Orange- A Short Story

 Orange

Kartik Mishra sat at his desk on the fourteenth floor, the glow of two monitors casting pale blue light across the papers spread before him. The office was almost empty. Tomorrow was the product launch. Eighteen months of development, and his presentation deck was as polished as it could be, and the demo environment was stable. He had run through the client walkthrough twice that evening, timing himself against the forty-five-minute slot they had been given.

The desk clock read 11:17 PM. He should have left two hours ago, but there was comfort in the preparation, in the certainty of tasks completed and the boxes ticked. It was a comfort he had learnt to value, because there had been years when certainty had deserted him entirely.

His phone buzzed. An unknown number with a Maharashtra landline prefix.

The voice on the other end was clipped and official. Lonavala Rural Police Station. There had been an accident on the old highway near Khandala Ghat. A car, three occupants. His number had been found on a phone recovered from the vehicle, listed under the contact name 'Papa'. He needed to come to the hospital in Lonavala town. The officer gave the name and address, and then the line went dead.

Papa. That was what his daughter Ananya called him. She was ten years old.

Kartik wrote the hospital name on the back of a printout.  The jagged letters on the page indicated the trembling hand.

He took the lift down to the basement parking and pulled out onto the empty Pune streets. The route to Lonavala was one he knew well. Sixty-odd kilometres on the expressway, then the ghat section winding up through the Western Ghats. At this hour, with no traffic, he could make it in under ninety minutes.

Mind clogged in uncertain apprehension, he drove.

* * *

The expressway stretched ahead, six lanes lit by overhead sodium lamps. A couple of long-haul trucks and a state transport bus with half its interior lights out were quickly overtaken before a lone motorcycle overtook him and vanished ahead.

Kartik gripped the steering wheel and tried to keep his thoughts on the road ahead, but his mind kept slipping into the past memories despite himself.

He thought of Jaya, his wife. Or rather, his former wife. The distinction still felt strange, even after four years.

He had met her in 2008, at an orientation session for new recruits at Capstone Technologies. She had been sitting two rows ahead of him in the conference room, taking notes in a small leather diary while everyone else typed on laptops. During the tea break, he had walked up to her and commented on the diary, something he would never remember afterwards, and she had looked up at him with an expression of amused patience that he would come to know very well over the years that followed.

They had started with coffee in the office cafeteria, which turned into lunches that kept stretching longer than they should have, which turned into weekends at bookshops in Deccan Gymkhana and walks along the river near Bund Garden. He had proposed on a rainy July evening outside a restaurant in Koregaon Park, and she had said yes before he finished his sentence, laughing at his nervousness.

They married in December 2010, in a small ceremony at her parents’ house in Kothrud. They had ditched extravaganza for practicality. Her father had made a speech about finding someone who reads the same books as you, and Kartik’s father had wept openly through the entire ceremony, which mortified Kartik at the time but became one of his most treasured memories.

His father. That was where the fracture had begun.

* * *

A toll booth appeared ahead, its green and red lights breaking the monotony of the highway. Kartik slowed and joined the queue behind a truck carrying steel rods. He rolled down the window and handed over the money. The attendant barely looked at him. Kartik pulled away and accelerated back onto the expressway.

His father had died in March 2019, of a cardiac arrest that came without warning. Retired from the state electricity board, he had been a quiet man who collected stamps and listened to classical music on a transistor radio that he refused to replace with anything modern. Kartik had been close to him in the way that sons sometimes are with fathers who do not demand closeness but simply offer it consistently, without condition.

Whisky softened the edges of the grief. A drink in the evening became two, then three, then a bottle that he kept in the study and replenished without mentioning it to Jaya.

Then came 2020, and the pandemic, and in the space of eleven terrible days in April, his mother went from a mild cough to a ventilator to a funeral that he attended through a haze of disbelief and cheap whisky. She had been a diabetic. The virus had been merciless.

