When Only Love Remains (21 page)

‘It’s not my idea,’ says a voice from behind. It’s Chautala dressed in an opulent suit and behind him are at least fifty people with big smiles and little gifts in their hands. ‘It’s their idea. They wanted to do something for you.’

Avanti welcomes them inside, still crying and smiling and thanking everyone. The gifts range from books to little Gummy Bears to cute, little baby-socks (an obsession of Avanti’s). She’s already quite overwhelmed when Chautala gifts Avanti a gigantic scrapbook.

‘What’s this now?’ asks Avanti. ‘You know all this is already a little more than I bargained for.’

‘It’s just a little something from all of us,’ says Chautala.

She opens the scrapbook and flips through it. It takes her a little while to grab what it’s about and when she does, her fingers start to tremble. Each page of the scrapbook has pictures from the CCTV cameras of the hospital and it shows Avanti sitting next to Devrat, introducing him to a new friend that she made that day.

‘Where did you get this from?’

‘I watched on the CCTV every time you got someone to meet Devrat. I watched their grief lessen every time you told them your story. And then you know, they invented screenshots. It wasn’t that hard,’ explains Chautala.

And beneath each picture is a quote from each of those people who met Devrat. On certain dates there are more than just one picture, and on some, there’s a lonely picture of just Avanti and Devrat.

‘You have been stalking me,’ Avanti tells Chautala.

‘It’s the best use of the CCTV cameras. These pictures are of love and hope. Not only for me, but for the entire hospital. We wanted to make it special for you. It’s to tell you how much we love you.’

Avanti smiles beneath her tears. She starts reading every quote and feels every day of the past year running through her body.

There’s a grainy picture of a ten-year-old who had come for an appendicitis operation sitting next to Avanti and Devrat, and beneath that is a quote from the little girl in her sketchy handwriting.

‘I remember Avanti di made me listen to Devrat’s song while we were in her room. The songs were average, but her love for those songs has made them the best for me.’

She moves to another picture, one of an old woman, who died three months ago at the hospital. Avanti looks at Chautala and Chautala tells her that they have been at this scrapbook for quite some time now. ‘It’s the least we could do.’

Avanti starts to read again. Chautala asks people to leave the room so that Avanti can go through the scrapbook on her own. Avanti thanks everyone and hugs every one of them before they leave.

She sits on the bed next to Devrat and starts to read loudly. She opens the page to the picture of the old woman who died and is holding Devrat’s hand in the picture. Beneath it are her words . . .

‘I’m dying and seeing this couple has made my going easier. It reminds of me when I was sixteen and got married. I was in love. So much in love. You make me feel like that, Avanti. And Devrat, you’re lucky. You’re a lucky, lucky boy. Come back for you’re missing the best thing in the world. I wish you get my life, whatever is left of it for I can’t see this girl suffer any longer.’

She flips to another page. It’s a picture of Chautala and her lunch-time group. She’s sitting in the canteen with her small group of nurses, and Chautala and his managers are looking at her from a distance. The picture is from a camera installed on the roof so it’s not clear but you can make out the faces if you can see them. Chautala has written . . .

‘I didn’t like her at first. She was a lunatic waiting for you to wake up. I was angry at her though my staff loved her! And it was irritating for me at first because they kept talking about her. But then I started dating her. We would meet for twenty minutes every day over a cup of tea. And now she’s like the daughter I never had. Her capacity to love and accept everyone is almost too good to be true. You can’t walk with her from one end of the hospital to the other end because she has to stop to talk to everyone. It’s irritating because when she’s around you feel like a bad, insensitive person. I felt like that. I felt jealous of the empathy she felt towards others. And then I started learning from her. Everyone around us did. She taught us how to be kind. Devrat, I have never talked to you, but I have listened to your music, and Avanti has forced me to like it, but I do want to thank you for bringing Avanti into our lives. I wish the best of luck to both of you.’

Avanti sobs on the scrapbook. She looks at Devrat and says, ‘I’m sorry if you feel that I’m a bit self-obsessive reading these good things about me to you. But I just love it.’ She laughs on her own joke and imagines Devrat laughing with her.

She starts to read again and it’s five in the morning by the time she’s done with half of the scrapbook. She’s on Devrat’s bed, her hand across his body, her face on his chest, crying.

‘If only you could listen to all of this,’ mumbles Avanti. ‘It’s been eight months Devrat and you have been sleeping. Please, please wake up. Can’t you just listen to me?’

Avanti dissolves into tears, and soon she’s angry, and she’s cursing everything in the world and is begging Devrat just to wake up. Just to give her some sign that he’s awake. It’s one of those days when she throws a major fit, and is furious at Devrat.

