Disowned

by Tikiri

“Okay. If you ever feel like you need a place to stay, call me.”

  I smiled at her. “That’s really nice of you.”

  “Hey, that’s what friends are for. Life can be weird sometimes, so I totally understand.”

  How true. Life can be weird. My short fling with Tim ended as quickly as it began. He said he was too scared of my “wacko aunt” to date me anymore. I knew what he really meant was I was too wacko to date. Four weeks later, I caught him kissing Monica, the cute new girl from Quebec. They were behind the locker rooms where Tim played tennis. That was the day my teenage heart broke into a million pieces and I cried all night.

  After that, I kept to myself. I had to focus on finishing school and getting back to Goa. Every time I strayed from that goal, I paid the price, it seemed.

  But things were odd at Mrs. Rao’s home now. A chilled stream of Arctic air had settled over the Rao mansion. The few conversations I’d had with Mrs. Rao before seemed gregarious compared to the atmosphere now. She didn’t even look at me anymore and left instructions on a notepad stuck to the fridge door.

  Ashok was, as usual, petrified of Mrs. Rao, the house, and sometimes, I suspected, even of me. He never made eye contact, and was always engrossed in his slippers. He only came out of the shipping container where he slept when Mrs. Rao pressed the buzzer to call him. I made sure to leave him a plate of food on the kitchen counter. It disappeared when I wasn’t looking, and the dirty dish reappeared mysteriously in the dishwasher, again when I wasn’t looking. It was like having a live ghost in the house.

  While Ashok went through the motions of picking me up and dropping me off at school, I could see he was nervous around me, like I had the power to hurt him. Once he jumped when I came out of the kitchen. I couldn’t fathom what he was scared of.

  One other peculiar thing happened a few weeks after Tim’s escapade from my room. Strangers in suits started knocking on our door every few weeks, leaving official envelopes on our doorstep when no one answered. I was no longer allowed to open the door or pick up mail. Then, I noticed the Saturday night dinners and full-moon night visits stopped altogether. Mrs. Rao didn’t explicitly ask me to stay in my room, no strange cars visited our driveway at midnight, and no one left muddy footprints for me to clean.

  Mrs. Rao slowly retreated to her bedroom. One day, she asked me to serve her breakfast in bed. Soon after, she asked for lunch in bed. Finally, she was taking all her meals in her room, on a tray in bed with the supersized TV across from her constantly tuned to the Bollywood channel. With Mrs. Rao cloistered away in her chambers and Ashok skulking in the shipping container in the backyard, I had the whole house to myself.

  I spent my days doing homework and housework, and eating in the kitchen alone. Cleaning had become cathartic. Instead of crying buckets over Tim, I scrubbed until my hands got callused. Instead of seething over Mrs. Rao’s mistreatment, I focused on my school homework. When I was done with both, I sat in the library and got lost in worlds of recipes and stories to forget the real world, both past and present. It was like I’d distanced myself from me.

  This zombie-like existence went on for several months until someone picked up the house phone for the first time since my arrival.

  Part SEVEN

  They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same,

  but I don’t think it’s possible for you to miss me as much as I’m missing you right now.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I was dusting the mantelpiece when Mrs. Rao’s home phone rang and was picked up.

  Strange. So strange it made me stop. Mrs. Rao never picked up the landline. She talked at length on her mobile, and avoided the house phone like it had an infectious disease, to the point I wondered why she kept it at all.

  It was almost nine months after Tim’s escapade from my room. Time had passed slowly. At school, I kept my head down and focused on my books. At home, I kept my head down and focused on my chores. Day after day, the same routine. I managed to get my homework done and pass my exams, not as well as I’d have liked, but at least I was progressing. By then, I’d seen my first snowfall, learned to hum to Christmas carols, watched days shorten and slowly lengthen again. My excitement over seeing snow had melted as quickly as the snow itself.

