Nikhil and Riya Read online

  52

  IT’S ONLY NOW that I am a father that I realize what B.P. must have gone through. Back then though, I was oblivious to anyone’s pain but my own. I was so involved in my own terror, my own shock, my own grief, that what B.P. may have been feeling as her father, after already having lost Riya’s mother, never really struck me. I could only think about myself, about how cruel the world was, first taking away my parents and now her, wondering why I couldn’t just die and put an end to all the misery.

  As I scale the dizzying heights of the mountain, fighting to keep my focus, looping the car round and round, so many thoughts swirl in my head. When my son was a baby, I remember how he scraped his knee and we had rushed him to ER; how when he had a bad cough, we worried that he would choke and die. The fear that a parent feels for his child is one of the most powerful emotions in the world, and though I loved Riya with all my being, and she was the centre of my universe, the pain that I had felt was incomparable to a father’s pain. This I did not realize, I could not realize, till I became a father myself.

  I am brought back to the world by the ringing of my phone. My wife’s name flashes on the screen. I take a deep breath, clear my throat and pick up the phone. I make an effort to be calm: the Nikhil she knows, not the Specs I have been so careful to conceal.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she says calmly.

  ‘A girl,’ I say slowly. It is hitting me bit by bit, not all at once. ‘We’re having a girl.’

  ‘Yes, a girl,’ she says, warm now, smiling in her voice.

  A girl, I think, a little girl. I do not know if it is the wind, the nausea, the drive, or something else, but I feel one little tear make its way down my face.

  53

  I CYCLED DOWN to Riya’s house in the evening during games time, leaving behind the cries of victory and the screams of play, cycling closer towards cruel tragedy. But today she wasn’t there, sitting on the steps, waiting for me. I rang the doorbell. Jeevan Singh opened the door, a sad, toothless smile on his wrinkled face.

  ‘Riya?’ I ask.

  He gave me a fierce look, grumbling that even though she was supposed to rest, she had left half an hour ago in the direction of the school. One tiny benefit of Riya’s illness was that Jeevan Singh had become somewhat less acrimonious towards me.

  I thanked him and hopped back on my bike. I had come from the school, but hadn’t seen her on the way. I had a strong suspicion of where she may be. At first I thought that I may have been wrong, because I didn’t see her right away. But then I spotted a little lump on the ground, lying on the side of the track on her back, her face towards the nougat-coloured sky. My heart almost jumped out of my chest and though we weren’t allowed to bring cycles on the track, I rode as fast as I could to her side.

  She heard me approaching and slowly got to her feet, red mud clinging to her white shirt.

  ‘I knew you’d come.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you just tell me?’ I said, gasping for air.

  ‘What happened, Specs? You cycled too fast?’ she said with a grin.

  I was slightly mollified; no matter what, at least I could still make her laugh.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, letting the bike fall carelessly to the grass.

  ‘What do you think?’ she replied lightly, brushing her shorts.

  I goggled at her. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Cancer maybe?’

  She shrugged. ‘I guess we all die, right?’

  ‘Not like this … and not so soon.’

  Riya brushed the hair from her face. ‘Your parents died in a car crash. That was more sudden than this. My mom died of cancer too.’

  I was still catching my breath and now I felt a cramp creeping from my stomach to my chest. I knelt down, hands on my knees, head towards the ground like Riya had taught me to do.

  ‘Our parents were thirty. You are sixteen. Plus, you’re not dying,’ I said.

  ‘But I am.’

  My voice slightly cracked. ‘But you’re not.’

  And then after a pause, seeing that I had gotten no reaction out of her, I stood up and looked her in the face. ‘You’re making me angry.’

  ‘I’m making you angry?’ she teased.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  But she didn’t take me seriously at all. ‘Can you crack my toes,’ she says, kicking off her shoes.

  ‘This is no time for cracking your toes!’ I said, trying to sound fierce.

  ‘It is though. They hurt,’ she said, plonking down on the ground.

  ‘No.’

  Though she was ill and tired, her eyes still sparkled. She pursed her lips and smiled.

  ‘Please?’ she asked simply.

  I melted in an instant, an ice cube in the sun. ‘Fine,’ I sighed, settling on the ground next to her.

  And there I was, pulling and cracking her toes as she lay on her back and stared into the sky.

  ‘I don’t feel … anything,’ she mused.

  ‘But I’ve already cracked two,’ I said, her foot in my lap.

  ‘I don’t mean the toes. I meant about dying.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, some part of us would know, right, if we were just going to die?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, not fully understanding what she was trying to say.

  ‘Did you know with your parents? That they were going to die?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I was so young. Did you know with your mom?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘I think…’ she said, frowning, doubt in her voice.

  ‘If something were to happen to you, I think I would know,’ I said.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ I firmly replied.

  That shut her up. Because she knew it was true. For a while we sat, her toes cracked, her feet still in my lap. Then she sprang up from the track in a way that I would never be able to and stretched her back, two quick cracks from side to side. I thought for the thousandth time: how could this be true when she looks so well.

  ‘Specs, you’ll time me, right?’ she said, tossing me the stopwatch.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Practising, what else?’ she replied.

