The Stolen Girl (12 page)

When Nomu, the boy Vani grew up playing cricket in the fields with, dies of a snake bite, she begs Aarti. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘I want to go. I want to say goodbye. I will be back in two days.’

‘Vani,’ Aarti sighs, ‘I can’t cope without you. You cannot leave me. Why don’t you understand? Why are you putting me through this?’

‘It is just for a couple of days.’

Aarti’s face hardens. ‘I don’t see why you are so attached to that village.
I
am your family now. If you go, I will die. Remember the pact,’ her voice sharp as venomous fangs stabbing tender skin. ‘Now, where is that shirt I was going to wear? Have you ironed it?’

That is the first time Vani thinks of running away. The pact, Aarti’s intense dependency on her, is becoming a noose around Vani’s neck.

She thinks of running away countless times after that. Whenever she is tempted to escape, the thought that holds her back is: where will she go? Vani knows nobody in Bangalore; all the people she knows are in the village, most of them dying or already dead. And she doesn’t fit in back in the village, not anymore. They cannot keep her. That is why they sent her away in the first place. And if Vani does escape, what if Aarti actually kills herself like she is always threatening to do? Aarti is neurotic, highly emotional. Vani wouldn’t put it past her to wilfully take her own life.

And despite everything, despite Aarti’s stifling need for Vani and her maddening superiority, despite her ordering Vani around and her bringing up the pact at every opportunity, despite her not allowing Vani to return to the village, her keeping Vani imprisoned almost, Vani
understands
her neurotic, highly insecure employer/friend. She feels sorry for Aarti.

And so Vani stays with Aarti, even though her every instinct warns her to flee. She casts her lot in with her.

H
eartache

Noun:
deep sadness especially for the loss of someone or something loved.

Synonyms:
grief, heartbreak, woe, sorrow.

Related Words:
agony, torment, dejection, desolateness.

I
wake
to mellow morning light streaming in under tear-glued, salt-stained eyelashes, dancing a tango upon closed lids, demanding that I open my eyes. I refuse to acquiesce to the request of soft February sun, creating dappled figures that cavort beneath my lids and, eyes shut tight, turn to my right, facing my mother’s bed. I know she’ll be sitting up in bed, her hair, which she normally ties back into a rigid bun, free to cascade down around her shoulders, a soft blue-black cloud with the occasional grey thrown in. She will be praying, mumbling whispered endearments and entreaties to a God she desperately, persistently believes in, her lips moving intently, her eyes closed. Her shift doesn’t start till ten and she allows herself this luxury until I wake, her mouth moving quietly in prayer.

‘God has been good to me thus far, very good,’ she likes to say when I ask her what she is doing, her eyes softening like ice cream sitting too long outside the confines of the freezer. ‘He has given me you and I am thanking him for it.’

‘So why don’t you go to the temple then?’ I tease, knowing it is the hordes of people milling there that puts my timid mother off.

‘I don’t have the time,’ she mumbles.

‘Don’t have the time for God? How could you, Mum? He might smite you for that – beware!’

And she will turn round in distress as if God is standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, hand raised ready to smite. Easily alarmed, that’s my mum.

I open my eyes to smile at her, spy the wardrobe where her bed should be. Have we moved sometime during the night? The night… And memory comes flooding back, in aching waves of pain, and I close my eyes and burrow under the bedclothes, pulling the duvet up around my head, tasting salt. The flower of pain that has taken up residence inside me throbs out a scorching scarlet greeting. It seems to have encroached everywhere, laying claim to my unresisting body. I lie there, trying to delude myself that the cocoon of darkness, the smell of my own sweat and hurt, is my mother’s embrace…

I could not get to sleep the previous night. Every time I closed my eyes, her face careered across closed lids, eyes pleading, ‘I am your mother, Diya. You are mine. I love you, Diya, my darling girl, light of my life.’

Where was she? What were they doing to her? Was she comfortable? And then, even though I fought it, the policewoman’s voice inveigled in, ‘Your
real
mother has been searching for you for the past thirteen years.’
No, No, No.

I did not want to think about it, any of it. But I couldn’t think of anything else.

‘Mum,’ I heard, a plaintive cry. And my heart ached. It literally ached. And I understood, finally, fully, the meaning of the word ‘heartache’. Food. I wanted,
needed
food to drown out another, different kind of hunger.

The soft padding of a little boy’s unerring footsteps, the creaking of a door, Farah’s voice, ‘Shh, Zain, it’s okay, Mummy’s here.’

Heartache bloomed, it reigned supreme. I ached for the arms of the woman who had loved me, looked after me for thirteen years, who had been, who is, my world, my life.

