The Stolen Girl (19 page)

T
oday my daughter
walked in the door and said, ‘Why did you lie to me?’

I thought then that she knew what I had done. She knew. I was terrified but determined to stand my ground, make my case.

Turns out she didn’t know. Her bluster was because Vani, that traitor, has actioned a DNA test.

I have been underestimating Vani all these years, I realise now. In my mind, she is still the meek, soft-spoken girl who was my confidante, not the woman who stole my child and kept her from me for thirteen years. I assumed that once Vani was apprehended, she would give up. But once again, she has surprised me…

I had such high expectations for who I would become. Vani stole that from me along with my daughter and my hopes for a happy family.

Sitting here, in this impersonal hotel room, whiling away the hours until my daughter comes – yes, she’s coming again! Ha, take that, Vani! – I remember. Memory is all I have left, as proof against Vani’s perfidy. Memory and this girl of course. My daughter, this stranger who watches me carefully with her father’s eyes, her trust and love something I have to play for, win over.

A
arti doesn’t know
when her food diary morphed into an actual diary but at some point it has. She twirls the pen in her hand, bites the end, savouring the bitter, inky blue taste in her mouth, and thinks of her daughter, of what she will say to her when she sees her next.

Mothers and daughters. Without warning, after years of ignoring her and pretending she doesn’t exist, her own mother’s face looms before Aarti’s eyes – that stunningly beautiful but cold woman Aarti strived to gratify for years. She tries to blink away thoughts of her mother, but somehow the memories keep on coming, like moving a boulder that has sat on the bed of the forest for years and dislodging a whole army of creatures beneath.

Aarti had yearned for a look from her mother, a smile, a kind word. She had been ridiculously delighted when her mother deigned to speak to her. She is struck by the irony of how she spent her childhood trying to please her mother and now, she is trying to please her daughter.

The last time Aarti blatantly tried to solicit her mother’s attention was the day she got her period and was aching for a hug, a kind word, and her mother pushed her away. After that, whenever Aarti desired affection, she binged on food and was sick. The feeling of being sick, purging herself of all desire, for food, for love, calmed her. She learned to rein in her emotions, to hide her hurt behind empty eyes. She was distant, reserved, cool. A coolness that drove men mad.

She never flung herself at her mother again. Never touched her except in public, when photographers urged, ‘Closer, closer, now smile,’ and she and her mother posed for the camera, pristine pearly whites flashing identical icy smiles, cold hands cringing on contact.

Years later, when the childish contours of Aarti’s face had taken shape and matured; when the promise of high cheekbones and full lips had materialised; when she was fawned over and adored more than she thought possible; when, if as far as her parents were concerned, she was the sum total of her achievements, then she had reached a pinnacle; when she no longer sought her parents’ approval, no longer wanted or needed to please them, when she had been out of touch with them for a while, her mother had tried to initiate contact.

Her mother had telephoned out of the blue and Aarti was pleased to note that the sound of her mother’s voice no longer incited turmoil in her like it once used to; it did not make Aarti feel instantly like a fat, ugly, unwanted child.

She listened to her mother say, ‘Hello? Aarti, is that you? Speak to me, darling…’ and she slammed the phone down, taking great pleasure in cutting her mother’s voice off, silencing it. How dared she call Aarti ‘darling’ when she had been anything but?

Her mother had tried again, and each time, Aarti had cut her off without replying, and the fourth time this happened, Aarti had said, ‘Please do not call me again,’ in a perfectly polite, perfectly cold voice that brooked no argument, the very tone of voice her mother had used on Aarti so many times over the years.

And then, one day, her mother turned up at one of her photo shoots to try and talk to her…

Aarti is at the Cosmopolitan India photo shoot, having her make-up done, when there is a knock at the door to her dressing room.

‘Tell whoever it is I am busy,’ she yells to the man expertly applying her make-up.

He goes to the door, opens it. Snippets of conversation drift in; a high-pitched voice, pleading.

Then he is saying softly, ‘It is your mother.’

A hush settles in the room. The oily tang of foundation.

