The Stolen Girl (26 page)

Everything is in place. She is nervous, she is worried, she is as ready as she will ever be.

And then, she gets her chance. Sudhir has to go to Mumbai for an awards ceremony. Just for the weekend. Aarti wants to go too; she wants all of them to go.

‘You go,’ Vani says. ‘Is it worth disrupting the baby’s routine for two days?’ she asks.

Aarti thinks about it. Vani knows that Aarti has found the reality of a baby very different from the idea of one. Babies require a lot of attention; they are not much fun. Aarti cannot stand Diya’s tears. The thought of sharing a flight with her, to have no means of escaping her wails even if only for an hour, is more than Aarti can fathom. Vani can see the cogs turning in Aarti’s brain, can anticipate the direction Aarti’s thoughts are taking. The luxury of having a weekend away with no baby is inviting. The idea of having Sudhir all to herself even more so. Sudhir is too focused on the child; he hardly pays any attention to Aarti. And even though Aarti tries not to let it affect her, Vani can see that it does. Even though Aarti endeavours not to be jealous of the baby, of the time Sudhir patiently devotes to her, she is. Vani can tell. She has always been able to read Aarti’s thoughts. Except of course that one time Aarti sprung the decision of Vani having a baby for her.

At this moment, Vani can see that Aarti is thinking of the press. She is anticipating what they might say, whether they will label her a bad mother if she spends a weekend away from her child.

‘Every new parent needs a break from their children once in a while, especially parents in the public eye who have the pressures of fame to deal with as well as new parenthood,’ Vani says soothingly. ‘You need some time for yourselves. The press know this. Ragini, that Bollywood actress, went away recently didn’t she? To LA with her husband, if I remember right, leaving their three-week-old baby behind. The press were indulgent.’

The irony that Vani is the new parent is lost on Aarti. She has lied so long to herself as well as to the public that she believes the lie, forgets that Vani is the mother of her child, that Vani is the one who has recently given birth, Vani is the one doing all the caring of the child. Aarti has had people cater to her every need for so long that she forgets to consider anyone else, only thinking of others in relation to herself. Vani is banking on this as she makes her arguments.

She has said the right thing. When she sees the smile grace Aarti’s face, Vani knows she has won.

And so Aarti lets Vani convince her.

‘It is only for the weekend. I will be back in two days,’ Aarti says. She is not worried about Vani running away anymore. Since the baby arrived, she has relaxed her vigilance on Vani, seeing how besotted Vani is with the child. And the thought that Vani might run away with her daughter in tow has not occurred to Aarti, or perhaps it has and she has dismissed it, thinking that Vani would never have the guts…

Ram books a flight for Vani and Diya as soon as it is confirmed that Aarti and Sudhir will definitely be going to Mumbai. He drives them to the airport the very night that Aarti and Sudhir fly to Mumbai.

‘Promise me this,’ Vani says to Ram, losing herself one last time in his coffee eyes. ‘Marry a nice girl. Have a good life.’

He holds Vani close, kisses her on the lips, kisses her child, lets them go. This man who has risked so much for Vani. Who loves her.

She waves goodbye, committing to memory that beloved face, the slumped shoulders, the defeated body that she would have, in a different life, been honoured to own. She does not know what is in store for her and her child on the other side of the barrier, what she is getting herself, getting her child into, and for the briefest of moments she is tempted to go back with this man, back to the life she has been leading; she is tempted to stick with the devil she knows.

And then her daughter moves, she snuggles closer into Vani. Vani looks at her daughter’s face, serene in sleep, completely innocent of the circumstances, the drama that prompted her arrival into the world, and she knows that she has to do it. Be strong for her child. Finally do something after years of doing nothing. Stand up for her child and for herself.

She waits trembling as their passports are put under scrutiny. She shivers until the inscrutable man doing the inspection nods, waves her daughter and her through. She has crossed the first hurdle. Now for the next. And the next.

She heaves a sigh as she sits on the plane. She waits for it to take off. Hoping, praying, a part of her expecting policemen to rush onboard and apprehend her. A taste of how it is going to be from now on. Always on her guard, always praying, worrying, running.

