The week following Sunil’s memorial, Kavita does little more than sleep. Occasionally, she wakes to check in on her parents or use the washroom or mindlessly eat a banana over the kitchen sink. Every other day or so, she somehow finds enough energy to shower and change into a fresh pair of pyjamas. Other than that, she prefers to drift in unconsciousness. What she hopes for every time she closes her eyes are dreams of Sunil, a message that he is all right wherever he is. What she dreams she can’t remember.
Sometimes she awakens startled, as if the house phone has rung or the alarm on her cell has beeped. Her heart flutters like a hummingbird in a cage. Her breath is rapid and shallow. Her gut blares like a warning beacon. Its message: Danger is imminent. Be warned, be ready. And her first waking thoughts: Mom and Dad. Where are Mom and Dad? When this happens, she rushes out of bed and checks each of their bedrooms. Once she sees that they are safe in their beds, the maniacal panic tapers, but not completely—a pool of it remains like a pesky sip of pop that lingers at the bottom of a bottle, fizzing. Then, drained of the little energy she has acquired in sleep, she stumbles back to bed and hides inside a tent of covers.
Her parents keep to the same unstructured sleep regime; her mother in particular, like a newborn, tires herself out with weeping until her swollen eyelids finally shut. Her father has taken to staring at things—walls, hedges—with the same purposeless focus of a housecat, often leaving Kavita to wonder when she catches him, not only what he is staring at, but why? Nirav spends most of the time playing video games in the basement.
After about a week of living like this, Kavita’s back aches and she knows it is time to leave her bed, if only long enough for the aches to stop their incessant moaning.
It is mid-afternoon—according to the cell phone—Sunday. She dresses in a forgotten pair of sweats she finds in her closet, then hobbles a path to the kitchen, hopeful they have run out of bananas.
The fridge shelves are stocked with leftovers and gifts of food from the memorial. From the top shelf, she grabs a Ziploc bag full of samosas and a jar of tamarind sauce. She bites off the pointy tip of the samosa. Her mother’s samosas are better, and this one is a little stale, but neither of these facts stops her from taking another bite.
Out of nowhere, Anchor pulls at her insides.
Eat up, you pig, it says, cool and clipped.
With effort, she pushes down a swallow, a ball of glue and sand that scratches along her throat. At least while she slept she was spared the company of her unwelcome guests. Part of her had dared to hope they had gathered up their torment and left. Anchor, at least, shows no signs of leaving her in peace, yet.
“Look at me, stuffing my face,” she frowns, sickened by the pleasing taste in her mouth. Sunil always loved samosas. “Sorry, Bear.” She holds one hand over her navel, half-expecting the bites she took to revolt from her gut. When, after a few moments, this doesn’t happen, she throws the rest of the samosa in the trash can under the sink.
“Who are you talking to, love?” says a voice from behind.
She jumps, the way their cat, Coal, does whenever he’s surprised by the vacuum cleaner, the blender, the hairdryer.
“Niru, you scared me. I didn’t hear you come upstairs.”
“No, I don’t suppose you did.” He glances around the kitchen. “I heard voices and came up. Thought perhaps your folks were finally out of bed.”
She blinks at the brown linoleum. “No, it’s just me.”
“Right, well, hello there.” He steps forward and kisses her longingly on the cheek. “It’s good to see you out and about.”
She grins a millimetre.
“It’s been terribly lonely round this place. I haven’t played video games for this many days straight since uni. It’ll be good to go home and sleep in our bed though, ay? Coal misses you like mad. I’ve been popping round every day to feed him and play with him for a bit.”
She sits at the table and stares numbly at Sunil’s vacant chair. “I didn’t know you went anywhere.”
He takes a seat across from her. “You’ve been dead to the world. But never mind all that. The point is, now that the fray is over, we should be getting on with it, shouldn’t we?”
She reaches across the table with big eyes. Emotions weren’t his thing, he used to tell her. In the beginning, it was a quality she admired. No drama. Not like her parents. Of course, that was before she realized how lonely life could be as the entire right brain of a relationship.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he continues. “But they’re adults, Kavita. They can look after themselves.”
“It’s still too soon. I need to be here.”
“You worry too much.”
“I can’t explain it. But I have this awful feeling that something bad is going to happen. Something else is going to fall apart. I know it.”
