Orange- A Short Story

 

Orange

Kartik Mishra was still at his desk on the fourteenth floor at 11:17 PM. Two monitors glowed over the launch papers, the demo environment was stable, and he had timed the walkthrough twice against its forty-five-minute slot. The office was empty. The launch was tomorrow.

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, saved 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.

His daughter's phone. Ananya was ten years old, and as far as he knew she was in Pune, in Aundh, asleep on a school night.

Kartik wrote the hospital name on the back of a printout. The letters came out jagged and twice the size of his usual hand, and the last word ran off the edge of the page.

He took the lift down to the basement parking and pulled out onto the empty Pune streets. Sixty-odd kilometres on the expressway to the Lonavala exit, and at this hour, with no traffic, he could make it in under an hour.

He drove.

The expressway stretched ahead, six lanes under sodium lamps. A truck, another truck, a state transport bus with half its interior lights out. He passed them all, the road emptied again, and there was nothing to do with his mind.

He called Jaya. It rang and rang and went nowhere. She slept with the phone on silent; she had always slept with the phone on silent; it was one of the things about her he still knew. At the next kilometre marker he called again, and then made himself stop, because a car, three occupants, and Ananya's phone in it, and Jaya not answering, made a sum he was not going to do at a hundred and ten kilometres an hour.

His hands were steady on the wheel. Ten and two. He looked at them.

Someone whose hands were steady. That had been Jaya's sentence, four years ago, in the chair by the window, in a voice she had clearly rehearsed. She was leaving. She and Jugal had grown close over the past year; it had not been planned, but it had happened, and she would not apologise for it. His drinking. His rages. The nights Ananya had cried into her pillow. Then the part that cut deeper than the rest: on the nights he passed out on the sofa, it was Jugal who drove Ananya to her dance class, and on the mornings he could not get out of bed, it was Jugal who picked up the groceries. She was not being cruel. She was being precise. He could see Ananya whenever he wished, Jaya said, as long as he was sober.

He had not reacted violently, which had surprised them both.

Jugal, of all people. 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. He was Ananya's favourite uncle, a man who bought books he never finished and left them at other people's houses, so that every shelf in the flat carried at least one of his abandoned paperbacks, and Jaya used to joke that he was furnishing their home one unread novel at a time. When the drinking got worse, Jugal had come on weekends and sat with Kartik on the balcony, talking about work and cricket and the old days before he turned, carefully, to what the drinking was doing to his health and his marriage. Kartik listened and nodded, and poured himself another drink after Jugal left.

The kilometre markers came and went. He did not call again.

A toll plaza appeared ahead, its lights breaking the monotony of the highway. He slowed through the FASTag lane behind a truck carrying steel rods, the barrier lifting a moment before the bonnet reached it, and accelerated back onto the expressway. He did not have to stop for anything. He noticed that, and did not want to think about why he had noticed it.

The car was too quiet. He put the radio on and got a jingle for a cement brand and switched it off, and out of that one second of music his father arrived whole, with the transistor radio he had refused to replace and his classical music on Sunday mornings. He was a man from the state electricity board who had wept openly all through Kartik's wedding, and who died of a cardiac arrest with no warning at all.

Whisky took the edge off that grief, and then the evening drink stopped being one drink, and there was a bottle in the study that he replaced without mentioning it to Jaya.

Then the pandemic, and in the space of eleven days his mother went from a mild cough to a ventilator to a funeral that he attended through a haze of disbelief and cheap whisky. After that the drinking was no longer something he did in the evenings. Capstone let him go that winter after a disciplinary hearing that took twenty minutes, and he signed the papers and felt almost nothing, which frightened him more than the hearing had.

Jaya stopped asking him to cut down and started sleeping in the spare bedroom. Neither of them discussed the move. She began leaving her things on the other side of the hallway, and he let her.

Ananya saw everything. The glasses left on kitchen counters, the voices behind closed doors, her mother's face tightening when her father came home late and unsteady. Once she refused to come out of her room for an entire Saturday because, as she told Jaya in a whisper Kartik overheard from the hallway, the house smelled wrong and she didn't like it.

A police checkpoint. Two constables in fluorescent vests stood beside a portable barrier, waving torches to guide cars to the side. Kartik slowed, stopped and handed over his licence. The constable ran the torch over the inside of the car, then leaned in at the window for the practised half-second of a man smelling for liquor, found nothing, and waved him through.

Found nothing. Four years of nothing.

There had been a Sunday morning three weeks after Jaya and Jugal moved into the flat in Aundh, Ananya staying with him for the weekend, the new arrangement still unfamiliar and formal. She came into the kitchen and found him at the counter with a glass in his hand, and she looked at him in a way no six-year-old should ever have had to look at anyone.

"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.

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

After that it was slow and unglamorous. A counsellor in Deccan. A support group on Tuesday evenings in a community hall in Kothrud. A new job at a logistics company in Hinjewadi, and a promotion. Ananya every weekend, and sometimes during the week when schedules allowed. Jaya when necessary, polite and efficient. He did not drink. He had promised.

And Ananya, who had his eyes and her mother's stubbornness, had grown into a girl who texted 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, was a photograph of a sunset from what he now understood was Lonavala, captioned "Orange." He had replied with a thumbs-up. He had not known where she was. He had not asked.

He came off the expressway at the Lonavala exit and onto the old highway, two lanes through a town that had gone to bed. The chikki shops were shuttered, their painted boards showing in the headlights and then gone. Fog was coming off the hills in loose sheets, and a bend came at him out of it faster than he expected, and he braked too hard and the tyres complained on the wet tarmac.

