A Sister's Promise (36 page)

Then the police bring Raj home, and Sharda calls, and the past beckons after a silence of almost two decades, and the next thing she knows, she is on a plane to India with her son beside her, recounting to him the story of her past, how she came to be where she is and why.

And now, after the cathartic purging of her past, the whole story that she hasn’t dared reveal in its entirety, even to herself, even in the secret confines of her mind, she is able to see clearly, for the first time in years.

Raj. Her boy. She wouldn’t have had him if she had stayed in India. He is here. He is hers.

And for now, it is enough.

RAJ

ELUSIVE DREAM

‘Mum, how you have punished yourself!’

‘Yes.’

A rickshaw honks, a dog howls, a little girl skips along right in the middle of the road, pigtails flying.

‘Aiyyo,’ a man calls.

‘I’ll take you to visit with your father, after all of this,’ his mum says.

Raj nods.

‘He tried very hard, son. He tried more than most. He left, Raj, because I vowed to myself not to give of myself anymore. He put up with me as much as he could. I don’t blame him.’

Next to where they are standing, a barber has set up shop at a makeshift stand, four poles holding up a roof of coconut frond woven mats. Despite the waning day, he is not short of customers. A wobbly chair, a basin of water, a comb, a blade and a pair of scissors, a towel draped across his shoulders and a mirror he gives his clients to hold, and he is ready to go.

‘Yes,’ Raj says.

‘He loved you; he loves you, very much. He loves you more than I dared.’ His mother says.

The barber cuts the hair of his clients at speed, black strands swirling briefly in the grimy air, before gliding down to join the thick carpet of ebony curls around the barber’s feet. The clients’ shorn necks, sporting minuscule spheres of shiny red from the unruly assaults of the barber’s blade, look naked and strangely vulnerable without their armour of hair, the pale flesh blushing maroon from being subjected involuntarily to the brash rays of the evening sun.

‘I know, mum,’ Raj says, ‘I understand now.’

‘Love was bad. It made people turn against me. Whoever I loved I lost. I tried so hard not to love you,’ she whispers. ‘I tried. I couldn’t. You and Kushi are two pulses that beat within me. When you used to launch yourself at me, when you were younger, I would ache to hold you, to experience you, to lose the person I had become in the haven of your perfect little smile, to find myself again in your innocent endearments, your sweet perfection. But I pushed you away, kept you safe. It worked a bit too well.’ A juddering sigh rocks her whole body, ‘I understand now that I did to you exactly what was done to me, pushed you away too much. I thought I was protecting you from me, keeping you safe. But I hurt you. I am sorry.’ Tears bleed into her voice. ‘In talking to you, telling you what happened, I can see clearly all the mistakes I have made. I wish . . . I wish I could turn back time.’

Raj goes up to his mother and holds her. She is so fragile in his arms, so insubstantial, like the fragmented memory of an elusive dream.

She sobs into his shoulder.

He holds her.

A bus shudders up to the stop, and pushes aside the lone rickshaw trundling along the narrow road. The rickshaw swerves, clipping one of the poles holding up the barber’s makeshift stand.

‘Lo!’ the barber yells, shaking his fist at the rickshaw driver, amid sneezes caused by the mini-tornado of displaced dust. But the awning of the barber’s stand crumples and the coconut mats collapse.

‘Thank you, Raj,’ his mother says, sniffing and wiping her eyes, streaking dirt across her moist face. ‘Thank you son.’

The barber abandons his customer mid-shave, and runs away with his towel draped over his shoulder, his scissors in one hand and mirror in the other. The customer stands up and squints, one hand hesitantly feeling his scalp, hairy on one side, shorn and blistering on the other. Then he too, runs, narrowly missing the falling fronds.

‘You’re welcome, Mum.’

A group of people exit the hospital, four women holding up one in the middle, who is hitting her forehead and sobbing: ‘Aiyyo, he’s gone. What will I do?’

A gale of fear rousts his mother’s eyes, sets her lips aquiver.

‘Ready to go inside and meet your daughter?’ Raj asks.

She nods, apprehension shining out of her eyes.

‘Ready to give her the gift of life again?’

