Sail Upon the Land (30 page)

Leeta remembered the lovely Patel home on Mountbar Hill, a palace of polished floors and professional interior decor, with a rambling garden. Padme had a whole floor to herself, with her own kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and sitting room now her brothers had set up homes of their own.

‘I don’t want to have to move out and get any old job now. Just when I’m getting qualified.’

Padme had finished her first dentistry degree, and was now studying at King’s for an MSc while working in her father’s thriving West End cosmetic practice. That little pink packet of pills might just scupper such a safe, successful future for her in the bosom of the family home and business.

‘Have you told Jake?’

‘No, and I never want to see him or talk to him again. I can’t risk my future for that silly disgusting nonsense, can I? How stupid could I be?’

Jake was the elder brother of their mutual schoolfriend Annabel. He was studying for a MA on the metaphysical poets at Goldsmiths and had wooed Padme for years, sighing that ‘Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide/Of Humber would complain.’

He had floppy hair and Leeta had always thought he was pretentious and annoying and that his great love for Padme was a pose. A year ago Padme had told a worried Leeta that she was so in love with him she’d risk anything. She was even contemplating running away from home to be with him. She’d only gone on the Pill a couple of months before, giving in as he had seemed so desperate. Leeta already had the impression that love in a bedsit with a mouldy shared student shower had been a bit of a wake-up call.

Now the cold water of her family’s disapproval seemed to have sluiced away all that idealistic romantic nonsense, leaving icy facts in its place. If Padme wanted a nice, comfortable, safe life, she needed to toe the family’s party line. And that meant ‘virginity’, a good, probably arranged, marriage and a successful and very lucrative career as a cosmetic dentist. There could be no other options – certainly not sexual ones – and it was not down to Padme to plan her own future.

Leeta was at a loss. Then, before she knew she was adopted and half-English, she had had no intention of spoiling her future for the sake of sex with some scruffy English boy. Now of course she wanted to kick herself for her smugness in thinking Padme had been a fool.

‘Do you think they believed you?’ Leeta had asked.

‘I think they would like to. I think they do love me and sweeping the whole thing under the carpet would be the best possible outcome. Can you go and see Jake and explain for me?’

‘Are you mad? Of course not. Look, let’s call Annabel and tell her what’s going on. She can tell Jake,’ Leeta suggested.

Padme shuddered. She said she never wanted to see Annabel again either. She didn’t want to be reminded of her dangerous folly. She wailed that she knew she was being horrible but Jake and all his silly poetry could go to hell.

‘He’ll probably love moping around and write a poem about his broken heart or something.’

Leeta saw her friend was defaulting to traditional Indian daughter mode, and judging Jake’s emotions by her own, which had turned out to be puddle shallow. She leaned towards Leeta and whispered in her ear: ‘Sex is dull and disgusting. He asked me to do things that were sick. I tried to like it, but it wasn’t worth giving my life up for – so embarrassing. Don’t understand all the fuss. I didn’t like looking at him naked either. It looks silly, all red and flabby. And his room was so cold and messy.’ She’d giggled, close to tears. Leeta had given her a hug.

Both Padme’s mother and her father had arrived as children with their parents from Uganda in 1972 when Idi Amin had done what was not called ethnic cleansing in those days, but amounted to the same thing. The families had been housed in an ex-RAF barracks while they recovered from the shock of having their smart, sophisticated lives in Africa stolen. Like other Ugandan Indian families, the parents had settled down and rapidly set up shops and small businesses, working hard to raise their own children back to where they had been before their expulsion. Padme’s mother Manisha was an accountant, and her father studied dentistry. Manisha now worked as business manager for the family’s thriving Busy Smiles Dental Clinic in New Cavendish Street.

Both Padme and Leeta had been shocked when they met girls brought up in Chennai or Mumbai where, among the well-off, traditional values were being eroded left, right and centre. Hedonistic drinking and partying sounded wilder than in London. Ugandan Indians on the other hand, living in the UK or America, were known to be particularly keen to hang on to respectable Fifties Gujarati values.

