A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  Even so, she refused to let herself feel admiration for the woman. She refused to feel like a terrible person for how she felt every time she thought about that day when she had walked in on Rahul with her.

  Jen was not the love of my life.

  How dare he say those words to her?

  How. Dare. He.

  And how dare she let it hurt so much.

  It felt like hot embers in her chest. It felt like they’d removed her heart again and put burning pieces of coal in its place. That’s how it had felt when she had first heard him talk about Jen. But she had ignored it as silliness. She had lectured herself about learning to deal with sharing him with the world once The Great Escape happened.

  She needed to stop calling it that.

  She needed to stop using all the terms Rahul came up with. But what would that leave her with? No language to reference anything.

  That ball of panic filling her belly wasn’t real. It was no longer real. He was no longer her window to the world. She was now inside her own world, and she intended for it to stay that way.

  She had already made up her mind where she wanted to go. Her entire life, all she’d done was change her plans because of things outside of her control. Nothing was changing her mind this time. Waiting for Asif Khan to wake up and answer her questions was a coward’s way out. She was going to track her donor down on her own.

  Settling back into her seat, she watched the world jerk and flash by as the auto-rickshaw tore through the traffic-clogged streets as though it were invincible—a perfect metaphor for how she was going to live her life now that death no longer loomed at every corner.

  3

  Rahul

  A long time ago

  Rahul understood death. He felt a kinship with it even. It had settled inside him when he was fourteen years old, when his father lay bleeding on his lap. Blood mixed with warm, undefinable things leaked from Baba’s perforated body and collected in the indentations his weight pressed into Rahul’s thighs. Death tremors tapped indelible beats into his muscles, leaving a tattoo of pressure rhythms against his skin, leaving the forever wetness of blood on his palms as he tried to plug the bullet holes and failed.

  He should have known then that death was seeping into him, pushing out half of him, merging into him like a ghost image that disappeared with corrective lenses, leaving behind crisper edges. He should have known then that the sensations of death would burrow like flesh-eating worms under his skin as soon as they pulled Baba off. But all he knew was that time had been trapped inside him after the gunshots had shut down his ears.

  It took two officers to lift Baba, his limbs heavier in death, magnetic in their stubbornness for wanting to fall back into Rahul’s lap.

  It struck him with some incredulity that death gave men weight, turned them into a sack of mud caked inside skin.

  Baba had been mud, even before they had put him on that stretcher.

  He will be okay. Keep courage.

  Courage.

  That’s what they kept calling it.

  This thing they wanted him to keep.

  But how did you keep something you did not own? Did not know? Could not find in the hungry panic inside you? Where everything was swallowed whole by your mother’s face, by your younger siblings’ faces, waiting at home with their noses pressed to the slats of the balcony railing, waiting for you to come home with their father, because the permanence of a parent was their entire reality.

  “Can I keep terror instead?” he wanted to ask as the holes in Baba’s chest refused to stop oozing blood in too many springs for his two hands to constrain.

  Can I keep terror instead?

  Because that’s all he could find.

  Why had he laughed with Baba when he had made fun of Aie for wanting him not to go?

  “It’s money, woman of mine. How will you get to show off a new sari on Diwali if I don’t report to duty when I’m called? It’s election season. Once it’s gone, I’ll stay home and worship you every weekend.” Baba in his brand-new assistant-sub-inspector, Mumbai Police uniform had been a sight to behold.

  “I don’t want a new sari for Diwali if it means your children don’t know the face of their father,” Rahul’s aie had said, flushed with anger because her perfect Sunday had decided to rebel out of her control.

  “They know your face, beautiful one, you’re their aie. It’s a more beautiful face anyway. Who would choose my ugly thobda over that?”

  It had calmed her. Rahul never thought of his aie as vain, but Baba could always get her to calm down with a little bit of flattery. His secret weapon.

  Baba was right too. Aie was beautiful. He’d heard all the aunts in the compound taunt her about it. Half envy, half joy that someone who looked like her—with that glossy skin and hip-length hair and eyes darker than melted tar—had to wait in line at the water tap just like they did.

