by Sonali Dev
Mona had taken to the school and to English like a little mem-saab. She loved their new school even more than he did, and when he took her home on the bus with him every afternoon she prattled on in English about all her teachers and classmates. Last year she had become something of a celebrity in her grade after winning the state science championship. Aie had made laddoos and sent him with a steel-box-full to the Patil mansion. But the family seemed to not be home and he had left the box with the guard, Bhola.
Today on the number four bus going home, Mona was barely talking.
“What happened, chatterbox?” he asked her, and she laid her head on his shoulder and told him that she was tired. By the time they got home she was dragging her feet, and when Aie touched her cheek to see why she was behaving the way she was, the worry that creased Aie’s forehead made Rahul put his cup of chai down and go to her.
“She’s burning up,” Aie said to him in that way where she expected him to do something about it.
Sometimes the speed with which things happened seemed so fast your memories couldn’t quite keep up and you forgot the sequence of events. For years to come, Rahul would carry with him every instant of those forty-eight hours in the starkest detail.
The fact that he tucked Mona in bed and ran down to the chemist for some Crocin while Aie placed cool cloths on her burning forehead. How Mona had tried to grip his hand when he told her he’d be right back and he’d registered the lack of strength and pushed away the trickle of panic. The speed with which Aie’s frown had gone from worried to panicked. Until that day, Aie had never worried when they got sick, but for years after, if Mohit ever so much as sniffled she would practically collapse where she stood. Rahul would never again tell his mother when he felt sick, because he could not put her through that.
The fact that the medicine had done nothing to reduce the fever—the cool cloths had warmed on Mona’s forehead but not taken away the heat that burned her skin. The doctor’s face when she told Rahul that they had to take Mona to the hospital immediately. And not the municipal hospital either.
The fact that the doctor at the private hospital had refused to start treatment until he was paid a deposit. Taking a rickshaw in the middle of the night to the Patil mansion while Aie sat in the hospital waiting room with Mona in her lap. Riding back to the hospital in a Mercedes with the leather seats cold against his sweating back, with Kirit Patil sitting next to him with a briefcase full of cash and not saying anything the entire ride.
And the futility of it all.
Meningitis progresses really fast.
There’s nothing we can do.
It’s too late.
Words.
And no Mona.
* * *
The two times in his life when Rahul’s life altered unrecognizably had nothing in common. Who would have thought devastation could have such varied means? The first time with Baba had been like a knife wound. Slow and sluggish, with his mind still registering pain and working around it to go on. Each day had been the sink and sweep of a needle and thread sewing together torn flesh, followed by the slow effort of standing up and walking again.
And then with Mona. That second time had been a bullet wound exploding everything into darkness forever after. A slamming scab armoring his being in one fell swoop. A black coating of no hope, ever. The taste of food, the meaning of words, all of it gone only for a flash and then slammed back in place so fast the grief couldn’t linger. Nothing could linger. Not after a child too small wrapped in sheets too white was laid on a pyre too bright that burned out too fast.
Rahul had walked home from the cremation ground. Alone. Then gone out to play football. For hours, running after the ball, using his skill, his brain. No slamming into anyone, no relief of split knees, torn elbows, bruised ribs, just the ball and the goal and him. Then he’d come home and washed and worked, lifting the urns of water and moving them around. Moving the dinner paath stools. Moving his mother’s grain. Shifting things and cleaning under them the way Aie usually had to nag him for days to do. Aie silent somewhere in the house. Everyone silent. This time there were no mourners. Some tragedies couldn’t be mourned.
Mohit followed him around with a cricket bat. But Rahul couldn’t do it. He couldn’t pick up Mohit, his sixteen-year-old arms with their grown man’s strength couldn’t pick up his little brother or his plastic bat or his plastic ball. He couldn’t do any more than leave Mohit calling softly behind him. “Dada, you want to play cricket with me?”
He had walked again across those lanes and roads, his blue slippers splattering the wet mud across the backs of his legs as they carried him to the other side of Bandra where up on a hill overlooking the ocean a mansion sat. There was no girl on the gatehouse, which seemed odd without her. But there seemed to be a hole in the air where she had folded in a crouch, making that terrible day well again. He wondered where she was, the girl with the baby-doe eyes.
Bhola let him in. Patting his shoulder with sad eyes Rahul could not acknowledge. Because he would not mourn.
“I want to pay you back for the hospital fees,” he said to the man he had once hated but now couldn’t remember why.
Kirit didn’t tell him it was impossible for a boy with empty hands to pay a briefcase full of money back to a man who didn’t need it. He simply nodded. “What can you do, son?”
“Work. I can work it off. I’ll cut your grass. Trim your trees. I can clean your floors. Your toilets. Whatever you need done.”
He could not mourn her, but he would pay for every bit of effort that had gone into saving her and getting to hold her as she went. And he wanted the payment to hurt, so he could feel at least that and remember it.
