A Sister's Promise

by Renita D'Silva

  ‘Thank you,’ Puja says, her eyes stinging.

  The woman lays a gnarled hand on Puja’s. ‘Take care, child. It’s an immense world out there. I will pray for you. Your name is . . .?’

  ‘Puja.’

  The woman smiles, her face creasing in a kindly blessing. ‘Meaning prayer. There you go.’

  Kushi, Puja thinks, as the bus careers through the night towards a city she doesn’t know, where she hopes she can lose herself. Meaning happiness. I hope you are happy. I hope you find the comfort I cannot give you in my sister’s arms.

  Gopi, look, I am running away, escaping like we always planned —although I feel imprisoned, not free. Have you escaped? Are you free?

  Mumbai is chaotic, teeming with people and vehicles, stray animals and hawkers’ carts, swarming buildings and overflowing sewers. It is blue with noise and exhaust, clogged with grime and traffic, rent with honks and howls. It reeks of festering rubbish and sizzling spices. It deadens her thoughts. It is balm to her mind, an ointment to her shattered soul.

  She dials the number the old woman gave her from a pay phone in the overrun bus station. She takes the overcrowded metro to Dadar, squashed in a seething bubble of people, swimming in their sweat. She breathes in their weary, work-scented thoughts, glad of a respite from her own.

  She lodges in the crowded guesthouse for girls run by the Ursuline nuns in the convent in Dadar. Her roommate procures her a job as a receptionist in a multinational company two metro stops away.

  Puja keeps her head down and answers the phones. She does not let visions of a wispy haired, rubbery-limbed baby intrude.

  Men pay her attention. She ignores them. She has had enough of men. But one of them is persistent. The other girls at the office urge her to go for him. He is one of the top guys in the company, they say, a good catch.

  He promises Puja the world. She does not go out with him.

  He proposes marriage, says he will make an honest woman of her.

  ‘We will move to England,’ he says.

  And that gives her pause. If she moves far enough away, then maybe she can outrun the memories, the visions of her child that dig at her at night, the persistent squalling whimpers invading her exhausted reveries.

  How to Begin Again:

  Run away to a different country, shedding your past like a snake shedding its skin.

  Hide the stomach that gives evidence of what it housed not that long ago.

  Wipe the slate clean of old crimes and concentrate on a new future.

  Do not allow your feelings to take you over again. Keep yourself at a remove from messy emotions, sentimental entanglements, at all times.

  England.

  A country that is as cold as her heart feels without love to warm it.

  She discovers that it is not far enough away.

  She watches the single mothers, allowed to live their life and bring up their children without being scarred by disrepute, or brushed by the indelible paint of blame and dishonour. She wonders how Sharda is coping. She tries not to think of her child.

  The stink of a sullied reputation and the taint of smoke dog her with a litany of her sins, the procession of her mistakes.

  Her husband is kind. He is gentle. He gives her space.

  But his patience has its limits.

  He wants a child. She doesn’t; a baby she longed to hold, but dared not touch, haunts her.

  ‘Please, Puja, one child,’ he begs.

  ‘I . . . I can’t, Dev,’ she sighs.

  ‘Leave me,’ she says. ‘I’m not right for you. You need a woman who’ll love you like you deserve to be loved.’

  I used you to come here, thinking I could escape my past, the deaths of my parents inextricably linked with the birth of my child.

  ‘I do not want another woman. I love you,’ he shouts exasperated and insanely upset.

  There are fights, anger, recriminations.

  She cannot bear to see her husband so upset. But she also cannot bear to bring another child into this uncertain world, fickle as the weather of this country she finds herself in, one more child she couldn’t bear to lose, one more perfect being that she won’t be worthy of, one more innocent angel she’ll love so much that she’ll be afraid to blemish it with the ineradicable mark of her countless transgressions.

  So she continues to take the pill.

