Changing Shades - 10

Chapter 10

Leaving Lavanya completely and absolutely stupefied, and for once, totally bereft of words, Arnav disappeared.

Arnav drove home, his brain reeling. He had picked up the phone by a genuine mistake. He hadn't heard the phone ring – it was never directly transmitted to him in his office, but always went to Lavanya's desk first. He just hadn't noticed the green light when he punched the button for a line, and had inadvertently found himself eavesdropping on a conversation he was definitely not supposed to overhear. His first instinct had been to cut the line – but something in the caller's voice, and Khushi's hushed, almost scared tones had stopped him from doing so, and he found himself listening. He didn't hear all the conversation, only the latter half, but it was enough. Enough to make him realise that something was terribly, terribly wrong. That Khushi's life was not the ideal holiday he had assumed it to be, and had found pleasure in savagely punishing with his cruel taunts.

He had known – oh, of course he had known that she was not happy at work, but naively, egotistically, he had assumed her discomfort to be due to his presence there, and to her own guilt at having turned him down so many years ago, a tacit admission that he was right about his reasons for her marrying Manish. He had been blind, blind to her feelings, except with regard to his own, his unrequited love had turned into an almost blind hatred, an unbearable jealousy of Manish; every time he visualized them together, a red cloud obscured his thinking, and he couldn’t look beyond that, couldn’t imagine that she could have other troubles than the ones he had found pleasure in giving her at the office.

Arnav cursed himself for his blindness, his selfishness, his ego. As he drove home, he remembered again and again, the ever-present worry and tension in Khushi's face, the dark circles under her eyes, the strain in her voice, her posture…everything he had never noticed in her presence came back to haunt him on that short ride home.

He reached home, and made a few quick calls, one to his travel agent, one to a hotel in Kathmandu, and then one to a special contact, a man who owed him a few favours.

******

Kathmandu, Nepal

 

Khushi stretched tiredly as the plane touched down, completely exhausted. She wanted nothing more than to get to the nearest bed, and sleep, preferably for ever, she thought, with a grimace. She had barely slept at night what with the tension of anticipation, and had been up early packing and mentally preparing herself for what she might find waiting for her in Kathmandu. Then the wait for the flight, which had, of course, been delayed, and finally the touchdown in a strange town, where she knew no one, except the person who was supposedly waiting for her. The next few hours promised to be the most traumatic ones in her life, she thought and she braced herself mentally as she left the plane and looked around for the man who had promised to be there.

The man whom she had spoken to on the telephone, was waiting for her, as he had promised. He was a small, thin Nepalese, with a tired, but kind face, and he smiled at her as she approached him.

“Khushi Dewan?” he asked, and when she nodded, he took her case, and led her out.

“I'm sorry to rush you like this, but we really haven't much time,” he said. “I was so afraid I wouldn't be able to find you in time. You don't know how many Dewans there are in Bombay!”

“Where are we going?” asked Khushi, as he ushered her into a waiting car. Neither of them noticed a man in a long overcoat and cap pulled over his eyes following them, nor did they see the car that he got into immediately behind them, which promptly pulled away from the kerb, and followed them into the traffic.

“To the hospital,” replied the other, and held out his hand to her for the first time. “I'm Raj Bahadur, by the way. Pratibha, my sister has told me about you. You don't know her, but she knows you very well. She…she…” he stopped, and looked away. To her horror, Khushi saw a tear roll down his cheek. He looked back at her.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Maybe it's better that she tells you herself.”

“Tell me what?” asked Khushi, completely nonplussed, but Raj Bahadur shook his head, and didn't say much more till they reached their destination.

Khushi got out wonderingly, and looked around her. It was early evening now, and getting dark, but the hospital was well lit, and she could see that it was not very large, but scrupulously clean. Raj Bahadur led the way in, and up the stairs into a landing, where a young girl was waiting anxiously. As they came up, she looked at them eagerly, and Khushi saw that she was very pretty, but very, very thin, almost as though something had eaten her away, to the point of emaciation. She was also, Khushi realised immediately, very sick. She made no attempt to get up from her wheelchair, and her arm, where it lay on the arm of the chair, had tubes running into it.

“Khushi?” said the girl, hesitantly, and Khushi nodded, and came over to her. The girl shrank back.

“No! Don't touch me! Please!”

Khushi looked at her, then back at Raj Bahadur helplessly. “Why? Will one of you please tell me what's going on? What's the matter? And where is Manish? You called me all the way here at a moment's notice for him – where is he? And who are you?”

The girl looked at her helplessly.

