A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  The fuckers wove through the quickly thinning crowd, exchanging fire with Maney and his men, who led them straight into Rahul’s path. He had them. His sight shifted like clockwork between the three as Maney and the others boxed them in and kept them from scattering again.

  They flew across the road and hit the beach, horns shrieking around them, screams rising from the crowd. The cold metal recoiled in Rahul’s hands. The familiar flash of warmth kissed his palm as the impact of the bullet leaving the muzzle shoved his arm muscles up as if he were pushing snug sleeves up his elbows.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. Three shots.

  He spun the pistol around his trigger finger and shoved it back in his holster. The bastards were out cold. All three of them. He sauntered over to the bodies sprawled across the dry sand. They hadn’t even made it to the wet part of the beach. No point hurrying; the bastards weren’t going anywhere good. Hopefully, they were already burning in the special hell there’d better be for fuckers who held children at gunpoint.

  Avoiding the bloodstains that spread around the bodies in imperfect circles, he leaned over the first body and shoved two fingers at the pulse that didn’t even stutter. Just the way the cop had done to Baba when he lay bleeding on Rahul’s lap. He didn’t bother to push away the memory and withdrew the hand he found rubbing the spot on his thigh where the imprint of Baba’s head would never stop burning.

  Every single time he put one of these bastards down, he relived that day when the constable had shoved a finger into Baba’s neck. The memory was inevitable. He’d given up fighting it years ago. He let it slash through his mind and pass. It was easier that way. Less messy than struggling with it, because it always won.

  “Gone, boss?” Maney said, running up behind Rahul.

  Rahul straightened without answering. Of course he was gone. If they cut him open, they’d find Rahul’s bullet exactly in the center of his heart.

  “We got one more down that way.” Maney ran the finger check on the other two bodies. “Perfect shots, boss, as always.” He waved to his team, which was already cordoning off the scene. “Oy, boys, over here, come see, Savant-sir’s handiwork.”

  Now that the danger seemed to have passed, a crowd was gathering again. The resilience of Mumbai’s citizens never ceased to amaze Rahul. It was almost as if they were so numb to danger and violence that they didn’t even internalize it before moving past it.

  But the danger was alive and well. Asif wasn’t among the dead.

  “I think we got all of them from the hospital, boss!” Maney said, but one look at Rahul’s scowl and his cockiness dissipated. “Except Asif, of course.”

  Rahul turned away from the bodies and headed back to Tina.

  Maney fell in step beside him. “He can’t keep running. We’ve dwindled his gang down to almost nothing. We’ll get him. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Time. The starkest truth of life—either you didn’t have enough or then it went on and on. And bastards like Asif used every moment of their endless lives to make it purgatory for the rest of the sods who trudged along trying to get by. It was about damn time someone ended his time here.

  Leaving Maney to deploy search teams, Rahul headed back up the hill to The Mansion. The sun was almost all the way up in the sky and blazing with that pre-monsoon intensity that parched every inch of the city and made it beg for the rains like a starving child.

  6

  Kimi

  Present day

  Kimi’s office cubicle was chock-full of pictures. Mostly story ideas (what she wanted to do) and events she had covered (what she did do). Getting hired as a celebrity reporter for the Indian operation of the world’s largest Internet media company hadn’t been hard. There wasn’t a celebrity who wouldn’t give Kirit Patil’s daughter an interview. Consequently, there wasn’t a media outlet that wouldn’t give her a job. And there wasn’t one that would give her a job reporting on anything other than celebrities, given that “dangerous work” wasn’t what Papa wanted her to do.

  She hit “send” on the piece that was due today: “Yummy Mummies: How Star Wives Rock Pregnancy.” She stuck a finger in her mouth and made a gagging sound. It was such cutesy, syrupy drivel, she thought she was going to make herself sick. But she had no one but herself to blame. After refusing to do an exposé on star marriages (“Rocky Marriages That Fake Being Rocking Marriages”), her boss had asked her, with enough syrupiness to rival her piece, what kind of “non-damaging” pieces she’d be okay with doing, and she’d had to come up with stupidass ideas such as this one.

