A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  “And, you’re going to be careful by not leaving this room until what? How long?” He was being a bastard by not understanding her fear. But he did understand it, and he hated how it sat on her. Her illness had sunk into her soul. It had told her all the things she could never do so many times that it had erased what she wanted. Altered how she saw herself.

  “Why are you being like this, Rahul? I thought you would be happy for me. For us.” Again she lifted her hand, but she couldn’t touch him. All she had ever wanted was in front of her, and all those years of fighting dragged at her, paralyzed her.

  He went back into the room. “Come with me.” He held out his hand.

  “Where?”

  “To the rock, you remember the rock? Come on . . .”

  She didn’t move. “You showed up weeks after I was sick enough to die, and now you’re upset with me because I won’t traipse off with you to the filthy ocean-side?”

  “I came as soon as you came home. You made me wait in the kitchen for four days.”

  “You waited in the kitchen?”

  What did it matter where he had waited? But she looked so angry he knew she hadn’t done that to him. He had always known. It wasn’t just anger, she looked humiliated, the way he should have been but hadn’t been because wanting to see her had overridden every other emotion. Everyone in the house, all the staff, hated that she had chosen to befriend someone so beneath her. He didn’t care. No one else needed to understand them. He would wait in an animal pen if that meant they’d let him see her.

  “You’re here now. Come with me.” All he wanted was to get her out of here.

  She pressed back into the railing. “I can’t. I’m not ready to go anywhere yet.”

  He knew Kirit and Rupa would never let her come home unless she was well enough. But he also knew that she wasn’t leaving here today. Truth was, no matter how much he wanted it, no matter how much she wanted it too, he could not imagine her ever leaving this place. Too much time had gone by for her to ever reclaim what she had lost. The sadness of it felt an awful lot like anger.

  He went back to her, looming over her. “So you’re planning to continue on here. Inside this room? You just made this bargain with your life and nothing’s changed?”

  “Everything’s changed.” She placed her hands on his chest with a tentative tremble that he hated. “Don’t you see? I can touch you now, Rahul. We can do things now. We can be together.”

  He stepped back. It was the last thing he wanted her to say.

  “Now we can be more than just friends.” She was about to say “finally,” but the expression on his face stopped her.

  What could be more than being friends? What could be more than what it felt like to wait by the phone to hear that she was okay? More than waiting to discuss every case with her? More than waiting to run his whole damn day by her? More than knowing that what she was thinking was not possible? Kirit had warned him repeatedly. Her mother would never leave the puja room if Kimi chose to be with him, a hawaldar’s son from a chawl. Plus he didn’t think of her that way. She was a friend, that was all.

  A friend whose heart was going to last only a few more years. If that.

  “What about your life, Kimi? What do you want to do now that you have a chance?”

  “I told you what I want to do.”

  He waved her words away. “That’s not what I mean and you know it. The Kimi I know would want to leap walls, she’d want to go into a classroom, she’d want to solve all the world’s problems. And when fear paralyzed her, she’d fight it.”

  She stepped around him and went back into the room. She sank into the huge, engulfing wing chair that seemed to swallow her up. If he didn’t know her so well, he’d think she was hurt because he had rejected her, but he knew the things that hurt her most, and he knew she was looking like he had just put a knife in her back because he had pointed out what was hurting her the most.

  Stepping out into the world after being locked up and afraid for so long wasn’t as easy as he had just made it sound. He wanted to apologize. But he couldn’t.

  She looked up at him. “I’m tired, Rahul. I need to rest.”

  He swallowed all the things he wanted to say. Because they were futile. The best thing he could do for her was to step out of her way.

  As he turned to leave, she reached for him and he placed his hand in her outstretched one, the time he had reached into the plastic glove flashing between their joined hands as though it were still there. Her hands were cool and soft except the tip of her forefinger where the clamp of a machine had made a permanent callus. The delicate beauty of her fingers in his made him conscious of his own bruised knuckles, his roughened calluses—the stark contrast between their hands giving form to all the things that separated them once they left this room, the way she now could.

  The intensity of the connection only added to all the reasons why he would do well not to forget all that separated them.

  “Will you come back and see me before you go back to New Delhi?”

  That would be a terrible idea. “Yes,” he said, and then he crossed the doorway where a plastic curtain had hung like the unbridgeable distance between them given physical form, and he left.

  26

  Kimi

  A long time ago

  Kimi had it on good authority that she could not live without Rahul. She had tried. She’d been so angry with him when he hadn’t come to the hospital, when he had turned all combative when she refused to leave her room. But she knew that wasn’t the real him. The real him wanted the same things she wanted. The real him wanted to be with her. She knew that and she would bring him around. How could she not? Sometimes the people you loved didn’t know what was best for them and you had to be their good sense. Wasn’t that what Mamma used to say to her?

  Some days she missed her mother’s aphorisms so terribly she wanted to storm into the temple room and steal her away from her gods. Not for too long, because Mamma needed what she needed, but only until she could give Kimi a few more stories, a few more of her lines to live by. The ones Kimi had collected years ago—before her vibrant, loving mother had disappeared behind her meditative shell—didn’t feel like they were enough anymore.

