by Helen Harris
Abruptly she asked the woman, “How come my ex-mother-in-law even has my son’s passport?”
The woman shrugged.
Struggling to control her anger so as not to lose face, Smita asked the woman, “Where are they now?”
To her horror, the woman answered, “We don’t know exactly. They are somewhere airside, waiting for their flight to be called.”
“But someone needs to stop them,” Smita exclaimed. “I’m telling you; that woman is dangerous.”
“There is a procedure,” the woman replied, incredibly patronisingly, Smita thought. She surprised herself by thinking sharply, ‘I suppose you say that to your husband in bed, do you?’
“We know from experience,” the woman went on, “that if people become alerted to the fact that we are after them while they are still at large in the airport, there is a risk that they will flee. We normally intercept them at the departure gate.”
Smita felt the urge to hold Anand in her arms so powerfully that she was ready to cry. “So where are we going?” she asked desperately. “Where are you taking me?”
“Aviation Security,” the woman answered smartly. “Your ex-husband is waiting there.”
That was enough for Smita to pull herself together; she had to be on top of this.
The woman led her to an unmarked white door in an unmarked white corridor, somewhere – it seemed to Smita – in the middle of a labyrinth. She knocked officiously and waited for the door to be opened. A woman in uniform, something like a policewoman but not quite a policewoman, answered the door. When she saw Smita, she said, “Oh good” but in a neutral business-like way, without smiling. She opened the door for Smita to come in and thanked the Air India woman. Smita knew she should thank her too – the woman was standing waiting for Smita’s thanks, she was the important person who had averted disaster – but Smita decided to snub her and went straight inside without saying anything.
Jeremy was sitting there, looking sick. When he saw Smita, he flushed deep red and she saw him stiffen for the onslaught. There would have been an onslaught too, worse than anything she had ever put him through before, but of course with the policewoman standing there and a policeman – or someone like a policeman – sitting at a desk in front of Jeremy, Smita had to control herself and make do with throwing Jeremy the nastiest look she could manage. She was pleased to see him flinch.
“We need to ask you a few questions Mrs Garland,” the policeman said.
Smita snapped, “My name is Mehta, Smita Mehta. I’m not Mrs Garland.” She didn’t look at Jeremy but she thought she sensed him cringing.
The policeman seemed unconcerned by his mistake. He continued monotonously, “First of all, would you please confirm your relationship to Anand Garland?”
“For God’s sake!” Smita exploded. “I’m his mother.”
Unruffled by Smita’s reaction, the policeman continued, “Do you have any ID?”
Smita nearly erupted again and it didn’t help that Jeremy said in a low voice, “I had to go through the same thing” as if Smita was being irrational and hysterical.
She threw him another vicious look, took her wallet out of her handbag and smacked it down on the desk in front of the policeman. “Take a look. Everything’s in there.”
He went through her wallet calmly, took down the details of her driving licence and handed the wallet back to her. “Would you please confirm your relationship to Mrs Sylvia Garland?”
Smita burst out, “I don’t have a relationship with Sylvia Garland. She used to be my mother-in-law.”
“So,” the policeman said doggedly. “She is Anand’s grandmother?”
Smita snapped, “Obviously.”
It seemed to Smita the policeman and the policewoman, who was standing next to Smita, exchanged glances.
“Listen,” Smita said desperately. “The flight leaves in less than an hour and a half. Why are you wasting time asking me all these pointless questions instead of going after them and rescuing my little boy?”
“We’ll intercept them at the departure gate,” the policeman said woodenly. “Don’t worry. We just need to make sure we have things absolutely straight first.”
“But you have,” Smita implored him. “You have. There’s no grey area here; she’s kidnapping him.”
“So my next question is this,” the policeman said calmly. “Do you want to press charges?”
Smita said, “Yes.”
Jeremy, surprisingly loudly and firmly, said, “No.”
They looked at each other.
“No,” Jeremy repeated loudly. Smita could see he was perspiring.
Smita turned away from him. “I will certainly want to press charges,” she said, “so can we please keep that option open?”
From beside her, the policewoman spoke up unexpectedly. “Will we be arresting Mrs Garland at the gate or just bringing her quietly back here together with your little boy?”
Jeremy said furiously, “You are not to arrest my mother.” And then, “Smita, please, why are you doing this? Think of the effect on Anand.”
“Think of the effect on Anand of what your mother’s done already,” Smita snapped. She sat back in her chair. “Fine. Just bring them back here first and then we can decide. When I see what sort of a state Anand is in.”
After a few more infuriating questions, the police pair went out and Smita and Jeremy were left on their own.
Jeremy said, “Look Smi, I’m sorry.”
Smita rounded on him. “I bet you’re bloody sorry. But not as sorry as you’re going to be by the time I’m through with this. How dare you dump him at your mother’s without telling me? I know you’ve done it before, probably loads of times, thinking you could get away with it. Well, not any more. Neither of you is ever going to be allowed anywhere near Anand again.”
Jeremy said, “You can’t do that.”
“Watch me,” Smita snapped. She turned her back on Jeremy and glared at the wall.
