The Stolen Girl (23 page)

V
ani runs madly
down the stairs and out of the door, she runs into the car like she has done countless times during Aarti and Sudhir’s interminable arguments. She gets in and she sits there shaking, shaking to the very core. Ram turns round in his seat and looks at her, and his eyes are as gentle as the sea after a storm, soft as the nest of her mother’s saris that she used to snuggle in once upon a time in a different life when she was loved and happy and not blindsided by a preposterous order couched as a favour.

Vani has always sat in the back of this car, even when she is on her own, partly because this is where she sits with Aarti and also to maintain propriety, alone as she is with a young man.

‘Are you okay?’ Ram asks and his voice is like water rippling in a pond on a summer’s day. ‘What’s the matter? What has she done?’

In all the time Vani has escaped into this car, her refuge, she has never heard this tone of voice from Ram. She trembles violently as she hears Aarti’s screams drifting out via the open windows and bombarding her ears, inveigling in, despite being cocooned with the doors closed.

Aarti sounds perplexed. ‘Vani.’ And again, ‘Vani?’ The faint suggestion of tears. In a minute it is going to morph into an angry wail, Vani knows.

‘Ram, drive. Anywhere. Just drive. Away from here.’

And he does. Even though he is not supposed to, even though he could get in trouble for it, lose his job. He drives Vani away, drives her around town like she is the memsahib and he is just the lowly driver.

This car is for Aarti’s exclusive use. Sudhir bought it for her when they got engaged. That is why it is always idling by the front door. This is Ram’s job, to wait there ready for Aarti when she needs to go out. Vani knows that Aarti will not go anywhere today. She has just returned from her shoot and she is exhausted, and this argument with Vani will be the last straw. Aarti will be sick, and then she will lie in bed with the curtains drawn and a pillow over her face, and wait for Vani to come back. Vani knows her so well. So very well. Then why didn’t she anticipate this? Why did it take her by surprise?

She starts shaking again, and she catches Ram looking worriedly at her in the rear-view mirror. To calm herself, she looks out of the window at the crowds, the noise, the bustle of people going about their business. A man steps in cow dung, a little girl laughs, a woman drags a child down the road, the child digging his feet and kicking up dust. A roadside stall selling pani puri does brisk business, a group of men in lungis milling around dunking the diminutive round puris in the spicy water and swallowing them whole.

She tries to curtail her brawling heart. Tries to stem the panic, the liquid bile seeping into every part of her. The car smells like it always does, of leather and the sandalwood car freshener Aarti favours. Time passes. She doesn’t know if it is an hour or two seconds. All she can hear is Aarti’s voice, the sparkle in it as if she is bestowing a great honour, ‘Will you have a baby for me?’

Vani thinks back to that first time when Aarti came into her room, mindlessly invading her privacy, and held Vani while she sobbed. Vani felt obligated to her after. And thus it began. Thus it began. The needy, insecure mistress. Always wanting confirmation, reassurance… Wanting so much of Vani. Wanting all of her. Her feelings, her thoughts, even her dead parents, her lost childhood, her happiness. Wanting…

‘Do you want to go home now?’ Ram asks, his voice like the colour cream, soothing, calm, washing over Vani.

She laughs, the sound as bitter as mustard seeds, as brittle as
her
voice. ‘Home? Where’s that?’

Ram pulls over onto the side of the road, almost overturning a cart brimming with flowers, causing havoc as vendors and pedestrians rush to get out of the way, yelling, ‘Lo, lo,’, raising an avalanche of dust which settles softly over the car,
poof
, in a cloud of orange mist.

He looks at Vani in the rear-view mirror, that naked, all-encompassing gaze. ‘What’s the matter? What did she do?’

‘She asked me to have a baby for her.’ Vani cringes as she says the words out loud. They do sound just as mad as she thought they did when Aarti spoke them to her.

She sees Ram’s face reflected in the mirror, blanched clean of colour, so he looks like a pale facsimile.

So it isn’t just me. He thinks it’s mad too.

‘What do you mean?’

An old man hobbles past, sticks his face up to the window, grins at Vani, displaying rotten teeth, a yawning cave of a mouth. He hobbles away when Ram shakes his fist at him.

