The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  It was strange, though, how the idea of canceling the whole thing flickered temptingly at the edges of her consciousness. It was like standing near an open flame or leaning out of the window on the top floor of a skyscraper. Somewhere in her mind, she was aware that she had a choice. Her upbringing in England, her education—these were not for nothing. She was not some silenced village bride being shuttled from one appointment to another, her every move under the careful surveillance of her in-laws.

  You can’t come back unless you do this.

  There it was, the reality of the situation. Shirina simply didn’t have a choice, unless she wanted to throw away her marriage. She had never been given an ultimatum before, and sometimes she wondered why she let it get to this point.

  She had spent her whole life listening rather than speaking, accepting rather than objecting. Even though she didn’t think Sehaj was being fair, there was no reason to start fighting now.

  Shirina knocked on Rajni’s door first. “I’m going to head downstairs,” Shirina said.

  “You want us to come with you?” Rajni asked. “I’m done packing myself.”

  Shirina shook her head. “That’s okay,” she said. The last thing she wanted was to make small talk with Rajni while watching the clock, nervous that those words on the tip of her tongue would spill out and she’d reveal everything.

  Rajni looked a bit hurt. “All right then. Enjoy. Send our regards to Sehaj’s family.” There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice and a twitch in her lip. Although she couldn’t possibly know where Shirina was actually going, Shirina felt a flash of worry.

  From the hallway, Shirina could hear clattering sounds coming from Jezmeen’s room. She stepped closer to the door and knocked tentatively. “Jezmeen, I’m heading off,” she called.

  Jezmeen flung open the door, her face looking slightly flushed. “It’s my phone,” she said. “I think I’ve lost it.”

  “Do you want me to locate it?” Shirina asked. She’d meant to disable the FindMe app but it was still on now. She opened the map and saw a bright light signaling Jezmeen’s phone at the temple. “Looks like you left it in the sarovar,” she said.

  Jezmeen cursed under her breath. “I’ll walk out with you, then,” she said. “I swear, if I keep losing things at this pace, I’m going to have a very light suitcase to take back to London.”

  In the lobby, a tour group was checking out. They formed a long line from the desk to the door. The bellhops were working in overdrive, picking up the suitcases and hauling them to each other in a frantic assembly line. Shirina glanced at the clock. A few minutes to nine, nearly time to go. She wondered if she should have spent a bit more time saying good-bye to her sisters, but what was there to say? They had all done their part by coming on this trip, this pilgrimage they did not want to take, and what did it achieve? Arguments, ugly memories, and none of the healing that Mum had wanted for them. Why prolong the trip any further? It was time to step into the next phase of her journey, and then return home. Shirina did not know when she’d see her sisters again—there were no plans to return to England regularly to visit; there was nothing she missed about London that she could not find in Melbourne. Would they come to see her? She doubted it. It would take another major event for them to be together again. A wedding, maybe if Jezmeen found someone. Or a funeral. Shirina shook away the morbid thought, surprised that it entered her mind. The person in her life most likely to die in the near future would be her mother-in-law and she didn’t want to think of that. If she thought of it, she might will it to happen.

  Rental cars were parked along the road outside. The bus for the tour group was parked at a diagonal, blocking the way. “Is your driver going to call you?” Jezmeen asked.

  “I guess he’ll have to,” Shirina said.

  “We had a guy called Tom Hanks taking us to the border yesterday, did I tell you that? He wouldn’t tell us his real name.”

  Shirina smiled. “I think they do that to make you feel at ease. You know you’re going to have a reliable journey with someone named Tom Hanks.”

  Jezmeen snorted. “Tell Rajni that. She was certain he would kill us before we got to the border. So what’s your driver’s name then? Mr. Speed Limit?”

  “Lucky Singh,” Shirina said.

  Jezmeen turned to Shirina. There was some confusion in her expression. It wasn’t that uncommon a nickname, Shirina thought, but Jezmeen looked taken aback. “Okay,” she said. The bellhop was holding open the door for her now. She gave Shirina a hug and said, “Safe travels,” and hurried off toward the temple, glancing back once before being swallowed by the crowd.

