‘They’ll be mad,’ she whispered.
‘They’ll be worried,’ I corrected.’
‘It’s not just about the disease Jai,’ she sighed, sitting herself up, making sure to keep the sheets wrapped around her as she reached over the side of the bed to grab my discarded tee and pull it on, gladly letting go of the blankets once it was over her head. She shuffled around a bit, settling herself more comfortably in the middle of the bed, turning to face me. One look at her face told me that it was time for the real serious conversation so I sat up too, allowing the blanket to slip down and pool at my waist.
‘What is it then?’ I asked, watching with mild concern as she sighed and tied her hair back with the bobble she always kept on her wrist.
‘Look, I know you don’t like how blunt I can be about all this but just hear me out before you say anything yeah?’ she began. I nodded, agreeing to do as she’d asked – or try at least. ‘Right, then I’ll tell it to you straight. The fact is that nobody can tell me how long I’ve got left. And I know we both know that already but, well, I’m being told that I’m dying and I feel like I’ve never even lived, you know?’ I nodded again, understanding the feeling but not quite understanding what it was she was getting at. ‘There’s so many things I wanna do Jai, so many places I wanna go and things to see. And I’ve not been able to do any of it. We’ve lived our entire lives in Blidworth; I’ve spent my whole life in one house. And that’s not a bad thing, not really. But this is a small town and we don’t get out of it all that often. And, when we do, it’s hardly ever to go somewhere beyond the East Mids. I’ve been out of the UK once, in my entire life, just the once. In 18 years.’ She paused a second, taking a breath and gathering her thoughts. ‘I just… I don’t want the rest of my life to pass me by the same way. I don’t’ want to die without doing anything. And I’m not saying I want to do something big. I just want to do something. I want to see the world, or a bit of it at least, explore, have an adventure. But, right now…’ she trailed off, sighing again and scrubbing a hand over her face.
‘I had a plan Jai. I’ve always had a plan. I knew what I wanted from life, knew what I wanted to do with my life. But now, I dunno, that plan, it just seems boring.’
‘What do you want to do then?’ I asked, unsure whether I was leaning more towards being understanding of where it was coming from or shocked to be hearing it from Alia; she wasn’t the type of person to deviate from The Plan. No matter what happened, The Plan didn’t change, had not changed since we were ten. It had grown, become more elaborate, more detailed, but the basics had always been the same.
‘I don’t know yaar,’ she said, almost whining. ‘All I know is that I don’t want to follow The Plan anymore Jai. I want to live.’
‘Als, listen, if that’s what you want, I’m with you. You tell me what it is that you want to do now and we’ll make it happen.’
‘There’re a lot of things I wanna do. I think the only thing that’s not included is go to uni surprisingly enough,’ she said with a light laugh and a shrug. ‘I’ve been making a list, a bucket list I guess.’
‘Wait a sec, so when you said that you were making a list of things to do before you die…’ It was my turn to trail off this time, realisation dawning on me.
‘I meant that seriously, not sarcastically,’ she finished for me.
‘Ah shit Li,’ I’m so sorry,’ I apologised, suddenly feeling like crap.
‘Don’t be. It came out a lot more sarcastically than I meant it to,’ she laughed.
‘Still, I know you well enough that I shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions like that,’ I protested.
‘We’ve both been running high on emotions lately and we don’t talk about anything nearly half as much as we should. It only ever comes out in bits and pieces here and there. One of us was bound to explode eventually,’ she pointed out. I had to admit, it was a valid point; it didn’t make me feel all that much better but I couldn’t deny its validity.
‘Okay, I guess you’re probably right,’ I conceded. ‘But maybe we should talk about this properly then, stop anymore explosions from happening?’
‘Probably, yeah,’ she agreed with a nod.
‘So, this bucket list of yours, where’s it come from?’ I asked.
‘I dunno really. It’s just, well, like I said, The Plan doesn’t feel like what I want to do anymore.’