She opens her eyes, peruses her reflection. Porcelain skin, the sheen and texture of silvery silk. Rosebud lips. Almond eyes that invite one to lose themselves in their depths, highlighted by russet eye shadow. Burnished ebony hair that cascades down her shoulders in lush waves. Hourglass figure, not an ounce of fat in evidence. She looks good even if she says so herself. Powder swirls gold in the air of the room that sits heavy and quiet, waiting.

‘Ask her to knock and wait to be let in,’ Aarti says coolly.

Her make-up artist stares at her.

‘Shut the door!’ she yells. ‘What are you looking at?’

He closes the door.

After a bit, there is a tentative knock.

‘Who is it?’ she shouts and hears her mother’s voice after a hiatus of five years, not imperious but timid: ‘Your mother.’

‘Go away,’ Aarti yells. ‘I am busy.’

‘Please,’ her mother begs and her voice breaks at the end.

And it is because she has never heard her mother plead before and because she herself is looking so good that Aarti lets her in.

She cannot fault the way I look,
she thinks.

‘Come in, but I can only spare three minutes,’ she says. ‘You can go,’ she tells the make-up artist, who takes his kit and runs.

Aarti does not recognise the woman who aroused such mixed emotions in her, equal parts hurt and need, affection and hatred, in the shrivelled but well-dressed woman standing just inside the door. The affection is gone now, Aarti muses. It has withered to nothing, squeezed out on a tide of unreciprocated regard. Aarti does not feel anything for the woman standing meekly by the door, her famous looks gone, and along with it, her haughtiness. This woman is weak, faltering. This woman is as easy to crush as a child’s willing and loving heart.

‘What do you want?’ Aarti asks.

‘I am sorry,’ her mother says. ‘I am sorry for how I was.’

Ha, too little too late,
she thinks.
What took you so long?
She thinks.
Now you feel sorry,
she thinks.
Now, when I am everything you are not.

Out loud, she says, her voice cold and cutting as ice cubes clinking in a tumbler, ‘Okay, you are sorry. Now go.’

‘I almost died when you were born, you see. I suffered so much. I couldn’t bond with you. I blamed you.’

‘And I blame you,’ Aarti says, the numbness replaced by hot, all-consuming rage. ‘But I am justified. You were not. I yearned for love and I was spurned. Why are you here now? It is too late, far too late. Go.’

‘Please,’ her mother says again.

‘I begged too,’ Aarti says, ‘I begged for an iota of affection. I got nothing. You didn’t even allow me into your room when I knocked. At least I did. Now go. I don’t ever want to see you again.’

Afterwards, she sobs. She cries and rages, her make-up running down her cheeks, the sheen disappearing in wet tracks, leaving behind a raw woman with a bleeding heart manifesting itself via dirty brown splotches on her skin and in the naked agony in her blotched eyes. Eyes one can drown in, choking on the waves of pain.

Enough…
Aarti resolutely shuts away the memories of her mother and concentrates instead on her daughter. She did not think she would survive losing her child and Vani in one fell swoop. But she did. She did not think she would survive living on her own again after losing her family and her best friend. But she did.

All these years there were dark times, especially after yet another sighting proved to be a dead end and she left this country empty-handed and hollow, devoid of hope once more. She survived all those, bounced back. This is the last lap. She will not, yet again, go back empty-handed.

She sits, pen and diary clutched in her fists like mascots, and watches the timorous sun of this alien country stain the grey horizon the blush pink of bougainvillea and the bright gold of the first sunflowers of the season.

F
amily

Noun:
any group of persons closely related by blood, as parents, children, uncles, aunts and cousins.

Synonyms:
blood, clan, kin.

S
chool is much better now
than it ever was. I have a group of friends. I am not thinking of food all the time. My skirts and trousers don’t fit anymore – I am used to that feeling, but this time round they are falling down rather than squeezing the breath out of me.

