The Stolen Girl (25 page)

That evening, Sudhir announces that he will have to return to the UK six months after the baby is due.

‘We can only shoot in the summer and in the UK, the season only lasts three months: June to August. So we’ll have to come back.’ He is looking at her apprehensively, worrying his lower lip with his hand.

Aarti goes up to him, rests her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat and thinking of her baby making its presence felt in another woman’s womb. He said ‘we’. He said ‘
we’ll
have to come back’.

‘Our first outing as a family, already planned,’ she laughs and notices a shadow cross Vani’s face which has, since she felt the baby move, been happier than Aarti has ever seen it.

Aarti thinks nothing of it.

G
rowing up
, Vani had always imagined that the man she slept with would be the man she would spend the rest of her life with, her husband, her destiny. They would grow a family together, grow old together.

Instead, she loses her virginity to Sudhir. Both of them not wanting to be with the other. Doing it because they have to, because the spectre of
her
in the hospital looms, pale, ghostly, almost but not quite of the next world.

Sudhir is gentle. He is kind. But he isn’t Vani’s.

Vani gets pregnant. A miracle takes root inside of her. She feels her body shift and grow to accommodate a new life. A part of her. How can she bear to share this child? How?

Aarti is everywhere. Her needy face, her grasping hands, laying claim to the one piece of Vani that she desperately, completely, wants just for herself. Vani has shared her dead parents with Aarti. She has shared her happiest memories with her. She has allowed Aarti to borrow her childhood. She has said yes, under duress, to letting Aarti borrow her womb. But how can she stand back and allow Aarti to appropriate her child?

Vani agreed to sharing her child with Aarti when the baby was a concept, but now that it is growing inside her, now that she has seen her child on the screen at the twelve week scan, a scrunched, squirming tadpole, minuscule fisted appendages waving hello, its jiggling, gulping heartbeat filling her being with hope, she cannot do it, she cannot. Vani knows that Aarti will lay claim to her child, have the bigger share, the deciding share, like in their silly, childish pact. That the balance will always shift in Aarti’s favour.

Already Aarti has put about in the tabloids that she is having a baby with Sudhir. She flounces about in public wearing loose-fitting clothes and conspicuously ingesting vitamin tablets and folic acid, which she regurgitates later in the privacy of her bathroom. How can Vani bear it if
her
child, the fruit of
her
womb, the child
she
nourished into being, how can she bear it if he/she starts treating her the way Aarti does, like Vani is her favourite dog, a prized possession to order around, to insult and to hurt and then pat on the back to make everything all right again?

Aarti has threatened to kill herself if Vani runs away again. That threat stopped Vani eloping with Ram. It is not enough to stop her now. Vani wants nothing but the best for her child. The life of a runaway, struggling to make ends meet, worrying about getting caught is not what she wants for the precious miracle growing inside of her. But a life of luxury with no heart to it, the life Aarti lives, Vani does not want that for her child either.

This much Vani knows: she doesn’t want her child to become like Aarti, treating people like objects, obsessed by image, thinking being sick after every meal is
de rigueur
.

And she doesn’t want her child to become the person Vani herself has been up until now either. She doesn’t want to subject her child to a life of servility, of dancing to Aarti’s tunes, of changing his/her temperament to suit Aarti’s quicksilver moods, her imperious commands.

Vani wants her child to have the childhood that she had, unburdened by the trappings of wealth, the noose of fame. She wants to keep her child, bring it up her way. And the only conceivable option, even though it isn’t the best one by far, is to run away.

She thinks long and hard about how to do it. And then the answer comes, from a very unlikely source…

When they are in London, Aarti gets a craving for bhindi bhaji. She says she wants the proper bhindi, not the thin dry ones from the supermarket, but the fat green ones available so readily in Bangalore but not in evidence here.

Vani goes in search of them, thinking,
what a waste of time and energy.
Aarti will take one bite and she won’t eat any more. Or she will eat and then be sick. What is the point?

After much asking around, Vani finally finds a stall selling the bhindi that Aarti wants and gets talking to the woman running it. The woman asks Vani where she is from.

‘Dhonihalli originally, but I live in Bangalore now.’

‘I am from Hubli,’ the woman says as she weighs the bhindi.

‘How long have you been here?’ Vani asks.

‘Four years,’ the woman sighs.

