The Stolen Girl (20 page)

I think that is why I was most at home doing my homework in chip shops while I waited for Mum to get home from work. The clatter of pots and pans, the bustle of a busy kitchen, the deliciously tantalising smells, the blast of cold air as the door was pushed open, the whisper of customers’ clothing as they walked past, the rise and fall of voices in conversation, they were all as familiar, as soothing to me as my mother’s embrace, the way she had of hugging me with a glance, imparting comfort with a smile.

I cannot be angry with her. She loved me. She loves me. I remember the look she gave me as she was led away, her promise to write, tell her side of the story. I haven’t received any letters. Perhaps she is not allowed to write to me. I know she has a valid reason for doing what she did and I will reserve judgement until I hear it. I do get cross sometimes, but I cannot stay angry with her for long. I miss her too much.

Truth is I do not want her to have been in the wrong. Truth is it is easier to believe her than countenance the alternative. Truth is I am hoping for a miracle.

Aarti – I always think of her as the other woman – loves me as well. And yet, somehow, even though it is my mum I should be angry with, I am angry at her, at Aarti. This woman who has been searching for me for almost a decade and a half. I am angry at her for turning up, for putting me in this position.

I open the window and look outside. The air smells green, jaunty, the fragrant evening redolent with the promise of spring, evident in the buttery slivers of daffodils the colour of hope peeking out from between cupped green bulbs like a woman’s face escaping the confines of her sari pallu. Shrubs are pregnant with shoots and the promise of new life, and the grass smiles its stained yellow, recovering-from-winter smile as it basks in the soft twilight glow. A bird calls from somewhere among the budding trees.

A car drives into the close and I realise with a thrill of recognition that it is Jane’s familiar Ford. I am not expecting her. There must be some news. Fear grabs my heart in a stranglehold. I clatter down the stairs, past the boys doing their homework with Farah, three bent heads, a profusion of black curls. Three pairs of eyes scrutinising me as I rush past and open the door. Jane’s low beams slither across the curtains, sweep a curved orange path along the wall, dance a pattern on my top as she pulls up, switches off her lights.

I stand at the front door, shivering even though the evening is mild, arms draped around myself, protecting me from whatever it is she has to say. The air is infused with the fug of dog waste and dread, sweet with a fusty undertone.

Jane gets out of the car and her gentle gaze meets mine. It is swimming, but I cannot make out the expression in her liquid, roasted almond eyes.

‘What is it?’ I ask, and my voice is breathless. It is plaited with fear, threaded through with panic.

‘Do you want to sit down? Go to your room? The car?’

A gaggle of teenagers walk past, laughing at something, bandying the F-word about, pushing each other into next door’s sprouting rose bushes. Squeals of laughter and shouts of ‘Ow!’ and ‘What did you do that for?’ rend the air which tastes of pain as I open my mouth and take huge gulps, finding myself suddenly, inexplicably unable to breathe.

‘No,’ I manage. ‘Tell me now.’

A pizza delivery boy zooms past on his motorbike.

‘The DNA test results came back,’ she says.

I sway on my feet. She reaches across and cups my face in the palm of her hand. I let her.

‘I don’t know why she put you through this.’ For the first time since I’ve known her, Jane’s marshmallow voice is angry, tough, sounding like a hard chewy toffee, like biting into a fruit and discovering, with a painful shock, that it is not sweet but hot and spicy inside.

A burst of evening air, nippy, carrying the scent of spring and the memory of winter strokes my cheeks. My legs give way and I lean against the doorjamb.

Jane holds out a letter to me. The results of the test. My eyes take it in, deciphering the meaning before it sinks into my heart and they swim with an assault of tears. The flimsy piece of paper determining my future flutters as my hand is suddenly rendered weightless; it falls on the mat with a sigh, pffff, like the sound a secret makes as it travels from a confiding mouth to an attentive ear.

Somewhere close by, a little girl’s voice, tinkling like a chorus of bells, calls, ‘Mum?’

Mum… I collapse onto the mat at the entrance that says ‘Welcome’ in cheery red coir letters and I sob. I sob like I have not done since that terrible evening. I sob like my being is being ripped in two. I sob loudly and completely, the sobs coming in waves, wracking me, tearing me to pieces.

A
ll her life
Aarti has had men interested in her. But for her, it’s only ever been a case of wanting what she cannot have. She’s stolen men away from other women, ruthlessly, just because she can. She wants men to like her, adore her, look only at her. If they don’t, and it is very rare that they don’t, she will up her charms and set out to ensnare them. She gets everything she wants, she always has.

And then he walks into her life, casually, one rainy evening in August.