  He’d heard Baba shout about it on Fridays when he came home tipsy.

  “I’ll kill any bastard who looks at you. You’re not a Bollywood heroine. This show is mine. Mine! Move along, suckers.” Baba would sweep his hand, shooing away the imaginary mob of men.

  Aie would laugh her shy laugh into her sari and watch Baba hand out the Cadbury chocolate eclairs he always remembered to bring the children, no matter how hard it was for him to stand up straight.

  “Come help me maintain my dignity,” he’d say to Rahul. And Rahul, who’d been as tall as Baba at ten, would shoulder him to the bathroom, help him out of his clothes, and then help him to the mattress on the floor that Aie and Baba shared in the inside room.

  “You know what the best thing about your aie is? Don’t let me fool you. It’s not that she looks like a goddess. It’s that she gave me you and your brother and sister,” Baba had said to Rahul once, leaning unabashedly on him. “All a man wants is a strapping son to take care of him in his old age. I’m giving you practice, what, Rahul?”

  Now here he was, watching as they lifted Baba into the ambulance, stumbling after them, leaving red handprints on the white ambulance door.

  “You can’t go in there, beta,” one of the constables said, holding Rahul back, his arms gentle but firm.

  “He can,” an authoritative voice said. It belonged to the politician Baba had jumped in front of when the madman had started shooting, the man who should have been on the stretcher instead of Baba. He nodded at the constable. Just one nod from him was enough to get the man to back away. “That’s the child’s father. Put him in the ambulance.”

  The constable lifted Rahul into the ambulance and the politician followed.

  “Sir, we can follow the ambulance in your car,” someone said behind them, but the politician didn’t stop. He squeezed himself in next to Rahul.

  Rahul shifted as far away from him as he could in the cramped space that smelled like blood and sweat and the alcohol doctors swiped on your arm before giving you an injection. He wanted to push the man into the stretcher bed, switch him out with Baba.

  “Let’s go. What are you waiting for?” the man shouted at the driver and they started moving. “I’m Kirit Patil,” he said, turning to Rahul. “I’m going to do everything I can to make things all right.”

  Two lies in one sentence from a man whose bullets sat inside his father’s bleeding body. Anger bloated inside Rahul, dulling the terror for a few seconds.

  “I’ve seen you in movies,” Rahul said, although it had been a while since he had seen the man in one.

  “Yes, I used to be called Karan Kumar when I acted in movies, but that’s not my real name.”

  “Why would anyone change their name?” It seemed like a horribly dishonest thing to do.

  “The world is a very complicated place. And our name is not as simple as two words.”

  Rahul shrugged. Baba’s hand in his was getting colder and heavier and Rahul shook it as though that would change things.

  “What is your name?”

  “Rahul Surajrao.” Baba’s name stuck in Rahul’s
throat and he had to push around it. “Savant.”

  He didn’t want to speak to the man. He wanted him to go away.

  But he didn’t. Not once they got to the hospital and not when a doctor came out of the operation theater and told Rahul what he already knew: that Baba was gone. That the skin on Rahul’s thighs that had pressed down under Baba’s weight would stay that way forever. That Aie and Mohit and Mona were still waiting at home for their usual Sunday dinner of fried fish, Baba’s favorite food in all the world. That Rahul would never again be able to eat fish without throwing up.

  The minister stayed there through it all. And for some reason as long as he was being watched by the skinny, tall film star or politician or whoever the man was with his mop of hair as black and thick as Baba’s, Rahul could not cry.

  To his horror, the man came home with Rahul. He, along with a crew of officers and constables from Baba’s chowki post, drove Rahul to the chawl compound where he had lived all his life. But as they stomped across the caked earth of the playground, edged on three sides by three long, squat buildings that made up the community that was his home, everything felt foreign, as though he were visiting for the very first time.

