The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  “I’m allowed to say no, then?” she asked, emboldened by Sehaj’s softened tone. He didn’t want to fight; he just wanted the problem to go away. They had hardly the space to argue in his house, with his mother always in the shadows, but this long-distance phone call was allowing more privacy. “This isn’t a trivial thing like choosing curtains or—” She paused at the sound of shuffling in the background.

  “Hang on,” Sehaj said. His voice became distant and then muffled because—of course, as if they conjured her just by speaking about her—his mother was now in the room. How did she manage to always do that?

  Moments later, Sehaj came back to the phone. “Sorry about that,” he said, but his voice was already different. Shirina felt the shift. There was something businesslike in his tone; all the tenderness was gone.

  The distance gave Shirina courage. In the silence and the emptiness of her hotel room, she shut her eyes. “Is she still there?”

  Either Sehaj registered her steely tone and was taken aback, or the slight delay meant that it took him a second or two to hear her. Either way, Shirina felt emboldened. She opened her eyes.

  “She just came up to get something,” Sehaj said.

  “She came up, did she? All by herself? She must be well, then,” Shirina said. She heard a warning voice—Stop, stop it, you’re going too far—but she ignored it.

  Again, the delay seemed to stretch. Shirina thought about the day she had handed in her resignation, saying that she had to stay at home to take care of her mother-in-law, who needed help climbing the stairs at home after her hip surgery. “There’s nobody else there,” Shirina explained. “It could be a long recovery.” The reluctance must have been apparent in her voice because her supervisor took her out for coffee that afternoon. “You have such potential,” she said. “Can’t you take some time off? Can’t you and your husband work out an arrangement? There are chair lifts if she can’t move.”

  Chair lifts became the single image in Shirina’s mind every time she thought about the difference between Eastern and Western values. Indian daughters-in-law took care of their families. They made necessary sacrifices. They knew what it took to preserve the peace in their home. Westerners installed chair lifts.

  “Shirina,” Sehaj said. And then he said nothing. There was more shuffling, more movement and voices. She recognized the sound of the door opening and shutting. He was leaving the room. “Sweetheart,” he said. The tenderness was restored in his voice. He had left his mother and found some privacy. “I know you’re upset, baby,” he said soothingly. “I know.”

  It was all she wanted, or at least this was what she thought. An offer of understanding. She thought about the little girl on the train, holding her hand out to play. She hadn’t stopped thinking about her and she could still hear the girl calling her “sister,” so disappointed when Shirina refused to play along. Throughout the journey, during all the bickering between Rajni and Jezmeen, Shirina hadn’t flipped the page of her novel once. She had read the same line over and over again until the words lost their meaning.

  Rajni needed the newspaper. She had left it in the lobby because the man at the reception desk was watching their every move, but an advertisement had caught her eye and the porter had whisked them away to their rooms before she could take down the information—discreetly of course, she didn’t need Jezmeen and Shirina knowing that she was considering hiring a private investigator. How would she explain that to them?

  She stepped out of the room and entered the lift with the stealth of a thief, looking left and right. The lobby was empty. The desk manager caught her eye and nodded. “Just another few minutes,” he said, thinking she had come for the passport. She was pleased for the excuse. “I’ll just wait here if you don’t mind,” she said haughtily. Once his gaze returned to the screen, she took a seat on the plush lounge chair and pulled up the newspaper. There it was, the ad in the corner:

  PRE-MATRIMONIAL INVESTIGATIONS

  “Better pre-nup than post-nup”

  Getting married? Want to know your future spouse’s history? We can do a thorough financial and moral check-up. Our experienced and highly skilled investigators are discreet and detail-oriented. They will not let you down! With a network of dedicated pre-matrimonial specialists spanning across India and the diaspora, we are now specializing in interstate and overseas marriages* and offering competitive rates. Call us now for a free consultation!