I stood up, I paced the small room. I switched on the bedside lamp, perused the books, but my mind wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t settle, and reading didn’t calm me or transport me like it usually did. How could I lose myself in someone else’s story when mine was taking centre stage?

I remembered the time we saw a little boy fall into the road. Mum had rushed to him while everyone else stood helpless, horrified. She had careened straight into oncoming traffic, disregarding the groan of vehicles, the distressed whine of car horns, the yelling of strangers, the police car drawing up, pulsing blue lights dancing. She had helped the boy up and wiped away his tears gently with the hem of her sari and handed him to his mother across the road, a look passing between the two of them, a look party only to mothers, a grateful look which encompassed a whole dialogue, completely wordless, underscored by glistening tears in both pairs of eyes. My mother had done this despite the fact that she did not like crowds, that she was afraid, illogically I had always thought, of the police.

‘We have done no wrong, Mum, committed no crime. They are not after you, you know,’ I would laugh when, every time a police car whizzed past, siren blaring she would tense, making to run away, convinced they were coming for her, her eyes wide and distraught.

She had flinched when I said that, her grip tightening on my arm, and I had smiled and patted her hand, ‘It’s okay, Mum. I was only joking.’

Oftentimes we were more like friends than mother and daughter. She made me laugh, brought out my protective instincts because she was afraid of everything. At thirteen, I was almost as tall as her, and far more worldly wise I thought, having commandeered and belonged to this world that she was still not quite a party to, because of her hang-ups and her many worries and fears. She watched from the outskirts, happy that I had fit in, and when I was with her, I felt accomplished, basking in the glow of her approval, her pride, and the bullies, their harsh words, the ribbing I endured at school was forgotten.

We had fun together, despite the fact that she was always working and exhausted when she was not. When she was with me, her face would radiate contentment, pleasure, pride.

‘You make my world complete,’ she liked to say. ‘You are my light, Diya, you are my world.’

And I knew I was, completely, unequivocally.

And now, my world is shattered and I don’t know who I am, where I belong.

I shake my head. No, I cannot erase all that went before because of one silly accusation. There must be some mistake, there must.

Where are you, Mum? I will come and find you, I will.

Somehow the thought gives me the courage I need to fling off the duvet, open the door, and poke my head outside. The house is quiet, still. No boisterous shouts, no noise, no laughter.

I make my way to the bathroom, stare at the pudgy-faced, swollen-eyed girl in the mirror and tell her to get a grip. ‘You are going to sort this today,’ I tell her sternly. ‘You are going to ask the social worker to take you to your mum, and you are not going to budge until she says yes.’

I pause then, the word ‘mum’ opening up a cavernous hunger for her arms, her touch, and I peruse my face in the mirror as I have done a million times before trying to spy in this fleshy visage my mother’s delicate features. Her face blossoms before my eyes and I think, her nose? No. Her eyes? No.

‘You look like your father,’ she’s said when I’ve asked. ‘He died when you were a baby. He loved you so, absolutely adored you. Who wouldn’t?’ her face shining.

‘How? How did he die?’

And her eyes would fluster, they would flit to the chair, the table, her hands frantically working the ragged ends of her sari. ‘An accident.’

I used to think she was a terrible liar. Now though, I wonder.

I thought her agitation was because of the fact that she had lost him, because memories of him were too hurtful, too raw. Now, I wonder.

No, Diya, no. She is your mum.

But I can see nothing of her in me, nothing at all. Nothing at all.

A flash of anger at her, the purple-red of a heating coil.
Why, Mum? Why?

My eyes fill with tears. I furiously blink them away. Recall her words as she was led away, her sigh so immense, ‘Perhaps there was some other way, but at the time…’

What do you mean, Mum? What do you mean? I am so angry at you. When I find you, I will give you a big hug, just to revel once again in the feel of your arms around me, and then I will fight with you. A big roaring wallop of a spat. Like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Tears threaten again and I resolutely stride out of the bathroom and make my way downstairs, deliberately making a lot of noise on the stairs to alert everyone to my presence just in case they have forgotten I am here.

All the three rooms that comprise the downstairs – the living room, dining room and kitchen – are empty. Buttery golden light pools in through the windows, dances on the surfaces, fawning on the curtains, lending a sheen to the worn black sofas, shining on the silent telly. It is one of those sunny yet extremely cold February days.

I walk to the kitchen which smells of stale curry and raw onions, and see the note on the table:
Taken the boys to their swimming lesson, will be back at 11:00. Sohrab had to go into work – another emergency! You were asleep, didn’t want to wake you. Milk, juice, butter, marmalade, cheese in fridge, bread in bread bin, cereal on top of fridge. Make yourself at home. Farah. xxx

I look at the clock, 10:15 a.m. I know my social worker’s arriving at 11:00 as well. I will be ready by then. I will have plenty of questions for her. She will be shocked and wonder where the quiet mousey girl from yesterday has gone. Good.