I like the solid comfort of Jane’s reliable presence. I love the familiar smell of her car: the chemical odour of citrus air freshener, her floral perfume mixed in with something musty, reminiscent of old shoes, yellowing photographs and greying memories, tainted by time, purple with age and shimmering with the orange glow that looking through the wistful lens of nostalgia into the past endows, all the more precious for being half forgotten. I feel secure when I am sitting in there with her, the doors locked, sheltering me, keeping out the weather and the world. I like the fact that she doesn’t talk, doesn’t push, the way she waits for me to make conversation. I am comfortable with her.

And I like the soft familiarity of Farah’s house, Farah’s quiet, unassuming presence, her unobtrusiveness. She doesn’t interfere and yet she is there. I appreciate, more than I can say, the way she did not say anything when I broke down one afternoon when I came in from school and saw her standing at the window. I caught a glimpse of her back and something in the way she lifted her arm to rub a stray hair out of her eyes made me mistake her for my mum. For a moment, when the foolhardiness of hope hijacked sense, I thought my mum had come home and was waiting for me, waiting to surprise me. She had turned then, and instead of the much loved profile I was expecting, I was treated to the disappointingly familiar one of Farah. To my intense embarrassment, I had burst into tears, loud, messy sobs a two-year-old would be ashamed to own. And Farah had wordlessly enveloped me in the refuge of her arms, letting me cry my angst out, vent my fury at the world, at her, passing me tissues when I needed them.

I adore little Affan and Zain. I suspect I might even be beginning to love them. They are not shy around me any longer. Their mother tells me that they stand at the window and wait none too patiently for me to get home and that they are out the front door as soon as they spy Jane’s car turning into the street. They commandeer me the moment I climb out of the car and fill me in on their day, their mother laughing and asking them to at least wait until I am inside the house. They want help building their Lego, they want to show me the latest additions to their football card collection, they need assistance getting onto the next level in the newest Mario game. Ideally, they would also like me to do their homework for them or at least, as Zain petulantly put it, biting the back of his pencil to mush, ‘Give us all the answers,’ and added a reluctant ‘please?’ – but here, their mother draws the line. It is nice to have the chatter of little boys crowd out the weed of pain that is always there, making its hurtful presence felt at the oddest times. It is nice to feel wanted, to be fawned over, to have their faces light up at the sight of me.

Spending time with Farah, Sohrab, Affan and Zain has made me realise, for the first time, what I have missed out on. I was always content with it being just me and Mum. But now, having met Sohrab, noticed the way his eyes soften when he looks at his boys, the way he helps me with my homework without my having to ask, the sheer strength of his presence imparting a sense of security and love, I miss the dad I never had. I feel a flash of guilt for entertaining the thought, even briefly. My mum, she has always been enough, her love wrapped around me like a warm blanket in the middle of winter, more than making up for the lack of other people in my life. And yet…now that I have experienced briefly what having a father figure feels like, I regret that I didn’t know my dad. It is like how I never realised I missed having company, friends my own age, until Lily.

And having Affan and Zain look up to me, the way they fill a room with their constant chatter, crowd out my pain with noise, their overwhelming generosity, the way they include me in everything as a matter of course, their unabashed, open-hearted affection, makes me wish I had had siblings. The first time they embraced me, I was gobsmacked. They had come into the kitchen and hugged their mum, both of them flinging themselves at her, grabbing any part of her they could. And next, without warning, they went for me. I had stood rigid as a commandment, stiff as a statute of law as the boys clambered all over me. And, though unexpected, it was lovely. I felt warm, loved; it brought surprised tears to my eyes.

‘Don’t cry, Didi,’ they had said, scrabbling to wipe my tears, their fingers smelling of chocolate and mud. ‘We were just playing. Did we hurt you?’

‘No,’ I had managed, ‘no.’

We had all sat together with a bowl of microwaved popcorn, the heady smell of caramel and charred smoke (Farah burnt the first pack but she managed to get the timing right for the second) filling the house, and settled down to watch a movie, the boys cuddling on either side of me, and their mother had explained that I had cried because I was happy and I had said yes, I was happy because I was loved so much.

‘So you cried?’ scoffed Affan and he had stretched across my stomach, tugged at his brother’s hand and rolled his eyes.

‘They were happy tears,’ I said, tickling first one and then the other, not stopping until they were crying with laughter and then, pointing at the tears streaming down their eyes, ‘Like yours.’