‘Ever go back?’ Vani queries.

Another deep sigh. ‘Can’t.’ The woman lowers her voice to a whisper, even though she is speaking in Kannada. ‘Am here illegally, you see.’

‘Ah,’ Vani says, and by the time she has left, she has garnered enough details to have the beginnings of a tentative plan.

Vani studies London closely after that, squirreling Tube maps and bus timetables in her luggage, working out train lines, public transport. London – a sprawling metropolis, so many people, all different colours and races, a city where Sudhir and Aarti don’t have clout.

‘It is a place where one can disappear easily,’ the bhindi bhaji vendor had said, her eyes soft as she smiled at Vani, wishing her luck, offering her blessing.

The moment they return to Bangalore, Vani goes to see Ram. He beams when he sees her, his gaze taking in her stomach which is showing, just, and yet the light does not go out of his eyes. He opens his arms and folds her into them and she breathes in his smell, musk and lemon. She has missed him.

Vani has stayed away from him since she agreed to Aarti’s request, since Ram ferried her back from his friend’s house, both of them quiet in the car, their tears speaking the words they couldn’t quite bring themselves to utter. She has stayed away because it would not be fair to continue seeing him when she is sleeping with another man. And after she got pregnant, she stayed away because she was ashamed of carrying another man’s child when it is him she loves, even though she knows that he doesn’t blame her, he never will. She has stayed away because she is selfish, because seeing him would mean confronting everything she has lost; it would mean aching for a different life and it would be a betrayal of this child, conceived under duress but whom she now loves more than life itself. Seeing him would make her yearn for things best left alone. It would make her regret this child. And she doesn’t want to regret this miracle growing inside her, the one wonderful thing in her life.

And Vani has come to see him now because she is selfish. She wants to ask him for help. She has no one else. She is shamelessly using him, exploiting his affection for her. But she is a mother now and she has to put her child first. And so she tells Ram her plan.

‘No. You cannot do this to me, go so far away,’ he says. ‘Come with me. We will run away, be a family.’

He doesn’t ask Vani to give up her child. He knows she can’t. She won’t. He knows she wants this child like she has never wanted anything or anyone, even him. He is condemning himself to the life of a runaway just to be with Vani. She is touched, she is awed. She cups his beloved face in the palm of her hand, learns its contours with her fingers.

His offer is tempting, tantalising. But she cannot do it to him. Wilfully destroy his life. If they run away, they will always live in fear of being caught. And if they are caught, he will lose his livelihood, nobody will employ him. For what? A fallen woman. A child that isn’t his. He is young, handsome, a nice man, a kind man. He deserves what his friend has, the one he took Vani to, the one she stayed with. A harmonious life. A family to love and care for. The family Vani wished for.

‘Please,’ he says, and he is standing very close, she can feel his breath caressing her face – cinnamon and mint.

She desperately wants to take up his offer. To turn the precious burden of protecting her child and doing the best by it over to him.

But this much she knows: Vani could, perhaps, live with the guilt of Aarti killing herself because of what she has done. But Vani couldn’t live with the knowledge that she is destroying the life of the man who has loved her, purely, fiercely, unselfishly.

She has got herself into this situation. It is her job and hers alone to get herself out of it.

And so, she refuses his offer, his proposal. But she does enlist his help.

And when his pleas fall on deaf ears, when he sees that she will not give in, he says, finally, reluctantly, his voice the grey-black of dejection, ‘I know people in London. They will help you.’

He loves her enough to agree to help her even if that means she will go to another country a world away, even if it means he will never see Vani again. She is humbled by his love.

And so, it is set in motion.

Hope uncoils in Vani’s belly, wrapping itself warmly around her child, warring with fear and worry. Is she doing the best by her baby? She does not know. All she knows is that she cannot share her child. She will not.

H
er little girl
enters the world screaming lustily and she is everything Vani had imagined and more. Vani holds her baby girl in her arms after ten arduous hours of labour and sees in the contours of her daughter’s face the silhouettes she has been looking for in the clouds, the visages she has been hunting for in the horizon. In the curve of her daughter’s cheek, in the way her lashes fan her cheeks, Vani sees her mother’s sleeping face in the moment before waking. In her daughter’s stub nose, in the shape of her cherry-bud mouth, Vani sees her father. Tears travel down her face and baptise her newborn and she squints, her mouth opening and rooting for her mother’s breast. Vani holds her daughter to her chest, and she can feel her parents smiling down at her, and she promises them and she promises her daughter that she will protect her, that she will love her like she deserves to be loved.

