by Sonali Dev
Words stuck in Shobi’s throat. This wasn’t how she’d wanted Ashna to find out. Actually, that part, the cruelest piece, she’d never wanted Ashna to find out.
Ashna laughed. “My entire life I’ve tried to figure out your marriage, to piece together the ugliness from overheard fights where you tried to destroy each other with words. Now it all makes sense. That’s why you never wanted to be around me. I . . . I was the ugliness in your marriage.”
“That’s not true. Ashi, listen to me. I—”
“No. You don’t have to lie anymore. Why did you even have me? Is that why you had to marry him? Oh God.” She gasped for air.
Shobi looked at Mina.
“You answer me. Why are you looking at Mina Kaki for help? Why does she have to do all your dirty work for you?”
Shobi went to Ashna, even as she scrambled back, until her back was pressed against the swirling railing of Bram’s bloody staircase. “Mina’s done the best part of my work. She got to raise you.”
“No, Mom, not now. Don’t. Manage. Me. Just be honest with me. No more lies.”
“Okay,” Shobi said. “Okay, so here’s the only truth that matters. None of this is your fault.”
“Stop it. Stop saying that. Will everyone please just stop saying that. It is my fault. How can it not be my fault? I’m the product of . . . of . . . God, Mom, if you stayed in a marriage like that for me, then it is my fault.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s Bram’s and my fault. Mine because I didn’t know how else to do this, because I wavered when I should have been stronger. And his, because . . . well, because he was him. And society’s fault for teaching him that it was his right because he was a man and a prince, and God knows what other unearned privilege.”
Ashna pressed her hands to her ears, tears dripping from her beautiful, tortured eyes. Shobi thought she knew what it meant to hurt, but she couldn’t have imagined this pain.
“I don’t give a shit about society. I don’t care. How can you make this about your damn crusade against the patriarchy?” She turned and looked at the door, as though gauging her distance from it. “You’re right. I don’t have the strength for this, for more lies. You were both right after all. I am too weak.”
With that she walked to the front door and out of the house.
“Ashi, beta, come back,” Mina called after her, following her to the front porch.
Ashna spun around and faced Mina. “You wanted me to stop believing the easiest thing to believe. There, you got your wish.”
Shobi stopped next to Mina. “I know this isn’t easy. But hear me out, please. Just give me a chance to explain.”
Ashna threw her head back and made a sound that broke Shobi’s heart.
“It’s okay,” Shobi whispered, but Ashna heard her, because she wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m not leaving, Ashna. I’m sorry I did before. No matter what happens, I’m never leaving you again.”
Ashna’s arms tightened around herself.
“Come inside, Ashi,” Mina said.
Mina’s voice unfroze her where Shobi’s had not. She turned her desperately helpless eyes on Mina. “I can’t. Please. I can’t be here right now.”
Shobi and Mina watched, as Ashna made her way down the driveway and stood there staring at the house Bram had built.
“I’m sorry.” At long last she looked directly at Shobi, horrid guilt in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just need some time. Please.” With that she walked away, legs unsteady, a baby learning to stand, a toddler learning to walk, a teenager backing away from a parent.
Shobi sat down on the front step, wishing she could burn down this bloody house Bram had put more thought into than he’d ever put into the child who’d loved him. “How did I let everything go so terribly wrong?”
Mina sat down beside her and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. She’s stronger than we think. At least now you can put the lies behind you.”
Chapter Thirty
Mina’s arm was wrapped around Shoban and she was rubbing her shoulder. The touch made Shoban’s stomach churn even as it made her feel grounded again.
Rage roiled in her chest, pressing out against her ribs, a continuous state for her now. It had been three months since Bram had shoved himself into his room, into his marital bed, and into his wife’s body.
Thinking about it like that, from a distance, was the only way Shoban could bear to live in her skin, and to not put a bullet through Bram’s brain.
I was drunk. I don’t remember anything. She’s lying.
His excuses had been endless.