  Neighbors—their chawl family Baba called them—stared down from the front verandas that ran the length of the buildings. The viewing gallery had been as permanent a fixture in Rahul’s life as the fact that he had two parents. It seemed to freeze as their procession crossed the ground. Everyone seemed to know. A few of Rahul’s friends who were kicking around a ball called out to him, but the uniform-clad sentry surrounding him kept anyone from actually approaching him.

  They trudged up two flights of stairs. The red betel leaf and tobacco juice sprayed into the grimy walls of the stairwell made Rahul’s stomach push acid up his throat. By the time they made their way down the veranda that connected the homes on their floor, he could hear the sound of his own breath ricocheting against the perpetually open front doors with their peeling blue and green paint. In all his life, Rahul had never walked down this path in silence, never without queries about his grades from the grandpa who sat in his easy chair all day and all night. Never without being stopped by the retired uncle who never let Rahul go until he had helped with the crossword. Never without the grandma next door shoving her latest sweet confection into his mouth.

  Finally, they stood outside Block Number Fifty-Five, where nothing more than a green door separated them from their chawl family. As always, the door was unlocked. Just last week Baba had bought the only cell phone in their family. They had never owned a landline. No one inside his home knew what he brought with him today. But the wall of uniform-clad officers behind him was almost as loud of a signal as his bloodstained shirt would have been if the politician hadn’t procured a clean shirt for him from somewhere.

  Even before Rahul said a word, Aie’s face went white. They said that in books—the blood drained from her face—but he could not have imagined his mother’s dusky skin turning Hollywood-actress white. Even her eyes faded. The black losing all its gloss. She fell back against the kitchen door, the latch rattling behind her. Mohit clung to her sari with both hands. Mona ran to Rahul, excited that he had brought home so many guests. She jumped up in his arms and his stiff body worked from memory and pulled her close.

  Her skinny legs wrapped around his waist, her sticky-sweet Mona smell filling his lungs and sitting on top of the hot, metallic tang of blood as she whispered a wet whisper into his ear. “Is Aie angry because Baba brought home too many people for dinner again?”

  Then she stiffened. Ever so slightly at first and then more and more as her body registered that there was a person missing from the crowd. A feeling Rahul would never lose. As though someone who should be here wasn’t, but only because he wasn’t looking hard enough.

  She stretched her neck to search. “Where’s Baba?” she said in an uncharacteristically scared voice.

  And Aie started to sob.

  * * *

  For weeks, an endless stream of uncles and aunts flooded the house, the kakas and kakus bringing with them an even more endless stream of questions and opinions.

  Has Rahul cried yet?

  Someone needs to get that child to cry. It’s unhealthy.

  Has anyone talked to Rahul about what he saw?

  No on all counts.

  Rahul hadn’t gone back to school yet either. His friends from the chawl compound had come over a few times and tried to talk to him, no doubt coerced by their mothers, who didn’t understand that social duty and fourteen-year-old boys didn’t go together. There had been shuffling feet and no words. Finally Mukesh, who could barely speak a sentence off the football field but turned into a dynamo of words (mostly of the swearing variety) on the field, dragged Rahul down to the playground.

  But his friends were worthless adversaries. The harder he played, the more accommodating they became, and that made him get more and more aggressive until the older boys playing on the other side of the field noticed and beckoned him over. “Oy, showoff, come show us what you’ve got.”

  He did, and they sent him home with bruised ribs and a bloody nose. It felt good. Standing around with the older boys as they smoked and leered at passing girls also felt good. Nothing was expected of him there. In their shadow he was invisible.

  “How old are you?” one of the older boys asked, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

  “Almost fifteen.”

  “You look like a fighter. You interested in the fight club? I can put in a good word with Azaad bhai.”

  Azaad bhai was the local gang lord. Aie would break Rahul’s legs if he even said that name in their home. Rahul walked away without answering. But fighting with his fists and getting paid for it sounded so good it made him hungry for it.

  4

  Kimi

  A long time ago

  Mamma was worried. Which was like saying the bitter gourd was bitter. It was, to use one of Mamma’s own phrases, stating the obvious, and to throw in one of Papa’s phrases, just her natural state. Mamma always worried.

