A Sister's Promise (37 page)

I want to run from this angst-charged room, down the claustrophobic corridors of the hospital and out through the door, to breathe lungfuls of the golden air tasting of jackfruit, and fragranced with the incense and entreaties that drift from the shrine by the hospital entrance.

It hurts to open my mouth. It takes effort to form the words I want to say. ‘Leave,’ I whisper. ‘Please, just go. I need to be alone for a bit.’

She stands, and extends a trembling hand towards me. I ignore it.

Her expression: mottled pain as deep and as wide as the Mangalore quarry, and remorse, the sparkling blue of spilled oil on a tarred road, and a plea for understanding, the desolate brown of drought.

I look away from the nakedness of her gaze. ‘I need some time to myself.’

My voice is clipped, and harsh. But I am too tired, too worn out by everything that has happened to me to be kind. I want to close my eyes and escape myself, even for a brief while, to seek solace in the soothing nothingness of sleep, if it will come.

‘I will be in the corridor just outside this room,’ she says. ‘I love you, Kushi.’

She turns away, a stooped figure bearing the weight of her falsehoods on her shoulders. I breathe her in, the rounded back and the defeated air of the woman I have known as my mother; the woman I have admired immensely and loved so much; the woman who has loved me and looked after me and brought me up, who has made me the person I am now . . .

Who
am
I?

I no longer know. I am lost, confused, sinking.

I am dying.

SHARDA—NOW

A SHADOW OF A MEMORY

Dearest Ma,

I am doing what I always do in moments of deep distress: I talk to you. I usually do so via the medium of paper, but I do not have the strength to write just now, so instead I will talk to you in my head.

You who have been dead for the exact time Kushi has been alive, you who are but the shadow of a memory now, you whose face I cannot recall clearly, but a glimpse of which I see in Kushi’s smile, in a certain expression she has, in that scowl that pushes her eyebrows together when she is trying to hold a thought.

Does it make me insane, I wonder, this talking to you in my head? I am mad, I suppose. Mad with worry. Mad with grief. Mad with hefting the burden of all the wrong choices I have made, and the wrong paths I have followed in this blind dash that is life.

I so wish I could cook now, Ma. Knead dough for chapathis. Marinate brinjal in a tangy sauce. Deep-fry seasoned, gramflour-coated plantain. Grind masala for fish curry.

I feel so inadequate, my whole being on tenterhooks, as I wait: for Puja’s visit, for Kushi to heal, from both the physical injuries inflicted on her by those cruel men and the internal ones I have inflicted on her soul by keeping the truth from her.

My hands feel useless, they should be chopping, stirring, frying—anything except staring at the walls of this disease-ridden hospital corridor, that close in on my desperation, my dread. My head is steeped in regret, marinated in what ifs, and pickled in scenarios—all the ways I could have protected Kushi, all the ways I could have told her the truth of her parentage.

Ma, I cannot stand any longer all these anxiety-swollen, excoriating thoughts populating my brain. I am going to cook instead. If I can talk to a person who only lives on in my head, I can cook in there too, what do you say?

So, I’ll prepare the marinade for the spicy squid that you loved so much, Ma. Look, I am adding two teaspoons of chilli powder, a teaspoon of cumin powder and one of coriander powder, a teaspoon of turmeric and one heaped tablespoon of vinegar.

Now I blend in all the spices until the combination becomes a lustrous golden red. I add salt to taste and then add the squid, carefully picked by Da and me from the rejects from the boats which arrived at dawn. I balance the squirming jellylike squid in my hand, helping you pull out the inky black bits from inside. We add it to the marinade and watch the creamy squid turn the pinkish tangerine of a summer sky at sunset.

Somehow I started in the present and have travelled back into the past, Ma, and although I usually love these fantasies where you and Da are home and safe, just now I cannot concentrate.