  But Kimi couldn’t bring herself to enter the temple room. She didn’t know why. Maybe because it belonged so definitively to Mamma. Maybe because the one time she had peeked in there, Mamma had seemed so far away that Kimi hadn’t recognized her and it had been terrifying.

  “She needs her Krishna,” Papa used to tell her years ago.

  Kimi understood. Mamma needed to hold Krishna accountable for this one child he had left her with after taking away seven. Krishna himself had been the eighth child of his parents and the only one to survive after his evil uncle Kamsa murdered the first seven to reverse the prophecy of his own death. The fact that Kimi, her eighth child, had lived was a sign. So, yes, Kimi understood her wanting to make sure that he did not rescind that sign and withdraw his gift even though it only left the tinkling of prayer bells as her daughter’s share of her.

  Kimi realized what a selfish thought this was. The fact that she was judging her mother’s love was wrong. She knew that.

  Especially since she wasn’t blameless in what had happened to her parents.

  Papa was no different. His days were spent maintaining his power, multiplying his money, so he could do the monetary part of her parents’ joint life’s work: Project KAKA. There was a time when Papa used to endlessly explain Mamma’s actions—she is doing all this for you, for the babies she lost. But somewhere along the way it had stopped. Her parents hadn’t just stopped referring to themselves as a single unit, but they had stopped referring to each other at all. They had become individuals isolated in their obsession with their vastly different methods toward achieving a joint cause.

  Truly, she was grateful for their love, but sometimes the weight of their fears piled on top of her own isolation became unbearable.

  How easily Rahul had
said, “Just leave the house and come with me to the beach.”

  Over the years, she’d seen the hordes at the beach grow from her bedroom window. All those people, all those germs. She saw the pathogens in the air the way the doctors had drawn them in their PowerPoint presentations. She saw them in her nightmares where they bit pieces out of her until she was mutilated beyond recognition.

  Even so, Rahul had been right to push her. What was the point of losing your heart to your freedom—she chuckled at her cleverness—if you didn’t have the courage to claim that freedom?

  It was time to claim it.

  She checked her watch as she paced her room. Rahul was coming over today. He had been on some super-secret mission in some remote part of the country for the past few months. The idea of him running around with a gun trying to hunt down criminals who also had guns made her stomach cramp, but the last thing she wanted him to see when he got here was worry or fear. Especially after he had found it so repulsive.

  She checked her watch again. He should be here in five minutes. Rahul had always been punctual, but now he was never, ever late. Ever since he’d become a cop, he’d taken on this new avatar. As though he’d taken all the extra-virtuous things about him and honed them into this near-robotic person in terms of precision.

  He’d always talked minimally, which worked well for her because he was a great listener, but now he was precise to a point of monosyllables. He’d always taken himself rather too seriously, but now he was downright severe in his worry about the world and all that was wrong with it. He’d always been punctual and dependable, never agreeing to do something if he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he could deliver. Now, well, right now it was seven fourteen and he’d told her he’d be here by seven fifteen, and she could count down the seconds . . . and there it was, the doorbell.

  She steeled herself to execute her plan. First, she would be all breezy and friendly and not obsessed and desperate the way she sometimes felt around him these days when he went all distant. Ever since she had seen him in that uniform, he made her go all gooey inside. How did one deal with that when it was your best friend? Okay, truthfully, it had been long before the uniform.

  She would deal with it. If all he wanted right now was to be friends, that’s all she would demand. Because sooner or later he was going to come around and see that she was the one—because she was, she just knew she was. Second, she would prove to him that she was brave, that she was done being locked inside the house. She could just see his face when he found out what she had done, how very ready she was to “blow this joint,” as they said in Hollywood movies.

  It had been a tough decision, but she had to do the hard thing and go away for two years. God alone knew how she was going to convince her parents, but Rahul would help with that.

  She stepped outside her room and watched him run up the stairs. The main stairs. She couldn’t believe they had made him take the servants’ stairs all these years. She had put a stop to that, and she didn’t care that Sarika tai had given her the silent treatment for a good month for it.

  His vitality was a living force. His eyes smiled when he saw her, although he didn’t yet give her the pleasure of a full-blown smile. It was his way. He made you work for that smile.

  He stopped short, his eyes turning a strange kind of intense for just a second. She was standing at the railing, outside the door to the waiting area of her room. It was a first for them, her greeting him this way. She walked around the house and the grounds now. Another thing she had to be grateful to him for. If he hadn’t goaded her to use her freedom, it would have taken her much longer to leave the confines of her room. Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. Why was the one thing she had wanted so badly so hard to claim?

  “Exactly on time,” she said, leaning into the railing and watching him. He was still in uniform. Which meant he had gotten off the plane and come straight here. He hadn’t had a chance to go home and change as he’d like to have done. But he’d committed to a time and he wouldn’t be late. If there weren’t these things, these parts where he understood that she waited, understood what waiting meant to her in a way no one else understood. If there weren’t these parts where she saw so clearly how much he cared, she would have let him go, would have believed what he wanted her to believe.