After that, the drinking was no longer something he did in the evenings. It was simply something he did.

His manager at Capstone, Raghav, called him into his office twice and spoke carefully about employee assistance programmes. Colleagues began to avoid him after lunch, when his breath carried the evidence of the hip flask he surreptitiously kept in his laptop bag. Jaya stopped asking him to cut down and started sleeping in the spare bedroom. Neither of them discussed the move. She simply began leaving her things on the other side of the hallway, and he simply let her.

And Ananya. Born in August 2015, she had been the centre of his world from the moment the nurse placed her in his arms. She had his eyes and Jaya’s stubbornness, and when she laughed, the sound could fill a room. By the time she was five, she had announced that she wanted to be a doctor. The decision had been shaped by the death of Kartik’s mother, her grandmother, whose lungs had failed because no donor organ could be found. Ananya had asked Kartik to explain what organ donation meant, and when he did, she had listened without interrupting, which was unusual for her. She brought it up often after that, with the persistence of a child who had decided that the adults around her were not paying sufficient attention.

She told him once, on a car ride home from visiting his mother’s grave, that she would make sure nobody’s grandmother had to die waiting for a lung. Kartik had smiled and said that was a big job. She had told him, with great seriousness, that she was planning to be tall.

She was also the one who saw everything. The glasses left on kitchen counters and the raised voices behind closed doors. She had watched her mother’s face tighten when her father came home late and unsteady. On one occasion, Ananya had refused to come out of her room for an entire Saturday because, as she told Jaya in a whisper that Kartik overheard from the hallway, the house smelled wrong and she didn’t like it.

* * *

A police checkpoint. Two constables in fluorescent vests were standing beside a portable barrier, waving torches to guide cars to the side. Kartik slowed and stopped, and then handed over his licence. The constable shone the torch across the interior of the car, lingered on Kartik’s face for a moment, then waved him through.

He was on the ghat road now, the expressway behind him, the road narrowing and curving as it climbed. The headlights swept across rock faces and clumps of wild grass, and occasionally the darkness opened up on one side to reveal the valley below, invisible except for some scattered lights.

For a moment, absurdly, he thought of a restaurant. A place in Koregaon Park that had closed years ago, the one with the wobbly table near the window where they used to sit. He could not remember its name. He could not remember why that particular memory flashed in his mind.

Jugal.

They had been friends since their first year at Capstone, thrown together on a project team and bonded over a shared dislike of the project manager. Jugal Mehta was a man who remembered birthdays and showed up when you moved house. He had been present at the wedding. He was Ananya’s favourite uncle. He had a habit of buying books he never finished and leaving them at other people’s houses, so that every shelf in Kartik and Jaya’s flat had at least one of Jugal’s abandoned paperbacks gathering dust. Jaya used to joke that Jugal was furnishing their home one unread novel at a time.

When Kartik’s drinking worsened, Jugal had been the most persistent voice urging him to stop. He would come to the house on weekends, sit with Kartik on the balcony, and simply talk. About work, about cricket, about the old days. And then, gently, about what the drinking was doing to Kartik’s health, his career, his marriage. Kartik had listened, nodded, and poured himself another drink after Jugal left.

He had been removed from Capstone in February 2021. A disciplinary hearing that lasted twenty minutes, with the outcome predetermined. He sat in the HR office, signed the papers, and felt almost nothing, which frightened him more than the termination itself.

He drove home, sat in the living room, and waited for Jaya.

She came home at seven. She sat across from him in the chair by the window and told him, in a steady and clearly rehearsed voice, that she was leaving. That she and Jugal had grown close over the past year. That it had not been planned, but it had happened, and she would not apologise for it. She spoke about his drinking and his rages, about the nights Ananya had spent crying into her pillow, about loneliness and the need to be held by someone whose hands were steady.