‘Exactly that. She wants me to get pregnant by her husband. She thinks I will be grateful for this honour. She actually said that, that it is an honour. She said he sleeps with other women, so it is fine if he sleeps with me. As I am an extension of her, it will be like
she
is having the baby. Oh, and she said that it doesn’t hurt, not really.’ Once she’s started, Vani cannot stop. The words keep on coming, tripping over one another, a veritable waterfall of thick brown bile.

The car door slams. A burst of humid air smelling of dust and drains, rotting fruit and spices invades the car. Ram is off.

‘Wait,’ she wants to yell but she is sapped, all the energy having leaked out of her.

Then the back door opens and Ram slides in beside Vani. He opens his arms. She slips into them. He holds her while she cries, while she sobs out her anguish. And when she looks up, she sees her pain reflected in his eyes, in the wet shimmer on his cheeks. She feels it in the moistness in her hair.

I love him.
The knowledge comes all of a sudden, it blindsides her, takes her by surprise. A part of her has always known, she realises. But it has taken Aarti’s request to make her open her eyes, to see things clearly, for what they really are. She loves this man. She feels at home in his arms. The thrill his touch incites in her is love. The reason she does not sit in the front seat next to him is because she is afraid of her emotions, the feelings he arouses in her.

But she doesn’t know how he feels. She is not worldly-wise; she doesn’t know men, doesn’t know if Ram’s teasing of her, his gentleness with her, the way he looks at her sometimes, his eyes tender as the sky at twilight, is love. Does he feel for her what she feels for him? Does he love her?

‘I know this is the worst possible time,’ he says now, his cinnamon eyes boring into Vani’s, his arms cradling her like something infinitely precious. ‘I love you, Vani.’

It is as if he has read her mind and answered the question looming there.

‘I have loved you from that first moment when I saw you peering anxiously down from the window, and you blustered and yelled to cover your embarrassment. I love the way you blush. I love your smile, your patience. I love everything about you. Marry me. We’ll run away together, you and I.’

Outside a woman yells, ‘Guavas, fresh guavas. Fifty paise only.’

She looks at this man, his liquid eyes, the way his gaze looks into the very heart of her.
He loves me.

She has been so naïve. She did not recognise love when it smiled at her in the rear-view mirror. She did not see it shining out of these familiar crinkly cornered twinkling eyes.

‘We will go far away from Aarti; we will have our own life together. You, me and one day the children we will have. You won’t belong to anybody. You will have all the freedom in the world.’

She imagines going back to the village, living in the house she grew up in, with this man. She imagines sending him off to work with chapattis in a tiffin box like her ma used to pack for her da. She imagines going about her chores, waiting for him to come home. She imagines cooking for him, red rice and pickle, both of them eating while watching the hens peck at grains and cows graze in the meadow, as the sun sets beyond the fields, behind Chinnappa’s hut at the edge of the village. She imagines their children playing hopscotch in the dust, their laughter ringing amongst the mango and guava trees, echoing in the jasmine-scented breeze. She imagines sharing a life with this man, a simple, uncomplicated life. A life where she is happy, where she owns herself and is not at the beck and call of another, bound to another by duty.

‘I would like that very much,’ she says.

He kisses her then, their tears mingling, the future tasting of salt.

He takes her to his friend who lives in Koramangala. And then he goes back to the mansion. They have decided that it is best Aarti doesn’t know Ram is involved, best that Ram carries on as normal. That way, they will know what to expect, what is going on.

Ram must have called his friend and his wife in advance because they do not to ask any questions. They welcome Vani and feed her, their big-eyed children watching curiously as she pecks at the rice, not really able to eat but not wanting to waste what they have willingly shared, food they can hardly afford.

Afterwards she lies on the mat on the floor beside the woman and her sniffling children, their soft snores filling the meagre space between them. And she does not think of Aarti and what she has asked. She does not. But her dreams are coloured with babies and screaming women who point accusatory fingers at her:
You promised. I gave you everything. Everything.

The next afternoon, Ram comes to visit. Vani does not ask him how Aarti is. There is no point. He sits with Vani for a bit, both of them glum, and then he goes.

