The House of Hidden Mothers (45 page)

Shyama shook her head, gathering her thoughts; it was like trying to catch surf, her head pounding rhythmically like an incoming tide. ‘Just … look after yourself. I will be back before … very soon. I don't want to leave you alone—'

There was an end to that sentence, but she couldn't remember what it might be. Toby. He had thrown on the first clothes that came to hand, a rumpled sweatshirt, stained jeans. He still had bed hair and pillow creases across one side of his face. She thought he had never looked as handsome as he did now.

They drove in silence for a while. It was early enough for the usually choked North Circular Road to be fairly empty – they would make good time. Night frost glistened on roofs and lamp posts, made cobwebs into icy doilies on passing hedges and fences. The first flush of a wintry dawn glowed far off on the horizon, pearly grey, the pale moon fading as if being slowly bled dry.

‘I wish you weren't going,' Toby said finally. Then corrected himself. ‘Sorry, I know you have to … I mean, I'm sorry you have to … like this. What I meant was, I wish I could come with you.'

They both knew why he couldn't.

Toby's unease felt like a physical pain, his guts twisting with every bend they took. He would have always said he was fond of Prem, comfortable with him. Now the possibility of losing him made him feel weak and lost, ambushed by how much he missed both of those dear old people. But there was something else, a fear that chilled him even with the car heating on full blast; he bit his tongue to stop his teeth chattering. He would be alone with Mala. It felt like staring into the headlights of an oncoming car, messy and inevitable.

‘Careful!' Shyama called out sharply. A car horn screamed at them, its banshee wail dying away just as quickly. Toby jerked the wheel quickly, steadying the car.

‘I should have got a cab. You're still half asleep, love.' Shyama placed a gentle hand on his thigh. Even through the denim he felt cold. ‘You didn't bring a coat,' she said. ‘Funny, neither did I.'

Shyama called Toby from Delhi every hour on the first day. By the week's end, Prem was still in a coma but the tests were looking hopeful – no apparent brain damage. There was no obvious reason why he hadn't woken up yet. The prognosis was ‘cautiously optimistic', although the doctors stressed they could not tell for sure what damage there might be until he regained consciousness. Sita had joked that it was the only way he could get some rest, after all the chaos of the last couple of months. They were all there, his wife, daughter, granddaughter. All the relatives had wanted to visit, but Sita was the gatekeeper, she only allowed in a favoured few – this wasn't a sideshow, after all – Prem's elder brother, his two sisters. No sign of Yogesh, the former favourite. But then Sita had warned that if he dared to show his face, he might end up in hospital himself. Toby wasn't to worry.

Neither, he replied back, was Shyama. The last scan had reassured them that although smallish, the baby seemed healthy, and that their due date could well be later than they thought. Which was good news given the circumstances.

Sita and Shyama had both made Tara return to work.

‘No point sitting here all day,
beti
… you come when you can.'

As it happened, Tara came every day, sometimes early in the morning on her way to Shakti, often around six o'clock after work, bringing her Nanima and mother magazines, bags of hot just-fried jalebis, or masala chaat from her favourite stall, still in its flimsy paper tray. And she brought a small CD player and soundtracks from old movies that Prem would remember –
Pakeezah, Three Char Sau Bees
, anything with Raj Kapoor in it.

‘Just play them to him, Nanima, I know he can hear us,' she urged Sita.

Tara looked just like an Indian girl now, Sita observed proudly. She had grown her hair, thank God, and she must have been putting in coconut oil because it had come back thicker. She wore it in a ponytail or sometimes loose: a plait would have looked nice, but you can't have everything. No more horrible black smears around her eyes, lovely cotton tops and smart jeans, and her face had filled out. Even without a scrap of make-up she looked healthy, even in such terrible circumstances. And all the adventures she was having! Some school project here, some internet project there, some out of Delhi. Those were the only couple of days when Tara didn't visit, although she phoned annoyingly often to make up for it.