“Please, Khushi, Please sit down. I have to tell you everything, and there's not much time. Not for him, anyway.  I'm Pratibha.”

“That doesn't tell me anything,” said Khushi, evenly. Pratibha looked at her miserably.

“Manish and I were married about eight months ago,” she said, softly, watching Khushi's face.

Khushi went blank.

She looked at the girl in front of her, her brain in total shock. She tried to speak, but no words came. Her head whirled, and she actually felt giddy for a moment. She put out a hand to steady herself, oblivious of the worried glances of the brother and sister looking at her.

“Married?” she whispered. “Married you …eight months… married?”

Then, with a supreme effort, she collected her scattered wits slowly. She looked at both of them, her face still mirroring her shock, and Raj Bahadur rushed to get her a glass of water. Pratibha looked at her anxiously.

“I'm sorry,” she said, weakly, and Khushi could see the physical effort it took for the girl to speak, her voice coming in short breaths. “He told me about you, that he was married. I always knew that. But he didn't want to go back. He told me that he didn't love you, that you didn't love him, had never loved him. I still would not have married him, it was enough for me to just live with him. He didn't want to go back, you know. But when I became pregnant, he insisted we get married. He wanted his child to have his name, and later, when we both became sick, we knew we had to. We didn't know whether the child would survive, whether I would survive, but we knew he would not. And Raj can't look after a child. His only hope was you.”

“Wait,” said Khushi, slowly, painfully. “Tell me the whole story from the start.”

So Pratibha told her. It was a pathetic story, and a short one. Manish had met Pratibha at one of the hangouts for young drug addicts. They both were on drugs, they both enjoyed each other's company, and they found living together, a natural solution. Manish wired his parents for money – the last letter they had received, after which they had sold their business, and moved to Bombay. He kept wiring them for more money, not knowing that his letters went unopened. He never believed their threats, never believed that they would not, and could not, give him any more. But within a few months of being with Pratibha, Manish discovered he had AIDS.

Khushi gasped. This time, she really had to sit down. She sat on the narrow hospital bench set against the wall, her hands clenched on the armrest, trying to digest what the other girl's words meant.

"AIDS. Manish has AIDS." She repeated the words again and again to herself, as though they would make more sense if she said them again. 

She looked at Pratibha, and try as she might, she couldn't keep the accusation out of her eyes, her tone.

"How ... where ... how did he ...? From ... you? Or from ..."

Pratibha's eyes were nervous, her tone hesitant.

"We don't know. Probably from the needles. They were not ... very clean. Or maybe ...," she stopped and took a deep breath before she continued. "Maybe from one of the other girls. We ... they ... it was communal living ... if you know what I mean ...  and we were all high most of the time ... we ... he ... didn't know what he was doing."

Khushi tried to digest this new shock. Manish had been on drugs, that was something she knew, had known for a long time ... but he had also been unfaithful? 

She spoke slowly, trying to make sense of what the other girl was saying.

"So you and he ... you weren't ... together ...?" she stopped. How to ask this young girl ... and, she thought slowly, did she even need to? Did she want the answer? She turned to Pratibha again, her tone marginally steadier.

"So ... when did you get together? And when did you know about his ... illness?"

She couldn't bring herself to say the dreaded word. But Pratibha, it appeared, was stronger. 

"His AIDS? Not too long back. Like I said, about eight months. We lived in this commune, about twenty of us ... and we, Manish and I, got together about a year ago. It was a few months after that. He was sick off and on ... all of us were ... the place we lived wasn't clean. But then he got sicker, and one night he started throwing up and didn't stop all night. In the morning, I took him to a doctor, and he ran a test ..."

Pratibha looked at Khushi squarely.

“I didn't leave him. How could I? He had nobody. His parents were not answering his letters, neither were you. And anyway, he didn't want to go back. He said he couldn't, his father would never accept him back. So I stayed with him, looked after him. Then I discovered I was pregnant. I just didn't know what to do. I didn't want the baby to be sick. So I went back to my brother. Manish followed me, and insisted I marry him. He said I needn't stay with him, but if we got married here, in Nepal, at least the baby would be registered as his, under his name. It would be legitimate. We were both hoping the baby would be all right. He even promised to give up drugs, if the baby was okay. He wanted me to stay away till the baby arrived, then test it to check. I agreed. He had already told me about his marriage to you, about his father, and how scared he was of him, everything. So we got married, and I stayed with Raj. Till the next bombshell.”

She looked at Khushi again.

