The Space Between Us (12 page)

T
he telegram that came from Delhi said only
POOJA AND RAJU SICK STOP COME IMMEDIATELY STOP.

Bhima had left for Delhi the next morning. Serabai had helped her get the train tickets.

AIDS.

Standing in the crowded, filthy hallway of the government hospital where Pooja lay on a moth-eaten cot, a young, tired-looking doctor had flung the word at Bhima. “Your daughter has AIDS,” he said briskly. “Given to her by your son-in-law. You understand? He’s not even going to live past the next day or so. As for”—he looked down and consulted a clipboard—“Pooja, it’s hard to tell how long she’ll be among us.”

“Eids?” she whispered. “Is that like food poisoning?” It was the only thing that could explain why Pooja and Raju had looked so emaciated.

The doctor sucked in his cheeks and stared at her. “You don’t know what AIDS is?” When she shook her head no, he did not bother to hide his disgust. “You people,” he said. “God knows why the government spends lakhs of rupees trying to educate you about family planning and all. It’s a useless cause.” He stared at her another minute and then swung around on his heel. “I don’t have
time to give you a medical lesson. Have hundreds of other patients to check on. Anyway, I’m a doctor, not a bleddy teacher.” He began to walk away and then stopped. “You better go say your goodbye to your daughter, if you want my advice.” And then, seeing the stricken look on her face, he added, “I’m sorry.”

Bhima stood in the hallway of the hospital, unable to move. Pooja and Raju dying? Had she heard the doctor correctly? Or had she, in her usual ignorant way, misunderstood what he was saying? And why had he sounded so angry at her? She looked around her and saw hundreds of people wandering the long corridor, looking as dazed and stricken as she did. Hundreds of people around her, and yet she had never felt so alone. If she had been in Bombay, she would’ve known what to do. She could’ve called Serabai and had her talk to that young doctor. Even a neighbor from the basti would have helped her at a time like this. She would’ve swallowed her pride and asked for help. For Pooja, she would’ve stripped herself naked and walk on her knees to get help. Anything to have saved her from this ugly, flesh-eating illness that was killing her. Suddenly, Bhima’s knees buckled under her, and her hand shot out to touch the dirty, paan-stained wall for support.

“Ae, somebody help that woman,” she heard a voice say, and a pair of arms gripped her from above the elbow. “Careful, didi, careful,” another voice said. “Here, come sit on this bench for a minute.”

Her head felt as light as a cleaned-out watermelon. She sat with her eyes closed until the nausea and dizziness passed and then opened them because Pooja’s thin and dying face was floating in front of her eyes. She turned to thank her rescuer and noticed that he was a young, lightly bearded man in his twenties. “God bless you, beta,” she said.

“Hyder is the name,” he said and then leapt to his feet. “Let me
get you a cup of water,” he said. “I have a flask.” And before she could reply, he was gone.

She watched him struggle past the ever-growing crowd of relatives as he made his way back to her. “Here, didi,” he said. “Cold-cold water.”

She hesitated for a split second. She had never shared a utensil with a Muslim before and a lifetime of teachings spiraled like a funnel cloud into her head. Then, she looked around the hellish place she was in—took in the wasted, hollow faces of the dying patients, the haggard, aged faces of their relatives, the foul smell of urine and cheap tobacco that hung in the air like a hangman’s noose. She took in Hyder’s gentle, curious face and realized that, in this place of wall-to-wall people, he was the only one who had come to her assistance.

She drank. The water ran cool down her parched throat.

Hyder watched her. “You’re not from Delhi town, didi,” he said in a tone that was more statement than question.

She nodded. “Bombay,” she said between sips. “But my daughter and her husband live here. Took the train to Delhi and came in yesterday.”

Hyder nodded. “I see. And…is that your daughter in there?”

The tears came into her eyes unbidden. “Daughter and son-in-law, both. He’s in the male ward.”

She was surprised to see that Hyder didn’t seem surprised. “Happens all the time,” he said. “Husband does get it and passes it on to wife.”

She felt a sudden flash of anger. So Raju was responsible for this? What had he done? Brought home some bad food? Or was it like a fever or malaria, where one person could make the other sick?

“What does the husband do?” she asked. “How does he pass it on?”

Hyder blushed. He looked at Bhima as if trying to decide what
and how much to tell her. She stared back at him pleadingly. “Beta, if I’m to have a cure for my daughter, I must know what this Eids is,” she said. “I’m an illiterate woman, knowing nothing. The doctor sahib was too busy to explain this illness to me.”

