A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  He wanted to laugh. Really, he did. But this was his home, and the fact that she looked like a string of pearls that had fallen into a muddy puddle made him feel dirty himself, as though he were on his hands and knees trying to dig the pearls out of the mud but they kept slipping from his fingers. He needed to get her out of here and back where she belonged fast.

  Kimi was still grinning and waving at the giggling gallery when he knocked on the door, which was locked. It was only ever locked when it was time for bed. The doors in the chawl tended to stay open and they were most certainly never locked.

  The latch clattered and Aie pulled the door open a crack, then pressed her hand to her mouth when she saw him. She looked utterly horrified when her gaze landed on Kimi.

  “Who’s this?” she asked, and completely uncharacteristically, she didn’t move out of the way and ask them to come inside.

  “I’m Kimaya Patil,” Kimi said and touched Aie’s feet, keeping with the traditional gesture of respect even through the crack in the door.

  Now Aie looked mortified. She patted Kimi on the head. “Bless you. May you live long. Wait, are you Patil-saheb’s daughter?”

  Kimi nodded.

  Aie studied Kimi. “How is your health now?” The door remained unopened.

  “Very good, thank you,” Kimi said as if they weren’t still waiting out on the veranda.

  Rahul shuffled his feet. He was about to ask Aie to let them in when she looked over his shoulder at the staring neighbors, and finally, with all the reluctance befitting a last resort, she ushered them inside.

  19

  Kimi

  Present day

  Kimi understood that Rahul was not used to his mother being less than enthusiastic in ushering him into his home. And yes, the distraught look on his mother’s face together with the entire gaping-at-them-through-a-crack-in-the-door thing was a bit disconcerting. But the panic that flashed across Rahul’s face when she finally let them in meant something was very wrong.

  “Where’s Mohit?” Rahul asked as soon as his mother shut the door behind them—rather hurriedly—and bolted it.

  Without answering the question, she went into the kitchen and started pouring water into steel tumblers from a matka. The clay flask was unglazed and perfectly smooth. It reminded Kimi of the time last month when she had tried to convince her editor to let her do a story on the nomadic potters who traversed the country with their beautiful earthenware. Naturally, her editor had asked her to do a piece on “The Favorite Handicrafts of Celebrities” instead.

  She took the tumbler of water she was offered with a thank-you. But Rahul, who was looking like he had swallowed a storm, took it away from her and then glared at her as though she was the one who had shoved the storm down his throat. She let the tumbler go without a fight. She was fully aware that she was only supposed to drink bottled water, thank you very much.

  “We don’t have a filtration system here in the block,” he growled as though not installing filtration systems in your home, on the off chance that a sickly person might visit, were a cardinal sin.

  He put his hand inside the bag that was hanging from her shoulder and fished out her bottled water and put it in her hand. Then he proceeded to empty the tumbler of water down his own throat.

  His aie smacked her forehead. “Sorry,” she said in English and then went on to add in Marathi how they were so lucky to get “bottle water” everywhere these days.

  Kimi squeezed her arm. “Please don’t apologize. It’s just a precaution.” She touched the terra-cotta matka. It was deep red and glossy with use. “This is beautiful.”

  His aie smiled into her sari. “Ish, what ‘beautiful’? It keeps the water cool. Rahul’s baba bought it when I was pregnant with Rahul. We didn’t buy a fridge until years later, but water from the fridge bothers my throat.”

  “Mine too,” Kimi said. Her own mother had never let her drink anything other than water just this side of boiling as a child—generally with a few drops of one of her grandfather’s germ-killing concoctions—and her throat now felt violated when the water was any colder than room temperature.

  His aie smiled. It was the sweetest smile. She was . . . what was the word for it? Lovely. No, gorgeous. Yes, she was more gorgeous than anyone Kimi had ever seen. Which was something, given her current job of poking at the lives of the nation’s most flawless faces.

  “Are you hungry?” Aie asked, her face suddenly turning more somber and making her look even more like her son, those exact same dark-tar eyes and wide lips getting all serious in unison.