‘PLEASE, DEVRAT! WAKE UP!’

She’s pacing around the room, throwing things near Devrat’s bed, and she’s shouting at the top of her voice.

‘LOOK AT ALL THIS, DEVRAT! PEOPLE LOVE ME! Can’t you see that? Can’t you love me enough to at least tell me that you’re inside? That I’m not crazy to talk to you every day and you don’t listen to me! PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU DO! PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU’RE INSIDE. That all my words, that all my love isn’t for waste and you can feel it a little,’ howls Avanti and throws the scrapbook at Devrat. A few pictures spill out.

Avanti’s on the ground now, by the foot of Devrat’s bed, holding on to it, crying, the cool metal of the bedpost touching against her cheek. She cries and she sobs and she curses and she goes to sleep. As she sleeps, she hopes never to wake up.

A few hours later, Avanti wakes up to a crackling noise in the room but doesn’t open her eyes or move. It’s the embarrassing day-after of her breakdown. It’s not the first time this has happened. Avanti wrecks the room, furious at the unfairness of the world, the rudeness of Devrat for not waking up, for not listening, and the next day Chautala sends a few nurses to put the room back in order.

She doesn’t want to open her eyes and face the truth. It’s been months now and she has been breaking down every day and, right now, she likes the darkness staring back at her. It’s better than the truth that lies behind it.

The crackling noise of the nurse crushing the wrapping papers doesn’t stop. Avanti opens her eyes, faking a smile so that she doesn’t have to answer the questions about how she is doing today. Avanti looks around but there’s no nurse. The room is still in a mess. Lamps are upturned, books lie on the ground, the gifts the staff got last night are strewn across. The sound of the wrapping paper being crushed is still echoing in the room. Avanti looks around for a rat in the room and almost shouts for a nurse to help her in doing that. She starts to collect the strewn portions of wrapping paper, crushes them into a ball and dunks them in to the wastepaper basket. The sound doesn’t stop. She looks around and sees a wrapping paper move. It’s on the bed on which Devrat is sleeping. It’s lying near his hand. Gingerly, she walks over, her heart pumping out of her chest. She clutches the wrapping paper, tears already damming up behind her eyes and picks it up, hoping that it would be a rat, because she knows she might die if it’s what she thinks it is, and she throws the wrapping paper away.

It isn’t a rat. It’s Devrat’s big thumb wiggling.

Avanti falls to the ground, crying and kissing the thumb; she’s afraid she might actually die of happiness. She runs to kiss his face and his eyes are moving, they are wet and they are moving. Those puppy eyes are actually moving.

Her puppy just woke up!

It’s been a week and the entire hospital’s attention has been focused on the room Devrat is in. Avanti, her father, Devrat’s parents have spent hours seeing the doctors doing multiple rounds of nerve conduction tests to check if there are other parts of Devrat’s body that can move or feel sensation. For the past week, he has been answering questions by wiggling the thumb and answering in Yes or No. If he wiggles it twice, it means a No, if he wiggles it once, it means a Yes. Devrat has also learnt to do it with his eyes. Blink twice for No and blink once for Yes. The doctors have been assaulting him with questions, and he has been hearing them and answering them in simple Yes or No.

Avanti hasn’t been able to tear her eyes off the thumb, like it’s a little newborn, who does tricks that are extraordinarily cute and novel; if that isn’t creepy enough Avanti has been clicking pictures of the thumb and videos of it wiggling around. The number of selfies she has clicked with Devrat’s eyes open run into thousands now.

She hasn’t got the time to talk to him much in the past few days, and whenever she has, she has just asked just one question, ‘Do you still love me?’ And the answer has always come in one wiggle. And she has always replied, ‘I love you, too!’

He’s learning to talk in Morse code. Avanti has been learning that, too, although Devrat can hear her.

It isn’t that difficult to learn. She would hold his hand and he would tap her hand with his thumb. ‘A’ meant a small tap and then a long one. ‘B’ meant one long tap and three small taps.

Morse code has tap sequences for every letter.

So ‘I love you’ means: Two small taps for ‘I’, one small tap, one long tap, two small taps for ‘L’ and so on . . .

This is till the time they get him a touchscreen and he can use that. But till then he has to get used to the basics, and so does Avanti. Never had she thought that a wiggling thumb can make her so happy.

