A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  It was time for her to stop acting like she was made of glass. Papa had lied about her surgery. Asif Khan had run a black-market organ ring. She wasn’t stupid. “How bad is it?”

  He looked like she felt, as though someone were squeezing him between plates of glass that were about to shatter. “I’m going to have to make an arrest in Jen’s murder case.”

  “But you killed Asif Khan. You got her murderer. Who else is there to arrest?”

  He took her hand. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be touched. Didn’t want him looking at her this way. Didn’t want to hear what he had to say.

  “Your heart—you were right to think that your heart had something to do with why Asif was after you.”

  She tried to pull her hand away. He didn’t let it go. Every single time she’d had a bad diagnosis, somewhere in her heart she’d known what was coming. It was that gauge inside that signaled impending disaster. It was going mad right now. And Rahul’s face reflecting all the panic she was feeling only made it worse.

  “You already know that Asif was stealing organs from people on Jen’s registry,” he said gently.

  She didn’t look away, but she could barely stay upright.

  “This is what I’ve put together. We’ll have to confirm the details.”

  “Just tell me, Rahul.” If he’d put it together, there was no chance in hell that he’d gotten it wrong.

  “When they couldn’t find you a donor, Kirit-sir somehow found out about Asif and went to him to procure a heart for you. Jen was on the organ registry too. Asif had access to the registry and found out that Jen was a match for you. He had her killed so you could have her heart.”

  She felt numb. Tears started streaming down her face, but her eyes felt dry.

  The image of Jen in Rahul’s arms kissing him filled her head and squeezed the breath from her lungs. She had felt such choking anger and hate.

  “I’m sorry,” he said uselessly, as though all his bloody apologies ever fixed anything.

  This time she yanked her hand away with enough force that he let it go. “Why is everything your fault, Rahul? Are you God? Do you make people pay for organs, do you make them kill people for you?”

  “Kimi.” He reached for her again, but she got off the bed. She wanted to rip off the wires and tubes, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She never disobeyed doctor’s orders. She had sworn never to. And now that she knew Jen had died so she could keep on living, how could she do anything to put it at risk? This heart that was snatched in the middle of a vibrant life, this heart that was a symbol of the cruelty in her genes.

  “Have they arrested him yet?” Suddenly, she was scared. “Do you know where he is?”

  “He’s at home. He can’t leave.”

  “Will you be the one to take him in? Please.”

  He didn’t move. He sat there as though he understood what she was feeling, as though he knew he could never understand. “There’s more,” he said.

  What more could there possibly be?

  “The person who threatened Nikki and sent her after Nikhil. That was him too.”

  No.

  He tried to take her in his arms. She pushed him away with all the violence gathering inside. “Don’t touch me, please.”

  “Kimi, please. None of this is your fault.”

  How could she not laugh at that? “Really?” she wanted to say. “Would any of this have happened if it weren’t for me?” But she could barely breathe, let alone make words.

  “Let me help you,” he said again, trying to hold her, but she pushed him away again.

  “Help me how? Will you let him go? Will you let him get away with it?”

  “Is that what you want me to do?”

  She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t see if he would do that for her. More mayhem in her name.

  “Of course not,” she said, when what she wanted to say was, “What about me? I’m a criminal too. I took the heart.”

  For the rest of their lives, she would be a constant reminder to him of a dead friend, of a heinous crime. He was right in thinking that love wasn’t worth it. That it always ended in loss and pain. That the price of getting what you wanted was always too high.

  “I want you to go,” she said. “I want you to be the one to arrest him. Will you make sure no one hurts him?”

  He nodded. “I owe him that much,” he said before he walked out of her room.

  She ran to the door and called after him, making him turn around. “You owe him nothing, Rahul.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “But you will make sure he’s safe? Please.”

  “I promise.” And then he was gone.

  35

  Kirit

  Present day

  Rahul would be here soon. Kirit took the gun out of the drawer and called his wife.

  As expected, he got her voice mail. A mechanical voice telling him she was not available. Even now at the very end, she remained unavailable. “Attachment is the heart of all suffering,” she loved to say. Every conversation with her was a reminder of that little ditty of hers.

  “This isn’t an apology,” he said into the phone. “But I did want to tell you that I loved you once and thank you for giving me the most beautiful thing in my life. My regret is that I have to leave her in the hands of the parent who doesn’t know how to be a parent anymore. If she ever needs you, try to be there for her. I doubt she will. We’ve both learned how to live without you. She loves that boy, and I’m giving them my blessings. As long as you don’t stand in their way, I have left you well taken care of. Use the money how you will. Go on and spend all of it on your gurus, who tell you to choke your ability to live until it is all gone, if you must. But let Kimi give life a chance.”

  He hadn’t expected saying good-bye to her to hurt like this. But life was full of surprises. He hadn’t expected any of this. Amazingly enough, the biggest problem with sugarcane farming was the husk waste. Sugarcane, like life, made you pay in tons of unsavory, unusable husk for a bowlful of sugar. Once that husk started to decay, the smell of that thing could burn your nose hairs.

