Cover Page

Half Title Page

SIDE by SIDE

SIDE by SIDE

a novel

ANITA KUSHWAHA

INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.
TORONTO, CANADA

Dedication Page

To N and J
For brotherly blessings

Epigraph

And I know you feel isolated

And I feel what you won’t say

I don’t care if the disbelievers don’t understand

You’re my pretty boy

Always

—“Pretty Boy” by Young Galaxy

Part I: Fall

There is an hour, a minute—you will remember it forever—when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don’t know—can’t know—that it is the first of a series of “wrongful” events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

—Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story

1.

Kavita slumps beside her husband on the curb outside her parents’ home where hours earlier an Ottawa police car had idled. A mild late-summer breeze, as light and downy as dandelion seeds, grazes across her skin. A bright half-moon hangs in the clear night sky. Crickets and grasshoppers chirp their nocturnal music. The kind of velvety, soul-sighing evening that reminds her of countless others spent with her brother Sunil, jogging through the quiet streets of their neighbourhood under the buttery glow of streetlights, hearing the beat of their even strides against the pavement and the rhythmic huff of their synchronous breath. As she sweeps away her tears, she knows running through the streets is futile now. The time for searching is over.

Her brother is gone.

The police came on the tenth day after Sunil’s disappearance. A Thursday. The day of the week dedicated to the worship of Lord Vishnu, the peace-loving deity of the Trimurti. For her mother, a day of fasting, of quietly holding a prayer in her heart, and yellow offerings, such as marigolds, since they are in season and can be plucked from the garden, those blooms that burst with the colour of happiness and peace. A day that used to end with prayers and halwa by the light of a diya. On this Thursday, however, the Guptas were not graced with the blessings of a gentle god. This Thursday, they felt only the quake of Shiva’s destruction.

“I can’t think straight,” she says, pressing her knuckles into her swollen eyes. Curtains of dark curls hide her face. Despite the mild evening, her bare arms and legs swell with a fine layer of goose bumps like textured leather. Although hindsight has no power over their present fate, she scours her memory of their last days together for clues, the way a detective might link scattered bits of evidence on a cork board with tacks and string in an effort to uncover relationships, causality, reason—to make sense of chaos.

“Shall we go in?” Nirav asks. He tucks a few strands behind her ear. “You’re knackered, love. Going over it won’t change anything. You’re going to drive yourself mad if you carry on like this.”

“Going over it is all I can do now,” she says, staring at the pavement. He is still dressed in his office clothes. He had left work as soon as she called him that afternoon. He had rushed to be with her. Yet, somehow, she can’t help but feel insulted by his proper appearance, the even tone of his voice, his dry eyes.

“Come, my love. Let’s go inside and I’ll make you some tea.”

“I can’t.” She turns away from him. “I can’t breathe in there.”

Inside the house, her parents have retreated into the solitudes of their grief and separate bedrooms. She had fixed each of them a toddy before helping them to bed, where they had withered into their mattresses, drained by weeping and a week of erratic sleep.

Afterwards, she had poured the rest of the brandy typically reserved for company down the kitchen sink without letting a drop touch her lips. The contents of her parents’ modest liquor cabinet went the way of the brandy. A diminutive yet self-preserving voice inside her head made a salient point: any substances that might be overconsumed as a remedy against the pain of bereavement had to be removed immediately. That same voice knew if she started down the path of forgetting—of numbing—then she would not stop until she reached oblivion.

Earlier, while administering the toddies, she had detected a similar precarious wish for oblivion in her parents’ deadened eyes. These ripples of Sunil’s suicide threatened to overwhelm them all. No matter how much she craved an end to the hurt, the survivor in her whispered with a meditative calm unique to the shock of trauma, reminding her of her duty to care for her parents; she was their death doula now. You’re all they have left, the voice told her.

“You can’t stay out here all night.” Nirav rubs circles on her back, a conciliatory gesture. The warmth of his broad palm soaks through the knit of her tank top. Rolling her shoulders back, she shrugs him off, rejecting his sympathy. She knows she doesn’t deserve any. He lifts his hand away as though in slow motion. Resting his forearms over his knees, he sighs.