She’s already making wedding plans and all that. She’s thinking she can leave the hospital, with Devrat in a wheelchair, and talk to him all day long. The thought is slight funny in her head, too, but all said and done it’s not the thumb that is exciting her, it’s the fact that he’s alive, truly alive, someone she can talk to, someone whose hand she can hold and feel. It’s all going to come back. It feels like the first day of their relationship again! She’s nervous of what to say to him, what to ask him; she feels like he’s a new person, now that he can communicate. There’s so much that she wants to say to him, so much that she wants to hear from him. For the past seven days, she hasn’t been able to sleep from the excitement.

The doctors, who had given up, now are hailing it as a small miracle, and are now thinking that there are chances of a full recovery. But Avanti doesn’t care about that, and for her, he’s already an athlete and she doesn’t care how and when he recovers.

On the eighth day, the touchscreen comes in. Avanti’s not too happy about it. She liked holding his hand and talking to him; the touchscreen makes it impersonal. That’s the thing about technology, the closer you think it brings you, the further it pulls you apart. While Devrat is being trained and doctors are trying to subject him to tests, she’s trying to make lists of things that she has to say to him.

It’s two weeks by the time the doctors and the therapists leave and hand over Devrat to the family. Devrat’s parents are the first ones to talk to Devrat and they talk for an hour. Devrat has a touchscreen pad with his thumb on it and it’s kept where he can see it.

Avanti has dressed up today.

She goes and sits next to Devrat. It’s like their first date all over again. She sees his pupils train on her and blink. Gingerly, she takes his thumb off the touchpad and takes it in her own palm.

‘I like it this way,’ says Avanti, tapping on his hand, and talking. ‘How are you?’

‘Not good,’ he answers by tapping on her hand.

‘Were you awake all this while?’

‘No, just a few days,’ taps Devrat.

‘Do you remember me?’ asks Avanti.

‘Clear as day.’

Avanti’s crying now; she can die a happy girl now.

‘I love you,’ says Avanti, and puts her head to his chest. ‘I love you so much.’

‘More,’ comes the answer. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘Waiting for you to wake up, Devrat,’ says Avanti. ‘I have been learning to play your songs on the guitar. Though I’m too scared to use your guitar. Sumit gave me your first performance guitar but I can’t use that yet.’

‘Play,’ taps Devrat on Avanti’s hand. ‘Use my guitar.’

Avanti gingerly picks the guitar like it’s fragile, tunes it, and starts to try strumming some of his songs. She’s not that good, she realizes that but Devrat’s eyes have welled up and a tear streaks down his cheek. Avanti wipes it clean. Devrat’s crying now.

‘Am I that bad?’ she asks.

‘You were imperfect. Like me,’ taps Devrat.

‘I like your imperfections. Your imperfections fit my perfect love story,’ says Avanti.

‘Play some more,’ taps Devrat. ‘And sing.’

‘No. You will sing. Not me, I’m not going to sing.’

‘I can’t talk,’ Devrat taps on Avanti’s hand.

‘But you will.’

And Avanti plays some more. Devrat’s eyes are dry of tears and hours pass by like seconds. Avanti then goes on to show him panels of his favourite comics and reads them out, playing different characters with different voices and apologizing for doing the voices really badly. But she doesn’t pull back from showing off how much she knows about them now. They also play a brief comic book quiz in which she beats Devrat hands down and Devrat admits in a series of taps that he agrees that the master is now the student.

There are small periods of silences where Avanti lets go of Devrat’s hand and wonders why Devrat’s not reacting when she sees his hand on the bed, his thumb moving.

Devrat asks Avanti more questions about what she has been doing in the past year or so and Avanti skirts the issue. The doctors have categorically told her and others to try and keep Devrat as positive and upbeat as possible and she doesn’t want to depress him with the details of her long stay at the hospital.

Four hours have passed by and it still feels like a blink of an eye. The doctors are at the door waiting for Avanti to leave so that they can resume their battery of tests and therapy on Devrat.

Just before leaving, Avanti asks Devrat, ‘Is there anything that you want?’

Devrat’s eyes well up and he taps on her hand, ‘You.’

‘I’m already yours. Is there anything else that you want?’

Devrat doesn’t react, but his eyes are wet. He taps on her hand.

‘I didn’t get it. What did you say?’ asks Avanti and gives him the touchscreen.

Avanti is looking at the screen, waiting for words to appear there. Nothing comes up. And then she hears a voice. It’s like someone’s being strangulated.

She looks at Devrat and his lips are moving. Devrat tries to talk again, his face strained, and the words are more like air whooshing through a punctured piece of cloth, like an old man coughing. She finally makes out what Devrat’s trying to say.

‘Say it again,’ Avanti says, bringing her ears next to his mouth.

‘I want to die.’