A Sister's Promise (6 page)

Ma, when the doctor’s eyes shied away from my needy gaze, desperate for a flicker of hope, when I noted the slump of his shoulders, I knew that it was not good news.

‘Both her kidneys were destroyed in the accident,’ he said. ‘She needs a transplant or she’ll be on dialysis for life.’

I jumped up. ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

I have been tested. Now it’s just a question of transplanting my kidney into Kushi’s body and, hopefully, she’ll be fine and back with me sooner rather than later.

My beloved girl.

He’s here, the doctor. And once again the darting eyes like a thief avoiding capture. The defeated stoop. What could possibly be wrong? How much more can I take?

Please God. Please.

He shakes his head. ‘I am so sorry.’

‘What . . . what do you mean?’ I ask.

‘You have only one kidney.’

‘B-but . . . how?’

He twists his lower lip as if the words he is uttering hurt him. ‘Having only one kidney is more common than people think.’

‘So I can’t. . . ’

We look at my prone daughter, at her washed out face, at her machine reinforced body.

‘No.’ A deep sigh. ‘I’m sorry.’

Punishment,
I think,
for failing to protect Kushi.
I quickly make calculations in my head. Even after selling the factory and our cottage and taking out a loan, I will not be able to afford to keep Kushi on dialysis for long. Each treatment is frighteningly expensive. I have never coveted money, Ma, have always given it away to the more needy, but at this moment, I wish with all my heart that I was rich, that money was no object.

‘We cannot afford dialysis for long,’ I whisper.

I wish I could give her my one kidney. I don’t mind dying so she can live unhindered.

But I know no doctor would agree to such a thing.

What kind of a cruel God are you, Lord? Why should my innocent girl who has not a bad bone in her body, who has fought to make life better for her fellow villagers, who loves so fiercely, lives so truly, pay for my mistakes?

The doctor sighs again, runs a hand across his drained face, and spreads the sweat beading on his upper lip all over it. ‘Then it’s imperative that we do a transplant, the sooner the better. Kushi’s blood type is rare and trawling through donors to find a match will take a lot of time.’

Please God, Kushi deserves a lifetime of time. Please. Take me instead.

The doctor’s voice cuts into my prayers, my fraught pleas. ‘Does she have any other relatives?’

I stand there dumbstruck.

Is this your doing, Ma? or Da’s? Is all this part of a big joke God is playing on us?

I know of course, what I have to do.

I looked her up long ago, Ma, found her number. I carry it everywhere with me, tucked into my sari blouse, along with my letters to you. I just haven’t had the nerve to call. I have never been the bravest, Ma. You know that. But now, I have to.

I look at Kushi and find my absconding courage right there. I plant a kiss like an offering, a blessing, an entreaty, a wish, on my daughter’s soft, young, but impassive cheek and then go in search of the international phone booth in this vast hospital that houses the ailing and their petrified relatives in this impersonal town miles away from Dhoompur and Bhoomihalli.

The little clinic in Dhoompur was not equipped to deal with Kushi’s injuries. They said this hospital was our only hope. And now, she, this woman whose number I have carried around close to my heart, is our only hope.

I take a deep breath and dial her number. I hate the fact that
I
cannot give my daughter the gift of life, that I have to ask
her
.

Will she make me grovel?

A beat that lasts a lifetime. Then the phone rings, once, twice.

‘Hello?’ Her voice, a British slant to her Indian vowels, bridges nearly two decades of seething silence.

PUJA

RAW WEDGE OF LIME

Puja’s son looks at her with stunned eyes that reflect her shocked face; startled tears sprout as he lifts a palm to his cheek that now bears the imprint of her palm.

Raj scrutinises Puja as if seeing her for the first time, his face, with the exception of the reddened cheek, the pale, dazed cream of a newly whitewashed room.

In the traumatised silence, smelling of old secrets and new misgivings, an echo from the past she has kept hidden for years, resonates through the layer upon layer of armour that encompasses her heart:
the scent of shock, the taste of tears, pink-tinged brine.

I am no better than my da,
she thinks.

