Monsoon Memories (2 page)

‘Yes?’ His voice was clipped.

‘Vinod, I saw...’

‘Shonu. I am at a meeting. Can I call you back?’

Why had she called him? She knew how busy he was, how he hated to be disturbed at work. Everything was off-kilter since the dream this morning. And what she had just seen... A hallucination? Something real? Here? Now?

He misinterpreted her silence. ‘Shonu, I’m sorry.’ She heard voices discussing flowcharts. Male laughter. ‘I’ll call you later. Bye.’ Ringtone loud in her ear. She put the phone back in her bag, unlocked the car and stepped outside on jelly legs. She was a survivor. She wouldn’t let what she’d just seen—thought she’d seen?—defeat her. She smoothed her skirt, flicked a sliver of lint off her shirt. A bell tinkled as she pushed open the door of the shop. The Asian man at the till looked up briefly. Drowsy brown eyes glazed with boredom.
Stop this. Stop inspecting the eyes of everyone you see.
She treated herself to coffee and a jam doughnut.

At work she was swamped with concerned queries and advice she didn’t want: ‘Shirin, you look peaky.’ ‘What’s the matter—you coming down with something?’ ‘Two ibuprofen and a black coffee, that’s what works for me.’ And exaggerated winks and nudges with allusions to the night before: ‘Enjoyed ourselves a bit too much last night, did we?’ ‘What was the occasion then?’

She went straight to Kate’s office and knocked. ‘Have you had breakfast? I got doughnuts.’

‘Are you all right, babe? You look like something the cat brought in.’

Kate: witty, straight-talking, Irish; her only friend in the UK. Kate was the one who had interviewed her at CST Solutions, looking for a software programmer to join her team. Immediately after the interview, Kate had held out her hand to Shirin: ‘I know I’m breaking all the rules and we’re supposed to get back to you after three days, but what the heck—you’re on. Welcome to CST Solutions, Shirin. Welcome to my team.’
Shirin had stared at Kate’s hand, at her beaming face with its faint dusting of freckles.

‘The person on the CV, that’s not who I am,’ she’d said.

‘It’s not? As long as you do your work well, I don’t care who you are,’ Kate had replied, a bemused smile on her face. Something in Shirin had shifted then; the chill that had taken root since leaving India had thawed slightly and she’d warmed to this woman with her upturned mouth made for laughter.

Kate was the only person besides Vinod who knew the truth about Shirin’s past. She had had to confide in her, when the thing happened with Ian. For Shirin, who had learned the hard way not to trust anyone, trusting Kate with her story was a leap of faith. To her credit, Kate had not been outraged, had not sacked Shirin as she’d half expected her to, had not treated her differently since. And tentatively over the years, Kate had morphed from boss to friend.

Now Shirin asked, ‘Do I look that bad?’

Kate nodded, ‘Like you’re coming down with something. Are you? Do you need the day off?’

‘No. I’ve just had a shock, that’s all. A blast from the past.’ She tried to be blasé, to put on a smile. It didn’t work. Not with Kate.

‘What happened?’

The concern in Kate’s voice brought it all back. Made her knees buckle. She sat. ‘I... I dreamt of home. Woke up aching with longing. I used to have these dreams a lot in the beginning. So vivid. Like I was there. Like that was real and this... this life a dream...’

‘But it wasn’t only that, was it?’

Perceptive Kate. ‘No.’ A deep breath. ‘On the way here, I was at a pedestrian crossing. I saw...’ A pair of eyes. Empty yet menacing. Looking directly at her. ‘The Eyes...’

Kate’s startled gaze held hers. ‘Here? Now?’

‘I... I don’t know.’

‘Was there a face? A person? Anything?’

An intake of breath that came out a sigh. ‘Just the Eyes. Like in the nightmares.’

‘Yesterday. Did something happen? Something that jogged your memory? Caused the dream and this...’

Shirin met Kate’s gaze. ‘Her birthday.’ A whisper.

Kate’s mouth: a perfect maroon-lipsticked O. A couple of years ago, when Kate had had her pregnancy scare with the Boyfriend from Hell, Shirin had told her. The final ugly truth about herself. Her guilty secret. Her biggest regret.

‘Does it happen every year?’

‘Not like this. The dream perhaps... But not...’

‘What you just saw?’

‘Must have been my imagination—don’t you think, Kate?’ It was a plea.

‘I’m sure it was.’ Kate gave Shirin’s arm another squeeze. ‘Shirin, it’s been ten years...’

