Secret Keeper (13 page)

But Ma’s fingers were tying and untying the end of her saree into a knot and her face was void again. Reet started to sing, her eyes on Ma, while Auntie accompanied her on the harmonium.
Knot. Unknot.
Ma’s fingers weren’t keeping the rhythm; her feet weren’t tapping the beat as they did when she wasn’t being held captive.

Reet’s song was making Auntie sniff over her harmonium. When the music and Reet’s high, sweet voice ended on the same note and the song was over, Auntie wiped away tears with her saree.

Asha heard the rumble of Uncle’s voice as he deposited groceries in the kitchen and the quick slaps of the cousins’ bare feet on the stairs as they headed to their room.

Grumbling at the lateness of the hour, Grandmother quickly fried some okra and reheated lentils and rice. Ma went through the motions of serving the family with Auntie, but her face stayed blank; Reet’s song hadn’t made a bit of difference.

Grandmother, Uncle, Raj, and the little girls ate quickly and left the table. Reet and Asha were almost done when Ma and Auntie sat down to join them. Auntie glanced at her sister- in- law’s drooping figure and gave it one last try. “That woman who cleans the toilets is terrible,” she said. “Should we fire her?”

“No, no,” Reet said quickly. “You should give her a raise. She’ll work harder then.”

“Sumitra,” Auntie said. “What do
you
think we should do? Your husband always told us how you managed your home so well in Delhi.”

To Asha’s amazement, this odd intervention, too, was temporarily successful. Ma straightened up and pulled her plate closer. “Fire her, of course,” she said. “The toilet in this house smells horrible. My girl in Delhi always kept the bathroom spotless. More money won’t make a bit of difference.”

Brought back by a smelly toilet,
Asha thought.
At least until the next blow.
She was grateful that Auntie had joined their side for a while in the never- ending battle. She herself still needed a break.

“Tuni Didi! Come upstairs
now!
We’re wa-a-a-iting for you!”

The chorus of voices was persistent, and Asha responded, racing upstairs with a loud roar for the usual bedtime romp.

EIGHTEEN

L
ATE-AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT WAS FLOODING THE ROOF, WARMING
Asha’s skin. She drank in the solitude and calm and stretched her legs out, pretending she was one of the lizards basking in the last sunshine. Inside, these tik- tiki darted into dark corners at the first sign of a human being. Up here, though, they didn’t seem to mind her company.

It was September, and Calcutta was on the brink of cooler harvest days and festivals; the monsoon would be leaving before she did. It was perfect cricket weather; maybe Raj wanted to practice in the garden until it got dark. Where was he, anyway? Probably lying low to avoid another lecture about his poor study habits. Or maybe he was keeping an eye out for that girl who paraded past the house every day, hips swishing under her salwar kameez as though she knew Raj was watching.

The cousins could use a practice session of cards, too, even though they were getting better at twenty- nine. The other night, Asha and Raj had actually won a round against his parents for the first time. The whole family, including Uncle and Auntie, had cheered loudly-except Ma, who stayed cloistered in her tiny room. Afterward, as Sita and Suma pummeled Asha with pillows and then ran squealing through the house, Asha had felt a strange sensation of timelessness, as though she’d been living in this ancestral home forever. Their time in Delhi, with Kavita, Bishop Academy, and Baba, which had ended months earlier, felt like a dream.

Asha turned to scrutinize Jay’s house. He’d been missing for three weeks, the shutters of his window closed tightly, and she hadn’t glimpsed him inside or outside the house. She hadn’t gathered the courage to ask anybody about him, either, although she’d been tempted to offer the sweeper who worked for both of their houses a rupee in exchange for information.

As though the intensity of her desire had summoned him, the window across the way flew open. Jay’s face, haggard and sporting a beard, grinned at her as though he’d just seen her the day before. “Osh!” he called triumphantly. “I’m done!”

“Shhh. Someone will hear you. Where have you been?”

“Here. Inside. Painting. And I’m finished.”

“You’ve been painting all this time? I thought you’d gone somewhere.”

“I’ve been living down in the servants’ quarters finishing up the portrait. I didn’t want to be distracted, Osh. I
knew if you were out here, I’d want to talk to you instead of paint, so I made myself move to the other side of the house.”

“You could have told me.”

“I’m sorry, I should have, but I was in the thick of it then. Possessed by the painting. I wasn’t thinking of anything else.”

“Not even me?” She spoke the words without thinking about how brash they might sound.

He smiled. “Not even you. I’ve sent it off posthaste to a gallery in Delhi.”

“
What?
I didn’t even get a peek, Jay.”

“How could you, Osh? You’d have had to come over here, and you know that’s impossible.”

“You could have held it up to the window.”

“I didn’t want to risk my parents seeing it if I carried it back upstairs. They’d know I’d been painting you, and they wouldn’t be pleased. So I wrapped it in paper and hauled it to the post office. I just got back. The gallery’s been wanting me to send them a portrait for months. They’re going to show it to international art dealers from around the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone wanted to display it in one of the galleries I used to visit in Paris when I was studying there?”

