Hold my Hand (Penguin Metro Reads)

by Durjoy Datta

  After Dad and Sadhika are done with buying half of Hong Kong and stuffing it into their suitcases, we find ourselves in a restaurant that smells like Japanese—even the waiter addresses us in Japanese.

  ‘So, Deep, how’s work?’ Dad asks after we are done ordering. I want his questions to be easy to answer for I have learned that Deep is easily thrown off his game by human attention.

  ‘They don’t really care if I turn up in office because then they have to deal with what work they have to give me. So it’s great!’ he replies.

  ‘Deep is here on a software internship project,’ Dad explains to Sadhika. ‘And she’s an aeronautical engineer and builds the planes I fly. She’s brilliant!’

  ‘That’s so cool,’ Deep says. ‘I have sold my life to software. We get a lot less credit than we deserve. Like rag-pickers. But I don’t mind it all that much.’

  Dad and I don’t get the joke but Sadhika laughs and says, ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. The software industry is probably the only one where you can be seventeen and a millionaire!’

  ‘That only makes it worse,’ Deep quips. ‘Not that I care too much about being a millionaire, but I wouldn’t mind it either.’

  ‘He’s a writer,’ I interrupt. I know Deep hates it when I say that, but I love the word and I love to think of him as one, so I just keep telling everybody who’d listen.

  ‘Oh, is he? That’s interesting,’ Sadhika says.

  ‘Writing is for girls,’ Dad says and laughs.

  ‘Dad!’ I snap. ‘You have been lugging a pink suitcase for the past half an hour, shopping like you just won a lottery.’

  ‘Shopping is very manly activity. It’s like hunting and gathering, like cavemen, only here you have to pay,’ he defends himself.

  ‘You can’t get past that,’ Sadhika adds. ‘I was surprised, too, when I saw him attack those shops with a vengeance.’

  We laugh.

  We eat prawn rolls, and sushi, and something I don’t know the name of, but it tastes delicious. Dad leaves with Sadhika after waving down a cab for Deep and I.

  Once I’m back in my room I crash. And this time, I sleep for real.

  Part Three

  Hold My Hand

  23

  Ranbeer wakes up exactly at 5 a.m., like he has done for the past ten years, brushes his teeth and changes into his Aéropostale gym trousers and an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt that is a size too small for him. He tiptoes out of the hotel room that he and his daughter share and runs down the eighteen floors to the gym, working up a nice sweat before he starts working out. Today, it’s back and legs, his favourite body parts to work on, and he starts with a mix of squats and deadlifts.

  Hotel gyms are mostly empty, he has noticed, except for the odd gym rat or the vacationing sports guy or middle-aged women looking for gym trainers to spend some fun time with. He likes it this way. Working out alone gives him plenty of time to think. Today, there is just one woman, in her early thirties he reckons, running furiously on a treadmill, the balls of her feet pounding the belt. It reminds him of how time has passed him by, because only yesterday he could run a mile under four minutes, something that seems out of reach now. He’s forty-four, without a wife, without a home to go back to, and a blind daughter whom he loves dearly.

  Being a mother to Ahana has been delightful, it’s the only time he doesn’t miss Farah, the woman who still has an iron grip on his heart. It’s been twelve years since she’s been gone. It seems like only yesterday that he followed her around the airport, thinking of what to say to her, and at the same time juggling the possibilities that lay ahead if she was single, wondering if she would be accepted in his family, and making up his mind to fight for her come what may.

  Ever since she went, losing her fight to a cancer which no one could detect in time, he has been running from one city to another, looking for respite from thoughts of her, from the life he thought he would have with her, guilty of how weak he felt sometimes, and wrecked because he thought he wasn’t being a good father. Farah often used to say that she’s married to a teenager, and this wasn’t far from the truth. Some men aren’t supposed to grow up, and Ranbeer was one of them.

  Fatherhood wasn’t that hard on him, loving Ahana was his second nature, but nurturing her was Farah’s job, and when she died, his world came tumbling down and he was rudderless. And as if that wasn’t tough enough, Ahana had gone blind, struck by a congenital disease that affects the optic nerve. This had happened a year before Farah had died, but it was what they saw as a small blip in a long, blissful familial life. They never saw her disability as something that could derail their life; it was just another chore to be taken care of, like the laundry, or the dishes. The cancer, though brief, was fierce and destroyed Farah, who went from being a beautiful woman to being a gaunt, weak cancer victim in a matter of months. It emptied their savings, and destroyed the life they had painstakingly built together.

  He left his job and went private, flying planes for corporations that needed trained, courageous pilots who could test new aircraft. The pay was good and he knew it was the only way he could have paid for the special schools that were essential for Ahana to cope with her blindness. Between then and now, they have lived in seven cities. Ahana had grown to be a beautiful woman, uncannily reminiscent of her mother, as if genetics had rejected all his traits.

  Ranbeer is in the middle of his leg press drop-set when his phone rings.

  ‘Is it today?’ he asks. ‘Right now? Fine. I will be there.’

