A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  “If Mona hadn’t died, Mohit would have known him. He would have been home more. He would have had a brother. My beautiful girl.” Aie broke into tears.

  Rahul wanted to go in there and comfort her. But he couldn’t move.

  Mona. Hearing her name scraped at that part of him where she lived. Constantly. Untouched. Because he needed it to be that way. It was a part that couldn’t bear touching, the skin over it too easily torn, irreparable.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and the hopeful, trusting eyes with which Mohit had followed him around today bored into him. He felt sick.

  “I’m going out,” he said to his mother but didn’t wait to hear her response. He walked that path he always seemed to find when he had nowhere to go. On his way he found the sporting goods store open. He bought a bat. Shiny and new.

  He found the rock on which he had always sat when he needed a rock to sit on, with water soaking up the hem of his jeans. He thought about the only time someone else had stood on the rock with him and wondered if she was okay. Wondered if he’d ever have a chance to bring her here again.

  It was past midnight when he got home. Mohit sat up when Rahul opened the front door and let himself in. He had been waiting up for him. He rubbed his sleep-filled eyes. He had Baba’s eyes. Mona’s smile. “Where did you go, Dada?” he asked.

  “I had work to do.”

  “Will you still buy me a new bat?”

  “Of course.” He kept the bat behind his back. He had no idea why.

  “Will you help me practice again tomorrow?” Why had he told Mohit he would help him practice? He didn’t have time. He shouldn’t have given the boy false hope.

  “I can’t. I’m busy, Mohit, I have to study for my finals and for my entrance exams. I have to start working to support Aie. You understand that, right?” He tried to sound gentle, but even to his own ears he sounded distant and harsh.

  “Yes, Dada.” Mohit’s voice was small when he lay down and turned away. Then in a much stronger voice he threw over his shoulder, “I’m busy too. I probably won’t have time to play tomorrow anyway.”

  Rahul didn’t answer. He laid out his pallet on the floor, lay down, and pulled his cotton sheet over himself. The next morning he was gone before the sun rose. But he left the bat on the divan where Mohit could find it when he woke up.

  22

  Kimi

  A long time ago

  This was the third time in her life that Kimi was returning to her own home after a long absence. She remembered each time vividly. Remembered how each of her homecomings was characterized by some sort of exuberant hope.

  Exuberant. Rahul loved to call her that. And yes, she had this weird, expandable thing in her chest that had always been there, the strangest combination of the stretchiness of hope and the tautness of determination. Like the minuscule bubbles inside a soufflé that held it up, that made it exist. The hardest thing to explain to people about her life was that she had this sense of permanency deep inside. Like you felt in your home, like you belonged here and that you weren’t going anywhere, because that sense of belonging had to mean that you weren’t going anywhere. Which wasn’t at all what people expected from her.

  Social workers, therapists, doctors were always trying to talk to her as though they were trying to assuage her fear of death. It made her wonder if she should be more afraid than she was.

  When she came home from one of her “breakthrough” treatments, everyone around her seemed to wear hope as though they were dressed up for a wedding. The only wedding she’d ever attended was Rafiq kaka’s, when she was ten years old. It was supposedly a small enough affair that Mamma deemed it suitable for her to go. The Diagnosis had not come knocking yet, and Papa had insisted on taking her along. Mamma had put her in the heaviest, most embellished anarkali salwar kameez, which fell in a full skirt all the way to her ankles. It had felt fantastic when she first put it on. She had felt all grown up and almost as beautiful as Mamma, almost regal. But by the end of the evening she had started to feel the weight of the thick silk, the itchiness of the embroidery, the strain from having to stand up tall, and she had craved the relief of taking it off. The hope the household wore every time she returned from a new treatment seemed to fit everyone a bit like that.

  This particular stint had been longer. More than three years in Switzerland this time. They’d given her another drug, used another method to replace her marrow, and they’d watched her body reject and accept their ministrations until it all stuck and she, like Frankenstein’s monster, was ready to be unleashed into the world. Well, not quite into the world, but more like into her natural habitat.

  Papa, naturally, had wrestled God knows how many more outrageously exorbitant medical equipment companies to ready her room for her return. Creating an environment to their specifications was the only condition under which her doctors had allowed her to go back home. But there was good news. She was no longer someone who had a “severely compromised” immune system. She was someone who had an “unusually underperforming” immune system.

  This meant that only roughly thirty percent of the viruses and bacteria that infiltrated the air could kill her. The other seventy percent she could mostly fend off. And if they did make her sick, the good news was that there were drugs that could help her fight them off. As she had found out in Switzerland by contracting and communing with the three-odd infectious parasites that dared to infiltrate the atmosphere in all that sparkly Swiss pristineness.

  Back home in Mumbai, things were, well, a little bit different in the pristineness department.

  The doctors had even created a PowerPoint presentation, complete with angry-germ-blob animation, to show them how many more pathogens she would be exposed to in the city of her birth. The city her mother wanted to keep her away from, but that her father could never leave and therefore she would never leave.

  “Our recommendation is that you continue to live in Switzerland until we can find a way to get your body to make more normal levels of antibodies,” Dr. Vaughn had said.

