I expect Nithya to withdraw, but she just nods and unlocks the gate. I step inside and we both stare at each other for a few seconds. She’s not quite the picture of grief, but close: her curly hair is pulled back in a ponytail, she’s wearing pyjama pants and a faded NIE T-shirt, her eyes aren’t red but darkened at the peripheries, as if weary of crying. Still, she looks just like the friend I remember from primary school, and I am overcome with an urge to hug her. I am suddenly acutely conscious of my chemically straightened hair, my overenthusiastic application of mascara, my carefully pleated skirt: all markers of how much time has passed. I assume I look almost foreign to her, but she says: “You look exactly the same.”
“So do you,” I say, relieved.
She half-laughs and shakes her head. “I don’t even want to know how I look right now,” she says.
I think briefly about protesting this politely, but remember again the directive not to be inauthentic. I change the subject. “Are you the only one home?”
She motions with a tilt of her head to the three closed bedroom doors. “Karthik is in his room. My aunts were here just now, but they just went out to get some drinks and snacks,” she says with a grimace. “Always so hospitable, even in the middle of something like this.”
I nod, unsure if I should roll my eyes along with her. I look towards the couch, and she invites me to sit.
“Have a lot of people come by already?” I ask as I sit down. I want to keep this conversation as normal as possible, for as long as possible. I have no idea how to tell her this isn’t exactly a compassionate visit on my part.
“Yeah, I think so,” she says. “I don’t really know. Karthik and I have been in our rooms most of the time. I think some relatives from my mother’s side came by, some neighbours.”
“Your friends?” I say, and immediately catch myself as Nithya visibly tenses. “Karthik’s friends?” I add, to take the focus off her.
“Some people I work with wanted to come, but I told them not to. I don’t really want them in my personal life. I mean, I don’t even know if I can go back to work after this, with everyone knowing everything…” she trails off.
“Where do you work now?” I say.
“I’m teaching,” she says. “I have a Primary 5 class this year. At our old school, actually.”
I feel a twinge of embarrassment that I did not know this. “Wow,” I say. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories,” she says. “And I don’t have to ask what you do. I see it every day.”
It always stuns me a little that people recognise my name from the newspaper, and the jolt is doubly severe when Nithya says it now.
“Yes,” I say, struggling for something more to say. I settle for: “Unfortunately.”
She studies my face. “Is that why you’re here?”
My breath catches, startled by the very topic I’d known all along I had to broach. It was silly of me to think even for a few seconds that I had seemed to Nithya like a concerned friend paying her a visit because of her murdered mother. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and she’d seen right through me from the start.
I let out the breath. “Yes,” I say, and debate saying more, but decide against it. Better to keep this forthright.
She nods and looks away from me. “I thought so. Karthik was the one who first mentioned it, actually. We had some reporters in front of our block, and one of them somehow got hold of Karthik’s mobile phone number,” she says, and looks at me, as though I could divine how this happened. I shake my head, both to say I had no idea how, and to express my disappointment with some colleague of mine for ferreting out Karthik’s number.
She sighs. “He was so out of it he didn’t even realise the person on the other end was a complete stranger. I guess they must have asked him how he was, and he said ‘fine’ because that’s just what he always says, you know?”
She pulls up a copy of the Local News section from underneath the end table and reads from the page it’s already flipped to: “Online searches revealed that Madam Reena had two children with Mr Mohan, a 25-year-old daughter named Nithya, a teacher, and a 22-year-old son named Karthik, an undergraduate. When contacted, the victim’s son said that the family was ‘fine’.”
She looks up at me. “It makes us sound like monsters. We’re doing just fine after our father murdered our mother?”
I know what Gary would say right now. He would jump at the opportunity and say: “Do you want to set the record straight? We can do that right now.”
But I can’t. I don’t know which of my colleagues wrote that story, but I can’t imagine it’s something I could ever have done, using the monosyllabic mumble of a griefstricken person for a reaction quote.
I say: “That was wrong of them. I’m really sorry.”
She stops for a second, and seems to lose some of the tension that I didn’t realise she had been holding. “It was really horrible to see that. I couldn’t stop reading it, you know. Just kept reading it over and over. And Karthik has been beating himself up about it all day.”
I nod, wondering how much further my shame could possibly deepen at this point, and then remember I haven’t even started the interview.
“Has he been in his room all day?” I ask.
Nithya nods. “He told me you would probably try to call me. He reads all your articles, you know,” she says. “He said you only write about ‘bad things happening to people’. So I asked him why you didn’t call me when my ex broke up with me last month.”
She gives me a weak smile to let me know it’s okay to laugh, but I am past the point of being able to smile back. The thought that Karthik faithfully followed the articles of his sister’s childhood best friend and knew to expect my visit when tragedy struck makes me feel like dirt.
Nithya is studying me. “So, that’s true, is it? About what you write?”
I clear my throat. “He’s not wrong,” I say, my voice catching on the last word.