Then she said something that cut deeper than the rest. She said that Jugal had been there. On the nights that Kartik had passed out on the sofa, it was Jugal who had driven Ananya to her dance class. Those mornings when Kartik could not get out of bed, it was Jugal who picked up the groceries. She was not being cruel. She was being precise. He understood then that she had gone over this so many times that the feelings were already worn down.

Kartik listened. He did not react violently, which surprised them both. He asked about Ananya, and Jaya said she would have full custody, but that Kartik could see her whenever he wished, as long as he was sober.

After Jaya left the room, Kartik remained sitting in the armchair for a long time. It hurt in two different ways. There was the wife, whose suffering he had caused and could not deny, whose reasons he could almost understand if he was honest with himself. And there was the friend, who had sat on this very balcony and spoken of concern and recovery while filling the spaces Kartik had left behind.

* * *

A sharp bend loomed ahead in the road, and Kartik braked harder than he needed to. The tyres protested on the damp tarmac. The ghats were cool at this altitude, and there was moisture in the air, the early suggestion of fog.

He thought of the day Ananya had saved him.

It was a Sunday morning, three weeks after Jaya and Jugal had moved into a flat together in Aundh. Ananya had been staying with Kartik for the weekend, and the new custody arrangement was still feeling unfamiliar and formal. She had come into the kitchen and found him standing at the counter with a glass in his hand, and she had looked at him with a look on her face that no five-year-old should have ever had.

“Papa, please stop. Please. I want my papa back. I want you to be the way you were before. Promise me.”

She stood in the kitchen doorway in her pyjamas with the cartoon elephants on them, and she asked her father to come back to her.

He put the glass down and poured the contents into the sink. Then he knelt on the kitchen floor, held her, and promised.

The recovery was slow and unglamorous. It was aided by a counsellor in Deccan who specialised in grief and addiction, and a support group that met on Tuesday evenings in a community hall in Kothrud. Long walks in the mornings became a regular routine, and within six months, he had a new job at a logistics company in Hinjewadi. Within a year, he had been promoted. He met Ananya every weekend, and sometimes during the week when schedules allowed. He spoke to Jaya when necessary, their conversations polite and efficient, cordial without warmth. He did not drink. He had promised.

Ananya thrived. She still wanted to be a doctor, and she still talked about organ donation, often enough that Kartik had begun to recognise the particular expression she wore when she was about to bring it up. She told him once, in the car on the way back from a school science exhibition, that when she died, she wanted every usable organ to be given to someone who needed it. Kartik had told her sombrely that she was ten years old and should perhaps worry about her maths homework before planning her organ donation. She had given him a look of exaggerated patience, so like her mother’s that it made his chest ache.

She had also developed, over the past year, a habit of texting him photographs of her meals with single-word reviews. A plate of dal: “Acceptable.” A school canteen samosa: “Suspicious.” A birthday cake at a friend’s party: “Architecture.” The last text he had received from her, two days ago, had been a photograph of a sunset from what he now understood was Lonavala, captioned with the word “Orange.” He had replied with a thumbs-up. He had not known where she was. He had not asked.

* * *

The hospital in Lonavala was a two-storey building set back from the main road. Kartik parked badly, half on the kerb, and ran through the entrance.

A nurse intercepted him. She asked his name, checked it against a list, and led him through a set of double doors into an intensive care ward. She spoke as they walked, her voice low and professional. A car accident on the ghat road. Three occupants. Two had died at the scene. The third, a child, was in critical condition. Severe head trauma. Internal injuries. The doctors had done what they could.

Kartik stopped walking.

“The two who died,” he said. “Who were they?”

The nurse hesitated. She gave him the names.

His legs kept moving because Ananya was behind those doors, and she was alive, and nothing else was real yet.

She was in the last bed on the right, behind a pale green curtain. Machines surrounded her, their screens tracing lines and numbers that Kartik could not interpret. Tubes ran from her arms and nose. Her face was swollen on the left side. A deep bruise was spreading from her temple to her jaw, and there was a bandage around her head, stained dark in places.