  Shirina’s phone dinged in her purse. She picked it up. “Notifications: Updates needed for FindMe app.” She ignored the notification and opted to disable the app before throwing her phone back in her purse. No, nobody needed to find her; Sehaj and Mother knew where she was headed.

  Rajni was in the midst of packing her bags to leave Amritsar behind her when she heard the faint ringing of her phone. She reached for it and realized it wasn’t on the side table. “Coming,” she said as the muffled ringing persisted. She must have packed it with her clothes. It had rung out by the time she’d tossed aside all the contents of her suitcase. One missed call from Nikhil, the private investigator. When she pressed the button to return the call, her heart began to beat a bit faster.

  “Hello, is this Nikhil?” she asked.

  “Yes, is this Rajni, ma’am?”

  “Yes. Sorry I missed your call earlier.”

  “Not a problem. Is this a convenient time to talk?”

  Rajni glanced at the clothes strewn all over the hotel-room floor. Checkout wasn’t for another half hour and the hotel could bloody well wait if Nikhil had some good information for her. “Yes,” she said.

  “Ma’am, we had one of our network investigators in London do a search on this woman, Davina. We found nothing out of the ordinary in her history—no previous husbands, no children. She does have an outstanding loan and took a second mortgage last year—”

  Aha! Rajni thought triumphantly. Gold digger!

  “—but our records show that her payments are on time and she’s not at risk of going into any further debt. There’s no money-seeking motive there, which should be a relief to you.”

  “Yes,” Rajni muttered. “What a relief.” Disappointment sank like a lead ball in her stomach. “So you haven’t really found anything on her, then?”

  “No,” Nikhil said. “But we’re still in the very early stages of investigation here. There could be much more to uncover about this woman, but our protocol is to keep you continuously informed.” He had become officious again. Rajni could hear clicking in the background. Her phone pinged in her ear. “Ma’am, I’ve just sent you a folder of pictures that we found on her private social media accounts. Nothing incriminating there, but if you want a record of what she’s up to and who she’s with, these things are useful to have.”

  Rajni suppressed her feelings of queasiness that were emerging again from talking to Nikhil. A mother had to be sure, she reasoned with herself. “Thank you,” she said, eager to get to the photos. Maybe there were things that she would spot that Nikhil wouldn’t know to look for. Her intuition had to be good for something.

  The attachment took a little while to download. Rajni tapped her fingers against the dresser impatiently and began to throw her clothes back into her suitcase, this time caring less about her system of packing cells. They would all get rumpled again anyway. Her heart thrummed in her chest.

  The first picture popped up. So this was Davina—more diminutive than Rajni had expected, with narrow shoulders and a refined, aristocratic nose. In the first photo, the stem of her wineglass dangled between her fingers. She smiled, leaning toward her dining partner. There was no mistaking who he was. If the picture were grainy, or taken from much farther away, Rajni would still know those broad shoulders and that sly grin. Anil.

  There were more pictures and screenshots in the folder.
Rajni skipped past the individual photos of Davina and focused instead on the pictures with friends or Anil. She didn’t know what she might be able to uncover but once she knew what Davina looked like, she wasn’t interested in seeing her selfies at a concert, or a holiday photo from several years ago in skiing gear with powdery-white mountains rising behind her. There were a few chains of comments with the screenshots from Davina’s social media accounts—“Lookin’ good!” “Thanks dear, you’re so sweet!” she always replied. Rajni had to admit, she was an attractive woman.

  Finally, Rajni came across another picture with Anil. He and Davina were sitting together on a park bench. From the focus and clarity of light, it was obviously a professional photo. Rajni clicked on the next one—they were a series of engagement shots, she realized. Davina’s head rested on Anil’s chest in one picture. Anil kissed her on the cheek in another one. Rajni grudgingly allowed herself to notice that they looked like a happy couple.

  She looked through the comments on the screenshots to see what other people were saying.

