Monsoon Memories

by Renita D'Silva

  * * *

  Heathrow Terminal Three was a bustling throng of people, all shapes, sizes and races, all pulling huge trolleys overflowing with luggage, all in a hurry. Shirin and Vinod made their way to the Air India check-in desk.

  Here time slowed. It was as if they had left the airport behind, like they were in India already. Women in saris and churidars, children and grandparents in tow, milled around, straying from the queue. In the corner, a Sikh family squatted in a row and ate chapattis and aloo sabji from stainless-steel tiffin boxes.

  Once her luggage was checked in, Vinod walked her to the security desk. He was not usually demonstrative in public. Their Indian upbringing saw to that. But now, he pulled her close and kissed her on the lips, surprising both of them. ‘Shonu...’ he whispered, ‘I will miss you. Look after yourself. And call me.’

  ‘I will.’ She could not let go.

  ‘I love you.’ His eyes were soft, his face creased from the effort it took to hide his worry.

  Shirin nodded and pulled away before she admitted she was scared or burst into tears. ‘Bye.’

  She waved until she could no longer see him, until he had disappeared in the swarm of people, until his face swam before her eyes. Why was she doing this, going back, risking rejection? She was happy with Vinod; she had a wonderful friend in Kate and a job she loved. And then she thought of her mother, in pain and asking for her. I am not coming back because you want me to. I am coming back because I want to. I have had enough of hiding away, punishing myself, colluding with you and your blasted pride. I refuse to be shunned. I want my daughter to know me. My daughter. Reena… Briskly she made her way towards the departure gate, clutching her handbag tightly for support. When she reached the gate and saw the words, ‘Flight AI 105 to Bangalore’ scrolling on the monitor, she sank down into a chair, feeling lightheaded all of a sudden.

  It was happening. She was so near home that she could smell the rich, earthy odour of rain-drenched mud, hear the distant roar of the sea. So near that she could almost touch the beads of sweat glistening on top of Madhu’s upper lip as she cleaned, scaled and prepared the fish for dinner.

  After eleven long years, she was, finally, going home...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dark Silhouettes

  ‘She’s coming as soon as she can,’ Aunt Anita announced after she’d disconnected the call. Tears were streaming down her face, but she didn’t seem aware of them. ‘She sounds just as she used to: gentle, soft, slightly hesitant... God, I can’t believe I just spoke to her.’

  They went by car. Deepak drove, Preeti beside him. Reena sat in the back with Aunt Anita. Outside, dark silhouettes whizzed past, their headlights briefly relieving the absolute black of night. Reena imagined the car eating up the distance between Bangalore and Taipur, desperate to reach Mai, to take her loved ones to her, to alleviate her pain. She pressed her face against the cool glass pane of the window, cocooned in air-conditioned comfort, and looked at the lights shining from the isolated little huts they passed, and imagined the ordinary lives that were being lived inside.

  She’s coming home. Aunt Shirin is finally coming home. What’s going on in her mind right now? What is she feeling?

  What am I going to find out?

  Don’t think about that.

  Lights twinkled in the darkness just ahead. Coaches, Lorries and cars had pulled into the muddy field beside a little shop making brisk business selling tea, coffee, beedies and snacks. A small shack beside it passed for a toilet.

  Deepak pulled up next to a coach which declared boldly in capitals, ‘Durgamba Express’, and in smaller letters, ‘Bangalore to Mangalore, Kundapur, Mumbai’, across the front and sides. It was packed full of weary travellers, some of them fast asleep, their mouths open, heads resting against the window, the turmeric glow from headlights playing hide and seek with the shadows on their faces.

  ‘Time for a break,’ Deepak said, his voice determinedly cheery.

  No one moved. Reena looked at the coach looming above. A child’s face was pressed against the glass pane of the window opposite. Curious eyes framed by curly hair peered down at her. The boy smiled, revealing yellow cavity-ridden teeth. Reena shivered.

  ‘Come on, I need a coffee,’ her dad said and they all slowly piled out of the car.

  The rest of the journey was quiet, uneventful. They were each lost in their own thoughts. Reena managed to doze off a couple of times. The silence was broken by Aunt Anita when they neared Mirakatte.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she exclaimed, clamping a hand on her mouth.

