And, more to the point, how long had I been out? Zia wasn’t exactly used to any one of us being away but she could manage alright for a while.
I opened my mouth to ask either of those questions when a far more important one reoccurred to me, spilling out in place of what I had intended to ask. ‘Where’s Jai?’
They exchanged another of those looks, significantly shorter this time, before didi spoke. ‘Actually Alia, Jai uh – he got into an accident,’ she told me, speaking slowly, words measured.
‘I know. I mean, I remember. The phone call is the last thing I remember before waking up here actually. But they didn’t say what happened. Was it some idiot not watching for bikers?’
‘Not – not exactly,’ she denied with a shake of her head.
‘Then what happened? And why isn’t he here?’ I demanded, feeling panic twist in my stomach and creep up my throat; I knew Jai better than anyone, better than I knew myself. And I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing short of a coma would have kept him from being there.
When nobody answered me, the panic turned to hysteria and I repeated the questions. ‘What happened to him? Su tyu ene? Kem ee aya na ayvo? Ene thik toh che na?’ At my evident hysteria, ma and didi practically ran to my side, ma seating herself next to me and cradling me as best as she could without pulling any of the wires, and didi sat by my knee, holding my hand.
‘Chalo Zain, ame bey chai gothwa jawu?’ Papa asked, getting an enthusiastic nod from my brother.
I barely registered their hasty retreat, too consumed by the terror that clawed at my gut. ‘Where is he mumma?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Jai?’
‘Betta…’ she began but trailed off, at a loss for words.
‘Alia, while you were at your appointment, Jai took Zia to the park,’ my sister took over, commandeering my attention. ‘You know he won’t let Zi on the bike so they walked. They were- they were on the way home and the ice cream van drove by on the other side of the road.’ She paused a second, gathering her thoughts and taking a steadying breath. ‘I don’t know exactly what happened; we’ve pieced it together the best we can from what we could get out of Zia and the people who saw it happened. As best as I can tell, Jai let go of Zia’s hand for half a minute to check he had cash on him. From what Tony told us, Jai noticed she’d run off seconds after she’d left his side but, by that time she was in the middle of the road with a car speeding at he.’
Didi stopped, her eyes closing and her fingers tightening around mine as she tried to contain her tears. A couple slipped out as she opened her eyes despite her efforts but she quickly wiped them away and continued on. ‘The uh, the driver himself said he wasn’t paying attention, didn’t see Zi in the road – not that that’s any comfort.’ I knew that didi was leaving out details and I could imagine well enough what they were but I needed her to tell me, needed to hear it if I was going to believe it.
‘Didi, I need to know what happened, all of it,’ I whispered.
She looked like she might just burst into tears but nodded and filled in the gaps all the same. ‘You know as well as I do that Jai would rather eat a bullet than let harm come to Zia. He chased after her into the road, pushed her out the way as hard as he dared. A few scrapes and bruises and all are better than what would’ve happened if the car hit her right? But he wasn’t fast enough to get out the way himself. The car rammed into him full speed; the doctors said he was lucky to make it to the hospital alive.’
The way she phrased it all but confirmed my worst fears but I had to ask, to make sure. ‘So, is he – is he recovering or…?’
Didi shook her head and ma suppressed a sob, giving me my answer. My mind went blank as a slate, unable to process the fact that I’d never again see my best friend’s face, never again see his lopsided grin or feel his arms around me, the ever-so-soft press of his lips against mine.
Some distant, logical part of my brain knew there were other things I needed to know, questions to be asked but I couldn’t find words, couldn’t think of what I was supposed to say.
For, in that moment, I felt my life lost all meaning. I’d lost my best friend, my rock, my home.
My heart forgot how to beat, my lungs forgot how to breathe, my eyes forgot how to cry. I’d forgotten how to smile, how to laugh. All the laughter, smiles, happiness, feeling from my life was gone.
And maybe it’d never come back.