  But then she is ill. Spiking temperature. Sickness and diarrhoea. Hallucinations. Visions of rain and fire, of death and birth. The smell of manure and blood. A wispy haired child bawling even though her name spells happiness. A squat, bespectacled girl who promises to love and protect Puja forever. Zooming on a motorbike, pigtails flying, spinning dreams of grand escapes with a boy who says she is his best friend in all the world. Sitting with Ma and Da in the market, counting out coins. Her mother laughing as they spin in the courtyard, raising a curtain of saffron dust. Her father hefting her high in the swing of his arms: My beloved girl.

  Her husband looks after her. He soothes her. He comforts her. He holds her. And he loves her. Six weeks later, she finds out that she is pregnant.

  Dev is ecstatic. She is terrified.

  Nine months later, Raj is born.

  This time, she is not bespattered with fear, haunted by smoke and fire and the hovering presence of death, with just the wise woman for company, in a hut smelling of drains and cow dung, and populated with marrows.

  This time, she is in a sterile hospital room and it is her husband holding her hand, him and the midwife urging her to push.

  And yet, she sees pregnant yellow marrows; she breathes in the smell of sewers and compost; she hears the wise woman’s voice in her ear, and she is comforted by her piercing gaze.

  ‘I won’t be able to give this one away,’ she wails.

  ‘You won’t have to,’ the wise woman whispers gently in her ear.

  Raj is born to celebrations and whoops, and there is no accompanying death. No terrifying bargain to make.

  But there is penance.

  A warm, squiggly being on her chest. Living, breathing, wailing, perfect. Her child. Hers.

  She doesn’t touch him. She cannot. How can she bear to touch this child when she didn’t touch Kushi? How can she comfort this child while Kushi went uncomforted? And what if she brands him with the smear of her mistakes, or punishes him with the stamp of her foul past? She couldn’t bear that.

  He has his father to love him. He is better off without her cursed love. Her love is a poisonous thing that strikes when you least expect.

  Her baby cries, the mournful complaint of a hungry kitten, wanting her breasts, wanting succour, wanting more than she can give. She closes her eyes. The acerbic tang of fluids and fear and fire and death and toxic love intrude into her fatigued trance. Her baby’s plaintive laments splotch her battered heart, and stain her snatched dreams the waxy yellow of an oozing wound.

  Dev tries.

  He employs a nanny. He goes to work and when he comes home, he looks after Raj.

  He tries to be patient with Puja.

  But she can see that it is harder for him to find the forbearance, harder to reconcile this woman who refuses to be a mother.

  ‘Just hold him, look, he wants you to.’

  Raj angles his small body towards her, trying to jump from Dev’s arms to hers, his little hands stretched out, palms wriggling.

  Puja imagines Raj’s arms hooked tightly around her neck, her nostrils redolent with his sweet baby boy smell of earth and moisture, of joy and adventure.

  She turns away, thinking of a little girl growing up in another country, calling another woman, ‘Ma.’

  The inevitable happens. Eventually, Dev gets tired of trying. One evening, he comes home and sits her down and from his sombre face, Puja knows what it coming.

  ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, Puja.’

  She nods. She understands. She has been expecting this since she married him.

  ‘I thought my love alone could sustain u
s. But it’s no longer enough.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will see Raj regularly, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  And just like that it is over. Another era in her life.

  Now it is just her and Raj, bumbling along.

  She tries to do her best by her son, but they are like two isolated balloons that will combust if they touch.

  With Dev’s generous divorce settlement, Puja invests in property. She will not countenance going back to the destitute person she was. She hears the landlord mocking, ‘You failed PUC. What will you do?’ She loses herself in her work.

  Raj starts at school, a sturdy, quiet little boy who seems content with the nanny and does not ask much of his mother.

  Dev marries again, and his wife is everything he deserves: a plump, happy, loving woman who is always cooking, her kitchen overflowing and heart giving. He moves to Scotland with his wife for his job. But he keeps up his visits with Raj despite having a whole other family, twin daughters and another son.