  He wraps up his workout with a couple of sets of lunges and back extensions. His flight to New Delhi leaves in two hours, where he is needed to test a new prototype of a small cargo plane that their company has developed. He doesn’t want to be late, a habit drilled into him since his days in the Indian Air Force. He runs back to his hotel room, this time his calves are screaming with pain, reminding him that his best days are long gone.

  Ahana is still sleeping, curled up in a ball, and looks like a cute puppy wrestling a ball of wool. He washes himself, gets dressed in a T-shirt that says ‘LICK’, and a pair of faded jeans, and all this while, he can’t take his eyes off his daughter, so young, so delicate, so unfortunate, yet so brave.

  He goes out of the room to spray himself with cologne, a habit he picked up from experience—Ahana used to wake up due to the smell—and comes back to the room. He kisses her goodbye.

  Ranbeer’s 1969 Harley Davidson is in its usual spot. He, often begrudgingly, admits he likes the attention he gets when he’s on the motorcycle, but maintains it was his love for the bike that made him buy it. He checks his reflection in the rear-view mirror and thinks about Sadhika, the only other woman whom he has let into his life.

  It’s a fifteen-minute ride but he drives around in circles because he loves to hear the deafening sound of the modified 150cc engine, it makes him the badass of the streets of Hong Kong, but not quite. Years of his daughter’s company have made me mellow, like a marshmallow, Sadhika had said.

  ‘Hi, Ranbeer!’ Sadhika says and they hug. Just days ago, they were shaking hands, but now they are hugging.

  She’s is beautiful, she’s broken, she’s like me, he’s thinking. His unflinching, unwavering love for Farah never allowed him to be interested in any other woman, although there were always some around, hankering for his attention.

  Sadhika was a happily married woman with a young son, until she was not. A long divorce and a messy custody battle had left her thin, fragile and depressed, almost suicidal. He had ignored it at first, the tears, and the disappearances into the Ladies room shortly after every meeting, but then he was reminded of Farah, alone and distressed at the airport, and he wanted to be there for Sadhika.

  Their friendship was fuelled by their need to tell someone that life is hard, and no matter how brave a face you put for the world, no matter how much you love your kids, it’s always hard bringing them up, and there are days when you wish life were simpler.

  ‘I need you to go through t
his with me. Also, here’s the manual which I want you to read. The aircraft is 456, an upgrade to the 380 we tested a few years back, so I don’t want you to ignore the manual. You have four hours on the flight to India. Please put it to good use,’ Sadhika instructs like a school teacher. God knows he wanted to hug her and tell her that he needed her, that he understood her pain, and that they could be together.

  ‘What would I do without you?’ Ranbeer nods and says— something he has told her a zillion times over the last few years that they have worked together. But usually it was about testing aircraft, while today it was about him. ‘I will call you once I land in New Delhi.’

  ‘I will wait,’ she answers. ‘And please, the manual.’

  ‘Whatever you say, ma’am,’ he says and salutes her.

  24

  Deep and Ahana are out in the city again—the city Ahana has come to love more than any other she has lived in. She always knows how the different parts of the city smell like—like Causeway Bay smells like the Times Square in New York or Champs-Élysées in Paris; Tsim Sha Tsui smells like a street in South Delhi; Jordan Street smells like delicious street food and the sweat and happiness of shoppers and shopkeepers alike; and the islands that surround Hong Kong Island, Lantau and Lamma Islands, smell like earth, and quietness and spirituality.

  Today, Ahana woke up to her father’s call telling her that he wouldn’t be home until late night, or probably the next morning, and Deep woke up wondering if it was the right time to call Ahana.

  It wasn’t until eleven that Ahana called and asked Deep if he could take her to the Hong Kong Museum of Art in Tsim Sha Tsui. She knew Deep was the kind of boy, thoughtful and considerate and intelligent, who would willingly want to go. Deep was kicked about it. The sun was out, so they decided to walk their way to the harbour. Deep had insisted that they would take a ferry again from there, and Ahana liked the idea—the memories of last night’s ferry ride were still fresh in her mind.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ Ahana asks after some time.

  ‘It’s easy to lose yourself in the streets of Hong Kong. But it’s not because you don’t know your way, it’s because the city consumes you in all ways possible,’ Deep tells her.

  Their fingers are intertwined and though they have been holding hands since the first day that they met, today it feels different. After breaking up with Aveek, Ahana had sworn off boys, she knows she isn’t good at dealing with loss. Nothing has been said between Deep and her, and she wants it to remain that way. She wants to believe that she isn’t in love with him, that she can let him go and yet get on with her life, but she is having a hard time convincing herself.

  Deep hasn’t said a word about their relationship either, but she can’t blame him. Though she doesn’t doubt Deep’s affection for her, it can very well be just that—affection, not love. It unsettles her how Deep understands her with all her complexities, how he never intentionally brings up her blindness in a conversation, and only thinks of it as a minor quirk, like a sixth thumb, or a purple streak in her hair.