  Only two things kept me going now. One was my father’s voice in my head telling me to finish school no matter what, and the other was my wall calendar that counted the days I had left till graduation from high school—exactly two weeks before my extra twelve months in purgatory ended. I marked each day off with a black felt pen. I couldn’t wait to see Preeti, Aunty Shilpa, and even Grandma, again. I got butterflies in my stomach every time I thought of them. I found myself daydreaming of the plane ride back, of anxiously waiting to see Preeti and Aunty Shilpa at the airport arrival area, and unlike last time, I was going to run and fling my arms around them. I couldn’t wait. My spirits rose steadily. Nothing Mrs. Rao could do would dampen my feelings now.

  That day, when someone picked up the house phone, I’d just pulled the heavy vacuum canister into the library, the next stop in my cleaning routine, and was about to start the machine. The phone rang twice and stopped, and a muffled murmur come from upstairs. Ashok had gone out on a chore, so it couldn’t have been him who picked it up.

  I listened to the muffled sound coming from upstairs with growing curiosity until I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed up the stairs with my duster in hand and walked toward Mrs. Rao’s room. I stood outside her door, pretending to dust the great blue Chinese vase on the high table outside, catching snippets of words floating out of the room.

  “…delivery not good…”

  “…pay back money…”

  “…if police find out…”

  Police?

  “…the girl…too much trouble…”

  The girl?

  I remembered next to the library was a den where Mrs. Rao kept important papers, bills, and the only other telephone in the house. She never worked in this room and only seemed to use it for document storage. It was a room, she’d said, that never needed cleaning. I tiptoed down the stairs, walked over to the den, and slowly turned the doorknob. To my surprise, it slid open. I walked in and closed the door gently behind me.

  An ebony black desk sat in the middle of the room, taking up two thirds of the space, an antique brought over from India decades ago. On my first day, when Mrs. Rao had given me a tour of her mansion, she’d opened this door and pointed at the desk. “See that? This is my husband’s desk. It’s a priceless piece of furniture, and I never, ever want you to touch it. If anything happens to it, it will cost you a fortune.”

  “You don’t want me to even dust it?”

  “I don’t want you to even look at it. In fact, you don’t need to clean this room at all, do you understand?”

  She’d shut the door, and that was all I remembered of that room. From the tour I’d had that day so far, I’d realized there was enough work to keep me busy for years. Not having to clean this one room in this mansion was perfectly fine with me.

  The phone on the desk was blinking, which meant a call was in progress. I reached out to pick up the handset and stopped just in time. Mrs. Rao was sure to hear a click if I picked up the phone now. I pulled my hand back and glanced around the room. Other than the desk and the oversized leather chair, there was not much else.

  For the first time, I touched the beautiful ebony wood. I ran my fingers over its polished surface. Ancient Indian motifs were carved into the wood, and elaborate flowery designs were etched on each drawer. This desk belonged in a museum, not in an abandoned room hardly anyone used. There was little on top of it other than a dusty green banker’s lamp, the telephone handset, and a legal-sized red file folder in one corner.

  My curiosity got the better of me. I reached for the folder and flipped it open. It contained official documents on loans, mortgages, and whatnot. I went through them quickly. A familiar logo caught
my eye on the last piece of paper. It was a letter from the West End Collection Agency. I skimmed down the page. It was dated a week ago and contained one paragraph. My eyes opened wide.

  Mrs. Rao was in trouble—deep trouble. She owed $1,432,965.43 to the agency—one-and-a-half million dollars, give or take. I gasped. I couldn’t imagine having that much money, let alone owing it to someone else. What did she do with all that? For this amount, I could help not just Aunty Shilpa but all of Goa.

  I kept reading. There was something about a “loan reprieve” a year ago. I did a quick mental calculation. That was about the time Tim got caught in my room. So this was why she was so preoccupied then. The last sentence in the letter said something about “repossessing the property” in July. I looked at the date. That was three months away. The letter went on to say if Mrs. Rao repaid a partial amount by the end of April, they’d reconsider the terms of the loan. Does this mean she’ll lose her house if she doesn’t pay?

  I glanced at the telephone. The light was still blinking. Without a smidgen of shame, I opened the first drawer. It slid out like it had been oiled with butter. She must use this desk often.

