She blinks back the warm tears stinging her eyes at his words. ‘I’ve been anything but.’
‘You’re here now,’ her son says. ‘You’re here when your daughter needs you the most.’
A woman paces up and down the phenyl-reeking corridor. She is hunched, as if warding off blows.
She looks up as Puja and Raj approach. Her face is careworn, set in deep grooves of worry and fear. But there is something about the eyes, the henna-coloured eyes that are no longer hidden behind unflattering lenses . . . Puja stares. Not Sharda surely? She seems too old.
The woman’s face lights up when she recognises Puja. And in that smile, that shy, tentative smile that doesn’t quite reach her anxious eyes, Puja sees her sister.
The intervening years fold away like the pleats of an accordion. Puja opens her mouth and tastes the past, earth and love and loss and remorse, fermented and salty with age, and a single word escapes her mouth and populates the space between them like a blessing.
‘Sharda.’
That one word, spanning the distance between them, dissolves all the hurt and anger, the guilt and remonstrance, leaving behind only the realisation that what is left after everything has been pared down, is the bond between sisters, a complex weave of love, genes and blood.
This is my sister, who held me while I was being sick, who carried me everywhere on her young hip, who introduced me and my daughter to the world, who’s brought my daughter up.
This is my sister, the only person who can see in the adult I have become, the child I once was; the gatekeeper to the hallowed memories of our joint childhood; the only one who can recall, like me, how our mother’s eyes changed colour when she laughed, how our father walked with the slightest hint of a limp; the only one whose precious reminiscences of our parents are marked by smoke, contaminated by flames lapping at a village, stealing it of colour, rendering it the grey of ash, the charred husk of a thousand hollow dreams, a myriad wasted lives.
‘Puja,’ Sharda says, her voice the awed hush of a child waking up to an incandescent world painted the glossy happily ever after of fairy tales by the magic brush of snow. ‘Thank God. Thank you for coming.’
Sharda comes up to her and touches her cheek. Her calloused palm feeling just like Ma’s, transports Puja right back into childhood. It is sanction and redemption. It is forgiveness and absolution.
‘I thank you, Sharda, for all that you did, all you are still doing. Thank you for taking Kushi on,’ Puja says.
Hot tears, silvery blue, trickle down the sides of Sharda’s face and wet her sari blouse.
‘Kushi . . . Sh-She’s not . . . Her kidneys . . . ’
The terror Puja feels is reflected in Sharda’s eyes. And the lingering remnants of the barrier of mistakes and misunderstandings and misjudgements that has built up between the two of them over the years crumbles in the urgency of what is here, what is now, the desperate dread of what might be, binding them together.
At that moment, they are two mothers, united in the fight to save their beloved child.
Sharda pulls Puja to her, holding her close.
‘Thank you,’ Sharda whispers, ‘for giving Kushi to me then. She saved me.’ A pause, then, ‘And thank you for coming now, to give her to me again.’
It is a warning. Puja understands.
She is mine, Sharda is saying.
‘Kushi is not mine to take, not anymore.’ Puja’s heart aches as she mouths the words, knowing that they are the truth, but feeling as she felt that smoke-scarred, anguish-hued day when her daughter was born and Puja turned away from her, even though every instinct cried otherwise.
Sharda nods, eyes brimming. ‘She is all I have.’ And softly, ‘And now, I have you too.’
Puja’s heart overflows.
Raj clears his throat somewhere behind her.
‘This is my son, Raj.’ She is caught unawares by the pride she feels when she says those words. Her heart blossoms as she introduces her son to her sister.
‘Wow, what a handsome young man. And tall. You look just like your mother.’ Sharda, not suffering any of the qualms Puja does, leans forward and folds Raj into a hug.
Raj blushes red as wet mud, as he stands awkwardly in his aunt’s arms.
And seeing her son encircled in her sister’s arms, Puja, for the first time in twenty years, gets a glimpse into a future that is unburdened by the follies of the past, but lifted up on the tentative wings of optimism, bright as light percolating into an overcast day and feeding it the promise of the brilliance to come. She breathes in deeply and tastes buoyancy, the soft pink of a tender bloom unfurling cautiously in the caress of spring.