The third day he doesn’t come. That night at ten there is a knock at the door. Soft and yet urgent, insistent. Vani has not fallen asleep, listening instead to the others snoring, the children’s soft breath inhabiting the mosquito-infested, dream-tinted air, letting the sound crowd out her thoughts, her anxieties at Ram’s no-show, knowing something of import must have happened. Ram’s friend, who is sleeping on the bench above the rest of the family clustered on the floor, startles awake.

It is Ram. Crowding the small doorway. Apologising to his friend. Ram, his face ashen. Pale. As if he has swallowed a ghost.

Without a word, they move outside into the tiny courtyard, so as not to wake the children. Vani looks at the sleeping family one last time, the children’s limbs flung across their mother’s body, her outstretched arms their pillow, her sari pallu their blanket.

She knows that she is not coming back.

‘I couldn’t get away before,’ Ram says and his voice is croaky, sodden with tears.

She has been observing this family, the man going to his labourer’s job, the woman caring for their children. They work very hard to make ends meet. And yet, Vani notices in the way Ram’s friend and his wife look at each other, in the way she serves him more rice before he’s even asked, the soft, quiet avowals of affection. Their children are happy and secure. They are a close-knit, quietly content family. All Vani has ever wanted all her life, she realises as she watches them, is this. What this woman has. The freedom to be her own boss in her own little house, the freedom to live her life the way she wants it. The freedom to be. Just be. Not beholden to anyone. Vani wants love like this woman has with this man. No fireworks, no explosions. Just small, day-to-day intimacies. And she wants children. She has always wanted children. She wants to love them like she was loved. She wants them to be the centre of her world, her husband’s world, like she was her parents’. She wants a little family and she wants them to be happy.

Ram takes her hand. He touches her fingers one by one, as if memorising them, learning the feel of her hand in his. She breathes his face in, that hooked nose, that strong jaw, that mouth made for smiling. This man she loves, who brings her a measure of peace. This man who knows her, with whom she could have the family she yearns for, the life she wants.

She doesn’t want to hear what he has to say. Not just yet. She wants to prolong this moment. She looks at his sombre face and she knows then that she will not get the small, happy family she has dreamed of. Not in her lifetime. Somehow, she knows. Even before Ram says a word.

She knows by the look on his face. Defeated.

She knows because she is bound to Aarti; she was bound the moment Aarti held her when she sobbed, the moment she took Vani’s hands and called her ‘sister’. She wishes it were possible to go back and whisper caution to her younger self. The timid, impressionable girl she was then, overly awed that this great woman, this supermodel, cared for her. Vani had been tickled that Aarti wanted what she had. The parental love that Vani had taken for granted. The love she had thought every child had as a given. Vani had been pleased to realise she had been special to get such love from her parents. She had been proud.

‘She tried to kill herself,’ Ram whispers. ‘Bhoomi, the girl who does the floors, found her just in time. She was holding some letter in her hand. Some promise you made to each other.’

Aarti wanted what Vani had as a child. She wants what she has now. Vani will never be free.

‘The pact,’ she whispers.

‘She had written another note as well. A note saying she cannot live without you and that is why she took the pills... She is in a critical condition in hospital.’

For one minute, one brief minute, a horrible thought flits through Vani’s brain. She curbs it instantly, before the shock of it, the thrill, the forbidden pleasure of it makes its way onto her face.
It would be good all round if she dies.
She looks at Ram and she knows he knows what she is thinking. And yet he loves her. He loves her despite her worst side. Perhaps he loves her because of it. He understands. He is the only one who does.

‘They are all searching for you. Sudhir, her parents.’ His hold on Vani’s hand tightens. ‘I had to tell you. I couldn’t not.’ His voice is drenched in sorrow.

She recalls how she and Aarti used to talk late into the night; how Aarti nursed Vani when she fell ill one time, feeding her soup, talking to her, sitting vigil by her bedside; how she stood up for Vani when one of Aarti’s fellow models was rude to Vani; how she has stunned Vani, at times, by her compassion, how she has moved her by her generosity.

‘You don’t have to go back. Stay here and I will visit when I can. I can’t leave them now, they’ll suspect something. But once she’s better, I will extricate myself. We will move away, far away from all this.’