“I know we have to go in eventually. But I can’t face it yet.” The reality of entering the house and not finding Sunil. Never again finding Sunil. Kavita gazes across the street at the flicker of television reflected in her neighbours’ front window. She pictures them sprawled on the couch, snacking on chips, chatting during the commercial breaks. Spending an evening blanketed in the comforts of banality. Taking it for granted the way fortunate people have the good fortune to do. The way she had lived until about a week ago.

She hugs her knees in for warmth. “I still can’t believe it.”

“It must be the shock.”

But that wasn’t it. “No, it’s this,” she says. “This is really happening.” But it wasn’t supposed to.

Why, Bear? she thinks to her elder brother, invoking her ancient nickname for him, which she hasn’t used in years but somehow comes back to her now, her version of bhaiya, a word which had been too knotting to her toddler tongue. Bear always felt more befitting of Sunil and Kavita meant it with no less affection than the Indian endearment. What changed your mind?

Sunil had called her at work, which alone surprised her. But when he asked her to leave early and come home without delay, she knew something wasn’t right.

The four of them gathered in the living room.

With his gaze fixed on the dusty rose carpet, Sunil began to tell them about his plan to end his life, all at once, mechanically, as though playing a cassette, as though he had rehearsed the lines too many times before. That he would drive far away, somewhere secluded, somewhere they would never find him. Swallow the sleeping pills he had been hoarding for weeks. Wait for the coma of a poisonous sleep.

As he spoke, Kavita’s body hardened as if his unreal words were an icy fog trying to leach into her marrow, but every part of her refused to absorb it. She couldn’t speak. But the first thought to enter her frozen mind was, He doesn’t mean it. How could her Sunil—her beautiful brother, the kindest, gentlest person she had ever known—want to cause himself such harm? Shock soon dissolved into fear like ice into puddles. Her next thought was a silent declaration to her brother: I won’t let you hurt yourself, Sunil. And finally: I’m going to save you. And that’s all there is to it. That was the power Kavita thought she possessed—the magic to dissolve terror in a potion of resolve. Simple. Done.

“I’m sorry,” Sunil went on, as their mother wrung her hands, and their father gripped the carpet with his toes. He hadn’t meant to hurt them, but he needed them to know. He was scared of himself and what he might do.

“What happened?” Kavita asked him. “How did it come to this?”

A few months earlier, the anti-depressants he had been taking since adolescence to manage his condition had stopped working. His doctor had prescribed him new medication. Those pills made him feel worse, even worse than before he had started treatment. The noise in his head was as loud and fast as his adrenaline heartbeat. He couldn’t settle. He couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t eating. The noise in his head grew louder and louder.

He was sick of it. The noise in his head. The troubles of his body. The pills. Having to accept words like managing and coping as poor substitutes for what he really wanted: to live, with ease, like a normal person.

So, he made up his mind. He was done with being broken. He was going to fix himself.

About a month ago, he had started weaning himself off his pills. He hadn’t consulted his doctor, whom he had lost faith in after his last experience. He decided he was through with being a lab rat. He researched the weaning process thoroughly online. It seemed straightforward enough. He felt empowered. He knew it was going to be a challenge, but he chose to believe in himself for a change. His will to live med-free, in and of itself, seemed like more than enough to carry him through the rough patches.

As he weaned, he replaced the pills with all the advice that had been bestowed upon him over the years, solicited and unsolicited, welcome and unwelcome, alike. He went for power walks in the sunshine. He tried laughter yoga. He ate turkey, salmon, and dark chocolate to the point of revulsion. He took his vitamins. He even considered eliminating gluten. Every day, he wrote a list of the things that were worrying him, followed by a list of all the things he was grateful for. He tried to stop taking life so seriously. He got into the habit of smiling, even when there was nothing to smile about, as a way of tricking his brain into thinking it was happy. Fake it till you make it became his personal credo.

At first, he had felt optimistic. He was doing it. He was his own placebo. He was fixing himself. By the third week, the false homeostasis began to fail. As the last traces of medication dwindled from his bloodstream, his symptoms had resurfaced. The noise in his head was the same as it had always been. He couldn’t settle. He couldn’t sleep. He stopped eating again.

He had tried to fix himself, with everything in him, but he had failed.

It was crushing.

The noise started to whisper he would always be broken.