  Then he announces that he is moving back to India. He promises Raj that he will be in touch. Raj walks to his room and shuts the door and refuses to come out to say goodbye.

  ‘You love Raj so much Puja. I know it. But I don’t think he does. Show him. Please. Before it is too late,’ Dev urges Puja before he leaves for India.

  Puja nods, knowing that Dev knows that he is asking the impossible. After all, isn’t this why he is moving back to India with another woman?

  As Raj grows older, he and Puja drift further apart. He takes his example from Puja and becomes very distant, a taciturn, sullen child.

  Every once in a while, he accuses her, ‘You only care about work.’

  She bristles and yells at him, although deep down she knows that he’s voicing the truth, what he has observed and experienced, his perspective as a child living under her roof, the only other participant in their silent, morose family of two.

  And she realises that she is no better than Gopi, who chose money over her. She is also choosing money, the promise and cushion and impersonal security of wealth over the vicissitudes, the capricious travesties of love.

  She expands her business, amassing more and more properties. She loses her son, accumulating more and more late nights, missed chances and multiplied mistakes.

  Somewhere in a hot, dust-glazed country, her other child grows. Sometimes Puja wonders if Kushi yearns to escape like she did, if perhaps it would have been better to bring Kushi here, where personal freedom is not an entity you have to fight for, but is a given. But she baulks at the thought. How can she face her child? What will she tell her? How can she disrupt her life, the life that Puja decided was best for her daughter?

  And so she stifles her aching heart, and the longing that threatens to burst out of it.

  When on holiday in other countries, she will see a woman cooking on an open hearth, catch a whiff of bubbling rice, breathe in the stench of festering rubbish, the reek of cesspits and stale lives, she will hear a baby’s mewling cry, see the mud rise off untarred roads, an asphyxiating cloud of peach smog, and she will feign a headache and retire to the impersonal hotel room for the rest of the day.

  Eventually, with the passing of time, she begins to call India home again in that secret part of her heart where she keeps her past locked away.

  Every year, on the day her daughter was born in a hut under an awning of swaying marrows, she claims a migraine and retreats to her room. She lies with a pillow covering her face and in the stilted dark, allows herself access to the memories that she has been keeping at bay. She gives her thirsting mind permission to wander, torturing it by conjuring images of the child she knowingly abandoned, a child growing up with no knowledge of her.

  She gives in to the cravings she keeps hidden, wave upon wave of painful recollections, the smell of her sister, and the comfort of Sharda’s accommodating arms. And in the evening, she cooks marrow soup, the buttery concoction reminding her of a day that she dare not acknowledge, a love she secretly nurses, a past she misses, a sister she hankers for, a child she willingly gave up but would do anything for a glimpse of, for a touch, a word, a smile, a hug, a missive.

  Puja realises that she has messed up. She has dug herself into a hole and she cannot dig herself out of it. She has alienated herself from her son. Her daughter has grown up without her. She doesn’t know how her sister feels about having been burdened with a child, not having been given a choice in the matter. The child Sharda was meant to have with the man Sharda was meant to marry.

  Late at night, as she catches up on emails and waits for her wayward, uncommunicative son to come home, as she gags on loneliness, she wonders if it was worth it. If perhaps, she should have taken a chance at love again. Perhaps she should have stayed in India, held her child close and opened her heart wide when the wise woman had offered Kushi to her, the day that her parents passed away and her daughter entered the world. What would have happened then? Would everything be different?

  Then the police bring Raj home, and Sharda calls, and the past beckons after a silence of almost two decades, and the next thing she knows, she is on a plane to India with her son beside her, recounting to him the story of her past, how she came to be where she is and why.

  And now, after the cathartic purging of her past, the whole story that she hasn’t dared reveal in its entirety, even to herself, even in the secret confines of her mind, she is able to see clearly, for the first time in years.

  Raj. Her boy. She wouldn’t have had him if she had stayed in India. He is here. He is hers.

  And for now, it is enough.

