Monsoon Memories (25 page)

From
[email protected]
. Subject: Oh, my God, I cannot believe it!!!

She laughed out loud. Typical Anita.
Neither can I, Anu.
She clicked on it. A long letter. From her sister, who hated writing, who thought writing letters was a waste of time spent living: ‘Come, let’s go pick water lilies. Press them on a page and send them to Da instead of writing to him. He’ll like that.’

Her heart singing, she started to read:

Dearest Shirin,

I cannot believe it! It’s you. After all these years. Imagine my surprise when, after a long break—I have been off work, long story, will explain later— decided to check my mail on the off chance there was something from Uttam. Okay, there it is. I can’t go two sentences without bringing him up...

Shirin grinned. It was like talking to her sister; her letter just as messy as her thoughts, jumping all over the place. Her Anu hadn’t changed one bit.

Uttam and I have split up. I am staying at Deepak’s for now.

Staying at Deepak’s? Shirin’s heart jumped.

It’s been a week since we split up and I have almost forgotten what we argued about. It was a bad one. We both said things we shouldn’t have. I was hoping he would call me, ask me to come back. I miss him, Shirin. There I go again, slipping so easily into little-sister mode, offloading my problems on you. Shirin, I’ve missed you so much. I have so many things to tell you. But most of all, I want to say sorry. I’m sorry, Shirin, for abandoning you. For not keeping in touch, for going along with Ma and Deepak, for shunning you. I still talk to you, you know, mostly, I have to admit, when the going gets tough. At night, into my pillow, I talk, imagining it to be you. Uttam caught me once. He laughed. He doesn’t understand this bond between sisters. It’s been so hard without you, like missing a limb. But it must be a thousand times worse for you. I didn’t have to leave everyone and everything I loved behind. And that after everything you’d been through... When I reached this new low in my life with Uttam, I came to Deepak, even though I knew he didn’t approve. I wanted the comfort of family. You didn’t have that. At your darkest time, the time when you needed us most, we reneged. I am sorry. I struck a deal. My seventeen pieces of silver were Uttam. I wanted him. You were the price I paid. Ironical, isn’t it, that now I’ve split up with him, I get an email from you?

Shirin, I have something to confess, to get off my chest before writing anything further. And I will understand if I never get another email from you, if, after hearing what I have to say, you decide never to contact me, talk to me again. Here goes: Shirin, I used you. Shamelessly. I announced I was marrying Uttam, just after everything happened with you… I timed it just right. After what happened with you, what I was doing didn’t seem quite so bad in Ma’s eyes. It didn’t have the same devastating impact as it would have done before… And of course I bargained. I wanted to get in touch with you, not go along with them. But it was you or Uttam… And I chose him.

I did one thing, though, my little rebellion. I changed my name to Sinha. I did not want to be associated with the Taipur Diazes any more. Stuff their status and their standing in Taipur society...

All these years, one thought has been hounding me. If it had been you in my situation, you would
not
have done the same, made the choice I did. Chosen your love over your sister. You were always the bigger person, Shirin. Shouldering the blame when I did something wrong. Carrying my crosses for me.

Over the years, I’ve wanted to get in touch countless times. And every time, Ma’s face swam before me, distorted, truly ugly as she snipped off your beautiful hair, that hair I have always admired and envied. And I became, once again, that girl cowering behind Madhu, that girl who couldn’t stand up for her sister… What if I got in touch and you didn’t want to talk to me? I could understand after what I did.

I brought it up with Deepak once. You’d been gone six years and the pain of losing you had morphed into a dull ache. I was flying to London on a shoot and I was determined to look you up, bring you home…

You were here, Anu? So close.

Deepak blustered and pontificated with his, ‘People in Taipur have been looking up to the Diaz family for generations,’ and, ‘I will not allow the family name to be sullied even though you tried your best with Uttam. When are you going to have a child? People are talking…’ I lost my temper. ‘We are living in the twenty-first century, not the middle ages!’ I yelled. ‘How can you live with what we’ve done, Deepak? I’m finding her and bringing her back.’ ‘Reena,’ was all he said. ‘Think of what this would do to her. She is happy, settled. It’s what Shirin wanted.’ There was vulnerability in his face, and fear. He loves her, Shirin, more than he’s loved anyone, more even than his love of status and family name. For all his faults, he’s a good dad. You chose well.