  And yet, the bowlful of sugar was worth it. Just like his Kimi. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to her.

  As expected there was a knock on the door. Kirit picked up the gun and held it to his head. “On time as usual, DCP Savant,” he said as Rahul walked in and froze, his tall, proud form taking in the situation with deadly calm. It was a strange time to feel pride in this boy who had never really been a boy. He’d been more of a man than most men, even when he was a boy.

  “Please put the gun down, sir,” he said in that even negotiator’s voice.

  “Have you told Kimi?”

  “You can tell her yourself. Please put the gun down.”

  Kirit couldn’t help it, he laughed. “You want me to tell her? I thought you loved the girl. How are you okay with what it will do to her?”

  To his credit, the boy looked utterly destroyed.

  “She’s capable of handling more than we give her credit for,” he said. “But you can’t do this to her. You can’t leave her with a dead father on top of everything else she has to handle.” He took a step closer, and Kirit released the safety.

  “Don’t come any closer or I won’t get to say what I need to say. What I need you to understand and explain to Kimi.”

  “Fine. I’m listening. But please take your finger off the trigger.”

  Kirit left his finger where it was. “Did you know I was an orphan?”

  Rahul shook his head.

  “My parents died when I was two. My uncle was forced to take me in. But I barely ever saw him. My nanny was my only source of affection, and I decided that she was my mother. At eight, I insisted that she take me to her home. It took one trip to the servants’ quarters for me to know definitively that she was not my mother. That I had been lying to myself. Her three children argued constantly. They made no effort to be nice. She smacked them when they misbehaved but
there was nothing hateful about it. What I saw in their home that day, it was like nothing I had ever seen before. I spent my entire childhood seeking it out—this thing that made families families. The ownership and the ability to be filterless and your very worst and best at the same time. I wanted it more than anything else.

  “What attracted me to Rupa was that she shared my yearning. We were on a film set with some children, and she wanted to play with the children all day. She was such a mother even before being a mother. Her first movie was a super hit. She was set to be a star. But when I offered her a family, she jumped at it. I told her then that my wife would not work. That our children would have to come before everything else. She agreed. No hesitation. It’s what she wanted too. When she got pregnant that first time, I thought the sheer volume of my happiness would kill me. But we couldn’t keep the babies. Three boys and four girls we lost before my Kimaya stayed.

  “Ten years—that’s all we got. For ten years I had a family. Because Rupa went through all that pain. I promised her that I would never let it be in vain. That our family would never break apart. Kimi turned us into a family. She became our life. I would have done anything. I would have cut out my own heart if it meant we got to keep Kimi.”

  “Jen was pregnant too. Did you know that?” Rahul said, as though everything Kirit had said meant nothing. “Her husband and she were also going to start a family.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Rahul. It couldn’t matter. How dare you not understand? You, who knows Kimi. Knows what she is. Could you let her go? Would you let her go if you had a choice to keep her?”

  He was about to answer. But Kirit couldn’t let him deny it. He swung the gun between them. “Don’t lie. I’ve asked you to let her go. I’ve told you how dangerous this connection between you two is. You can never keep her happy. Not because she’s a princess and you’re barely a step above a beggar, but because you could never bear the pain of living with loss hanging over your head. Your cowardice would kill her spirit. If I had let her die when I was offered a solution, what would your life have been? And she would have died. We had come to the end of the road. I was offered a bridge and I took it.”

  “What you were offered was the chance to steal another human being’s heart. You made the decision to let another person die, so someone you love could live.”

  “It wasn’t like that. Asif tricked me so he could blackmail me. I thought I was paying to get to the top of a list of recipients. I didn’t know he would kill someone.”

  “So it was okay to let other people on the list die?”

  “Judge me all you will. But you know you would have done the same thing.” Kirit’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Rahul said, not moving a muscle. “But Kimi has to live with the knowledge that her life comes from someone’s death. And now you want her to live with the additional burden of knowing it made you take your own life. After how hard she’s fought for you. You’re the coward here.” He took a step closer. “I lied earlier. Kimi already knows it was you. And her only response was that I don’t let anyone hurt you. She won’t be able to live with what you’re about to do. You know that.”

  Kimi knew? The entire burden of the pain he had caused her descended upon him, making the gun feel too heavy in his hand.

  “You said yourself I know her. I do know her. Kimi believes you always do the right thing. She understands your motivations better than anybody. All the things you just told me. When you tell her she’ll understand. If you turn yourself in and take your punishment, she has only your crime to deal with. She might still forgive you. Don’t take that choice away from her. Please. You’ve already taken too many choices away.”

  Rahul’s form got blurry as Kirit’s eyes filled with tears. His baby girl. He’d never asked her what she wanted. And she’d never complained.

  “Her life has just started. Don’t end any chance she has at happiness this way.”

  The gun trembled in Kirit’s hand.

  “Put the gun down.”

  He tried, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. Kimi really was just starting out. He couldn’t take her lease on life away from her.

  It was the hardest thing he had ever done. Harder even than reading the last rites for seven babies. He put the gun down.