“There is no cure,” Hyder said, and she flinched at the hard cruelty of his words. “That’s the first thing to understand, didi. Nobody lives from this wicked illness.” His voice softened as he saw the devastation his words had wreaked. “What they say is, it’s a blood illness. Men get it from, you know”—he blinked rapidly, trying to hide his embarrassment—“from having relations with bad girls. Whores and the like,” he added, to make sure Bhima understood. “And then they come home and pass on their badness to their wives.” His voice lowered. “They’re saying the streets of Delhi are filled with such cases. Bombay, too, probably.”

Bhima was shocked. “But my Raju is not like that,” she said. “He and my Pooja were happy in…”

Hyder chewed on his lower lip. “I’m not saying anything about your Raju, didi,” he said. Then his face brightened. “They say it can be in your body for years and years before its ugliness shows. So even if your Raju had—you know—before marriage, it can still be there.”

Bhima stared at the young man with fascination. “Like a curse,” she whispered. And when she saw that he didn’t understand, she said, “Someone does some jadoo on you—like they put cut fingernails under your mattress or they hide chilis and lime in an old rag and put it in your path—and years go by and you think you are safe. And then one day, something bad happens and you realize that the curse was with you all these years. You just didn’t know it.”

“Exactly,” Hyder shouted. “Exactly like a curse, didi.”

“Except in our case the curse was my son-in-law,” Bhima said bitterly.

For the next few days, Bhima leaned on Hyder like a walking stick. In the land of the sick, his good health, his vigor, propped up her own sagging strength. Hyder raced from tending to his own dying friend—a young man of twenty-three whose parents had disowned him—to looking in on Bhima and Pooja.

He was with them the day Pooja visited her husband. Despite Pooja’s own terrible sickness, she had insisted on walking the long hallway into the men’s ward so that she could see Raju one last time. As always, Bhima had been helpless against Pooja’s determination. It was as if that willpower was the only thing left of her daughter, the only part of her altered remains that Bhima could still recognize. So Pooja walked, her skeleton hands digging into Bhima’s wrist on one side and holding on to Hyder’s arm on the other. To Bhima, their slow, unsteady walk looked like a funeral procession, and indeed that was what it was, because by the time they reached Raju’s bedside it was hard to tell the living from the dead. Bhima could feel a part of herself die during that walk, as if a piece of the old, creaky machine that was her heart had fallen off and been lost forever. Hyder, too, stiff with fatigue from tending to his dying friend, looked as solemn and blank-faced as a death row inmate. As for Pooja…Bhima winced as she noticed how much it hurt her daughter to lower herself onto a folding chair that one of the ward boys had placed next to Raju’s bed. “Forgive me, Bhagwan,” she said to herself. “I must’ve committed many-many wicked sins in my last life, to be so punished in this janam. Watching your own daughter suffer like this must be a punishment reserved only for murderers and other special cases.”

Pooja lowered herself on the chair. “Raju,” she whispered. “Raju, open your eyes. Look, it’s your Pooja. I have kept both my promises to you, my husband. I told you that you will not die alone
and that I would not leave you alone on this suffering earth. You go first, janu, and then I will follow.”

Raju’s eyes were open. He stared at Pooja, but Bhima was unsure if he could see any of them. His right hand, which was resting on his chest, rose a few inches off his body and shook. Immediately, Pooja took it in her own hand, wincing at the effort this cost her. She caressed Raju’s hand with her own before gently lowering it back onto his chest. Raju’s eyes stayed open for another minute. Then he shut his eyes, and the terrible, harsh, rasping breathing started again. Pooja turned toward her mother, her eyes opaque with fear. “Ma,” she cried. “Let’s take our Raju and go home. I’m frightened, Ma, of what will happen if we stay in this hellish place.”

Bhima looked at Hyder for help, unsure of how to respond. Part of her would’ve liked nothing better than to load the two sick children into a taxi and take them home, where she could cook good, strength-giving food for them and nurse them back to health. But Hyder’s emphatic words about how nobody survived this monstrous illness held her in check. Before she could think of what to say, Pooja spoke again. “No, it is God’s wish that we die here, in this place of strangers,” she said in a whisper. “Our fates decided before we were even born. So it is. So it will be.”