But she’s my wife.
Finally, that last one, his truth.
Shoban had screamed but he had slapped a hand across her mouth, the pads of his fingers pushing up against her nose, cutting off her breath, and torn through her underwear and her flesh.
Jumping off the couch, Shoban paced the clinic’s waiting room as Mina watched her, eyes filled with the wretched guilt that had become permanently lodged there.
Shoban would not have made it through these three months without Mina.
Mina had found her on the palace cliffs. She’d been sitting on the rocks and staring at the ocean the morning after, bruised everywhere, but with only the bruise that split her lip visible to the world.
Shoban had pushed herself out from under Bram after he passed out on top of her. She’d taken herself to the shower and washed off the blood but hadn’t been able to wash off the violation, no matter how scalding the water. Pulling on a white kurta over jeans, she had walked out of the palace and to the cliffs as the sun started to break the horizon.
She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there when Mina found her on her morning run. On the night of the wedding, sometime after Shobi had left Mina outside the balcony, Mina and Shree had put a heavily drunk Bram in one of the rooms in their suite, where they had believed he had fallen into an inebriated stupor. How Bram had let himself out of there and made it into Shoban’s room, no one seemed to know.
Mina had apologized and apologized, but it wasn’t her fault.
When Mina and Ma-saheb asked Shobi what she wanted to do, all she could think was I want to put a bullet in his head.
She couldn’t remember if she had said the words out loud, but the intense full-bodied numbness that she couldn’t shake off had been both a blessing and a curse.
Pressing charges wasn’t an option. Shoban had no witnesses, and no judge would hear a marital rape case. Bram had been sent off to a rehab facility in Switzerland. A banishment, a peace offering, a cover-up, Shoban wasn’t sure which.
Mina had let Shree and Ma-saheb return to California, to her three children, without her. She refused to leave Shoban’s side, sitting with her day and night as Shoban said nothing. All Shoban could get herself to do all day was practice cricket at the palace pitch. Run and toss. Run and toss. Over and over and over. With Mina sitting cross-legged on the grass watching her.
The numbness hadn’t turned to rage until Shoban had fainted one afternoon while running down the wicket, the sun turning her skin clammy where her hairline edged her forehead. Just one day before she crossed over into the second trimester, the doctor had declared Shoban pregnant.
How an act that ugly, that violent, could result in such a thing, Shoban couldn’t believe. But she and Mina had made their way to the family planning clinic in Goa where they took care of such matters with discretion. It was the very last day in the pregnancy that the doctor would perform the procedure.
Grotesque feelings so acrid she could taste them swirled inside Shoban, but she had no names for them. Her ability to decipher her own feelings seemed permanently lost. Unable to curb her restlessness, she sat down next to Mina again. Mina took her hand and resumed her stroking, which, God help her, was actually soothing.
The woman sitting across from them in the waiting room smiled at them. “A girl, ha?” she said, throwing a glance at Shoban’s stomach, a camaraderie in her voice. A demented sort o
f commiseration shone in her bespectacled eyes.
She was dressed in designer jeans and a silk blouse, and her hair was blown out and highlighted. “How many do you have already?” she asked, not needing an answer or even acknowledgment from Shoban and Mina. “I have two.” She widened her eyes, as though such horrors were entirely incomprehensible. “Now, until we know it’s a boy . . .” She twirled her manicured hand around the clinic, indicating the fate of her unborn girl children.
The gesture made the white walls spin around Shoban. A typhoon churned up her guts. She sprinted to the bathroom and brought up everything she had ever consumed. At least, that’s how it felt.
It was the first time she was throwing up and it would not stop. Cramps locked her belly, her lungs, her calves, her toes. Everything spasmed like bubbling hot lava, desperate to leave her body.
With a soft knock Mina came into the bathroom and bent over her, pulling her hair back as Shoban vomited again and again.
When the heaving died down, exhausting itself, they sat on the stall floor, face-to-face.