  The drawer contained another file folder, a blue one, this time. I pulled it out and settled back on the leather chair to rummage through it. There were letters from the Super India Fruit and Vegetable Exporters of Goa. I looked at the first one. The purple-blue ink and the shaky handwriting were familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  The letter said deliveries were to come from Goa to Mrs. Rao’s home in Toronto, via Singapore and Vancouver. That’s a long way for fruit and vegetables to travel. I rummaged through the other letters. Each gave the number of crates and a delivery date. Sometimes, a letter was sent to say they—whoever they were—lost a crate in Singapore or Manila. How can you lose a fruit and vegetable crate? I looked at the delivery dates. Something nagged at me. One letter, dated exactly a year and eleven months ago, said a cargo was to be delivered on 15 March. I stopped. I remembered that date very well. That was the day I landed in Toronto.

  Then, it came to me. All these dates, except the day I came to Toronto, matched the nights I’d been asked to stay in my room. I knew this because I’d written the dates of the full moons in a notepad to remind myself when I’d be stuck in my room. It had only been after I’d met Tim, distracted by his attention, that I’d forgotten to keep tracking the dates.

  I peered at the letters again, and the handwriting jumped off the page. This is Franky’s writing. It was unmistakable. Since when did Franky run a fruit and vegetable exporting business?

  I went through each letter, organizing them in order of date. It seemed Mrs. Rao’s home was a way point. From here, cargo was sent to the United States, some to New York, some to Chicago, and others to Detroit. What a roundabout way to get bananas and mangoes to their final destinations. Wouldn’t they all turn bad before they reach the grocery stores? So those mysterious footsteps on full-moon nights belonged to truck drivers? Crate carriers? Vegetable traders? Some days, they delivered one crate. How many people did it take to move one box? Wouldn’t that be expensive? Something didn’t make sense.

  I shuffled through the papers and finally got to the end of the file. There was a bulky envelope in the back. After a quick glance at the blinking phone to make sure Mrs. Rao was still occupied, I pried the envelope open. Slippery pieces of small black-and-white paper slid onto my lap and onto the floor. Photos. There must have been dozens and dozens of them. I picked one up and looked at the strange face. The photos were of Indian men, and some young women. All were black-and-white and passport-sized, and among them, I found one of Ashok. I stared at his unsmiling face, willing it to tell me what was going on here.

  I thrust all the photos in the envelope and stuffed the folder back into the drawer. That was when I felt something else. I peeked inside the drawer to see what it was. Right at the back, in a dark corner, was a small booklet with a blue-black cover and a golden embossed etch. I recognized it. My passport! I grabbed it and pulled it out, almost ripping the cover. I looked over it quickly to make sure it wasn’t damaged or changed from when I’d last seen it, and thrust it in my pocket.

  Together with my passport, I’d also pulled out loose pieces of flimsy paper from the back of the drawer. They flew out, one settling on my arm, others falling to the floor. I picked one up. It was a small, see-through, credit-card-sized paper with a shiny sticker in a shape I now recognized as a maple leaf. I pulled my passport back out of my pocket and opened it to the last page that had been used. There it was—the same sticker with a shimmery maple leaf, with the words “Visa” in black letters on top.

  I remembered my parents complaining how long it took to get visas to travel to a new country. They had to first fill out long applications and send them with our passports to the official embassy of whatever country we wanted to travel to, and then, we waited. And waited. Most times it took months. I remembered, because I was always worried about which school I’d be going to next, and If I hated my current school, the waiting took forever. If I liked my school, the visas came too quickly.

  How did Mrs. Rao have all these visa papers in her drawer? Was she an official embassy of sorts? I remembered how quickly Franky had got my visa—within a week almost. Is that even possible?

  That reminded me of a conversation my parents had over dinner one night, a long time ago. They’d been talking about “snake-heads.” I’d sat quietly, listening, eating my food, conjuring up images of beefy men in sarongs with deadly cobra crowns in place of human heads. These snake-heads, my parents had said, charged thousands of dollars to poor villagers who wanted to escape their poverty-ridden lives to the free West.