  I was appalled. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

  ‘For you, maybe,’ she laughed, trotting off to the starting blocks.

  I could argue with her but I knew that it was pointless.

  She took position, digging her bare feet in the ground, poised on her fingertips. I hunkered in my usual spot beneath the scoreboard, the flimsy plastic stopwatch ticking in my hand.

  ‘Ready?’ she called faintly.

  I completed the ritual: ‘Go.’

  She began as she usually did, bending her head down low, touching the earth with her hand and then bringing it to her head. And then she started slowly but swiftly, her mouth a little open, her tongue touching the tips of her teeth. She hadn’t even gone a hundred metres when I saw her flailing, her arms and legs bobbling out of sync. No one else would have noticed, but I knew her gait like the back of my hand and I knew that she wasn’t going to make her time. She reached the 200-metre turn when she should have been streaking across the finish line. She had run faster with a 101 fever, a sprained ankle or a bleeding sore on her foot. It was her slowest 400-metre attempt that I had ever timed. She crossed the finish line, white in the face, her hands on her tiny waist, breathing in sharp pained gasps, breathing more heavily than I had ever seen before.

  ‘Time?’ she managed, approaching me with a lurching walk.

  ‘Two minutes thirty,’ I said in a shaky voice, cutting it by twenty-five seconds, my heart beating as fast as hers.

  She stood there for a few seconds, bent over, catching her breath, gulping air.

  ‘Liar,’ she finally said in a breathless voice.

  She grabbed the stopwatch from my hand, looked at the incriminating time and then threw the sto
pwatch into the air with as much force as she could.

  ‘Good riddance,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed softly and then sat down in the middle of the tracks.

  Maybe it was seeing her time or watching her struggle to run just 400 metres, but as I sat with her in the sand, it struck me – really struck me – that Riya was actually sick, really truly sick, and that there was a real possibility that she would die. Till now, I had been in denial. I had entertained all kind of private hopes – Riya was making this all up and it was some cruel joke; Riya was trying to bunk school; the doctors had misdiagnosed her and they would call and tell her that they had made a mistake; or simply that Riya was sick and that she would get better, the way that sick people do. But now, for the first time, I began wondering if all of this were actually true.

  ‘I’m all in,’ she gasped, still breathless, rubbing her legs, laughing over at me. ‘I’m done for.’

  I knew then that it had struck her too.

  I didn’t say anything to her but we sat like that for a while in the dimming light. I could feel her shivering in the settling cold so I took off my sweater and handed it to her. But she didn’t put it on, she just held it in her lap, absently rubbing the fabric.

  ‘Are you scared?’ I asked.

  ‘Mostly no,’ she answered with a shrug.

  ‘I would be,’ I slowly said.

  ‘I don’t know. I … just don’t feel a thing,’ she said, her voice trailing off. ‘I guess some races you can’t win.’

  ‘Life isn’t exactly a race,’ I said quietly.

  ‘I know, Specs. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you win some races, and you lose some, but you accept them all the same way. That’s the only way I can really think about things right now. Good things happen, bad things happen and I guess you just accept them all in the same way.’

  ‘This is not just a good thing or a bad thing. This is a matter-of-life-and-death thing.’

  She gazed up at the sky and continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘You know, Specs, I wasn’t always as good at running as I am right now. Earlier, I would always think about the finish line, about the bends and turns that would get me there. About all the steps I had left to take. Then one day, I changed that, and I started thinking of just running, not of winning or of losing but of really feeling every step, and putting in my best. And that’s when I became really good. That’s what I’m kind of doing, thinking not of tomorrow, but of now. One step at a time.’

  Even though I wanted to tell that that she had to fight, that she couldn’t just give up on life, I sat quietly contemplating her words, trying to understand if she had a point.

  We sat there for a long time, not talking, the night settling down around us, first violet then blue then silvery black. We both gazed at our favourite stars winking brightly at us, the Pegasus, the Shepard and the Little Bear. We were looking at the same sky but seeing such different things. The stars were never – before or since – brighter to me than they were that night.

  54

  ‘CAN I GO to the doctor’s with you?’

  ‘Why, Specs? Don’t tell me you want to be a doctor now.’

  ‘Um, no,’ I lied. ‘I just thought that maybe I could go with you. It gives me a chance to bunk classes too.’

  To be honest, I had given it a thought. If I became a doctor, my life would have purpose. I would find a cure for cancer and make sure that Riya was all right.

  ‘Bunking?’ She laughed warmly. ‘Since when do you bunk?’

  When she saw that I was serious, she stopped smiling and studied me, like my face was a particularly interesting running track, and then she patted my arm. ‘I guess it should be fine. I’ll just ask Papa.’

  I didn’t mention that going with her had been B.P.’s idea in the first place. Riya had been seeing a doctor at the local hospital for blood tests and other medical things and when I had come over looking for her the other day, he had told me, not looking up from the book that he was holding, that she was at the hospital and that one of these days if I too could go with her.

  These trips of hers – though time-consuming – gave me some hope. As long as she kept seeing doctors and going to the hospital, it seemed like there was at least a small chance of finding a cure.

