Monsoon Memories (38 page)

Shirin closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she found Jacinta looking right at her. Her mother’s eyes were twin pools of pain. Shirin had seen them like that once before and they had haunted her ever since.

‘Shirin...’ Jacinta held out a hand. It seemed to require all her strength to do so.

‘Ma...’ Shirin put her hand in her mother’s frail one. She knelt down beside the bed, so she was at her mother’s eye level.

Slowly, Jacinta raised her hand and rested it on Shirin’s cheek. ‘I am sorry, Shirin, so sorry...’

Now you’re sorry.
Her mother had forgiven her. Why didn’t she feel better? Why did she only feel anger, sharp and hot like the point of a knife piercing tender skin?

Every word her mother spoke required great effort. ‘When you were born, I made a promise to myself, to you, that whatever happened, I would be a better mother than mine had been to me. But in the end, I was worse than her, Shirin, worse...’

Jacinta’s eyes were soft. She was looking at Shirin with such tenderness—the look Shirin had ached for. ‘It was my pride, my blasted pride. You were hurting. You had been through so much. And yet, at the time you needed me the most, I abandoned you...’ Jacinta’s face crumpled. Tears slid down her cheeks and soaked into the pillow. ‘That morning when I walked up to your in-laws’ house, your house, people clustered in groups and pointed and whispered. It was what I had endured every day of my childhood and I could not go back. I would not. In those brief moments before I disowned you, I thought of everything I would lose otherwise: how I would never be able to get Deepak and Anita married, how the whole village would laugh at us. I thought of the shame, the disgrace, of how I would be an outcast again... I did not think of you...’ Jacinta took a long, deep breath that came out a sob.

You made me an outcast instead.

Jacinta clearly had more to say and seemed to want to say it before her strength failed her. ‘I, of all people, should have understood. My alcoholic father... The day we met Prem for the first time, the signs were there. A part of me knew. But I refused to pay heed.’ A pause. A gasp. ‘Over the years I have wanted to contact you so many times…’

‘Why didn’t you, Ma?’ Biting out the words.

‘My pride, my blasted pride.’ Jacinta whispered.

Anger. White hot. Like harbouring a plateful of chillies in her stomach. ‘All those years, I was aching to see Reena. And I stayed away…’ She couldn’t bear to look at her mother. She turned, her eyes seeking Reena. Reena met her gaze, her eyes wide, innocent, the eyelashes glittery from tears.
My daughter. My beautiful child.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Can a voice shatter from too much pain?
She cleared her throat, willed her voice to not let her down.
‘I wanted nothing more than to see you grow up. But I stayed away. I thought: if my own mother cannot forgive me, how will I ever face my daughter?’ She paused, gathering her thoughts. There was so much she wanted to say. And it was so important she said this right. ‘I know you found out the truth today. That must have been hard. What I did… it must have felt like betrayal. What mother gives her child away? You may think—if you haven’t already—that you weren’t wanted. That isn’t true. I loved you, Reena. I love you. So much. You were the one good thing to come out of everything that happened. When they handed you to me and you nuzzled close, trusting me so completely, trusting me to protect you, I knew then. You deserved better. You didn’t deserve a mother who was so broken she couldn’t give you the love you deserved. You didn’t deserve to live like an outcast, in a different country, away from the land and the people you belonged with. None of what happened was your fault and you didn’t deserve to carry the burden of your history for the rest of your life. You didn’t deserve a mother who did what I did…’

She looked around at her family then, these people she had so longed for, assembled in this room, and the anger, the hurt finally burst out of her. ‘I blamed myself for eleven years for what I did to Prem. Despite the counselling. Despite what my husband and my best friend said. I was to blame, wasn’t I? My family definitely agreed. They shunned me, stayed away.’ Neither Deepak nor Anita met her gaze. ‘From birth I was conditioned for guilt. Being a girl was my fault. Daring to accept a note from a boy who loved me—my fault. What Prem did to me—my fault. I must have provoked him in some way. What I did to him. Unforgivable. I was guilty. I was rotten inside. The girl who consorts with boys. The girl who loves a Muslim. The girl who brings disgrace to the revered family name. And I gave away the one good thing to come out of it all. My daughter. Was it fair to ask her to live with the ignominy brought on by her horrible mother?’

