A Sister's Promise (35 page)

England.

A country that is as cold as her heart feels without love to warm it.

She discovers that it is not far enough away.

She watches the single mothers, allowed to live their life and bring up their children without being scarred by disrepute, or brushed by the indelible paint of blame and dishonour. She wonders how Sharda is coping. She tries not to think of her child.

The stink of a sullied reputation and the taint of smoke dog her with a litany of her sins, the procession of her mistakes.

Her husband is kind. He is gentle. He gives her space.

But his patience has its limits.

He wants a child. She doesn’t; a baby she longed to hold, but dared not touch, haunts her.

‘Please, Puja, one child,’ he begs.

‘I . . . I can’t, Dev,’ she sighs.

‘Leave me,’ she says. ‘I’m not right for you. You need a woman who’ll love you like you deserve to be loved.’

I used you to come here, thinking I could escape my past, the deaths of my parents inextricably linked with the birth of my child.

‘I do not want another woman. I love
you
,’ he shouts exasperated and insanely upset.

There are fights, anger, recriminations.

She cannot bear to see her husband so upset. But she also cannot bear to bring another child into this uncertain world, fickle as the weather of this country she finds herself in, one more child she couldn’t bear to lose, one more perfect being that she won’t be worthy of, one more innocent angel she’ll love so much that she’ll be afraid to blemish it with the ineradicable mark of her countless transgressions.

So she continues to take the pill.

But then she is ill. Spiking temperature. Sickness and diarrhoea. Hallucinations. Visions of rain and fire, of death and birth. The smell of manure and blood. A wispy haired child bawling even though her name spells happiness. A squat, bespectacled girl who promises to love and protect Puja forever. Zooming on a motorbike, pigtails flying, spinning dreams of grand escapes with a boy who says she is his best friend in all the world. Sitting with Ma and Da in the market, counting out coins. Her mother laughing as they spin in the courtyard, raising a curtain of saffron dust. Her father hefting her high in the swing of his arms:
My beloved girl.

Her husband looks after her. He soothes her. He comforts her. He holds her. And he loves her. Six weeks later, she finds out that she is pregnant.

Dev is ecstatic. She is terrified.

Nine months later, Raj is born.

This time, she is not bespattered with fear, haunted by smoke and fire and the hovering presence of death, with just the wise woman for company, in a hut smelling of drains and cow dung, and populated with marrows.

This time, she is in a sterile hospital room and it is her husband holding her hand, him and the midwife urging her to push.

And yet, she sees pregnant yellow marrows; she breathes in the smell of sewers and compost; she hears the wise woman’s voice in her ear, and she is comforted by her piercing gaze.

‘I won’t be able to give this one away,’ she wails.

‘You won’t have to,’ the wise woman whispers gently in her ear.

Raj is born to celebrations and whoops, and there is no accompanying death. No terrifying bargain to make.

But there is penance.

A warm, squiggly being on her chest. Living, breathing, wailing, perfect. Her child. Hers.

She doesn’t touch him. She cannot. How can she bear to touch this child when she didn’t touch Kushi? How can she comfort this child while Kushi went uncomforted? And what if she brands him with the smear of her mistakes, or punishes him with the stamp of her foul past? She couldn’t bear that.

He has his father to love him. He is better off without her cursed love. Her love is a poisonous thing that strikes when you least expect.

Her baby cries, the mournful complaint of a hungry kitten, wanting her breasts, wanting succour, wanting more than she can give. She closes her eyes. The acerbic tang of fluids and fear and fire and death and toxic love intrude into her fatigued trance. Her baby’s plaintive laments splotch her battered heart, and stain her snatched dreams the waxy yellow of an oozing wound.

Dev tries.

He employs a nanny. He goes to work and when he comes home, he looks after Raj.

He tries to be patient with Puja.

But she can see that it is harder for him to find the forbearance, harder to reconcile this woman who refuses to be a mother.

‘Just hold him, look, he wants you to.’

Raj angles his small body towards her, trying to jump from Dev’s arms to hers, his little hands stretched out, palms wriggling.

Puja imagines Raj’s arms hooked tightly around her neck, her nostrils redolent with his sweet baby boy smell of earth and moisture, of joy and adventure.

She turns away, thinking of a little girl growing up in another country, calling another woman, ‘Ma.’

The inevitable happens. Eventually, Dev gets tired of trying. One evening, he comes home and sits her down and from his sombre face, Puja knows what it coming.

