A voice I have been hoping and fearing to hear, she thinks, as she lowers herself very gently onto the scuffed carpet of her son’s room, every time I have picked up the phone, every single day these past two decades.
‘Sharda?’ She squeaks—the only sound her vocal chords seem capable of producing.
‘It is you?’ There is relief in the question, and apprehension and agony—hurt mingling with angst. Above all, there is urgency.
And just like that, the years that have elapsed since she last saw this woman, collapse like land assaulted by flood, washed away by the truant waves of a roaring, monsoon-incited ocean.
‘What is it?’
She pictures the tangled coil that still connects them after a span of nearly twenty years and the distance of five-thousand miles. She wishes she could unravel the coil, smooth out the past, so there were no longer these bumps and hurts, no longer all the pain and guilt and allegations and misunderstandings, over which they are stumbling—a past like a thickly congealed river of tar that they must wade through to get to the other side, to reach each other.
‘It’s . . . my daughter, Kushi . . . she’s dying.’ Tears saturate Sharda’s voice, and flood down the telephone line.
Puja closes her eyes. Sharda. I am speaking to Sharda.
‘Kushi needs a kidney, urgently. Mine . . .’ A sigh that is hijacked by a sob, ‘I have only one it seems. Please. She needs you. We need you. Come home.’
Home . . .myriad nuances radiate from that one small word. Everything lost. Everything . . .
‘It is not my home. It hasn’t been for ages.’
‘I know that. I know. But . . . I can’t think what else to do . . . ’
‘So I’m your last resort?’ Not what she meant to say, but the words come out in a bilious rush, sharper then she intended, like sucking the juice from a raw wedge of lime. Puja bites down on her lower lip, tastes iron and salt.
‘Do you want me to beg? Then I will. Please, Puja, please help.’
‘I . . .’ Images from the past cascade behind Puja’s closed lids, images that over the years she has consciously tuned out, and tried to ignore. Hurtful words and angry recriminations: marinated in grief, caked in the dust of almost twenty years of dormancy, the ubiquitous orange powder that embroiders the air of the country she has denounced, of the life she has buried.
‘Kushi’s on dialysis right now, but I cannot afford to keep her on it for long,’ Sharda’s desperate voice, cuts into Puja’s musings, and brings her back to the here and now.
Puja takes a deep breath, and steadies herself. ‘If it’s money you want . . .’
‘We don’t want your money . . .’ A blaze of heat bubbles through Sharda’s ravaged, dread-soaked voice, making her sound clipped, abrupt.
‘I need you. Kushi needs you. Please, Puja.’ Sharda’s anger dissipates as quickly as it flared, and is replaced by raw anguish.
Anguish that resounds in Puja’s chest, which feels as if it has been spliced open, and all the protective armour built up over the years collapses.
Be careful. Her heart, which has never completely healed after the past had finished with her, warns. ‘I don’t know if I can . . .’
‘Please . . .’ Sharda whispers, wretchedly.
‘I . . . I’ll come,’ Puja says, without thinking it through fully. Or, perhaps, thinking more clearly than she has in years. ‘But I can’t promise . . . ’
‘Thank you.’ Sharda’s voice blooms with gratitude like flowering jasmine buds. ‘Thank you. Please, come as soon as you can.’
What have I just done? Puja wonders. And even though Sharda has cut the call, she holds the phone to her ear with her still-smarting hand, the taste of new fears on her suddenly parched lips.
RAJ
FRESH WOUNDS AND STALE ALCOHOL
Raj stares at his mother, watching an alarming array of emotions parade across her face. His mother who is so cool and collected, except when she is raging at him. His mother the accomplished businesswoman and rubbish parent. His mother who’s just given him a tiny glimpse into her secretive past —she grew up in a hut? His mother who’s just hit him for the first time in his life.
Puja sits, uninvited, on the floor of his room, the phone still pressed to her ear. Now that the ultra-rare emotional display is over, she looks completely zoned out. Is she ever going to leave?
