by Sonali Dev
He put down the phone he’d been holding. He was being fanciful. Even if Rupa cared, her only response would be to pray some more. No, she didn’t deserve to know. He would handle Asif Khan himself. Just like he had done thus far. Because his love was real, unconditional. And because he was not a coward.
Love was supposed to be courageous and selfless.
It was the only reason he had let the Rahul problem continue. Rupa hated him for it. It had further fueled her mass punitive treatment of everyone and everything.
The boy lives in a chawl, she had said. You might as well let your only daughter consort with the slum kids too.
Truth was, her intuition might not be entirely dead because she had seen it, the danger that was Rahul. But again, she saw only what scared her, not what her child needed. It was obvious to any bystander that Kimaya was not the same after Rahul came into her life. Kirit had considered replacing him, but two things had stopped him. One, his Kimaya was too bright to be friends with any child who wasn’t as intellectually superior as her. And two, Rahul would never cross the chasm between himself and Kimi. Kirit had made sure of that. Rahul would never forget the burden of debt Kirit had piled upon him. The kind of debt that repayment could never cancel out, because with debt timeliness was everything.
More crucially, Rahul would never forget that Kimi came with a guarantee of loss. And no matter what Kimaya believed, Rahul didn’t have the kind of courage it took to bear another loss. Not after what he’d been through. Kirit had seen it in his eyes the night of his sister’s death.
Which is why Kirit could not decide if he was proud of Rahul or furious at him for not disclosing where Kimi and he were hiding out.
The good news was that if Kirit didn’t know, Asif wouldn’t know either.
The phone in Kirit’s pocket buzzed. No wonder the bastard had survived all those bullets. The moment you thought about him, he turned up, like the immortal death god. Kirit sprang up and locked the door to his office.
He didn’t greet the bastard when he answered. Not because he hated him with an obsessive virulence, but because someone else could have found Asif’s phone and might be trying to trap Kirit.
“It’s me. Sorry, not dead yet,” Asif Khan said in that horridly rough diction.
“Pity.”
“The pity is that you think you could send your daughter off to the police safe house and I wouldn’t find out. Do you have any idea how easy it is to get your police force to sing like mynah birds? Turn on the TV.”
Kirit hated taking orders from the bastard, but he turned on the small flat screen he’d had installed in his office mainly because so much of politics and public opinion was traded through the media these days. These television pimps had suddenly become the keepers of the vote bank.
Asif Khan chuckled on the phone when he heard the TV come on.
Kirit pushed off his desk, terror coursing through his body. Someone had shot three people outside a building in Colaba. Two of the bodies were identified as male police officers, and the third one was an unidentified woman.
Kirit’s heart pounded so hard he could no longer hear Asif on the phone. He hung up, refusing to panic.
He called Rahul.
But Rahul didn’t answer.
21
Rahul
A long time ago
“Have we not lost enough men to the police force in this family that Rahul suddenly wants to become a police officer too!” his grandmother said to Aie.
The two women were discussing him in the kitchen, and Rahul changed his mind about going in there. Nothing could drag him anywhere near that conversation, no matter how hungry he was. And he was starving. Trying to study for his engineering finals and his Civil Services Exam wasn’t quite as easy for him as Kimi seemed to believe it was.
But then, that was Kimi. She romanticized everything. She certainly saw him as someone he wasn’t. He still couldn’t believe he was trying to get into the IPS. If he passed the exam, based on his score he could choose between the administrative service, the diplomatic core, or the police service. There was no doubt in his mind which he was going to pick. The idea of being an IPS officer, from the moment Kimi had planted that seed, had started a fire inside him. Not only did IPS officers lead law enforcement across the country, but they also commanded the national intelligence agencies. The weight of Baba’s body had never eased off his lap, but the idea that he could be a part of ridding his country of criminal scum suddenly made it matter.
Plus, it wasn’t anywhere near as easy as any exam he’d ever taken, and strangely enough, he couldn’t walk away from something that challenged him this much. There was also his job at the kitchen appliances company, where he had worked all through engineering college. Sitting behind a desk for hours in a row had almost driven him out of his mind. Just the thought of going to work there made him break into a sweat.
Then there was the fact that Kimi had said those stupid words.
The next time I see him he will have decided to take the Civil Services Exam.
He wanted her to see him again.
It had been two years since she had left for Switzerland. Kirit had informed him that his services were no longer required and that the debt had been paid off in full. Every once in a while they got a new consignment of books and Rahul went in to help with cataloging the new arrivals. Or they got new computers and he went in to set them up. Those were the only times when he got actual medical updates on Kimi. Albeit after having to finagle them from the staff.
Rafiq was generally his best bet. Sarika was the one he had to keep his guard up with. Kimi’s nanny made no bones about the fact that a servant boy had no business aspiring to a friendship with Kimi. He didn’t disagree with her, but he still needed to know what was going on, and Kimi’s e-mails were frustratingly lacking in medical details.