  Pregnant women were adorable and all, but seriously, just the photo shoot had been enough to induce failure on her poor secondhand heart. Imagine five pregnant women in couture trying to look thin and cute and complaining the entire time about being in pain. Because, hello! Those heels alone would give even an Olympic athlete aches and pains. Finally, airbrushing had saved the day. Whatever the magazine was paying Rumi, her photographer partner, it was not bloody enough.

  She peeked into Rumi’s cubicle, but it was too early for anyone to be at work. “It’s media, darling,” Rumi loved to say. “Nothing of interest happens in the mornings.”

  She scrawled Rumi a note, trying not to think about another note she had scrawled. She could imagine the smile on Rumi’s face when he got it. He thought it was so cute that she left notes.

  The note she had left Rahul? Nope, he would not be thinking there was anything cute about that.

  She plucked a picture off her cubicle wall and slipped it into her bag. Taking the picture with her was another stupidass idea, but she did it anyway. Then she threw a quick glance around the office and made sure no one was around in the sea of cubicles before running her hand over the red fabric-draped wall. “I love you,” she whispered to her cubicle and then quickly to her computer and her chair and to Rambo, her fern. “I’m going to miss you.”

  Her job might not be the dark-underbelly journalism Kimi had dreamed of, but much as she hated that it wasn’t, and much as the work she did sometimes annoyed her, she also loved it. Having something as normal as a job was a dream she had been too afraid to dream even in her most reckless moments, and she loved it. The cubicles, the offices of the bigwigs that sat in the center where everyone could covet them, even the bathrooms with the psychedelically painted stalls and mirrors stenciled with inspirational quotes. All of it, she loved all of it.

  Rolling her suitcase across the office, she attempted a minor lecture to herself. You’re going to be gone for just two weeks. All of this will still be here after two weeks. You will still be here. Yes, she would. She would still be here. She passed a mounted poster of the National Award for Media Excellence. A collage of earthquake-ravaged slums, the prime minister with his hands folded in a namaste, and the parliament houses, death and suffering juxtaposed over power. She had to still be here, for a long, long time. There was so much she had to do.

  All those times when she’d had this thought and everything had slipped from her grip like sand turning to air swept through her in a disorienting wave and she almost stumbled. But she caught herself. She refused to stumble. She might want to report on hopelessly depressing and infuriating things, but she would not allow herself to become those things. Those were the exact things she had sworn never to become when The Great Escape happened. Hopelessness and anger were exactly the things she hated about people who took themselves too seriously. People who took themselves too seriously were her pet peeve.

  Except Rahul. He was so good at taking himself too seriously that it felt almost as if he was too serious despite himself. He carried it like armor that got so heavy you wanted to take it off him so he could breathe.

  Or that’s how she had felt most of her life.

  Not anymore.

  Now she saw Rahul for what he was. Someone she had idolized and put on a pedestal for too long. Far too long. And he had let her. That made her angry again. How dare he? She had to think of something positive. All this anger was corrosive and n
ot at all good for her heart.

  Raja the doorman jumped up from his wood stool when he saw her. “Going on trip, madam?” he asked in that wonderfully friendly yet shy way of his that cheered her up instantly. “Travel safely.”

  She beamed at him. Ah, forget it. She let go of the suitcase she was dragging and took his hand in both of hers and shook it with all her heart. “Thank you, Mr. Raja! I’ll see you when I get back!”

  He blinked, then blushed, then stuttered, and she felt a bit awful for making him so uncomfortable. But the smile that ultimately settled in his eyes made everything okay.

  Her superhero auto-rickshaw was waiting in the parking lot. She had asked the driver to wait, since she didn’t want to be stuck with going out and finding another one to take her to the airport. The Bandra-Kurla complex was notorious for it being impossible to find rickshaws and taxis when you wanted them.