‘I found your number’ Sharda says softly. ‘I’ve been carrying it around close to my heart, trying to pluck up the courage to call. For the first two years after you left, I was on tenterhooks, worried you would come back and take Kushi away. Then I relaxed, knowing that you had made the ultimate sacrifice. You had relinquished your claim on her.’ Sharda swallows. ‘I am sorry, Puja. That day . . . ’
Puja knows instantly the day Sharda is talking about: the day her world shattered, the day the girl she was died and the woman she is now started to emerge. The memory of it is a throbbing in her back, an ache in her chest, the flavour of blood and sorrow in her mouth.
‘It was I who carried the tales from the matrons to Da. It was me.’
Puja lifts up her hand as if to stop now what had happened then. ‘Oh what does it matter now, Sharda?’ she sighs.
Why does it still hurt?
‘I need to say it,’ Sharda whispers. ‘I have been apologising to you in my head for so many years.’
Puja nods, tasting grief and regret.
‘I’m sorry for having allowed it all to happen, for perpetrating it, for not bringing you back home where you belonged. For letting you stay away from all of us, for everything you had to go through alone.’ Sharda says, her voice haemorrhaging.
Puja nods again, overcome. The countless mistakes, the guilt, the untold hurt bleeding into so many years of their lives, have stooped their backs and rendered their hearts heavy with the load of feelings undeclared and quarrels unresolved, wrong things said and important ones left unsaid, love unrequited and love taken for granted.
‘I am sorry too,’ she says. ‘For saddling you with Kushi. I know how hard it must have been for you to be a single mother here. But I knew too that if anyone could do it, it would be you, Sharda. At the time, I didn’t think myself worthy of my baby. And I could only think of one person I could entrust my precious daughter to—You.’
The cramped corridor smells of aired secrets. It feels light—a heart relieved, confidences renewed, and old wounds throbbing with hurt for so many years, healing
Sharda’s eyes flood. ‘I loved her. I love her. She is very fragile right now. She’s just found out. I . . . I couldn’t tell her before.’ She takes a breath. ‘Kushi’s a star, Puja. She’s so amazing. So honest, so driven and such a stickler for the truth. She’s the very best of me and you. I . . . I should have protected her more.’
Sharda’s face is wet with her tears and Puja’s mouth is wet with the taste of them.
‘Ah, Sharda, don’t blame yourself.’
‘She will come through. That’s what I keep telling myself. But I am beside myself with worry. What with her internal injuries . . .’
‘She’ll be fine. She has to be.’ Puja says, a pledge, a petition, a prayer.
I gave her up all those years ago because I thought I was protecting her. What use the sacrifice I made, all the precious time I lost with her, if I still cannot protect her? God, you owe me.
‘If Ma and Da are looking down on us now, they’ll be pleased.’ Sharda says softly.
‘Really?’ Puja asks, her voice radiating ache like a wood chip splinter in fragile skin.
‘Da pined for you, Puja. He punished himself every moment, every day.’
‘Then why didn’t he come to get me? Why didn’t he bring me back?’
‘We were going to, and then the fire happened.’ Sharda’s eyes are undone with remorse.
‘Oh.’ Puja breathes in the cobalt scent of erroneous choices and thoughtless slip-ups. Her mouth is bitter with the inky flavour of the thousand moments together with her family denied her. She is ambushed by the sepia taste of nostalgia, the pearly waterfall of myriad happy memories that had made up the life she and Sharda had once shared.
‘He loved you most. Right up to the end, he loved you. They both did.’
Puja had not believed the wise woman when she had said the same thing the fateful day when she gave up her daughter, but now, she believes her sister.
‘Yes.’ She says, her voice light as she feels the burden she has been carrying for what seems forever, slip from her shoulders.
‘Gopi died in a motorbike accident a couple of years after you left. No wife or kids.’