“I escaped AIDS but I got TB. I could take some of the medicines, but not all, because of the baby, and TB here in Nepal is drug-resistant – my infection hasn’t been responding to much. We didn’t know whether I would get better or not. We were both shell shocked – we didn't know what to do. For a while we thought of aborting the baby – what was the use of bringing it into this world, when both parents might be dead before long? But while I was pregnant, without my knowledge, Manish started trying to track you down. He thought his parents would have nothing to do with the baby, but he thought…he hoped that you might. He sent Raj, as he was already unable to travel. Raj, bless him, went all the way to Delhi to look for you. He didn’t find you, of course, the people at the house had no idea where you were. With great difficulty, he traced your lawyer, then found you had moved to Mumbai. But by that time, his health started getting worse, and he was in such a state that he couldn't give any names of anybody you might know in Mumbai. So Raj started calling up all the Dewans in the phone book one by one. That's how he found you. We had to find you."

Pratibha stopped, and looked at Khushi pleadingly. She whispered in a lower voice, "We had to find you, Khushi. You were our only hope.”

Her hand came out to cover Khushi's. Her eyes, as they gazed into Khushi's were wide, scared.

Khushi swallowed. “Where…where is Manish now?” she asked, almost in a whisper. Raj, who had been sitting silently all the while, listening to the conversation, got up.

“I'll take you to him,” he said quietly. “But be prepared. He will not know you.”

Khushi smiled bitterly.

“He’ll know me,” she said flatly. “He knows me better than I did myself.”

She followed Raj into the small hospital room. And saw her husband for the first time in two years.

She hardly recognized him. He lay, frail and thin, under the covers, an emaciated hand peeping out from the sheet, into which a clear plastic tube dripped fluids. His eyes were closed, and he breathed heavily and noisily. Wires ran from his chest electrodes up to the shelf behind his bed, where the heart and blood pressure monitors bleeped their warnings, and an irregular green tracing paced repetitively across the screen.

Khushi looked at him ... at the boy she had grown up with ... the man she had married ... her friend, her biggest enemy. The man whose parents had given everything she needed when she was orphaned and alone in the world, and the man who had taken everything away from her. 

And she found that she felt nothing. Not love, not affection ... and not even hatred. She was blank. Numb. Empty of all emotion.

He was sleeping. Or was he? The nurse, dressed in protective clothing, gloves, and a mask, looked up at them, and bent back to her work of adjusting the drip rate.

“Visitors? Now? Visiting hours are over.” Her tone was dismissive, but not overtly rude. She must have been used to relatives coming in at odd hours.

“She's just got in from Bombay,” explained Raj Bahadur. The nurse looked at Khushi.

“You may be too late,” she said, not unkindly. “He's been like this for the last couple of weeks. He drifts in and out, but it's not so frequent now.”

“What's happening to him?” asked Khushi, and then felt foolish for asking. The nurse looked at her consideringly.

“You know he has AIDS?” As Khushi nodded, she went on.

“Well, I don't know how much you understand of the illness, but basically it means his immune system is knocked out. So he's prone to getting bugs which would not bother normal people. Also some cancers. He's got a tumour in the brain, which is making him unconscious from time to time. Now and then we manage to bring down the pressure on his brain, and he becomes lucid. Then he goes off again. He's got a skin cancer. He's got fungus all over his intestines, and that is not responding to any treatment. Then one of his lungs also has a fungus, a different one. That's causing his lungs to collapse, and he needs breathing support and oxygen all the time. What we're worried about, is that the fungus in the lungs may have infected his heart.”

Khushi sat down. It was too much for her. Pratibha wheeled herself in and looked at her. She made as if to say something, then a sound from the bed stopped them both. They whirled around to the bed.

Manish had opened his eyes, and was staring vacantly around.

Pratibha wheeled her chair to his side, and took his hand. “Manish,” she said, softly. “I'm here. I'm here. Can you hear me?”

The hand in hers twitched, then his gaze seemed to become more focussed. He looked at her.

“Pratibha,” his voice was slurred, laborious.

“Did you find them? Did you find ma and baba?”

Pratibha held his hand tightly.

“Manish?” she spoke clearly, slowly. “Can you hear me? Yes, I did find them. I found Khushi, Manish. I found Khushi. She's here. Can you see her?”

Khushi moved so that Manish could see her directly. She was incapable of speech. Manish turned slightly, and gazed at her vacantly. Then his eyes seemed to focus, and she saw them light with recognition. He struggled for speech.

“Khushi? It's really you?”

She nodded. It was all she was capable of doing.

He spoke again, slowly, with effort, and she could see the pain and the concentration it took for him to stay there, to orient himself.

“How long has it been? Years? Khushi, I'm sorry.”

Khushi gaped at him. That was the last thing she had expected to hear.