  Next to the asterisk, there was a list in tiny print of territories where their detectives could reach. London, UK, was third after Toronto, Canada, and California, USA. Rajni glanced at the reception desk and pressed the newspaper to the table with her palm. Then she slowly ripped the ad out, careful not to make a sound. She had a feeling that even a small transgression like this could make the hotel owner revoke their right to stay in this holiest of cities.

  Stuffing the torn piece of paper in her pocket, Rajni headed back to the lift. “Ma’am,” the desk manager called as she passed him. She felt her heart leap in her throat and then realized how silly she was being. Ripping a newspaper was hardly vandalism, although after the visit to the police station yesterday, she didn’t want to take any chances. Just the thought of getting into trouble made her break out in a sweat.

  “Yes?” she replied, trying to sound casual.

  “Your passport,” he said.

  “I can take the others if you want,” Rajni said, feeling overly generous because now she felt bad about defacing his newspaper.

  He paused to consider this and then handed all three to Rajni.

  She returned to her room and read the ad again, considering what the detectives might do. What did she want them to uncover? She wasn’t certain, but she knew that it was worth having a look around. Judging from the way she and Kabir left their last conversation, she was certain that he wasn’t thinking the worst of Davina—that she could be a con artist. It would be ideal, Rajni thought as she dialed the number, her confidence building, if Davina was already married. Rajni didn’t want to devastate Anil. She certainly didn’t want the investigators to uncover something dangerous that might have an adverse effect on her son—like a serious STD or a violent criminal history (worse yet, if Davina’s husband was in jail for violent criminal behavior and was out on bail and could come after Anil). But she also welcomed the thought of handing over a dossier to her foolish, naive son and saying, “HAH!”

  “WELCOME TO BHARAT INVESIGATORS,” blared a prerecorded message that gave Rajni a jolt. She held the phone half an arm’s length away from her ear to listen to the menu options. “PRESS ZERO TO SPEAK TO ONE OF OUR QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS.” She pressed zero and waited again, this time through a staticky old Hindi song that she vaguely recognized—it was a classic about love.

  “Hello, welcome to Bharat Investigators, how may I help you?”

  The young male voice was a pleasant surprise. For some reason, she had pictured a matronly auntie type sitting at a cluttered desk serviced by a single fan that blew dust around the room. The detective’s worldwide networks would be no more sophisticated than a community of wives and sisters-in-law who were migrants in other Indian enclaves in multicultural cities, and the work would be a side hobby, no different from anything they were already doing, but now it earned them a bit of pocket money.

  “Hello,” Rajni said. “I’m considering engaging an investigator to do a background check on a woman.”

  “No problem, ma’am. Can I know how to address you, please?”

  “My name is . . .” Here she hesitated. If the investigator had networks in London, how likely was he to blab to a friend who might tell another friend about her family secrets? There was no harm in giving a false name. “Meera,” she said.

  “Ma’am, your real name, please,” the man responded.

  “How did you—”

  “Almost every woman who calls uses the name Meera,” he said.

  She knew she should have picked a less common Indian name, or at least one that sounded authent
ic, like . . . . Rajni. It was like telling the detective that her name was Jane Doe and expecting not to raise any suspicions.

  “I’m Rajni,” she said a bit sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.” The man was breezy. “We just need to be honest with each other in order to do this right, okay?”

  “And your name?” she asked.

  “Nikhil Ahuja,” he said. “We’re a pair of brothers running this company.” He prattled on for a while about the company’s history—started in 2003 when a new generation of young Indians abroad began demanding pre-matrimonial checks after hearing horror stories of friends being deceived. (Those marriages were the result of a boom in Indian matrimonial websites, which made Rajni think of Shirina. Did she ever consider getting somebody to look into Sehaj’s background? she wondered. But of course, why would she? There was nothing suspicious about Sehaj—it was as if Shirina had typed “perfect Indian male companion” into a machine and 3-D printed the ideal husband.)

  “And we recently expanded to territories in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand,” Nikhil said.