The nights do not stretch endlessly like a bottomless cavern anymore. I can sleep now; the huge weight I am carrying doesn’t threaten to crush me, dissolve me into a million pieces when I shut my eyes at night. The weight, like the weed of pain residing inside me, is familiar as my left arm, familiar as the heavy cloud of melancholic air that suffuses the room I have started to call, tentatively, my home away from home, familiar as the cat that jumps onto the roof of the shed and regards me with tawny eyes as I try to fall asleep, familiar as the fox’s plaintive cry, familiar as the sliver of cloudy grey sky silhouetted purple and dirty brown by the chilly yellow glow of the drooping lamp just outside my window, familiar as the smacking sounds of lovers kissing beneath the lamp post at the same time every day, familiar as the smell of tulips from the air freshener Farah favours mingling with the fresh vanilla scent of laundered sheets barely masking the reek of sorrow and loss and guilt and hurt and betrayal that populates the room, familiar as the wardrobe that is the last thing I see when I close my eyes and the first when I wake, the thing I see in place of my mother.

Some days I can smile and it doesn’t feel like my cheeks are hurting with the effort. Yesterday I even laughed at something Lily said and she gave me a tight hug, her eyes shining.

‘I missed the sound of your laughter, Diya,’ she whispered.

Some days I close my eyes and I cannot summon up the sound of my mother’s laughter, her voice when she used to say, ‘Diya, you are the light of my life.’

I am confused. I am torn. I am on tenterhooks. I am awaiting the result of the DNA test. I am dreading the result of the DNA test.

Every evening, Jane drives me to visit with Aarti. I try to call her Mum like she wants me to, gargantuan eyes in her skeletal face pleading, but the word sticks in my throat, like a bitter pill, like a lump of liquorice, and it is too much of a struggle to roll it off my tongue, push it out past the barrier of my lips. This thin, needy woman will never be my mother regardless of what the birth certificate she showed me says, irrespective of what the result of the DNA test might determine, but I cannot bear to break her by telling her so, even though I suspect she knows. She looks at me with those lacklustre eyes and I want to say something, do something to add some life, some shine into them.

When I visited the day after I accused her of lying, after I told her about the DNA test and she told me about my mother, we sat at that lonely little table that wobbled on unsteady legs. She poured me lukewarm tea from the pot and I wondered how long it had been sitting there. I took a sip and tried not to gag. It was too sweet and spiced with something. Cardamom? Cinnamon? I managed to swallow it down.

‘Eat a biscuit,’ she said, her eyes never leaving me, her hands moving constantly on her lap.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said, the horribly saccharine taste of the tea roosting in my mouth like a lingering bad smell.

She smiled then, the lines around her face creasing, the bones looking to poke through skin. She was so thin, fragile like the best china you are afraid to use, to touch, to look at even, in case it breaks.

‘That’s good,’ she said, nodding. ‘Full of sugar, those things. I don’t touch them. Bought them for you.’

You should touch them. If I were you, I would cram them in my mouth, ingest them in bucket loads
, I thought. But I was moved. She had gone to the trouble of getting the biscuits for me.

I was pleased she was venturing out, though the thought of her thin body jolted and jogged by people’s arms and elbows gave me the shudders. Yet, the thought of her pacing up and down this tiny room, waiting for me to visit, hurt too. All I felt when I was with this woman, when I thought of her, was a desperate pity, a fraught sadness and guilt. Guilt that I couldn’t love her like she deserved. Guilt that she was reduced to this. Guilt and hurt at the need shining out of her eyes, at the bones dancing beneath the thin, brittle layer of translucent brown skin.

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked, the question bursting out of me despite my not wanting to know the answer. How could she? She was displaced from her home, confined to this tiny room, meeting with a daughter who found it hard to acknowledge her, whom she saw for an hour each evening. I knew Jane would let me stay with Aarti if I asked, and I knew Aarti would have liked that, liked the company, but I couldn’t, not yet. As it was, the hour passed in a state of agony. I did not want to say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, cause tears to shine out of those aggrieved eyes. I did not want to stay any longer than necessary in the vicinity of this woman who carried her hurt like a war wound, always on display.

