A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  “Maybe my brother just made that up to impress you.” But he looked anything but sure.

  “Oh, he doesn’t know that I know. I only know because I’m really good at listening at doors and at hacking into my father’s computer.” She lined up the filled bag of turmeric next to the others.

  Mohit’s jaw was still set in stubbornness, but in his eyes she could see that she had just upended his life. When she’d first met him barely a few hours ago, she had been amused by how obvious his attention-seeking obnoxiousness was. But maybe it wasn’t so much obvious as it was familiar. If she understood anything, she understood how daunting Rahul’s distantness could be and how damn much it hurt.

  “Listen, Mohit, I’m sure your friends do good work, but you can be so much more helpful to them with an education, don’t you think? If your brain is anything like your brother’s, you can employ more people yourself someday than you can bully reluctant employers into hiring for pathetic wages. I’m just a stupid rich girl, but that seems pretty clear to me.”

  Rahul walked in and his eyes found her, amusement lighting them up for the barest second as he registered her sitting cross-legged on the floor amid all those yellow packets. In a flash he was serious again and went off to survey the block for threats. Although, if someone had been hiding in an inner room and hadn’t done anything by now, they weren’t that much of a threat in the first place, now, were they? But he was Rahul and he would make sure.

  Mohit lowered his voice to a whisper. “So how long has this been going on?” His eyes danced with playfulness again. He glanced between the door Rahul had gone through and Kimi. “How long have you been in love with my brother?”

  Kimi looked down at her hands. She didn’t remember touching the turmeric, but her fingers were yellow. “It doesn’t matter,” she said absently, picking up another bag.

  “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t see that the fire burns equally on both sides,” he said, using the oldest Bollywood line in the book and clutched his heart dramatically.

  She shook the plastic bag at him and tipped her chin at the scoop in his hand. “You misunderstand me, young one,” she said just as dramatically. “I’m not the one who can’t see it.”

  25

  Rahul

  A long time ago

  Nothing could make Rahul step inside a hospital. It had been years since he had been inside one. Nothing good could ever come of it. Now Kirit was asking him to visit Kimi in the hospital. Begging him.

  “I can’t, sir,” he said, trying to ignore the desperation in Kirit’s voice on the phone.

  Desperation that was completely uncharacteristic and spotlighted how hard Kirit was fighting to keep his despair in check. He sounded at once determined and angry and afraid to acknowledge any of it, because the second he acknowledged it, it would become reality. Rahul knew exactly how he felt.

  Rahul had felt that way once. But it had lasted a day. His determination had held up for less than twenty-four hours, forever taking away any faith in his being able to get into a fight with fate and win.

  Kirit still believed he had control. He had, in fact, been able to transform his faith into reality for so long, Rahul, if he were another person, would have believed that money was the one thing that could make you build reality out of your desires. But Rahul was who he was, and so, he tried every day to change what he could change with his hands—with his gun and his pen and his fists. As an officer of the cadre he could combine those three things. He had never expected to love anything again as much as he loved his job. But he loved it. And right now he had work to do.

  “I’ll come see her when she comes home.”

  There was a long pause. Kirit trying to work out what Rahul wanted to hear, and Rahul willing him not to say what he wanted to say. Because even if there was the slightest chance that the saying of words could turn them into reality, then Rahul didn’t want Kirit to tell him that Kimi might not come home. They were two chorus dancers in fate’s chaotic dance drama, thinking they had control, knowing they had none, but following the cues they were given and begging for the outcome they wanted.

  Kirit adjusted his tone, trying a different tack. “She is very attached to you. I don’t know if I should have allowed her to get so attached to you. But she is.”

  Rahul said nothing. There was no response to that.

  “She used to be such a bright child. Not just in the sense of being clever. But in the sense of spreading brightness around her. I used to call her my early-morning sunshine. Always gentle, always caring, always spreading happiness. One generally loves one’s child simply because that child is theirs, but Kimi—how could she not be loved by anyone who met her? It was the brightness; it was contagious.”

  Yes, Rahul was aware. If Kirit meant to change Rahul’s mind, he wasn’t succeeding.

  “Even after she got sick she remained bright for a while. She held on to it. But then it started to fade. It was no longer her being bright, but her trying to be bright. An attempt made for the benefit of her mother and me. My morning sunshine through a muslin curtain. But it returned, her brightness returned when you started to become her friend. Her mother thought it was dangerous, for many reasons, to allow a friendship like that to grow. I’m being honest with you today, so I’ll tell you that your young anger made Rupa uncomfortable. But Kimi was a different child after she had a friend. So, even though we were afraid for her, we both knew that leaving your friendship intact was part of helping her stay healthy. Somehow you two had a connection. It was almost as though she had found a brother.”

  Rahul felt sick.

  I want a boy to kiss me.

  It was the nausea that kept him from responding. What Kimi was to him wasn’t something he ever thought about. She was the one who did the analyzing in their friendship. All he knew was that she was a part of his life that never touched any other part of his life. She sat apart from everything else, an entire section of his life all her own. That’s all he knew and that’s all that mattered.

