Muffled Thoughts of a Drifting Soul - Chapter 3

Kabir couldn't catch the only available flight back to his city. He booked another one, connecting through a different city. There wasn't enough strength left in him to hold back the tsunami of remorse. His mind had gone numb, operating mechanically on its own and was unwilling to put in any effort to pull himself out of this state. He checked in, and while waiting at the boarding gate, drifted into a nap, into oblivion.

Within a few minutes, he woke up, remembering about the two letters handed to him by Aarav's father. He knew there might be some hard-hitting truth in the one addressed to him, and definitely something about the other. Opening his backpack, he took out the letter addressed to him. His wits were together now, but in the last eighteen hours or so he had gone through such emotional wreckage that he would not dare read the letter. At least not at airport, where an anxiety attack could turn ugly. He was caught, once again, between his conflicting thoughts. As much as he wanted to read it, hoping, absurdly, for one last conversation with his friend, he didn't open it. He didn't trust his own mind, not after the blackout earlier that day.

Putting back the letter in his backpack, he boarded the flight. Memories rushed back, and he felt overwhelmed carrying his best friend's last words with him. He could almost feel Aarav speaking to him, candid and straightforward as ever. The last words Aarav had said to him at a friend's wedding reception flashed back, shockingly, from nowhere. "Are you happy, bhai?" He had been so naive to take it casually, mocking him for being too cheesy. He would give anything now to go back to that moment and give him a hug instead. He wished he had known better, back when he was prioritising his ambition over everything else.

By the time his connecting flight finally landed and he made it back to his apartment, it was almost morning. The city, though the same as always, felt quieter, as if carrying the weight of everyone's unspoken emotions. Yet as the hustle and bustle slowly picked up around him, the chatter rising with it, Kabir realised that perhaps what he was witnessing wasn't the city at all. It was a reflection of his own emotional state. He reached home and went straight into his room. He slept like he would never wake up again.

He woke well into the afternoon, the kind of sleep that overcompensates, leaving you feeling like an addict coming off an overdose, yet somehow craving more of it. For a moment, lying there, he wondered if he'd forgotten. But it came back to him before he could even finish the thought, all of it, at once. The weight of his grief returned so suddenly that his heart sank instantly, and his breathing turned shallow, uneven. Before his mind could wander further down memory lane, he sat up to get the letters.

He took out the letter from the backpack, thrown in the corner of the room. He sat up properly, opened it, and read it once. Then again. Somewhere in the second reading, Aarav's question found him again, “are you happy bhai?” and this time it didn't feel like a throwaway line over a plate of catered food. It felt like Aarav himself, reaching through the letter, finally saying properly what he had only half asked back then, months too late for Kabir to answer out loud.

As he watched the sunshine piercing into the room, his thoughts wandered back to childhood days. After a game of cricket, Kabir and Aarav had decided to raid a nearby field for mangoes. Some other kids had been going on about how they had found the ground littered with fallen mangoes a couple of days earlier, after a storm had shaken the trees bare. Both of them were fully onboard when they set off, but after a few fruitless minutes of finding nothing on the ground, Kabir had already started to lose faith in the plan. They realised someone would have to climb. Both of them tried, but only Aarav managed to pull himself up into one of the trees, and the moment his hands closed around the first mango, the two of them broke into cheering, giddy with it. Seconds later, they heard a man shouting somewhere in the distance. Kabir, still on the ground, turned to see him charging toward them, a thick stick raised in one hand. Like most kids his age would have, Kabir ran, leaving Aarav stranded in the tree behind him. Aarav must have been hurt, deserted by his best friend. But he never once brought it up, not then, and not in all the years after. Now, reading the letter, Kabir couldn't begin to imagine the pain Aarav must have carried through the cancer, quietly. And yet the letter held none of that. No disappointment, no reckoning owed. Only love for a brother.

He sat with that for a long moment before the restlessness caught up with him again, the same restlessness that had been building since the flight, since the letter, since always. He needed to hear another voice, one that wouldn't try to fix anything, just sit with him in it. 

Kabir,

If you're reading this, then you must know that I am no longer alive. If you do not, get this letter back to me at once, and dare not read further.

In the last few weeks, I kept thinking about all the time we spent together, and somehow none of it feels enough. I used to complain about you dragging me into your nonsense, but the truth is I looked forward to it every single time. You made ordinary days feel like something worth remembering, and I am proof of that, because here I am remembering them, right up to the end.

I have been proud of you for longer than you probably know. Not for the job, not for whatever numbers you keep chasing. I was proud of you back when you were the kid who raised one hand because his shirt was torn, and I have been proud of that same kid every year since, even when he tried very hard to bury himself under someone more serious, more sensible, more acceptable to everyone watching.

