A Scandalous Secret

by Jaishree Misra

  ‘Are you lunching alone?’ a male voice with an American accent asked.

  Neha looked up, unable to conceal a small frown. ‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at an oldish man with silver hair and an open, pleasant countenance.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’ the man persisted gently, glancing at the empty chair opposite her.

  Neha hesitated momentarily, wondering if she ought to show her irritation at the intrusion. But the man’s expression was non-threatening and friendly and suddenly she felt like company; company that would be completely free of the kind of expectations that usually accompanied interactions with friends and relations. And company that would distract her from her tormented train of thought too. Ananda was about the safest place to befriend strangers. Everyone who came here seemed to share a certain mindset that was all to do with healing and support. Neha smiled and waved at the chair across the table. ‘Please join me,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, I’m Arif,’ the man said as they shook hands over the table.

  ‘Hello, I’m Neha.’

  ‘Hello, Neha, very pleased to have met you and thank you for letting me join you in your lunch,’ Arif said with mock formality as he shook out his napkin over his knees. Neha saw that his eyes – kindly eyes – were twinkling. She could not tell how old the man was but she guessed he was probably around her father’s age.

  Neha, adopting the same faux-pompous tone, replied, ‘I am very pleased to be joined at lunch, for lunching was not an activity ever meant to be conducted with either seriousness or solitude.’

  Arif smiled. ‘Do you mind if I ask where that accent’s from. It’s either British or posh Indian. Can I guess – the latter?’

  ‘That depends on what “posh Indian” means,’ Neha replied lightly. ‘If you mean royalty, then, no. But if you mean to ask if I was brought up properly and taught to mind my manners, you’ll find a lot of Indians fit that description, actually.’

  ‘No, I meant to ask if a British education played a part somewhere,’ Arif replied.

  Despite the American-style directness, Neha liked the good-natured curiosity with which her dining companion was conducting his inquisition. ‘Well, yes and no,’ she replied, ‘because I’m not sure a year at Oxford can qualify as a “British education”. It’s very unlikely to have left a lasting impression anyway!’

  ‘Just a year? I didn’t think Oxford University had any one-year courses, unless you did a post-grad diploma?’

  It was another rather inquisitive question and this time Neha ignored it. Luckily, they were interrupted at that moment by the waiter arriving to take their lunch orders. They returned to their conversation after the waiter had departed but Arif appeared to have forgotten his earlier query.

  Over a leisurely lunch, Neha discovered that Arif was a recently retired lawyer from Los Angeles, on his way back home from visiting his parents in Iran, and passing through India for the first time. He had specialized in ‘Californian Lemon Law’ he said, clarifying, ‘You know, when people are sold a lemon. In this case, cars. But I’m glad to have left that particular rat-race. My epiphany came in the shape of a Vedanta lecture that someone once dragged me to in Beverley Hills. And it’s been more fun than I’d have ever thought, this pursuit of the meaningful. Especially when it brings me to beautiful places like your country … I just love what I’ve seen of it so far.’

  Neha found herself enjoying the elderly American’s peculiar brand of warm curiosity which seemed to apply to everything he had seen and done in India. She was also surprised at how easily she fell into the kind of banter she associated with her long-gone days at Oxford. Certainly, her social life in Delhi, which was invariably a much more formal affair, was not conducive to this sort of instantly laid-back conversation at all and, by the time their plates were being cleared, she and Arif were chatting like old friends.

  ‘Hey, Neha, I’ve been meaning to ask someone what exactly the standard greeting here is. I thought namaste was how Indians greeted each other but, here at Ananda, I keep hearing the word namashka. Everyone you pass in this place kinda bobs their head and says namashka – I hope I’m saying it properly? – I just wanted to be sure I was getting it right before returning the compliment!’

  Neha smiled. ‘It’s just another way of saying namaste, a bit more formal, I guess. You’re nearly there, actually. It’s namashkar – n-a-m-a-s-h-k-a-r – but you’re right, the “r” is mostly silent.’ Then she laughed. ‘Did you see that film The Love Guru?’ Arif looked questioningly at Neha and so she explained, ‘You know, the Mike Myers spoof on Indian ashrams? I saw a DVD of it recently.’

  Arif shook his head. ‘Never seen it. Any good?’ he enquired.