  Which basically meant: “No going home unless you want to die, or unless you want to continue to live inside your bubble.”

  It was not even a question. She wanted to go home. It wasn’t like she could be out and about in Switzerland. She could take walks in the countryside, but she couldn’t go to malls or college or anywhere there were a lot of people. She probably could, but her mother would never let her.

  If she had to continue to live an isolated existence, she’d rather do it in her own house, where her mother’s prayer bells rang and the food tasted familiar and her father stopped by to discuss his work and where she had friends. Well, one friend. But it was Rahul, so he counted for at least a few. She had missed him so very terribly this time, one could even say that he counted for ten.

  She had to come home. Promising to stay indoors was nothing new. And if an irrepressible urge to walk around the countryside suddenly struck, she could always go back to Switzerland for a few days as Papa had suggested. But if she let herself roll down the hill of honesty, the idea of another space-suit-wrapped plane ride into another pristine foreign hospital made her chest tighten the way it did when her oxygen levels fell fast and furious and a straitjacket wrapped and pulled against her lungs. The thought terrified her enough to never want to touch it.

  The plastic curtain was gone. Replaced by an air curtain. She could walk around the house but with a face mask, at least until her body adjusted. The most incredible part, however, was that she could be touched. No plastic gloves as long as people washed their hands and scrubbed them with disinfectant. She could shake hands. Shake hands! She loved it. She loved everything about touching people’s hands. Which sounded a bit creepier than it was.

  The first time the social worker had shaken her hand, she had refused to let it go for an embarrassingly long time. Papa had taken her hand from the social worker’s and held it. But they kept warning her that it wasn’t a good idea to take this for granted. It was alwa
ys best to be careful and so forth. Another promise she’d had to make was to be extra, extra careful in India. Yes, because what was she going to do? Run around her empty room holding the hands of all the people there? It’s not like her friends were lolling around the room the way Cher and Dionne lolled in Clueless.

  Speaking of friends, where was Rahul?

  Seriously, dude, how are you not here yet? she texted him. She loved text messaging. It was the most amazing thing, like being with someone all the time, but condensing your thoughts into only those words that were absolutely necessary.

  Which, come to think of it, was how Rahul communicated anyway. Mr. Monosyllables. Papa had told her that text messages cost a lot to both send and receive, so she had to be judicious and considerate.

  Then, just in case she didn’t understand his mild suggestion, Papa had asked her pointedly to not send Rahul every thought that popped into her head.

  That wasn’t a very nice thing to say. She had no idea why Papa would accuse her of such a thing. It’s not like he was privy to the e-mails she sent Rahul.

  Definitely thought vomit.

  She could bet anyone willing to lose money that Rahul barely skimmed her e-mails. Not that she could blame him. She did tend to go on. But then he would reference something from nine e-mails ago, and she was tempted to think that he actually did read them all very carefully. Well, truth be told, her e-mails were very well written and filled with all these great insights, things that suddenly struck her in the middle of a transfusion, like are “This too shall pass” and “Live every moment” opposing edicts?

  “I had to look up the word edict,” had been his only response.

  Which was a lie, of course, because he had the best vocabulary of anyone. Thanks to the word lists for the SAT she made him help her with. He had told her he could only get here in the evening, because Mister had a fancy job now. Assistant Superintendent of Police.

  Assistant Superintendent of Police!

  She kept saying the words out loud.

  She’d asked him over and over again to scan and send her a picture of himself. But of course she hadn’t actually expected him to do it.

  Please don’t call me “dude” his text message buzzed through. That sounded like a text to the milkman.

  Lame, she typed. Cross language jokes are so elementary school. But even as she had typed the word dude, she had imagined him saying it so it sounded like the Marathi word for milk. Yes, it was lame, but who was she kidding? Rahul was making juvenile jokes. So, naturally, she couldn’t stop smiling.

  She heard the doorbell and jumped into bed. She had a new one now. The plan was to only switch it out with her old spaceship-style hospital bed when she got sick. Until then it stayed in a storeroom somewhere in the house, thank God! She hated that thing! (Only a little bit. She totally got how invaluable it was to her, etc.). Her new bed she loved. It had a bacteria-resistant polyurethane headboard that was thick and luxuriant and best of all normal. She pulled the sheets all the way up to her chin and waited.

  The knock on the door came as soon as she had settled in and donned her I’m-sick expression. Watching Grey’s had its advantages because she had no idea how she actually looked when she was sick.

  “It’s the look in your eyes that changes,” Rahul had told her once when she had pestered him to tell her how it looked from the other side.

  “Come in,” she said as weakly as she could manage and tried not to giggle.

  He let himself into the waiting area that led to her room.

  Rahul.

  It had to be her imagination because the smell in the room changed. His clean, soapy smell.

  “Kimi?” he said tentatively, and something rippled inside her belly. A tiny little spark. Okay, it wasn’t tiny.

  “In here.” How she managed to keep up the soft, sick-voiced pretense, she would never know.