Both Padme’s parents were protecting something infinitely precious, something that had been hard won against bitter odds. There was no safety net that allowed for sloppy Western values to spoil what their parents had created for them out of their smashed lives, and what they had made for themselves. Leeta’s parents had been born in India, were both doctors and were not so insular, but she knew they still valued the traditions, and condoning a pregnancy outside marriage would have been unthinkable.

Padme did not have a rebellious streak. She was too soft, too loved and spoiled, to risk it all for love. She liked all her berries far too much: Mulberry, Burberry and Blackberry.

Padme and Leeta had often discussed the emotional mess in which many of their British schoolfriends lived, with bitterly divorced parents, all ‘Mum’s boyfriends’, dismal weekends with Dad, and microwaved ready-meals.

‘It’s just not worth it,’ wailed Padme. ‘It’s OK for my brothers. They had lots of English girlfriends before they married, and the parents never said a thing.’

Leeta sat curled up in Damson’s chair remembering Padme’s look of naked fear. She was quite sure that the same terrible rejection, or worse, would have happened to her if she had confessed to this shameful pregnancy and thrown herself on her parents’ mercy. How could she have been so stupid as to get drunk and go upstairs with that boy? Afterwards she had huddled her clothes on and run from the house.

Damson would be home soon to find her there. Presumably giving her up as a baby had been painful. She remembered how Damson had clutched her arms in the consulting room and the wild look on her face before she visibly controlled herself and let go.

Was she going to hurt her birth mother by flitting into her life, using her as a solution to a problem, and then leaving? She wasn’t sure she cared, as she herself had been abandoned. Fenning was just a refuge while she sorted out the consequences of her mistake. Damson was someone who would potentially help. It was as simple as that. She would have to stay with this strange woman who was her real mother, who looked like a lesbian. Perhaps she was a lesbian, and that was why she had given her up. But that would be an odd reason.

As for Padme, presumably her parents had decided to overlook the Pill incident and carry on as normal. She had heard that Padme was engaged now, to a dentist. She wondered if a discreet visit to Harley Street to restore certain torn membranes had been arranged as well.

Leeta wasn’t even wholly Indian. She panicked as she imagined Papa, who was always so kind, proud and encouraging, flinging cruel words at her, as Padme’s father had, about ‘your slut of an English mother’ and ‘bad blood showing up as soon as it could’. She couldn’t trust them to understand. Padme was at least the real child of her parents, and taking the Pill had prevented her foolish lapse from ending in pregnancy.

Damson had shown herself trustful and willing at least in the short term when she gave Leeta the key. With any luck there would be no trace of this stupid pregnancy on her perfect body. Her thick creamy skin was resilient and there were no stretch marks. Youth and the gym had seen to that. She shied away from the word ‘baby’ in her own mind.

She remembered with crystal clarity what had happened earlier in the year. Hearing Dadima’s cold words, first she’d flung open the sitting room door and stared at them all. Then she’d run up to her room, turning the key in the door and flinging herself on the bed, too stunned to do anything but stare at the ceiling.

‘Leeta, let me in.’

It was her mother at the bedroom door. But not her ‘mother’. No, some stranger now. Great sobs shook her.

‘Leeta,
meri jaan
. Mummy is here. I am so sorry that you should have heard like that. Please let me in. Your Dadima was very wrong to blurt it out where you were likely to hear.’

Leeta was so lonely in that moment. All that was sure and certain had splintered and crashed away from her, leaving her standing on the brink of a void. ‘Who am I?’ she said, out loud. But she loved Mira, her soft, sweet-smelling, practical mother, so she got up and unlocked the door, going back to lie down without looking at her. The bed dipped as Mira sat down. They were silent for a bit. Leeta wanted to do something dramatic, like sob loudly or kick her mother off the bed. Treat her as she had never treated her before. Because she had never had any reason to do anything but love her mother. Her mother? Stunned, she continued to look at the ceiling.

‘I wanted to tell you years ago.’

‘Why didn’t you then?’ Leeta didn’t care that she sounded rude.

‘Papa said not. And he had been so good about having you in our family when his mother didn’t want us to adopt. I didn’t want to go against him again.’

Leeta knew how chilly her Dadima could be.

‘You should have told me. I had a right to know.’

