Thank you, Ma. Thank you, God. I thank you. What I did, keeping the truth from her, hasn’t broken her. Meeting with her birth mother and brother hasn’t either. I would not have been able to bear it if discovering her parentage had defeated her, Ma, if it had turned her into a facsimile of her real self.
Kushi lifts up her hand with its snaking of tubes and says, her voice barely louder than the soft rustle dust makes as it settles, ‘I would like a hug.’
Sharda’s whole being sings.
I do not deserve this, Sharda thinks even as she enjoys the familiar and much longed for warmth of her daughter in her arms. I am blessed.
‘I’m sorry, Kushi,’ Sharda says tremulously. ‘I lied to you because I thought I was doing the best by you, because I did not want you to carry the burden of knowing that your birth mother had given you up. You would have blamed yourself for Puja leaving. And I didn’t want that. I wanted you to be the confident girl you are now, not a diffident one crushed by that knowledge.’
Her daughter does not say a word, just burrows her head deeper into Sharda’s shoulder and Sharda feels her daughter’s hot tears soaking her arm, and her neck.
Sharda swallows down her own tears and, taking courage from her daughter’s continued embrace, continues. ‘After what happened with Puja, I made up my mind that I would let you be the person you wanted to be. I would not hold you back. And in the process, you have made me the person I have always wanted to be. You’ve made me whole. You’ve filled my life with unparalleled love and joy . . . and Kushi . . . while I was waiting in the corridor, I heard. They have been caught, the people who did this to you.’
Her daughter looks up at Sharda and her eyes are huge with the desire to know.
‘It was the parents of the boys involved in your Da’s death. The parents of the boys who were expelled. All of them were in on it. They hired some goondas to hurt you. They’ve been caught and are in jail. They’ll be tried, and they’ll lose their jobs. They’ll pay for what they did no matter how high up they are on the influential ladder. The papers are on the case. You’re the media darling, sweetie. They’ll not let the attack on you go unpunished.’
Kushi sighs, nods, then snuggles into her again.
Sharda takes it as her cue to proceed. ‘I promised my ma on her deathbed that I would find Puja and bring her home. You have made me realise that promise, so many years later. You gave me the courage to make that phone call, to talk to my sister, to invite her home. Kushi, it is you who are the adhesive cementing us together, the thread that binds us, the hope, the sunlit promise of a future together. You, Kushi, are our harbinger of happy ever afters. You’ll get better, Kushi, I promise you that.’
Kushi nods and still she does not say anything, which is uncharacteristic of her garrulous, vivacious daughter.
Sharda has always known what is going on in Kushi’s head because it comes bursting out of her mouth a moment later. But now, there is only silence—an impenetrable heaving sludge. A silence Kushi seems loath to break in case the tide of revelations recedes, trickles once more into a muteness dense with secrets that have been locked up for almost two decades.
‘I should not have kept the truth from you. It was yours to know and own, I realise that. But I was afraid. You were, you are, so much like Puja, so outgoing, so full of life, and I worried that, if you found out, it would be too much for you. I could not have stomached that . . . I was terrified of the past. I had lost my sister to it. I could not have survived losing you too. I could not have borne my vital, wonderful girl becoming a shadow, overcome by the encumbrances of truth, and never recovering from it.
‘I know this is hard for you to comprehend, Kushi, but I thought that, by lying, I was giving you a gift, unshackling you from the past, freeing you, to make of yourself what you wanted, unhindered and untarnished by what had gone before. But to be completely honest, I was not entirely unselfish. I wanted you for myself and I guess a part of me worried that if I told you, you might want to see Puja, get to know her. I missed my sister. I wanted to see her. But I did not want to share you. I am so sorry.’
‘No, I am sorry, Ma, for that shameful outburst before,’ Kushi says and at the sacred sound of that one word dropping like a blessing from her daughter’s throat, that one word exiting the sunburst bud of her lips, the word Sharda thought she’d never hear again from Kushi’s mouth, the weight that has been sitting on her heart and constricting her throat melts and the manifestation of the thaw inundates her eyes.