The hospital was a private one on the main road, three storeys with a lit red cross on the roof. 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 towards the intensive care ward, speaking in a low professional voice as they walked. A car accident on the ghat road. Three occupants. Two had died at the scene. The third, a child, was in critical condition, with severe head trauma and 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.

One of the names belonged to a woman he had been married to for eleven years. He stood in the corridor and waited to feel it, and there was nothing where the feeling should have been. His legs kept moving because Ananya was behind those doors, and she was alive.

She was in the last bed on the right, behind a pale green curtain. Machines surrounded her, their screens tracing lines and numbers Kartik could not read, and a ventilator rose and fell beside the bed, breathing for her at a rate somebody had chosen. Tubes ran from her arms and nose. The left side of her face was swollen, a bruise spreading from her temple to her jaw, and the bandage around her head was stained dark in places.

But it was Ananya. Ten years old, small for her age, her eyes closed beneath lids that looked as 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 her smallness terrified him, as if the whole of his attention could keep her here.

A doctor came. He was young, and he did not look away, which Kartik would remember later with something like gratitude. He spoke about the scans, about pressure and swelling, and the word irreversible was used, and Kartik heard it from somewhere far off. There was no activity in the brainstem. There were formal examinations for this, the doctor said, two of them, hours apart, and the first had been done before Kartik arrived. He was not offering hope. He wanted Kartik to understand what the second one would show.

Kartik sat through the night holding her hand. Someone put a glass of tea beside him at some point. It went cold on the trolley and no one took it away.

Some time after two he found he was watching the ventilator, the rise and the fall of it, and his mother was in the room. It was her ventilator that had made Ananya want to be a doctor. Five years old, and she had wanted to know why the doctors could not simply give her grandmother new lungs, and Kartik, out of his depth, had told her what organ donation was and that there were never enough. She listened without interrupting, which was unusual for her. After that she brought it up at dinner, in the car, and once loudly at a wedding, until Jaya banned the word kidney at the table.

She did not open her eyes. On the drive up he had thought of the things he would say to her, and in the ward he said none of them. Instead he told her, in a low voice, about the product launch, the demo environment, and a client in Singapore who said "per se" eleven times in one call. It was the kind of thing she liked. Halfway through he understood that he was doing what she did, sending reports from an ordinary day, and that this was the last one, and he kept his voice level to the end of the sentence and then stopped talking.

Some time before dawn a constable found him in the corridor, on a plastic chair by the pharmacy hatch. He had a notebook.

The constable spoke in the careful tone people use when they can see the person in front of them is only partly there. 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 take a curve, gone 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 back of the car had taken less of the force.

The constable paused and looked at his notes.

The three of them had been staying at a resort in Lonavala for two days, part of a four-day holiday. Earlier that evening the driver and the woman had eaten at a restaurant in town, and the staff confirmed they had ordered drinks. Wine for the woman. Whisky for the man. The bill showed three rounds. The casualty doctor had recorded a strong smell of alcohol on the driver, and blood samples had gone for testing, the constable said, though the result would take some days.

For one second, one whole second, something in Kartik stood up. Someone whose hands were steady, and the bill said three rounds. Then the second was over and he was left holding what he had felt, forty feet from where his daughter lay, and it was the filthiest thing he had ever held, and he put it down and could not find where it had come from.

The constable asked if he had understood. He said he had. The constable went away.

He wanted a drink. The want arrived whole, four years old and not aged a day, the first swallow already in it. He sat on the plastic chair with his forearms on his knees and let it stand in front of him. It stood there a long time. Then it was not there, and he was still sitting in the chair, and he had not moved.

It was half past four in the morning. He said nothing to anyone.

The second examination was completed a little after nine. The doctor came out and told him, and the telling was gentle and total, and the sound that came out of Kartik was not a word. It bent him forward and dropped him to the floor beside her bed, his forehead against the mattress where her hand lay, and he wept without control, and the nurses stepped back, and the doctor stepped back, and they let him be. The monitor went on drawing its lines above him. The machines did not know.

When it was over he stayed on the floor a while. He became aware of the cold tiles against his knees and the fluorescent tube buzzing overhead. He stood, and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

The doctor began, carefully, on the subject of what could come next, and Kartik said, "Take them."

The doctor stopped.

"Whatever you can use. All of it. She wanted..." and there his voice went, four years of steady gone in one word, and the doctor stood and waited, and did not touch him, and after a while Kartik finished it on paper instead.

There were forms. There was a board of four doctors, two of whom he had never seen, and a police inspector who had to sign as well because of the accident, and a woman from the transplant registry in Pune on a video call who thanked him in a way that had nothing rehearsed in it. A retrieval team was on the road from Pune. He answered every question. He signed his name more times in an hour than he had at his own wedding.

They let him sit with her until the team arrived and the theatre was ready. Her hand was warm and the warmth was the machines' and he knew it and held it anyway. He leaned down and kissed his daughter's forehead.

They took her in with the ventilator still counting. Her heart was beating when she left him.

Outside the hospital entrance a chai stall was open to the morning, glasses in rows on a steel tray, the stove lit. A scooter went past with three schoolbags on it. A ward boy laughed at something on his phone. Milk was being poured. Behind him in that building they were opening his daughter, and out here a man was arranging glasses so that his day would go well.

It came up out of him again, in the open, in front of strangers. He sat down on the hospital steps because his legs made the decision, and he howled and did not care that he howled, and the vendor turned his flame down and looked away.

When it had wrung him out he took out his phone and opened her thread. The sunset filled the screen, the ghats black along the bottom, the sky the colour she had named. Under it, the word. Under the word, his thumbs-up.

The screen dimmed. He touched it alight again