Nikhil and Riya Read online

  76

  I WALKED BACK to my dorm one mild winter night, the trees tumbling and tossing with a foamy whoosh, the air fresh and sweet, and all my favourite stars twinkling in the sky. This night had no right to be so beautiful, not when Riya was about to die.

  I had taken a different route back home tonight. I wanted some time to clear my mind, and I found myself wandering around at the far end of campus, near the junior school houses and the nursery school. In my wandering, I happened to cross by the school temple, and I’m not sure why, but I took off my shoes and went inside.

  I hadn’t been inside that temple for at least ten years: it was one of the few buildings in this school where I hadn’t spent much time. The temple was dark and cool, and smelt like a mix of dirty socks and camphor. There were no lights except candles which flickered like winter stars. The light threw weird shadows on the garlanded statues. In the darkness, I could not tell which deity was which.

  I wasn’t sure why I had even showed up here but now that I had, I decided that there wasn’t anything for me to do but to pray. And so I began to pray. I prayed mostly for Riya, I prayed for me and I even prayed a bit for B.P. I prayed to the book gods who were always kind to me. I prayed to all the different gods I knew – there was so many gods, couldn’t just one of them hear me?

  A big brass bell hung from the ceiling, and I reached up and touched the frozen clapper. I began ringing the bell, first measuredly, like a dirge; then faster and faster, like a dervish, or a storm. I hauled on the rope with all my strength, something inside me snapping, my rage matching the intensity of the sound. I rang the bells with such fury that my fingers went numb. I wanted to break the bells. I wanted to break these statues, break them like they had broken me.

  I rang and rang the bells till the sound dissolved into a cacophonic blur. Which each clang I cried out to them, ‘Hear me! Hear me! Why aren’t you listening to me, you meaningless pieces of stone?’ I imagined the sound booming through the night: gong gong gong, over the cricket field, past the main building, the academic block and Ashok House. I wanted everyone to hear, to feel what I felt. I wanted to get people out of their beds. I wanted them to scratch their heads and peer out of the window and ask each other: What on earth is going on?

  Gradually, the madness passed and I lay down exhausted on the cool marble floor, my forehead burning, my white shirt stuck to my skin.

  My wild heart thumped against my chest and I’m glad that my ribcage held in my wild heart. A sort of fatigue passed over me and suddenly I was tired of being angry, of yelling in my head. What was the point? It wasn’t getting me anywhere. Lots of people yelled at God every day – even the people who had nothing to yell at him about. My marks are bad. Why did you do this to me, God? My mother died, why did you do this to me, God? I have cancer. Why did you do this to me, God? There were probably more angry people out in the world than there were holy ones, and I didn’t want to be either. I decided, as I lay on the floor, that I was tired of fighting. I knew that I simply had to stop.

  That night, as I left the temple, the bells and statues sitting there so calm as if they were mocking me, I vowed never ever to pray again, at least not until some part of my prayer was answered. One hint, one whisper, one sign from above. But the next day I was back at the temple, praying with all my might, apologizing for my tantrum too. I went back because I had no one else to turn to and nowhere else to go. But it wasn’t strictly out of necessity, something inside me urged me to go. I kept hearing Riya’s voice in my head: ‘It just feels right, Specs.’ Somehow, I was starting to know what she meant.

  77

  SHE CRIED ONLY once during her illness, and she did it like she ran – precisely, gracefully, step by step. First, her dimpled chin quivered. Then her nose, and then her eyes. Then came the tears, slowly and then at a steady stream. The tears seemed simply to exude from her, like drops of rain.

  I knew that I had to hold her, comfort her; to say something, do something. But I couldn’t manage any of it. I just stared at that quivering chin and those dewy tears that sprung from her almond eyes.

  I let her cry till she had had her fill. Tears, I knew from experience, were always limited – after the quota was over, you couldn’t cry any more. She gradually quieted down, and came and sat down next to me, quiet and quivering, hiccupping, her head resting on the right side of my arm.