  ‘Patchily funny,’ Neha replied. ‘Funnier in retrospect, actually, now that I’m here. A lot of things here at Ananda are suddenly reminding me of the ashram in the film. Including your question about the endless namashkars. The Americans in the film don’t have a clue what namashkar is, of course, and so they go around greeting everyone with the word ‘Mariska!’

  ‘Mariska?’ Arif responded, puzzled, before he got the joke and burst into a loud guffaw. ‘Mariska Hargitay, the actress! Is she in it?’

  Neha nodded, quite forgetting her troubles now as she too sat back, enjoying Arif’s mirth. ‘In fact, the yoga teacher who took my session this morning reminded me of the character in the film who’s played by Ben Kingsley – a teacher going by the irresistible name of ‘Guru Tuggin-my-phuddha!’ She giggled at the memory. ‘Sorry that pun won’t mean anything to a non-Hindi speaker, I just realized.’

  ‘Teach me, teach me! I’m willing to learn,’ Arif replied, ‘Especially if it means expanding my lexicon of rude words.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ Neha protested, reddening, ‘It’s really rude!’

  ‘All the more reason,’ Arif insisted. ‘If you won’t tell me, I’m going to ask that guy over there.’ He turned in his chair to call out to a waiter, ‘Excuse me, but could you tell me the meaning of a Hindi expression please – I believe it goes “tuggin’ my …”’

  Neha stopped Arif by grabbing his forearm with a small anguished cry. She was still laughing but was by now quite flushed from embarrassment, ‘You can’t just ask someone that, Arif, it’s really, really, really rude!’

  ‘Can’t be ruder than “dick”, can it?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘Oh well, okay,’ Neha said, wiping her eyes with her napkin. ‘That’s what it means then.’

  ‘Dick? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes, if you insist, “dick”. Although it is a ruder version, I have to say.’

  ‘Pooda? Have I said it right?’

  Neha flapped her hands in distress again and dropped her voice to a near whisper in order to correct Arif’s pronounciation, ‘Shhh … shhh … not pooda but phuddha. Oh, I can’t believe I’m saying this. But, please, the waiter’s coming back to our table now. Believe me, this is not the time!’

  ‘Oh, okay, I’ll behave,’ Arif said, straightening the expression on his face to one of extreme solemnity. He took the dessert menu off the waiter and scanned it before looking up at the waiter. ‘I’ll have the sorbet, please,’ he said with an exaggerated serious air.

  ‘And I’ll have the kheer,’ Neha said.

  This time it was Arif who burst into loud laughter, puzzling both Neha and the waiter as he doubled over and rocked in his chair. ‘I can’t believe you just said that!’ he accused Neha as the waiter walked away, shaking his head.

  ‘What did I just say?’ Neha asked, confused.

  ‘That word!’

  ‘What word? I just asked for kheer.’

  ‘Shhh … shhh … don’t!’ Arif implored, looking over his shoulder as though terrified someone would hear them. ‘It’s very, very rude!’

  Neha laughed nervously. ‘You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, no, I promise I’m not,’ Arif replied, pressing his napkin over his watering eyes.

  Neha, suddenly uncertain, dropped her voice as she repea
ted. ‘Kheer? Kheer is a rude word?’ She saw Arif nodding. ‘In what language? For heaven’s sake it’s just a kind of rice pudding!’

  ‘I know,’ Arif said, his eyes creased with laughter. ‘I discovered it on my first day in India, in fact. That the name for India’s favourite dessert is one of the rudest words in the Persian language!’

  Chapter Eighteen

  By the time Sonya and Estella had made their way back to the Mahajans’ B&B from their aborted visit to the Chaturvedi residence, they were wiped out, both from the heat and their earlier roadside argument. The sight of Mrs Mahajan standing in her darkening garden with her sari hitched up while she hosed down her hydrangea bushes was like a tonic and both girls melted at the warmth with which they were greeted by their landlady and offered all manner of food and drink.

  ‘Oh, yes please, we’d love some tea, Mrs Mahajan,’ Estella said.

  ‘Don’t be all British, calling me Mrs Mahajan and all. Just call me Aunty, okay? Kusum Aunty. While you are here in Delhi, you are in my care, just as if you are my own nieces. Or daughters even.’ Mrs Mahajan stopped scolding for a minute and peered at the pair of tired and dusty faces before her. ‘Are you girls all right?’ Without waiting for an answer, she carried on, ‘Delhi can be a very bad place, very aggressive. The men especially are very bad, always staring at young girls, especially young foreigners like you. You must be careful. And, if you have any bad experiences, you just come and tell me. I will sort it out. Now you go upstairs and get freshened up and I will send tea upstairs for you. Then we will have an early dinner, okay? Maybe at about seven thirty or eight? After Mr Mahajan comes back from the office?’