  The driver was dozing across the passenger seat in the back, and she cleared her throat to wake him. He jumped awake and swaggered to the driver’s seat. Kimi settled back against the sticky vinyl seat.

  Finally, she was on her way to the airport. She had the mad urge to stick her face out of the rickshaw and laugh. How on earth had Papa let her go? He didn’t know where she was going, of course. She wasn’t stupid enough to tell him. Plus, she was seeking freedom here, and telling the people you were seeking freedom from how exactly you were seeking it was missing the point a bit, now, wasn’t it?

  She could barely believe it. Why had it taken her so long to ask? It’s not like Papa had ever denied her anything she wanted. Well, wanted was a complicated term. He definitely hadn’t denied her anything she had asked for. To call him an indulgent father was to shortchange him. She was alive today because he never took no for an answer.

  Now his part was done. It was her turn to make sure he hadn’t done all he had for nothing by not just being alive but by living. It would be two weeks before Papa would expect her to come back home. Rahul wouldn’t care one way or the other. At least she hoped he wouldn’t care. Actually, it didn’t matter, not what Rahul wanted, not what Papa wanted, not what Mamma wanted.

  Although Mamma was the least of her worries. She was in Dharamsala chanting with the Dalai Lama’s monks. After all these years of praying for Kimi, it was now time to say her thank-yous and to go on praying for Kimi to keep her health. It was yet another awfully ungrateful thought, and Kimi shook it off along with all the other misguided thinking that had defined her life. The life she was defining for herself from now on had no place in it for negativity. Only happy thoughts and forward motion.

  All that mattered now was what Kimi wanted.

  And Kimi wanted to live. Not breathe and exist, but live.

  She was going to climb mountains, swim seas, go to the Galápa-gos Islands and Antarctica. She was going to photograph the migrating caribou traversing Alaska on their way to the Arctic.

  There, she was happy now, all set to traipse off across the world (or at least across a small part of Asia) armed with a smile and a bounce in her step! As if on cue, the auto-rickshaw jerked to a stop outside Chatrapati Shivaji Airport departures. She got out, staring fondly at the musclebound Krish and the gleeful-with-victory Durga and getting a narrow-eyed look from the driver. Are you a little off? that look said.

  No matter. She often wondered that herself.

  “I love your rickshaw!” she said, reaching across to touch the vibrant transfer-sticker art she couldn’t seem to look away from.

  The driver sat up a little straighter and dropped his gaze to her breasts. “I’ll wait if you want more return journey?” he said as though there were some sort of hidden meaning to his words and threw a look at the backseat.

  Discomfort prickled along her skin.

  “Thank you. I don’t need a return journey,” she said, taking a step back and kicking herself for having done something wrong, although she couldn’t exactly identify what it was.

  The man licked his lips and his hand lingered a second too long on her fingers as she paid him. She yanked her hand away, her skin crawling, and tried not to think about Rahul lecturing her about being careful whom she trusted. All she had done was compliment the man’s auto-rickshaw. How was that being careless? Even so, the driver leered at her as she turned away.

  “Come on, princess, I’ll show you how to love my rickshaw,” he said behind her, and she almost turned around and told him to buzz off. But there was something so sick about the look in his eyes, as though he knew how uncomfortable his leering made her and that somehow excited him, and she couldn’t make herself look at him again.

  Instead, she ignored the sound of him revving his rickshaw behind her and walked through the high-pillared canopy toward the terminal entrance. She didn’t need any more trouble than she was already seeking out.

  The world is an ugly place, Rahul had once told her. At least in here there is no ugliness.

  He had apologized almost instantly for saying it, for being so insensitive. That was the thing about Rahul: He always knew when things hurt her, even when no one else did. Although he might have misunderstood why she had been hurt by those words of his. There was something so inherently ugly about sickness, especially sickness that seemed insurmountable and constant, that it had made her wonder about his life. What kind of life did he have that he could see her life as desirable, even for a moment?

