Oleander Girl (12 page)

“Plus I feel stupid for being so gullible.”

He takes a deep breath. His job right now is to comfort Korobi. She is his heart, his breath, the way out of his own abyss. “You can’t blame yourself for believing them. You had no reason to think it could be a lie. I would have done the same.”

“Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’m never going to trust anyone so blindly.”

The weary bitterness in her voice troubles him. “Cara, surely you can trust me.”

She raises a mutinous chin, her body hard, her eyes narrow and so angry he hardly recognizes them. It strikes him that he doesn’t know her as well as he’d thought. But then she gives a giant sigh and crumples against him.

“You’re right. You’re the only one I can count on. That’s why I had to tell you. Grandma said I shouldn’t, that it might change things between us. But I had to. I can’t lie like that to the man I love.”

That word
love,
it comforts him. “You did the best thing.”

“Was Grandma right? Do you feel differently about me because of what I just told you?”

“Of course not.” But a part of Rajat is troubled. One of the things that had always charmed him about Korobi was her background. Old Bengal through and through, her great-grandfather the judge, her grandfather the barrister, her father the brilliant law student cut down tragically in his prime—khandaani, something with heft, something you could never buy your way into. As different from Sonia as handloomed silk from glittery synthetics. Marriage to Korobi, he had hoped, would initiate him into the mysteries of this life.

Now she isn’t quite the person he had believed her to be.

Can she read his thoughts? Because just then she says, “I’m so confused. All the things I was so proud of, my family, my heritage—they’re only half-true. The other half of me—I don’t know anything about it. Except that all this time my father was alive, and in America.”

In the light of the streetlamp Rajat examines his fiancée’s distressed expression, the slight tremble of her lips, the hair escaped from its braid to curl untidily around her face. For a heart-stopping moment, he feels nothing. Then, thankfully, love comes rushing back like the ocean after low tide. It’s in her eyes, the real reason he loves her, and nothing can take it away: her forthrightness, her unspoiled enthusiasm—and now, courage and honesty in the face of the unexpected. At the moment, those eyes are swollen from crying and clouded with distrust. He vows that he’ll bring the shine back to them. He, Rajat, will be 100 percent dependable. He feels again that overwhelming desire to protect that he has never experienced with any other girlfriend. He kisses her with great relief.

“You’re still my Cara, and I adore you. What you learned today doesn’t make the slightest difference to me. Don’t think about it anymore. We’ll get married in a couple of months, just as we had planned. With time, what you heard will fade away—”

She shakes her head impatiently as though she didn’t even hear his
declaration of love. “Rajat, you don’t understand! I don’t
want
it to fade away. I’m shocked and hurt, yes, but I’m excited, too. Do you see? I have a father now! I can meet the man my mother loved so much! All my life I longed to understand my parents. Now fate has given me a chance.”

Rajat doesn’t like the sound of this, but before he can respond, a car door slams, startling him. A trio of men has stepped out of an Ambassador, carrying bottles of beer. They see Rajat and Korobi, and one of them says something. The others snicker. The group begins to walk toward them.

“Cara, we have to leave.”

“I need to find him, talk to him. I need to know who he is. And he can finally tell me about my mother—the things that no one else knows. My mother in love. Won’t that be wonderful, Rajat? Then I’ll know who I really am, too. But how will I find him? I don’t even have his name. And America is such a big country.”

He hears the words, but they are too much to process right now. He grabs her hand and hurries her to the car.

“Will you help me, Rajat?”

The men are closer now, goonda types, he can see: flashy nylon shirts, thick chains around their necks. One calls out, “Come on, bhaiya, join us for a drink. And your girlfriend, too.”

Korobi doesn’t notice. “Until I find him, Rajat, I’m not sure I can get married.”

He pushes her into the car. Locks her door. At least she knows enough to lean over and unlock the driver’s side.

As he slips inside the car and locks his door, too, the man sneers, “Looks like the bhaiya got scared! Eh, bhaiya, we were only being sociable.”

Heat pulses inside Rajat’s head. The city is going to the dogs, even this beautiful riverbank. He wishes he carried a gun, like some of his friends do. He has a flash vision of pointing it at the man’s face, seeing his features crumple. In his mind he says,
Let’s see who’s scared now, bhaiya.

He takes a deep breath. Back away from trouble, Rajat. You need to be Cara’s support right now. Plus, Papa and Maman have enough problems—the gallery in America, their money troubles here. And now this
news about Cara’s father. He needs to figure out how to contain it, like a radioactive leak. As for that daft notion of hers that she can’t get married until she finds Rob, Rajat hopes that a good night’s sleep will rid her of it.

“We’ve got to tell your parents.” Korobi puts a hand on his arm. “I know they will want to know. They are like parents to me already, but they will understand I need to find my own papa before the wedding. . . . Will you tell them for me? Right now, it’s too painful for me to go over it again.”

He inclines his head, a motion that could be a yes or a no, and turns the key in the ignition. The last thing his parents need right now is to have to deal with this disconcerting development. He’s going to do all he can to keep it from them.

The car roars to life, gratifyingly obedient, carrying them to safety.

I sit on the edge of my chair in the investigator’s office, hands clasped tight, watching the man’s face. Mr. Sen does not look happy; his brow is creased as he hands back the photograph I gave him at our last meeting. It’s an old Polaroid, the colors faded. In it, two young women dressed in jeans and sweatshirts stand in front of a tall, pointy tower. A shadow has fallen over one woman’s face so her features are blurred, but the other woman can be seen quite clearly.