  Promising meekly to do all that was being demanded of them, the two girls proceeded to their room above the garage. The sun had sunk behind the treetops in a blaze of orange and gold but both girls were too exhausted and dispirited to notice the beautiful Delhi dusk. When a pot of tea was brought upstairs, along with a platter of strange round biscuits and a bowl of fudge-like milk sweets, Estella fussed over the tray, stirring sugar into Sonya’s tea and carrying it across to where she was sitting, leaning her back on the headboard of the bed.

  ‘Thanks, Stel,’ Sonya said, sitting up and taking the mug off her. In the mirror across the room, even she could see what a wan expression she wore on her face.

  Estella sat at the edge of her bed and said, ‘I’m sorry I made you cry, Sonya; you know I didn’t mean any of what I said earlier.’

  Sonya was silent for a moment before she spoke. ‘No, I’m glad you stopped me when you did, Stel. It would have been totally counterproductive to go back to the Chaturvedi house and talk to the husband. I wasn’t thinking straight. The adoption social worker back in England warned me my feelings would be on a rollercoaster when I tried to search for my birth parents.’

  ‘Didn’t she ever try discouraging you from embarking on this search?’ Estella asked.

  Sonya shook her head. ‘No, not at all, actually. I think people now understand how important it is for adopted children to be able to find out about their pasts, so there are now all sorts of laws to help them discover the circumstances of their birth and history.’

  ‘I’ve never asked you how traumatic it was, trying to piece the information together. I knew you were doing it these past few weeks but it all seemed a little exciting, to be honest, and you never seemed too fazed by anything. It’s different being here, I guess.’

  Sonya sighed before answering. ‘That’s the funny bit, Stel. It was so bloody easy back in England, almost as if the information was lying there just waiting for me to walk in and look for it. All I had to do was go to the British Adoption and Fostering website and from then on it was a cakewalk. The folks at the Births Register helped me locate the adoption agency that had handled my case. I was allowed to read the reports they had written up at the time and there it was: the name Neha Chaturvedi and quite a lot of detail about her time in Oxford as a student.’

  ‘Nothing about your birth father?’

  Sonya shook her head, ‘No. Because he didn’t want any involvement apparently. And Neha didn’t offer any information on him at the time. As a matter of fact, she signed papers expressing her wish not to be contacted by me. But the rules have changed since, you see.’

  Estella raised her eyebrows. ‘God, that does make her sound callous, I’ve got to say. What were the reasons she gave you up? Did the report say?’

  Sonya shook her head again, her voice starting to wobble precariously once more. ‘It just said something vague about her knowing there was no future to be had with my birth father and her needing to get on with her own life. I suspect she had some kind of student fling at Oxford and then wanted out. Easy-peasy, eh?’

  ‘Poor Sonya,’ Estella said softly, putting her arm around her friend as she started to weep again. ‘You’ve been through the wringer with this, haven’t you? Listen, you’ll tell me, won’t you, if you want to give this quest up and go home?’

  At that Sonya shook her head vigorously. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going without resolving a few things first. I’m not after revenge, Stel, but people shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this kind of an irresponsible attitude, y’know.’

  ‘I dunno … I’m still terrified you may have the wrong person, Sonya.’

  Sonya blew her nose before replying. ‘I can’t be surer of the information I have, Stel. Perhaps I just got lucky because Neha doesn’t seem to have changed her surname. Either that or it’s some kind of caste name: Chaturvedi. All I did was Google the name I saw on the birth certificate and suddenly there was all this information. Apparently they’re a bit of a power couple and there’s loads of stuff about them online, mostly magazine articles. I even found a couple of pictures.’

  ‘You don’t say! Fuck, was she anything like you expected?’

  ‘I don’t know what I expected,’ Sonya replied. ‘The pictures were a bit fuzzy anyway. All I could see was a couple arm-in-arm and smiling. One taken at an art gallery and another at some kind of Bollywood event.’

  ‘But how do you know you have the right person, Sonya? There could be millions of people with the same name here in India.’

