#aabha

When Aabha gets the call, she’s sitting in her regular nail salon. 

She’s not getting the same dark red she usually gets, and she later blames this change in habit for what happens next - her phone starts vibrating in her pocket and she apologizes when she tries to get it out without ruining the glorious, shiny lavender nail polish. Chandni, it says on the display, and the screen offers her one green and one red button. Aabha taps green, and lifts the phone to her ear. Her older sister is speaking Gujarati, and she’s violently sobbing, so violently, that Aabha cannot understand a word she says. “Calm.”, she says, and then waits for Chandni to calm down. This is bad. It really is. She isn’t sure if she’s heard the oldest Nanku sister cry before. “Is something with the girls, luv?”, she asks then, and glares at her nail lady, who keeps tugging on her hand. “Aabha.”, Chandni gasps out, and she can hear her two nieces yelling in the background. Her chest tightens. “Your husband?” She hands the lady double the money and leaves the salon with unfinished and messy nails. (Even years later, the color lavender will still make her feel sick and trapped.)

“No.” Chandni switches to English, and Aabha can hear her leaving the living room, or whatever room her nieces were playing in. “It’s Neshdan. There was a car crash.” Aabha pauses in the middle of the sidewalk. A grumpy old man runs into her and complains, but she completely disregards him. Suddenly, all she hears is white noise. It’s not that they are were best friends. It’s not that they willingly hang hung out with each other all the time. But Neshdan is was still her brother. “Okay.”, she says, in an attempt to calm herself down. “Okay.” It takes her ten minutes to get to her car, and when she’s finally sitting inside, she grips the steering wheel so hard that it makes little cracking noises. “And mum?” Aabha asks, “Has anyone told mum? Shya? Rahi? Naani? When will he get out of the hospital? How bad is it?” Chandni chokes on a cry. “Aabha, he was out near Thames, with that one doctor friend he has. He drowned, Aabha. They were’t even able to find his corpse.”

Aabha blacks out.

Four days later, she’s sitting on a couch, trapped between Rahi and Shya, and she’s being stared at by Nesh. He looks ugly in the picture her mother chose to display. Shya is crying. Her mother looks empty, and she has never seen her like this before. She’s lost her favorite child, of course, the golden boy. Rahi starts crying, too, and Aabha escapes, heels hitting the ground as she makes her way into the room she and Chandni used to share - it’s packed with childhood memories. 

Aabha uses one of her heeled feet to kick some of the boxes. Then she kicks the doorframe, and the bed, and the wall, and when her foot hurts so much that she can’t even move her toes anymore she stops and breaks down. She cries for five minutes, and then she promises herself to never cry ever again, not about Nesh, not about his death. 

The woman opens her eyes, and something catches her attention. It’s a picture that’s fallen onto the ground. It’s from one of the boxes she left in this room when she had moved apartments a while ago. She uses her arm to wipe tears and snot and messy makeup away, and looks at the picture. She’s surprised to see his face, she really is. She hasn’t thought of him in ages (A lie. She thinks of him every time she sits in her car and has to drive for longer than an hour, and she remembers his hands on the steering wheel, remembers his slang and his words and his eyes and his lips. Sometimes she thinks of him at night, when she’s alone in her bed and her apartment is so quiet and sickeningly empty.) “My getaway car.”, she croaks out and rushed to pull her phone out of her bag, but when she dials his number and calls him up;

“The number you have dialed is not in service.”

She waits a moment, then she throws the picture away, angry, mad, fuming, and dials Nesh’s number. She hasn’t called him in months. Hasn’t spoken to him in ages, not since last year’s Diwali.

“You have reached the mailbox of: Neshdan Nanku! Currently not available, leave a message after the tone.”

The beep is deafening in Aabha’s ears, and she throws the phone across the room. Then, after five minutes she raises from where she was sitting, and she picks up the phone to dial a third number.

Lila picks up immediately.

“Hello? Who is this?”, she asks, and Aabha immediately regrets calling. “Of course you have already deleted my number, you snake.”, she spits into the phone, “You’re a fucking bitch. I hate you with my whole heart. I will destroy you and your life as soon as you get the chance.” She’s yelling now, completely furious, “Neshdan is dead! Nesh is dead and it’s all your fault” She hangs up and doesn’t hear the gasp Lila lets out, and now she’s crying bitter tears. Chandni enters the room, but she doesn’t even hear, doesn’t even notice. Her heart aches so badly that it almost falls out her chest, and now that she’s said the words out loud, it finally feels realer than it did before. She’s crying in her sisters arms, bitter tears and violent sobs, and she’s repeating the words over and over again: He’s dead. We’re all alone now.

She sits through the ceremony that they have to do without a body, and through tears and hugs and words from family members and strangers.