  I remembered my parents shaking their heads, talking about how these poor people were stuffed into shipping containers with no food, no toilets, and barely enough water. Some didn’t survive the journey. Once on shore, they were smuggled by trucks and vans and forced to work in factories and farms to pay back debts to the snake-heads. They had no choice because they could never go to the police, who’d throw them in jail anyway. They were trapped for life. “Modern-day slavery,” my mother had called it. A chill went down my spine.

  It all came together now. The noises on full-moon nights made sense. Ashok’s sudden appearance made sense. Mrs. Rao was not transporting vegetables all over the world. She was smuggling people. Tim was right. She was a criminal. A snake-head.

  I sat at the edge of the chair, feeling goose bumps on my arms and neck. Is this why Ashok’s so jumpy? Was he smuggled? What about me? Was I smuggled too? But I came in a plane. What about my visa? Was it fake? If the police caught me, would I go to jail? I had all the reasons to go through Mrs. Rao’s drawers now.

  The phone light was still blinking. I yanked open the last drawer. It was filled with stuffed envelopes that looked strangely familiar. I picked up the first and turned it over. When I saw the writing on the front, I nearly dropped it. This was my letter, one of the many letters I’d sent to Preeti and Aunty Shilpa. I pulled out all the envelopes in the drawer with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  All the letters I’d written over the course of many sleepless nights and passed onto Mrs. Rao, who’d promised to mail them—these letters to Preeti, to Aunty Shilpa, and even to Franky—were still here. They’d been piled up in this drawer over the two years, addressed and stamped by me, but never sent. One of them had the address crossed out and “To be shredded” written on it. I guessed Mrs. Rao, a pack rat by nature, had been collecting these to be discarded, but had forgotten them in here.

  A hot flash of anger went through my body. So this is why no one’s replied to me.

  I sat glued to edge of the chair, feeling rivulets of sweat go down my back. Something was nagging at me. Something dark and frightening in the back of my brain slowly percolated up, and I froze.

  Did Aunty Shilpa get my money and the help she needed? Is she okay? Is Preeti okay? Is Grandma okay?

  A door banged upstairs, making me
jump.

  I glanced at the telephone on the desk. The blinking light was gone. Mrs. Rao had ended her call.

  I looked around frantically. The desk was strewn with papers. I had to move fast. I shoved the papers and files back into the drawers, taking care not to make noise. My heart was thumping so loudly I was sure she could hear it from wherever she was in the house. I was about to shut the last drawer when my eye caught a yellow envelope stuck to the bottom. I hadn’t seen it before. I pulled it out. It bore an Indian stamp from an address in Goa. I recognized the handwriting.

  I pushed it into my pocket with my passport and dashed out of the room.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “Where were you, girl? Didn’t you hear me call?”

  Mrs. Rao was standing by the doorway of the library in her fluffy pink bathrobe and matching bunny slippers. Her hair was a tousled mess and her eyeglasses were askew. I got a whiff of ratty, unwashed smell mixed with the bitter odor of whiskey. Though she had a choice of three luxurious bathrooms, Mrs. Rao had stopped taking showers weeks ago. She was beginning to look and smell like a homeless person.

  I opened my mouth only to discover my voice had disappeared. Ten seconds earlier, I’d been madly stuffing papers back into her desk drawers. I’d just picked up the vacuum hose in the library when she walked in. My chest was heaving, my heart was thumping and I was sure my face gave everything away.

  “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you talk?” she snapped.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Rao.” I barely got the words out.

  “The TV remote in my room is dead. Fix it, okay?”

  “Okay,” I managed to peep.

  Mrs. Rao shuffled back up the stairs, into her bedroom, and banged the door shut. I stood frozen for a whole minute before I realized I had got away free.

  It was late at night, after finishing all my chores and crawling into bed, that I remembered the yellow envelope in my pocket. I pulled the letter out. The dated stamp told me this letter had arrived a year ago, a year after I left Goa, but it hadn’t been opened. The letter, addressed to me, had originally been sent to Franky’s office in India, but someone had scratched that address out and written Mrs. Rao’s address on top of it.