  ‘Too many of the details matched. It had to be her. The name, age, the year she spent in Oxford that exactly matches my birth date. One magazine article even mentioned that she returned from England to continue her undergrad studies here in India because she was homesick for her parents. Yes, I know, fucking ironic, isn’t it? No pregnancy was ever mentioned in that article, so it looks like she managed to keep her little secret very well.’

  ‘Bloody Nora,’ Estella muttered, sipping contemplatively on her tea. Sonya was silent and so she asked tentatively, ‘So what do we do now, Son?’

  Sonya took a few minutes before replying, her voice pensive. ‘I just have to wait until she gets back from wherever she’s gone.’

  ‘And the phone number we’ve got? Did you not want to try calling her?’

  Sonya shook her head vigorously. ‘The more I think of it, no. Simply because I think she’s gone into hiding having received my letter and, if I let her know that I’m actually here in Delhi, chances are she’ll never surface. Quite likely she has swish pads and hideyholes all over the country, going by the affluence that we saw today.’ Sonya’s blue eyes turned icy again as they narrowed, making her normally pretty face harden into a mask Estella could not read. ‘I really do need to meet her face to face to ask her a few things,’ Sonya said, adding more to herself than to her friend, ‘and I’m running out of time.’

  Half an hour later, when Estella went for a shower, Sonya lay back on her bed, willing herself to rest and recharge before going down for dinner with the Mahajans. But her mind kept darting back to the mansion she had seen earlier on Prithviraj Road; sweeping and graceful and enormous, and so different from the yellow-brick semi in which she had grown up in back in Orpington. They had not seen the entire house, of course, but it was not difficult to imagine what the rest of it would
be like from the glimpses of wealth that had been so obviously on view, even if they were unintended.

  After an initial bit of hesitation and a tetchy exchange in Hindi to the guard who had escorted them in, a butlerish sort in crisp Indian clothes had eventually seated them on a pair of wicker hammock chairs generously filled with blue and green silk cushions. He had then gone indoors before reappearing with two tall glasses of iced water. Both she and Estella had accepted the drink gratefully, as the evening was hot and still, and butler-man had stood over them as they drained their glasses. When he had gone back indoors, they had sat silently, even Estella’s normal chatter seemingly quelled by the hush of their luxurious surroundings. From that deep, cool veranda fringed with heavily budding rose creepers, they had looked out over an expanse of emerald lawn that was being painstakingly weeded by one gardener on his knees while the other expertly wielded a pair of shears, clipping away like an attentive hairdresser. A couple of cars were visible at the bottom of the drive and a man in a peaked cap was polishing them to glittering perfection. Someone else was stacking white garden chairs and putting them away in a shed. Then the butler, whose reserve appeared to be gradually thawing, emerged again, this time with two small silver bowls filled with cashew nuts and raisins … Sonya smiled, thinking of how even Estella had turned down this offering, open-mouthed and clearly reduced to awed silence by the general air of sumptuousness at the Chaturvedi house. Rather reassuring to know that it wasn’t just Sonya who had felt dwarfed by the experience.

  As the sound of running water was stilled in the bathroom and Estella broke out into a sudden warbling rendition of Lady Gaga, Sonya got up to gather her own toiletries together and choose a set of fresh clothes, mulling over her response to the evening’s events. What was most galling to Sonya was that, from all her reading on the subject, she knew that most adoptees who set off to discover their natural parents had quite the opposite experience to her own. Most people shared Chelsea Brigham-Smith’s experience – finding her birth parents living in a squalid council flat, with open food cans littering every surface and cats slinking all over the place. However ghastly, surely that was easier to deal with – the knowledge of having been given up by people who clearly could not cope with parenthood, socially or financially. Chelsea had described her experience as a swift dawning of realization, a genuine understanding and a final closing of that door. But Sonya did not feel like that at all. Far from understanding and forgiving, it felt like a cruel insult to imagine that her birth mother lived in surroundings so much more lavish than the ones in which she herself had grown up. Her birth mother was certainly no voiceless and downtrodden woman who had been forced to give her up. No, the woman was a bloody memsahib, living in the lap of luxury, and Sonya could only think that she had been discarded as an inconvenience that didn’t fit in with that scheme. Briefly, she couldn’t help imagining what life would have been like for her had she not been given up: the wealth and the luxury, the servants waiting hand and foot on her, the cavalcade of fancy cars … and then she hastily put the thought out of her head. That was not only stupid and fanciful but also terribly disloyal to poor old Mum and Dad back at home.