“What if it’s a girl?” Shoban said, the words scraping her throat raw. “What if it’s a girl?”
Shoban wasn’t sure if her tears came first or Mina’s. But they sat there and cried, two women who knew how unwanted they had been.
That’s when Shoban first saw her, felt her. Her baby girl. Inside her. So very beautiful. With large too-forgiving eyes, and tiny too-loving hands, and a heart that had no vileness in it. None at all. And Shoban knew with the deepest certainty that she would bring only beauty with her. A beauty without which Shoban would never heal. Never feel whole again.
Without a word, Mina took Shoban’s hand and they walked out of the clinic. Words didn’t find them again. Not in the car, not as Mina pulled the Jeep onto the beach and they walked and walked until the day turned to night.
In the months that followed, Mina returned to Woodside and Ma-saheb came back to Sripore. Then Mina came back for the delivery. The two of them taking turns to stay by Shobi’s side.
Baby Ashna came into the world exactly on her due date, screaming as though she wanted to wake the dead and just as beautiful as Shoban had imagined. A thick head of silky black hair, puffy baby eyes that stretched clean across her round face, and a mouth so pouty and determined that the sight of it made Shoban cry and cry as she pressed her to her breast.
“Let’s take her to America,” Mina said, pressing her close and unabashedly inhaling her baby smell. Her own Trisha was two. Unlike Shoban, Mina had craved and cherished being a mother. Unlike Shoban, Mina was born to be a mother.
Shoban wanted nothing to do with America. The idea of living anywhere but here in India was entirely incomprehensible to her.
“I want to go back to playing cricket,” Shoban said that first day they went back to the palace from the hospital with baby Ashna. The thought had been bubbling beneath the numbness for a while. Shoban had put off committing to the national team because she had believed she was off to Oxford; now she could see no other path for herself.
“Will they let you play now?” Mina asked.
“Women athletes compete in the Olympics after childbirth,” Shoban said.
“That’s a great idea,” their mother-in-law said. “You have to find something to keep yourself busy. The commissioner of the Board of Control for Cricket is a cousin. You focus on your recovery right now. I’ll call on him.”
“I still want a divorce.” Shoban had no idea why she had waited so long to say it, but seeing her baby’s face had made her resolve stronger. She never wanted to see Bram again. Oddly enough, she couldn’t let herself think about Omar either. Missing him was a pain that sharpened all the things that hurt.
He hadn’t made any contact with her. She had no idea how much he knew and what betrayal he believed her capable of. Shoban was just too exhausted to sort through any of it.
One thing she did know: the idea of not having Mina and Ma-saheb in her life made her want to roll up in a ball and never get up. Given that her hands were full of baby, that was not an option.
Her mother-in-law picked up Ashna, who immediately grabbed at her aji’s pearls and spat up on her pristine white Chanderi sari. “We’ll talk about all that later. When you’re strong enough,” Ma-saheb didn’t bother to wipe the spit-up as she gurgled at her granddaughter with smitten eyes. “From now on only what you want will happen, beta.” Ma-saheb always knew exactly what Shoban needed to hear.
It was easy to assign manipulation to her actions, but Shoban had to believe in something and she believed that these women understood, and that their love was her only chance.
Shoban settled back into the palace. She told herself it was temporary. But it was the best place for Ashna. There were nurses on staff, and a bright and sunny nursery with the most beautiful carved rosewood cradle. Not that Shoban could let her baby sleep anywhere but in her bed, where Shoban could roll over on her side and nurse her when she woke in the middle of the night.
“No matter what happens, you’re never getting rid of me,” Mina said as they both lay on Shoban’s bed with Ashna between them and the quilted Kashida canopy bright above them.
Shoban had never gone back to Bram’s room. A new suite of rooms had been made up for her in a different part of the palace after her wedding night. Oddly, Shoban felt more at home in her rooms here than she had felt anywhere else in her life.