  Rahul was on the gun in a second. He popped out the magazine, pulled out a pair of handcuffs, and called to the officers who were standing outside.

  Five officers stormed into Kirit’s office, guns drawn. Rahul handed the handcuffs to another officer and left the room.

  The officer turned Kirit around. “You are under arrest for abetment in a criminal offense and intentionally participating in a criminal activity.” The click of the handcuffs was louder than he had expected.

  “I release you from your promise,” Kirit said to no one in particular.

  Rahul was exactly the kind of man his Kimi deserved.

  36

  Kimi

  Present day

  Kimi used to think Rahul’s apologies were complicated things. That showed how much more she had left to learn about life.

  In the span of these past few weeks, she’d heard enough apologies to last her a lifetime, and they had all twisted and untwisted the braid of her life.

  First, her mother had rushed back from Kashi. Her mother had never rushed back from anything, ever. No matter what. And she’d been in a panic. Mamma’s worry had been such a part of Kimi’s life once. Long ago before Kimi had lost her freedom to one room in her home, and her mother to another. But the worry had felt like an old friend, instantly worming its way into Kimi’s heart again.

  “I’m sorry, beta, so very sorry,” she had said, rushing into Kimi’s hospital room and wrapping Kimi in a hug that still smelled the same. “I was sitting on the banks of the Ganga when I saw your face in Mother Ganga. You were calling out to me. ‘Mamma!’ It was so clear. Like a mirror, like you were right there, but not you now, you at every age as one. And I saw my baba. Smiling at me after all these years of anger.

  “Your grandfather had been so angry at Kirit and me. He thought we had lost our balance in our quest to become parents. He wanted us to listen to the universe. His belief was that if we pushed the universe too hard, it would push back. He died three months after you were conceived. He was perfectly healthy. Then one day he didn’t wake up. No doctor could explain why his healthy heart stopped. But the week before that he had told me that if God took him so Kirit and I could end our penance, he’d gladly go.

  “I saw him on Mother Ganga and he smiled at you, and I knew, just knew, that we had finished paying the price now. And then your father called, and it was a miracle. Here I had my vision, and there I heard his voice on my phone telling me you needed me.”

  Were you a prisoner of your parents’ thinking?

  Kimi sure hoped not.

  She wanted to care for her mother’s great epiphany. But everything was blurry and slow. Even more than it had been after her surgeries and transfusions and treatments. She was glad Mamma was back, because seeing Papa handcuffed and behind bars was not something she could have done by herself no matter how numb she was.

  Rahul had been by her side, incessantly, every step of the way, but she couldn’t bear his presence. It made the heaviness worse. With her parents, with the bail and bonds and lawyers and paperwork, she could distract herself by doing things. One look at Rahul, and she wanted to collapse into herself.

  “Don’t do this, Kimi,” his lips kept saying. “Let me in,” his eyes kept saying.

  Ironic? Yes.

  But that’s the way it was.

  She resigned from her job, gave Rambo to Rumi, then plucked all her dream stories from her cubicle wall, and brought them back home and tucked them away.

  Then there was her father’s apology. Her father apologized and apologized. She heard every one of his excuses from across a table in a jail visiting room. Everything from how his uncle had locked him up in his nursery for crying, to
his vow to her mother that she would not lose another child. But she could see them as no more than excuses.

  Would she have done the same? It was a question that was asked over and over again by the press to panels of experts. Apparently, the public wasn’t quite as judgmental about a father going to the black market to save his daughter as one would have expected. The TV was rife with arguments about moral-ethical dilemmas, but it wasn’t quite the one-sided stoning one would expect either.

  All she knew was that if this is what love was, an excuse to justify murder, she didn’t want any part of it. Not from her parents and not from Rahul, no matter the pain that flashed in his eyes every time he looked at her.

  “None of this is your fault,” Nikki said to Kimi, handing her a cup of chai.

  Kimi still couldn’t believe she was sitting in Nikki and Nikhil’s living room, drinking chai with Nikki.

  How Kimi had made her way to Nikki and Nikhil’s flat after they returned from Chicago, she would never know. But it had been her turn to apologize, and she had to.

  They hadn’t turned her away. Hadn’t turned her apology away. Hadn’t turned her gift to Joy away.

  She had found the perfect little Lhasa Apso for Joy, and Joy was very much in love.

  “Why don’t you hate me?” she asked Nikki, because Nikki was the kind of person of whom you could ask something like that. Nikhil had taken a little more time to adjust to the fact that his dead wife’s heart actually beat inside Kimi and that he had lost Jen because of Kimi. He hadn’t been mean, just shaken. But then he had come around with his signature kindness.

  “Because you weren’t responsible. You didn’t even know. You have to stop punishing yourself. Maybe even stop punishing Rahul?”

  She ignored the mention of Rahul the way she always did these days. “Can I ask you a horribly personal question? You don’t have to answer.”

  Nikki nodded.

  “Is that how being a parent feels? Would you do that for Joy? Kill for him?”