A Distant Heart by Sonali Dev

Author:Sonali Dev [Dev, Sonali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

22

Kimi

A long time ago

This was the third time in her life that Kimi was returning to her own home after a long absence. She remembered each time vividly. Remembered how each of her homecomings was characterized by some sort of exuberant hope.

Exuberant. Rahul loved to call her that. And yes, she had this weird, expandable thing in her chest that had always been there, the strangest combination of the stretchiness of hope and the tautness of determination. Like the minuscule bubbles inside a soufflé that held it up, that made it exist. The hardest thing to explain to people about her life was that she had this sense of permanency deep inside. Like you felt in your home, like you belonged here and that you weren’t going anywhere, because that sense of belonging had to mean that you weren’t going anywhere. Which wasn’t at all what people expected from her.

Social workers, therapists, doctors were always trying to talk to her as though they were trying to assuage her fear of death. It made her wonder if she should be more afraid than she was.

When she came home from one of her “breakthrough” treatments, everyone around her seemed to wear hope as though they were dressed up for a wedding. The only wedding she’d ever attended was Rafiq kaka’s, when she was ten years old. It was supposedly a small enough affair that Mamma deemed it suitable for her to go. The Diagnosis had not come knocking yet, and Papa had insisted on taking her along. Mamma had put her in the heaviest, most embellished anarkali salwar kameez, which fell in a full skirt all the way to her ankles. It had felt fantastic when she first put it on. She had felt all grown up and almost as beautiful as Mamma, almost regal. But by the end of the evening she had started to feel the weight of the thick silk, the itchiness of the embroidery, the strain from having to stand up tall, and she had craved the relief of taking it off. The hope the household wore every time she returned from a new treatment seemed to fit everyone a bit like that.

This particular stint had been longer. More than three years in Switzerland this time. They’d given her another drug, used another method to replace her marrow, and they’d watched her body reject and accept their ministrations until it all stuck and she, like Frankenstein’s monster, was ready to be unleashed into the world. Well, not quite into the world, but more like into her natural habitat.

Papa, naturally, had wrestled God knows how many more outrageously exorbitant medical equipment companies to ready her room for her return. Creating an environment to their specifications was the only condition under which her doctors had allowed her to go back home. But there was good news. She was no longer someone who had a “severely compromised” immune system. She was someone who had an “unusually underperforming” immune system.

This meant that only roughly thirty percent of the viruses and bacteria that infiltrated the air could kill her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.