My mind is enmeshed in the ward next door, where on the fourth bed on the right, my daughter lies, traumatized by what she has learned. It keeps dragging back to Kushi, who also loves squid prepared just that way; Kushi who, when she was little used to hold the fried squid with both hands and stuff it into her mouth. Once she inadvertently rubbed the spicy juices in her eyes. How she scrunched up her face and howled then! I gently washed her eyes with cold water, until she was able to open them again.

‘Do you think I’ll be able to see again, Ma?’ she asked looking right at me, eyes swollen and adorned with tears.

‘Tell me what you see, Kushi,’ I said holding up two fingers and just as she said ‘two’, I changed them to three. And we laughed together, her hurt forgotten, the half-eaten squid lying neglected on her plate.

Kushi, my girl, so open with her emotions, Ma, so loving, always declaring her wholehearted affection for me.

‘You are my role model, Ma,’ she would say often and I’d smile although my heart was aching, burdened by the weight of all I was keeping from her.

And now she knows.

And I wait here in the corridor next to her ward. I wait for my heartbroken daughter to heal—and even though I know it is too much to ask after what I have done, I hope that I will not find Kushi’s bright eyes, burning with the zeal to set right the injustices of the world, dulled by the injustice done to her by the woman she trusted, for long.

I hope that her shoulders, always so bouncy with enthusiasm, are not now forever weighted down by my dishonesty and duplicity.

I pray that my sister’s—her mother’s—kidney will heal my daughter. The girl I brought up as my own, thinking love was enough.

I dream that she will forgive me.

And I wait.

PUJA—NOW

THE SEPIA TASTE OF NOSTALGIA

At the shrine at the entrance to the hospital, Puja folds her hands and prays. She pleads with a God she forsook the day her parents died, the day she also gave birth to and gave up her daughter, for her daughter’s life.

Please God. I gave her up once. Please don’t make me go through it again. Save her. Take me.

All around her is noise: honks and shouts, barks and moos, the trundle of buses and the rattle of auto rickshaws, the laughter of women, and the chatter of children in a language she hadn’t realised just how much she missed until she heard it again. The smell of spices and dust, incense and heat, festering garbage and desperation. The taste of grit and ripening fruit, of sunshine and sweat. India. Home.

‘Kushi Shankar is in the dialysis ward which is just down through that door there and left along the corridor,’ says the harassed receptionist, who is swamped by the maelstrom of people lobbing queries at her from all sides.

Kushi Shankar. The wispy haired baby she’s longed for, for nearly eighteen years. Her daughter, and yet, not hers.

Her son, whom she has failed just as much, if not more than her daughter, squeezes her hand and she is grateful for this. She who has shied away from physical contact for as long as her daughter has been alive.

‘Remember, Mum,’ he says, ‘you’re doing them a favour.’

‘Sharda did me a favour by raising Kushi, Raj. I am only doing my duty. She is my child. I gave her up because I did not want to lose her, and I am losing her anyway.’

‘You’re not,’ Raj says, her wayward son who, in the course of this journey has become a man, a wise one at that. ‘She’ll be fine.’

‘If she asks me why I gave her up, what do I tell her?’ She breathes in the universal smell of hospitals and shudders

‘You tell her the truth. That you thought you were doing the best by her. At the time you believed it, even though it may not have been the right decision. Be honest, Mum, like you’ve been with me. It’ll be okay.’

‘Son, you’ve turned out so well despite my neglect,’ she says softly, giving in at last to the urge of her heart, the yearning she has been clamping down for so long that it has become second nature, and clasping her son’s face. The ice that her heart has been encased in for almost twenty years, which started to melt when Raj patted her hand hesitantly in the plane and held her when she cried just now, thaws fully at this contact. ‘You are just like your father, thank goodness. Loving and giving.’

‘I am just like you,’ her son replies. ‘Loving and giving.’

She blinks back the warm tears stinging her eyes at his words. ‘I’ve been anything but.’

‘You’re here now,’ her son says. ‘You’re here when your daughter needs you the most.’

A woman paces up and down the phenyl-reeking corridor. She is hunched, as if warding off blows.

