. Seeing Devrat wasting away in his bed, is something she can never get used to. Her grandmother sits on the chair next to bed and runs her wrinkled hand lovingly over his forehead. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ says her grandmother.

  ‘You should have seen him before the accident,’ answers Avanti. For the first time in months, she has beamed and been happy.

  ‘Everything will be okay,’ says the grandmother and looks in Avanti’s direction instead. It’s hard for her to stare at Devrat for long, and she doesn’t want to cry in front of Avanti. Devrat’s weight loss has been drastic and he looks nothing like he used to look in the picture she saw of him.

  ‘You have become so weak,’ says her grandmother. ‘I made you biryani. It’s in my suitcase downstairs. I will ask someone to get it.’

  ‘I’m not hungry, Nanu.’

  ‘If not for yourself, at least eat for his sake. He wouldn’t like to see you like that when he wakes up. And moreover, I think he can still feel you around. So by not eating like you should, you’re actually hurting him.’

  Avanti frowns. ‘Now you’re being manipulative, Nanu.’

  ‘I’m your nani,’ she says. She spots Devrat’s guitar lying near his bed.

  ‘It’s the guitar from his first performance,’ explains Avanti.

  ‘Have you tried playing it?’ asks Nani.

  ‘No. It’s too painful,’ replies Avanti.

  ‘That should be better for the learning, no? Okay, now go and eat, Devrat and I have to talk,’ says Nani.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asks Avanti.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. Now move along,’ growls her grandmother and sends her away.

  Avanti can’t tear her eyes away from her grandmother as she takes Devrat’s hand into her own and starts talking to him. She doesn’t know whether it’s beautiful or sad, all she knows is that she won’t be able to fall out of love with Devrat, her little puppy.

  ‘So Devrat, my granddaughter is complaining about you and you have a lot of explaining to do—’

  Avanti leaves the room. She’s in the hallway sharing the biryani with Devrat’s parents and her father.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ says Devrat’s mother, but Avanti’s distracted.

  She’s constructing elaborate scenarios of how the doctors will come and announce that he has regained consciousness and that he’s okay to go home. How she will be the only one awake and she will run to his room and throw herself on him and scream at him for sleeping too long.

  ‘WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’ Avanti will shout.

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘SHUT UP!’ Avanti will start hitting him and Devrat will keep apologizing and they both will cry and hug and kiss each other and not stop until forever.

  These three months have given Avanti a lot of time to think about death, specifically Devrat’s. It’s morbid, but Avanti does it intentionally to prepare herself for the pain when it comes. She keeps asking herself more about what will happen when Devrat passes on. The body will be burnt, but what will happen to that smile, that personality, those s
ongs, those feelings? They can’t be burnt, right? Where do they go? How can they just vanish from the world? It’s believable that they somehow fade away as the person grows old and so when the body dies, everything else does too. But where will Devrat’s smile go? It’s not something tangible. She felt it. She felt it inside him. Over these conversations with herself, she has realized why people believe in a soul. It’s because they have to for they have no other choice. It’s hard to bear that all the conversations, all the memories you had with your parents, with your sisters, with the person you loved were burnt or buried, snuffed out of life. So conveniently, people invented the soul, not for the benefit of the deceased, but the loved ones he or she left behind, to make them feel that while they suffer, he or she is watching, and that they equally miss them, like they, too, think of them, and they, too, are watching him.

  We can’t think of the people we love as bodies buried in caskets or an urn full of ashes, so we think of them as a concentrated mist of nothingness which we call the human soul. No matter how hard we try to make ourselves believe that they are around us, the truth is that they are gone.

  Avanti knows this now. She believes her puppy has a soul, and that all her memories will be stored in it, that even if Devrat dies, he will still remember her, and that the songs he wrote about her won’t be destroyed in the fire that consumes his body. That’s the only way to move on.

  Avanti looks at her father. Over the past year, she has sensed the constant restlessness in her father, the constant fidgeting, the looking around, the nervousness, and the guarded smiles. He has noticed that her father is never at ease; it’s like he’s constantly running from something . . .

  She wonders what it must be like for her father. After all, Avanti’s mother left him and a month later she died. Does he still blame himself like Avanti blames herself for Devrat? Does he still think that had she not left house she would still be alive? For someone like her father, forging relationships isn’t easy, he isn’t like Avanti, outwardly positive and kind and gregarious. But like her, he lost someone close to him. Avanti slips her arms around him and buries her face in his chest.