Pooja insisted on sitting on that wooden folding chair in the narrow aisle between her husband’s bed and the next one. Bhima tried a few times to cajole her daughter to return to her bed and then gave up. It was obvious that Raju would not make it through the night, and it was important to Pooja to keep her promise to her husband. So Bhima squatted on the floor beside her daughter, and the night filled with the sounds of hacking, groaning, moaning men. But it was the smells that bothered her more—the dull odor of the phenol with which the ward boys washed the stone floors; the sharp scent of the Flit that was sprayed into the air to kill the mosquitoes that swarmed around the damp beds; and above all, the
smell of death that lingered like a dark promise. Occasionally, she mustered up the courage to take Pooja’s pencil-thin hand in hers, fighting the revulsion she felt when her hand encountered bone instead of flesh. How she had worked and fought over the years to fatten up this hand. And for what? So that some man could inject an illness into her daughter that would turn her into a skeleton. She looked bitterly over to where Raju was waging a silent battle with death and found she couldn’t muster up the energy that hatred called for. All she felt was pity, a bone-piercingly sharp pity for the dying man, for her Pooja, for herself, for Hyder, for every one of them trapped here in this hospital.

She felt Pooja stirring next to her. “Why didn’t you send me the telegram earlier?” she whispered and then regretted the question as she saw the pained look pass like a cloud over her daughter’s face.

“I don’t know, Ma. Raju didn’t want anyone to know. Especially you. He was so ashamed, you know? And also, for a long time, only he was sick, not me. Colds that stayed for weeks, blisters in his mouth that wouldn’t heal. And stomach cramps. Arre Bhagwan, those stomach cramps he used to get.” She shuddered. She swallowed hard and ran her tongue over her cracked, dry lips. “But I didn’t mind because I was strong. I could take care of him and Maya, both. No need to alarm you. But about six months ago, I began to get sick also. Then I—”

“Six months?” Bhima couldn’t keep the indignation out of her voice. “Six months you’ve been sick and you didn’t tell me? Daughter, I could’ve come and helped you—”

“I know, Ma, I know. Anyway, what’s done is done. God’s plan for your wretched daughter.” She paused for a long time. The effort to speak had exhausted Pooja completely, and Bhima was remorseful. “Correct,” she said, patting the bony hand. “No point in going over the past. Anyway, you rest now.”

They were quiet for a long time. Then, as if there had been no
break in the conversation, Pooja started speaking. Her voice was so low that Bhima had to strain to hear. “But see, we didn’t even know what this sickness was until I got very sick about three months ago,” Pooja continued. “Then, Nanavatsahib—Raju’s boss—he insisted we both get a blood test. Raju was telling him how I couldn’t sleep at night, how I’d wake up all shivering and sweating. So something popped up in Nanavatisahib’s mind. That was the first time we ever saw this wretched hospital. Even then we were not knowing that, a few months later, we would get to know it so well. Now, of course, I see it in my dreams.”

Bhima knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself. “And…how did Raju contact this daaku of an illness?”

Pooja’s face became a blank sheet. “No use in asking that question, Ma. What’s done is done. He is my husband. And until all this, he kept me like a queen in his house.”

As if he had heard his name, Raju groaned. Bhima leapt to her feet and stroked his hand. “Raju beta,” she said gently. “It is okay. We are all with you, beta. Sleep now.”

But Raju moaned even louder, a harrowing sound that carried such an awful loneliness that the hair on Bhima’s arms stood up. It was the sound of a man who was truly alone, who was standing on the banks of a river where he was beyond the reach of his fellow human beings. The last of her resistance crumbled under that moan. “Raju,” Bhima cried. “Look, your Pooja is here with you. I am here also. I will take care of Pooja, I promise. And Maya,” she continued wildly. “I will raise your Maya as my own child. You have nothing to worry about, Raju beta. Go now. Go in peace.”

Raju’s jaw moved a few times. His mouth opened and shut. There was a loud, rasping breath that made his entire body shudder. His hand fluttered a few times against his chest. And then, he was gone.

Bhima and Pooja stared at each other, too numb to say anything.
Bhima was dimly aware that Hyder had come running back toward Raju’s bedside and was saying something to her. But she couldn’t hear him. Her mind was still seeing the footprints of death on Raju’s torn body. She was still in shock at how intrusive and brutal a force death really was, how its dark breath had made Raju’s frail body shudder and move under its oppressive weight.