“But it’s of me.
Me.
I should have seen it, Jay.”

Jay was flying so high with euphoria that he didn’t notice how upset Asha was.

“You will, Osh. I’ll take you to Paris when it’s hanging in the Louvre, and we’ll see it together.”

Her heart thump- thumped. That was more like it; her anger ebbed. “We will?”

“Definitely.”

“It’s
come!”
A shriek rocked the house, and Asha jumped. What was going on? Why was Grandmother shouting like that?

“Telegram! Sumitra! Bontu! Where are you?”

“It’s Baba! He must have found a job!” Asha flashed Jay a smile and barreled down the stairs two at a time, stumbling once, catching herself on the banister.

This was it. Finally. Baba had come through; he was sending for them; they would escape the prison of this house forever. And someday Jay’s fame would bring him to New York, where he would seek her out, she was sure of it. She felt like singing and dancing with joy.

Reet raced breathlessly into the living room and took Asha’s hand. Grandmother was holding a slip of paper in her hand and a ripped envelope in the other. Ma and Auntie joined them, followed by Raj, Uncle, and the cousins.

“I can’t make sense of it,” Grandmother said, handing it to Uncle. “It’s in English.”

“Read it quickly, brother,” Ma said, breaking a youngest-wife-in-the-household rule for the first time and actually ordering her brother- in- law to do something.

Nobody reacted to her breach of conduct; every eye was riveted on the telegram. Uncle read it silently. Asha watched his face grow as blank as an erased chalkboard. He crumpled the telegram in his fist and still didn’t say word. Suddenly Asha knew; her heart was inside his hand along with that foreign piece of paper.

“What’s wrong?” Grandmother asked, her voice trembling. “Tell us now, Bontu.”

“It’s not from him at all,” Uncle said. “It’s from the police department in New York City. He’s-he’s-” He stopped, and his eyes darted from his mother, to his sister- in- law, to his nieces before he managed to say the two words they were by now all dreading: “He’s dead.”

For the rest of her life, Asha would replay what happened in that room where her father had crawled as a baby, laughed with his brother in his youth, and embraced his mother countless times.

Grandmother swayed before falling, and Uncle ran to catch her. Reet went to Ma and guided her to the sofa, where they sat down. The little cousins began to cry; Auntie gathered them close. Raj stood apart, his head bowed. Some where in the distance a wounded mongoose began to shriek, stung by the cobra it was trying to kill. It took Asha a minute to realize that the high- pitched wail was coming out of her own mouth, and then everything went dark.

NINETEEN

A
SHA WAS UNDER HER MOSQUITO NET, AND
R
EET’S BODY WAS
curled tightly against her back. Each deep, steady breath her sister exhaled stirred the hair on the back of Asha’s skull. Moonlight flooded the room, and rising up on one elbow, she could make out the dim forms of Sita’s and Suma’s bodies on the other side of the bed. Everything seemed normal, but suddenly she realized that she was still wearing the salwar kameez she’d put on the morning before.

So the telegram hadn’t been the worst nightmare of her life.

It was real.

Baba was gone.

He had died in a train station, jostled by the crowd off the platform and onto the electric rail, dead in seconds
after the shock had ravaged his nervous system. That was what Asha thought she remembered, but vaguely, as Uncle had made phone call after phone call trying to gather information. Maybe her sister knew more.

“Reet, Reet, Reet,” Asha said, shaking her sister and trying not to wake the twins. It didn’t work; Reet didn’t stir.

Asha lifted the mosquito net and scanned the small table beside the bed. She dimly remembered coming into consciousness, taking three pills, and drinking the glass of water Uncle handed her. Sure enough, a bottle of pills and an empty glass stood there. How many of those had they made her sister swallow? Reet was still in oblivion; the three they’d given Asha hadn’t lasted through the night. How many did you need before you never woke up again, never saw your rumpled salwar kameez, never realized that your father had fallen on an electric rail and was no longer there?

Had he felt pain? Had the volts of electricity fried his body, brain, bones, blood? Fighting the urge to scream, Asha counted out three pills and swallowed them quickly. Then she tucked herself back into the curve of her sister’s body, put a pillow over her head, and waited for sleep to take her again.

The Jailor easily seized all three of them. A heavy numbness displaced Asha’s despair the next time she woke. It was so bulky that it didn’t allow her to cry, scream, utter even two words. Both her sister and her mother were equally lifeless,
the three of them managing the motions of eating, sitting, sleeping, and bathing in a silent daze.

I'm suffocating,
Asha thought at least thirty times a day, longing to run up to the roof so that she could breathe. But she didn’t. She stayed by her sister’s side, and they flanked their silent mother like statues.

They could hear Grandmother sobbing in her prayer room, and a pill bottle like the one the girls reached for at night was on their grandmother’s dresser. Only their mother refused Uncle’s gift of medicated oblivion, and soon dark half circles discolored the flesh under her eyes.