That is the only thing I want to say to you clearly, since I will not get another chance to fix it later like we always did.

Stop living for the version of yourself that other people find impressive. Your parents, your office, the community, even me, none of us should get to decide what your life is supposed to be. I am not asking you to throw everything away. I am asking you to finally ask yourself what makes you happy, and then have the courage to walk toward it, before you run out of time the way I did. I did not get a choice in how much time I had left. You still do.

One last thing. There is another letter with this one, meant for Shree. You may not remember her from school, but I do, and these last few months have reminded me why. I want you to find her and give it to her yourself, in person. I know this is asking a lot of you, but a dying man wouldn’t care. Actually, I trust no one else to do it the way I need it done.

You will always be my best friend. You already know that. I just wanted to say it one last time.

— Aarav

Muffled Thoughts of a Drifting Soul

Chapter 2

Slowly coming back to his senses, Kabir realises he is sitting in the middle of Aarav's house with a plate of food in front of him. Someone must have walked him back from the cremation ground, though he cannot recall it. That was not his concern. He has still not come in agreement with his friend's death, but the flames engulfing Aarav's body are too vivid for him to leave any doubt behind. Aarav is gone. What happened to him? Was it a freak accident, an illness, something no one had told him about? His mind is still in disbelief. He cannot eat anything. Across the room, he watches Aarav's mother surrounded by family, people asking her to drink water, to eat one bite. He wonders if he can even comprehend her sorrow. Tears roll down his eyes, and before the lump in his throat can turn into sobbing, he drinks the glass of water in front of him and stands up.

Kabir finds Aarav's cousins strolling outside the house. He hears one of them say, "Aarav bhaiya was so brave." He cannot place the context, but he knows well enough how much mettle Aarav had in him. He thinks of asking the boys what happened, but he doesn't want to interrupt. They carry on remembering old days, and somewhere in between, one of them says his name. "Aarav bhaiya and Kabir bhaiya's friendship stories were so cult. That one time they beat up eight guys together. Crazy."

Kabir almost laughs. What? When did that happen?

The only time he and Aarav had ever gotten into a fight was after school hours, when they ran into four boys from another school. The boys had gone after Aarav, hurling abuses, making fun of his cycle. Kabir and Aarav ignored them and pedalled on. One of the boys came dangerously close, and Kabir, without knowing what he was doing, pressed his foot against the rear wheel of one of the boy’s cycle. The boy toppled straight into the other three, all four of them scrambling over each other on the ground. Kabir and Aarav rode on as hard as they could and hoped never to see those boys again.

That was the whole story. Eight guys beaten up, apparently.

Kabir introduces himself, and the cousins look at him like he's stepped out of a legend. "Bhaiya, we've heard so many stories about you." He doesn't have the heart to downplay the glorified version of his friendship with Aarav, so he only nods along, and lets them go on. One boy claims Kabir once climbed the school boundary wall to sneak out and bring back ice cream for Aarav when he was feeling sad. Another swears they'd once ran a prank on sports teacher by putting frogs inside the sports room. Kabir keeps nodding, wondering how a handful of ordinary, forgettable afternoons had turned into folklore somewhere between Aarav's memory and this cousin's mouth. He wants to correct them, to tell them the truth was smaller and stranger and enough on its own. He says nothing.

Before he can ask what actually happened to Aarav, one of the boys says it plainly, the way children say things without knowing the weight of them. A rare blood cancer. It hadn't given Aarav bhaiya even two months.

Kabir does not have the heart to tell them he hadn't known. He doesn't utter a word. He only nods, or looks past them at the sun settling into the horizon.

After a while, Kabir decides to meet Aarav's parents once more before leaving. Aarav's father studies him for a moment. "Are you Kabir?"

Kabir nods, unsure if he had ever introduced himself.

"I have something for you," the father says, and goes inside. He returns with two envelopes, one with Kabir's name on it, the other addressed to no one at all. "Aarav asked me to give these to you," he says, placing them in Kabir's hands.

Kabir stands there, the envelopes light in his palms, heavier than anything he has held all day. He does not open them. Not yet.

He turns to Aarav's mother and bends to touch her feet. She rests a hand on his head, and says nothing. It is in this moment, under her palm, in that withered touch of a mother’s love for a lost child, that something in him finally loosens. The tears he had held back all day arrive without warning. For the first time since the phone call, he feels something close to peace, as if her hand alone understood everything he had been carrying and had quietly agreed to hold some of it for him.