‘Oh.’ Puja doesn’t know what, if anything, she feels.
‘The landlord went mad with grief, and he died soon after.’
An unpleasant taste at the back of her throat like she has swallowed a mango seed and it is stuck, the asphyxiating feel of grappling for the painfully elusive, silvery essence of life, the whitewashed hum of sadness.
The booming landlord, so full of himself. His cowardly son: the boy who taught her how to love, and also, how not to love.
We are only human in the end, she thinks, trying to picture the landlord, insane with grief. He had loved his son in his own way. Had Gopi known that?
We waste the little time we are given in this world on immaterial things, not the things that really matter, she thinks. And then, when it is far too late, we long for one more moment together, a moment which, if bestowed, we will draw out and treasure, a moment in which we will say all those things left unsaid, a moment into which we will cram a lifetime’s worth of good times.
I need to tell my children I love them. I need to hold them in my arms, as I have always yearned to do. I need to explain to my daughter why I did what I did. I have squandered enough time.
Puja smiles at her son, still squirming in his aunt’s embrace.
Sharda holds out her pinkie finger to Puja. Puja takes it.
‘I love you, Puja.’ Sharda says, her voice the luminous gold of promise.
‘I love you too,’ Puja says. The words she thought she would stumble on flow as easily as champagne and she grins as her son stares at her in open-mouthed astonishment.
KUSHI
THE PROFOUND STILLNESS BETWEEN ROARS
Long strands of curly brown hair frame the thin face of the woman standing next to my bed. Her pistachio eyes, underlined by violet shadows, glisten as they hungrily devour me.
Her lips quiver as she tries on a wavering smile, much like the tremulous lines on one of the beeping machines rigged to my chest.
I look like her. She is a thinner, paler, slightly taller version of me. My mother.
‘Why did you give me away?’ I ask, my voice watery, clogged with the weight of eighteen years of lost moments.
I think I know why she did what she did but I want to hear what she has to say, understand her side of my story.
She stands there absorbing every inch of me as if she cannot quite believe she is here at last, with me, the daughter she thought she had lost.
Finally she speaks, and her voice is soft as the caress of a dew-spattered leaf, fluid as a lake in the moonlight, grave as the profound stillness between roars. ‘I did it because I loved you.’
And then, in that putrid ward, Puja tells me her story which is also the beginning of mine.
By the end of it we are both battling a barrage of tears.
‘You loved me,’ I sniffle.
‘I never stopped loving you, Kushi.’ My name on her lips sounds like a dedication. ‘I’ve yearned for you and missed you every single moment of every day of your life.’
I picture a girl not much older than I am now, trying to come to terms with losing her family and her love, a girl who yearned for absolution, a girl who thought that to give up her child was to do penance for sins committed.
I think of all the girls who have come to me for help and advice. And I look at this woman. My mother. Who thought she was protecting me by giving me up.
‘But your reasoning was silly,’ I say.
She laughs wetly, a chuckle surprised out of her. ‘It was, now that I look at it in the cold light of present day. But at the time . . .’ Her gaze is sunshine spilling across a rain-swept courtyard.
‘I know you are angry. I’ll understand if you hate me.’
‘You said you longed to hold me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’
She laughs, properly this time, and it is mango juice dripping down your chin on a summer’s evening, it is a rainbow glimpsed at the end of a storm battered day, it is warm pebbles skittering on a beach on a drowsy afternoon.
She leans forward and then she is holding me, tubes and all, and I settle into her chest and hear her heart beat and I think that this is how it must have been when I was inside her womb, taking comfort from the rhythmic boom, boom, boom of the blood pumping inside her, the blood that sustained me.
‘I did not want to hold you,’ she whispers, ‘because I was worried I would not be able to let you go. Nothing has changed.’
And I smile in her arms and I can feel her smiling back as she strokes my hair which is matted at the back from the pillow.
‘Do you know I haven’t touched anyone like this in years?’ she says and her voice is awed as a child taking the first bite of cotton candy and discovering heaven on earth, ‘I can’t for the life of me think why.’