  And there he was, filling up the waiting room doorway where he had pulled a chair and taught her so many things. Algebra and chemistry and the stories of Premchand, but really just what it meant to be alive and have a friend. Where he had sat as they watched movies and fought about books.

  He was in uniform.

  Khaki stretched across his chest, which was rising and falling in a labored way. The way he always breathed when he was anxious.

  “What’s wrong?” he said in that gentle, worried voice, and she knew she couldn’t pretend to be sick the way she had been meaning to. “Should I call Sarika?”

  “Ah, so you are capable of calling people then,” she said, sitting up and throwing her legs over the side of the bed, watching him watch her and go from worried to relieved to irritated to amused so fast that each one of those emotions zinged in tiny sparks from her belly to her heart.

  Finally, he settled on a smile. Not helping the sparks at all.

  “You’re late,” she said, trying to frown but failing rather spectacularly.

  “Not true. You can only be late if you postulated a time.”

  “Don’t use big words to impress me.”

  “Come on, time isn’t that impressive.”

  She jumped out of bed, laughter spilling from her. Because how on earth could she not let out the joy that was filling her up?

  “There’s no plastic curtain,” he said with wonder in his voice, but he had not moved from the doorway.

  “So there isn’t.”

  “Does that mean I can come in?”

  She laughed again and nodded and for no reason at all her eyes filled with tears. “But you have to wash up first.”

  He leaned his body back and peered at the sink that had been installed in the waiting room. The movement made his thick hair flop across his forehead, turning him for an instant into the boy who had jumped up onto her balcony every day to help with her homework. He walked to the sink, his eyes smiling his disbelief at her, and then he scrubbed and scrubbed and went on scrubbing his hands for so long she had a good mind to turn off the faucet herself.

  She stood in the doorway where the plastic curtain had always separated them (she was still a bit terrified of crossing it) and watched him. Then he was standing in front of her.

  He held up his hands. “Clean enough?”

  She nodded again. It seemed all the words she had wanted to say to him were elbowing one another so hard to get outside that they were causing a traffic jam inside her. “There’s only an eight percent chance that you’ll kill me if you touch me.”

  He frowned.

  What on earth? Really, that was the first thing she said to him?

  “The disinfectant hand wash is effective against . . .” He said the rest of the words with her. “Ninety-two percent of germs.” They both smiled.

  He reached over and wiped her cheek and she started. A quick stuttering jerk that made him withdraw his hand too fast.

  “Was that not okay?” he asked, stepping away from her even before she answered.

  She grabbed his hands in both of hers and tugged him back, her heart thudding. For so many, many reasons. This was Rahul. She was touching him, and his hand was rough and warm and heavy in hers and it felt like nothing she could describe. But it also terrified her. She wanted to pull it to her face, nuzzle it like a beloved toy, which basically made her sound like a psycho.

  Truth was she really was terrified. When everything was a danger, and everything could spell loss, even something that felt so good had a way of filling you up with all the things it could take away from you. And she didn’t know what to do with any of it.

  “Hey,” he said, in his gruff, gentle Rahul voice.

  She had dreamed of his voice every day.

  She threaded their fingers together and pressed their palms together, the way he had done through those gloves. But this, this was different. And yet it was the same.

  Touching him was not like touching anyone else. Not that her experience was particularly varied. Touching him was, it was . . . “Does it always feel like this?”

  “What?”


  “Touching people?”

  He swallowed. “No. But then not everyone goes nine years without touching anyone.” He was trying to ruin the moment. Trying to wrap it in Rahul logic. But that made it worse. “It will stop feeling this intense.”

  It seemed impossible. “It’s not getting less intense.”

  “Give it maybe more than seventy seconds?”

  Gladly. She’d gladly give it all her time in this world. “You remember what I told you the last time we met?”

  “It was too long ago.” But that slight flush told her he remembered.

  “One part of it came true. You’re Assistant Superintendent of Police. Asst. SP Rahul Surajrao Savant! Oh, Rahul, I’m so proud of you!”

  His only reaction was the darkening of his eyes.

  “What about the second part?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had always been a bad liar. She loosened her grip, just to make sure what she was feeling wasn’t just her. He didn’t let her hand go.

  “Don’t lie.” She studied him study their intertwined hands. “And you’re safe. Don’t worry. Because I don’t think I can.” She was the one who finally pulled away.

  “Phew,” he said and swept a finger across his forehead. But his eyes shone. They shone so brightly she couldn’t look away from them.

  “Don’t be too relieved. I’m researching it. Once I figure it out you have no choice. You have to kiss me.”

  He didn’t say anything, and it made her angry. “I thought boys liked kissing girls.”

  “Not girls who are their friends.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is us, Kimi. We’re not like that.”

  “Yes, Rahul, this is us. Who else could I ask?”

  “Tell me what the situation is. You never did. You still can’t leave the room?”

  “No. Not until this drug they’re working on is ready.”

  “Then why did you come back here? It’s dangerous for you to be here and to not have the curtain.” He stepped back.

  “No. As long as I stay here I’ll be fine. There’s an air filter and what-not. And how could I not come back? I had no friends there, no one to talk to. You’re here, Rahul.”