I open the fridge, pour myself a glass of milk, down it in one gulp and then start my quest. I systematically go through each drawer, find lentils and pulses, rice, atta for chapattis, three different kinds of pasta. I open and close each cupboard and drawer, disturbing nothing until, in the last set of drawers, tucked into the corner, I find an open pack of Chocolate Fingers, a six-pack of Walkers containing only three packs – two cheese and onion and one ready salted, and a four-finger KitKat.

I take my haul upstairs and eat my way through the loot, tasting nothing except the sallow yellow tang of grief. Once again, the food does nothing to ease the pain, to keep the sorrow, the desperate ache for my mum at bay. The taste of chocolate and salt, invoking nausea, summoning heartache. Like in the hospital cafeteria the previous evening, I cannot finish the food. It hurts too much, brings back memories of how, lost and desperate, I had raided the kitchen of the flat that I had, until the previous evening, shared with my mother and munched my way through all the junk food I could find and yet… it hadn’t helped. It could not assuage the anguish, could not douse the pain of missing my mum, could not quieten the voice shouting in my head that she had lied to me all my life, betrayed me.
No, no, no, no.

Food is not helping anymore. In fact, if anything, it is exacerbating the wound, rubbing against it, chafing it.

I throw the half-eaten KitKat, the dregs of the chocolate biscuits and the crisps in the bin just as I hear the key in the lock, the high-pitched voices of the boys bringing noise on a blast of freezing air into the house and Farah asking them to shush. I sit there, one of the books from the bedside table open on my lap, staring at nothing, the words blurring before my eyes.

How is it fair,
I think,
that they have their mum with them while I don’t?

Stop,
I tell myself, just as a car pulls up outside, making a racket on the gravel. There is a soft knock on the door and the musical voices of the boys calling ‘Mum’ in unison drift upstairs. I ignore the ache in my heart as I hear Farah’s gentle footsteps making their way to the front door, as another blast of ice incites the warm fuzzy cloud of air that has just settled inside the house into disarray like a cockerel among chickens.

‘
W
here is my mum
?’ I ask Jane as soon as we are seated in the car.

She does not look away from the road and her soft voice undulating brings to mind the honeyed sweetness of tender pink marshmallows exploding in my mouth, belying the harshness of the words she is uttering, ‘She has been taken to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court and she will be served papers for extradition today I imagine.’

Extradition. I roll the word around in my mouth. A word I don’t know – one that qualifies for my vocabulary book. Hard, uncompromising, like the plum stone I bit into by mistake once and nearly broke my tooth on. ‘What is extradition?’ It drops out of my mouth like a cold, ruthless bullet. I hate the word, I decide.

Jane sighs and I know immediately that whatever is coming is not good news. ‘Since she committed…uh…the crime in India…she will have to go back to India for the trial…’

The panic comes from nowhere, enveloping me, swallowing me whole. ‘No!’ I yell, dropping my head onto my lap, screaming my pain out, ‘No! No! No!’

The car swerves and stops. I feel cool arms around me. Jane doesn’t say anything, just holds me, and for that I am grateful, even though as soon as I am able to breathe I shrug off her arms. Every hug I receive, however welcome, only makes me miss Mum more, only shows how inadequate other arms are when I am attuned to that one pair, the arms that have raised me, that have played with me, that have carried me, held me countless times, have nursed me through childhood illnesses, that have always, always been there. Until now when I need them the most.

‘There must be some mistake,’ I say when I can talk. I will not be able to live knowing she is in another country, thousands of miles away. I can’t bear it. I cannot.

‘The Indian police had to submit a request for a warrant of arrest and extradition to the Secretary of State here, Diya,’ Jane’s voice is softer than usual, like a very fluffy, warm pillow I could sink into. Despite how much her words have the power to hurt, her voice takes the edge off them. ‘It was all checked, double-checked and approved.’

I ignore her words, let them wash over me and away, like a stream gurgling over pebbles on its meandering journey to the river. ‘Can I see her?’ I ask once again, knowing what her answer will be and yet unable to bear the thought of Mum being so far away, separated by an unbridgeable distance. They cannot do this, isolate me from the only mum I have known, surely? I have to see her. I have to. Now. I will only find the comfort I am seeking in her arms. This cannot be happening to me, to us. This is some sort of joke.

‘Um…I know you want to...’ Jane begins and I explode.