  In the open space where the weekly market congregated were the charred remains of what had once been a bus. The market was deserted. There was nobody about, which was unusual for this time of the morning. Even the rickshaws which stood in a line, waiting for passengers beside the main bus stop were abandoned. There were no rickshaw drivers milling around and gossiping while smoking beedies, their lungis hitched onto their waists, or trying to persuade people laden with bags to hire them instead of taking the bus. The butcher’s shop and the little grocer’s shop by the corner were shut. The ‘Medical Store’ was shut too. Mirakatte looked like a ghost town.

  ‘This is worse than I thought,’ Preeti said, just as a rock came out of nowhere and hit the back of the car.

  ‘Speed up,’ Anita urged and before they knew it they were driving over the bumpy pipes in front of the gates of the ancient hospital, put there to deter the stray cows from wandering in, where Reena had got her foot stuck and sprained her ankle once, when she was little.

  ‘Whew. I never thought Taipur would get dangerous. I always imagined it to be the safest place in the world.’ Aunt Anita sounded distressed.

  ‘Everything changes. And nothing is ever as it should be,’ Deepak said tiredly, sounding like a weary old man as he got out of the car.

  The hospital, thankfully, was just the same, busy and humming with activity. It smelt the same, too: of bitter medicine and raw fear.

  ‘They wouldn’t dare do anything to us. We treat anyone who needs medical attention here—Hindus, Muslims and Catholics alike. And they know it. They need this hospital. They need us. All the wards are full because of the riots, and we’ve had to send the really bad ones to the big hospital in Manipal.’ The nun who was taking them to see Jacinta spoke so fast that Reena’s tired mind had to work extra hard to keep up. ‘This can’t continue. It will stop, sooner or later. The Bishop arrived yesterday and he’s been trying to reach a peaceful agreement with the Hindus and Muslims.’

  She paused outside a closed door.

  ‘Now, I must warn you, she doesn’t look too good. She has had some severe second-degree burns. But she’s responding well to treatment and should be able to go home soon.’

  The nun opened the door and announced cheerily, ‘Jacinta Bai, look who’s come to visit!’

  It was a cramped room, with hardly enough space for all of them. Madhu sat hunched beside the bed, wearing the faded sari she lived in. Her hair had completely escaped her bun and was everywhere. There were more lines on her face than there had been the last time Reena had seen her, just a month ago. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. She had been crying.

  Jacinta looked tiny in the huge bed. She wore a loose housecoat. There were welts and blisters on every bit of exposed skin. Her face was swollen and red. She opened her eyes with difficulty when they came in. She looked at each of them in turn, her gaze finally settling on Reena.

  Her lips moved.

  ‘What is it, Ma?’ Deepak asked gently.

  ‘Shirin.’ Her whisper was loud in the quiet room. She beckoned to Reena with her eyes.

  Reena walked towards her, slowly. Madhu moved away, making space for Reena beside Jacinta. With great effort, Jacinta opened the fingers of her palm. Reena understood what she wanted. She laid her hand on Jacinta’s swolle
n one. Jacinta’s skin was feverish, hot. Slowly Jacinta closed her fingers around Reena’s hand.

  ‘Mai,’ Reena’s voice was soft. She hoped it didn’t betray the anguish she felt at seeing her grandmother like this. Did this happen because she had been angry with her Mai? Had she caused this somehow?

  ‘Shirin...’

  ‘She’s not Shirin, Ma. She’s Reena, our daughter,’ Deepak said gently.

  ‘Shirin’s daughter, Reena...’ Jacinta nodded slowly, every movement an effort, her gaze tender as it rested on Reena.

  ‘No, Mai,’ Reena started to protest but stopped when she saw the same expression mirrored on the face of every other person in the room. It was the expression she’d sported the time her mother caught her with an adult magazine. None of them would look at her. It was as if some secret they had all been privy to had been inadvertently exposed...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Spilt Coffee

  ‘Ma’am, please could you step out of the queue; I need to look at your passport.’

  Shirin felt a stab of alarm. Why had they singled her out? What had they found?

  ‘Your passport, ma’am. Can I have it please?’