‘Eleven,’ Shirin whispered.

‘Eleven then. After all you’ve been through, what’s the worst that can happen?’

Shirin closed her eyes, gripped the arms of her chair. She could think of a few things.

‘All right, I’ll shut up now. I’m not helping.’ And then, very gently, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

Shirin shook her head, no. Kate nodded once, then stood abruptly, clicking her fingers. ‘Come on, you need a strong black coffee. And work. Nothing like work to get your mind off all this.’

‘Yes,’ said Shirin, shaking her head to clear her mind of visions of cold, empty, accusing eyes. ‘Nothing quite like work.’

CHAPTER TWO

The Curious Case of
the Mysterious Girl from
the Photograph

SEPTEMBER

I
t was when she was visiting her grandmother on a rain-drenched, gloomy afternoon in September and there was nothing better to do than go over old photographs, musty and yellowed with age, that Reena found it. It was tucked away behind one of the other photos in the album. She would never have discovered it if it hadn’t been for Chinnu the cat, who squeezed in through the bars of the open window, landed on the album and then proceeded to shake vigorously to rid herself of the raindrops in her coat. Reena squealed. She had been lying on her stomach, legs bent at the knees, feet swinging merrily in the air, on the cool cement floor. Madhu had warned her repeatedly not to do so. ‘You’re a city girl and not used to these floors. You’ll catch a cold. It will seep straight into your chest from the cement. Then how will you travel back home in the overnight bus, tell me?’ Madhu had yelled just that morning when she found Reena sprawled on the naked floor.

Reena smiled as she remembered asking her dad once, when she was little: ‘Is Madhu your aunt?’ Her dad had picked her up and twirled her around, so her dress bloomed in patterned swirls like a Bharatanatyam dancer’s, and, laughing, had said, ‘No, darling. She’s more like a second mum.’

She had scrunched up her nose, puzzled. ‘Another mum?’ From up in the air, suspended in her dad’s strong arms, his face had looked different, wider somehow.

‘She came to stay when your Mai was about to give birth to me, to help with the housework. She’s never left. She’s part of the family now.’

‘Why don’t I have a second mum?’ Reena had asked and her dad had laughed. She had watched, fascinated, as his face became wider as it got closer, until she was so close she could see the tiny hairs curling just inside his nostrils.

‘Your mum’s a superwoman, that’s why. She says she manages quite well on her own.’ Reena had wrapped her arms around her dad’s neck, had laid her head in that warm safe space just above his left shoulder and breathed in the familiar smell of his sweat.

‘Yes,’ she had said, voice muffled, ‘she does.’

Reena jumped up and pulled the album out from under Chinnu. That was when she saw something peek out from behind the picture she had been looking at.

Wonder what that is
, thought Reena excitedly, imagination in overdrive.
Perhaps something of great value that someone wanted to conceal… What better hiding place than an old, woodlice-ridden album of photographs!

She had just started reading
Nancy Drew
and wanted so much to be a sleuth like her. She knew her mother hoped she would be a doctor, and her father wanted nothing more than for his only daughter to follow in his footsteps and become a computer programmer. But ever since Reena had laid her hands on the first
Famous Five
book at the age of nine, she had wanted to be a detective. Solving mysteries seemed such fun. And there was a dearth of Indian detectives, which was a shame really considering there was so much crime in India, so many unsolved murders.

She had listened enough to her parents’ laments after they watched the news or read the paper. Her mother would shake her head sadly and say to Mrs. Gupta next door, ‘Did you hear about the poor woman being attacked and left for dead in her flat for hours? Everything taken, even the dog’s bowl it seems.’

‘Arre Baap re,’ Mrs. Gupta would moan, ‘I am sure it was the servants. You have to be very careful, Preeti. They are very sly, these lower-class people. Once they know where you keep your keys, God help you...’ One of Mrs. Gupta’s hands would be clutching her right breast dramatically, checking to see that the keys she kept tucked inside her bra were safe. Reena was sure Mrs. Gupta was aiming for the ‘tragic heroine’ look, but with her long pointy nose and evil face, she was anything but.

Murli, Mrs. Gupta’s cook and Reena’s friend, regaled her with horror stories about crimes that went unchecked in his village. In Murli’s version, it was the rich people, the employers, who were the villains.

