Have a Heart by Nashina Makhani

Author:Nashina Makhani [Makhani, Nashina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-08T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

I keep saying it but, things that feel like they should make everything different never really do.

Things didn’t change much at all between me and Alia after that – except the fact that I was allowed to kiss her now. Of course, there was the teasing from her family as well, not that they hadn’t always teased us, but it was different now. It wasn’t to annoy us or make us blush, roll our eyes or go on the defensive anymore. Now, they did it because, to use Anjali di’s words, sometimes it just couldn’t be helped.

One thing that had changed was that Alia was more willing to listen to me now. I wasn’t crazy enough to think that it had anything to do with me being her boyfriend – as girlish as it might sound, even thinking that made me grin like a fool; Alia wasn’t the type to ever let a guy control her, be it her dad, her brother or her boyfriend. No, she listened to me now because it made sense to her, because she understood that when I told her to relax and take a breather or reminded her to take her medicine, it was for her own good. She’d known it before too, known that I was only looking out for her but now it had finally sunk in.

She stuck to all the plans we’d come up with over summer, took her medications consistently, tried to stress less, even tried eating more of the ‘heart-healthy’ foods the doctor had recommended – though she complained constantly that they couldn’t even come close to ma ka haath ka khana. She still had to go for regular check-ups, both with the GP and the cardiologist, and the dizzy spells, chest pains and plethora of other symptoms hadn’t cleared out entirely but they were becoming less frequent, less severe. The doctors seemed to think she was doing everything right and I started to hope that she really might be okay.

Alia’s change in handling her condition was only one of the many changes that happened in those weeks. While nothing had changed between the two of us, we’d both definitely changed. Alia had become a little more light-hearted, stopped looking at the world in terms of all the things she couldn’t do, saw more than just the dangers. As for me, I stopped being so guarded all the time, let people actually see what I was feeling on occasion, laughed more freely and even let myself cry in the emotional parts of films.

One of the biggest changes though was the one that I hadn’t realised had happened.

Somehow, without either of us noticing, we’d fully grown up, become all the more responsible. It was proper weird to realise it because we’d always been older than our ages, grown up fast, but in a very different way. Before, it’d been about understanding what the adults were talking about, being able to look after ourselves, not relying on anyone else to do things for us and, for the past few years, looking after Zia.

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