One day she arrived and Sita worried for a moment that Tara's old demons had returned, whatever they might have been. She looked pale, her eyes red-rimmed. When she kissed her grandfather's forehead, as she always did, she let her lips linger as if she wanted to warm herself on his skin. She later told Sita that she had been to a special hostel where a charity housed and rehabilitated the victims of acid attacks, all women, all of them disfigured by men they had known – rebuffed suitors, abandoned husbands, jealous boyfriends. The cruelty of the world shook her like the sapling she was. Sita let her sway and grieve. Let her learn it now; there would be much more to see and mourn some day, hopefully still far away.

‘I am very impressed with your knowledge of Hindi films,' Sita told her, until she realized where the knowledge must be coming from. The plumpie boy who was so often with her granddaughter nowadays, sitting in his car in the parking area below, tapping on his phone. She couldn't tell much about him from this high-up window, but she watched them drive away together so often it had become a sort of comforting ritual, along with combing Prem's hair every morning and massaging his feet. Along with the daily scooter ride from Prem's eldest brother's house (they had insisted on pain of torture that she and Shyama should stay with them, so they could be fed and watered and have company around them every evening). She let them spoil her – it made up for the years of feigned deafness and blindness about the stolen flat. They hadn't wanted to get involved. Well, they were now.

Shyama's anguish for her father was renewed every day as she walked into the hospital room and saw him again, unchanged, seemingly asleep. It never left her, a shadow that moved with her when she ate, talked, flicked through endless magazines. But it was tempered by her growing realization of how her daughter was changing before her eyes. Every day that Nana-ji slept on was another day when Tara grew a little more in confidence, poise and knowledge, bringing back morsels from the world outside this room that Shyama fell upon hungrily, always eager for more. Their conversations never seemed to have a beginning or an end: they picked up from where they had left off the day before; they parted with sentences that ended in those three dots that Shyama had always thought denoted irony. Now she knew they meant there were some stories with no clear ending.

Tara had told her mother about Dhruv after the first week, when Shyama had asked why Tara wasn't staying at her uncle's house with them.

‘It just feels wrong, you paying out for a hostel, on your own, when we're all here,' Shyama had told her.

Tara shuffled her feet, her old childhood sign that she was hiding something, and pretty unsuccessfully.

‘I'm not in the hostel any more, Mama …' She called her that now, reverting to her first word. Shyama felt a sharp pang of something like
déjà vu
, except she saw before her not the child Tara had been, but the woman she was becoming. How had those years flown by so quickly? There was a new baby coming soon to fill the void, but Shyama knew now that nothing could replace a child – not even another one. The fact was, from the moment they existed they claimed a piece of you; as they grew, so did that sliver of your heart in their hands, and when they left you, they took it with them without a backward glance.

‘I'm staying at a friend's house …' Tara shuffled her feet some more.

‘The friend who is also your taxi service here and back?' Shyama enquired. She'd clocked the young man sitting like a devoted pet in his car downstairs. She'd half expected to see him stick his head out of the window and let his ears flap in the breeze whilst he waited.

‘It's not what you think,' Tara continued.

‘You don't know what I think,' replied Shyama, enjoying this.

‘He lives at home, with his parents. I'm staying in his sister's room, sharing with her, Devika. She's lovely, she's a first-year Chemical Engineering student, really brainy, and his mum and dad are so sweet. They offered to put me up after they heard about Nana, because they said, why waste all that money on a hostel? They put up loads of Dhruv's friends because they've got this huge house – it's really ancient, falling apart practically. They're not rich, it's an old family home, and there's always a bunch of young people hanging around. They're sort of old hippies really, his parents. I think you'd have a lot in common and they've been asking to meet you, but you've been so upset and—'

‘I'd take a breath now before you hyperventilate,' Shyama said.

Tara did so, letting out a shaky sigh. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her wrist jangling with thin silver bracelets.