She raises her eyebrows. “What a horrible job,” she says, and the emphatic way she says it makes me shrink. It’s a thought I have almost every day, but hearing her say it somehow underscores how objective the statement is. “I guess you don’t have a choice in what you write about?”
“Not really,” I say. “We get assigned different beats when we start and don’t really get to switch until we’ve been there a while.” Professionalism seems to have gone out the window at this point so I add: “It really is horrible. I would love to write about anything else. Literally anything else.”
She looks confused. “There’s a beat that’s just about people who died?”
Kind of, I want to say, but instead say: “It’s not supposed to be. It’s called Crime, so it should be about any sort of criminal activity. But there’s not that much crime in Singapore, I guess, so we end up spending most of our time writing about…people who died.”
She pauses. “Not everyone who died, right?”
I try not to chew my lip as I struggle to find the right words. “No,” I say. “People who died of unnatural causes.”
Those were not the right words. They hang ominously in the air between us now, these words Nithya has probably only ever heard on TV or read in newspapers, now used to record her mother’s death and file it away somewhere by impassive hands.
She nods slowly and I feel the distance between us start to expand again. “I guess I didn’t know there were that many murders in Singapore.”
“There aren’t,” I say, remembering that this was one of the first questions I had asked another reporter. “We write about accidents, natural disasters, things like that, too.”
The death beat, I remember thinking when I’d first heard this exact answer, and it seems to me to be what Nithya’s thinking now, too. Any familiarity or warmth I thought I had gained so far seems to be draining away in Nithya’s face, and she is silent for a long time while watching me, as though deciding what to do with me. I can’t hold eye contact, and look down.
“Regrettable things,” she finally says.
“What?” I say.
“That’s what your beat should be called,” she says. “Regrettable things that happened yesterday. That’s more accurate, right?”
I have no idea how to respond to this and just stare at her, trying desperately to squash the discomfort that has been so plainly written all over me since I arrived.
“Yes, you’re right,” I say after a minute, at the same time that she says: “I’m sorry.”
“I have no idea why I said that,” Nithya says. “I’m feeling very weird. Please don’t write that I said that.”
“No, of course not,” I say, finally feeling an opening to steer the conversation towards what I came for. “Nothing is on the record yet. Maybe you could tell me a little more about how you’ve been holding up? And now… on the record, if you don’t mind?”
The first question is always the hardest, I tell myself as I involuntarily end up holding my breath to see if she will answer or show me the door.
She sighs deeply and sinks back into the couch. “Exactly how one would expect I’m doing,” she says. She gestures to her clothes. “I haven’t changed out of these clothes in two days. I couldn’t stop crying until this morning, and then now I just feel like… I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m feeling now. Tired.”
I nod, wishing I had taken out my voice recorder instead of my notebook. I feel like an idiot, scribbling my friend’s words about her grief as fast as I can across notebook paper. It strikes me as both ludicrous and amazing yet again that people open up about their grief to reporters.
“And Karthik?” I ask. “About the same?”
She shrugs. “You remember Karthik. I mean, I don’t know if you do, but he’s always been very quiet, very sensitive,” she says and I nod. “He’s been blaming himself. But more than the normal way I’ve been blaming myself, or my aunts have been blaming themselves. Very intensely. That’s kind of why the article was so bad. As if he needed one more thing to blame himself for.”
I nod, and proceed before shame threatens to take over and derail the interview again. “Is there a reason he’s blaming himself so intensely?” I ask.
She hesitates, then nods. “Well, you know what happened that night, right?” she says.
“Yes,” I say carefully. “But would you mind telling me again? You were out, right?”
“Yes,” she says. “And Karthik was here playing video games. That’s why he blames himself, mostly, because he was right here when Pa—my dad came over, he was sitting right here when my mother was making him tea, and they were talking. He had these—noise-cancelling headphones on. They were super effective, I guess. I mean, I don’t mean that in a mean way—no one is blaming him but himself. He didn’t even realise they were in her room, or hear any struggle. The next thing he knew, my dad was leaving without saying goodbye, which is not that unusual for him, anyway.”
She takes a breath. “When I came home, I asked him where my mother was, and we both found it strange that she was in her room with her door locked. My dad had locked it from the inside. We banged on it and there was no answer, so I went and got the spare room keys and opened it. She was on her bed, like she was sleeping, but there was blood on her head, and on the lamp beside her bed.”
She says all of this matter-of-factly, like she’s said it before, but it’s clear it’s still hard to recite the details. She pauses and looks at me.
“How did you react?” I ask, hating myself.
She bites her lip as if trying to remember. “Karthik says I screamed very loudly. He says it didn’t really register for him until I screamed like that and my mother still didn’t wake up. But I remember him shouting. The neighbour came to see what had happened and then the police were there. I thought I called them but maybe the neighbour did. And then I think the police must have called our relatives, because two of our aunts came over very quickly.”
Her chest heaves slightly. “They told me I didn’t start crying until the police left.”