‘But you do still have a plan, right?’ I asked, unable to comprehend Alia not having a plan at all.
‘The plan… the plan is to not have a plan,’ she said, looking like she herself wasn’t quite able to believe she’d actually just said that.
‘You’ve- you’ve not got a plan?’ I repeated. ‘You, the one who’s always planned everything; you don’t have a plan?’
‘Yeah, it’s pretty weird for me too,’ she admitted. ‘But, in a way, it also feels kinda good. I feel like, you know, I’ve always followed the plans, stuck to this path, and been bloody strict about it too. But now, to say screw it all, it feels liberating. To not have a plan, to just do what I want, when I want. Even just the thought of it feels amazing.’
‘Okay, if I didn’t know that even an alien wouldn’t stand any kind of chance against you, I’d ask who you are and what you’ve done with my best mate,’ I joked, earning myself an eyeroll and a light slap on the arm.
‘I’m serious Jai,’ she scolded.
‘Okay baba, you’re serious,’ I laughed. ‘How about we take a look at this list of yours then, see what we can do?’
‘Really?’ she asked, sounding relieved.
‘Oi, what’s so shocking about that?’ I demanded, affronted.
‘Nothing. I just, I figured you’d be pretty annoyed with me is all. I mean, I’ve been harping on about The Plan since we were still in primary school,’ she explained. ‘Changing it all up on you now, it’s not exactly considerate of me.’
‘Als, you do know I’ve never really cared all that much about The Plan, right?’ I asked, almost relieved to finally be able to admit it.
‘You didn’t?’ she questioned, genuinely confused. ‘But, all the time we spent making it… you never had any interest in it?’
‘Do you honestly think I would’ve spent the time planning it if I wasn’t at all interested?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘But you just said-’
‘I said I never actually cared about it, not that I had no interest,’ I pointed out. ‘It was fun to make it. All the research we did, putting it together. The vision boards and scrapbooks of ideas and everything; I enjoyed doing that. But it never mattered to me like it did to you. I mean, you genuinely cared about it, you were crazy passionate about it too. I only cared about it because it meant so much to you.’
‘So you spent all that time helping me research and put things together just because it mattered to me?’ she asked, sounding a little perplexed. I nodded, wondering why that confused her. ‘I’ve known you eighteen years and you’re still finding ways to surprise me,’ she told me with a laugh.
‘It really shouldn’t surprise you Li; after all, you’re the one who calls me an emotional fool.’ She tilted her head, conceding the point. ‘Anyway, enough about The Plan now. Let’s take a look at this bucket list of yours.’
‘Alright, I’ll just go grab it,’ she said, getting out of bed and heading for the door.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I looked at the page-long list in Alia’s notebook, a little taken aback by how extensive it was. ‘You know, when you said bucket list, I thought it would be, I dunno… smaller,’ I told her, looking from the list to her and back again.
‘It’s a list of all the things I wanna do before I die; like I said, there’s a lot of things I wanna do,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I can see that,’ I remarked, still looking over the list.
‘We don’t have to tick everything off, I know that probably won’t be possible – not unless, by some miracle, they find a heart donor match,’ she told me, scoffing a little a
t the thought. Though I hated when she was pessimistic like that, I couldn’t deny that even I wasn’t getting my hopes up for that; though they’d decided to put her on the list after her assessment at the transplant centre, they’d also said that it was rare for a match to be found, and even rarer for one to be found that was close enough to be viable. ‘I’ve basically just been writing down everything I could think of.’ She shrugged, acting like it was no big thing but it didn’t take a genius to see that she wanted to try to do it all at least.
‘I figured as much,’ I chuckled. ‘But, no matter how extensive your list is, we’re going to try to get as much of it done as we possibly can. Starting with teaching you how to ride a motorbike.’
‘Why’re we starting with that?’ she asked, forehead creasing as her eyebrows pulled together. ‘I mean, there’re other, probably easier, options.’