In the first two months that she was gone, he had heard nothing from her and it had felt a bit too much like panic. So much so that he’d been summoned to the dean’s office for leaving classes early too many times because he’d been leaving to go to the lab to check his e-mails between classes. Finally, after two months, he had received a call from Kirit telling him that Kimi was fine and that she would e-mail as soon as she could.
She had reacted badly to this last breakthrough she had been so excited about, and it had taken a few months for them to stabilize her. Then they had decided to try another experimental treatment, which involved blood transfusions every few weeks. That had taken another six months. By this time Rahul had relived, over and over again, all the times her health had taken a terrible downturn after he had gotten carried away and done something he wasn’t supposed to do. When he forgot his place and stepped over lines, Kimi tended to pay the price.
Then her incessant e-mails had started. Sorely lacking in details about her treatment, but effusively detailed about all the nurses and doctors and technicians: how each one looked, who she thought was “crushing” on whom. “It’s exactly like Grey’s Anatomy, Rahul. There’s a McDreamy and McSteamy and then there’s Meredith and Cristina. Only McDreamy is a nurse and Cristina is a social worker. And they all speak with European accents instead of American.”
He had only watched a few episodes of the American show with her because she had talked about it so much that he’d had to promise to watch a few episodes on the condition that she stop talking about it. Which was all he could take because there had been far too much drama for him to keep track of all the medical cases.
“The show isn’t about the medical cases, Mr. Goose!” She had unleashed her pout-frown at him.
“But the medical cases are what’s fun.” There was a man whose skin had grown so many warts he resembled a tree. They even called him Tree Man and a spider had crawled out of one of the gigantic bark-like warts that encased him. It had been almost good enough to put up with all the film-y drama.
Kimi had almost thrown up. How someone who had been through those many medical procedures was this queasy h
e would never know. Just when the bizarre medical cases had become interesting, some people had started blathering on about loving someone so much they couldn’t breathe, and he had laughed, and Kimi had been sobbing and after that she refused to watch any more episodes with him. Which was a gigantic relief. Not that he’d tell her, because, God help him, he wasn’t stupid!
As it was, she watched far too much American TV. Maybe that’s why she was so optimistic all the time. The fact that she had never walked down a street in Mumbai, except that time he had taken her to his rock, completely astounded him when he thought about it. What would she think if she ever came to his home? With a thousand people living in a little more space than The Mansion, with its common bathrooms in the back, with a drain in the corner of the kitchen where Aie squatted down to wash the dishes, with the paath stools that they put down in a circle on the cement kitchen floor when they sat down to eat their meals.
Not that his family had eaten together in years. After he started working at the Patil mansion, Rahul had rarely ever been home for dinner. Even though Aie had known that he usually ate at The Mansion, she had continued to put dinner aside for him on a plate. When he started college, she had done it no matter how late he stayed at the kitchen appliance factory. Usually, he came home, took his plate to the outside room, and ate sitting on Baba’s easy chair.
This was exactly what he wanted to do right now. But Aie was explaining to his grandmother that it only made sense that Rahul was taking the exams because his baba would have been so proud. There was no reason for him to go into the kitchen and add to that explanation. It was a good thing his grandmother only visited from Pune once every few years, because she enjoyed talking about her dead son and granddaughter a bit too much, and Rahul wasn’t a fan of digging up ancient history. He knew both Aie and Aji were working to balance their pride with their worry about his future, and he didn’t want to tip that over in any one direction.
No, he wasn’t hungry enough to go into the kitchen. Instead of going back to his text book, he reached for the book he had picked up at Bandra station yesterday—a love story set in World War II that Kimi had gone on about in her last e-mail. He hadn’t wanted to read it, but he’d seen it at the bookstall on the platform, sitting there like one of those things that you suddenly started to notice everywhere right after someone mentioned it, and he hadn’t been able to stop himself from picking it up.
He sank into Baba’s easy chair just as Mohit walked in, a battered-looking cricket bat tucked under his arm and his face streaked with dirt. A whiff of sweat hit Rahul and he almost coughed. Mohit at ten years old was a skinny thing. Rahul had taken after his mother’s side of the family where the men tended to be thicker and broader. Unlike Mohit, Rahul had always looked older than his years. Mohit looked exactly like their father. Sometimes when he looked at Mohit, Rahul felt as though Baba had aged in reverse since his death and here he was.
“It’s still bright outside. What are you doing back home so early?” Rahul asked as Mohit walked by.
His brother jerked to a stop, his expression so blank, Rahul wasn’t quite sure what was going through his head. Then without answering he headed for the inner room.
“Mohit, I asked you a question.” Why his tone was so stern, Rahul didn’t know. He hadn’t meant for it to be.
Mohit turned around, blinking up at Rahul in surprise as though he couldn’t believe Rahul was actually speaking to him. “The game’s over.”
Something about the way his mouth drooped and his eyes lost their sparkle made Rahul get up and go out to the front veranda. A pack of very noisy boys was playing cricket on the playground.
He turned to find that Mohit’s despondent face had turned defiant. “I’m too good for them,” he said. “I was bored playing with them.”