‘Yes.’ She pushes her shoulders back, her face flushed; anxiety playing peekaboo with the sense of purpose in her face. And then, ‘Thank you, Raj. I know I didn’t give you much of a choice, but I appreciate you doing this, coming here with me, especially as you can’t stand hospitals. It means so much to me.’

He nods.

She swallows and says, her eyes shimmering. ‘That evening when you were ill in hospital and you asked me to stay . . . ’

He closes his eyes, tries to push away the stab of hurt caused by the memory.

‘I did.’

‘What?’ He opens his eyes, and stares at her.

‘I was pacing outside. In the corridor. I just . . . I could not bear to sit next to you and watch you suffer. I was terrified I’d lose you too. I wanted to crush you to me and not let go. I wanted to sob, rail against God and fate, question why it was you, my innocent boy who had to hurt . . . ’ A shaky breath, then, ‘If I had stayed beside you, I would have gone to pieces, and scared you into being more ill than you already were. And so, I pretended to leave. I went to pieces in the corridor instead. And I kept vigil. I prayed all that night even though I had denounced God the day Kushi was born. I watched that little boy in the bed next to yours being wheeled away and thanked God that it wasn’t you, and then felt guilty about it.’ A shudder, ‘It was me who sent that nurse to you when I saw you sitting up in bed and rocking. And in the morning, when the nurse informed me that your temperature had eased a tiny bit, I was able to give myself a pep talk, comb my hair, spray perfume, paste a smile on my face and come to you . . .’

‘Oh mum…’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

He nods. There is an obstruction flooding his throat, tasting of the sea. ‘Come on then.’ And he gives her his arm and leads her into the hospital that houses his newly discovered sister.

KUSHI

THE MAKEUP OF FABRICATIONS

She’s here, the woman who taught me right from wrong, who expounded the importance of truth, the necessity of being honest with oneself, the woman whom I had believed in and trusted, whose every word I took at face value, without question, this woman whom I have loved more than anyone else in the world.

She looks at me with the fear spattered, worry infected gaze of a liar who has been found out, a guilty criminal in the dock.

‘Why? Why didn’t you tell me? All my life I have championed the truth, fought for it and all the while I’ve been living a lie . . .’ Despite myself, my voice wavers. It breaks, as vulnerable as the flimsy foundations upon which our life together has been built.

After all, how can any relationship that has been constructed upon a lie thrive, stay secure and strong? Won’t it tremble with every malicious waft of gossip, the whisper of scandal, the insinuation of the truth?

Having the secrets she’s been hiding all her life out in the open and shrinking from the spotlight of honesty and directness, seems to have rendered her mute, her face naked without its makeup of fabrications.

Tears glint silver in her eyes like droplets of steam hugging the rim of a dhal saucepan, one travels down her nose and shimmers on her cheek.

She holds out her hand and flexes her fingers, one by one, a plea, a beckoning; her mouth opening and closing like a drowning man gasping for air and finding only water.

I do not want her pleas. I want answers.

I want her to look me in the eye, want to see, finally, the truth laid bare, denuded of its armour of deceits.

‘When you held me, and urged me to stay true to myself, weren’t you aware of the irony, the hypocrisy? How could you ask me to be true to myself when you weren’t?’ Each aggrieved word drops like flint from my mouth.

‘I tried to tell you, several times. But my tongue refused to push the words out of my mouth; and my throat would dry up.’ Her voice wavers. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you. You are so against bias and unfairness of any kind, so vehemently opposed to deceit that I dreaded what knowing the truth would do to you.’

‘Ha!’ I taste bile, bitter as facts stripped of the sugar coating of palatable falsehoods. ‘I trusted you, looked up to you. And you . . . you kept this huge part of my life from me . . . ’

‘It just . . . it was never the right time,’ she whispers. ‘I would look at your beautiful face, at your eyes glowing with zeal, at your impassioned appetite for life, at your belief in a righteous, black and white world and I . . . I did not want to be the one who burst your bubble, the one who pointed out the palette of grey interspersed between the black and white of your idealistic world. Your Da and I . . .’

