Wordlessly, he clenches his jaw, the muscles pulsing like a slow heartbeat.

“It’s been really upsetting for me, Niru.”

He rises from the bed and towers over her, blocking the lamp light with his long silhouette. “Not everything’s about you, Kavita,” he tells her, bluntly, before marching out of the room, and shutting her inside with only the yaw of her confusion for company.

21.

DID THAT JUST HAPPEN? she thinks, stunned. Did he really call me selfish?

Her thinking self says it’s her own fault for raising the subject at the wrong time. Nirav isn’t himself right now. He has a short temper because he’s grieving. She needs to give him time. Once the fog settles, he’ll see things more objectively. Then he’ll make things right. Her thinking self tells her she really should have waited.

Her feeling self careens as if shoved off balance. As it falls, this part of her knows that no reasonable explanation is coming. For whatever reason, Nirav’s family has kept her brother’s suicide a secret. Families can talk about anything, she remembers from the lecture at the dinner table. But not everything, apparently.

For a while, Kavita sits, holding her knees, still yet buzzing.

Then a sound breaks the cold silence of her mind. It is her mother’s voice, monotone and frank: No one judges people who die of cancer.

Back then, when they had gathered around the kitchen table, on that first bleary morning after Sunil had been found, and struggled with how to plan his memorial, Kavita had criticized her mother for being paranoid about people’s reactions. Now, she understands her mother’s reasoning, perhaps in the only way children ever come to sympathize with their parents, in hindsight.

Her mother was right. People didn’t judge. They pinned pink ribbons on their jackets and wore t-shirts that shouted fuck cancer and ran in all-night relays and made record-breaking donations during celebrity-hosted telecasts.

Because no one asks for it. Because the ill fight courageous battles. The ones who make it are conquerors. The ones that don’t are heroes. They deserve to be remembered.

Kavita’s throat aches. Well, it was the same for you, Bear. You wanted to get better too. You wanted to live as much as anyone. Living is all you ever wanted.

With every tremulous moment, her hurt calcifies a little more, casting her like a splintered bone, until the only fluid part of her is her stark thoughts. The awful words surge back, and this time she has nothing left to stop them.

No one knows about him.

No one knows about him.

No one knows about him.

Selfish….

As the words spin and spin, they core her, they empty her. Cold spills into the vacant space where something important once lived. In its place, frigid emptiness.

At last, she knows what it is: Shame, cold and dark as a cellar.