In front of Sharda’s blurry eyes, dances the vision of the little girl who used to sit on her bottom and lift up her arms when she wished to be carried, dimples cavorting in her rosy cheeks as she said the one word she had learned before any other, ‘Ma.’
She brushes her daughter’s velvet curls back from her eyes, and she holds her in her arms as she has done a million times before, imparting and drawing comfort, praying: Please God let Puja’s kidney be a match. Please.
RAJ
RAINBOW OF FIREWORKS
‘I need a few things from the cottage at home,’ his aunt says, the morning following their arrival, Raj and his mum having spent the night with Sharda and Kushi at Kushi’s bedside.
And before he knows what he is doing, Raj says, ‘I’ll go.’
He doesn’t want to stay one minute longer in this hospital stalked by illness, haunted by the ghosts of the dead.
He doesn’t want to look at his cousin, no, his sister, who is trying so hard to be brave, but he can smell the fear on her, and in her wan face and tired eyes, he can read the agony she is enduring, and the trauma she is going through.
He can’t bear to be party to his aunt’s barely concealed terror, the consternation emanating from her in frantic waves.
Most of all, he doesn’t want to be in the hospital when the mum he has just discovered, this gentle, loving woman who was hiding behind his remote mother’s rigid façade, is wheeled into the operating room for tests. He wants to ambush the doctors, ask them if they are qualified enough to know what they’re doing, and subject them to tests before trusting them with his mother. He wants to plead with them to please take care of his mother.
He needs her.
Before he leaves for the village, he speaks to his father.
‘Raj!’ his father is disbelieving.
Raj has never called his father. It is always the other way round, with his dad calling him.
‘I’m in India,’ Raj says.
‘Wow!’ His father’s voice is as festive as a rainbow of fireworks. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’
‘Long story, Dad.’
‘I’ve got time.’
And Raj realises, as he tells his father what has happened, that his father has always had time for him, even when Raj was at his worst.
Like his mother said, his father has tried. He has always tried.
‘I’m sorry, Dad, for staying away.’ Raj whispers.
‘You are here now, son,’ his father replies, gentle as a salve on a pulsing wound.
‘I’ll come and see you.’ Raj says.
‘No, stay put. You’ve got a lot going on there. We’ll come and see you.’
‘Thank you, dad.’
‘And Raj?’
‘Yes?’
‘Hope it all goes okay with your sister.’
My sister.
He is so lucky, Raj thinks. He has a father who loves him, a mother who he now knows without a doubt loves him with everything she has, and he has a healthy body. He can walk away from this hospital on his own two feet, all parts of him in perfect working condition.
His new-found sister can’t.
This is another thing I have taken for granted: my health, he thinks.
Raj sprints out of the hospital, into the light and heat, the spicy warm air enveloping him in a humid embrace. Following his aunt’s instructions, he crosses the road to the bus stop opposite, narrowly avoiding bumping into a cow and being knocked over by an auto rickshaw.
He
waits in the sweltering heat, the sun beating down on his bare head and cooking his brain, sweat trailing tracks down his back and making his clothes cling to him in a soggy embrace.
He climbs into the juddering, rusting jalopy that masquerades as a bus, which pulls up with a jarring screech of brakes at the shack that passes for a bus stop, and gives the name of the village, ‘Bhoomihalli’, which he has to repeat a couple of times, before the conductor gets his accent. Raj shoves some money from his wallet into the conductor’s sticky hand, grateful to his mother for insisting he kept some of the rupees she’d exchanged for pounds at the airport.
The conductor stares at him over the top of his glasses, his khaki uniform tinted ginger with sweat and grime, the collar discoloured, and indistinguishable from the lines of filth embedded into the grooves of his neck. He smells of saliva and spices, and Raj’s jet-lagged stomach gives a lurch of nausea. The conductor presses most of the notes, some coins and a sheaf of blue stubs back into Raj’s palm, and, not pausing to take a breath, lifts the whistle hanging from a string on his chest to his mouth and emits an ear-splitting shriek.