Bear, Kavita thinks to him now. I’m sorry I just sat there. I should’ve said something reassuring. I was about to, but I pulled back. I’m not sure why. You were always so private about these sorts of things. I knew how hard it must have been for you to let us in. I didn’t want to make you feel even more uncomfortable. But that seems stupid now. How could knowing I was there for you make you feel worse? That’s what I wanted to tell you. That I was there for you, no matter what, no matter how long. I felt every word you said, and I believed you.

“He probably thought I was ashamed of him,” she says.

“He would never think that.”

“He might have. There’s so much we didn’t know.” An awful thought occurs to her. Maybe she never really knew Sunil at all. The closeness she felt between them was all in her head. One-sided. Can it be true? And if so, what can she do about it now? Sunil, she wants to yell at the sky. Tell me it isn’t true.

“Who knows what to say in these situations? You didn’t want to push him farther away, that’s all.”

“I should’ve risked it.” Kavita lifts her gaze to the night sky, to the gaps between the strobe light stars. “He couldn’t be farther away from me than he is now.”

After a while, their mother said, “We should go to the hospital.”

“There’s no way. I’m not going to emerg. It’s too fucking humiliating.”

“But beta—”

“Mom, I’m serious. No hospital.” There was a panicked look in his eye, and it spread through them all, as they sensed his unspoken threat to flee.

“Okay, okay. No hospital. Just settle down, beta, please?”

No one spoke for half a minute. “Can we at least call your doctor?” their mother asked, gently. “It’s not too late. They might still be able to see us.”

“Can we go tomorrow? I’m exhausted.”

“I think we should go now,” Kavita blurted. They needed to keep him safe, and they needed help, fast.

“I’m not going to do anything.”

“We should at least get your doctor on the phone,” Kavita pressed. “He needs to know about this.” Maybe the doctor would have better luck convincing Sunil to go to the hospital.

“It took everything I have just to tell you guys. I can’t do it all over again.”

“Sunil—”

“Kavita, I just want to go to bed.”

She reached for her parents for support but both looked as bewildered as she was.

“Okay,” their mother said. “Tonight, you rest. Tomorrow we’ll call.”

Kavita shook her head. Her gut was telling her waiting was the wrong move. But what could she do? She couldn’t force him. And she didn’t want to scare him into doing something reckless.

Sunil rose to his feet. “Come on, narc,” he said to her. “I’ve got some pills for you to confiscate.”

Kavita wanted to reprimand him then, for making light of their terror. But fear kept her expression placid. As they descended the stairs to his basement bedroom, the connective tissue that held her knees together felt slackened, overstretched. Kavita gripped the railing like a crutch. While he fetched the pills, she stood outside his bedroom, not peering inside, not giving him a reason to withdraw. He needed to feel safe, in control—with his condition, control was essential. That much, at least, Kavita understood about his condition.

Sunil emerged from the doorway and swung a white plastic bag at her. “Trick or treat?”

“Not funny.” Her hands felt weak as she caught the bag. “Is that all of them?”

“You want to search my room?” He meant it as a joke, but could probably tell from the look on her face, Kavita was considering it. “That’s all of the them, okay, Little One? Don’t you trust me anymore?”

“Of course I do.” But the truth was, part of her couldn’t, not yet. “You know I have to ask.” She hesitated for a few seconds. “Sunil, are you sure you don’t want to see the doctor now? Why not get it over with? I’ll be right there with you. Come on, let’s just jump in the car and go.” As she watched his face closely, the panicked look she had seen earlier charged his features again.

“So, you don’t trust me.”

“N-no, I do. I just … I don’t know what to do. I’m scared. I want to help you and I don’t know how.”

“Then listen to me,” he said. “That’s what I would have done for you.”

“Sunil—”

He started walking towards his room. “I’m going to bed.”

“Let me know if you need anything, okay? I’ll be right over there.” She pointed behind her, to the orange and brown velvet couch in the family room. She wouldn’t sleep that night. Instead, she planned to sit vigil until morning, within earshot of Sunil’s bedroom, monitoring access to the front door, just to be on the safe side.

“You’re staying over?”

“Where else would I be?”

He gave her a faint half smile. “I’ll leave my door open.” A second later, she heard the creak of bed springs.

Acting quickly, she rushed to the bathroom and started flushing the sleeping pills, while keeping an eye on the stairs. As she emptied the last bubble pack, she felt as though she were diffusing dozens of little bombs that would have destroyed them.