Her phone rings, shrill, puncturing the wounded atmosphere, colouring it with burnished sound, and she whips it out of her pocket, hand shaking, the offending palm stinging.

‘Hello?’

A bruised heartbeat of static and then, ‘Puja?’

You spend almost twenty years building a wall,
she thinks, swaying on her feet.
You
layer it, brick by brick with the silence of each month that passes with no communication with the past and then, like moss that creeps over the wall and travels to the other side, like ants that find the chinks in the age worn bricks and make their arduous way across from one side of the wall to the other
,
one voice leaps across the gap and bridges it—that cadence, that tone, as familiar as your own—capable of rousing so much love and so much hurt.

A voice I have been hoping and fearing to hear,
she thinks, as she lowers herself very gently onto the scuffed carpet of her son’s room,
every time I have picked up the phone, every single day these past two decades.

‘Sharda?’ She squeaks—the only sound her vocal chords seem capable of producing.

‘It is you?’ There is relief in the question, and apprehension and agony—hurt mingling with angst. Above all, there is urgency.

And just like that, the years that have elapsed since she last saw this woman, collapse like land assaulted by flood, washed away by the truant waves of a roaring, monsoon-incited ocean.

‘What is it?’

She pictures the tangled coil that still connects them after a span of nearly twenty years and the distance of five-thousand miles. She wishes she could unravel the coil, smooth out the past, so there were no longer these bumps and hurts, no longer all the pain and guilt and allegations and misunderstandings, over which they are stumbling—a past like a thickly congealed river of tar that they must wade through to get to the other side, to reach each other.

‘It’s . . . my daughter, Kushi . . . she’s dying.’ Tears saturate Sharda’s voice, and flood down the telephone line.

Puja closes her eyes.
Sharda. I am speaking to Sharda.

‘Kushi needs a kidney, urgently. Mine . . .’ A sigh that is hijacked by a sob, ‘I have only one it seems. Please. She needs you. We need you. Come home.’

Home . . .myriad nuances radiate from that one small word. Everything lost. Everything . . .

‘It is not my home. It hasn’t been for ages.’

‘I know that. I know. But . . . I can’t think what else to do . . . ’

‘So I’m your last resort?’ Not what she meant to say, but the words come out in a bilious rush, sharper then she intended, like sucking the juice from a raw wedge of lime. Puja bites down on her lower lip, tastes iron and salt.

‘Do you want me to beg? Then I will. Please, Puja, please help.’

‘I . . .’ Images from the past cascade behind Puja’s closed lids, images that over the years she has consciously tuned out, and tried to ignore. Hurtful words and angry recriminations: marinated in grief, caked in the dust of almost twenty years of dormancy, the ubiquitous orange powder that embroiders the air of the country she has denounced, of the life she has buried.

‘Kushi’s on dialysis right now, but I cannot afford to keep her on it for long,’ Sharda’s desperate voice, cuts into Puja’s musings, and brings her back to the here and now.

Puja takes a deep breath, and steadies herself. ‘If it’s money you want . . .’

‘We don’t want your money . . .’ A blaze of heat bubbles through Sharda’s ravaged, dread-soaked voice, making her sound clipped, abrupt.

‘I need you. Kushi needs you. Please, Puja.’ Sharda’s anger dissipates as quickly as it flared, and is replaced by raw anguish.

Anguish that resounds in Puja’s chest, which feels as if it has been spliced open, and all the protective armour built up over the years collapses.

Be careful
. Her heart, which has never completely healed after the past had finished with her, warns. ‘I don’t know if I can . . .’

‘Please . . .’ Sharda whispers, wretchedly.

‘I . . . I’ll come,’ Puja says, without thinking it through fully. Or, perhaps, thinking more clearly than she has in years. ‘But I can’t promise . . . ’

‘Thank you.’ Sharda’s voice blooms with gratitude like flowering jasmine buds. ‘Thank you. Please, come as soon as you can.’

What have I just done?
Puja wonders. And even though Sharda has cut the call, she holds the phone to her ear with her still-smarting hand, the taste of new fears on her suddenly parched lips.