The night I told Rajat about my father, I found the photo on my bed, with a note attached:

I found this tonight, searching through your grandfather’s papers. I’d been hoping he loved Anu too much to destroy every single image of hers. She sent us this photo to us just a few months after she went to America.

There’s something else I remembered: A week or so before her accident, I had asked Anu where she planned to live when she went back to America. She was careful not to mention your father, but she did tell me that they were thinking of moving to the East Coast because of a job opportunity.

I lifted the photo with shaking fingers. At last I was to see my mother, my real mother and not the mournful, mouthless silhouette of my dream. I knew her right away—those serious, straight eyebrows were the ones I saw whenever I looked in the mirror. But she was her own person, too, with her generous, strong-willed, beautiful mouth. She smiled with such vivacity into the camera that I was sure my father had been the photographer. Indeed, when I turned it over, a bold script stated,
To lovely Anu.
My heart raced. Halfway across the world, before I had even been imagined, my father had handed this piece of paper to my mother. Perhaps their hands had touched and she had shyly smiled—it would have been in the early days, soon after they met. I ran my fingers across the back, over where their fingers had rested. It was as close to touching the two of them as I had ever been. In a strange way, it made my father possible.

How could I remain angry with a grandmother who had given me such a gift? Now that I was calmer, I could see how impossible it would have been for her to stand up against Grandfather. His will, which I had always thought of as protecting and supporting me, would in this case have been an avalanche, crushing everything in its path.

I went into the bedroom. She was sitting by the shuttered windows in the melancholy, slatted moonlight. I sat by her. We didn’t speak, but I leaned into her and felt something begin to mend, as when one blind end of a fractured bone finds its partner under the skin. And here’s something strange: I was still furious with Grandfather, but a question rose up through my anger. Of all the photos of my mother, why had he chosen to save this one? Had some subterranean part of his mind recoiled from cutting me off totally from my father?

Now I knew what my dream-mother had wanted. She wanted me to understand that I had a future across the ocean, someone waiting there for me, although he didn’t realize it yet. The photo had cemented my decision to find my father, the man who had shared my mother’s smiles, the unwritten half of her tender letter, the presence at the other end of the camera. But I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Filled with a restless hope, I started searching the Internet that same night, typing random words into the browser, peering hopefully into the
infinite blue of the computer for a directive.
Rob, Anu Roy, University of California, Berkeley, International Relations, marriage records, East Coast,
the approximate dates of my mother’s sojourn in America. But though the machine spewed up an enormous number of entries (were there really sixty-two men at the university during those years nicknamed
Rob
?), it was unable to offer me a definitive lead. I would need professional assistance.

That night I slept fitfully with the photo under my pillow, dreaming of my parents walking down an oleander pathway arm in arm, my earnest mother, the blank, white oval of my father’s face. As soon as it was morning, I called Rajat’s mobile.

“Will you help me find a private detective?”

I must have startled him from sleep, for he blurted what was on his mind without attempting diplomacy. Had I gone crazy? Didn’t I remember what he’d advised last night, that I should let things be? In any case, he didn’t know such men. Decent families didn’t have anything to do with them.

I held on to my temper. He had been my anchor the night before, and I was grateful for his strength. But I couldn’t so easily give up the possibility of finding my father, not even for the man I loved.

“I’ll find a detective myself, then.”

“How?” He sounded annoyed and amused at the same time—as though I were a child to be humored.

“I’ll ask Mimi. Just last month during lunch break she said her cousin had hired someone to find out if her husband was cheating on her—”

He groaned. “God, no! Don’t say anything to Mimi! It’ll be all over Kolkata within a week, and we really need to keep this inside the family. You understand that, don’t you?”

I didn’t respond, and finally he sighed. “Very well, I’ll ask around discreetly and see what I can come up with.”

When Rajat sets his mind on something, he doesn’t waste time. Within a couple of days, he had found Mr. Sen, explained my situation, hired him, and given him the photograph. That is why we’re here today, sitting side by side, watching Mr. Sen slide the photo back across his gleaming mahogany desk and shake his head.

“I’m sorry. That photo doesn’t help much. The other woman—I’m guessing she was a friend of your mother—her face is too blurry to follow up on. And there’s too little information on your father. I need a last name, at the very least. I searched on the Internet, even called overseas, but that first name is too common. We don’t even know if he was a student at the university, and that really widens the field. I searched for marriage records for Anu Roy, but nothing came up there, either. They might have gone to another state—or maybe even another country—Canada perhaps. Some private religious organizations don’t post their records on the Web. The possibilities are just too many. My advice to you is to forget about it. Don’t waste any more of your money and your time. Besides, in old cases like this, it’s very possible that the man has gone on with his life and remarried. Even if you found him, he might not be happy about it. He might even refuse to see you.”

My heart plunges. I think about telling the detective about my mother’s note and her ghostly visitation, but I know they don’t prove anything. Besides, those secrets are too close to my core. I’m not ready to share them yet—not even with Rajat.

Rajat is nodding, his face bright with relief.

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking! Cara, you must listen to Mr. Sen. He has years of experience in such matters.”

I know Rajat is right, finding my father seems impossible, but I can’t give up so easily. Stubbornness rises inside me like a wall. “I don’t care how hard it is! I must do everything I can to find him. He’s my
father,
for heaven’s sake!”

“In that case,” Mr. Sen says mournfully, “I’d recommend that you work with an investigator who lives in the United States. Such a man might be able to access old records that aren’t on the Internet. He could send someone to the Berkeley campus to talk to people who knew your mother, who might remember—”