Raj is exhausted and wants to sleep away the horrendous evening he’s had. The sobering ride in the police car had seemed to take forever, and he’d prayed that the nightmare he’d wound up right in the middle of would be over soon, and that his mother wouldn’t flip; he’d sworn to himself that he would never drink or smoke or get into trouble again.
‘Raj?’ Puja’s voice is tentative.
The room smells rankly of fresh wounds and stale alcohol. It tastes of blood, hot, red. It feels inflamed, like his throbbing cheek.
He does not want to talk to her. He is so angry. So hurt. So tired. He just wants her out of his room.
‘Go away,’ he mumbles, lying back down, pulling the duvet over his head.
‘Raj,’ her voice insistent. ‘We have to go to India.’
He throws off his duvet, sits up, and glares at her. ‘Have you gone quite mad? First you slap me, and now this.’
His mother blanches, wilts like a flower without water. ‘Son, I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t call me son. You sure as hell don’t treat me like one.’ His voice trembles and he is annoyed with himself for this weakness.
She stands, and goes towards him. He cringes. She hesitates and squats back down on the carpet again.
Raj sighs. What an evening this was turning out to be, going from horrible to abysmal in the space of an hour.
‘You’ve barged into my room uninvited, hit me, and now you won’t leave. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve had a terrible evening, made worse by you. I want to sleep.’
‘I’ll leave in a minute, but you need to know this. I’m not joking. We’re going to India.’
He looks at her, properly this time. She is clutching the phone to her as if it is her talisman. She looks as knackered as he feels. For the second time that day he is surprised by a pang of guilt for what he is putting her through, but it is quickly replaced by righteous resentment when his sore cheek pulses with remembered pain.
‘Why India for Christ’s sake? That wasn’t Dad on the phone, was it? I could have sworn you were talking to a woman?’
Another pang. This one of hurt at the thought of his dad, who moved to India years ago and has invited Raj to visit countless times since. Raj has refused on principle. Why should he go all the way to India when it is his dad who left? His dad finally gave up asking a couple of years previously when…
Raj suddenly, desperately craves a cigarette.
He knows, deep down that his mum is right in some ways, that he shouldn’t resent her working. It is because of her that they are able to live more comfortably than most of his classmates.
What he begrudges is his mother not showing him an ounce of affection, always keeping him at a remove, treating him as if he is someone she has to put up with rather than someone she cares for. At least his dad used to be demonstrative, used to hug him, and kiss him goodnight.
After his dad left, Raj used to go to his mum, yearning comfort, a cuddle, a pat, something. But she would smile at him, give him food, a toy and fob him off on his nanny, who was lovely, whose arms were expansive, but who never belonged to him, who went home to her own kids at the end of the day.
But warring with the pangs of hurt when he hears his mum talking about going to India, there is a tiny blossom of hope—the first shoots budding after winter’s thaw.
Perhaps his dad is trying again.
‘No, not your dad.’ Her voice brittle as old bones. And then it softens. ‘He cares for you, you do know that?’
Raj turns away so she does not see the tears blistering in his eyes.
Who is this woman? This is not the remote mother h
e knows. First the slap, which, although it hurt, made his mother seem more real, more flesh and blood than the remote sighing and tutting robot he has come to expect.
And now this softer side he has never been party to . . .
They should have had this conversation when his dad left, not now! Back then, when he was that much younger and lost without his dad and more in need of her sympathy, there was only silence.
He’s had enough. ‘So who was it who called? Why did you say we had to go to India? Why are you speaking in riddles? What has happened to you?’
His mother’s eyes are liquid—swirling pools of hurt. He cannot bear to look at her, so he worries the duvet instead.
‘The woman who phoned is Sharda—my sister.’ Puja puts her head in her hands. Her body slumps, a small brown comma punctuating his cream carpet.
Her words perforate the stifling, vinegary fug pervading his room, leaking shock, and the mothball odour of mystery. Countless, baffled questions trip over one another in their haste to slip from his tongue.