RAJ

FRESH WOUNDS AND STALE ALCOHOL

Raj stares at his mother, watching an alarming array of emotions parade across her face. His mother who is so cool and collected, except when she is raging at him. His mother the accomplished businesswoman and rubbish parent. His mother who’s just given him a tiny glimpse into her secretive past —she grew up in a hut? His mother who’s just hit him for the first time in his life.

Puja sits, uninvited, on the floor of his room, the phone still pressed to her ear. Now that the ultra-rare emotional display is over, she looks completely zoned out. Is she ever going to leave?

Raj is exhausted and wants to sleep away the horrendous evening he’s had. The sobering ride in the police car had seemed to take forever, and he’d prayed that the nightmare he’d wound up right in the middle of would be over soon, and that his mother wouldn’t flip; he’d sworn to himself that he would never drink or smoke or get into trouble again.

‘Raj?’ Puja’s voice is tentative.

The room smells rankly of fresh wounds and stale alcohol. It tastes of blood, hot, red. It feels inflamed, like his throbbing cheek.

He does not want to talk to her. He is so angry. So hurt. So tired. He just wants her out of his room.

‘Go away,’ he mumbles, lying back down, pulling the duvet over his head.

‘Raj,’ her voice insistent. ‘We have to go to India.’

He throws off his duvet, sits up, and glares at her. ‘Have you gone quite mad? First you slap me, and now this.’

His mother blanches, wilts like a flower without water. ‘Son, I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t call me son. You sure as hell don’t treat me like one.’ His voice trembles and he is annoyed with himself for this weakness.

She stands, and goes towards him. He cringes. She hesitates and squats back down on the carpet again.

Raj sighs. What an evening this was turning out to be, going from horrible to abysmal in the space of an hour.

‘You’ve barged into my room uninvited, hit me, and now you won’t leave. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve had a terrible evening, made worse by you. I want to sleep.’

‘I’ll leave in a minute, but you need to know this. I’m not joking. We’re going to India.’

He looks at her, properly this time. She is clutching the phone to her as if it is her talisman. She looks as knackered as he feels. For the second time that day he is surprised by a pang of guilt for what he is putting her through, but it is quickly replaced by righteous resentment when his sore cheek pulses with remembered pain.

‘Why India for Christ’s sake? That wasn’t Dad on the phone, was it? I could have sworn you were talking to a woman?’

Another pang. This one of hurt at the thought of his dad, who moved to India years ago and has invited Raj to visit countless times since. Raj has refused on principle. Why should he go all the way to India when it is his dad who left? His dad finally gave up asking a couple of years previously when…

Raj suddenly, desperately craves a cigarette.

He knows, deep down that his mum is right in some ways, that he shouldn’t resent her working. It is because of her that they are able to live more comfortably than most of his classmates.

What he begrudges is his mother not showing him an ounce of affection, always keeping him at a remove, treating him as if he is someone she has to put up with rather than someone she cares for. At least his dad used to be demonstrative, used to hug him, and kiss him goodnight.

After his dad left, Raj used to go to his mum, yearning comfort, a cuddle, a pat,
something
. But she would smile at him, give him food, a toy and fob him off on his nanny, who was lovely, whose arms were expansive, but who never belonged to him, who went home to her own kids at the end of the day.

But warring with the pangs of hurt when he hears his mum talking about going to India, there is a tiny blossom of hope—the first shoots budding after winter’s thaw.

Perhaps his dad is trying again.

‘No, not your dad.’ Her voice brittle as old bones. And then it softens. ‘He cares for you, you do know that?’

Raj turns away so she does not see the tears blistering in his eyes.

Who is this woman? This is not the remote mother he knows. First the slap, which, although it hurt, made his mother seem more real, more flesh and blood than the remote sighing and tutting robot he has come to expect.

And now this softer side he has never been party to . . .

They should have had this conversation when his dad left, not now! Back then, when he was that much younger and lost without his dad and more in need of her sympathy, there was only silence.

He’s had enough. ‘So who was it who called? Why did you say we had to go to India? Why are you speaking in riddles? What has happened to you?’

His mother’s eyes are liquid—swirling pools of hurt. He cannot bear to look at her, so he worries the duvet instead.