‘I know you did. But you don’t understand. We just don’t adopt like people do in the West. Or if we do, we keep very quiet about it. Living in England it’s easier, because you can just go to India, adopt there and then come back with a baby. We would have gone to India ourselves if you hadn’t become available so quickly after we were approved.’

Leeta digested the idea of ‘becoming available’ after a lifetime of believing she had ‘been born’.

‘What do you know about my birth mother?’

‘We know she was clever like you. She was studying to be a doctor, again like you – and us.’

‘Oh, I suppose her family wanted a cover-up, and made her have me adopted so she could get married respectably. Is she here or in India?’

‘I think she’s here but I don’t know.’ Mira stopped, looking confused. Leeta, who was trying to get used to this new idea, was so desperate for comfort that she snuggled into her mother’s armpit where she was safe, breathing in the warm familiar scent of her skin.

She didn’t say anything else, just wrapped her arms around her daughter. Leeta pulled away slightly and looked at her, sensing her hesitation. Mira looked down.

‘What happened to her? Is she dead?’

‘As far as I know she’s fine, nothing out of the ordinary. The thing is that she is not Indian, she’s English.’

Leeta fell back on to the bed. Mira bent over her anxiously.

‘It’s OK,
meri jaan
. She was clever, from a good family, not just anybody.’

Leeta stared at the ceiling, still dotted with plastic luminous stars from when she was little and would watch them dim until she slept. Safe with Papa and Mummy downstairs, and smells of cooking wafting under the door.

Leeta rolled slowly on to her side with her back to Mira, drawing her knees to her chest to take up as little space as possible in this house which was no longer home.

She examined her long, shapely hands, her bony wrists. Then she sat up again, taking Mira’s hands in hers: small hands with soft palms and wrists rounded like smooth pipes, no bones or tendons visible. Had she ever wondered why she was so much taller and lankier, and – she had to accept this – paler than her parents?

‘As soon as I saw you, I fell in love with you, my darling little Leeta. Let Mummy hug you, come on.’

Leeta could not resist, and crept, tall though she was, back into her mother’s embrace. Making herself small to fit. They sat quietly, each absorbing comfort from the other’s breath going in and out, in and out, as if nothing had happened.

‘Your Dadima’s always been a bitch,’ said Mira, unexpectedly. Mira, whom Leeta had seen touching her mother-in-law’s feet, always so respectful.

‘It was such a relief when we came to practise in London, and I didn’t have to live with her in Jaipur and be submissive. I never liked her, and she was so jealous of me. So spiteful and critical all the time. Who can blame her? I had studied medicine at university, she had just been a housewife. Papa is her only son. As you know, ours was a love marriage, and she was a widow, and had had no say. Perfectly suitable, but not arranged by her. She didn’t like that at all.’

‘How did she work out that you’d adopted me?’

‘I think she wondered repeatedly out loud why you were so pale and had grey eyes, and in the end Papa told her. But he also told her to keep it a secret. As if that would work, but men always have a rose-tinted view of their mothers. She’s come storming over to interfere and talk about arranging a marriage for you. I think she was afraid you might meet and marry an English doctor. Of course it would have been different if you had been a boy. She simply could not understand why we had adopted a little girl who wasn’t even properly Indian.’

‘Why did you?’

‘Because it turned out to be quite easy. Few Indians were adopting in the Eighties, and the whole idea was for mixed-race babies’ – Leeta winced – ‘to go to Indian parents. I couldn’t conceive, you see.’

Leeta was listening hard, though her face was hidden from Mira’s.

‘We went through the business of having a social worker round to ask all sorts of awkward questions. Papa played his part, although he was so embarrassed by the intrusion. Then they told us they had a baby on the way we might be interested in. It all happened much more quickly than I expected.’

‘You had me from birth?’

‘Pretty well. You were a week old. We picked you up from the social services contact centre. Your mother had brought you there from the hospital.’

‘You mean you met her?’

‘Oh no, that wasn’t allowed. But she had said goodbye to you in the room from which we collected you.’

Leeta uncurled herself. She’d put an arm around her mother. ‘What else do you know about the birth parents?’