She looks up as Puja and Raj approach. Her face is careworn, set in deep grooves of worry and fear. But there is something about the eyes, the henna-coloured eyes that are no longer hidden behind unflattering lenses . . . Puja stares. Not Sharda surely? She seems too old.

The woman’s face lights up when she recognises Puja. And in that smile, that shy, tentative smile that doesn’t quite reach her anxious eyes, Puja sees her sister.

The intervening years fold away like the pleats of an accordion. Puja opens her mouth and tastes the past, earth and love and loss and remorse, fermented and salty with age, and a single word escapes her mouth and populates the space between them like a blessing.

‘Sharda.’

That one word, spanning the distance between them, dissolves all the hurt and anger, the guilt and remonstrance, leaving behind only the realisation that what is left after everything has been pared down, is the bond between sisters, a complex weave of love, genes and blood.

This is my sister, who held me while I was being sick, who carried me everywhere on her young hip, who introduced me and my daughter to the world, who’s brought my daughter up.

This is my sister, the only person who can see in the adult I have become, the child I once was; the gatekeeper to the hallowed memories of our joint childhood; the only one who can recall, like me, how our mother’s eyes changed colour when she laughed, how our father walked with the slightest hint of a limp; the only one whose precious reminiscences of our parents are marked by smoke, contaminated by flames lapping at a village, stealing it of colour, rendering it the grey of ash, the charred husk of a thousand hollow dreams, a myriad wasted lives.

‘Puja,’ Sharda says, her voice the awed hush of a child waking up to an incandescent world painted the glossy happily ever after of fairy tales by the magic brush of snow. ‘Thank God. Thank you for coming.’

Sharda comes up to her and touches her cheek. Her calloused palm feeling just like Ma’s, transports Puja right back into childhood. It is sanction and redemption. It is forgiveness and absolution.

‘I thank you, Sharda, for all that you did, all you are still doing. Thank you for taking Kushi on,’ Puja says.

Hot tears, silvery blue, trickle down the sides of Sharda’s face and wet her sari blouse.

‘Kushi . . . Sh-She’s not . . . Her kidneys . . . ’

The terror Puja feels is reflected in Sharda’s eyes. And the lingering remnants of the barrier of mistakes and misunderstandings and misjudgements that has built up between the two of them over the years crumbles in the urgency of what is here, what is now, the desperate dread of what might be, binding them together.

At that moment, they are two mothers, united in the fight to save their beloved child.

Sharda pulls Puja to her, holding her close.

‘Thank you,’ Sharda whispers, ‘for giving Kushi to me then. She saved me.’ A pause, then, ‘And thank you for coming now, to give her to me again.’

It is a warning. Puja understands.

She is mine,
Sharda is saying.

‘Kushi is not mine to take, not anymore.’ Puja’s heart aches as she mouths the words, knowing that they are the truth, but feeling as she felt that smoke-scarred, anguish-hued day when her daughter was born and Puja turned away from her, even though every instinct cried otherwise.

Sharda nods, eyes brimming. ‘She is all I have.’ And softly, ‘And now, I have you too.’

Puja’s heart overflows.

Raj clears his throat somewhere behind her.

‘This is my son, Raj.’ She is caught unawares by the pride she feels when she says those words. Her heart blossoms as she introduces
her
son to
her
sister.

‘Wow, what a handsome young man. And tall. You look just like your mother.’ Sharda, not suffering any of the qualms Puja does, leans forward and folds Raj into a hug.

Raj blushes red as wet mud, as he stands awkwardly in his aunt’s arms.

And seeing her son encircled in her sister’s arms, Puja, for the first time in twenty years, gets a glimpse into a future that is unburdened by the follies of the past, but lifted up on the tentative wings of optimism, bright as light percolating into an overcast day and feeding it the promise of the brilliance to come. She breathes in deeply and tastes buoyancy, the soft pink of a tender bloom unfurling cautiously in the caress of spring.