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, Puja.’

She nods. She understands. She has been expecting this since she married him.

‘I thought my love alone could sustain us. But it’s no longer enough.’

‘Yes.’

‘I will see Raj regularly, of course.’

‘Of course.’

And just like that it is over. Another era in her life.

Now it is just her and Raj, bumbling along.

She tries to do her best by her son, but they are like two isolated balloons that will combust if they touch.

With Dev’s generous divorce settlement, Puja invests in property. She will not countenance going back to the destitute person she was. She hears the landlord mocking, ‘You failed PUC. What will you do?’ She loses herself in her work.

Raj starts at school, a sturdy, quiet little boy who seems content with the nanny and does not ask much of his mother.

Dev marries again, and his wife is everything he deserves: a plump, happy, loving woman who is always cooking, her kitchen overflowing and heart giving. He moves to Scotland with his wife for his job. But he keeps up his visits with Raj despite having a whole other family, twin daughters and another son.

Then he announces that he is moving back to India. He promises Raj that he will be in touch. Raj walks to his room and shuts the door and refuses to come out to say goodbye.

‘You love Raj so much Puja.
I
know it. But I don’t think
he
does. Show him. Please. Before it is too late,’ Dev urges Puja before he leaves for India.

Puja nods, knowing that Dev knows that he is asking the impossible. After all, isn’t this why he is moving back to India with another woman?

As Raj grows older, he and Puja drift further apart. He takes his example from Puja and becomes very distant, a taciturn, sullen child.

Every once in a while, he accuses her, ‘You only care about work.’

She bristles and yells at him, although deep down she knows that he’s voicing the truth, what he has observed and experienced, his perspective as a child living under her roof, the only other participant in their silent, morose family of two.

And she realises that she is no better than Gopi, who chose money over her. She is also choosing money, the promise and cushion and impersonal security of wealth over the vicissitudes, the capricious travesties of love.

She expands her business, amassing more and more properties. She loses her son, accumulating more and more late nights, missed chances and multiplied mistakes.

Somewhere in a hot, dust-glazed country, her other child grows. Sometimes Puja wonders if Kushi yearns to escape like she did, if perhaps it would have been better to bring Kushi here, where personal freedom is not an entity you have to fight for, but is a given. But she baulks at the thought. How can she face her child? What will she tell her? How can she disrupt her life, the life that Puja decided was best for her daughter?

And so she stifles her aching heart, and the longing that threatens to burst out of it.

When on holiday in other countries, she will see a woman cooking on an open hearth, catch a whiff of bubbling rice, breathe in the stench of festering rubbish, the reek of cesspits and stale lives, she will hear a baby’s mewling cry, see the mud rise off untarred roads, an asphyxiating cloud of peach smog, and she will feign a headache and retire to the impersonal hotel room for the rest of the day.

Eventually, with the passing of time, she begins to call India home again in that secret part of her heart where she keeps her past locked away.

Every year, on the day her daughter was born in a hut under an awning of swaying marrows, she claims a migraine and retreats to her room. She lies with a pillow covering her face and in the stilted dark, allows herself access to the memories that she has been keeping at bay. She gives her thirsting mind permission to wander, torturing it by conjuring images of the child she knowingly abandoned, a child growing up with no knowledge of her.

She gives in to the cravings she keeps hidden, wave upon wave of painful recollections, the smell of her sister, and the comfort of Sharda’s accommodating arms. And in the evening, she cooks marrow soup, the buttery concoction reminding her of a day that she dare not acknowledge, a love she secretly nurses, a past she misses, a sister she hankers for, a child she willingly gave up but would do anything for a glimpse of, for a touch, a word, a smile, a hug, a missive.

Puja realises that she has messed up. She has dug herself into a hole and she cannot dig herself out of it. She has alienated herself from her son. Her daughter has grown up without her. She doesn’t know how her sister feels about having been burdened with a child, not having been given a choice in the matter. The child
Sharda
was meant to have with the man
Sharda
was meant to marry.

Late at night, as she catches up on emails and waits for her wayward, uncommunicative son to come home, as she gags on loneliness, she wonders if it was worth it. If perhaps, she should have taken a chance at love again. Perhaps she should have stayed in India, held her child close and opened her heart wide when the wise woman had offered Kushi to her, the day that her parents passed away and her daughter entered the world. What would have happened then? Would everything be different?