  “A little,” Kimi said just as Rahul said, “Not at all,” and both women stared at him and then at the kitchen floor.

  Rahul looked like they had jointly conspired to make his life a special kind of hell. Seriously, the man had no humor left in him.

  Okay, that was a lie. It was more like his humor had to fight through six feet of earth to see the light. Like a live body stuck in a grave.

  It was admittedly an awfully morbid analogy, but Kimi was suddenly feeling more than a little morbid. Not to mention hopelessly sad and angry, despite her vow to avoid those tiresome feelings at all costs.

  “Kimi can eat. I have a few phone calls to make,” said the cause of at least sixty percent of her hopeless sadness and anger. “We have to take a trip for a few days. I have to make arrangements.”

  Wait a minute. What?

  He shrugged when she balked at him as if to say, “What? Weren’t you the one who wanted to go to Hong Kong?”

  She had the sudden urge to launch herself at him. She didn’t. “Thank you,” she said instead, in a tone that made his aie throw all sorts of questioning glances at him.

  They were all saved from this storm of ocular smoke signals by a crash in the inner room.

  Rahul went for his gun and pushed Kimi behind him.

  “Put that away. What is wrong with you?” his aie snapped—no question about where he had inherited his snapping from—and walked past him and into a back room.

  He followed her, gun still drawn, Kimi still pushed behind him.

  “I hope you’re not planning to set that thing off,” a very crumpled-looking man (more boy, really) said, sitting up on a bed. One of his eyes was swollen shut and alarmingly purple. “Gunshots are arse on a hangover.”

  Kimi hadn’t meant to but she laughed, and the boy leaned sideways to throw her a glance over Rahul’s shoulder. “Well, well, what do we have here? DCP Upright has brought home a girl. And a hottie at that!”

  “Mohit, be quiet, beta. Does your tongue have no bone?” Rahul’s aie said far too calmly for someone speaking to a son whose face looked like a gang of street fighters had gone freestyle on it.

  So this was Mohit. The brother Rahul never talked about. Actually, he never talked about his family at all.

  Rahul holstered his gun. His expression said that the gang-of-street-fighters thing was not as uncommon as one would think. This explained his aie’s reluctance to let them into the house and Rahul’s panic at her reluctance.

  “What did you do this time?” Rahul asked.

  “What? Are we pretending to care in front of your girlfriend?”

  “Mohit!” their aie said with a little more heat.

  “Are you okay?” Kimi said, elbowing her way out from behind Rahul. “That looks like it hurts!”

  “You should see the other guy,” this Mohit person said, and Kimi smiled. She liked this guy, clichés and smashed face and all.

  She held out her hand. “I’m Kimi, Rahul’s, umm, just friend.”

  “Mohit, Rahul’s just-about brother.”

  Kimi’s smile widened. “Same. I’m just-about his friend too,” she said, and Mohit grinned.

  Rahul slipped into full-on Storm Boy mode. “You’re waking up now?” he said, pointing out the obvious as he often did when especially grumpy.

  “Actually, I was trying not to wake up, but beer’s shit on the bladder.” And with that Mohit dragged himself out of bed and
out a back door, leaving Rahul glowering in his wake.

  “I’ll get lunch ready,” their aie said with an exhausted sigh, and Rahul’s face softened a little.

  “I can help.” Kimi followed her to the kitchen.

  Or tried, because Rahul called her name and she turned around. “Did you want to, you know, freshen up or anything? It’s been a crazy day.”

  More of that stating the obvious. He wasn’t just grumpy, he was downright tortured, and she had the unbearable urge to go to him and tell him all would be well.

  “Thank you,” she said, hating that she hated seeing him this tortured.

  Her gratitude made things worse. “Kimi, please,” he said and took a step closer but then stopped and turned to a door. “The bathroom’s there. It’s . . .” Something at once too alien and far too familiar tinged his eyes. “It’s the only room with a door. Or you could wait for Mohit to come back and then lock these two doors.” He looked at the two doors on two sides of the room as though they were somehow offensive. And she knew that thing in his eyes was shame.

