A Change of Heart by Sonali Dev

Author:Sonali Dev [Dev, Sonali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

24

I identified another two bodies today. Two sisters I’d talked into getting on the registry. I remember every word they said to me, how they bickered with each other. Why do dead people live on forever? Dying should erase life, not leak into it as memories.

—Dr. Jen Joshi

Shimmering silk and intricately embroidered gold spilled from the bag as Nikhil threw it open. Just his luck that the first thing staring at him when he opened it was Jen’s wedding sari. Jade. That’s what she had called the color. It was Ria’s word, of course. The only way Jen would ever use jade for a color was if it identified a radiology dye. And yet on their wedding day she had looked as elegant, as beautiful, as impeccably put together as the most fastidious fashionista.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Jen walking up the aisle to him as he waited for her under an altar of lilies, running those last few steps—it was a vision he was going to carry to his dying day. It would always be as fresh, as real, as the moment it happened.

The silk slid between his fingers, every one of his senses searching for her beneath it. He’d peeled it off her body fast, too fast, mindless in his hurry to get to her. Her skin. Her smell. She had smelled like a drug. She had been a drug. Familiar, irresistible, sparking unfathomable hunger, bringing incomparable numbing peace. His tough, take-on-the-world wife had been his drug. She was charas to his charsi. Weed to his pothead.

What kind of idiot smiled now? Here. Where his dead wife was all around him. In boxes and bags and lifeless saris. But he’d just called her “weed” and it was hilarious. And she would have thought so too.

He let the sari go. How could you want something so badly and be so very tired of it all at once?

“Nikhil?” The soft hand on his shoulder wasn’t her, he knew it wasn’t. And yet it kept him from folding over and throwing up the grief that consumed him.

“Sometimes I feel like this isn’t happening. That I’ll wake up and she’ll be here and all of this will have been a nightmare.”

“I know.”

“How? How could you possibly know what this feels like?” Even as he said it he was certain she knew what it was to be altered by loss. “Was it Joy’s dad? Was he someone you loved?”

That trademark blast of pain, which he’d grown to recognize, flickered across her face and was gone. “Will it be easier if I went through the bags?” she said with a gentleness that turned her into someone entirely different from that yogic Goddess of Darkness she wore so well.

He let go of the sari he was gripping. “No.” He had to do this himself.

He started filing through the saris. Shoving away the images of Jen in each one of them. The midnight-blue, in which Ria had first taught her how to wear a sari. The shimmering burgundy she had carried with the confidence of a princess at their reception.

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