None of them would look at her. Not her mother, whose tears squeezed onto the pillow, not her brother nor her sister.
The cowards
. ‘And I did to my daughter what my mother had done to me. I deserted her. The irony of it.’ She paused, took a breath. ‘And through it all, that nightmare time, those nine long months of pregnancy, living in a fug of depression in a rented flat, the stranger I married looked after me. Not any of you. No. A man I had known for a week—at that. He believed in me. He stood by me. He convinced me that what I did was not my fault. Why didn’t you?’

And still they wouldn’t look at her.

‘You didn’t forgive me for what I did and I have craved your forgiveness all these years. Why, Ma? I was just a girl then. A girl who had left her family and all that was familiar to live with strangers. A girl who was trying so hard to please her mother by being a good wife, a good daughter-in-law, a good sister-in-law. And now you are ill, you call me. Because you require my forgiveness. A tick in the box.’ She paused, trying to catch her breath. ‘Even if you hadn’t called me home, Ma, I would have come anyway. I wasn’t ready to stay away any longer, to be in cahoots with you, with your image of me as someone horrible, someone to be shunned. Yes, I stabbed him. But he hurt me. He hurt me.’

Jacinta’s feeble voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

She couldn’t bear to be near her mother. ‘You took so much from me.’ She stood, turned to run and almost bumped into Reena.

‘I’m sorry.’ Shirin’s gaze bored into Reena.

Reena put her arms around her. Shirin stopped, her agitation stilled. Gently she rested her head on her daughter’s hair, whispered into her ear, ‘I love you.’

‘Shirin, you must be very hungry after that long journey,’ Madhu said, trying to ease the tension that had settled in the room, glutinous like the bitter medicine she had been forced to drink when she was ill. ‘I have made all your favourites. Samosas, potato bondas, biryani, pork and mutli...’

Shirin managed a watery smile. ‘You don’t know how long I’ve waited to eat your food again, Madhu. But I need some time to myself. I need to leave...’

‘Leave? You just came.’ Madhu sounded panicked.

‘Don’t go,’ said Jacinta weakly.

Shirin gently kissed the top of Reena’s head, her cheeks, the tip of her nose. ‘I can’t stay here. Not now. But I’ll come back, I promise.’ She tipped Reena’s face up with her hand and looked into her eyes. ‘This time round, I won’t let you go...’

CHAPTER THIRTY

Colossians 3:13

‘S
he’s beautiful, Vinod.’ The tamarind tree sighed in the breeze that lifted the hair off the nape of her neck. Gypsy followed as she navigated the narrow path between the fields, a panting, comforting presence.
I am home. Reena. Holding her in my arms. The warmth of her. Real. Here
.

Vinod was at work. Shirin could hear the busy clatter of keyboards, a high-pitched female voice, laughter.

‘Of course.’ The smile in his voice caressing her down the crackling phone line. ‘And you? Are you okay?’ Concern.

‘Yes.’ And then, ‘Come home, Vinod. I miss you. I love you.’

She carried his surprised bark of a laugh in her heart like a gift as she dialled Kate’s number, wanting to hear her friend’s voice.

‘Oh, my God, Shirin, it’s you. Hang on a minute; I’m going outside.’ Clatter of keyboards receding. Bursts of conversation like voice-filled bubbles, a police siren whining, waning, gone. ‘Shirin, you there?’

An image of Kate in her workaday uniform of pencil skirt and white dress shirt, phone glued to her ear, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, sitting in the smokers’ corner on the only bench not covered in pigeon droppings. A sudden ache to be back in the ordered world of the office, fixing UAT issues, writing business specs, laughing with Kate over sandwiches and cups of tea.

‘We miss you here. Justine’s not up to managing your team. And, like a fool, I head over to your desk to tell you something and then it hits me. When are you coming back?’ And then, softly, ‘Just kidding. How is she, your mum? Did you meet Reena?’

‘Reena is perfect. She knows, Kate. And yet, she came into my arms and it felt…’ How to describe the feeling? As if she had been waiting all her life for that moment and it was everything she had expected and more… Her daughter in her arms had felt like… ‘Like coming home.’

‘And your mum?’ Kate prompted.

