A Distant Heart by Sonali Dev (12)

12

Rahul
A long time ago

 

It was another two years before Rahul saw the girl with those strangely large eyes that reminded him of the baby doe he had seen on a school visit to the Jijamata Zoo—slightly lost, wildly playful, and unabashedly curious. But over those two years he had thought about her on that gatehouse roof and smiled more times than he could count. Dirty as Rahul had felt when he walked to the Patil mansion that day, he couldn’t seem to forget how he had felt coming home. The day had completely flipped on its axis after she had dragged him to his rock, their bizarre adventure painting over everything else.

When he thought about that day, what he remembered was the strange sense he had experienced when he had seen her crouched on top of the gatehouse. Like unexpectedly spotting your reflection while passing a window. She had looked as fragile on the outside as he had felt on the inside, standing there talking to the hulking guard. He’d experienced that same feeling again when she had magically shown up on the front porch of The Mansion looking as though her life had taken an entirely unexpected turn.

Between Kirit Patil giving him the power to know that he had choices and the girl giving him a chance to be fourteen again, he’d found himself on steady ground for the first time since losing Baba. How had he been stupid enough to turn away the opportunities Kirit had offered?

If he never wanted to be helpless again, he needed power. To have power you needed money and for someone like him, education was the only way to get it. Turning away opportunity wasn’t a mistake he ever planned to repeat. What had happened that day was dead and buried, he would never touch it again. Those other memories of that day that had changed his life were so much safer. And his favorite one was of the girl with the baby-doe eyes on his rock.

When he was trying to convince Rahul to go to St. Mary’s, Kirit Patil had told him that his own child went there too. For a long time after Rahul started at his new school, he kept an eye out for her during assemblies and when he passed the lower classes. But if he hadn’t seen her in two years it probably meant that she wasn’t at the same school.

In any case, Rahul had no direct contact with Kirit and he intended to keep it that way. At least until he could pay the man back for all his generosity. Rahul wouldn’t lie. He had grown to love his new school. He hadn’t realized how bored he had been at his old school. Here if he found something easy, they moved him to a class where there was material that challenged him.

Kirit Patil had kept his word and provided Mona and him with brand-new uniforms and shoes and backpacks and books and no one at school knew that they lived in a chawl on the other side of the tracks. Patil-sir had also tried to arrange for one of the English teachers to make sure that the fact that Rahul’s medium of education had been Marathi until now did not interfere with his education. But Rahul had refused. He could read English well enough, but speaking was different. His mind tended to make sentences in Marathi, but recently his internal translator had become faster and faster, and now sometimes when Aie asked him something he answered in English without even thinking about it.

It usually made her giggle into her sari, but some days she would tear up and dab at her eyes with it instead.

The school had a huge cathedral-ceilinged library that they opened up to students every lunch hour. This had solved the only two problems Rahul had with the school—one, he didn’t have to socialize with his classmates, who all spoke English as though they had been born in a whole different country, and two, after reading through almost the entire contents of the library, his English improved enough that he could converse with his classmates with only minimal embarrassment when he mispronounced something.

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.

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.