  I looked at her face and realized that she was scared. Riya, who never got scared. I was the craven, the coward, never ever her, and when she professed her fear to me in an unfamiliar, vulnerable voice, tears pricked my eyes. I held them back, though I almost choked. I was not strong, but I had to at least pretend to be. It occurred to me that the only thing more painful than crying was trying to hold back the tears.

  Eventually, when my Adam’s apple stopped throbbing and I could breathe steadily I reached out to her and held her in my arms. She put her chin on my shoulder and sniffled in my ear. We were almost the same height, and it felt good to hold her close like this, to feel her warmth across my chest.

  For a long time we just sat there on her veranda. I, very still, trying to control the tears, while Riya, rid of hers, stared into the nothingness of space.

  By now the last rays of sunshine had dissolved and the cold pierced us strong and hard.

  ‘Specs,’ she finally said. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t answer that question without lying or crying or sounding totally dumb, so I didn’t say anything at all. The irony, of course, was that this was all I thought about, day and night, the answers swarming around my head like drunken flies.

  78

  AS RIYA GREW weaker, for the first time since I had known her, she let herself be dependent on me. She allowed me help her sit up, help her walk, sometimes even help her get dressed. I would help her take off the thick, heavy woollen sweater, and then the thin T-shirt underneath, deliberately looking away from her chest, which was now as flat as a junior school girl’s. Then I would comb her hair. This became a favourite ritual of mine, though it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I would brush her hair as gently as I could, concentrating almost as hard as I did on a maths sum, trying not to hurt her as I untangled the knots with my fingers and brushed it till it shone. Her hair was always soft and sweet-smelling and thick, like rich dark loam, vital and healthy, even as she faded. And it always smelled like the earth.

  Physical contact, which I thought irritated her when she was healthy, she now seemed to like. She touched me more, held my hand, drew me into her embrace. She would cling to me, softly rubbing my sleeves or hair as if she wanted to slip inside me and stay there.

  It was worse when her mind began playing tricks on her – she would start speaking and then suddenly forget what she was about to say, instead coughing in scared ragged fits. She didn’t especially want visitors now, though people still came. She would hardly see anyone at all. I would come every day and even though I just sat and she just slept, she would do so facing me: so we could be together for long as we could possibly be.

  When I wasn’t with her, I was in a daze. I attended classes but didn’t hear a thing. I read my books but didn’t understand a word. I even did my homework but didn’t register anything. Most people left me alone, and when they tried to speak to me, I replied though I never quite remembered the conversations that we had. Vikram, strangely quiet and not quite as smug as before, asked me more often than I would have liked how she was. I tried my best to accept everything, and even though I almost had, there still remained a tiny fragment of hope.

  I guess as long as there is life there is hope, and I hoped endlessly for a miracle. But nothing happened, and as each day went by, she spent more time sleeping, falling deeper into her illness as I looked on, not able to do a thing. Imagine watching the person that you love most fade, while you continue to live, and I wished for the thousandth time that I could give my life for hers.

  79

  WE WERE SITTING on the sofa
in the living room, her feet propped in my lap. I had just failed the first exam in my life – physics, electromagnetic waves – but strangely I had not felt anything except nostalgia when I looked at my answer sheet marked red and remembered Riya’s old maths exams.

  ‘If there was anything that you could do right now what would it be?’ I asked, tickling her toes.

  She didn’t think about it for even a second, which meant that she had thought about it a lot. ‘I miss running,’ she said. ‘It was what made me feel alive.’

  I didn’t say anything for a long time, I only thought and then I looked at her, beatific in the light of the lamp, so thin, so pale, so fragile that she seemed almost invisible.

  ‘Well, let’s do it, then. Let’s run.’

  She shrugged and looked away. ‘How? I can’t. And you can’t either. One thing that we finally share.’

  ‘My calamity and your fate,’ I murmured automatically, rubbing her ankles carefully.

