Nikhil and Riya Read online

  At length, a team of young doctors took her away to a small room, wheeling her through the corridors. Someone asked me to wait outside, I don’t remember who, but I stood there stupidly, my glasses slipping off my face, staring at them taking her away. I wondered if this could even be true; it seemed like just a moment ago we had been in the market, laughing and eating noodles.

  Riya could not die. It was impossible for her to die, not when I needed her as much as I did. Not yet. I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t prepared to let her go. I needed more time. I couldn’t let her die. What would happen to me once she was gone? Desperate thoughts rattled my brain and I felt like I couldn’t move. Eventually, I dragged myself to a plastic chair and sat down, feeling utterly helpless – there was nothing, absolutely nothing that I could do but sit there, frozen with misery, staring dumbly at the stained hospital walls.

  My body sank and I listened to my breath go in and out. I wondered if this was finally and really goodbye. No, it simply could not be. In my darkest moments, I had imagined how it would happen, but never once had it been like this. Patients sat around me, absorbed in their own pain, not caring about me or about her. I found myself oddly thinking of God, though I hadn’t been one to pray for most of my life.

  I eventually got up and walked, as if in a trance, to the small room where she was being kept for observation. She lay under a blue blanket and B.P. was sitting next to her on a chair, very still. I desperately wanted to go inside, but looking at both of them, I knew it was incorrect to intrude, so I went back to my chair.

  Hours spilled past and I sat still, unable to sleep or eat or even read. Gradually, a creeping terror rose from a place beyond thoughts. It was like the chime of the Residency School bell, over and over, twelve times: ‘Why her? Why her? Why not me? Can’t I trade my life for hers?’

  The reappearance of B.P. jolted me out of my thoughts. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ I said in a daze.

  ‘I’ll go get some food. You can go,’ he said, pointing to her room and then walking away.

  I tiptoed inside, nervous about what I would find. She was asleep now, a tube in her arm, the flashing red numbers on the machines, but I knew nothing about what they meant. So much for full marks in biology.

  ‘Riya, please look at me,’ I whispered and begged, squeezing my eyes shut, bending towards her. I wasn’t prepared for her to die – not yet, not right now. Please, please, please – not right now.

  ‘I’m looking, Specs,’ she said in a drowsy voice, though her eyes were shut.

  ‘You’re awake?’ I said, jerking back, my eyes opening wide and clear.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she replied.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘It just hurts a bit.’

  She opened her eyes, and, for a second, squinted blearily at me. One hand was on her side, and the other hand was splayed out, an IV stuck in her right arm. I don’t know what part of her body was hurting, but I didn’t want to guess. In that gown, I could see bruises up and down both of her arms.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Will everyone stop asking me that? I’m sleepy, that’s all,’ she murmured. Even now she acted like nothing was wrong. She closed her eyes and dozed off into a drug-induced sleep.

  I was startled by squeaky footsteps on the linoleum floor, and I saw that it was the doctor, a tired young man with a dirty white coat. A spider of anxiety crawled up the back of my neck and I quickly stood up, bracing myself for bad news.

  ‘You’re her brother?’ he asked.

  ‘No, a friend.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said in a distracted way, scribbling notes on a pad. Somehow, I didn’t trust what he said.

  ‘Should I wake her?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘No,’ said the doctor, waving his hand in the arm, ‘let her sleep.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Low blood pressure, high altitude. She fainted, that’s all,’ he said brusquely.

  After a brief, charged pause he looked up from his pad to say, ‘But in her condition, it could be dangerous. She needs to rest.’

  He then said definitively, ‘Take her home and don’t take any more trips.’

  Then he left the room and handed me a piece of paper attached to which was a pink discharge slip. The lights in the room buzzed and winked and I was so relieved that I thought now I would be the one to faint.

  Part 4

  69

  ITURN THE bend and there it is, exactly as I had left it all those years ago. The light is pale gold and dimming, but I can see the top of the Residency School dome, changing colours like a sunrise, first grey, then silver and then pink as I approach the entrance, which, after all this time, is still imposing.

  ‘Alum,’ I say to the liveried guards. They salute me and let me through, and I am suddenly in another world – a world of verdant hedges and acres of manicured lawn, of lush playing fields and red brick buildings, of gables and turrets and playing fields for as far as the eye can see. The buildings still glisten, though they are almost a hundred years old and I cannot help but notice that the marble clock tower, the heart of the school, now as back then, does not accurately keep the time.

  Everywhere there are small bodies, their screams flying like cricket balls. The workers are trimming the lawns, sweeping the leaves that swirl like confetti and then litter the ground. I drive straight to Scindia Pavilion, drive past the main building, past the academic block and the boys’ cricket field, and there it is looming in the distance, its stone walls seem to call out my name.

  ‘Specs!’ she calls, running towards me. Her face is flushed, her shorts bunched at her thighs, her legs thin and strong and brown. It’s a midsummer evening and the air is unnaturally warm. She is covered in a layer of sweat and she throws herself down on the grass, closing her eyes, her chest moving up and down.