I nod and look down, scribbling more notes than I need to. It was very unfair of Gary to ask me to do this and my shame at being here becomes anger towards him. I knew Nithya’s mother, too. Memories of Aunty Reena come flooding back to me as I listen to Nithya’s retelling of finding her dead body, but I cannot cry. I have to do the job Gary sent me here to do.
But Nithya visibly softens when she sees me struggling to stay dry-eyed. “Do you remember her?” she says, and I nod.
“She liked you a lot,” she says.
I’m tongue-tied, caught off-guard again in an intimate moment in a professional situation, and beg my brain not to mess it up. After a pause I say: “I liked her a lot, too. She was always so kind to me.”
Nithya nods. “She was maybe too kind to some people,” she says, with more than a trace of bitterness.
“The police caught him that same night?” I ask, almost grateful for an easy way to continue an interview that has only become more difficult with each passing question. Maybe it’s the first ten questions that are the hardest.
“Yes,” she says. “Within the hour. He was just sitting in his room, apparently. He’s been staying with my aunt since the separation.”
“How long ago was that?” I had been wondering about this in particular—her parents had been together when I’d last seen them, and I had always thought of them as extremely conservative. I wouldn’t have thought Aunty Reena would have wanted a separation given what that would look like to the outside world, particularly after everything I’d already seen her put up with.
“Not very long,” she says. “Maybe two years.”
“And was it because…he was violent?” I ask, surprising myself.
She gives me an unreadable look. “No, he was never violent until this happened. For some reason no one seems to believe that just because—” she catches herself and stops. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been hearing some of my relatives say the same thing, that he had always been violent, but he never was, not towards us anyway.”
She looks away. “I’m not trying to defend him.”
“I understand,” I say quickly, almost out of reflex. I get a flash of an old memory of Nithya trying to tell me something without coming out and saying it, and me telling her I understood. After being in cahoots for so long, even when I didn’t understand, I would say I did. What I remember most clearly now is the relief on her face when I said it then, but it doesn’t appear now.
“My mother actually didn’t want the separation,” she says quietly, not making eye contact. “He wanted it. When he makes up his mind, it’s hard to stop him, even though my mother did try.”
This stuns me, and I write it down slowly so as to not show it on my face. I had few memories of her dad—he was quiet, and stayed inside his room a lot, and seemed shy the few times I said hi to him. Other than the times when I knew he was the cause of the commotion behind locked doors, it had been easy to forget he was there, to forget he was part of Nithya’s life.
“Why did he want to leave?” I ask slowly.
She gives me the same look again, then frowns. “You’re not going to write about my parents’ marriage, right?”
“Um, no, I’ll just mention they were living apart,” I say, suddenly flustered by the question. “I was just asking, because, you know, sometimes it turns out to be…relevant.”
Nithya looks shocked, and I’m sure I do, too, since I hadn’t planned to say that at all. “My father did not hate my mother,” she says forcefully, and I’m back to being held at a distance.
“I know,” I say quickly. “I’m just trying to understand why—”
“Everyone is trying to understand,” she says, throwing up her hands. “Don’t you think I want to know, too? Everyone has been asking why he did it, why he would have done it—my relatives, the police, everyone—but I have no clue. Something made him angry, I guess. Unless he tells us, we’re never going to know.”
“Has h
e said anything?” I ask quietly, trying to sink myself back into the couch cushions so as to somehow be less obtrusive. “Has he said anything to the police about why?”
She shakes her head, and doesn’t meet my eye. “The police said they can’t get him to say anything,” she says.
The police are lying to you, I want to say to her. At least, that’s if Gary’s sources in the police are to be believed. And then I pause. I haven’t even considered the possibility that she might be lying to me.
I decide to try again. “Wow, he’s said nothing at all to them for three days?” I say, trying to look and sound as sympathetic as possible.
She nods, and looks at me once before glancing away and then I know she’s lying. For some reason, this emboldens me.
“Nithya, I remember your dad, and he wasn’t a violent man,” I say, and she seems to relax before tensing again at what I say next. “So I hate to ask you this.”
We lock eyes for a second and I try not to read anything into hers. “Is it possible it had something to do with his mental illness?” I say.
Her face contorts suddenly, but not in the way I was expecting. I had been digging my nails into my palms anticipating anger, not fear.
“My father did not have a mental illness,” she says quietly.
I try to keep my face neutral, like I was expecting this denial, even as my heart seems to free-fall through my body. “Nithya,” I say, and I sound confident to my own ears. “I know he did.”
She looks away from me and towards Karthik’s closed door, and I do, too. After a while, she says: “I didn’t know how much you remembered.”
I nod. “I remember what he was like,” I say.
“I can’t remember what you saw, or heard,” she says. “I guess it must have been enough. You always knew he had—that he was sick?”
“I knew there was some kind of problem that I wasn’t allowed to ask about,” I say and hesitate before going on. “He said something to me once that scared me.”
Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Page 12
