“Make me… without even touching me?” She looked around the room, her cheeks bright. Samar began to feel like a man again. He pressed his mouth to her cheek, and she bent down until his lips were on her forehead.
“Tempers and emotions are running very high for us,” he told her. “That must be the case for everyone outside as well.”
She nodded.
“Thank you for carrying all this alone.”
Amaal pulled back, sitting down on her chair and gazing up at him with that smile that showed him her dimple without the mask — “Hmm.”
————————————————————
“Ashutosh shashank shekhar chandramoli chindambara… Koti koti pranam shambhu koti naman diga…”
Samar startled awake. Who was patting his back?
He turned his head, and found that nobody was.
“Samar.”
He stared up at the ceiling. Amaal’s face came in front of him. She bent down, splaying her hand over his forehead.
“You still have a fever.” She pulled back, striding out of the room. He closed his eyes, trying to reach back into that voice. His mother’s voice. He heard the nurse come in and stab more antibiotics into his IV. His last grafting had caused another infection in his left lower extremity. The result was this fever which was not letting up.
“Hey,” Amaal’s palm patted at his forehead again, smoothening her fingers over his eyebrows. Apparently they were growing back. He hadn’t seen anything of his own face, wasn’t interested.
“Hmm.” He opened his eyes, meeting smiling blues again. “What?”
“You are hot, Daaxsaab.” She smirked through that translucent mask. Samar sighed, failing to return her amusement today. He had missed the voice. He wanted it back. Badly. All the comfort of his agony was in there.
“What’s wrong?” She pulled her chair closer to his bed and sat down, not taking her hand off his forehead.
Samar stared quietly at the ceiling. He had never said her name out loud. Never said that she existed, though the entire world knew she must. He had been born of a mother, after all, hadn’t he?
“Can a secret be in front of the whole world and yet still so hidden that nobody sees it?” He asked.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
He blinked, his eyes burning.
“When I was driving that car and the timer kept beeping, I was ready to die. One part of my brain was working on taking the car as far as I could and the other part was blanked out because what do you think at the moment of death? I wasn’t even able to say my mother’s name like anybody would as a reflex when they get hurt or are about to get hurt but she sang to me and I don’t even know how I remember it because she has never sung to me in what little I remember of her but she was singing, and I was too small to remember but she was with me and holding me and singing like she wanted me to listen to her, grow up with those words, imbibe them in my life. I was going to die and she kept singing, patting my back, holding me close. I keep hearing her singing to me again and again, and they are words that I remember but don’t know from where.”
He huffed, catching his breath. Silence embraced the room again.
“What does she sing?”
“Something about Shiv.”
“You don’t know it?”
“I don’t know it but I know it.”
“Maybe she sang to you as a baby?”
“Maybe.” He kept staring at the ceiling.
“What happened to her?”
Samar stilled.