  Looking at her lying there on the ground, I want her so badly that I cannot look away. I am relieved that her eyes are shut because I cannot prise mine away. Suddenly her eyes flutter open and she catches me. Her mouth forms an ‘O’ of surprise. Embarrassed, I turn my head away.

  She laughs her childish laughter.

  ‘Oh, Specs,’ she says, still catching her breath.

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Come,’ she says, patting the grass, ‘come look at the sky with me.’

  I lie down on my back next to her and look heavenward. The sun is slowly setting and we lie under the fading light, watching the slow hypnotic descent of the sun. Then, in a rare act of courage, I reach out and place my hand upon hers.

  I feel her touch on my shoulder. I look up startled, her face is flushed. She brings her finger to my lips and I lie very still, holding my breath, nervously waiting, my heart swelling and swelling and swelling. Then I take a breath, opening my mouth to speak, and she suddenly leans forward and her lips touch my own. And just like that, under the setting sun and crimson skies, as the wind blows red sand into our faces, I kiss her lips, salty after her run.

  It is a physical pleasure so intense that I know no other moment will ever compare to it. I feel foolish now for having been so afraid, for having waited so long, for having rehearsed the moment so carefully in my mind. Now, as I kiss her, it is the simplest thing in the world. My fear melts away like wax from a candle and all I can feel is warmth.

  I walk into the small back room of the pavilion and it is exactly as I remember it; like so much of Residency School, it is as if time hasn’t touched this place. There is dust and athletic equipment everywhere – rusty discuses thrown carelessly on the floor, a set of hurdles bent into a painful V and piles of worn-out spikes. I study the athletic records carefully on the wall, checking for her name. All her records have been broken – except one. The 400 metres, I knew, would stand, till the end of time.

  Horror and dismay engulf me when I see that the stone walls have been painted freshly white. But then I move closer and touch the wall. I am almost absurdly relieved
to discover they are still there, the names, behind the row of javelins, like they have been for sixteen years. I run my fingers over grooves and I trace our names chiselled deep into the wall.

  She takes me there, into a small room in the pavilion. ‘Athletics headquarters,’ she says proudly.

  ‘Impressive,’ I reply, looking at the dark, dank room, a storage room of dusty equipment lined with rough wooden honour boards that contain all the school’s athletic records. She points hers out to me – 100 metres, 200 metres, 400 metres, 800 metres, 1200 metres. All five belonged to her: as if I didn’t know, I knew all her records, her timings – down to the second by heart.

  ‘Now see this,’ she says in an excited whisper, nodding to the old walls made of blocks of grey-black stone.

  At first it isn’t apparent, but when I look closely, I see hundreds of initials, names, hearts and years written on the wall. It is a powerful sight, proof of the same ancient urge that made people scratch cave paintings, carve statues, build tombs like the Taj Mahal: the need of all lovers everywhere to leave evidence of themselves, so something will remain when they are gone.

  ‘What’s this place? A vault of love?’

  ‘Something like that.’ She grins. ‘It’s a secret place.’

  I trace the initials and florets and curlicues.

  ‘Who knew this much love happened at this school?’

  ‘But it does,’ she says, staring at me solemnly. ‘It happens everywhere.’

  I use my pen to write our names on the wall, next to a pair of lovers’ initials, ‘IT ♥ TF – 1984’. I wonder briefly where they were today and what had happened to them.

  ‘Not like that, Specs.’

  ‘Then how?’

  She is holding her spikes in her arms. She takes one shoe and with her fingers plucks out a metal pin from the sole.

  She crouches, and, using the pin, etches our names into the wall. When she is done, she turns to me. I see that the tips of her fingers are covered in blood.

  Her voice is satisfied. ‘See, Specs, now it’s forever.’

  So there it is – ‘Nikhil & Riya’ forever engraved in the very veins of this school. She rocks back on her heels, stares at the wall for a second, admiring her handiwork, and then reaches out and touches our names, staining them red with her blood.

  70

  OUR SCHOOL WAS so small and insular that the Rajat Sinha incident had gripped everyone in its maddening vice. But now the scandal was old news and Riya had been gone an inordinately long time, the rumour mills begun to spin.

  Someone said she was in Delhi preparing for the nationals. Others said that they had seen her on campus, driving out in B.P.’s car. Mrinalini claimed to know that she was in the mountains, undertaking altitude training for the Olympics. I was puzzled and a little bit amused by many of these accounts. When people asked me where she was, I was deliberately vague with my answers.

  I sat at my desk trying to complete vast amounts of unfinished schoolwork. Vikram, holding a hockey stick in his hand, came into the bare room that should have been his. In a rare act of sympathy, Ansari Sir had not given away my room along with my badge. I never knew what induced his pity, though I suspected it may have dawned upon him about how useful I had been during the Rajat Sinha incident – and not only as a scapegoat. While Ansari Sir had spent weeks spinning off into his geriatric deliriums, I had hand-copied hundreds of pages of records, made long tedious reports and filled out extensive police paperwork.

  Vikram looked around the room, studying the walls and piles of books.

  I wondered vaguely if he were here to sneer at me, or lord over his prefecture. I hadn’t seen him much since his investiture. None of it mattered to me though, not like the way it did before. I was too focused on Riya, everything else seemed immaterial.