  “All right,” Rajni said. She was feeling a bit overwhelmed by Nikhil’s enthusiasm. “And you handle, uh, cases where people want to just check somebody out because they have suspicions?” In Rajni’s private opinion, a thirty-six-year-old woman getting pregnant by a young man half her age deserved a stronger description than “suspicious” but for brevity’s sake, she felt it was important to downplay it.

  “Certainly,” Nikhil declared. There was that enthusiasm again. It made Rajni just the slightest bit queasy. “I’ll give you an example of a case we worked on recently—very successful, in fact it was even publicized. A young doctor in Singapore agreed to an arranged marriage to a woman in the Sikh community. Both boy and girl liked each other, decided to get engaged. However, the girl’s mother had some suspicions about the boy. Not really any evidence, but he was a doctor—you know, high income and handsome. Why was he still available? Her family told her not to be silly; she was being overly cautious, they said. Then the unthinkable happened!”

  Nikhil had a flair for the dramatic, Rajni noted.

  “It turned out that the mother was trying to draw everybody’s attention away from the daughter, who had a boyfriend in New Zealand, where she studied. Some pictures were beginning to surface. The boyfriend felt betrayed that after five years together, she was just leaving him for an arranged marriage. He had called the house several times to speak to the parents during the engagement. The doctor’s parents were aware of it—the New Zealander had managed to contact them somehow as well, Facebook, I think—and the mother-in-law was already considering rescinding the marriage offer.”

  “So the marriage wasn’t going to go through, and the girl’s mother was preemptively spreading the rumor that it was the boy’s fault?” Rajni asked.

  “Yes,” Nikhil said. “Turns out the girl was the one doing shameful things.”

  Shameful things. But really, all she did was have a boyfriend outside the community, didn’t she? Rajni was uncomfortable with Nikhil’s moralizing. When he posed his next question, she found herself stumbling and considered hanging up because surely he knew what she was hiding:

  “So can you let me know the nature of your case?” he asked.

  “Uh . . . yes. See, my son—he’s going out with, he’s about to marry this woman,” Rajni said. It was not strictly the truth, but if she told Nikhil that Anil had got Davina pregnant, he might not be very sympathetic. Worse yet, he would wonder what kind of mother she was—a question that had been turning in her mind ever since she awoke from her fainting spell back in London.

  “Okay,” Nikhil said. “And you have doubts? Some feelings that it is not right?”

  “Yes,” Rajni said. That was putting it mildly. “She’s a bit older than him.”

  “Okay,” Nikhil said. “How much older?”

  Rajni had done the math as soon as Anil told her, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. “She’s in her thirties. My son is . . . he’s in his twenties.” Did it make a difference if she added a few years to his age? She decided not.

  “Look, the thing I’m suspicious about is that he seems very . . . influenced by her. He had career plans that he’s suddenly putting on hold because of this woman.”

  “Could she be pregnant?” Nikhil asked.

  Dammit. “Yes,” Rajni said. “She could be.”

  “Could be, or she is?”

  “She . . . she is,” Rajni said. “They’re getting together in a bit of a rush because of this whole thing, but I’m wondering if she’s roped him into it.”

  “It’s a bit difficult for us to determine the circumstances around a woman’s pregnancy,” Nikhil said after a pause. “He’s certain it’s his baby?”

  Anil still had that annoying teenager habit of filling every minor pause with “uh” and “like.” Rajni could not imagine him being certain of anything.

  “He is,” Rajni said. “But I think he’s being fooled.”

  There was a pause again. Rajni heard Nikhil repeating the facts under his breath, and a keyboard clicking away.

  “I’d like to know . . . other things about her as well,” Rajni said. “Her background. Any skeletons in the closet.”

  “Of course,” Nikhil said. “A woman like that, she’s bound to have a few stories, or people who can tell us a few things.”

  Once again, Rajni felt uneasy but she suppressed it. That’s not fair. She tried not to think of Mum and the family who abandoned her after rumors started circulating about Rajni.