That’s how three times every week Rahul left his fancy school and walked to The Mansion and climbed up on a ladder and cleaned bird droppings that splattered in thick, amorphous patterns across the ocean-facing windows of The Mansion. He scrubbed and scraped the glass, the frames. And when that was done he washed the cars and dug up the weeds. For almost six months he did not see the girl with the baby-doe eyes.
And then she returned.
13
Kimi
A long time ago
Kimi rarely thought about Storm Boy. But today for some reason she kept thinking about him helping her keep her balance on the rock in the middle of the ocean. Well, she knew it wasn’t the actual middle. But it had felt like that and that’s what mattered.
It had been two years since she had seen him. She’d spent most of that time in London. Unfortunately, not in that glamorous, “Oh, I spent two years in London, darling!” la-di-da way. She’d barely seen anything more than the inside of the clinic and the place they called Rehab. Most of that time she’d spent struggling to breathe. It was funny that after Mamma and Papa had spent so much time trying to protect her from the outside world, she’d carried the problem inside her.
She’d apparently been born with a rare condition where her body did not make enough antibodies and platelets to let her body fight infections. So it turned out Mamma had been right to protect the heck out of her, because if Mamma had not done that Kimi would have joined her dead siblings in the roster of Those Lost years ago.
Amazingly enough, Kimi had come home from her trip to the beach with Storm Boy ecstatic and soaked to the bone (she had tampered with the evidence rather cleverly by leaving her clothes on the bathroom floor and then letting a tap “leak”). The next day she had woken up with a bronchial infection and a fever that would not go away. That’s how the doctors had discovered the immune deficiency problem.
Fortunately, the problem could be temporarily solved by regular blood transfusions, which she could only get in London, until Papa worked with the hospital in India to bring the technology to them. The bigger problem was to keep out infection between the blood transfusions that happened once every two months. She had stayed at the clinic in London where the laminar airflow room kept her cut off from pathogens in the air. This naturally was much harder to do
in India, and so she hadn’t come back until Papa had imported all the filtration equipment from America and then had an extension put on the house and turned her room into a laminar airflow room. The good news was that this meant she could live in her own home and not in some hospital thousands of miles away. The bad news was that she could never leave her room unless it was to go to some hospital.
In truth, it sounded more pathetic an existence than it actually was. If she only thought about it as one day, each day, it became much easier. One of the social workers at the London clinic had told her that—think about what you’re going to do today when you wake up in the morning, and don’t worry about tomorrow—and amazingly enough it had worked.
Most days.
Today was not one of those days. It was always harder a few weeks after she had finished with a transfusion, after those first few weeks when she felt mostly sleepy, she felt suddenly energetic. Her brain seemed to go crazy with the blast of oxygen. But she wasn’t supposed to move around much to get everything to settle. She had read through all her lessons. She still didn’t understand her algebra at all, and Shakespeare was driving her batty because, seriously, who talked like that? She usually did her lessons with her tutors in London over videoconferencing equipment that Papa had procured even though it was still in the prototype stage, and her exams weren’t for another six months; she’d probably take them when she went back for the next set of transfusions.
She was rarely bored out of her mind, but today she was. Mamma was probably in the temple room doing her prayers, which she had become more and more obsessive about over the past two years. Sometimes Kimi felt like she never saw Mamma anymore. She could hear the clinking of bells every so often. Although she was probably imagining it from her days in London where Mamma did her prayers in the next room and not on the other side of the house. Given that she would be chanting all the sahasranaams for all the gods and incarnations, she would be gone all afternoon. How or why each god had a thousand names Kimi didn’t know, and chanting each one of them over and over seemed like an awful waste of time when you could use that time actually doing things. But what did she know?
Mamma had told her not to get out of bed today and Papa had asked her to listen to Mamma. All the equipment in the new room was still new, and they weren’t sure how it would all work out in the KAKA program. That’s what Kimi had named the joint goal of her parents and her doctors: Keep Ailing Kimi Alive. If Mamma had her way, they would have stayed on in London (it’s so much cleaner) but that meant not seeing Papa unless he visited and that wasn’t possible to do often enough for Papa (our life is here). Thank God her father had a way of moving the universe so it did as he wanted. The fact that Kimi was thirteen years old with this disease and still alive was testament to this fact (as she’d heard one of the doctors in London say).
Ah, forget it. Much as she was all for KAKA succeeding, she could not stay in bed and read Moby-Dick for another second longer.
She sat up and let the dizziness clear. No, it wasn’t that she was sick. She could tell the difference between sick-dizziness and well-dizziness, thank you very much. Well-dizziness just meant that her body was getting used to going from prolonged horizontalness to verticalness.
She walked to the window and pressed a button to retract the shades. She had arrived after dark the day before yesterday, and the drugs they’d given her had knocked her out, so really, this was the first time she’d seen the view out of her window. It was quite lovely, in that way that everything here was lovely. Because it felt like it was hers. It fit around her perfectly. The way Mamma’s food tasted or the way Papa smelled. There was no wait between experiencing it and recognizing it. With everything in London there had been that wait. Just that fraction of a second after she tasted a scone when this entire conversation passed between her taste buds and her brain.