To Vani, her daughter is Diya, meaning ‘Light’. She is Vani’s guiding light, the person who has brightened her life, showed her the way forward. But Vani doesn’t get a say in choosing her child’s name. Her daughter is supposedly called Rupa Shetty, a name decided upon by Aarti, a name Vani first hears of when she is asked to keep the birth certificate in the safe with all the other important documents.

Vani’s name is not on the birth certificate. For the right amount of money, her child’s parents are Aarti and Sudhir Shetty. Vani is a nonentity even though she nurtured Diya in her womb, laboured with her and gave birth to her, even though Vani is the one who nurses her through the night, even though Vani puts her to sleep, far away from her ‘mother’ as the baby’s cries disturb her. Aarti visits with ‘her child’ a few times a day. She loves her, on her terms, like she has everything and everyone else. And this makes Vani all the more determined to carry through with her plan.

The only thing that makes Vani have second thoughts is Sudhir’s obvious joy in his child. He is besotted with his daughter; he is a different man where she is concerned, incredibly patient, utterly tender, spending every minute away from work with her, delighting in her company. But even though the nursery is right next to the master bedroom and Sudhir would like it to stay that way, Aarti has asked Vani to move downstairs with the baby temporarily. It is because, she says, she cannot bear her child to be unhappy. Aarti says it upsets her that the baby is hurting.

‘All babies cry,’ Vani says. ‘It is their way of communicating.’

‘Make it stop,’ Aarti complains, putting her hands to her ears. ‘Take it away.’

To placate the journalists who have been calling non-stop and parking outside the gates of the mansion, Aarti and Sudhir host a celebratory do to introduce their child to the world. Despite Sudhir’s urging, Aarti does not allow Vani to attend.

‘The baby will not settle without me,’ Vani says. She refuses to call her daughter Rupa. To her, she is Diya.

‘It will be better all round if Vani attends. There will be noise and flashing cameras; Rupa will be daunted,’ Sudhir says.

But Aarti is adamant. ‘The baby will be fine for a couple of hours,’ she insists.

Vani knows that Aarti does not want her to be present because she fears some enterprising hack might put two and two together and the truth will out.

And so, Vani sits in her room and tries to hold in the milk and tears which flow incessantly from her breasts and eyes as she hears her baby scream non-stop for the three hours that she is separated from her mother and showed off to the world, subjected to flashes and intrusive cameras. And that is the last straw.

When the final journalist has left and an exhausted, sobbing Diya is handed to Vani and promptly stops crying and falls asleep at her breast, when Vani spends the night trying to console a fretful, hiccupping infant who clings to her and sobs in her sleep, who wakes up wailing in remembered bursts of agony the moment Vani disentangles her from her arms and places her in her cot, Vani vows never to be separated from her daughter again, making her mind up once and for all, Sudhir’s bond with the child notwithstanding.

Aarti sets about acquiring a passport for the baby in anticipation of the proposed UK trip for Sudhir’s shoot. She renews Vani’s visa to the UK, along with hers and Sudhir’s. Then she gives Vani the passports as is her wont to keep in the safe with the other documents, as Vani knew she would. She has been counting on it.

Vani spirits Aarti’s passport and her child’s away and passes them on to Ram. He gives them to a man he knows who is an expert at forging passports, who switches Aarti’s picture with Vani’s. Ram also gives Vani the contact details of the people in the UK with whom she will be staying initially until she finds her feet.

‘You can stay with them for as long as you want,’ Ram assures her. ‘They are very close, almost like family to me. Their children are both grown and settled in the US so they are lonely. They told me that they will be glad of the company.’ His eyes glitter and shine. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’

She is sure, she tells him, although what she would like more than anything is to give herself over to the relief of his arms, the comfort of having him make the decisions for her, having him look after her and her child.

This couple, these friends of Ram’s, own an Indian restaurant in Wembley and Ram has arranged for Vani to work there, pay her way. He also arranges for fake UK passports for Vani and Diya and a false birth certificate for Diya. Vani withdraws the money she has been saving all these years, all the money she has received from Aarti in return for her life of subservience. Ram changes most of it into pounds for her.