  RAJ

  ELUSIVE DREAM

  ‘Mum, how you have punished yourself!’

  ‘Yes.’

  A rickshaw honks, a dog howls, a little girl skips along right in the middle of the road, pigtails flying.

  ‘Aiyyo,’ a man calls.

  ‘I’ll take you to visit with your father, after all of this,’ his mum says.

  Raj nods.

  ‘He tried very hard, son. He tried more than most. He left, Raj, because I vowed to myself not to give of myself anymore. He put up with me as much as he could. I don’t blame him.’

  Next to where they are standing, a barber has set up shop at a makeshift stand, four poles holding up a roof of coconut frond woven mats. Despite the waning day, he is not short of customers. A wobbly chair, a basin of water, a comb, a blade and a pair of scissors, a towel draped across his shoulders and a mirror he gives his clients to hold, and he is ready to go.

  ‘Yes,’ Raj says.

  ‘He loved you; he loves you, very much. He loves you more than I dared.’ His mother says.

  The barber cuts the hair of his clients at speed, black strands swirling briefly in the grimy air, before gliding down to join the thick carpet of ebony curls around the barber’s feet. The clients’ shorn necks, sporting minuscule spheres of shiny red from the unruly assaults of the barber’s blade, look naked and strangely vulnerable without their armour of hair, the pale flesh blushing maroon from being subjected involuntarily to the brash rays of the evening sun.

  ‘I know, mum,’ Raj says, ‘I understand now.’

  ‘Love was bad. It made people turn against me. Whoever I loved I lost. I tried so hard not to love you,’ she whispers. ‘I tried. I couldn’t. You and Kushi are two pulses that beat within me. When you used to launch yourself at me, when you were younger, I would ache to hold you, to experience you, to lose the person I had become in the haven of your perfect little smile, to find myself again in your innocent endearments, your sweet perfection. But I pushed you away, kept you safe. It worked a bit too well.’ A juddering sigh rocks her whole body, ‘I understand now that I did to you exactly what was done to me, pushed you away too much. I thought I was protecting you from me, keeping you safe. But I hurt you. I am sorry.’ Tears bleed into her voice. ‘In talking to you, telling you what happened, I can see clearly all the mistakes I have made. I wish . . . I wish I co
uld turn back time.’

  Raj goes up to his mother and holds her. She is so fragile in his arms, so insubstantial, like the fragmented memory of an elusive dream.

  She sobs into his shoulder.

  He holds her.

  A bus shudders up to the stop, and pushes aside the lone rickshaw trundling along the narrow road. The rickshaw swerves, clipping one of the poles holding up the barber’s makeshift stand.

  ‘Lo!’ the barber yells, shaking his fist at the rickshaw driver, amid sneezes caused by the mini-tornado of displaced dust. But the awning of the barber’s stand crumples and the coconut mats collapse.

  ‘Thank you, Raj,’ his mother says, sniffing and wiping her eyes, streaking dirt across her moist face. ‘Thank you son.’

  The barber abandons his customer mid-shave, and runs away with his towel draped over his shoulder, his scissors in one hand and mirror in the other. The customer stands up and squints, one hand hesitantly feeling his scalp, hairy on one side, shorn and blistering on the other. Then he too, runs, narrowly missing the falling fronds.

  ‘You’re welcome, Mum.’

  * * *

  A group of people exit the hospital, four women holding up one in the middle, who is hitting her forehead and sobbing: ‘Aiyyo, he’s gone. What will I do?’

  A gale of fear rousts his mother’s eyes, sets her lips aquiver.

  ‘Ready to go inside and meet your daughter?’ Raj asks.

  She nods, apprehension shining out of her eyes.

  ‘Ready to give her the gift of life again?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pushes her shoulders back, her face flushed; anxiety playing peekaboo with the sense of purpose in her face. And then, ‘Thank you, Raj. I know I didn’t give you much of a choice, but I appreciate you doing this, coming here with me, especially as you can’t stand hospitals. It means so much to me.’