  ‘Have you been reading Shakespeare again?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said a little embarrassed.

  She gave me a look that suddenly pierced me, it was so typically her: how many more of those will I ever see?

  ‘I’m going to take you running,’ I said with false resolve.

  ‘Have you been reading love stories again?’

  ‘No,’ I said a little offended now. ‘Let’s go, it’ll be fun.’

  She didn’t look convinced.

  ‘It’s beautiful outside. Your gods have given us summer for just one day.’

  She still didn’t look convinced so I tried again. This time, I decided, I wouldn’t let it go.

  ‘Remember that time you wanted me to ride the bike?’

  She nodded her head.

  ‘Well, I did, didn’t I? Even though I’d never imagined being on a bike.’

  ‘Now you’re Superman on that bike,’ she said, remembering with a little smile on her pale lips.

  ‘I did what you asked me to do, and now you have to do what I say.’

  And she did. We slipped off to the track, me in a tracksuit and a crippled leg, she in a night suit and a wheelchair, a shawl covering her legs. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that I had to make this happen, no matter what.

  The weather, at least, was on my side. The cold had broken and a gentle, fragrant breeze blew through the night. It was really as if the weather gods had thawed winter just for this night.

  I had pushed the heavy metal wheelchair all the way to the track from Riya’s house, almost a kilometre or more. My chest was heaving and I was drenched in sweat. Now I stood there, in the quiet of the night, realizing that somehow I had to run.

  I had till now never run, not even once in my life. I had limped, walked, stumbled. I had fallen and crawled. I had even cycled, but I had never really run. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes, the white chalked lines fading into a blur and I suddenly launched myself from a standstill, pushing the wheelchair with all my crippled might. Leaning most of the weight of my body against the wheelchair, I pushed her and myself onto the track, and my legs had no option but to explode into movement. I started erratically, wildly, slowly before an ancient human instinct came into play, gaining momentum step by step, somehow my legs not just keeping up, but propelling us on. Then she released the gears of the wheelchair and bent forward at the waist, her mouth slightly open, exactly as she did when she ran. We went faster and faster, my legs for once obeying my heart, moving fervently, more decisively than they had ever before. Then in a heartbeat, before I could fathom what was going on, I was running. I was really running and the wind was in her hair as I ran and we spun and she flew. And just like that, I, who had never run before, finally ran for the first time in his life.

  80

  THE DAY BEGAN ominously. I slept fitfully and when I woke up, the world seemed oddly empty and silent and I realized that the birds that created havoc in the morning were today as silent as stones. I felt in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong and I lay in bed, lost in my uncomfortable fog, missing assembly and not even making it to my first class. The feeling stayed through Singh Ma’am’s double-period physics class, as she droned on about the Heisen berg Uncertainty Principle. I tried really hard to focus – this was my favourite topic after all – but it was impossible to ignore the discomfort in my heart, and my mind kept straying to her, no matter what.

  The feeling persisted through tea break, through chemistry, through biology and through maths. I became nervous though I didn’t know why, I squirmed in my seat and I shook my good leg so hard that I moved the desk. I spilled ink on my fingers and looked at page fifty-nine while the teacher read from sixty-two. I stared out of the window at the oppressively bright day, squinting as the sunlight reflected like spears on the huge paint-splashed panes of glass, the trees so green, everything too still, too bright, too perfect to be real.

  Finally, when I couldn’t take it any more, when my mind felt like it may just explode, I got up in the middle of the English class and without even asking the teacher, I made my way out of the door, my footsteps echoing loudly in the empty corridors. I walked over to B.P.’s office where the wooden door was bolted shut. I rattled the handle uselessly, wondering where he was. I knew that today was Monday, the day of the senior staff meeting, and even with Riya’s illness, this was not something that B.P. could miss. I went next to Principal Sir’s office where his mean-faced, octogenarian secretary gave me a cold stare. Typically, I would have run off in fright, but today I didn’t care and I asked him if B.P. was there. He didn’t say a word and just made a face, and bobbed his head left and right, which I knew meant a no. I went next to the senior teachers’ parking lot next to the main building, looking for B.P.’s white car, but it was nowhere in sight. The day had fooled me – though it was bright, it was cold as ice. I hadn’t brought my coat, but I hurried as fast as I could towards her house.