Things are going well for Aarti. She is at the top of her game, the best supermodel in Karnataka, one of the top three in India. She has Vani who accompanies her everywhere now, whom she cannot do without, who even comes along on her shoots.

Her mother has complained about this, has warned, ‘You’re getting too attached to the servant. She’ll get ideas in her head.’

The very things Aarti herself had agonised over when she first started getting close to Vani. But she pooh-poohs her mother, laughs at her.

Now that she has Vani, she doesn’t much care about trying to please her parents. In fact, she doesn’t even think of them as her parents anymore. She has a secret fantasy, which she hasn’t shared with anyone, not even Vani, especially not Vani. At night as she waits for sleep to lay claim, as her starved stomach growls and complains, she imagines that Vani’s parents were, in fact, hers, that
she
was the little girl who was desperately wanted, who was loved and feted and adored. It could be true. After all, she and Vani are so close they could be sisters. Lying in the dark listening to Vani’s quiet exhalations and her own abused stomach’s loud grievances, the air drifting in through the partly open window whispering secrets smelling of night jasmine and intrigue, anything seems possible.

And so she laughs at her mother and is pleased to note the hard glint that comes into her mother’s eyes, the shadow that fleetingly crosses her face. Hurt? Upset? Aarti doesn’t care.

‘Well, you’ll learn the hard way,’ her mother says. ‘No good ever comes from fraternising with that class of people. All they want is what you have.’ Her mother’s voice brittle as peanut candy.

Many years later, Aarti will recall this particular phrase of her mother’s and she will admit, even though it feels like trying to swallow a raw bitter gourd, that her mother was right. But for now, she is happy, secure in her unlikely friendship with her trusted servant.

Aarti is at a party when it happens, when love swoops down and takes hold, catching her unawares.

Outside the club where the party is taking place – a celebration for the release of a Kannada blockbuster – rain falls in slanting sheets of fury, blurring everything in sight, giving dust-swirled, grime-sodden Bangalore a much-needed sheen, working magic like the wand of a make-up artist adding definition here, shadow there, completing the metamorphosis from plain to stunning.

Umbrellas bob and pedestrians caught off guard scurry for cover, the women pulling pallus and dupattas over their heads. A group of boys run, laughing, using their rapidly wilting notebooks as shields. They will go home to see that the ink has bled onto the pages, gluing them together, depriving the boys of notes to study for their exam the next day. Their mothers will yell at them, ask if they have coconuts for brains, and they will grin through mouthfuls of steaming vadais and sweet tea, cosy in their warm kitchens smelling of oil and fried spices, watching the rain skitter on roofs and churn the mud into slush.

A little girl skips in the middle of the road, dancing amongst gurgling potholes of restless brown water, sodden tendrils of hair clinging possessively to her shimmering face, immune to rickshaws honking, bus conductors leaning on their horns, people yelling at her to move out of the way of traffic. Her mother dashes onto the road and gathers the girl in her arms, kissing her wet face again and again, which must taste, Aarti thinks, of rain and mud and little girl. She watches them standing there, surrounded by honking traffic and yet, lost in their own world, the little girl safe in the harbour of her mother’s embrace, her small arms wrapped securely around her mother’s soggy neck, and she feels a pang, that ache of longing that she keeps hidden from the world.
Unconditional love,
she thinks.
Vani had that,
she thinks.

‘Romantic, isn’t it?’ a voice queries from behind her. A deep voice. Musical in a masculine way. Familiar.

A voice she’s pretty sure she’s heard before.

She doesn’t turn immediately, just takes a dainty sip from her glass and lets the noise and bustle of the party wash over her in soothing ripples. ‘Yes,’ she says eventually.

‘Are you always like this, weighing every word you utter, thinking it through?’ There is a smile in his voice. He is standing very close, she can feel his body heat emanating from just behind her, the smell of lemon and musk, the mint and wine on his breath.

She pauses for good measure, watches a woman slip on a puddle, a man hold her arm and help her back onto her feet, watches the woman thank him profusely, her face upturned, wet tendrils of hair hugging it, even as she tries to ineffectively wipe the grime off her muddy sari.

‘Not always,’ Aarti says.

He laughs, waves of warm chocolate washing over her. His laughter is even more seductive than his voice.