‘Well, yeah. But getting you to drive a motorbike may or may not be on my bucket list too,’ I told her with a grin.
‘Oh really?’ she questioned, looking at me with a new kind of interest. ‘And what else is on your bucket list?’
‘Oh you’ll find out eventually,’ I dismissed, purposely vague. She rolled her eyes but shrugged, having learnt by now that pushing me for details only ever led to me withholding them.
We both went quiet a minute after that, me looking back at the list again and Alia probably thinking up a way to trick me into telling what else was on my list.
I spoke before she did, deciding it was about time to get around to voicing something that’d been on my mind a while. ‘Ek vaat kou tane?’
‘Like, serious vaat?’ she questioned, both eyebrows raised.
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, sure,’ she agreed with a nod, sounding a little apprehensive.
‘Before we even start thinking about ticking things off, I think we should tell your parents.;
‘Jai, telling my parents… maybe they’ll understand but maybe they won’t,’ she sighed, biting her lip.
‘Als, they’re your parents, they’ll get it,’ I assured.
‘They’ll get that I’m sick, yeah. But will they understand that I want to live life on my own terms, that I don’t want to stick to The Plan? I mean, they’re the reason for it; yes, I always wanted to go to uni but mainly because nobody else in my family made it that far. Are any of them going to understand that I don’t want it anymore?’ she questioned, looking to me for the answer like she honestly didn’t know what she should expect from her parents.
And honestly, I couldn’t say I blamed her. Rahul uncle and Jaya aunty were extremely liberal as far as Indian parents went; they were about the most progressive people I’d ever met really, brown or not. But they had this habit of worrying about their kids more than was probably healthy – for them or their three kids, four if you included me like they did. While I was sure they would understand why their youngest daughter had taken so long to tell them about the things that were going on in her life, I couldn’t honestly tell her that they’d understand her wanting to make the most of whatever time she had left.
All the same, they were her parents, they did have a right to know. And I knew she wouldn’t be all that happy to hear that so, I chose my next words very carefully, speaking slowly. ‘Look, I can’t give you a guarantee that they’ll for sure understand but you have to try. Otherwise… I mean, hiding from your family, especially now, when you don’t know how long you’ve got left, is that really what you want to do?’ I asked.
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds and then she let out a huff, crossing her arms over her chest. ‘You, Jaival Edmonds, are a conniving asshole,’ she grumbled, making me laugh.
‘So, you’ll tell them then?’ I asked – though, really, I didn’t need to; the abusive language and glare directed at me were answer enough.
‘Ugh, yes you asshat, I’ll tell them,’ she said anyway, looking very much like she’d like to kill me as I continued to laugh.
***
The next day, I found myself at the Sharma house at nine a.m.
While it wasn’t all that odd for me to be there as soon as I’d finished breakfast – or sometimes before, especially when I had nothing else to be doing – it was weird definitely weird for me to walk into Alia’s room and find her on the floor, her scrapbooks all around her. Some of them were piled haphazardly, others open, spread on the floor in front of her. ‘What’s all this?’ I asked, gesturing to the books covering almost every available surface.
‘Was looking for these,’ she told me, lifting the one she was looking at to show me the cover. One look was all it took for me to recognise that it was one of the earliest versions of The Plan.
‘God, we made that so long ago!’ I exclaimed with a laugh, crossing the room and shifting some of the scrapbooks out of the way so I could sit down on the floor next to her.
‘D’you remember how many hours we spent cutting pictures of unis outta newspapers and magazines?’ she asked with a nostalgic little smile.
‘And the glue. It got everywhere,’ I remembered, grinning at the thought of Jaya aunty’s exasperation when she’d seen we’d got PVC glue all over her table cloth.
‘We were what? Ten?’ she sighed, suddenly looking much older than her eighteen years.
‘We had no clue what it took to get into uni back then, or even how to pick which one we wanted to go to. We picked them at random, the ones that looked good or were the easiest to cut out.’