The plane takes off, flying Vani and her precious bundle into a new life. She thinks of Aarti coming home to an empty house, going from room to room, calling for Vani, calling for her daughter, her voice increasing in pitch, wobbling at the corners as each room is empty, devoid of the faces she is searching for. She pictures Sudhir looking for his daughter, the only girl he has loved wholly and with abandon, the only girl he has been completely faithful to. She thinks of Aarti taking pills, putting one after another in her mouth. Aarti’s face as she was in the hospital, ghastly pale, on the brink of death, looms. Vani holds her daughter close, breathes her in – her scent: talcum powder, milk, new baby. Chasing away the smell of death and doom.

A
s soon as
she steps in the door, Aarti knows.

They find soiled nappies in the bin; they trip over toys – the teething ring, the windup music box, the baby gym, the cuddly bear almost bigger than the baby herself. They find the clothes she was wearing when they waved goodbye to her just two days ago, the Babygro, the little vest and skirt, uncharacteristically discarded on the floor. Normally Vani tidies them away immediately, does a batch of laundry… Vani…

There is a letter on Aarti’s nightstand: ‘I am sorry. So sorry. I just cannot stand being your possession anymore. And I do not want my child to treat me that way.’

Aarti runs. She sprints through the house calling for her child. The house populated by myriad precious treasures but not the treasure she is looking for; peopled by numerous servants who avert their gaze and try to be unobtrusive, but not the servant she is looking for. The unnervingly silent house undisturbed by the wails of a baby, uninterrupted by the gaiety that accompanies an infant’s delighted gurgling. The disconcertingly quiet house, a noiselessness very different from the quiet of a house with a sleeping baby in it, people tiptoeing around so as not to wake it up, watching over it, marvelling at the miracle of its little chest moving up and down, its beautiful face serene, the tiny fisted hands thrown in abandon above its head, its mouth twitching, dancing to the tune of its dreams. The eerily empty house, the air heavy and still.

Waiting.

Waiting for the chaos that is to follow, the questioning of servants who vow they know nothing, who deny allegiance to the traitor amongst them and any knowledge of what she was planning, their faces composed in masks of appropriate concern, unswerving loyalty and unimpeachable honesty.

Waiting for the team of police officers and detectives who will trudge through the house, dragging mud across its scrubbed floors, populating it with a different kind of noise.

Waiting for the flash of bulbs, the gaggle of reporters and journalists who perform a vigil outside the gates.

Waiting for the unexpected sound of a grown man’s sobs to reverberate through its walls, to shock its very foundations, a grief like no other, all the more distressing, all the more profound for its rarity. A grown man sitting in a nursery surrounded by the debris of his child’s limited time with him, more toys and clothes than the number of days she’s been in this world, a grown man reduced to a sniffing snivelling heap, clutching to his face his daughter’s clothes, garments that he refuses to allow to be washed, the clothes she had worn when he innocently waved goodbye, not knowing it would be his last, breathing in the last lingering traces of her sweet baby smell and imagining he is holding her, the tears continuing to come, unhindered.

Despite floundering in a quagmire of grief, this shocks Aarti the most, seeing Sudhir go so completely to pieces.

‘It is all your fault!’ Sudhir yells on one of the interminable dark days after, black as endless night and blending into one another, thick with grief the colour and consistency of sludge.

The detective in charge of finding their child has just called to say that although they are following all leads, they have come up with nothing so far. Aarti is lying in bed, curtains drawn, pillow shielding her swollen, throbbing eyes when Sudhir comes barging in.

‘Vani runs away with
my
child and you…you have the temerity to blame
me
?’ She screeches at him.

I will kill you, Vani
, she thinks,
for doing this to us. When I find you. I will put my hands around your neck and squeeze, until all the breath leaves your body and you go slack as a cloth doll, floppy as a puppet.

‘You caused this.’ Sudhir’s voice is distorted by anger, unhinged by pain. ‘You blackmailed Vani into having Rupa. You blackmailed me into sleeping with her.’

She is too stunned to come up with a retort.

‘We brought that innocent child into this world on a whim of yours. And now. And now…’ His voice anguished, the colour and texture of a burnt auburn sky bemoaning the setting sun.

‘You are a grown man,’ she bellows, her voice morphing into a shriek. ‘You could have said no.’

‘And sit back and allow you to take your life?’ Sudhir looks at her, properly looks at her for the first time in days, and his voice is soft as he says, ‘I loved you, Aarti, more than I have ever loved anyone.’

Despite her agony, or perhaps because of it, she notes the use of the past tense and it devastates her.