She turns. He’s tall, a head taller than her – and that’s saying something as she’s one of the tallest models around. A toned body that suggests long hours at the gym. Warm golden eyes that match the feeling that hearing him laugh aroused in her. A profusion of curly brown hair. A day’s growth of beard. Straight nose and lips…full and inviting. She is caught unawares by a sudden, unexpected thrill of desire. It’s been a long time since she’s felt like this. The last time was in high school when she had that crush on Magesh. He was already taken, his girlfriend a plump, plain girl called Shanta. Perhaps that was part of his appeal for Aarti, since he wasn’t all that good-looking. Aarti had set out on a campaign to win him over. By the time she had the satisfaction of seeing chubby Shanta devastated and looking even uglier with her long face and penchant for bursting into tears, Aarti had lost interest in him. Magesh had followed her around doggedly for a year, sending notes and flowers. Spurning his advances had given her great pleasure. And it set the tone for the years that followed. She found that she enjoyed making boys and men alike fall in love with her, losing interest the moment they did.

She has always been faintly repelled by the men she’s come across, by their attraction to her, their desire. But not this man. She finds she is enjoying his attention, responding to it.

‘I know you,’ she says.

‘Do you?’ he smiles, and his eyes glow charmingly.

She is blindsided by a sudden impulse to touch the dimple dancing in his left cheek. She sets her glass down very carefully on the table beside her, gathers her breath.
Where is Vani?
she thinks, knowing, of course, that Vani is waiting in the car for her like Aarti asked her to. She could do with Vani beside her right now, to bolster her confidence.

‘You are…’ It comes to her in a flash. ‘Sudhir Shetty. The Kannada movie heartthrob,’ she recites, repeating what she’s read about him in the papers. That is why his voice was so familiar; she’s heard it on television! She stops, suddenly realising what she has said, her heart clamouring loudly, painfully in the confines of her chest. She bites her lower lip, feels colour flood to her face.

He smiles, flashing that dimple again, his eyes twinkling down at her. It is so nice to be able to look up to someone for a change, she thinks, even as her heart executes a tango. Makes a change from bending her knees to maintain eye contact with other men, who are almost always shorter than she is.

‘Do continue,’ he grins, a mischievous gleam in his eyes. ‘I love listening to pretty women describing my charms.’

‘I did say I only think before I speak sometimes,’ she counters tartly. ‘Obviously this wasn’t one of them.’

‘Ah, but when you don’t think before you speak, is that your heart speaking?’ he asks, winking.

‘No, just the entertainment column of
The Hindu
,’ she says and his eyes twinkle merrily, the dimple tantalising as he laughs.

She looks around him, behind him. ‘Where’s your entourage?’

All the pictures she’s seen of him – and there have been many; he’s one of the best-looking men to grace the Kannada film scene and rumour has it he’ll be poached by Bollywood soon enough – he’s trailed closely by security guards and personal assistants. But here he is, alone and talking to her. Now that she’s managed to look away from him, she’s aware of the eyes of the whole room on them, cameras flashing in their direction. You can never keep the press away from these dos and nobody wants to either – after all, any publicity is good publicity.

He waves his hand languidly, his dancing, flame-coloured eyes devouring her face. ‘Sent them away. They deserve some time off, don’t you think?’

He leans close and for a moment she is sure he is going to kiss her. She can feel his minty, alcohol-stained breath on her face, caressing her. Her heart is performing weird somersaults. She can sense her face getting hot, feel the eyes of the room on her, knowing they are craning their necks, the photographers edging surreptitiously forward, the better to capture the moment.

‘I could do with a break from them, to be honest. I feel like a schoolboy doing a bunk.’ He winks at her, moves back.

She realises she has been holding her breath only when she releases it in a sigh. She is disappointed. She
wanted
him to kiss her, she realises, surprising herself, spectators be damned.

Just as her heartbeat is returning to normal, he leans very close again, his breath tickling her cheek, raising goosebumps.

‘I don’t know about you, but I have the strangest feeling we’re being watched.’

She cannot help it, she bursts out laughing. And that is the picture that appears in all the newspapers and tabloids the next day, Sudhir leaning into her and Aarti grinning, her mouth wide open in what her mother snorts is ‘a very unflattering pose. No lady should reveal her tonsils to the general public.’ And then, appraising her curiously, a segment of the orange that constitutes her breakfast in her hand, ‘So is there some truth to the rumours?’

Aarti turns away so her mother will not see the blush creeping up her neck, the fluster she feels inside.
I hope. I wish,
she thinks.

She’s spent the previous night awake, thinking about Sudhir, fantasising about the two of them together. Fantasies that had made her wish, for the first time since Vani started sleeping in her room, that Vani wasn’t there, her breathing intruding into Aarti’s imaginings.

‘Oh, none at all,’ she says airily to her mother. ‘I have my career to think of.’

‘Your career will get a huge boost if you hook up with the most eligible bachelor in town,’ her mother muses. ‘In fact, the two of you together will be a force to reckon with.’