‘And we didn’t know a thing about what happened afterwards. Jobs, careers, housing, mortgages… we were clueless. We just wrote down any random shit, so long as it sounded good,’ she reminisced. ‘But every year, we’d learn a little more, narrow things down, figure it out, bit by bit.’
‘The amount of time we spent writing everything out so carefully, making sure it was all nice and neat, putting these things together,’ I said, looking around at the books full of our research that littered the room.
‘And now, all of this is gonna go down the drain,’ she sighed, staring at the book in her hands.
‘You know, if you’re not sure about it, if you want to stick to the plan, you can. That’s okay too,’ I told her.
‘I-I don’t. I mean, that’s not what it is, not really. It’s just, it’s hard to believe it you know. After all these years, all our research, I’m giving it up,’ she explained, sounding like she didn’t know if she should be upset or relieved.
I let out a sigh, aware of how difficult it was for her to set out to live her life without a plan – and how important it was too. My words could make a world of difference here so I knew that I had to be extremely careful about what I said. At the same time though, I knew that I couldn’t make it seem like I knew what was best for her.
Aside from the fact that she had a tendency to do the exact opposite of what she was told was best for her, the truth was, I had no idea what that was, not this time.
I hadn’t had a single doubt about telling her that hiding from her parents was a bad idea – though I’d been sure to keep quiet about it until she’d brought it up – and I could tell her with absolute certainty that relaxing and not pushing herself too hard was a brilliant one. But there was no way I could tell her whether or not it would be better for her to stick to our carefully constructed and thoroughly researched plan or not. I could give her my opinion, sure; but whether that really was the best thing for her I couldn’t say.
The thing is, The Plan wasn’t just a layout, it was so much more than that. It was all of her goals, all the things she wanted to achieve, the things she could achieve. And, while that kind of order and structure definitely wasn’t something that worked for me and my hyperactive brain, it was exactly what Alia needed. To throw all of it away, live life without schedules, colour-coded notes and a clearly defined path to follow… well, I can’t say I didn’t understand why she was hesitant, even if I personally wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
Because, even though there was definitely a hell of
a lot we had in common, where we differed, we differed massively.
So I knew that I couldn’t tell her what she should do, only lay things out for her clearly, show it to her outside of her own head. ‘Listen, I can’t tell you what you should do because, as well as I know you Als, I don’t know what exactly you should do here; fact of the matter is that only you really know what’s best for you. I know this is scary for you, that “throwing away” all the hard work and living life without the careful structure. But, just take a second and think about how you’d feel if you followed it. If you went to uni, spent the next three years – which could very well be the rest of your life – studying. And then maybe, hopefully, working – if you manage to make it through three years of coursework and exams without a stress overload.’ She sighed, biting her lip in a way that told me that, though my words were helping her to sort through the jumbled mess of thoughts in her head, they weren’t helping her come to a decision.
‘Look, I’m not saying you have to give it up. If it’s what you really want, follow it and I’ll go along with you. But Alu, even if I don’t know what’s best for you right now, I do know you. And I know for sure that the way you spoke yesterday, what you said about living life on your own terms, that’s something you want as much as you’ve always wanted the degree and the career, if not more.’
‘It is,’ she admitted quietly, almost like she didn’t want to. ‘And that’s what scares me Jai. It’s not about letting go of the neat, organised, colour-coded path. The thought of being free of it all, just doing what I want, living my dreams… it’s exciting, thrilling, and that – that Jai-Jai, is terrifying.’
I looked at her for a long moment, the pieces finally coming together as I ran over her words. I remembered how strange it had been to hear her say she didn’t have a plan anymore, how confused I’d been yesterday when she’d explained to me that the feeling of not having an outline for how her life was supposed to go was liberating. And I realised that, if it had been so shocking and weird for me, it must have been beyond strange for her.
Have a Heart Page 13