  By the time I reached, I was panting and my glasses were frozen to my face. I saw that there was no car outside and when I edged closer I saw a padlock on the door. They had never, as long as I had known her, once locked the door. For a moment, my heart stood still and then a strange fear, stronger than anxiety, stronger than sorrow, stronger than anything I had known, overtook me and thrashed furiously inside my chest.

  The air was so cold now it was hard for me to breathe but I knew that I had to get to the hospital. I limp-ran the three kilometres to the main gate, lifting and dragging my stupid leg when it cramped in bone-numbing pain. At the school gate, the guards looked at me curiously and I panted for breath, the taste of blood in my mouth.

  ‘Auto … auto,’ I said but they looked dumbly into the distance with not a single auto in sight.

  But there was no option but to turn around and go back, to somehow find a way from the school to the hospital. I walked fast, pulling my leg behind me, my shoe scraping the gravel, though I couldn’t feel a thing. And then I fell hard, snot in my mouth, each breath now fire in my chest. I got up and continued but then I fell again. And again. And again. When I couldn’t walk any more, not a single step, I sat on the side of the road, white, breathless, my glasses cracked from my fall, so desperate now that I thought about crawling back.

  I saw a boy sauntering towards me from the distance, and even in my pain, and through the cracks, I recognized him: there was no one else with a walk like that. He was the last person in the world that I would have liked to see, but there he was mid-class, out on the ‘prefect duties’ that should have been mine.

  He looked at me curiously, no jeer on his lips.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, almost sounding concerned.

  ‘Riya…’ I managed to say, the fire in my chest burning bright as I wiped my dripping nose.

  ‘Is she okay?’ he asked, now with an edge in his voice.

  No, my mind screamed, but I managed one word. ‘Hospital.’

  I sat there looking up at him, and he looking down at me. And in that silent exchange he und
erstood what I was trying to say – it must have been those twelve long years we had shared.

  ‘Wait. We need a car,’ he slowly said, his bushy eyebrows knitting like caterpillars above his beady eyes.

  I nodded. He told me to wait, and sprinted like a gazelle as I sat there holding my frozen leg. He was back in minutes, zipping down the road in a cherry-red car. For a second, I thought he wouldn’t stop but then he braked, the tyres screeching, almost running over my good leg.

  He got out of the car, gave me his hand and helped me into the car.

  ‘Is this Principal Sir’s car?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, a tense smile on his face.

  ‘You…’

  ‘Stole it,’ he finished the sentence as we sped out of the gate, the guards grinning widely as they saluted him.

  81

  SOMETHING ABOUT THE blue-white light in Riya’s room intensified everything – the starkness of the walls, the whiteness of the sheets, the steel-grey of the machines that were attached to almost every single part of her. Nurses, doctors swarmed around her and B.P. sat by her side. His face had not changed but his lips were white; he just sat there looking at her, blinking very fast.

  Riya lay there, tiny and flat like a little girl, an insubstantial wrinkle under the sheet. Her body scarcely sunk into the bedding, her closed eyes shrunken twin circles, the mauve shadows on her body telling of sleepless nights, the creases between her brows speaking of silent pain.

  I stood outside her room for a long time, just waiting and watching everything and everyone. Gradually, the doctors and nurses left, talking in hushed whispered and murmuring tones. Only B.P. was left now, sitting by her side, not staring at her any more but straight out in front, caressing her cheekbones. Then in an act of tenderness – which almost seemed unnatural for such a severe and stern man – he kissed her gently on the eyes.