After a couple of minutes, Jeremy said, “I think she did this because she’s so upset about your taking him to America. She thinks she won’t ever get to see him again.”
“Well, she won’t ever get to see him again now,” Smita answered “and whose fault is that?”
“America!” She went on furiously. “She’s upset about America? What about taking a five-year-old child to India? He hasn’t had any vaccinations, has he, she probably hasn’t got malaria tablets either, she’s endangering him. I don’t care what pathetic excuses you come up with; the minute I get him back, I’m calling my solicitor and I’m going to make bloody sure neither of you can get anywhere near him ever again.”
“I will fight you,” Jeremy said solemnly, “every step of the way.”
They waited in painful silence for about forty minutes until, without warning or any sound of approaching footsteps, the door opened and Anand appeared in the doorway.
With a great cry of joy, he ran forward and Smita and her child hurled themselves into each other’s arms.
She had not registered anyone else in the doorway. But once she held Anand, once she could see he was himself and fine, she looked up at Sylvia who was standing turned to stone in the doorway, surrounded by policemen and hissed at her, “You’re mad. What were you thinking of?”
Jeremy stepped forward. Oh, of course, he was going to take his mother’s side now too, was he?
Smita snapped at him, “I don’t want to hear a word from you.”
She hugged Anand closer. “I’ll work out how I’m going to deal with this,” she said softly to Sylvia, keeping her voice low so as not to upset Anand. “But I hope we never see you again.”
Anand cried out shrilly, “No, no!” He wriggled out of Smita’s arms and dashed over to his grandmother. Clutching her round her broad stripy skirt, he pleaded, “I want to see Grandma again. It was only a little half term holiday. I want to see Grandma again.”
Jeremy spoke up. He doubtless meant to diffuse the situation. “Hey Anand, what about
a hug for me?”
But Anand, overwhelmed by all the conflicting demands on him, let go of his grandmother and began to scream. Flailing his arms and drumming desperately with his feet, he spun round and round, screaming hysterically.
The policewoman, who was still standing in the doorway, surveyed the mess they had made of Anand’s childhood and commented censoriously, “Poor little mite.”
After the fiasco at the airport, Sylvia didn’t get out of bed for two or three days. She had no reason to and, if she had, she would have had to confront the contents of her flat, the little hidey-hole she had created for Anand away from his unsatisfactory parents. She would have had to face the unbearable fact that Anand was, most probably, never coming back there. So she stayed in bed, weeping and vaguely contemplated suicide. When she absolutely had to, she tottered to the bathroom, drank from her tooth mug and averted her eyes from the plastic turtles round the edge of the bath.
No-one telephoned. She knew there was no possibility of Smita phoning; her revenge would be served cold, long distance and Sylvia dreaded it. But she half expected Jeremy to call; to tell her off some more, to berate her yet again for all her multiple shortcomings and, funnily enough, she would have welcomed it.
She lay and in the distance heard the gloomy inhabitants of Sutherland Avenue going about their gloomy business. She understood that the colossal mistake which she had made was just the latest in a lengthy catalogue of mistakes. What had come to an end a couple of days ago at the airport had begun thirty-five years ago in a nursing home in New Delhi.
She had not clutched onto Anand and tried to take him for herself just because she had lost her husband and little Anand had obligingly come along to replace him. The truth which faced her now from her bedroom ceiling was deeper and darker and more shameful than that. She writhed as she remembered it.
Roger was of course largely to blame. Even though, in the five years since Roger’s death, Sylvia had done her best to remember only their happiness, the long stretches of their marriage when everything was going swimmingly, she supposed it was inevitable that the bad times would sooner or later return to trouble her. You were not meant to speak ill of the dead. So she hadn’t; she had pretended that their marriage had consisted only of its jolly, well-intentioned beginnings and then the long calm period of companionship which had finally come upon them – perhaps from exhaustion – in middle age. Everything which had come in between she refused to remember.
Now though – for why should she bear the blame for what had gone wrong alone? – she let herself consider Roger’s part. She cried as she lay and let herself remember what had stopped her from being a good mother to her own son. The tears ran round the back of her neck and reminded her of sweat and suffering in hot countries.
There must have been others before PeeJay Clarke, must have. Not that Sylvia had ever found any evidence of them but, after the move to Hong Kong, they were so often apart, she and Roger. He was forever travelling for the firm, visiting their construction sites all over South East Asia and she was stuck on her own in Hong Kong week after week. Then, a few years down the line, there had been all her trips to London for the fertility treatment which wasn’t yet available in Hong Kong. What had Roger got up to on his own in the heat and humidity all that time Sylvia was away, with her legs up in stirrups in Harley Street?
She had found out about PeeJay Clarke in the most shocking way while she was expecting Jeremy. The treatment in London, which had cost an arm and a leg, had paid off and, after ten years of waiting, she had, rather disconcertingly, fallen pregnant. It had taken so long that, by the time what she thought were her wishes came true, she wasn’t really sure anymore if she wanted a child after all. She had got used to her leisurely life, she rather liked her freedom. The period when she had envied her friends their adorable babies and toddlers was over; they weren’t babies and toddlers anymore but far less appealing ten-and twelve-year-olds with shrill voices, grubby habits and non-stop demands. Some of them had already been sent away to boarding school. There was Sylvia, rather taken aback, with her big tummy, preparing a nursery.