‘I loved you. But my love was wasted on you. You only love yourself.’ He accused her of this once before – when she told him of her plan, asking him to have a baby with Vani.

‘What I did, I did to keep you and Vani with me. You and Vani were my world.’ If he can use the past tense, so can she. ‘I loved you both so much.’

He shakes his head vigorously, like a Bharatanatyam performer. ‘You
needed
me and Vani to fan your ego, to dance to your tunes. You don’t love anyone but yourself.’

That again. She cannot bear it, she cannot. She tries to block out his words, fisting her hands and putting them on her ears, rocking back and forth, back and forth, but they nudge in anyway, twirling inside her head like impish devils pointing accusing fingers.

‘When, for once, we didn’t do what you wanted, you turned on us. You used us. You manipulated us. It’s all you know. To use others. To possess them. It is what you learnt from your parents. You do not love Rupa; you don’t know what it is to love, truly love, selflessly love. You wanted the child, my child,’ his voice trips over a sob but he soldiers on, ‘as a possession. So you can surround yourself with people you own, call them your “family”, delude yourself that you love them, when they are mere planets revolving around you – the sun in the centre, mere subjects catering to your every whim.’

He pauses, draws in a breath. When he releases it, he is a much smaller, thinner, insubstantial version of himself, not the handsome actor who graces the screens but his shadow, a man who has lost his puff. Literally. ‘That was the police commissioner on the phone. There are no leads. Vani has disappeared. We are not going to find them,’ his voice bleak, desolate as land devastated by drought, parched and cracked and aching for rain. ‘Perhaps it is best to leave Vani to get on with her life. She will raise Rupa well, be a good mother to her.’

Shock silences her, robs her of her voice.

He leans into her and she jerks away. Undone by what he has said, the accusations he has hurled her way.

‘Goodbye, Aarti.’

Sudhir leaves and doesn’t come back. She waits for him. And waits. Like she waited for Vani to return that fateful day when Aarti asked her to have a baby for her. It is becoming a pattern, this. The people she loves leaving her, disappearing clean from her life.

And so, she does what she did when Vani went away. She arranges the pills she has been collecting meticulously for just such an eventuality (although she never really believed she would need to use them again; she had assumed the threat of taking them once had been enough) by her bedside table, writes a note – again like she did before. But this time she does not arrange for a servant to find her just in time. After all, what has she got to live for? And then she takes the pills. Or tries to.

She can’t go through with it. If she dies, Vani will win. Perhaps Vani is hoping for just this – after all, she knows Aarti well enough. Aarti can picture Vani scouring the papers for news of Aarti’s demise so she can relax and enjoy her child, flaunt her in public without worry. Aarti will not give her that satisfaction. She will not.

Aarti does not take the pills, saving them instead, with the note – just in case. She flits about the empty rooms of the huge house like she did in her parents’ home as a child, lonely once more, alone like she never thought she would be again. She tried, desperately, to protect herself against this very eventuality. She failed.

She roams the rooms – every one reminding her of the hopes and dreams she had weaved for a future that included her, her husband, her child and her friend. She is a ghost, insubstantial, unable to puncture the heavy silence that settles like an interminable sigh. Who is she, without people to define her? She is lost. Hollow.

In desperation, she turns to what she knows best, the gorging on food to fill the abyss and the disgorging after; the comfort derived as she throws up, as her stomach is emptied, her body drained. It is the only time she is able to keep the other pain, the mental pain that pulls her towards a yawning void, at bay. That pain takes second place as her body heaves and shudders, as she regurgitates all the food she has mindlessly eaten in order to forget. The smell of vomit and phenyl briefly dislodging the fog of pain, the purple aura of grief, the reddish yellow stain of loss that trails her. After, she is able to sleep, slip into a black dreamless daze until she wakes and with consciousness comes realisation, the heavy silence of a sombre house doused in mourning – no baby cries, no noise, no laughter, no joy. And the nightmare begins again.

It is her driver, Ram, who calls for medical help. She cannot remember the ride to hospital, the transfer to the exclusive clinic where they coax her back to health with a mixture of firmness and kindness, something she has never previously known. They encourage her to start keeping a food diary and she finds that penning down religiously what she has managed to push past the plug of her throat gives her some measure of comfort, some structure to the day, some way of filling the cavernous hours that stretch before her.