  This was probably the time to assure Kirit that he would never abuse the trust Kirit had put in him by letting Kimi and him be friends. But the fact that Kirit was telling him all this now, when Kimi was sick, was something that would make him angry if he allowed himself to feel anger. But he didn’t. He understood everything Kirit was saying to him. Kirit and he had a secret language born of a shared awareness of a bullet that had exploded in the wrong chest and now a common love for a girl neither could bear to lose.

  “Please, Rahul. She won’t stop asking for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Then how can you refuse to come see her?”

  Because he would not go and say good-bye. He would not step into a hospital. “I can’t, sir, I have far too much work to do. I can’t leave this assignment in New Delhi right now.”

  He thought he heard a sob. But it was so strange to think of Kirit as allowing his will to weaken that it had to be his imagination.

  “I need you to listen to what I’m saying, sir. I’ll see her when she comes home.”

  This time Kirit did not hesitate. “It might be too—”

  “I’ll speak to her on the phone, if that will make you feel better. But I really can’t leave this case right now.”

  Suddenly, he wanted her on the phone. Wanted to hear her tell him that he was being an idiot. He knew he was. But he knew what he knew and he was not going to visit her in a hospital.

  “What is wrong with you, Rahul?” Kirit snapped. “She can’t talk on the phone. They have a bloody tube shoved down her throat. She’s barely breathing, but she says your name.”

  “Then tell her what I’ve already told you, tell her that she can see me when she comes home.”

  Kirit disconnected the phone without answering.

  * * *

  A week later, Kimi came home. For a week after that she refused to see Rahul. He visited The Mansion every day and waited in the kitchen with Cook for Kimi to send word that it was okay for him to go u
p. Usually, he ran up the back stairs as soon as Cook let him in. But now, Cook asked him to wait in the kitchen, stiff bodied, as though she didn’t even know who Rahul was. For the first time since he had started working at The Mansion, none of the servants would let him into the main house.

  Kirit refused to meet him.

  “Come on, Sarika tai, just five minutes,” he wasn’t beyond begging. “If she’s too sick I’ll just see her and leave, I won’t wake her up.”

  Sarika had always been the most stern of all the staff, making no bones about her disapproval when he stayed late or if she caught Kimi laughing too hard in his presence. And unlike with the other staff, her attitude toward him hadn’t changed after he’d become an IPS officer. “Kirit-sir has been very clear—Kimi-baby gets to decide who visits her. And I already told you Kimi-baby said she never wants to see you again. Stop wasting everyone’s time.”

  Finally, after four days of sitting in the kitchen waiting for Kimi to calm down with no success, he made his way to the back of the house and used the pipes to climb onto her balcony.

  He wasn’t angry with her for being angry, but he refused to apologize. Maybe what he’d done was wrong, but he did not regret his actions. He knew without a doubt that if he had walked into that hospital that day something horrible would have happened. What he hadn’t known was how hard it would be to wait for the buzz of his phone to finally tell him that she was home, followed by the seemingly endless flight from New Delhi to Mumbai to get to her. And then being shut out like this.

  Her drapes were open and she was reading in her wing chair. He knocked on the glass, startling her. She met his eyes across the glass and it was like losing his footing on a ladder and flying off it.

  She took her own sweet time to walk to him, but instead of pulling the curtain closed, she opened the French doors. “I thought you were my friend,” she said, looking up at him with none of the anger he had expected and far more sadness than he ever wanted to see.

  “Is that why you wanted to say bye to me?”

  She thrust her chin forward, but her eyes softened. “I just wanted someone to hold my hand and to tell me everything was going to be okay.”

  He lifted his hand to touch her cheek, but then lowered it again and walked across her room to the sink to scrub his hands. “You had a lot of people there to do that.”

  She made a frustrated sound and followed him into the room. “How can you not understand that it’s not the same thing? I have one friend. You are my one friend. Is it that hard to understand what it is to have only one friend?”

  He understood. He had only one too.

  “You’re thinking you understand, don’t you? That I’m your only friend too. I wish there was a word for what you’re doing. I wish there was a word for being blind to someone’s situation because you think you know how it feels and you use some tiny part of your own experience and extrapolate it to theirs without realizing that you have a choice and that they have none.” She walked away from him again, deflated this time, her shoulders drooping, and sat down on the bed.

  He sat down next to her. “I couldn’t do it. Don’t you see? I can’t do this. Whatever it is you want from me. I can’t. I’m not the person you think I am.”

  She turned to him then and grabbed his hand, looking so frightened he knew what she was going to say even before she said it. “Don’t you want to be my friend, Rahul?”

  Twenty-two years old and sometimes she sounded like such a child, able to boil her needs down to the simplest things. And yet she was the wisest, oldest soul he knew.

  He pushed a wisp of hair off her forehead. “I will always be your friend, Kimi.”

  And because she started to cry, and because he knew that no matter what he told himself, he wasn’t her friend only because she needed it, he said what he had never said aloud before. “I’ve never left a hospital with good news.”