Rage. ‘I thought I could forgive her, Kate, but I find…’

‘Thank goodness for that. I was beginning to worry you were like one of those martyred saints we were expected to emulate every Sunday at church; Saint Shirin—nice ring to it…’

A bubble of laughter pushed past the weight in Shirin’s chest and escaped from her mouth in a surprised giggle. ‘I miss you, Kate.’

When she disconnected the call, Shirin found herself at the church. She had walked out of the house blindly, punching Vinod’s number on her mobile, wanting to hear his voice. And her feet, despite being shod in trainers and not chappals, despite being years out of practice, led her through the well-worn path between the fields, past the stream and up the hill, past Lenny Bai’s compound and to the church without her noticing. Her feet had slipped effortlessly back in time to a past where they had made this journey a thousand times—it was her heart that was finding it harder, more painful, to make the transition.

A mass was in full swing when she slipped in quietly through a side door and knelt in one of the pews at the back. There were only a few people in attendance. They were singing the hymn preceding the second reading. It had been eleven years since she had last been in a church. But, she soon found, rituals drummed into one during childhood are not forgotten easily. She knelt down and made the sign of the cross. And, along with the rest of the congregation, began reciting prayers which came as easily to her lips as if she had been reciting them every day...

The priest was saying, ‘Today’s reading is from Colossians 3:13. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you
.
This is one of the hardest things God asks us to do, especially in the world today. Take the riots, for example, where poor Mr D’Sa was killed for no fault of his. This senseless violence makes us angry. It makes us want revenge. But the Lord asks us to turn the other cheek. The Lord asks us to count our blessings, to remember all those favours that He bestows upon us. All He asks in return is that we forgive. As He forgave us, as He continues to forgive us every single day...’

It was all very well for the priest to stand there and sermonise, to blithely ask his congregation to count their blessings and to forgive. If only it were that easy...

Disillusioned, Shirin slipped out of the church and went to the cemetery to find her father’s grave. The headstone said simply, ‘Walter Diaz, much-loved husband and father.’ Shirin sat beside it, beside the mound of earth that housed her father, and remembered the mound of his belly; how, when she put her ear to his belly button she heard churning and gurgling, busy sounds like the workings of a factory. ‘It is a factory,’ Walter had said, smiling down at her, ‘It converts the food we eat to liquid so it can be digested easily. Isn’t that amazing?’

She, Deepak and Anita had launched on him once, a mini mutiny, wanting to tickle him until he begged them to stop like he did to them. His laughter had started as a rumble deep in his chest and emanated in infectious waves until they were all laughing as they rolled on top of him, not sure who was tickling whom.

An aeroplane flew overhead, interrupting Shirin’s thoughts with its low hum.

‘I want to fly like you, Da,’ she had said to him, hope shining in her eyes. He had lifted her then, swung her high above him and she had screamed, equal parts of fear and joy.

‘There,’ he’d said afterward, holding her close. ‘You flew.’

‘Not like that,’ she’d put her arms round his neck, rubbing her cheek against his mostly white stubble. ‘In an aeroplane.’

‘It’s not that different from going in a bus, you know.’

‘It is! You get food in an aeroplane, in little trays. You told me that once.’

‘It’s not as tasty as Madhu’s.’

Shirin had played her trump card then: ‘You get to see clouds floating below you. You get to see heaven.’

He had put her down gently and smiled his dimpled, eye-crinkling smile. ‘Ah. That you do.’

She held a fistful of mud in her hand, closed her eyes and tried to picture her father. And finally she saw him, hovering behind her eyelids: his almost bald head; his forever stubble; his round, benevolent face with the double chin that he had bequeathed her; the twinkling dimples; the kind eyes. He was smiling.

Are you in heaven, Da? Are you happy? My baby, my little girl, I saw her just now, Da. She’s beautiful, all grown-up, without me. Is that how you felt when you visited every two years? Did you find it hard to reconcile the children in front of you with the images in your head?

And this was where Madhu found her, sitting on the mud beside her father’s grave, talking to him.

Shirin was unsurprised. A part of her had known Madhu would come, had been waiting for her.

Madhu was panting. She must have run all the way. ‘Ma’am is dying, Shirin. She had a heart attack after you left. Please come.’