A History of Longings, Part 1

Prologue, 20

How the night, beloved of long, betrays.

Eight Years Ago, 13

Her brother died on a Thursday. He took slow breaths, smiled a little, and died.

She was not there for his death. This story is one a nurse told her consolingly. Her mind has conjured his smile into one a little sad, a little ironic. Goodbye world, she imagines he said, this has been fun. When she counts how many years he had lived–more than what the doctors had thought possible–she wonders what he considered of those extra four years. Did Rahul wait for life? Or for death?

Each year on his birthday, Rajni prayed. She asked God, with the deepest respect and the utmost plea, to spare her older brother–if just one more year. If not a whole one, then half of one, and if not that, then a month, a week, a day, an hour. She begged silently, on her knees. When she placed a hand against her chest, she could feel the pressure against her heart as it pounded. What she wouldn’t have given, to siphon this source of her life, and place it into him.

Once, she asked a doctor, when she was five, pulling on his sleeve to speak to him. What if she just gave him half her heart? Her memory has not retained his response, but she recalls the warmth of his hand, a gentle look in his eyes. He gave her a lollipop, and one for Rahul as well. She took it to him in his hospital room and sat on his bed, making quick work of the plastic cover, handing it to him. They laughed at his turned blue tongue, and hers green.

For those years, so it seemed, her prayers had been answered. She felt the touch of God in every step and every breath that her brother took. Rajni watched him laugh, thrilling at the evidence of her power.

But she knows now she failed him.

Exhausted from staying up for two whole days, she had pretended to sleep for her parents’ sake while they waited for the results of his emergency surgery. By then he was nine, and she six. And he would mutter under his breath now, that every surgery was pointless. Wasn’t he simply a ticking clock? Her mother’s eyes had been glazed, but she gave him a no-nonsense smile and her father, not able to speak, pinched his nose. He had yelped at them and slapped their arms, rolling his eyes. And then, for some reason, they had all begun to laugh. Inexplicably, they laughed so much their cheeks ached, their sides hurt, and tears rolled down their cheeks.

And so she forgot, asleep by his bed after he was wheeled in from surgery, curled up in a hospital chair. Her parents had been meeting with doctors elsewhere.

Rahul called her name that night. “Rajni,” he said softly, his voice weak. “Rajni,” he called, till she awoke. She dragged her chair close to him and held his hand. He asked her for a favour. She nodded, attentive.

He wanted mango ice cream, from their corner ice cream parlour, he asked very nicely. She promised to bring him some the next day. It was Wednesday night.

Rahul passed away the morning she went home. It was a Thursday.

She never ate mangoes or ice cream again.

–

Her mother no longer slept the night, her father could not speak. They were a home emptied of love and joy. It was possible that the stress and the added pressures resulted in her younger sister’s stillbirth. Vera never lived at all.

Rajni remembers wearing white, waiting outside the funeral home with her mother and Khala Perveen, holding both their hands tightly. Her father was seeing to the funeral rites and signing papers, on his own inside. Her mother’s other hand clutched her face. She would never forget her mother’s eyes in that moment, broken by pain.

Uncle Boman drove into the parking lot, and then he walked through the doors to her father. Her vision was unclear, hazy from the heat playing upon the asphalt. Aslan came to her from his father’s car, and Khala Perveen ran a hand over her son’s hair. She left Rajni to support Rajni’s mother, Simran, with an arm around her shoulders. Aslan and Rajni watched them walk with their heads leaning against each other to the car. When their mothers were seated inside, and she could see her father, Veer, with Uncle Boman, returning to them, she met Aslan’s eyes briefly when he grasped her hand tightly. Then she looked away, from all of them, blinking against the fierce, burning sun.

–

And so, an education in the ease with which life is extinguished compels her to frivolity. Fearlessness runs in her veins, heart pounding and feverish. Searching great heights, she reaches for every high. Her bedroom becomes a breeding ground for bad habits; tucked in every corner is evidence of her secret longings, her late nights of danger. She learns to climb the old maple tree in her backyard to its tallest branch in the same year Rahul and Vera passed. But that is not enough, as she tosses and turns at night.

Her questions about life she asks no one, discovering what is permissible and what is not, when she sneaks into her neighbours’ homes. In the summer, doors are left wide open. So she finds her way in, quietly, observing the material life of the family with three children on her right, slipping into their bedrooms and running her hands over their quilts. She looks at photographs, stacked on mantels and endless shelves, in the retired married couple’s home on her left. The sheer abundance of people takes her breath away–young, old, packs of them all the same age, they smile at her across decades. In their closet, she tries on a hair scarf and models it for herself in the mirror. She is almost caught then, but she sneaks away using the side door.

When her house is emptied as her parents run errands, for the routine of life was inevitable, she drags a quilt to the top of the stairs and stands upon it, riding down all the way to the bottom. She does this over and over and over; the moment of fear before she knows if she will make it standing or if she shall fall, is a feeling like nasha. This intoxication with danger lands her often in the place she hates most: the doctor’s office. Or God forbid, the hospital. But she makes no prayers now, for she sees no point in asking for her life to be prolonged. Sometimes it feels to her that she is simply in an in-between, waiting her turn, to join her brother and sister.

But at other times she is propelled firmly back into the world. When she is eight, her mother sleeps in summer afternoons beside her baby sister. A miracle child is what the doctors call Zoya. Her little sister chases after her, toddling along the driveway as Raj takes off on her bicycle, standing upon the pedals as the wind rushes through her hair. She tries to stand on the seat once and makes it down one street, Zoya shrieking a few paces behind. Their childhood is filled with this: Raj taking off upon a new escapade, wide-eyed Zoya begging to take her hand.

Leaving, she always looks back from her shoulder. She cannot bear to part from her sister. And yet neither is it possible to take Zoya along. Even saying her sister’s name makes her heart ache, the syllables difficult around her throat. She knows there is nothing more that Zoya wants than to spend all her days and nights with her, but Raj lets herself grow annoyed with the unconditional, ceaseless love that her sister bestows. The weight of it, a gift that their mother reminds her will spoil without care, is a source of constant nerves. Raj has forgotten how to love a sibling. She suspects sometimes that she has forgotten how to love at all.