  Nikhil gave her a basic game plan: he would discuss the case with his partners in the UK and do a comprehensive background check on Davina. These things were perfectly legal, he assured Rajni with a chuckle that indicated there were less legal methods to follow. “If nothing comes up in the background check—no major debt, no current spouse, etc.—then I will assign somebody to follow her for a week. Details often emerge from this part of the investigation.”

  “All right,” Rajni said.

  “Mrs. Rajni, I have one more question,” Nikhil asked.

  Here was where he was going to ask if she had been one hundred percent honest with him. Is there anything else I should know?

  “Yes?” she squeaked.

  “Will you pay your deposit by Visa, Bank Transfer, or Paytm?” Nikhil asked, his voice smooth as honey.

  The tone in Cameron’s email sounded genuinely excited. “Have some roles that are perfect for you.” The word “perfect” had a line through it because Cameron had been so excited, he forgot how to underline.

  “Jezmeen!” he answered the phone. “How are things? How’s India?”

  How was India? She could not sum up her experience in an easy sentence. “It’s incredible,” she said. “Just like the advertisements.” And the consular guidelines, which I’ll take more seriously from now on, she thought.

  “I backpacked through Uttar Pradesh myself, you know,” Cameron said with a hint of pride. “Twenty years ago.”

  “Did you?” Jezmeen asked, not because it was her first time hearing it (it wasn’t) but because Cameron seemed to think that this was part of their connection somehow. He understood the Indian experience because he had stayed in a filthy flea motel on a mountain and got a parasite from a dodgy curry.

  “Oh yes,” Cameron said. “Really went off the beaten path. Incredible country. Such lovely people. So warm and welcoming to travelers.”

  Men who backpacked or did cycling tours around India often said this of their experience. Such a great place to travel. They had made their way around solo, reliant on the kindness of strangers who invited them into their homes to share a meal. Traveling as a woman in India was an entirely different thing. Even with her sisters at her side, Jezmeen felt vulnerable.

  “So tell me about these roles,” she said.

  Cameron drew in a breath. “Two possibilities, very strong ones—the first is for a new television ser
ies called The Disgraced.”

  “I like the title,” Jezmeen said. She had an instant image in her mind of a strong female character, not unlike the one Polly played in The Boathouse, her backlit profile against the dark and mysterious waters of the Thames. “What’s the premise?”

  Cameron cleared his throat. “A promising young British-Asian woman looking for a match online becomes slowly radicalized by her lover, who is a fundamentalist and a skilled recruiter for a global terror network.”

  “Very interesting,” Jezmeen said. There was some promise there. She didn’t want to get too excited, and she hoped that the script would portray the woman as a universal, identifiable sort of character, not one of those “my fundamentalism has always been in me like some kind of genetic mutation which has now been activated!” people.

  “I thought you’d be intrigued by that. I have to tell you, before we go any further; you won’t be considered for the main role.”

  “Oh,” Jezmeen said, feeling a flutter of disappointment. “What’s the role, then?”

  “It’s a smaller role,” Cameron said.

  “Like a sister?” In a moment of sheer horror, Jezmeen thought he might offer her the role of this woman’s mother.

  “Like a wife,” Cameron said.

  “Oh,” Jezmeen said. “That’s not so bad. The wife of another character, then.”

  “Yes,” Cameron said.

  “Go on, then, tell me about her,” Jezmeen said.

  Somebody was knocking on the door. As Jezmeen walked over and pressed the phone between her tipped head and a raised shoulder, she heard Cameron’s response but did not think she heard it correctly.

  “Wife of Terrorist Number Seven,” Cameron said as Jezmeen threw open the door.

  “WHAT?” she shrieked. The porter was at the door, holding a large silver tray.

  “Ma’am, you ordered room service,” he protested.

  “You want me to be the WIFE OF A TERRORIST?”

  The porter looked very alarmed.

  “Sorry,” Jezmeen said to him, opening the door wider to let him bring the food inside. It was a more elaborate meal than she thought she had paid for, and her mouth watered at the smell of the paneer masala and steamed rice. Still, she was not done with Cameron yet. Focus.