  To her, everything about him had always seemed beautiful. From that very first time she’d seen him, there had been this wildly beautiful thing inside him. He had felt like a tornado, all that freedom, all that energy. Someone who could go anywhere untethered. Someone who could jump rocks until he reached the farthest one before the ocean churned away from it to travel halfway across the earth. That moment when she had held his hand to balance herself against the whipping surf and wind was what she had held on to for all those years. The tangible form the intangible, out-of-reach idea of freedom had taken in her mind. Now here it was. Finally in her hands and entirely different from how she had expected it to be. Freedom.

  For years Kimi had tried to forget what Rahul had said about the ugliness. She tried not to see it in the eyes of bastards like Asif Khan, in the leer of the rickshaw driver. Being determined to see only beauty was a hard job, and Kimi had tried not to think about that word on Rahul’s lips every time one of those things happened. But it was like a Post-it note being slapped across her vision: Ugly Place. The world is an Ugly Place.

  The queue to get into the airport was ridiculously long. Something had to be wrong given how thoroughly they were checking everyone before letting them through the metal detectors and into the terminal. Kimi joined the line and tried not to think about Asif Khan. The psychopath had taken elementary school children hostage on their school playground last month. That’s when Rahul had pumped him full of bullets, rescued the children, and put Asif Khan in a coma. She drew in a long breath. Thinking about Rahul usually did strange things to her, but she especially hated when she got these awful bouts of discomfort in the pit of her stomach, as though something deep inside her seemed to sense that he was in danger.

  She tried to talk herself out of doing it, but she couldn’t stop herself from turning on her cell phone even though she had sworn not to do it. This made her certifiably stupid given that the reason she had switched it off in the first place was to make sure that Rahul or Papa did not find a way to derail her escape.

  Please call me. It’s important.

  Before she could push it away, a jubilant blast of hope popped inside her at the sight of those words. She seriously needed to have her head examined. She squeezed her eyes shut and, within the span of a moment, the hope was replaced with a blast of anger just as violent. Why couldn’t he leave her alone? She could practically taste her freedom. Why couldn’t he let her claim it?

  She pulled up his number and glared at the picture of him in those Ray-Ban aviators she had bought him—the only present he had ever accepted from her. They obscured his eyes but lef
t his wide, too-soft-for-that-jaw mouth to express all his amusement at her wanting to take a picture of him in his uniform.

  No, she wasn’t thinking about him in uniform. And no, she wasn’t calling him. Puppy-dog Kimi in all her worshipful glory doing as Rahul asked her to do had left the building. And she was about to leave the country.

  Turning off the phone again, she stepped forward as, wonder of wonders, the crawling line moved. She wasn’t letting anything ruin this—not his stupid text, not that stupid discomfort in her belly. That part of her life when she would have done anything to make sure he was happy was behind her.

  7

  Rahul

  A long time ago

  It was hard enough coming home with a split lip and bleeding knees when it was just Aie, Mohit, and Mona. But when Rahul walked through the front door of their housing block and saw his aie serving the minister tea, he wanted nothing more than to turn around and go back to the playground. Then Aie caught sight of his face and the cup shook in her hand and Rahul stopped in his tracks.

  Aie wasn’t like other mothers in the chawl. She never raised her voice, never used the cane or the broom to teach her children right from wrong. But she had never let Rahul get away with anything without a firm tongue-lashing that induced enough guilt to rival any caning. These days, however, she treated Rahul as though he were breakable. She tiptoed around him.

  Through the doorway across the outside room he could see his own face in the mirrored metal cupboard in the inside room. His jaw was streaked with mud, his lip bloody. Usually, Aie would have asked him a million questions, maybe even threatened to go down to the playground and speak to the boys who had done this to him, threatened to complain to their mothers. Now she looked at Rahul and the cup in her hand barely trembled enough to cause a stutter on the saucer.