  Kimi had come home from school and sneezed. Three times. Usually, one sneeze was bad enough, but sneezing three times around Mamma was inviting the Big Box.

  Mamma’s father had been a raj-vaidya, a grand master of ayurvedic medicine. Kimi had never met her grandfather. He had died just after Mamma had become pregnant with Kimi. It was a story Mamma could never tell without needing to dab her nose and eyes with her embroidered handkerchief. But then the story of Kimi’s birth was one no one ever seemed capable of telling without tears. The part of the story Kimi had not been able to piece together (because stories like this did not come with a question-answer section) was what her birth had to do with her grandfather’s death. All Kimi knew was that the two things were related.

  The Big Box was her grandfather’s legacy to Mamma. The servants weren’t allowed to touch the leather-bound trunk with its two shiny brass latches. Iron locks hung by the latches, and the keys always hung by Mamma’s waist along with the cluster of keys she tucked into her sari with a large silver key hook. The hook with its bells and embossed statue of Saraswati the goddess of knowledge had been in Mamma’s family for centuries, mothers passing it down to daughters from generation to generation. According to Mamma this was the rarest of things, because most family treasures were passed down from father to son or mother to daughter-in-law.

  Kimi loved to run her fingers over the timeworn silver when she hugged Mamma. No matter how hot it got, the key hook remained cool to the touch. When Mamma moved through the house, the tinkling sound of the bells mixed with the muted jangle of the keys. It was possibly Kimi’s favorite sound in all the world.

  Inside the Big Box were all the herbs and remedies her grandfather had mixed into potions that could cure everything from a common cold to broken bones. Kimi loved to hear the stories of her grandfather’s miraculous potions. He had once saved the prime minister from an attempt to poison him by identifying and delivering an antidot
e after one look in the minister’s eyes. He had healed the warts on a grand maestro’s vocal cords and given him back his singing voice. Mamma had told Kimi that she could walk into any of the maestro’s concerts anywhere in the world and tell him whose granddaughter she was and she would be invited into the concert for free.

  He was legendary, her grandfather. But he wasn’t a miracle worker, as Mamma made sure Kimi knew. He was a scientist. He could identify a plant not just by sight or touch alone but also by smell, even if the plant had been plucked years ago. He was said to have had a hundred thousand vials in his storerooms before his dispensary in Ahmednagar had been burned down during one of the communal riots. Fortunately, her grandfather had been traveling to Pune with the Big Box at the time to treat the dean of the Film Institute. It was the only reason his most precious remedies, or at least remnants of the most vital ones, had survived. Her grandfather had left the box to Mamma along with guidelines for formulations and their usage.

  Three sneezes meant Kimi’s grandfather’s genius was in order and out came the Big Box. The first question Mamma asked Sarika tai, Kimi’s nanny, was if any of the servants had been sick recently.

  Apparently, mali kaka had shown some signs of sniffling. Not that the gardener ever came inside the house. Kimi wasn’t about to tell Mamma that she had helped mali kaka pluck the flowers for Mamma’s evening prayers yesterday.

  Mamma leaned over the open trunk, extracted one measure of gray powder from a jar with a silver spoon, and placed it in the glass Sarika was holding out. “Twenty milliliters of water and three drops of coconut oil,” she said, and then to Kimi, “up to bed.”

  Kimi groaned. Not that anyone heard it. Kimi made sure no one ever heard her groaning. But she had an entire dictionary of inner groans tucked away. First, she hated coconut oil. It made her gag. But Mamma seemed to believe it was the cure for all evil. She had Sarika tai massage coconut oil into Kimi’s hair every Sunday and then wash her hair out with scalding-hot water. Anyone who saw Kimi and her hip-length hair seemed to remark upon it, so Kimi knew that Mamma’s remedies were not entirely without merit. Still, her grandfather’s potions were so vile tasting it wasn’t a miracle that the germs all died. They must choke to death from the taste alone.