  She hates it when he says all the right combinations of words because they stick, and they resonate in her head every night when she goes to sleep. It hurts as much as it feels great because she knows she will never forget the things he has said, and he will. Boys, especially ones with eyes, always forget what they say to girls with no eyes. As Deep puts it, ‘Stupid eyes, always ruining everything.’ She is surprised how she remembers every conversation she has had with Deep in such detail.

  ‘Oh, there was a shop which looks exactly like a Metro station!’ Deep points out.

  They have been walking for an hour now, but that’s what it’s like to walk in Hong Kong. You just want to keep doing it. A five-minute walk turns to an hour and an hour turns into two and then it’s already evening. No wonder there are so many foot massage centres in the city, Deep thinks. The roads turn at perfect right angles and they never seem to end. They are just stuck, wilfully, in a never-ending maze with fascinating people and places and shops and temples tucked away in corners.

  ‘Where are we?’ Ahana asks.

  ‘We are under a flyover where ten old women are beating something with the soles of their shoes. I read about it online. You give them a reason or a cause for your sorrow and they beat their shoes and it’s all gone!’ he says, trying to sound excited.

  It’s been like that all these days. Deep has tried hard to keep Ahana entertained, scared that she might not call, petrified that she might choose Aveek over him and go to some blind convention rather than take him around the city. So whenever he tells her about the goldfish market in Kowloon Island where there are forty-odd shops that sell goldfish in tiny little transparent packets filled with water, making the entire street look like it is water and gold, he hopes she will be fascinated. Or when he makes her smell every one of the zillion flowers that the flower markets have in every conceivable colour, he tries to make it sound like Hogwarts, like they are in a magical place, and strangely enough, he begins to believe his own words.

  When he recollects his day at night, thinking of what they did together, it seems like they walked hand in hand through a land where goldfish swam between big flowers along with ferries that sailed into the sunset—unbelievable and beautiful.

  Deep has never felt sorry for Ahana or her disability, for if she were able to see, she would never be with him, and worse, he feared it would change her. He had not yet written a word of his book after the first two paragraphs. It’s not that he hadn’t tried, but writing didn’t come naturally to him, and even when it did, it came in short bursts. The words he wrote could never do justice to Ahana. It was like falling short of words describing your favourite book; you can’t explain to another person how much you like it.

  They take the ferry again, and he is excited, though not as much as he was the night before. The sun is shining and he’s not as brave to caress her hand while she’s still awake. They reach the harbour. Deep spots a few couples dressed in flowing white dresses and tuxedos getting their pictures clicked by a professional photographer who continuously suggests new poses. He describes it to her, scared that he wouldn’t be able to put in words—the beauty of the moment, the smiles of the couples, their embarrassment and their happiness. The realization that he will never be good enough for her strikes him again.

  Being a midnight girl doesn’t take away the fact that Ahana, too, is a girl, and she, too, has dreams of being swept off her feet, led to the altar by her father and be married to someone who will always be with her in thick and thin.

  And in blindness.

  When Deep tells her about the happy couples, painting a picture in front of her, she curses her disability, something she does rarely. Who would want her? She asks herself. She knows Deep romanticizes the smallest of incidents, making them grand and beautiful. Now, she can’t help but think of who Deep is thinking about while he describes the whiteness of the brides’ dresses. It’s definitely not her. Who would want her? She asks herself again.

  ‘Do you know who Andy Warhol was?’ Deep asks and she shakes her head, feeling inadequate and stupid. ‘He was the pioneer of pop art. I’m not sure what that is, but it’s basically people’s pictures in different colours. So Marilyn Monroe’s is one of the most famous portraits made by him.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ she asks.

  ‘Because you wanted to come to the museum and they have a special exhibition on Andy Warhol. I thought that’s why you wanted to come here,’ he explains.

  ‘Right.’

  She feels small and foolish. This morning, she had turned on the television and had heard someone talk about the museum and she thought it would be a nice pretext to go out with Deep again, but Deep, who knows everything unnecessary, didn’t see through it.

  They walk around the museum listlessly. Deep tells Ahana about Hong Kong’s obsession with preserving history, naming sites as heritage sites all over the city, and restoring them to their past glory. He tells her about t
he walled villages in Hong Kong like Tsang Tai Uk, amongst scores of others, some of them dating back two hundred years, that their government have now restored. This fossilizing their past—the old houses, the sources of livelihood, the tiny beds, the little walls that protected them—are all for their future to see. He says he has read about them on the Internet and really wants to go, but Ahana is barely listening. It’s not the first time Deep has expressed his shock over how the region is furiously building skyscrapers, yet industriously protecting its earthly past, and how this marriage of development and history is seamless and unobtrusive.

  Deep buys Ahana a pair of headphones and an audio guide that explains all the artefacts. Ahana can’t concentrate at all, and waits for those times when he leans towards her, his face barely inches away and tries to listen in with her. Though it all seems futile to her; eventually Deep has to go, to his world where he has friends and books and family and girls with eyes to date, and she will be alone with only her dad.

  She has to let go, she decides.

  Deep is no longer interested in seeing paintings on display, yet he keeps bending over so that he can be close to her beautiful face. He notices her expressionless face and stays quiet, letting her concentrate on the audio book while he wallows in self-pity.