‘What!’ is all he can manage. He cannot believe it. All these years his mother has made not one mention of a sister.
But then his mother does not mention much of anything at all, really, except for her work. And his failings. His mother is a world unto herself, a world to which he has always been denied entry. He shouldn’t be surprised that she has kept her sister from him. Come to think of it, he can believe it. He wouldn’t be too shocked if he were to discover she has a brother too, or heck, a whole other family. Who knows what else she is hiding, or what else he will find out.
‘Kushi her . . . her daughter is very ill. Her kidneys are destroyed and she’s on dialysis. My sister . . . she wants me there. I . . . I have agreed to go . . . ’
The rage that erupts, blazes a trail through his alcohol-lined innards. ‘Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You’re willing to put your precious work on hold and cross an ocean to go to visit this girl, your niece, who’s in a hospital five thousand miles away—a girl you barely know, the child of a sister you’ve never mentioned—when you did not even stay with me that one time I was in hospital, when I desperately needed you?’ he spits out and his mother’s face crumples before she turns away from him to hide it.
It was just after his father had departed for India. Raj had been dreadfully ill, a spiking fever which refused to relinquish its hold on him, and stayed in the hundreds no matter how much Calpol and Neurofen his nanny administered. He was hospitalised and was being subjected to various tests to try and find out the cause.
Raj had been terrified, scared and lonely after his nanny left that evening. He had wanted his mother, had begged her to stay with him in that strange room with its whirring machines and wailing children. But his mother had abandoned him to the blue-smocked nurses with their well-meaning smiles that did not quite reach their tired eyes. Even then, especially then, she had chosen her work over him, not willing to give it up for a few hours to stay at her sick son’s side.
That night the boy in the next bed had convulsed, and all the nurses and doctors in the hospital had converged on him, it seemed to Raj. He can still recall the strident panic in the air, the rasping sounds of curtains being drawn to shield the other children, the staccato clip of feet urgently slapping against the tiles, the frantic beep, beep of the machines, and the boy’s face, pale and lifeless, as he was wheeled away. . .
Raj had sat up most of the night, terrified, shivering, and afraid to call out for the nurses. A nurse had found him rocking, and whispering, ‘Mum, Dad,’ over and over, as his sobs shuddered through his fevered body, the tears making slippery, wet tracks on his face, and his eyelashes crusted in salty clumps.
He has hated hospitals with a passion ever since. He looks at his mother now, and sees the memory of that hospital, of him begging her to stay, reflected in her eyes.
He had launched himself at her, his hot body trembling with relief and disbelief, when she visited the next morning, unable to trust the evidence of his sickly eyes, having convinced himself that this was it, that he would be wheeled away like that other boy, that he would never see his mum or his dad again. He had breathed her in—she smelled as always of a dewy, sun sprinkled, spring morning—had revelled in the unfamiliar luxury of her arms for all of a minute before she’d untangled him, gently backing away, patting her hair in place, smoothing her skirt, perching delicately at the edge of his bed, keeping him, as always, at arms’ length.
‘I’ve promised my sister,’ she says now, her voice low, hesitant.
‘You haven’t spoken to her, or of her, that I know of. And now she calls and you pack up your life, your work, which you’ve always maintained is so very important and will fall to pieces if you’re not around, to embark on this trip to India . . . ’
Why is this unknown sister so important and I am not? Why don’t I matter? Why have I never mattered?
She sighs, fiddles with a thread on the carpet, not meeting his eye. ‘Raj, she wants me there. I said I’d go . . . her daughter . . . Raj, we need to go to India. I’ll book the first flight out.’
‘We don’t need to go to India. Dad’s invited me there so many times. And I’ve always refused. If I didn’t go for him, what makes you think I’ll go now? For some aunt and cousin I haven’t even heard of up until now. I’m not going. You go if you want to so desperately.’
She sighs again. ‘I’m sorry son, you don’t have a choice. Not this time.’ She is referring to his dad and his pleas for Raj to come visit. Her voice is brisk, all emotion wiped out of it. ‘Good job you only have a week left of school before you break up. I’ll call the school, get special dispensation.’