I didn’t come to London in the end. The shoot got cancelled. I think I was glad I didn’t have to make the choice, didn’t have to be proactive. I could preserve the status quo but still console myself if I tried.

You once told me you admired my ‘devil may care’ courage. What courage does it take to barter your sister for your love? What courage does it take to come up with excuses not to do the one thing that would make a difference? You are the brave one, Shirin, the truly courageous one. Taking all that happened on the chin. Doing what you had to for Reena.

In your email, you said, ‘If you want to talk...’ It should be the other way around. I cannot believe you still want to talk to me. After what I did. Thank you.

Shirin, your email, it came in the wake of me being grilled by an eleven-year-old on how I could possibly abandon my sister, how I could wipe her out of my life. Yes, I am talking about Reena. She’s grown into a lovely young girl—mature, sensible, kind. When I look at her, I feel broody. I who have always maintained I am not maternal. She’s been asking me about you. She found that photograph of us taken on your twelfth birthday, the one where we had to pose in Ashok’s studio for what felt like hours and I started to cry and had to be consoled by promise of mango ice cream after—if I smiled. Remember? Madhu had saved it. Reena doesn’t know much, only that you are her aunt. She’s angry on your behalf with all of us. As she should be. What we did, are still doing, is disgraceful. I gave her the letters you wrote to me while I was away at college. Hope that is okay. I wanted her to get to know you first, before easing her into...

She looks just like you.

Shall I tell her?

Shirin, I have so much more to say. But I will end for now with this: Come home. This has gone on long enough. Ma and Deepak can be talked around. Please come home.

Lots and lots of love (remember how we used to sign off letters to Da this way? Only Ma made us add, ‘Craving your blessings.’ Bleugh.).

Anu xxx

‘Shirin.’ She was vaguely aware of arms around her. Kate. She pointed to the screen. ‘Read,’ she mouthed.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

Afterwards, Kate locked Shirin’s computer. ‘Come outside for a bit.’ Kate led her to the smokers’ corner. ‘Hay fever,’ Shirin explained, sniffing, to Jane, Justine and Rob who were blowing smoke rings and laughing about something.
In silent agreement, she and Kate chose the bench furthest from the door, tucked into the rose bushes. ‘Hay fever in October? What was I thinking?’

‘You weren’t. Sod it. They weren’t listening anyway. Here. Have a good cry,’ Kate said, handing Shirin a pack of Kleenex.

Shirin blew her nose, crumpled the tissue in her fingers. ‘She’s found out about me. She’s angry on my behalf.’ Through her tears she smiled. And then she was laughing, so hard she had to gasp for breath.

Kate laughed along with her.

‘When I think of going home,’ she said, sniffing, ‘I think of my mother…’ Her ma’s face. Closed. Turning away.
You are dead to me.
A memory: reading her mother’s diary, hungrily lapping up her mother’s words, the cold seeping in through the floorboards and settling in her bones...

Just before her marriage, when she was preparing to leave her childhood home, Shirin discovered her mother’s diary—a worn hardbound notebook, a posy of faded pink carnations adorning the front with ‘JACINTA MACHADO’ written in bold capitals below—lurking among her mother’s best saris at the back of the Godrej wardrobe. It felt like a gift, at an emotional time. Shirin had had no idea that her mother kept diaries. At last, an insight into her mother’s mind. Without pausing to question whether what she was doing was right, Shirin packed the diary.

She didn’t have time to read it. Preparations for her wedding were under way; there was so much to do. She couldn’t read it immediately after her wedding either. But she hid it among her belongings, savouring this secret from home, looking at her mother’s handwriting, conjuring her up when homesickness threatened; and waited for the right moment to read it. It never came. Events took over and after
it
happened, Shirin was too depressed to care or even remember that she had something of her mother’s.

And then one gloomy, drizzle-soaked autumn morning, their first week in the UK, Shirin was pacing aimlessly between cardboard boxes that Vinod was in the process of unpacking, when she saw something disturbingly familiar poking out of one of them. Curious, she pulled it out. And found herself staring at her mother’s busy, untidy handwriting, so unlike Jacinta’s calm, reserved exterior. She stopped pacing, plonked herself down on the chilly wooden floor, and, one finger unconsciously caressing the pages her mother had once touched, where her aloof mother had poured out her feelings, she started to read.