Then she called Nirav from her cell.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “I’ve won an all-inclusive trip to Jamaica!”

It was a game they played sometimes, especially in the afternoons, when each of their cubicles felt particularly prison-like.

“Niru—”

“Well, I’m sorry to tell you, miss, but I won that trip last time. Any chance for Cuba?”

“Nirav, please stop.”

“Sorry love,” he said, apologetic. “I was just having a laugh. Is something wrong?”

“It’s Sunil.” Something about hearing her husband’s voice weakened her. Kavita felt her belly fill with tears. But now wasn’t the time to fall apart. Sunil needed her to be strong. She willed the tears into a block of ice, and told Nirav the details of Sunil’s plan, mechanically, realizing there was no other way to deliver such news.

“He can’t be serious?”

“He handed me a bag of pills a minute ago. I flushed them.”

“I don’t know what to say, darling. But really, I’m sure he doesn’t mean it.”

“Can you bring over a bag of my things?”

“I’ll come right after work.”

“Will you stay over too?”

Now, as Kavita rubs heat into her arms, she feels her belated anger rise, degree by degree. Would an extra pair of eyes have made a difference the next day? Eyes that could have helped her keep watch over Sunil. Eyes that still remain offensively dry.

“Why didn’t you spend the night when I asked you to?”

“I told you, I had a meeting early the next morning.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

“No, I did.”

“If you had believed him, you wouldn’t have been able to stay away, meeting or no meeting.”

“I—”

“Why haven’t you cried?”

“I don’t know,” Nirav shrugs. “Maybe it’s shock.”

Kavita shakes her head. Where was her husband’s sympathy for her brother? Why wasn’t he slowly crumbling like she was?

“If I do feel anything right now, it’s awful, for you and your parents. That you have to go through any of this at all.”

You, Kavita notes. Not us. Not we. Married only a year, and already, there they were, facing a crisis that would have strained even the longest and strongest of marriages.

“Because of Sunil? Is that what you mean? Are you trying to blame him?”

Nirav averts his eyes. “It might seem foolish now,” he offers, after a brief silence. “But honestly, I didn’t think he meant to go through with it. I believed he was in distress, but since he came to you, I thought that meant he didn’t really want to hurt himself in the end. I thought he was reaching out.”

The heat rising inside of Kavita stops. She can’t be angry at her husband for this reasoning, at least. She knows it is possible to believe someone is in as much danger as they insist, and also believe the danger will not come to pass. The conceit of it sickens her now. Or is it the ignorance? What can she say in her defence, other than, she didn’t know what she was really up against at the time. After a few moments, when her larynx softens, she manages to mutter, “So did I.”

Kavita sat vigil on the basement stairs—the couch was too comfortable—watching Netflix on her iPad, the waterline of the coffee pot, slowly lowering, as daylight rose.

They were the gp’s first appointment of the day. Kavita sat with Sunil in the examination room, while their parents waited outside.

He dangled his legs back and forth over the edge of the examination table, rustling the crisp white sanitary paper. Over the years, he had confided in her about his aversion to doctor appointments, a hostility he had carried since childhood. He hated the undressing and weighing and measuring. Having to stick out his tongue, breathe deeply, endure the pricks of needles. The power of doctors made him nervous. A relative stranger who told him if he was too heavy or too light, if his blood pressure was too high or low, if he needed to be switched to this or that medication. Always, the doctor judged if he was normal or abnormal, within the curve or an outlier.

Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Jones tapped on the door. He was a silver-haired, middle-aged man with a sombre countenance. Not unfriendly exactly, just to the point, like a hastily written prescription. Sunil saw him every few months. The GP made him fill out quizzes to verify that his symptoms were still in remission and wrote him new prescriptions and told him to keep doing what he was doing—eat right, exercise, take his pills, get enough sleep. Sunil had thought of him more as a pharmacist than a doctor, really.

“So,” Dr. Jones said as he took a seat at the desk. “What can I do for you today?”

Sunil spoke to the tiles.

“You shouldn’t have tried weaning off your medication by yourself,” Dr. Jones said. “By the sound of it, you did it too quickly. It can take months to wean properly. And you did it in, what? About a month?” Dr. Jones shook his head. “Some people have to stay on medication for their whole lives.”

“I know.”

“Of course, having said that, you can come off them at any time. They aren’t the problem.”

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