  So for the first time in my twelve years at Residency School, I bunked a full day of classes to go to the hospital.

  Riya had told me what she obviously considered the most relevant information about Dr Chopra: his breath didn’t smell, he didn’t talk too much and that he was ‘relaxed’, although I wasn’t sure if that was a quality that I wanted in Riya’s doctor.

  In real life, Dr Chopra was even more pleasant than Riya had made him out to be. He was friendly, greeting me with a smile and Riya with a pat on her back. He had snow-white hair, powdery skin and light grey eyes that looked like a monsoon cloud about to burst. He immediately noticed the golden badge pinned to my chest and congratulated me for being a prefect. He added with a chuckle that while he was never good enough to have been a prefect himself, a cousin of his had done the family proud by becoming the head boy.

  Riya was led away by a short plump nurse for tests. While she was gone, Dr Chopra let me sit in his office, a crowded room where patients came and went. In one lull between patients, he offered me tea and then settled back into his chair and asked me gently if I had any questions for him.

  Did I have questions? I had questions. I couldn’t sleep, I had so many questions. For so many nights, questions had buzzed round and round in my head like the fireflies that the junior school boys caught in jars, and there was one in particular that I felt was slowly driving me mad.

  ‘Why her, doctor?’ I asked, hoping that he could explain why of all the sixteen-year-olds in the world, why this had to happen to my girl.

  He looked at me for a long moment, sipping his chai. Then he smiled kindly and told me in his patient voice, ‘It is very unusual, of course,’ and then asked, ‘You’ve studied biology?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then you will easily understand. It all comes down to one cell in the body amongst billions of cells. Each cell is supposed to die when its time comes, but a small genetic defect produces one bad cell that refuses to leave. That one bad cell grows, and divides uncontrollably, producing more and more bad cells. This army of bad cells has no respect for tissue boundaries and they invade areas of the body where they have no right to go. Eventually, our whole body goes to war against the army of bad cells, but it’s a war that’s already won. Or lost. The bad cells are invincible, and they can never die.’

  I swallowed. ‘Is that cancer?’

  He nodded. ‘That starts just about now.’

  I pictured one malicious leukocyte multiplying furiously, taking over her whole body. I felt a stab of anger and clenched my fists.

  The doctor continued in his placid voice: I got the impression he gave bad news often and it must usually be in this tone. ‘The bad cells invade the whole body with uncontrolled growth and at the end of the war between the good cells and the bad cells, even the very strong bad cells are in a sorry state. They lose all normal functions like accurate DNA replication, control over the cell cycle and interaction with other cells.’

  Dr Chopra smiled sadly, shaking his head. He blew on his tea. ‘It’s all about a bad cell that just doesn’t want to die. And one day, when the situation becomes terrible, the soul decides to stop the war and turn the master switch off. That is how it ends.’

  I pondered over the doctor’s explanation for a long time as I waited for Riya to return. He left to attend other patients while I remained on that small plastic chair for what felt like forever, thinking about that one bad cell that refused to die.

  55

  ‘THE FUNNY THING, Specs, is that I didn’t even know where the lungs were before all this. I thought they were in the stomach. Because my coach always used to tell me to breath from my stomach.’

  That finally brought a smile to my face.
I remembered explaining to her, before the tenth-standard board exam, where each organ was, and drawing in the balloon lungs above the mango-shaped liver. I had told her to pay attention since this was a sure-shot board question but Riya had just shrugged.

  ‘That was on our boards, you know.’

  ‘Too bad I didn’t have cancer then,’ she said with a twisted little smile. ‘I could have got that one right.’

  ‘I don’t want you speaking like this,’ I said and turned my head away.

  We were lying on the grass in Riya’s garden on an unusually warm afternoon, the sweet smell of grass and pine wafting in the air. We had shed our thick woollen sweaters and they were rolled up in balls under our heads. Above us, the sky, like the ocean, stretched blue and endless and deep, behind us hunkered the steadfast mountains, blue and green and grey, always the same but always changing, one day like fury, on another the epitome of calm. As the breeze kissed my cheeks, I wanted to forget everything just for a moment and lose myself in the infinite sky.

  But Riya wouldn’t let me forget, not even for a second. She joked about her cancer often, which I knew I was supposed to find funny, but really just made me want to cry.

  Enough was enough. I hated it when she spoke so morbidly. So I decided, on an impulse, that today I would protest, leap up on my feet and storm away, like I had often see her do. But in my energetic effort, my glasses slipped off my face and landed in a puddle.

  Riya burst out laughing, while I just stood there, spectacle-less.

  ‘Oh, Specs, drama doesn’t suit you!’ she said, raising her arm, beckoning me to come back.

  ‘This day isn’t going to last forever,’ she continued as I stood there like a fool, glasses in my hand. ‘Papa will be back soon.’

  She was right, she always was. Plus, what was I trying to prove to a girl who was so ill. So I picked up my sweater, rolled it up again and lay under the strong mountain sun, knowing I would be nursing sunburns tonight. Riya, on the other hand – even with the yellowness of illness – would turn a beautiful, golden-brown.