  “Always.” He walked up to her, and she held out her hand feeling like Emma greeting Mr. Knightley, when she wanted to be Lydia and throw herself at Mr. Wickham, giggling madly.

  He smiled and took her hand, and she got the full-faced smile she’d been hungering for. “You’re thinking of literary comparisons to how we’re greeting each other, aren’t you?”

  Did she need to prove her “he loves me” theory anymore?

  Ah, but all in good time, right?

  She tugged him into the room. “Certainly not Cathy and Heathcliff, not even Mercedes and the Count,” he said, his eyes doing that searching thing.

  Thank God for that. Those were not love stories to aspire to.

  “You didn’t stiff-curtsy, so it isn’t your usual Elizabeth and Darcy.”

  Getting warmer.

  “Ah, Emma and Knightley, of course.” He looked jubilant at having solved it. But it was she who felt all the jubilation, all the way down her arms to her fingertips.

  He looked away from her face, suddenly not as jubilant. She couldn’t let tension creep between them today.

  “Okay, so guess what’s happening today?” she asked, trying not to bounce on her toes.

  He relaxed and smiled again. “You’re going to let me take you to the beach?”

  She balked—tongue-hanging-out-all-agog, eyeballs-popping-out-like-a-cartoon-film balked, making him laugh out loud like the Rahul he was inside.

  “Seriously? Because I was being sarcastic.”

  Did he really believe her such a coward? She must’ve pouted, because he said, “Okay, okay, sorry, I should not have said that.”

  Good, he was in a let’s-not-fight mood. Which meant they were on the same page. She picked up his hand again and dragged him toward the stairs.

  “What, we’re leaving right now?”

  If she thought about it she would chicken out. “Let’s at least leave the house. That much I’ve been doing.”

  He gave her his “I’m so proud of you” look, and she took it without telling him about the knee-shaking, clammy-palm reaction she had every time the front door opened. At first it had happened every time she stepped out of her bedroom. While that had slowly reduced in intensity, the front door was still a little nerve-racking. But the very thought of the gate made all of her nerves turn into twanging rubber bands at once.

  But not today.

  Rahul and she headed down the corridor. The prayer room was silent. So, Mamma was still at the temple. Sarika tai stepped out of the kitchen. She still worked at the house part-time, just in case Kimi got sick and needed a hand. “Baby, everything okay?” she asked, her concern turning to alarm when she saw Rahul next to Kimi.

  “Yes, thanks, Sarika tai, just going to walk around the back lawn with Rahul.” The last thing she needed was another conversation in which Sarika dropped as many references to all the work Rahul had done in the house. Kimi had long stopped kidding herself that any of that had been praise for Rahul’s hard work, and she was getting tired of having to point to all of Rahul’s achievements without provoking any real admiration.

  If Rahul thought it was strange she had lied about where they were going, his face didn’t give anything away.

  Then Mahesh the doorman jumped up when he saw her and studied his watch, even though there was a floor-to-ceiling teakwood grandfather clock salvaged from the palace of Kolhapur sitting right across the entrance lobby from him. “It’s a little late for Baby’s walk?” he said without moving to open the door.

  “Yes, a little late today, kaka,” she said. “But it’s still light outside.”

  Rahul watched silently as Mahesh did a quick bow and nod and opened the door. “I lighted
all the mosquito lamps earlier, so Baby should be safe from bites.”

  “Thank you, kaka,” she said, and Rahul followed her out, where they were stopped by mali kaka, the gardener, who also started when he saw her out at this time of day. Unless it was because she was with Rahul. But no, that wasn’t it this time, because pride shone in Mali kaka’s rheumy eyes when they fell on Rahul’s uniform, and he straightened and saluted him. Instead of smiling at him or being embarrassed, Rahul saluted back, a quick, smart flick of hand against forehead that flashed a whole different Rahul at her.

  For a minute her absolute belief that she knew him, all of him, inside and out, teetered. But he walked to the gate and she followed him, her heart hammering at the thought of what lay beyond those high wood-and-brass gates. This was where she had first seen him, standing right by the gate, the storm inside him too large to be dwarfed by her vantage point on top of the gatehouse.

  “Wait a minute, Rahul,” she said, breathing hard. “Why don’t we walk for a bit on the back lawn?”

  He came back to her, leaned into her ear, and pointed at the gatehouse. “Remember that girl, Kimi? You know what struck me most about her that day?”

  “That she had freakishly large eyes. I know, you’ve told me a million times.”

  He smiled like that boy he’d been. Storm Boy.

  “She still has freakishly large eyes. But back then her eyes held adventure.”

  She swallowed. Then took the hand he proffered and her feet began to move.

  It had been exactly what she needed to hear. Adventure—she had craved it with a mad, childish wanting. It used to make her want to skip. It used to make her feel like she was bursting out of her skin.

  Twelve years and it was gone without a trace, and she couldn’t backtrack to the moment when it had disappeared.

  She ran past him and stopped when Bhola smiled widely at her. “Hello, Kimi-baby,” he said, pulling the gate open. “Saying bye-bye to Rahul? Very good,” he said in careful English. And it made her smile even wider.