Because of her age, the doctors told her to take it easy: no swimming and no tennis. Although nowadays 32 seemed to be a perfectly normal age to have a first baby, then it was considered rather elderly. In fact that was what the doctors had called her: “an elderly prima gravida”. “An elderly prima ballerina”, she and Roger had joked as she waddled around in the heat in her tent dress on swollen legs. Not allowed to exert herself in any way, she had no choice but to sit around the house all day, getting bored and fat. The move to India when she was four or five months pregnant hadn’t helped of course; leaving her jolly circle of Hong Kong friends, starting afresh with all the Delhi coffee mornings had made her rather moody.
The last straw must have been the troubles she developed in the later stages: panicky little false starts to labour which meant she had to keep being rushed into hospital and then kept in there for a week or two at a time. Marital relations, as dear old Dr Daruwallah so quaintly put it, were strictly forbidden.
It was after one of those hospital stays that she found out about PeeJay Clarke. The doctors had told her one lunchtime that she was free to go home and, rather than get Roger from work yet again, Sylvia decided simply to call a taxi and make her own way home.
She was a bit surprised to find the front door unlocked but the maid was sometimes careless. She went into the kitchen to get a glass of cold water and spotted in the middle of the floor something small, bright pink and shimmery. When she bent with difficulty to pick it up, she saw it was a pair of silky knickers. She considered them for a moment, still thinking that they had something to do with the maid, when from the verandah beyond the kitchen she heard the most peculiar noise. It was half way between a laugh and a gasp. Very quietly, Sylvia walked over to the glass doors which led onto the verandah, imagining that she was about to catch the maid up to some sort of mischief. But what she saw, waving in the air from the sun lounger, were the fleshy pink legs of PeeJay Clarke and jigging away between them Roger’s familiar backside.
The shock nearly felled her. She had to hold onto the door frame as a giant spasm gripped her belly and she let out the most ear-splitting wail.
Was it any surprise if after that Sylvia had blamed the baby? If it hadn’t been for her pregnancy and all the problems it had caused, Roger might never have strayed. When Jeremy was born, less than a week later, Sylvia had a shameful urge to ask the midwife to take him away. Even though Roger was contrite, swore he would never do such a filthy thing again and Peejay was already on a flight back to London.
Sylvia hadn’t forgiven Roger, not for years and she hadn’t really forgiven Jeremy either. When Roger brought her and the baby back from the nursing home and she found herself stuck with a small uninteresting creature who did nothing but scream and soil its nappy, her resentment grew. Everyone else was out partying, including Roger; only she was stuck at home.
In due course obviously, Jeremy grew. He developed into a delightful though clingy toddler and then a well-behaved little boy. But there was something about him which always got on Sylvia’s nerves somehow, however hard the poor boy tried. It was no excuse that Roger found Jeremy aggravating too; the little boy was such a sissy, always frightened, always shy, not at all the sort of son Roger had anticipated.
With her grandson, Sylvia imagined that life had given her a second chance but she had bungled it.
When her phone finally rang, on the morning of her third day under the covers, it was the last person in the world she expected to hear from: Naisha.
“Sylvia!” She exclaimed purposefully. For an unrealistic moment, Sylvia hoped that Naisha was simply ringing by chance, that she knew nothing at all about the shameful episode at the airport. That was, of course, ridiculously implausible.
“I am very cross with you,” Naisha began solemnly as if she were addressing a small child. “When Smita told me what you had done, I couldn’t believe i
t. Couldn’t believe it! How could you do such a thing? Try to take our little boy away to India?” And, her voice rising shrilly, “What were you thinking of?”
Sylvia drew a laboured breath. Wearily, she said, “I meant well.”
“Meant well?” Naisha repeated indignantly. “Meant well? What on earth do you mean?”
Sylvia pondered; what did she mean? “I meant him no harm,” she said very softly so that Naisha, whose hearing wasn’t what it once was, had to order her, “Speak up! I can’t hear you.”
Sylvia repeated weakly, “I meant no harm.”
“You meant no harm,” Naisha chastised her, “but you might very well have done him a great deal of harm. Do you realise that Sylvia? If you had taken such a young child to India with no medical precautions?”
Sylvia’s heart lurched. It was true; she hadn’t given a thought to vaccinations and so on. What a terrible person she was. Suddenly she recalled Jeremy spluttering and protesting as she made him take his bitter-tasting malaria tablets. Well, of course, she thought foggily, she could have taken Anand to dear old Dr Daruwalla as soon as they got to Delhi. He would have given the boy his vaccinations.
Before Sylvia could answer, Naisha carried on, “Smita is beside herself, you must understand that. She is talking of all sorts of extreme measures. But I hope she will calm down eventually and not do what she is threatening to. As a grandmother myself, I’m not comfortable with the idea of the other grandmother being banned from seeing her only grandchild. Also, from time to time, a boy must see his father.”