Taste Buds: Hmm, what is this?
Brain: It tastes like cake with the texture of a nankhatai biscuit but with a pasty aftertaste something like a laddoo.
The length of the conversation reduced the more she ate scones but still, when she popped a laddoo made by Cook into her mouth (after it was processed through the nuking machine to kill any germs, of course), there was no conversation. Her brain knew all its little details seamlessly.
This view from her window was like that. All the roofs of the buildings between the ocean and their home were something her eyes didn’t even see, they were part of that thing labeled HOME in her head, and her eyes went straight to the ocean, her favorite thing in the whole world.
The tide was rising, making the waves churn in that particular way, where they seemed torn between which direction to go in, and then they just crashed into the rocks, coming faster and faster until one by one they ate up the rocks and the water was all the way to the thin strip of sand. She reached out and touched the glass, trying to stroke the waves. And jumped, because someone was perched on a ladder and wiping away at the window a few feet away from her.
It wasn’t one of the regular staff. Had Papa hired someone new? The splatters of gull droppings on the windows made Papa really crazy. Her window was gleaming; none of the amoebic white and gray shapes she was so used to. The person on the ladder moved and something about him was so familiar it was like one of those shocks you got when you touched something that had collected too much static electricity. Then he turned.
It was Storm Boy!
At least she thought it was. She had to look at him a bit longer to make sure that it really was Storm Boy. Because Storm Boy had changed.
She waved, but he wasn’t looking at her. His entire focus was on the gunk that the seagulls managed to acrobatically splatter against the windows every day. It had been one of her favorite things to do as a child: watch white projectile gull poop splatter into starburst patterns on her window. When he didn’t look at her, she tapped a fingernail on her window. But he still didn’t turn, so she made a fist and rapped the glass harder with her knuckles.
He startled and his foot slid off the ladder, but instead of falling back he made some sort of trapeze artist maneuver and, despite missing a few rungs, he grabbed on and hung there for a second before finding his footing again.
He glared at her, then suddenly his expression registered recognition and he looked excited and waved back. Because apparently through all his tumbling she was still waving. She remembered the expression on his face when she had waved at him from the front porch and he had looked behind him to check if it really was him she was waving at. The memory made her laugh and she beckoned him over.
He did it again. Looked over his shoulder as though someone might be floating midair behind him. But when it made her laugh and beckon more vigorously, he jumped off the ladder, grabbed a pipe running alongside her balcony, and climbed it. Before she knew it, he had jumped over the railing and was standing across the glass from her, and she was so excited it was as though they were long-lost friends. But she had only met him once. Even though it had been the best day of her life.
He was wearing a ganji inner shirt and jean shorts and he was covered in sweat. It must be hot outside. The sun was beating down so harshly it was making him squint. Her room was so overly air-conditioned she was wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt, with thumbs cut into the cuffs, over sweats. His hair was also wet with sweat and sticking to his forehead over his thick, dark brows, and he was still carrying the rag he had been using to scrape away her favorite animal excretion.
He followed her eyes to the rag and self-consciously made circular motions with it. “I was cleaning the windows.”
Oh! She could hear him! The windows were sealed, but she could hear him. It made her ecstatic.
“But why?” she asked.
He beamed, also realizing that they could hear each other.
“Why are you cleaning our windows?” she asked again.
He pretended to give it grave thought. “Because they’re dirty.” He shrugged, one brow raised, one hand on his hip. Then he grinne
d at his own cleverness.
In the years to come, whenever she tried to put a finger on when exactly she had fallen in love with him, she would always think of this moment when he had given her that entirely unexpected cocky grin.
“Are you on a mission to clean the city then?” she asked, mirroring his nonchalance.
“Only Pali Hill mansions. I’m not very ambitious.”
She laughed. As in wrapped her arms around her tummy and laughed until it hurt. “No, I mean, why isn’t one of the servants doing it?”
“He is,” he said more seriously. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you around for months.”
“I was in London.”
“Wow, I thought your parents didn’t let you leave the house!” he said, as though he’d caught her in a lie.
She thought about that day when they had jumped the wall and he had taken her to that rock. A longing to do it again tingled all the way to the very tips of her toes. She curled her toes and dug them into the soft soles of her slippers. With all her heart she wanted to climb a wall, run down a sloping, curving road, cross a street with zipping cars, and run across sand in her bare feet, her sandals gripped in her hand. She tried to remember what the social worker had taught her. Think only about what you’re going to do today.
He had thought it was strange for her to be locked up in the house back then. What would he think now if he knew she couldn’t leave her room?
“Is it really hot outside?” she asked, but the sudden change of topic seemed to upset him.
“No, I usually sweat like a pig for no reason.” He didn’t look like a pig at all, and she wanted nothing more than to step outside and sweat like that.
“Pigs don’t really sweat much,” she said unnecessarily. “That expression comes from this form of iron called pig iron that sweats when it’s being smelted from iron ore.”