“You want to go down and practice with me?”
For a moment Mohit’s eyes flashed bright with excitement. Then he stepped back, sullen again. “I can’t. I have too much homework.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday. You can do your homework then. Let’s go down and practice.” He almost added, “Like we used to,” but Mohit had been so little the last time Rahul had played cricket with him—played anything with him—Rahul doubted he remembered it.
“Really?” Mohit asked when Rahul continued to look at him.
Rahul held out his hand for the bat and Mohit shook his head. “It’s broken.”
“Is that why the boys won’t let you play?”
“Who cares. They really play like girls.”
Rahul flinched. Unsurprisingly, he thought about Kimi. “I’m sure the Indian Women’s Cricket Team would not like to hear you say that.”
“There’s a women’s cricket team?” Mohit asked, as though Rahul had told him their neighbors were from Mars.
“Yes, I think they are world champions too.”
Mohit looked impressed and pointed his chin at the veranda. “Well, those losers sure don’t play like world champions.”
Rahul took the bat from Mohit. “Why didn’t you tell me you needed a new bat?”
Mohit shrugged. He hadn’t told Rahul he needed anything for the past six years.
The bat looked like it had seen better days. A really, really long time ago. Lots of rope and duct tape held it together. A really impressive patch-up job. Even through all the repair jobs Rahul recognized it. “Is this my bat?”
Mohit got defiant again. His brother had a temper. Rahul wondered if he got in trouble with that temper and being a skinny guy. “Aie gave it to me a few years ago. She said you hadn’t played with it for years. It was just lying there behind the cupboard.”
Rahul hadn’t played for years. Cricket was too slow for him. He needed the constant motion of football, the running until you were out of breath and the falling and feeling your knees and elbows as they scraped and bled. But this was Baba’s bat and he had given it to Rahul, hoping he would follow in his footsteps and fall in love with his favorite sport.
Looked like his younger son was fulfilling their father’s dream.
“No, it’s completely fine. It was never really mine. It was Baba’s. I think he would have wanted you to have it.” Mohit’s body sagged with relief. Had he thought Rahul would be angry with him for using his bat? “Did you patch this up?” He peeled the duct tape off and found a few small nails hammered into the broken wood. His little brother could fix things with so much finesse at ten years old? “This is impressive,” he said.
Mohit beamed, then realized he was beaming and went back to scowling. “It’s just a broken bat. And it won’t work anymore anyway.”
“Well, I think we could fix it one more time. Then I’ll show you how to really break a bat and get you a new one from Linking Road tomorrow.”
“Really?” Mohit said for the nth time that day and Rahul felt like a giant shit.
“Go get me the nail box and hammer.” Rahul started peeling off the tape and tried to pry the nails out with his fingers.
Mohit nudged him with pliers. “You’ll need these.”
Together they pulled out the nails and then secured the broken wood with a couple long screws. They wouldn’t hold for more than a few good strokes, but no harm in trying. Once the wood was secured, Rahul pulled out good duct tape from his backpack. He’d bought it for a college project. Mohit held the bat up while Rahul wrapped it up.
When they were done, Rahul handed it to Mohit and asked him to swing. Mohit did.
“Wow, your form is fantastic.”
Mohit whooped, and Rahul heard a giggle behind him and turned to find Aie and his grandmother watching and dabbing their eyes. How long had they been watching?
“He’s the primary-school team captain,” Aie said, her wet eyes glistening with pride. How did Rahul not know this?
“Well, then he’s going to have to teach me some moves. Let’s go down and break that thing the right way,” Rahul said.
Mohit was really good. Rahul wasn’t exactly great but he had a decent long arm and off
spin. Yet Mohit swung his balls to the far reaches of the field as though they were full-toss balls. They kept going, Mohit turning his balls into sixers and fours, and finally on one lofty ball the bat split with a harsh crack, and all the boys who had joined them burst into cheers.
“In the garbage dump that goes,” Rahul said.
But Mohit hugged both pieces to his chest. He didn’t say more, but he looked somehow happier than Rahul had seen him look in a very long time. Rahul tried not to think about that.
“Thank you, Dada,” Mohit said as they walked into their block and threw his arms around Rahul.
“Ugh, you smell,” Rahul said and ruffled his sweaty hair, making him laugh as though it were a compliment. “Off to a bath.”
Mohit disappeared through the back doors into the common corridor that led to the bathrooms. The silly boy had forgotten his towel. Rahul pulled a towel from the hook behind the door and took it out to the bathroom.
“Where’s your towel, Captain-saheb?” he asked, knocking on the door.
The door opened a crack and a skinny arm stuck out. “Thank you, Dada,” he said one more time as Rahul pushed the towel into his hand and went back into the block, smiling.
He heard a sniff from the kitchen.
“He used to be like this with Mona,” he heard his mother say, and Rahul stopped in his tracks, his heart starting to beat faster. “She used to idolize him. Her dada was everything to her.”
“But that’s our Rahul,” his grandmother said. “Everyone should have a big brother like him.”