You Do Not Get To Disappear

The clinic smelled of antiseptic and burnt coffee.

Meera sat perched on the examination bed with her sleeve pushed up past the elbow, swinging one leg, while Nurse Kavita picked grit out of the cut running along her forearm.

“It’s fine.”

“You said that while bleeding through three tissues.”

“It looked smaller in the studio.”

“Everything looks smaller at four in the afternoon on no lunch.” Kavita reached for fresh gauze without looking up. “There is a reason the studio has a stepladder and a rule about not climbing the shelving. I imagine somebody has told you that at least once.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Not really.” Meera frowned. “That’s the odd part. It should, shouldn’t it?”

“Mm.” Kavita tilted the arm toward the light and looked at it for slightly longer than she had before. “We’ll let the doctor say.”

“Which doctor?”

“Whichever doctor is standing nearest when I go and find one.”

“Kavita.”

“Meera.”

“He’s still in theatre. Isn’t he.” She tried to make it casual. She failed.

Kavita finally looked up, and there was far too much amusement in her face.

“You speak of Dr. Rao as though he were some angry husband.”

Meera went scarlet. “You bet.”

Kavita laughed and went back to the gauze, and that was the trouble with Kavita — she had known Meera since she was fifteen and sulking in the corridor waiting for a lift home, and she was entirely impossible to lie to.

It was why Meera had come here at all. The cut needed somebody who knew what they were doing; the clinic was ten minutes from the university, and the operating list had three cases on it, which meant Arjun would be in theatre until at least six.

That had been the plan. In, out, plaster, home.

“I’ll be gone in ten minutes,” Meera said. “It’s a scratch. I’ll put a plaster on it at home and he’ll never—”

“Sit still.”

“Kavita—”

“Sit still.”

Dr. Arjun Rao, senior resident in surgery. Twenty-eight, in his final year of it, and three weeks off the exams that would make him a consultant — which nobody in that building expected him to have the slightest difficulty with.

To everybody there, he was Dr. Rao.

To Meera he had been Arjun since she was eight years old.

She had been eight when she came to the Rao house, carrying everything she owned in a faded blue cloth bag and refusing to cry.

The two families had been close for years. Her father and Arjun’s had trained together; there had been holidays, and a great many long lunches, and photographs of the two households at somebody or other’s wedding. Then Meera was left with nobody at all on either side, and the Raos sent a car.

Arjun was fourteen. Already far too serious for his age.

He had stood at the top of the staircase while his mother led her inside. Nobody told him to come down. He stayed anyway.

Below him, the adults arranged her future in hushed voices.

“Poor child.”

“And so young—”

“She’ll stay with us now,” his mother said. Firmly. The way she said things that were finished.

Meera’s eyes moved everywhere except toward them. The brass lamp. The rain coming off the veranda tiles in a thin unbroken sheet. The corridor going back and back into the house, further than any corridor she had ever stood in.

Her fingers tightened around the bag until the knuckles went white.

Then she looked up. Straight at him.

Not shy. Not afraid.

Just curious.

“Do you live here too?”

Somewhere behind her a teacup touched a saucer too loudly.

“Obviously,” Arjun said.

She had thought about that word for years afterwards — how flat it was, how unimpressed, how completely without pity. Everybody in that hall had been softening their voices at her all evening as though she might come apart.

He was the only person who spoke to her as if she were simply a person who had arrived.

She had followed him around ever since. Fourteen years of it — his shadow at the dining table, his shadow in the corridor, his shadow sitting on the floor outside whichever door he had shut in order to study behind it.

Which made it a strange thing, and an unfair one, that the person she loved most in the world was the only person she ever lied to.

Not lies, exactly. Omissions.

She had worked out very early that Arjun noticed everything. Not in a watchful way — he simply kept hold of detail the way other people kept hold of grudges. That she had eaten half a lunch. That she had gone quiet on a Thursday. Which pair of her shoes was by the door and which wasn’t.

And she had worked out, just as early, what he actually got angry about. Never broken things, or bad marks, or money, or any of the ordinary catastrophes of a household. Only ever her. A scraped knee she hadn’t mentioned. A road she’d crossed without looking.

So she learned to hide those. Only those.

Full sleeves in summer over a burn along the inside of her wrist, held under cold water for twenty minutes so the redness would fade before he got home.

The big one had happened on the terrace, when she was thirteen.

There was a water tank up there on a concrete platform, and from the top of it you could see the whole road and both temples and, if you stood properly, a grey line that Meera had decided was the sea. Getting up was easy. Getting down was where it went wrong. Her foot slipped on the last stretch and she put a hand out to save herself and came down on it hard.

She didn’t cry. Not on the terrace, not on the stairs, not in the auto.

She had not thought about it for a second. She had come down the terrace stairs holding her own wrist and gone straight past his mother in the hall, past the telephone, past everybody, to the one room in that house that mattered — because whatever had happened, Arjun fixed it. That had been true since she was eight and she had never once had cause to test it.

She cried when she noticed his hands.

He had gone pale — not angry-red, pale. He sat her on the kitchen table because it was the nearest flat surface, and wrapped her wrist so carefully it hardly hurt at all, and his fingers shook at every pass.

“You could have fallen.”

“I didn’t.”

“Meera.”

That was all. Just her name, quietly, and something underneath it he had no idea how to say.

That was when she started crying. Not because of the wrist.

He noticed, of course. He noticed everything, even then. He didn’t say a word about it — he only finished the bandage, and then put his hand round the back of her head and leaned in and rested his forehead against hers, and stayed there until she had stopped.

It was the first time he ever did that. Neither of them said anything about it, then or afterwards, and he did it every single time after.

Then he sat down on the table beside her and let her lean into his shoulder until the auto came.

After that, hiding things stopped being a habit and became a rule.

Not because she was afraid of him. Never that.

Because she couldn’t bear the look that crossed his face whenever she got hurt. The one that arrived before the scolding did, and left the moment he had her safe and sitting down.

As though the world had reached out and very nearly taken her away.

“Nearly done,” Kavita said. “One more and then we tape it.”

“And then I go home.”

“And then you sit here quietly while I fetch a doctor, because that edge needs closing and I am not doing it with a butterfly plaster and a prayer.”

Meera opened her mouth to argue.

Down the corridor, a door opened.

She knew the walk. She had known that walk since she was eight years old — unhurried, even, the sound of a man who had never once run for anything in a hospital because running frightens patients.

“Kavita,” she whispered. “Kavita.”

“I did tell you to sit still.”

The door opened.

Arjun stood in it in dark scrubs under his coat, sleeves shoved past the elbow, hair wrecked from six hours under a surgical cap. He looked exhausted in the particular way he only ever looked after a long list, and it suited him in a way Meera had never once found convenient.

His eyes went from Meera, to the bloodied gauze in the tray, to the four tissues in the bin.

And the exhaustion went out of him completely.

Kavita straightened up. “Eight-centimetre laceration, left forearm, roughly four hours old. She says she doesn’t feel much of it.”

“Traitor,” Meera said.

“Yes,” said Kavita, entirely unbothered, and squeezed her shoulder on the way past. At the door she paused, caught Meera’s eye, and mouthed good luck — with enough sympathy in it to be genuine and enough enjoyment to be unforgivable.

Then she was gone, and the door clicked, and the room was very quiet.

Meera tried a smile. “Hi.”

Arjun crossed to the bed. Stopped in front of her. His eyes moved once over all of it — the cut, the swelling at her ankle she hadn’t mentioned to anybody, the dried blood along her fingers.

He didn’t shout. He never shouted, not at first.

He simply held out his hand for her arm, and asked, very quietly:

“How?”