13
Kimi
A long time ago
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 grinned 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.”
That made him laugh. His entire face crinkled when he laughed, and she found herself laughing too as though his laughter were an infection. And she was good at catching those.
“Why don’t you come outside and see for yourself how hot it is?” He studied her with suddenly curious eyes that seemed to get gentler the more they studied her.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because if I breathe air that isn’t treated to get rid of all the pathogens in it I’ll catch an infection and end up dead.”
“For real?”
“Can you end up dead for pretend?”
He smiled and then looked sad and then smiled again.
She often did this herself when something made her happy and then she thought of everything that was wrong and then she decided not to think about that part of it and she was happy again.
“So why were you really in London?”
“Because my parents thought the doctors there could make me well. But all they can do is try and prevent infections until someone else finds a way to make me well.”
“And until then you can’t leave your room?”
She nodded.
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s not so bad.”
He watched her and she frowned at him. “Okay, it’s pretty awful. But the social worker in London told me that if I can train my brain to only think about the present moment, then it would be easier to get through.”
He looked thoughtful. “She’s right.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it makes sense. How long do you have to be inside?”
“Until they come up with a cure for my condition.”
“That makes sense too. What do you do in there?” He pointed his rag at the room behind her.
“I go to school via videoconferencing. Do my lessons, watch TV, play video games, and read a whole lot. And don’t say that makes sense because you sound like a broken record.”
He pursed his lips as though he was trying to stop himself from smiling. “Well, you have to be ready for life outside when they let you out, now, don’t you?”
She made a face. Because, ugh, it made sense. And that made her want to giggle again.
“School via videoconferencing? That sounds very science fiction. And fantastic.”
“It’s really not. Especially not algebra.”
“Why?”
“I hate algebra.”
“It’s my favorite subject.”
“Are you mad? How can xs and ys be anyone’s favorite subject?”
“Because they’re not just xs and ys. They could basically be anyone or anything.” He grinned that cocky grin again, totally thrilled with his own cleverness.
Come to think of it, it was pretty clever. “Will you teach me?”
“From across a window?”
Well, that was a problem. She could ask him to come inside, but she knew Mamma and Papa would never, ever allow it.
He was grinning again and she frowned at him. “What’s funny?”
“You think really loudly. I can almost hear it. So, no one can come inside your room?”
“You can come inside one part of it, but you have to wear a mask and gloves and whatnot.”
He looked down at himself. “And wearing bird shit the way I am wouldn’t work, huh? Let’s try to do it like this. You want to show me your problems through the window?”
She grabbed her homework off the desk and came back to the French doors. “Can you do quadratic equations?”
His eyes actually lit up.