“What do you reckon’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know.” She holds her elbows. “It’s just a feeling of unbearable dread. Like every cell in my body’s been fixed with an alarm and I’m just waiting for them to go off. But I don’t know when. So I can’t ease up. I can’t get comfortable like last time. I won’t let myself fall into another false sense of security. Who knows what my parents will be like once their exhaustion wears off and they have to actually face a day rather than sleep through it.”
“You’re just stressed out. You need to go out for a stroll. Get some sun.”
She stares at him with her lips slightly parted. Blaze churns, slow and thick. So, it hasn’t left either. She hides her hands underneath the table and presses her thumb into the cigarette burn on her left palm that is covered up with a manky Band-Aid. Focuses on the pain. The scar has healed while she’s been asleep. She presses harder and waits for the release.
“What about work?” he asks her.
“I’m not ready yet.” The government job she slags off from time-to-time has its benefits, and extended leave, given the circumstances of her bereavement, is one of them.
“Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea. The sooner we get back to our old lives, the better.”
Her eyes soften with pity for Nirav. He doesn’t realize there is no old life to go back to anymore.
“I wish you wouldn’t rush me through this, Niru.” She wishes he would talk to her about what has happened, what is happening, rather than distract away from it. “You won’t talk to me about Sunil. You won’t even mention his name.”
He scowls at the floor. “That’s perhaps for the best.”
“You know you can—”
“No, Kavita, I can’t. And you wouldn’t want me to either.” He stands up. “Right, well, I can’t take it anymore. It’s too sad here, Kavita. I’ll stay one more night but then I’m moving back to the condo. Tomorrow, I’m going back to work.”
He storms out of the kitchen, tumbling down the stairs with noisy steps, she assumes, to resume his video game marathon.
She blinks at a Sunil’s empty chair, wishing he was sitting across from her, like he had during every family meal. How do I do it? she wants to ask him. How do I split myself into pieces and please them all?
She agonized about how to save her relationship only once before, at the end of Nirav’s one-year exchange in university, the summer he went back to London. Back then, she had no desire to split herself in two, she wanted to follow him across the ocean, whole and devoted, all of herself with all of him, always. Even though she was young, twenty-one at the time, she knew he was different than the soppy sucks she usually attracted, and the accomplished assholes that attracted her. He was worth crossing the cold Atlantic for, because even in those early days, she knew she had met the man she was going marry, for love, not obligation, like her parents.
They met in Microbiology lab, arguably the least romantic of locales with its pungent scents of agar and microbial cultures oppressing the air, vapours sweet and mouldy. She arrived late for class after getting lost in the unfamiliar and winding halls of the newly constructed Biology building. By the time she tiptoed into the room, red-faced and hunched, and took a seat at the nearest unoccupied bench, the other students had already paired up. She was in the process of accepting that she would have to figure out the labs on her own, when she heard an intriguingly-exotic English voice say to her, “Pardon me, but you wouldn’t be in the market for a laboratory partner, would you?” He beamed at her with a toothy smile that crinkled the corners of his hazel eyes. “I’m Nirav,” he said. She noted his Indian name along with his fair complexion. It wasn’t until their first date, after midterms, that he told her about his mixed heritage, an experience he described as not white enough for the English and not brown enough for the Asians. She eyed him, sceptical. A charming accent wasn’t going to earn them nineties. Still, she needed a partner. “I’m Kavita,” she grinned, not knowing at the time that such a small choice would change the course of her life.
When they weren’t in class or at the library, they explored the city together. She assumed the role of tour guide and took him to the usual places—Parliament Hill, the Byward Market, various museums that had free admission on Thursday evenings.
During Winterlude, when the canal froze, she lent him a pair of Sunil’s skates and taught him how to skate. She found it irresistibly cute every time he exclaimed, “I can’t believe I’m actually skating on a river!” While inwardly she corrected his misnomer—canal not river—outwardly she could only smile. They shared their first kiss after an evening skate, in the orange glow of a Beavertails stand, the taste of cinnamon and sugar on their lips.
That kiss started everything. Sweet and innocent and plump with new love. It made her think they were different than her parents, they understood each other. Now, as she senses the growing distance between them, as cold and choppy as the ocean that once kept them apart, she wonders if this is how it happens, how people turn away from each other, one time, then another, and another, until all that is left of love are unspoken words crushed inside throats, and silence.