‘Being in your arms is like settling into the chair at home that is my favourite, that sags in all the right places and carries my weight so securely, knowing just where to support me and where to let go,’ I say and I can feel her hot tears splashing onto me.
She takes a deep breath, then, ‘Kushi, Sharda has told me all about you and I am so very proud. I always yearned to escape the village. I felt suffocated in its confines, bound by the stifling chains of tradition. After I left, I wondered if perhaps I had condemned you to a horrible life, a life with only boundaries, a closed life where getting pregnant out of wedlock ruined you. But you, you’re something else.’ Her voice thick with pride, shiny with love, ‘You felt claustrophobic in the village, so you did something about it. You’ve changed the village, improved it, instead of running away. You’re so strong, so very brave, you’re the best of Sharda and me.’
‘I am as far from brave as you can get. Right now, I am terrified,’ I whisper, ‘what if . . . what if this is my life?’ admitting my deepest fear at last.
She does not let go of me, but pulls back a bit so she can look into my eyes. ‘You’re going to be fine, I promise.’ Her gaze imparts courage to my floundering soul. ‘My kidney will be a match and you’ll be as right as rain.’
And then she holds me as I cry; as I unburden all the anxieties I’ve been keeping inside, the worry and the terror.
‘You’re going to be fine. I know this,’ she repeats. ‘I love you, Kushi. So very much,’ she whispers.
Over her shoulder I see Ma approaching, and behind her a tall boy who looks weirdly familiar, and behind them, the doctor.
Ma’s eyes plead with me, they apologise and they love, they tell me a thousand things without one word exiting her lips.
‘Mum,’ the tall boy says and Puja turns, her whole face transformed, beaming at her son.
‘Kushi,’ she says, ‘this is Raj.’
My brother.
He seems shy, this tall hulking man-boy. He looks uncomfortable and more than a little lost.
‘Hey bro,’ I say and he laughs, a rumbling growl and snort, his shyness ebbing.
‘So,’ the doctor says, ‘I hear we may have a potential donor.’
Ma clutches her chest. Puja squeezes my shoulder, then stands up and turns to look
at the doctor.
And hope raises its sunny head and winks at me.
PUJA—NOW
FREEDOM
When she holds her daughter in her arms, Puja feels the chains she has knotted herself in so tightly and for so many years loosen.
She gazes at her daughter with her caramel-gold eyes that radiate courage and valiantly try and mask the anxiety that attempts to steal her smile. Her beautiful daughter with her expressive face, her long hair coiled in a messy plait down her back, with her dimples skipping tantalisingly in her pallid cheeks that should be radiant with the rosy stamp of youth. Her daughter, her grin an exact replica of Sharda’s open-mouthed smile.
I never dared hope I would experience this miracle of holding my daughter in my arms. My grown-up daughter. A gorgeous young lady. So very brave. So absolutely amazing.
She holds her daughter and it is the sweetest essence of a magical dream come true.
She holds her daughter and it is hope wafting on a draft of spring air.
She holds her daughter and she finds the freedom she has been searching for all her life.
And then, she sets about the business of healing her daughter, giving her of herself.
SHARDA—NOW
HARBINGER OF HAPPY EVER AFTERS
Puja is taken for tests to check if her kidney is compatible.
Raj ventures into the village to bring back a change of clothes for Sharda and for Kushi too if all goes well.
And then Sharda is alone with her daughter.
Alone now that Kushi has met with Puja.
The space beside Kushi’s bed which Sharda occupies is pungent with Sharda’s fear, rank with her anguish.
Sharda looks at Kushi, breathes her in. This girl Sharda has brought up as her own, this girl she has loved so much, this girl who breathed new life into her just by being, this girl who is her life.
Kushi’s eyes are puffy, her face shiny with tears, but her shoulders are not slumped as they were when she had read Sharda’s letters and had asked Sharda to give her space, and her head sits straight on the delicate stalk of her graceful neck.
A Sister's Promise Page 27