  She squeezed his fingers and lifted them to her cheek. He still couldn’t believe she could do that. Couldn’t believe how long and hard she had struggled to be able to do it. Then she leaned over and kissed his cheek. He wanted to stiffen, to pull away, but he pressed into her kiss. An incredibly soft sensation that softened everything inside him. That somehow made all the hard places loosen. And the loose places harden.

  “You are the bravest boy I know, Rahul.”

  “Yes, so brave I can’t even go into a big, scary hospital.”

  Her lips smiled against his cheek, and he was oddly glad that he could feel the smile instead of see it. Had he really thought of her as childish? She saw everything. That was the thing about Kimi, trapped in a world more limited than imaginable, she constantly used her mind to roam beyond the confines of all the limits she had no control over. She had a mind and a heart that saw more than most well-traveled people would ever see.

  She had always known why he hadn’t come.

  “It was not your fault then, and it will not be your fault when it happens to me.”

  He interlaced his fingers in hers. There were no words. Nothing he could ever say could be a response to her words. But suddenly he understood why she was so patient about her mother’s superstitions. She understood her own role as an instrument of pain, and she wanted those she loved to have help, any which way they could get it.

  Not only had she decided to be patient with his beliefs too, but she’d given him the seeds to heal his guilt, in case the thing they both did not want to happen happened. It was more than anything anyone had ever done for him.

  That softest kiss consumed him, swallowed him whole, overwhelmed him. He was trapped between the need to run before he was lost and the desire to stay here forever and be soothed by her lips on his cheek.

  What the hell, her lips were on his cheek. Panic rushed through him. He pulled away. “Kimi, what are you doing?”

  She smiled her too-wide smile. “I told you that you would be the first boy I kissed.”

  “It’s not funny, Kimi. You just gave everyone a scare and now you’re—”

  “What? I can now. Didn’t you hear?”

  She was the only one who told him about her health anymore. Who would have told him? “Hear what?”

  “That I’m almost like a normal girl now. I can even go walk around outside and everything.”

  He leaned back and studied her. “You’re serious?”

  “Have I ever lied to you about my health? This new medication they gave me with the transfusion basically makes my heart create normal levels of platelets. So, I can actually fight off infection now.” She made kung fu moves with her arms. “I can, in fact, do much more than just kiss you.” She scooted closer but stopped when he backed up. “One would think you find me unpleasant, Rahul.”

  “So this medication it . . . it cured you?”

  She laughed, got off the bed, and went back to the balcony and leaned into the carved marble railing.

  He followed her, a weird discomfort churning in the pit of his stomach.

  “Yes. I’m cured,” she said without taking her eyes off the ocean. “For now. It’s an interim cure.”

  “In the interim between what?”

  “Between being cured and having my heart give out.”

  He grabbed her arm and turned her to him, but he couldn’t form the question.

  “There is this breakthrough,” she said with a mirthless laugh. “A drug that can fix the immunity problem. But that could potentially destroy my heart.”

  “Kimi, no!” What had she let them do to her?

  “It was the only way I could come back home from the hospital.” She hugged her arms around herself and looked up at him, her eyes tired in a way so familiar there were no words for it. “No, really, this is good news. Apparently, hearts can be replaced but immunity is nowhere to be found for a body like mine.”

  He went down on his knees in front of her. She lifted her arm, but instead of reaching for him she wrapped her arms back around herself. It was a reflex, the fear of touching him, touching anyone. She h
ad kissed his cheek. He had soaked it up and then berated her for it because it had scared him. It had been an act of bravery. But now that he had punished her for it with not understanding, she was terrified again.

  He stood back up and cupped her face, and brought his lips close to hers. For a moment he could feel her warm breath and her racing heart with every part of his being. Then she froze. It was the slightest movement, but he felt her withdraw. He let her go and stepped back, furious.

  Furious with himself because of what he had been about to do. Furious with her for the price she had chosen to pay for his stubbornness. Furious because what choice did she have? Furious because she wouldn’t stop testing him. Everything she stood for, it felt like a constant test of courage.

  “Have you been outside then?” he asked, needing to put all that fury somewhere.

  Her chin dropped a fraction of an inch. Her arms wrapped tighter around herself. The ocean breeze had pulled strands of hair from her always tidy ponytail and they swished a little around her cheek—it was the only way he knew she had shaken her head.

  It had been years since he had thought about her delighted, hiccoughing laughter when her toes had touched the warm ocean foam as she stood on his rock. Mere meters from them that very same ocean churned on and on for as far as the eye could see. What kind of girl watched the ocean from her room every day but had never touched it with her toes? He remembered thinking that. Cruel in his judgment and unaware of the decade ahead.

  He almost reached for her hand, overwhelmed by the urge to sneak out over the wall the way they had done that day. He wanted to be on the rock with her again.

  “I’m still not supposed to push it and get infections because the harder my system has to work to fight things off, the faster things could deteriorate.”

  “So what, the doctors have given you a green light to go out, but you can’t?” Or her parents wouldn’t let her.

  “It’s not a green light exactly. It’s more like a greenish light for now. I’m supposed to be careful. And Mamma says—”