That overcast wintry day, sitting among the cardboard boxes which were all she and Vinod had of the past they had left behind, with her mother’s diary on her lap, something had unfurled in the cold emptiness that had settled within Shirin since
it
happened. She had been wanted. Her mother had wanted her. This diary was proof. Her mother’s voice described the joy she felt on discovering she was pregnant, her excitement on having a sibling for Deepak, but stopped right before Shirin’s birth. She’d flicked through the few remaining pages, feeling cheated, wanting to read more, to find out how her mother had felt when she was born: a girl; dark-skinned; plump.

‘How could she do what she did, Kate?’ Jacinta’s face the last time she’d seen her swam before her eyes. That day, after reading the diary, she’d tucked it carefully back into the box, feeling bereft, chilled to the bone. She’d put on another coat, pulled the hood over her head, left the apartment and walked, as she had done every day since she and Vinod arrived in the UK, as if the very act of walking would erase her mistakes and the recent past... ‘For a long time, I could not forgive myself for what I did. But she’s my mother... Mothers forgive, don’t they? If Reena had been in my situation, God forbid, I would have believed her, been there for her…’

‘Shirin...’

‘One day, when I was about eight I think, Ma took the three of us by bus to Mangalore. I got off at the wrong stop. As the bus pulled away with her in it and me standing outside, I saw her face. And I carried her expression of pure panic with me for days, savouring it, like a gift. That was the first time I knew,
really
knew that my ma loved me...’ She paused, took a breath. ‘All my life I’ve tried to please her, to be worthy of her. When I married the man she chose for me, I thought I had succeeded. She was happy, proud even. Of me. And then...’ Her mother’s face. Wounded. Ashamed.

‘This is about Reena, too, Shirin.’ Kate’s voice was soft.

‘Oh, Kate. Why do you think I did what I did? That horrible choice I made. It is about Reena, but it is and always has been about Ma... How can I ask Reena to invite me into her life, to accept me, if my own mother cannot forgive me?’

* * *

She forwarded Vinod Anita’s email and he called right back.

‘You read it?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Joy in his voice, dancing down the phone line.

‘Anita said she looks just like me.’

‘She’s beautiful, then.’ And, a heartbeat later, ‘We can go home now, Shonu.’

Chappals hitting feet. Like slaps. Hard. Urgent. Fetid rank breaths. Gaining. A pair of eyes, empty, menacing. She willed them away. They went. Vinod’s face puckered in pain: ‘I miss them.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Once Anu has talked to Ma and Deepak and Preeti. And prepared Reena.’

‘Sounds to me like she’s already made up her mind about you. She’s on your side, giving her aunt a piece of her mind.’

She laughed along with Vinod, identifying the emotion ballooning in her chest as pride. ‘Yes. That she is.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Destined for Greatness

‘S
o, is she starring in a film, then, your aunt?’ Murli asked, grinning. Since Aunt Anita’s arrival, Reena’d hardly had time to see him, but now they were sitting in their usual spot by the pool, Murli having escaped his chores for a few minutes.

It was a sunny Saturday. Birds chirped, women gossiped, sitting or standing hunched in little groups outside their flats. Chattering monkeys in bold gangs of twos and threes hopped from the roof of one building to the other, trying to enter flats through windows left inadvertently open, drawn by the promise of food, scents of cooking. One sat right across from Reena, black lips on a hairy brown face stretched in a smirk, munching on a chapatti, feeding bits to the baby straddled across its stomach. The two girls were on the swings again, actually swinging this time, heads thrown back, pigtails flying. Upstairs in their flat, Reena’s dad worked. Aunt Anita and Preeti were shopping. They had asked if Reena wanted to come but she’d declined, saying she’d rather read a book. ‘Just like your Aunt Shirin,’ Aunt Anita had whispered in her ear, and, ‘No reply yet.’ The fact that she said the two together: Aunt Shirin and reply, in the same sentence, Reena took to be confirmation that the email had been from Aunt Shirin. It was only a matter of time before Reena found out the truth. ‘She’ll be back soon. I know it,’ Madhu had said last month. Reena’s heart jumped at the thought of meeting this mythical person she had grown to like and even perhaps love, without ever having met her… The girl from her dream rose before her eyes.
Bring me home, please.
She blinked.