  ‘So where is she?’ he asked casually, juggling the hockey stick in his hands.

  I looked up at him, feeling no fear at all. ‘Who?’

  ‘Your little bird.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ I muttered, pretending to be studying something in my book.

  ‘I didn’t ask how she was. I asked where she was.’

  There was no way for me to escape this question. I was, after all, trapped in the confines of my room; his unerring sportsman’s instinct for space and movement effectively blocked the only escape. I looked up at him and for a fleeting instant, I swear that I saw concern in his beady eyes.

  At that moment, I heard the wheezy voice of Ansari Sir from the corridor. ‘Vikram, my office please.’

  Vikram, surprised at Ansari Sir’s arrival, stepped away. To my surprise, he nodded stiffly at me. Ansari Sir popped into the doorway and peered at me, a curious look in his old eyes. Then he turned, closing the door behind him so quietly that even a small baby would not wake.

  71

  JUST ABOUT NOW, things began moving very quickly. For a few weeks, time had seemed to stand still, as if it was creating memories especially for me. Now it sped like a train that had a destination but was making very quick stops.

  She too was changing fast. One moment, she was strong; the next, she was a sick girl staring at me with blank, listless eyes. She was thinner than I had ever seen her and was tired a lot, sometimes never even getting out of bed. Though these changes had been happening right in front of my eyes, I never quite registered them – like the slow deterioration of a tree, the stages so gradual they cannot be distinguished separately. But now, every time I looked at her, I saw a different Riya from the one I knew, the Riya I had first laid eyes on all those years ago in the tenth-standard classroom, the girl with the short skirt and the wild hair that matched her eyes, the girl who ran like a dancer on the tracks.

  What upset me most – oddly enough – was when she stopped eating the food she had once gobbled like a starving teenage boy. I’d always teased her about being constantly hungry, about being able to eat far more than I could.

  I spent the last of the money I had won in the GK competition on her favourite foods – chocolate bars, cream biscuits, imported caramel toffees, masala chips, but she hardly ate anything. She would thank me sweetly and tell me that she was saving the treat for later. The next day I would find everything still there by the side of her bed, little insects and bugs swarming around her food.

  As she melted from body to bones, I knew somewhere deep within that I would be better off if I accepted it all. Earlier, my despair about her disease had been poisoned by hope. But now I was finally understanding that hope is a dangerous thing – it smoulders on and consumes you, bit by bit. Now my hope was lifting and the despair too was becoming lighter, like smoke drifting into the air.

  I began wondering, was death really so terrible a thing? I wasn’t sure any more. My parents had died, Riya’s mom had died, and I would die one day too. What the master said was true. We all had to die at some point, and I wondered, was sooner really worse than later? Who knew? Maybe death would be a journey into another place, a place that was in fact magnificent, beautiful, a place where she and I could never be separated again. It struck me that maybe me wanting Riya to stay alive was simply my selfish desire of always wanting to be with her.

  During this time, I found it helpful to heed the master’s advice and to live in the present, mostly because thinking about the past was too painful, and thinking about the future was too grim. The present, it seemed, was really the best place for me, and so this is where I stayed, just Riya and me.

  72

  I DON’T QUITE remember whose idea it was. It could have been Riya’s or B.P.’s; it might even have been mine. I talked a lot those days, trying to keep Riya’s spirits high. Over time, the idea became a topic of discussion, then a hypothetical situation. At some point it became a plan: a get-together to break the news about Riya’s condition to the batch.

  At that time – mid-November – I was more or less living at Riya’s house. Jeevan Singh expected me five minutes after the school day ended, and always had tea waiting. B.P. had withdrawn into him
self and hardly ever spoke more than necessary words. However, following the trip to the master, he seemed to accept my constant presence, and would occasionally grunt in my direction. I counted this as tacit permission to keep visiting; though we both knew he wouldn’t be able to keep me away.

  We sat around her living room and debated the issue endlessly. She usually reclined on the sofa, covered with a blanket. I lounged on the floor by her side.

  ‘Do you think it’s a bit much?’ she asked.

  ‘It’ll give you a chance to see everyone. They’ve been asking about you.’

  ‘They have?’

  ‘People have noticed that you’ve been gone.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care, and I don’t want to see most of these people anyway,’ she said with a shrug.

  ‘You’re going to have to at some point.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s probably the right thing to do,’ I said, now doubtful of the argument I was trying to make.

  ‘There’s nothing right or wrong about it,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s my life. And death.’

  In the end she was convinced by B.P. that a small gathering was appropriate though by now I had doubts about the wisdom of the plan. It would tire her and potentially distress her to see their reactions and deal with their questions. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted her to do this, but I also didn’t want to say anything because I was painfully aware now that this could just be me being selfish, wanting her all to myself.

  I told myself that it wasn’t a big deal – just our batchmates on B.P.’s lawn, drinking juice and eating chips. We did that every day during tea, didn’t we? But something about this whole affair bothered me. It felt like one of those ‘farewell’ teas that the school had for the staff when they were about to leave the school.

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ she asked me hesitantly, breaking my thoughts.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘To the tea.’