‘I am not travelling five thousand miles to a country I’ve never wanted to visit, to see a girl I do not know, who is in a hospital at that. I loathe hospitals.’
And whose fault is that?
‘You are coming. You have no choice.’ His mother’s voice has morphed back into that efficient, no-nonsense tone he knows.
‘I can stay here on my own.’ He is so tired; he just wants to sleep. Can’t she just leave him alone?
‘You’re coming with me.’
‘You can’t make me go.’ Why does he behave like a toddler having a tantrum in his dealings with his mother?
‘I can. I’m booking a flight now and I’ll get leave of absence from your school.’ Her voice softens suddenly, ‘I know this is all very confusing, especially after the evening you’ve had. I’m . . . I’m so sorry for hitting you.’ She hesitates and looks at him as if to say more, but then she rubs at her eyes wearily. ‘Try and get some sleep. Good night.’
She leaves the room, closing the door softly behind her.
I hate you, he thinks. A girl you barely know is ill halfway across the world and you are prepared to drag me over there, blithely making the decision for both of us, callously usurping my life without a thought as to how I might feel, what I might want, not caring that I’m leaving my life and everything I know, all that is familiar, behind.
A picture forms in his mind of Ellie mouthing, ‘Hi’ through the bus window, and gesturing ‘I heart you’. Ellie—the one good thing in his life at the moment.
It is instantly chased away by another wave of loathing toward his mother.
I want to go to school tomorrow, see if Ellie meant what she said, not come with you to a country I don’t know and never meant to visit. And all this upheaval to travel to the other side of the globe, to visit a hospital of all places . . . and yet, when I was ill, you didn’t even stay. You didn’t stay. How can I forgive you?
Sleep, so desperately craved just minutes ago, eludes him. India—the country he’s always hated, because it took his father from him. A provocative country full of surprises, now extending the consolation prize of aunt and cousin, in return for snatching his father. India, now showing him a different side to his mother. His mother, who has refused to give him anything of herself—except material things, certainly nothing like the love
he has so craved—is now preparing to travel five-thousand miles to the hospital bedside of an unknown niece, jumping to obey the summons of an unknown sister and in doing so, uprooting his life and hers. His mother, who has always been a closed book, is now marginally opening and promising pages full of secrets. What more will he find? And does he really want to?
Raj pulls the duvet over his head the way he did as a child. Breathing in the familiar smell of his sweat, alcohol fumes and stale cigarette smoke, he is assailed by new fears, clandestine worries and a vulnerability that he only unmasks privately, in the fusty dark.
KUSHI
THE BITTER TANG OF MEDICINE AND MALAISE
I am trapped, I cannot move. My hands and upper body feel trussed like the mutton carcasses suspended in Abdul’s meat shack in Dhoompur. I cannot feel my legs. There’s something sitting on my chest, seizing it in a stranglehold.
Where am I?
I feel tiredness like an ache deep in my bones, a weariness so heavy it weighs down my eyelids. There is a harsh taste of nails in my mouth as if I have swallowed whole, one of the tumbledown rust buckets that pass for buses in Bhoomihalli.
When the rush of blood whooshing in my ears dies down, I make out other sounds. The clatter of trolleys, the beep of machines, the smell of anaesthetic, the humming of electricity, sobs and moans and agonised entreaties.
The bitter tang of medicine and malaise.
I am in hospital.
Why?
Something scratches at the edges of memory, elusive, fluttering. I drag my sore eyes open, resisting an intense urge to close them immediately. The first thing I see is the framework of ugly apparatus surrounding me, contraptions holding me in place like the yoke on a bullock’s back. No wonder I feel imprisoned.
My eyelids heavy, I move my throbbing eyes past the machinery hemming me in. Beside my bed, a chair and folded into it, is my ma, clutching a sheaf of papers, her mouth open, her eyes closed. Streaky grey hair escapes her bun. She looks as if she has aged ten years since I saw her last.
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