  “Congrats you two!”

  “Dav, he’s one lucky guy! You are GLOWING!!”

  “Enough pictures of you two, where’s the ring??!! LOLLL!”

  Davina had dutifully responded to all of the comments, with the usual “Thank you” and “You’ll meet him soon enough.” Always followed by a winking face. In response to the comment about the ring, she said, “Had to get it resized already, would you believe it? Fingers already swollen.” This was followed by two winking faces. The friend replied: “Starting early I see! I know how that goes! By four months preggers, I was wearing Steve’s slippers. Feet never came back to normal size!!”

  So people knew. Rajni wondered how long it had been public knowledge that Davina was pregnant. The comments were clearly from friends of hers but this meant that the information wasn’t being kept between them. Maybe it had never been a secret. Maybe Rajni was the last to know. She certainly didn’t have any way of finding out what Anil was broadcasting since he’d blocked her on social media.

  Rajni looked back at the pictures. Davina hardly looked pregnant, but she was in the early stages. Rajni remembered those days well—not just in her pregnancy with Anil, but the next pregnancy that ended so early that she vowed that next time she wouldn’t tell Kabir and Mum until she was certain—telling them about the miscarriage had devastated everyone. Then after the next pregnancy ended again before she had a chance to tell anyone, Rajni hoped for another chance. If she got pregnant again, she wouldn’t dare even think about it until it was safe to do so. Her promise didn’t make any difference—the miscarriage still happened and it still broke her heart, although Rajni liked to think that by keeping it a secret, even from herself, she was able to dull the pain. You couldn’t feel loss for something that you never had, after all. After the doctor told them to stop trying, Rajni didn’t allow herself to think about pregnancy at all. At work, she was the last person to guess that a colleague was pregnant, often only noticing the woman’s weight gain or increased sick days after she’d made the announcement. It pinched Rajni each time, just a little bit, when somebody was expecting a child. She always thought she had come to terms with her infertility but those moments reminded her of the grief that was always waiting in the wings.

  It was easier to pretend that it wasn’t there.

  Rajni looked at Davina’s pictures again. Knowing that she was pregnant, Rajni could make out the faint outline of a bump pressing against the tight fabric of her dress. In that picture where Anil was kissing her cheek, she was facing the camera and smiling, a hand resting on his shoulder. A bare hand, the fingers already too big for a ring.

  Like Shirina’s hands.

  Rajni squinted at the photo. She returned to her phone menu and searched it, not knowing what she was looking for at first. It was crazy to think that Shirina was pregnant, and hadn’t told them. Why would she do that? She remembered her conversation with Jezmeen this morning about Sehaj.

  Rajni tried calling Shirina first and got no answer. She looked her up in the FindMe map and found that Shirina was no longer on it. Not just inactive, but completely disappeared from the map. Now Rajni began to panic. The certainty of Shirina’s pregnancy began to grow in her mind—how she was ill on the way to the police station. Rajni had been so occupied with Jezmeen’s problems that she had ignored Shirina. And what Shirina had said to her in the café about having daughters.

  Sehaj’s name was just above Shirina’s in Rajni’s contact list. Rajni pressed on his name. It was probably afternoon in Melbourne now.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. It’s Rajni.”

  There was a pause. “Rajni. Hello. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. And yourself?”

  “Good. What’s the weather like over there?”

  He wasn’t wondering why she was calling him? It struck Rajni as strange, but she played along.

  “Oh, you know India. Hot hot hot,” she said.

  “It’s freezing over here,” Sehaj said. “Take whatever sunshine you can get.”

  “Yes,” Rajni said with a small laugh. “Listen, Sehaj, I was—”

  “And Kabir and Anil are good?” Sehaj asked.

  “Yeah,” Rajni said. “Sehaj, when did you last speak to Shirina?”

  “That would be . . . yesterday, I think. Is she there?”

  “No. She’s gone off to visit your family. We said good-bye earlier.”