With Jane and at Farah’s I could retreat into myself if I didn’t want to talk, they would let me be. Here, I had to talk; I had to smile, act happy to see her, be with her. I felt compelled to please her. It was too much. The effort took it out of me. It was as if I was the adult and she the child that I needed to entertain constantly. I was under pressure to produce the right reactions. Anything different from expected and her lower lip would tremble and she would turn away and I knew I had hurt her, disappointed her, not met expectations, not done what was required, yet again.

It was hard to feel sympathy for her when she bruised so easily. Guilt bloomed, damson as a plum lodging in my throat. And anger. Blossoming scarlet behind my eyes, tasting hot as the raw chilli I had once bitten into by mistake. A childish petty rage when I wished she would grow up, when I wanted to throw her emotions back at her, to speak my mind to her without worrying she would crumple, disintegrate into a million pieces, when I wanted to yell, ‘You started it.’

And now, I had asked her this pointless question, asked her if she liked it here. Why? Was I a sucker for punishment?

‘I do,’ she replied, her eyes shining as she smiled at me, ‘because you are here.’

She opened the wardrobe on the other side of the bed, pulled her suitcase out, rummaged through it.

‘Here,’ she said, holding something out.

A doll. Blonde hair, pink face, red cherub lips, blue eyes, long curling lashes.

‘For you.’ She smiled shyly. ‘I got it when I came from India. I was waiting for the right moment.’

I managed a wide smile that almost spilt my face in two, held it in place.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘She is beautiful. I’ll call her Maeve,’ pulling the name out of nowhere.

She laughed, the sound like glass shattering. ‘Lovely name,’ she trilled.

‘Why Rupa?’ I asked. ‘Why did you choose that name for me?’

‘Rupa means beautiful.’ She smiled. ‘You were a lovely baby – huge caramel eyes, dimpled cheeks, creamy vanilla skin. Very cute. As I knew you would be.’

Were. She said ‘were’.
Stop being so petty.

Her voice wobbled as she said, ‘And she took that away from me too. Vani. I rue the day I met her.’

Change the topic, quick.
‘What do you do here while waiting for me? What is your routine?’
Oh no,
I thought.
Another question set to trip the guilt switch.

‘Oh, I have breakfast, then go for a walk, then come back and wait for you.’ Her voice was soft. ‘I don’t mind. Honestly. I have waited thirteen years – what are a few hours here and there?’

Why can’t I love her like she wants to be loved?
I thought. And as always another face swam before my eyes, the face I ached to see again, the woman I yearned for and missed.

I left soon after with the doll. It sits in my room, in the wardrobe beside the holdall Jane packed for me with all of my clothes and stuff from the flat that horrible evening. It looks at me with accusing eyes whenever I open the wardrobe to get my clothes. I just couldn’t tell her I was too old for dolls. And there it sits, begging to be played with, a reminder of the mess I find myself in.

It occurs to me sometimes that I should be angry with my mother, that in many ways this is her fault, that even though she showered me with love, I did not have the best of childhoods, moving as we did from place to place. I could have had a different childhood, a different life. And yet, I never felt I was lacking in anything, never wanted for anything. I liked being with her, just the two of us. I did not mind waiting for her during the long evenings she worked to make ends meet.

When I was younger, before I was old enough to be left alone in the apartments, she took me with her to whichever Indian restaurant she was working in at the time. She would sit me in a corner with a garlic bulb to peel or a potato to chop with a blunt knife. I loved being there amidst the noise and the heat of a working kitchen, the appetising spicy smells, the steam from the pots, the dancing flames, the sounds of sizzling and frying, chopping and stirring, the easy banter of the cooks. I loved being showered with kisses, sneaked sweetmeats by workers on their break, hugged, cuddled, taken for a walk. I loved the feeling of cold air on my face after the hot kitchen, the feel of a warm hand in mine, the food I had been fed constantly, a piece of ladoo here, a samosa there, heavy in my stomach. I felt secure. I knew, without a doubt that I was loved.