My girl is so beautiful and young, thought Shyama with a swell of pride and envy. ‘Do you like this boy?' she eventually asked. Seeing Tara's sheepish expression, she added quickly, ‘You can tell me it's none of my business …'

And then they both said, ‘But it is …'

Tara insisted that Dhruv was just a friend, a good and special friend. Shyama asked for his parents' number; she felt out of her depth as to how awkward a social situation this might be, but they were putting up her daughter and she had to meet them. She had to make contact as soon as she could – she didn't know how much longer she was going to stay, would be able to stay. She called up immediately, had a brief but friendly chat with Dhruv's mother and was invited to supper the following evening.

‘Are you worried I'm going to embarrass you?' Shyama asked Tara later.

‘Make up for all the times I've done it to you,' her daughter grinned back.

They were walking through the car park. Tara waved at Dhruv, some distance away, who flashed his lights in response. The sun was sinking in the sudden way it did in this sky, a fat yolk swallowed in one gulp by the horizon. Shyama declined to meet him then – she would wait till the next day.

‘Unusual name, Dhruv,' she remarked.

‘I know. It means North Star,' Tara said with a small smile, before she ran towards him, glowing scarlet in the last rays of the day.

Mala could now name every different bottle of perfume on Shyama's dressing-table. The one with the curved surface that curled in on itself like a wave and smelt of tuberose: Hermès; the fat, satisfied one that looked like a large medicine bottle with its thick amber liquid: Ac-qua Di Par-ma; the two thin glass columns with silver lids: Jo Malone; and her favourite, a bottle shaped like a temple goddess, all breasts and hips in shimmering pink: Jean-Paul Gault-ier. She said each name like a mantra as she lifted them to polish the dark-brown wood, wiping the glass so they sparkled like soldiers lining up for inspection.

She knew almost every inch of this house now, roaming round it restlessly like a caged animal with a duster in one hand and a can of Pledge in the other. Toby sahib had said it was best she stopped going to the salon, with Shyama not being there to look after her. If something were to happen … She understood.
Chalo
, I can't even walk now anyway without puffing like a she-elephant, she grumbled to herself as she waddled around looking for something, anything, to tidy and clean.

She missed the women in the salon – they laughed at her jokes, they stroked her hair, she could have spun them any stupid story about the village and they would have sat there catching flies with their pretty open mouths. Now all her inventions and potions were being used and sold without her. Even though the money was flying through the air and into her bank account with just one press of a computer button, it didn't make up for the loss of her independence.

It had been a revelation for Mala, that you didn't work just for the money, you worked for the freedom work gave you, for the chance to be a stronger, more interesting version of yourself. She had assumed she would simply do the same thing when she got back to India. Why not? She had enough money to open her own place, be total boss herself, impress people with her specialized knowledge all the way from a top-class A-One exclusive London salon. And then she began to realize it would never work that way: here, her humble background meant nothing to the women she met; if anything, they liked her better because she was ‘the real thing' – hah, that's me, natural and fresh as newly shat dung. But back in India, what high-class madam was going to let her lay her dark small hands on her expensive fair skin? One look at her and they would know everything. It doesn't matter how far you have come, it is where you have come from that matters, and that she knew she couldn't hide easily. Of course, hah, have your own salon, but not in our mall – try a few miles out of town where you can cater for the ladies that look like you, understand you – cutting hair and removing moustaches. That's what she would end up doing, when where she wanted to be was sitting with the madams without ever having to call anyone Madam again.

Too many thoughts, too much energy and an overwhelming desire to create a nest, which also felt like a prison. None of it made any sense. So she just kept cleaning.

Shyama's clothes were well organized: Mala approved of the colour-coding system, the way she kept her tops and trousers separate but next to each other, the ones that matched. Her shoes were far too big for Mala – all that striding about running a business and owning your life, you needed huge feet for that. Toby sahib's wardrobe – well, that was as she expected, everything crushed together, all his shoes jumbled up, some still with farmyard dirt on them. She enjoyed scraping off the dried mud with an old toothbrush over the sink. When the soil made contact with water, it released a deep loamy smell that made Mala inhale sharply, and then slowly, breathing it in as deeply as her compressed ribs would allow. Hai, the smell of the fields! The smell of a man – better than any perfume. It made the little man inside her wriggle with pleasure.