  “Oh. All right. Is everything okay, then?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I just—”

  Somebody knocked on her room door. “Raj, Raj! It’s Jezmeen. Open up quick!”

  Rajni dropped the phone and ran to the door. She saw Jezmeen in the hallway, her face ashen. “It’s Shirina,” she said. “We have to go and get her.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tom Hanks was the first driver Jezmeen spotted at the end of the lane when they hurried out of the hotel. He was polishing his wing mirrors while bobbing his shoulders to the beat that thumped from his speakers. Jezmeen flung open the door and buckled herself into the backseat. “We need to get to Chandigarh as soon as possible,” she said.

  “Your price, madam?” Tom Hanks asked, poking his head in the open window. “There is a last-minute booking fee—”

  “Anything,” Jezmeen said. “Just get us there as soon as possible. I’ll give you the address in a minute.” The tattered pieces of the card were in her pocket. She took them out and began fitting them together on her lap while Tom Hanks put her bags in the trunk.

  “Jezmeen, hold on,” Rajni shouted. She was hobbling along the lane and wrestling to release the wheel of one of her suitcases, which had got stuck in a gutter. Two turbaned men sitting on a low bench outside a juice stand got up to help. “Hurry, hurry,” Jezmeen said through gritted teeth as she watched them pull the suitcase free. Tom Hanks got into the driver’s seat and shot the car out of the lane like a rocket.

  Jezmeen screamed, “Tom Hanks! Wait for my sister!”

  “Oh, sorry,” Tom Hanks said, peering over his shoulder. “I thought we were trying to get away from her.” He pulled the car into reverse. They flew backward down the lane and arrived at Rajni’s feet. The men leaped out of the way and hollered at Tom Hanks, who apologized with a wave. “Just get in, Raj,” Jezmeen urged. Tom Hanks threw Rajni’s suitcases into the trunk, got back into the driver’s seat, and off they went.

  “We didn’t even check out properly. Did you take anything from the minibar?” Rajni asked once she was buckled in.

  Jezmeen didn’t answer her. She was reading the address on the card. “Restoration Road, Women’s Clinic,” she said to Tom Hanks. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I’ll find it, madam, no problem. Have I mentioned that using the GPS service requires an additional fee?” The car hurtled out of the lane and onto a major road. Jezmeen gripped the sides of her seat.

  “We’re trusting this guy with our lives again?” Rajni asked under her breath, and th
en she cleared her throat. “Tom Hanks, I know we need to get somewhere urgently but we also need to get there alive, understand?”

  “Yes, madam,” Tom Hanks said. The car slowed down and Tom Hanks resisted overtaking the truck in the next lane. A cow at the back of the truck stared balefully into their window.

  “Thank you,” Rajni told Tom Hanks. She turned to Jezmeen. “Now what the hell is going on?”

  “Shirina’s on her way to that women’s clinic and I think I know why.”

  “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “No,” Rajni said. “I just put it together. Her swollen fingers, the nausea, the weight gain. Honestly, I can’t believe we didn’t notice it before. Sehaj didn’t exactly deny it.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I was on the phone with him just now. He didn’t seem to think Shirina’s pregnancy was any of my business, though.”

  “That’s because it’s a girl, and they’re making her terminate it.”

  Rajni swallowed and stared at Jezmeen. “How do you know?”

  “You remember that older woman from the baths, the one who was with me and Shirina when she slipped yesterday?”

  “You said she said something that freaked Shirina out.”

  Jezmeen nodded. “I left my phone in the baths this morning, so I went back to get it. She was there. She saw me and said, ‘Tell your sister she should really be careful. When I was expecting my third child, I slipped in the kitchen and they had to bring the midwife over right away because they thought I was going to give birth right there.’ I said to her, ‘My sister isn’t pregnant,’ and she just gave me this look like I was completely daft. I said, ‘She can’t be pregnant. She would have told us.’ The woman said, ‘Must be a girl, then.’ So then I asked her what she meant by that, and she sort of waved me off like she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It only took me a moment after that, and then I wondered how the hell I didn’t see it before.”