  “The bathroom works fine,” she said and left him before she told him he was being an idiot.

  She splashed her face and wiped it with the hand towel that smelled of lemony detergent and sunshine. The bathroom was pure white, tiled from floor to ceiling and sparkling clean with an exposed metal water heater mounted on a wall, a stainless-steel bucket under a brass faucet, a commode, and a sink.

  The shame that had darkened Rahul’s eyes was something she had only seen there a few times, but she remembered each time clearly. His eyes were usually so proud, so self-confident, that the flashes were like acid burns she could never heal from.

  She wanted to be angry with him, was angry. But she felt small in her anger now. Her anger flaring outward beyond him to a world that was so unbalanced, so utterly without reason in how it distributed privilege. Who Rahul was had nothing to do with this three-room block, this spartan white bathroom. And yet he seemed to think it had everything to do with it.

  Why are all the billionaires in books and movies men? she had asked him after they had watched Pretty Woman, a film she found amazingly sexist and yet madly romantic.

  Because men are supposed to provide. Our manliness rests either on the shoulders of our financial success or on our physical strength. It’s the way the world is structured. There had been finality in his voice but also enough cynicism that she knew he didn’t agree. He just bought in.

  That’s bogus, she had said. So when a man shares his money with a woman, she’s made a catch. But when a woman shares her money with a man, he’s no longer man enough?

  No one said society’s rules weren’t bogus, Kimi. Just convenient.

  Good thing she didn’t rate convenience too highly. Rahul didn’t either. But fat lot of good that was going to do either of them.

  So they had been born into families that owned different amounts of wealth. She was entirely aware of how fortunate she was to be born where she had been born. For starters, she wouldn’t be alive if not for that little piece of luck. She wished she could tell him to stop buying into this stupidass patriarchal way of thinking. They didn’t live in a time when she would travel across villages in a bullock cart to join his family and be relegated to giving up her way of life if they married.

  Not that she needed to worry about that, given his decided lack of interest in that particular option.

  She dug into her bag looking for her antibacterial gel and her hand touched the picture she had plucked off her cubicle wall when escape had seemed so near. When freedom had seemed like such a simple solution. It was her favorite picture. Taken at the top of Kalsubai Peak from her first full-fledged hike. Admittedly, the peak was only sixteen hundred–odd meters and not a hard climb for seasoned mountaineers, but for her it had been the difference between knowing she could do something and fearing she couldn’t.

  Truth be told, it had been the moment that had changed her life, in so many ways. It had only been one year since her transplant, and the first few meters had been terrible. But once she learned how to listen to her body and stop and go in a way that kept her breathing constant and her pulse under one forty, everything had changed. The secret was monitoring herself with the same zeal that Mamma and Papa had monitored her during KAKA. Only, doing it herself was a little less frenetic, because she knew what she was feeling and knew when to push forth and when to pull back. As opposed to her parents, who had lived in perpetual pull-back mode.

  She stroked a finger over the faces in the picture. There he was—Rahul—both her arms wrapped around him in complete possession. Rahul. Caught in a moment of joy, shaken out of his usual somber glory by this moment of triumph.

  She shouldn’t love the picture so much, shouldn’t love how the giggling girl from a hiking troop who happened to have made the climb just then had captured Rahul and her exactly the way Kimi saw them in her mind. Leaning into each other, caught between laughter and disbelief at having made it up together. Burning bright with connection. The very essence of their selves laid bare.

  Moments before he had broken her heart.

  She had climbed up that mountain as one person and come down as another. Her plan had been to make the climb herself. She hadn’t asked him to show up at four in the morning just as she was getting ready to leave. He had dismissed the driver, and taken the backpack from her and stashed it in Tina’s carrier. And, no, when she had talked to him for months about making the hike, she hadn’t been dropping hints for him to come along. The night before, they had been talking on the phone and he had asked who else was going with her. She had told him she was going by herself, and he’d gone all silent and then shown up at her door the next morning.