  As the official flicked through her passport, flashing a glance at her to compare her face to the one in the photograph, her panicked mind reached back to the dreary weekend morning, their second winter in the UK, when, after a particularly bad night of being harangued by nightmares—Prem’s face, his accusatory eyes—she’d asked Vinod, ‘In India, do I have a criminal record?’

  Vinod. She wanted him now. By her side. To sort this out, whatever it was. She fingered the phone in her purse. Should she?

  That winter morning so long ago—suddenly crystal clear in her mind—Vinod had looked up, startled at her question. In her mind’s eye, she saw the Financial Times spread out around him, the orange pages strangely obscene on the pristine white duvet. ‘No, Shonu. You don’t have a criminal record. Not in India. Not anywhere. I can’t believe you’ve lived all this while with this fear. My parents bribed the police. If you give the police a large enough sum of money, Shonu, they will turn a blind eye to anything... And anyway, that stab wound...’ Shirin had flinched then. Coffee had sloshed, a drop falling on the Financial Times, brown stain leaching through flimsy orange paper onto the snowy duvet. Shirin had closed her eyes. Blood had seeped in behind closed eyelids. Her hands touched Prem’s shoulder, his head, tried to stem the flow, came away bright red, sodden. ‘Shonu, you didn’t kill him.’ Vinod’s voice in her ear, soft, tender. She didn’t deserve it. She pulled away. ‘Shonu, there wasn’t even a formal police report. I checked. To find out if we were implicated in any way, before I applied for visas to come here.’ I don’t deserve the pristine, untainted pages on my passport. Nothing changes the fact that I stabbed him. I committed the crime. It was me. If I hadn’t stabbed him, he wouldn’t have fallen. Hit his head. Those empty eyes, unseeing...

  ‘Here, ma’am, you can go.’ The official handed her back the passport, flashed a smile.

  She nodded at the man. Eyes the palest shade of blue, like the sea at dawn. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  She arrived at gate 25, found a seat by the glass window looking out onto the tarmac and stared unseeingly at the giant wing of the plane that was going to take her home.

  ‘It was the same that other time too,’ Vinod had said that day.

  That gave her pause. ‘What other time?’

  Vinod had swallowed, not meeting her eyes. Guilty. ‘It was when Prem was a teenager. He had been out with his gang. Those rich boys that got him into all this. They got drunk. The next day, the parents of one of the girls turned up at our door, accusing my brother of rape, demanding that he marry their daughter. They threatened to go to the police. My parents begged and pleaded, and in the end paid them off...’

  Shirin was shocked. ‘So he had done it before?’

  Vinod was having trouble working his throat. ‘Just that once, Shonu. He was sixteen. My parents kept a strict eye on him from then on. He couldn’t give up the alcohol, but he stayed away from the girls. He was all right. Until... I should have known he had it in him all along. I should have known that the brother I felt sorry for was a monster underneath. I should have known...’ Vinod had bunched the duvet, hard. ‘I was going to kill him that day, Shonu. I would have...’

  ‘Do you blame me?’ Shirin had stared at her coffee, looking at the dark drown dregs and seeing something else.

  ‘Blame you? Why? Shonu, I blame myself. Every single day. Did he do that to you to get his own back at me? Why didn’t I notice his absence at work and leave for home earlier? If only I had got home earlier, I could have stopped it, stopped you having to go through...’

  ‘Did you believe what he said?’ She still couldn’t look at him.

  ‘What? All that nonsense about you wanting it?’ He reached out and touched her face gently. She cringed. His hand dropped away. And on his face comprehension dawned. ‘Is that why you cannot bear to be touched by me—because you think that somehow it is your fault?’

  ‘That’s what the counsellor says,’ she’d whispered. The counsellor. Thick brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Cloudy glasses, square frames, kind eyes. ‘You think what happened was punishment for wanting him so badly. You are afraid to touch him, to be touched by him, in case something bad will happen again. And, you think it’s just punishment for your crime: Not being able to touch the man you love, staying away from the daughter you love, being exiled from the home you love.’

  ‘Look at me,’ he’d urged.

  He’d made sure she was looking right at him. ‘No. I didn’t believe anything he said, Shonu. Not for a minute.’

  And that was enough. Now there was only one question left. One she had wanted to ask since their wedding night.