‘Don’t bring Da into it. Not that he is my Da anyway. That has been taken from me as well, the certainty that he . . .’ I cannot speak any more, my words trapped by a lump, a brine-inflated sponge that is obstructing my throat.

She blanches, her face pale as milky skin skimming the surface of much brewed tea. ‘I wish I could absorb all your hurt, your anger, your pain, so you could emerge unscathed from this, Kushi.’ Her voice is plaited with grief and regret.

‘You should have thought of that before, not now, when it is too late . . .’ The lump disintegrates into messy sobs that tear through my body and it feels as if all the bits of me that aren’t already broken are breaking now.

The whole ward is silent for once and everyone is staring at us. The ailing, at the other end of the ward nearest the toilets, crane their necks and limp closer, their illness forgotten for a brief while.

I might heal physically if my mother’s—
my
mother’s—kidney is a match, but will I ever feel whole again? How will I come out of this in one piece? How will I reconcile what I have learnt with what I have believed all my life?

And unreasonable though it is, I want this woman, whose eyes glimmer like raindrops clinging to leaves, to hold me, to tide me through this, to soothe my pain, as she has done a million times before.

No-one else will do.

She tries to reach for me, but I shudder and she slumps back, defeated.

‘Kushi,’ she whispers, ‘Kushi,’ as if my name is a magic key that will make everything better. ‘My darling . . .’

I cannot bear her endearments, cannot stand to watch her struggle with her emotions. I want her comfort, for her to say, ‘It will be okay, it will get better.’

But how? How can any of this get better? How will I rid myself of this throbbing in my chest, this feeling of being let down by her colossal betrayal?

When my da succumbed to fire, (I cannot help thinking of him as Da), there were clear cut villains to direct my anger against, but what do you do when the person you love the most is also the one who has wronged you?

The truth is a splinter in my eye, making everything blurred. I want to remove the splinter. I want everything to go back to the way it was before.

There have been too many sacrifices, too much hurt. Ma’s letters, her words, have afforded a glimpse inside her head. I think I understand. I do. And yet, I feel wounded too. Because the people I believed to be my parents did not trust me enough to tell me
my
story, the truth about
my
past.

If I were to find one word to describe what I am feeling, it would be ‘confused’.

I want Ma to take me in my arms, chase away the confusion. I ache for the comfort of the platitudes she will utter, every word of which I have always believed, unquestioning, until now. I thought that her arms were the truest things I would ever encounter, where I would always be safe. She was my temple, the solid rigidity of her a constant in the wavering world that stole my da in a blink. In the depths of our grief for Da, she decreed that things would get better and they did. And then . . . . and then she gave me her letters to
her
mother and they changed not only my world, but the way I see her. And that is what I am finding the hardest. She is not the constant I took her to be. I have been ensconced in a fleeting mirage, a house of cards that has toppled with one flick of a careless hand.

Before she returned from the bank, I had reached an understanding, I had thought I had come to terms with this new-found knowledge. But the moment I saw her, the instant her face loomed before me, worry warring with fear, all the hurt and befuddlement I was feeling found an outlet. I lashed out, overcome by rage at her lies.

I am grateful to her for taking me on, loving me unconditionally, in the midst of grieving for her parents and suffering the abuse directed at a single mother. And I am grateful to Da. Da who was brave enough to marry a ‘fallen’ woman, to take on another man’s child, and to tolerate the judgement of the village. But I resent being lied to, being made a fool of.

Ma and Da never gave any indication that I was not theirs, both of them loving me so completely, making me the centre of their world, allowing me the freedom to be the person I wanted to be; which is why this revelation has come as such a shock.

And Puja . . .? I have so many questions for her, the most pressing being why she gave me away. I think I understand . . . I think I do. I have helped enough young girls burdened by circumstance, undone by fate not to . . .

My head is spinning; my body tied to this bed. Why was I so enamoured with truth? Knowing the truth should not feel like this. I am blindsided by it, and I am reeling from the weight of it, crushed—worse than when that car hit me.

I want to go back to a past where Ma was
mine
, unmarred by this knowledge that she’s a liar, that she has been lying to me all these years.

I cannot trust her, not anymore. And that hurts. I feel I cannot trust
anyone
after those closest to me have proved to be capable of such deceit.