Chapter Thirty-Five
By the time I was allowed home, Christmas and New Year’s had already passed.
Though I’d begged and pleaded, the doctors hadn’t let me leave the sterile white room at all, not even for Jai’s funeral. They said it put me at too much risk of infection and, with the immunorepresors I had to take to make sure my body didn’t reject the new heart I’d been given, it was a risk they couldn’t allow me to take for a long list of medical, ethical and moral reasons.
I’d laughed at that, partly from genuine amusement and partly out of hysteria. ‘Reject it?’ I repeated. ‘There’s no chance of that.’ The doctors and nurses and even my own family tried to tell me that yes, there was in face a chance of that, every chance of that. They explained graft-versus-host disease, how my antibodies could mistake the heart for an intruder, an illness, launch an attack against it in a misguided attempt to protect me.
I shook my head and shut my ears, refusing to accept it.
After all, how could my body possibly reject it?
Perhaps if it had been a different heart, I might’ve been persuaded to listen. But it wasn’t another heart. It was Jai’s heart, the heart that had been made to beat with mine, the heart that had really always been mine anyway… how could my body turn that heart away?
Of course, logically, I knew that the body didn’t work like that but, well, dil toh dimaag ki baat kabhi suntna nahi, na? When does the heart ever listen to reason?
In the end, it took a video call from a very tearful, clearly distraught Zia begging me to listen to the doctors so that she wouldn’t have to lose me like she lost unc’a Jai to get me to give in. The truth hit me like a bucket of cold water then. Seeing Zia, my bright little light, like that, crying, her small frame wracked with sobs as she sat curled up in my bhabhi’s lap, hiccupping as she begged me to jus’ lis’n ta fve do’tors, p’ease Alu fui, completely shattered me.
It was in that moment that I realised that I wasn’t the only one who’d lost Jai.
Yes, he’d been my best friend, my partner in crime my… my Jai. But I wasn’t the only one who had been hurt – devastated – by the loss. I was the one he’d been closest to, the one who knew him best but that didn’t mean I was the only one who had loved him, who still loved him. Maybe they’d had different relationships but my family had loved him too, just as much as I did. In different ways, yes, but no less.
To my parents, he was a fourth child, a second son. Bhaiya and didi looked at him as their little brother, treated him exactly the same way they treated me. Bhabhi had called him her dher – her husband’s little brother – something that’d made everyone laugh when they found out the two of us were together. ‘One day you’ll be my dherani,’ she’d teased, making me wrinkle my nose.
But the person who’d been hit hardest of all, harder than even I’d been, was Zia. Jai had been her superhero, her knight in shining armour – literally when they played princess in the tower – her best friend in the entire world. Zia had been convinced that her unc’a Jai could do no wrong, that he’d personally hung the moon and the stars in the sky, hung them just for her; and that, if she asked him to, he’d have reached into space and plucked a star down for her.
And if he could’ve, he absolutely would’ve too.
From the second Jai first saw little baby Zia, filing into the room with the rest of the family just minutes after she’d been born, she’d carved out a space for herself in his heart bigger than even the place I had. He’d not only treated her like she was his kin but as his blood, his own.
He’d been the one to paint the Hun
dred Acre Woods on her nursery walls, the one who’d given her her first toy, the rainbow-coloured bear that she toted everywhere with her and never slept without. Jai had even been the one to give her her very first sip of water – something that my mum always said created a lifelong attachment, something closer than any other relation could be.
Zia loved Jai more than anyone in the entire world and, not only had she lost him but she’d had to watch it happen. And we all knew that it was eating her up on the inside, even if she didn’t have the words to say it.
We’d all lost Jai. And, really, I was the luckiest; I had the most memories with him and, more than that, I had a piece of him to carry with me, forever. That was more than most people could ever hope for.
A second realisation came hand in hand with that one. Me being stubborn, refusing to listen, alternating between being a moody cow and a numb, blank shell really wasn’t helping any of us.