  Maybe it had been wrong to puke out her feelings for him up there where there was no graceful exit. She hadn’t meant to do it. But all that adrenaline had mixed with all those feelings that filled her up, and it had messed with her head. Then there was the fact that she hadn’t for a second considered that something so all-consuming could still not be enough.

  I don’t feel the same way about you, Kimi. I’ve only ever thought of you as a friend.

  That . . . that had been his response.

  The world is different outside your room. You’ll find what you’re looking for out here. Just give yourself time.

  He’d made it sound simple. She had spent the past year convincing herself it was simple. But it wasn’t.

  20

  Kirit

  Present day

  Kirit stared at his phone. The one laying on his teakwood table. The one in his pocket he would not place anywhere someone walking into his office could see it. Only one person used that phone, and not one day went by that Kirit did not curse the day he had taken the phone from Asif Khan. Except, his Kimaya was alive today because he had. But then that was life for those who fought it instead of lying down and taking its punches as they came. Warriors didn’t get mired in guilt and regret, they focused on the goal.

  The situation with Asif Khan had become serious enough that he should call his wife. Rupa, of course, was on one of her pilgrimages to Kashi. She had gone there straight from Dharamsala without even bothering to come home. It was one of the five holy pilgrimages she went on every year. Most people strove to complete the five pilgrimages once in a lifetime, but Rupa was not most people. Usually, he would not disturb her spiritual journeying for anything. Communing with your gods was a solitary business, and Rupa made no bones about how seriously she took her communions.

  Would she want to know about the threat to Kimi? Kirit hadn’t paid heed to what Rupa wanted for so long that he no longer knew.

  The real question he was currently pondering was if he needed to call her.

  Many years ago, before he had lost her to her god, his wife had possessed great instincts. The word she preferred was intuition. It had been a huge asset in the movie business. She could take one look at a script and tell him if a project was going to be successful or not. Sh
e could take one look at his heroines and tell if they were making passes at him or not. He had been unwaveringly faithful, of course, no matter how hard and fast the temptations came. She had given up her own career to be his wife, and she had borne more pain than he could comprehend to give them a family.

  How he’d loved her for it. It had felt unbearable sometimes, the volume of his love. So, yes, he’d been faithful. He’d been her slave. Not only for as long as she had been the woman he had married, but for a long time after she stopped. He had stubbornly clung on to his fidelity like a beacon of hope that someday she’d return.

  After Kimaya got sick, her instincts weren’t all Rupa lost. For a long time he didn’t blame Rupa for losing interest in everything other than her god. Back then he shared her belief that their only hope of seeing their daughter reach adulthood lay in the hands of that all-knowing, all-controlling entity.

  It had started with Rupa spending more and more time in front of the small altar in the kitchen with its inch-high silver idols of Ganesha, Lakshmi, and Krishna, which were part of every woman’s trousseau. Slowly, the altar had moved to a room upstairs. Then as Kimi got sicker, that room had turned into a full-fledged temple. The small home-sized idols that had been in her family for generations had been replaced with human-sized marble statues that were bathed and clothed every day in addition to being meditated upon for hours and fasted in honor of in increasingly severe ways. Prayers were performed on a schedule to exacting standards and rules for which strotra was acceptable for chanting at which precise hour. Nothing could be out of place, because any error could throw all the hours of prayers out of alignment and incur the wrath of the gods who had so obviously decided to test them.

  That too Kirit had understood. He shared Rupa’s desperation to see their daughter live and thrive. But then she had abandoned Kimi. For a long time he had made excuses for her, seeing her actions as a mother’s love, as her sacrifice for her child’s health. It’s what he had always done too. But one day Kimi had been so sick she’d been gasping for breath. Despite that, she had still managed to call for her mother. Rupa had refused to leave her meditation position in front of her idols in the middle of prayer. That’s when Kirit had understood that it wasn’t a mother’s love that motivated Rupa, it was a selfish woman’s inability to deal with the hand she’d been dealt. His own abandonment he could forgive, but the removal of a mother’s loving hand from Kimaya’s head he could never forgive.