Maybe because Ma-saheb had kept her safe and sent her son away without lobbing one single doubt or accusation in Shoban’s direction.
Maybe because she and Mina had found each other here.
“If something happens to me, you’ll take care of her, right?” Shoban asked Mina, voicing a worry that had been eating away at her.
“I’ll take care of her even if nothing happens to you. Isn’t that right, Ashi-pishi? You’re your Kaki’s baby girl, aren’t you?” Mina blew into Ashna’s belly and she gurgled around a smile. Her first smile. The two women sat up, awed beyond words, and tried to get her to do it again. She complied, proving definitively that she was ticklish and not gassy, and consequently the most perfect baby on earth.
When Ashna was three months old, Shoban started playing cricket again. Until Ashna was two, Bram stayed out of their lives. His mother made sure he went from rehab in Switzerland to Paris to work with a cousin who ran a chain of restaurants in Europe. He had made his mother promise that he could come home if he stayed clean for two years.
By the time he came home Shobi had already made her way onto the national team. Women’s cricket was entirely ignored in a country obsessed with cricket, but that only made the flame that had always flickered inside Shobi grow into an inferno. The women on her team each came from struggle. They swallowed the neglect of their passion because it gave them power, even though no one bothered to acknowledge it.
Shoban learned their stories, the battles they fought to reject the expectations of their families. Expectations that they be demure and feminine in preassigned ways, that they might play their beloved sport only if they returned after to the kitchens and bedrooms, mothers and daughters-in-law and wives. The more Shoban encountered the stories of her teammates, the fiercer the monster inside her grew until a woman she barely recognized emerged from her.
Shining Shobi. It was the name her teammates gave her, because she never tired of pushing them to fight, to win, and to claim the power of their wins to fight on and off the field.
When the opening batsman (yes, that’s what she was called even though she was a woman) showed up at Shobi’s door one day, beaten by her father because she refused to comply with some directive of his, Shobi learned that the Raje name was the sharpest weapon she could wield. One phone call to the commissioner of police, and the dynamics of power shifted. Direct access to media, access to safe houses and charities the family ran, the ear of celebrities and influencers: it all rolled drop by drop into a wave of seismic force.
Suddenly, right at Shobi’s fingertips was the power
to change things, to not bend, and it took root inside her, fast and strong. Or it simply watered the seed that had always been within her. Before she knew it, she became Shining Shobi, every iota of fear inside her burned away as though it had never existed, and one too many people looked to her for strength.
When Bram returned, with the belief that his short banishment had been sufficient penance, all Shobi could do was laugh. He was full of apologies, as though remorse were all it took to erase evil. A great reset switch that she would be complicit in flipping over her dead body. But she would not give up her new life either. They would have separate lives. The only thing shared between them would be Ashna, because the simple acts of hugging her and spinning her in the air had been enough for Bram to win their daughter’s love. Shobi had always sworn that Ashna would make her own choices no matter how young, that she would hone her own spirit as she wished.
Loving her father was Ashna’s right, and Shobi couldn’t snatch that from her even as Bram trapped them in a power struggle. As Shobi’s popularity in the media grew, Bram found new and increasingly exasperating ways to humiliate himself publicly. The more the family tried to curb him, the more creative he became in his wildness. Until finally, on a hunting trip, he shot a blackbuck, an endangered antelope, one of earth’s most majestic creatures. It was a repeat offense that came with a jail sentence, and not just a fine like the first time. A fine that would’ve crippled anyone not born with a diamond-encrusted spoon in his ungrateful mouth.
A weird sort of thing had happened in the two years when Bram was gone. Shobi had developed an internalized mechanism to shut him out. Maybe her subconscious knew that it was the only way to achieve everything she wanted to achieve without letting him take that away from her.
The more she shut him out, the less he was able to do the same. The numbness toward Bram, combined with the fire her work gave her, might have worked had it not caused the collateral damage that Shobi didn’t quite acknowledge until it was too late. Her Ashna.