We were all suffering, hurting, and we needed to be there for each other. I needed to be there for my family.
So, though it didn’t exactly come naturally to me, I stopped arguing and started listening. I finally caved and agreed to attend my best friend’s funeral over Skype, delivering the eulogy I’d written and rewritten a billion times as best as I could, knowing that the words I’d written on the paper could never, ever even come close to doing justice to the beautiful soul I’d known all my life.
I spoke about him and listened as everyone else did too, allowing myself to let a couple tears fall while I knew nobody was paying me any attention.
And then, when the funeral was over, I wiped my tears away, took a deep breath and did what I’d done a hundred-thousand times; I pushed down all the hurt, rage, pain and sadness, locked it in a box and tucked it away in the corner of my brain with all the rest of them.
My family had been there for me, supported me, through the past year, through the hardest times of my life. And even through the past couple weeks when I’d been a pain to deal with. Now, I needed to be there for them.
And that’s exactly what I did.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Jai’s funeral had taken place four days after I’d woken up. In the seventeen days between it and my being released, I kept everything locked away. Nobody knew anything about my feelings, not even me if I was honest.
Maybe the ease with which I could hide from myself should’ve frightened me but it didn’t Maybe it had something to do with how I was already locking all my emotion away in a box or maybe it was because I was so used to doing this, putting everything else aside so I could be the pillar to lean on for everyone else. I didn’t know which it was and, in all honesty, I didn’t particularly care.
I suppose it didn’t really matter either way. The important thing was that it helped me do what I needed to’ my inability to realise how bad it was that I could bottle things up so easily made it that much easier to be that pillar.
At least, it did until the day I left the hospital.
I got home on the 7th of January, but it felt like it might’ve been two days before Christmas. There were still Christmas decorations on the lawn and in the windows, fairy lights lining the doorframe. ‘Di, shouldn’t the decorations have come down by now?’ I asked my sister as we got out the car, confused.
‘Well, yeah. But we thought, given you were in the hospital for Christmas and all, we’d wait until you came home,’ she explained. I nodded, giving her a smile that I was sure didn’t fully reach my eyes. She smiled back at me, not mentioning the lack of enthusiasm on my face.
Without another word, we entered the house. As soon as the door closed, I heard a very excited exclamation of ‘Fui!’ and the sound of little feet hitting the hardwood floor of the hallway. Seconds later, Zia came around the corner, slowing to a walk before she reached us to avoid ploughing us down. ‘You’re home!’ she exclaimed, carefully moving forwards and wrapping her little arms around my legs.
‘I’m home,’ I agreed, ruffling her hair and reminding myself that I couldn’t yet pick her up.
‘We c’n open pwesents now?’ she asked, looking up at me with hopeful eyes. I chuckled and nodded, telling her to lead the way.
She took a step back from me, letting her arms drop from around my knees and grabbing my hand instead, all but dragging me through to the living room.
***
I spent most of the day watching Zia open and play with her presents. There were presents under the tree for everyone of course, but nobody got nearly half as much joy out of opening our own as we did from seeing Zi tear the wrapping paper off the packages that had her name written on them, exclaiming happily about the coolness of each new thing she uncovered.
When I did eventually get around to opening my own stack of presents, it didn’t surprise me in the slightest to find that they were mostly books, with the exception of several large, squishy packages which turned out to be pillows, cuddly toys and a throw blanket. ‘You know, I love fluffy pillows and blankets as much as anyone but aren’t you guys the ones always telling me that I don’t need more of them?’ I questioned, raising an eyebrow.
‘Well, we thought we could make an exception, just this once,’ ma told me, her eyes twinkling a little.
Her answer did nothing to settle my confusion and it must’ve shown on my face if the laughter that came from everyone was anything to go by. ‘I think maybe it’s time to show Alia her last present, huh ma?’ bhabhi asked, getting a nod from my mother and an excited squeal from my niece, who immediately dropped the toy dinosaur she’d been playing with and sprung up from the floor, clearly itching to lead the way to this mystery present.