But it was Ananya. His Ananya. Ten years old, small for her age, with her father’s eyes closed beneath lids that looked thin as paper.

He pulled a chair to the bedside and took her hand. It was warm. He held it the way he had held it when she was a newborn and terrified him with her smallness, gently and completely, as if the whole of his attention could keep her here.

A doctor came and spoke about scans and prognosis, and the word irreversible was used, and Kartik heard it as if from far away.

Then Ananya opened her eyes.

They were unfocused at first, drifting across the ceiling and the blinking machines. Then they found him. Her fingers tightened around his, barely, and he knew she was there.

“Papa.”

Her voice was barely there.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m right here.”

She tried to say more. Her lips moved, and he leaned closer, bringing his ear almost to her mouth.

“Papa. Remember what I said.”

He held her hand and nodded, and she saw the nod, and her eyes held his for a moment longer. Then they closed. The line on the monitor changed its rhythm. The machines began to sound their alarms, and staff came through the curtain, and Kartik was moved to one side, and he stood with his back against the wall and watched as they worked over her.

And then they stopped.

The doctor turned to him. Kartik saw the answer in his face before the words came. The sound that came out of him wasn’t a word. It bent him forward and dropped him to the floor beside her bed. He pressed his forehead against the mattress where her hand lay, and he wept, sobs he couldn’t control, and the nurses stepped back, and the doctor stepped back, and they let him be, because this was not something that could be helped or hurried.

When it was over, he stayed on the floor. He became slowly aware of the coldness of the tiles against his knees and the fluorescent light buzzing above him. He stood. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He leaned down and kissed his daughter’s forehead, and her skin was already cooling.

* * *

He was in the corridor. Sitting aimlessly on a plastic chair. A constable with a notebook stood in front of him.

The constable spoke in the careful, measured tone people use when they sense the person they are addressing is only partially present. The accident had occurred at approximately 10:45 PM on the Khandala Ghat road. The vehicle, a white Hyundai Creta registered in Pune, had failed to negotiate a curve, went through the barrier, and down the embankment. The driver and the front-seat passenger had died on impact. The child in the rear seat had survived the initial crash because the rear structure of the car had absorbed part of the force.

The constable paused and consulted his notes.

The three of them had been staying at a resort in Lonavala for the past two days, he continued, part of a four-day holiday. Earlier that evening, the driver and the woman had dined at a restaurant in town. The restaurant staff confirmed they had ordered drinks with their meal. Wine for the woman. Whisky for the man. The bill showed three rounds. The constable read out the driver’s blood alcohol level from the preliminary post-mortem report. It was a clinical figure, expressed in milligrams per decilitre.

The driver had been well over the permissible limit.

Kartik looked at the constable. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He had been the drinker. He had been the one they had all warned, counselled, pitied, and finally left behind. He had clawed his way back from the bottom of a bottle because a five-year-old girl in elephant pyjamas had asked him to. And the man who had taken his wife, who had sat on his balcony and spoken of friendship and concern while filling the spaces Kartik had left behind, had driven drunk on a mountain road at night with Kartik’s daughter in the back seat.

He said nothing. He sat on the plastic chair in a hospital corridor in Lonavala at half past four in the morning, and he said nothing at all.

* * *

He took out his phone and called the hospital reception. He asked to speak to the doctor who had attended to his daughter. When the doctor came on the line, Kartik told him what Ananya had wanted. He told him clearly, because his voice, though raw, was steady enough for this. It had been steady for four years.

He put the phone back in his pocket. Outside the hospital entrance, a chai stall was being set up for the morning, glasses being arranged in rows on a steel tray, and the small blue flame of the stove was already lit. Kartik watched the vendor work for a while, the quiet, practised movements of a man beginning his day, and then he sat down on the steps and waited for whatever came next.