The bus shudders, once, twice and finally works up the strength to move in a rush of clanging gears and Raj prays that he will reach the village in one piece. He peers between the rusting bars of the window, inhaling the scent of iron and mud, as the hospital fades from view.
Almost an hour later, the old bus grinds to a convulsive halt and the conductor announces ‘Bhoomihalli’ with another shrill whistle that sounds worse than a horde of shrieking hyenas. Raj stumbles down the uneven steps and he has barely jumped off when the bus takes off again, wheezing and grovelling, in a cloud of auburn dust.
When the grit settles, there are a dozen children clothed in holey rags, apparitions conjured up by the dirt: bare feet, unkempt hair. They are covered in vermilion grime from head to toe, but their eyes glimmer through, eager, excited, starved, hopeful.
What must it be like, Raj wonders, to go hungry all the time? He feels a gnawing pain in his stomach at the thought.
They swarm him, these children, holding palms out, their eyes hungry, their bellies sunken, their garments tattered. ‘Please saar.’
He doesn’t know if begging is legal here, if it is allowed. Oh what does it matter? He has seen more beggars during the taxi ride to the hospital than he had seen in a year in the UK.
He digs in his pockets, checks his wallet. He does not have enough coins, received courtesy of the bus conductor, for all of these kids, so he deposits a ten rupee note in each of the keen little hands.
The children’s faces light up. They look at each other, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes. They kiss the notes and they jump in the air, their animated eyes in their dust-coated faces dancing. They lift their hands and whirl, holding the notes high.
And he is inordinately, disproportionately happy.
They say, ‘Thank you, saar, thank you,’ and touch his feet.
Now, he is just plain embarrassed.
He tries to lift them up, but they cling to his feet as if he is their deliverer.
‘Why are you here, saar? Who are you here for?’ A shy girl at the back asks.
‘I am Kushi’s . . . ah . . . Kushi’s cousin. You know Kushi?’
‘Huh?’ they stare at him, their faces scrunched up in befuddlement. ‘Why are you speaking that way, saar? All pish pish.’
He smiles at their bemused expressions. Pish, pish. He likes the sound of that!
‘Kuuu shiii,’ he says, drawing out each syllable slowly and smiles again as he watches their mouths try to follow his. ‘Kuuu shiii’s couuu sin.’
‘Ah,’ they grin. ‘Kushi’s cousin, Kushi’s cousin,’ they yell in unison, skipping and giggling.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he nods.
‘Kushi’s cousin.’ A choir of chaotic voices.
He blinks and they are gone, a crew of wide-eyed children running riot in the fields, scattering like beads from a broken necklace, so all that is left is mud settling in a soft orange sigh, in their wake.
What is this village? He wonders. The warm afternoon breeze smells of mangoes ripening in the sun and flicks more grit onto his face. As if he needs it when he is already coated in a dusty turmeric film from sweaty head to perspiring toe!
There seem to be a couple of drowsy huts, a sleepy-looking shop—a tiny oblong with a thatched roof. He has to stoop to enter. There are a couple of glass jars, half filled with small sweets and what looks like peanut brittle, all buzzing with mosquitoes and flies. A few plastic bags of garish apricot crisps hang from the low beams.
Nobody mans the shop. There is nobody about.
A ghost town. Not a town, no. Even village is an overstatement.
Next door, there’s another hut, a pungent smell emanating from it. An opening which yawns into darkness.
He cannot see anything else for the swirling dust.
Not a soul.
It is as if the kids have disappeared into thin air.
He should have paid better attention as to which direction they had gone, but he was coughing from the dust which had launched a fresh assault on his eyes and his face.
The sun beats down mercilessly, the heat an insect burrowing inside his very soul. He can see the appeal of going naked here he really can, wearing nothing but a covering of dust which will do for modesty and uniformity. You can’t see anything anyway, there’s always dust eddying in front of you or yellow sun causing you to scrunch your eyes into squints, and making everything shimmer.