‘I guess Zi’s leading the way then?’ I asked, getting up from my seat and looking around. Papa made a go ahead gesture that Zia took to mean yes and she shot off like a bullet, running for the stairs faster than I could even get out of the room. ‘Zi, slow down,’ I called with a laugh, waiting for everyone else to get up. She came back to the doorway, waiting impatiently as everyone got themselves to their feet.
‘C’mon!’ she exclaimed, jogging on the spot.
‘We’re coming. We’re not all so small and energetic, little bunny,’ bhabhi told her, getting a frustrated harrumph! from the four-year-old.
‘Come on then, little madam, show me this big surprise,’ I told her. ‘These slowpokes will just have to catch us up.’ She grinned that cheeky grin of hers and grabbed my hand eagerly, starting off for the stairs again, going significantly slower this time. Though we both knew the pace was a fraction of the speed I usually went at, Zia didn’t say a thing; I figured maybe ma or bhabhi had told her that I wasn’t yet back to myself, that she’d have to allow for me to go a little slower, be a little less active. But still, I had to give the kid credit; she didn’t complain even once as she led me up the stairs at snail speed.
Zia was bouncing with energy by the time we reached what was apparently our destination – the door to my room. ‘Zi, why’re we at my room?’ I asked, getting a giggle form her. ‘Zia, you gonna tell me?’
‘Gotta wait,’ she told me, shaking her head.
‘For what?’
‘Dada-dadi and mummy and papa and fui.’ My forehead creased in confusion; what on Earth was this surprise that we had to wait for everyone? I knew better than to try to get the answer to that question out of Zia though so I just shrugged and resigned myself to waiting.
I didn’t have to wait all that long before I heard di’s voice from behind me. ‘We’re here,’ she said, ‘open the door Zi.’
Zia clapped and dashed for the door, opening it with obvious glee and pulling me inside. ‘Wha’ d’you fink fui?’ she asked eagerly, rocking back and forth on her heels as she watched for my reaction.
In all honesty, my first thought was is this really my room? But, with my entire family waiting for my reaction, I knew that probably wasn’t the best thing to say; there was a good chance they’d take it the wrong way at first and we’d end up arguing before they realised I’d only been re
gistering disbelief.
So, for a long minute, I said nothing, looking around, trying to take in all the changes that’d been made since I’d last been in here.
Quotes now filled the large empty spaces on the three walls, I’d painted. My favourite book quotes surrounded my bookshelves, a song quote over the top of my sound system and music collection – which, I realised, had been rehomed into its own little cabinet – and words to live by on the wall by the bed.
Which brought my attention to the bed. The bed that definitely wasn’t the same one that had been in here a month ago. It was my dream bed, a beautiful wood-frame four-poser with deep-blue hangings – like something straight out of a fantasy novel.
It was the type of thing I’d dreamt about for years, one of the things that was on my list of things that I’d buy for myself when I had a house and job of my own. Seeing it in my room at that moment, like an image pulled from my head and brought to life, I knew exactly who’s idea it’d been. ‘So, this is what you were up to that day then?’ I asked, crossing the room to sit on the bed, running a hand over the familiar brushed cotton of my favourite teddy-bear patterned quilt cover, the one I put on every December. ‘Those weird scraping noises, how distracted Jai was…’ I faltered, my words abandoning me as I realised it was the first time I’d said his name since I’d found out he was gone; even when I’d delivered his eulogy, I’d avoided using it.
My fingers stilled on the quilt and I lost my train of thought, my mind being flooded with memories.
For a moment, I allowed them to cloud my brain before I caught up to myself, realising I couldn’t let myself be lost to the waves of memory crashing over me. Trying my best not to let on what was going through my head, I shook off the thoughts and looked up, only for my gaze to land on the wall opposite me, the wall that had been unfinished the last time I’d seen it.
Have a Heart Page 20