All this only served to make Reena more determined to be a detective. It would have helped if she had a book starring an Indian detective as a guide. The India she knew didn’t have moors, gorse, secret islands and open spaces like the England of the
Famous Five
books, except maybe at her grandmother’s house. But the open spaces in Taipur were populated with mud, mosquitoes and snakes. She couldn’t find a single book, fiction or otherwise, with an Indian girl, boy or adult detective. She had even braved asking the Scrooge of a librarian at her school, who had looked down her nose at Reena with her ogre-like eyes and pinched-together face and asked, ‘Who wants to know?’ Reena was a tiny bit ashamed of the fact she had fled. But, she reasoned, detectives needed to keep a low profile. They couldn’t afford to blow their cover...

In the beginning she had been all for forming a club like in the
Famous Five
or the
Secret Seven
and had spent ages concocting names and passwords. She had given up when she realised that she had names aplenty but a scarcity of friends or siblings who could be coerced to join. Then she started reading
Nancy Drew
and bingo, she realised that she could go it alone. She spent hours practising her signature in her notebook, adding flourishes and titles. She personally liked ‘Reena Diaz, Super Sleuth’ best. It had a nice ring to it. She decided she would be the first Indian girl detective. All that remained was to find a mystery. The only problem was that once Reena decided to become a detective, there were no mysteries to be found. No murders or burglaries were reported in the local newspapers or on the TV channels. Even Murli didn’t have any more horror stories of unsolved crimes to impart. Her life, Reena was fast coming to the conclusion, was extremely mundane. Nothing thrilling ever happened in it.

And now, thanks to Chinnu, she seemed to have stumbled on something exciting, even if it wasn’t the murder she’d been hoping for as her debut case.

Before proceeding any further with the discovery, and wanting to prolong the sense of mystery as much as possible, Reena glanced furtively around her, as she imagined Nancy Drew would. Chinnu was sitting under the wooden bench in the corner cleaning her whiskers busily with her paw.

Her grandmother, Mai, was having her afternoon siesta. She lay on the mat by the front door. Her mouth was open and little snores escaped it from time to time. Her sari was slightly askew, the pink skirt she wore underneath showing. The steady hum of rain relentlessly beating down on the tiles and the steps leading down from the front door served as a familiar lullaby.

Outside, the coconut trees stood out in relief against the blanket of rain which muddied the courtyard that Madhu had diligently swept and tidied just that morning. Dirty little puddles had formed everywhere.

Her parents were out visiting with her father’s old school friends. They had tried to get Reena to go but these friends of her dad’s did not have any children and nothing could persuade her to venture out into the blinding rain, get wet and muddy only to sit in their house, stare at their walls and listen to her father reminisce about the good old days. Looking at yellowing photographs of people she didn’t know to the accompaniment of Mai’s snores, while eating hot golibhajis dipped in coconut chutney and sipping cardamom tea was much better.

At least she was dry.

She went to the kitchen, ostensibly to get a tumbler of water, but in reality to check on Madhu. Madhu was sitting beside the hand grinder which she used to pound spices into thick masala for her curries, preferring it to the new electric grinder, which she insisted didn’t make a smooth enough paste. Her knees were drawn up, and she was resting her head on them. Strands of grey escaped her bun and obscured her lined face. She was wearing the stained, old apron that she was never without around her sari. She was fast asleep. The kitchen door was wide open and sprawled across the entrance was Gypsy. She was fast asleep as well.

Reena hurried back into the living room. Luck was on her side. Her parents were not due back for a while yet. And it was as if an epidemic of sleep had struck the rest of the household. Even Chinnu was asleep now, lying on her side under the wooden bench, paws stretched out.

Slowly, Reena pulled out whatever it was that was peeking out from beneath the picture she had been looking at—and sighed in disappointment. Just her luck! It wasn’t a mystery at all but another black-and-white photograph. It must have slipped behind the other one by mistake. Like the others, this one too was yellowed with age. And, like the others, rot had begun to eat away at it.

She pulled it closer for a better look—and noticed something different. Unlike the other pictures she had spent the afternoon flicking through, this one was creased and worn, as though someone had run their fingers across it many times and then folded it and tucked it away. It was a picture of three children, all of them smiling what were obviously false smiles for the camera. The youngest—the little girl sitting cross-legged on the floor, hair in bunches, flashing dimples—Reena recognised as Aunt Anita, from the countless pictures she had seen of her as a baby and toddler. The boy in the photograph, tummy sticking out, adorable gap-toothed grin, awkward stance, was her father, Deepak, as a child.