* * *
‘Hello? Sir?’ he hears and turns.
A boy about his age, perhaps a year or two older, is standing before him, holding out his hand.
‘Hi, I’m Raj,’ he says, taking the proffered hand and rudely transferring the grime he is coated with onto it.
‘Nice to meet you. I am Somu.’ The boy says in very good English, although he pauses before each word as if he is reading from a page in a book etched onto his memory. ‘You are Kushi’s cousin?’ Somu politely does not mention the dust Raj has transferred onto his hand, gamely wiping it onto the white skirt like thing all the men here wear, and which instantly turns a vivid tangerine.
Raj hesitates, then, ‘Yes.’ He does not want to get into the whole story, and say, she’s actually my sister, but . . . This notion of him being known and accepted not for himself, but in relation to Kushi, the wan girl he’s left behind in hospital, feels strange, and takes some getting used to.
‘We are all so upset about what happened to her.’ Somu’s face is very expressive and seems to enact every word he utters. ‘Kushi is our saviour.’
‘Your saviour?’ Raj’s voice is sprinkled with amused disbelief.
But Somu nods earnestly, his face grave, voice solemn. ‘Kushi made sure I got the engineering seat I deserved. She has helped every one of us here in so many ways. She is amazing. The heroine of our village. Is she okay?’
He thinks of his mother even now being tested for a match.
‘She’s getting there,’ he says.
‘Good.’ The boy nods again. ‘Shall I show you around the village?’
Wow, Raj thinks as he walks through the village—so far it is a dusty smattering of huts nestling amongst grime-washed emerald fields—with Somu who tells him all that Kushi has done for him, and for the villagers. Raj is getting a different image of the girl he has to keep reminding himself is his sister, the scared girl trying so hard to be brave at the hospital morphing into this remarkable person who was so incensed by the injustice of her father’s death that she wrote a letter that changed everything.
Raj pictures a girl with blazing eyes and fervent views, an incorrigible zest for life and a commitment to change the world around her and her absolute belief that she will do so, a girl absolutely aware of exactly where she’s headed in life and the knowledge of how to get there.
I wish I knew where my life was headed.
What an awesome girl Kushi is. His sister. He feels a ru
sh of pride. He is so honoured, he thinks, to be associated with this extraordinary girl.
Please let Mum’s kidney be a match, he thinks, even as he shies away from the vision of his mum on the operating table. Please get better, Kushi, he thinks. You have a world to save.
Somu tells him about the boys who were expelled and how their parents wrought their revenge. Raj is beset by a helpless, frustrated fury on behalf of his sister, much like he was when he heard his mother’s story, what had been done to her.
‘We are taking action. The media is in an uproar. What happened to her will not go unpunished,’ Somu declares fervently, nodding his head.
Gentle-eyed, dirt-crusted cows stalk down the road, flicking away the flies that alight on their backs with a swish of their tails. It is hot enough to fry eggs in and the ubiquitous churning dust makes him feel like he is walking through a carroty haze. It tickles his nose, provoking a perpetual urge to sneeze. The air, thick with soil angst, hangs heavy with a strangely piquant, but overpowering aroma of spices, gutters, and heat.
The huts they encounter look barely big enough to house him, let alone the families he glimpses inside. He would have to crouch to enter one and keep crouching inside, he thinks, they are that small.
Bedraggled children wearing nothing but hungry expressions, thin bruised coverings of brittle brown skin straining over their ribs and dipping into the concave hollows of their stomachs, stare curiously at him, their liquid eyes the colour of ditch water.
I have been so lucky, Raj thinks, and so very spoiled.
He samples the pungent flavour of a world completely different from the one he is used to, the soft give of yellowish red soil beneath his feet whispering with every step.
Women in multi-coloured saris cooking on fires out in the open, mud pots simmering and hissing, avert their eyes from his gaze. But all of them wave to Somu and chat with him, in rapid-fire exchanges in the regional language, which Somu tells him is Kannada.
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