When she returns home from the clinic, having achieved a semblance of sanity, Sudhir visits and for one brief moment she thinks he has come back to her. But he is here to apologise for what he has inadvertently put her through, to inform her that he has moved on.

‘I had to leave, Aarti,’ he says, wringing his hands. ‘Our marriage had been floundering for some time and this was the last straw.’

She is hurt beyond belief. While she has been sinking in the quicksand of depression, he has been ‘moving on’. Images of Sudhir with nubile co-stars float before her eyes. She blinks them away. She shows Sudhir the door, does not binge on food like she would have done once, and is disarmingly pleased to write in her diary that she had a chapatti, some vegetables and a mixed fruit salad for supper. She has passed her first test.

Afterwards, she patrols the empty house and thinks:
You did this to me, Vani. You have destroyed my life, taken everything I ever loved from me.

Her voice of conscience pipes up, softly, ‘Her note. Did you read what it said? Perhaps if you had treated her better…’

She shushes it, angrily.
What more could I have done? She has taken my child, everything good in my life. I will find her. I will.

She calls the police commissioner and finds that the police team searching for Vani has dwindled to two officers. They assure her in progressively weary voices every time she phones that they are doing everything in their power to find her child but that the trail had gone cold.

She calls Sudhir and rails at him for letting things slide. She hires a team of investigators, the very best, to search the length and breadth of the country, to dig Vani out of hiding. After an extensive search, they too come back with nothing. No trace of Vani. It is as if she has disappeared into the ether, taking Aarti’s child with her.

How can that slip of a girl outsmart me? She’s a mere servant; she’s nothing without my generosity, my munificence.

‘She is not in India, ma’am,’ the investigators inform her.

And hard as it is to believe, to picture shy, diffident Vani abroad, all the evidence seems to point that way. Perhaps Vani decided not to stay in India, after Aarti’s threats, aware of the clout Aarti and Sudhir exercised. So where can she have gone?

Aarti tries to put herself in Vani’s shoes. She thinks of the shadows that crossed Vani’s face every time Aarti said ‘my child’. She thinks of the way Vani had said, the day of the scan, ‘I want this child,’ and the way her face had become an impenetrable mask when Aarti had first laughed and then raged at her. Aarti should have been more careful, she realises now. She grossly underestimated how motherhood would change Vani, how it would give the meek, shy slip of a girl a backbone of steel, how it would compel her to steal what wasn’t hers and run away, to start a new life rooted in the sorrow and loss of the sister related to her by friendship.

Where can Vani take a baby?

And then one day, as she is getting money out of the safe, Vani’s passport tumbles out. Aarti doesn’t think much of it; after all, she herself had actioned Vani’s passport and visa for their trip to the UK that… Wait. Frantically, she rummages in the safe for her passport and the baby’s but she knows she will not find them. She calls Sudhir and asks him to look among his things, her hand clenched around Vani’s passport, flaming orange rage consuming her, thick green bile flooding her mouth with the acrid taste of Vani’s treachery, of being taken for a fool.

And thus it begins.

Aarti applies for a new passport and because of her connections, she is able to get one almost immediately. She flies into Heathrow the following week, hires a private investigator, stays a month while the investigator scours London. When no trace turns up of either Vani or Aarti’s baby, Aarti asks him to widen the search area, look in the suburbs and the other big cities with thriving Indian populations, knowing that Vani would want to blend in, not stand out. Nothing. No sightings. She retains the investigator even after she goes back, although he costs the earth and a bit, and they search. And search.

Sudhir pays another visit.

‘You have your whole life ahead of you, Aarti,’ he says, impassioned in a way he hadn’t been during the last few years of their married life. ‘Go back to work. That is how I got over it.’

She looks in the mirror, at the husk of the woman she has become, the lined face, the bloodshot eyes, and laughs. ‘You are joking. Who would want me?’

‘I am not joking,’ he says. ‘All the agencies want you back, I assure you. They keep hounding me to persuade you to give it a try again. They know what you’ve been through, what you are still going through. Lord knows I’ve had enough of the press coverage. And now, there’s even talk of a movie, did you know that? They are enthralled by a servant having the temerity to steal the child of the “golden couple”, leading to the breakdown of our marriage, the ending of your career. My director even had the gall to ask me if I would play the lead! Lord, some days I want to shout the truth from the rooftops.’