  This time she looked straight at him. ‘Didn’t you want me?’

  ‘Oh, Shonu...’ Tears glistened in his eyes. ‘How could you think that? Have you been thinking it all along? Did you believe what Prem said?’

  She shook her head, entranced by his tears.

  ‘I didn’t ever explain to you why I was waiting, did I? I thought you knew. More fool me.’ The tears trembled on Vinod’s eyelashes and started down cheeks stubbly from a night’s growth of beard. ‘I wanted you so badly, Shonu. I desired you so much. Couldn’t you tell?’

  Again, she shook her head.

  ‘Why do you think I held you so gingerly, so far away from me? I wanted to crush you, to devour you. And when you emitted those little moans, it took all my strength not to...’ He paused, took a deep breath and looked at her, oh so tenderly. ‘I wanted our first time to be right. I didn’t want you to remember it as having sex with this man you had been contracted to marry. I wanted you to make love with me.’ A pause that came out a sob. ‘And he ruined it. My brother ruined it...’

  The tears had created two silvery tracks on his cheeks now. Vinod cleared his throat, looked straight at her. ‘He took away a lot, Shonu, but not everything. Not our future. We’ve still got that.’

  Shirin reached across and, with her finger, caught one of Vinod’s tears in her hand. It was the first time since it had happened that she had touched him of her own accord.

  ‘We do,’ she agreed.

  * * *

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. In a few minutes, we will be landing at Bangalore International Airport. The local time is 5:30 a.m. and the temperature is a pleasant twenty degrees. Thank you for flying Air India. Hope to see you again soon.’

  Shirin looked out the window. The plane was taxiing on land, past squat buildings that looked like they had mushroomed out of dry red mud. It was all so familiar, as if she had never been away. The plane taxied to a stop in front of a building declaring, in bold letters, ‘Bangalore International Airport’. The beautiful Kanna
da script with its curvy voluptuous letters winked at her from billboards everywhere. She stood on unsteady legs to retrieve her cabin baggage, her vision blurred by a film of tears.

  Home. Jacinta desperately ill and asking for her, for Shirin. Jacinta’s face the last time she saw her eleven years ago. That nightmare evening. Her mother-in-law’s screams. The ambulance arriving, the stretcher carrying Prem past the growing crowd of spectators munching paan and spinning yarns. Her father-in-law walking beside the stretcher, a broken man. Vinod carrying her out of the kitchen with a gentleness she didn’t deserve, undressing her for the first time—oh, the irony of it— bathing the blood off her so tenderly, crying the whole time. She, dry-eyed, hounded by Prem’s empty gaze. Lying in a foetal position, staring at the walls. Prem’s eyes staring back. Dawn arriving, blush-pink, like the merest hint of blood sprouting from under bruised skin. And with it, Jacinta. Her mother’s familiar, beloved voice: ‘Where is she?’ Shirin’s heart rising: hope, an ache. Please hold me, Ma. Please make all this go away. The bed creaking. Her mother’s smell enveloping her, caressing her. Her mother’s hand on her arm, kiss on her cheek. Hold me, Ma. Don’t let me go. Take me away, far away. I want to go home. To coconut trees whispering in the breeze, conversing with crows. To power cuts, patholis wrapped in banana leaves, mosquitoes humming in twilight skies. To air so heavy it sighs as it waits for the monsoons. To rain drumming on tiles and ricocheting off roofs. To Boroline and the shelter of Madhu’s arms. Take me home. Jacinta’s voice, weighed down with sorrow: ‘What have you done, Shirin? Tell me, is it true?’ Vinod’s voice breaking on a sob: ‘She was raped.’ Jacinta, insistent, ‘Tell me, Shirin, did you do what they say?’ Vinod: ‘They are not telling you the whole story. None of this is her fault. It’s mine. I should have protected her...’ Vinod crying. Jacinta, dry-eyed, waiting for Shirin’s reply. Prem’s eyes mocking. Shirin nodding imperceptibly. Yes, Ma, I’m guilty as charged. Jacinta’s face. So many emotions. Pain, anger, fear, hurt and, worst of all, shame. ‘How could you, Shirin? How could you do this? After everything... You have disgraced me and brought disgrace to our entire family. You are dead to me from now on. Dead.’