The Stolen Girl (3 page)

M
y darling Diya
, light of my life,

I am sorry, so very sorry. I wish I could have spared you this pain, this horror.

The look on your face, like you were being broken, shattered into a million pieces. Oh, sweetheart, I wish I could have held you, comforted you. Remember when you were little how you used to jump into my arms, wrap your legs behind my back, your arms around my neck and bury your head in the curve of my shoulder? I wanted to hold you like that again, hold you close to my heart until I erased that look from your face, until the smile that habitually inhabits your face made an appearance. I wanted it to be just the two of us against the world, like we were for so long. But the world butted in, didn’t it?

Diya, I know you are lost at the moment. I know you are confused and hurting. But know this: you are loved. So very much.

I have regretted not being able to give you more, to give you material things, the buttress of a family. I have yearned to shower you with gifts; to take you on holiday instead of running away with you to a new place every six months just when you were settling into the old one; to provide you with a mansion in which to live instead of a poky little flat where you have to share a room with your mother; to give you a big family instead of just me, a pale facsimile of a woman afraid of her own reflection.

In lieu of all that I wished to give you but couldn’t, I showered you with love, all the love I had, and hoped, prayed that it was enough. And it seems to have been. You have been happy, haven’t you, my sweet? After that very first smile you flashed just for me when you were a baby, you have never really stopped smiling. And seeing you happy has made even my darkest days endurable. Seeing you smile, seeing your trust in me, has made everything worthwhile.

Diya, I know that what you are going through must seem intolerable, and I cannot bear the thought of your pain, but what gives me courage is the knowledge that you will be looked after, that all your needs will be met. I have done my research into this eventuality. I know you will be assigned a social worker; you will be put into foster care. I pray that you will go to a nice home, that the woman there, a mother like me, will look at you and see a child who is desperately lost and hurting, and take you under her wing.

I pray.

Diya, my precious, I know also that you will be beside yourself worrying about me. Please try not to. I assure you, it is not that bad here. This is a wonderful country, populated with kind people who care about human rights, even those of prisoners like me who have stayed here illegally, abusing their hospitality. After they took me away from you, I was briefly held at the local police station where I asked for a solicitor. (I have been reading up, preparing quietly for this.)

‘Do you have any kids?’ was one of the first questions I asked my solicitor, a gentle, balding, bespectacled man.

‘Two,’ he said. ‘A boy and a girl. Nine and seven.’ He showed me their pictures.

I could not help the tears that graced my face then, Diya. ‘I do not have a picture of my daughter to show you,’ I said. ‘She’s mine,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Since an Extradition Arrest Warrant has been issued, we have to attend the initial hearing. We can set about preparing your defence once that is over.’

The solicitor accompanied me to Westminster Magistrates’ Court. At the preliminary hearing, I was denied bail and the judge served me with papers and set a date for my extradition hearing, which is four weeks from now.

I ache to see you, Diya my darling, I desperately do. I want that more than anything else in the world, but my solicitor tells me that he doubts the family lawyers assigned to your care will allow you to visit me before the extradition hearing. You see, my darling, in the eyes of the people who are looking after you right now, in the eyes of the world, I have committed a crime by claiming you for myself and compounded it by staying here with you without permission, in this country that has been so good to us so far.

Diya, you will hear the word ‘extradition’ with regards to me sooner or later. You like your words, but I don’t think you know this one. How could you? Extradition means that I will be deported to India to be tried for the offence of abducting you
–
‘abduction’, such a harsh word for what I did out of love for you
–
as I committed it there.

You will hear the word ‘extradition’ with regards to me, and you will panic. Please don’t. Words are just that, my darling, mere scribbles on a page. You think they have the power to hurt, but they only will if you let them. Just because it is jotted on a legal document, an arrest warrant, does not make ‘extradition’ special.

There is no way I am going to be extradited, sweetheart. You are my daughter and I am going to prove it. No judge in any court can keep a mother from her daughter.

I will fight for you. I will.

I have had to fight for you all your life. Fight to keep you, fight to own you. But this is, by far, the most important fight. And I will win it.

We will be apart for a while, my sweet, just until this is sorted. Not forever, that is a promise. And I have kept all the promises I made you, haven’t I? Except for the sleepover with Lily. That was beyond my resources. But this is what we will do: when I come home, which, I have to warn you, may not be soon – you see, even though I am your mum and the judge will see it my way, we have been living here with false documents, under false pretences, you and I, and I do not need my lawyer to tell me that I have broken many laws and I will be punished for it. But when I do get out, I will invite Lily round. I am sure you will still be friends with her. She gets you, Diya, doesn’t she? She loves you. Who wouldn’t? But then I suppose I am biased. It is because of love for you that this situation has happened in the first place. Too many people loving you, claiming you for their own.

I know you are floundering now. But know this: you are a survivor, Diya, like me. I never thought I was capable of doing what I did. But being a mother changes a person, transforms them. You transformed me. You made me into a stronger person, a person who would do anything for her child, including break the law over and over again.

You will come through, I know. I have to believe that, if I have to get through each day without you. I have to.

You used to pester me, ‘Tell me about my dad.’

So many questions and I used to scrabble around for answers, for lies. Now, in these letters, I will tell you the truth. And I will begin at the beginning. And for me, everything begins in the village in India where I grew up, where I lived the first few years of my life.

You know, Diya, my dearest wish has always been to take you to my village in India one day. Remember I showed it to you on the map once?

‘Why don’t we go back, Mum?’ you asked.

I suppressed my yearning; I did not allow the insinuation of what had happened to paint my face the crimson of guilt. Instead, I said quietly, ‘We cannot afford it, Diya, not right now. Perhaps one day.’

You had sighed then, like an old soul. You had said, ‘Mum, if you listened to me and worked in Tesco or something instead of those Indian restaurants where they pay you a pittance and do not even give you proper holidays…’ This was your particular bugbear. And you were off, lecturing me as usual.

I had smiled at your earnestness, had ruffled your hair, had said, ‘Don’t you have any homework?’

‘Mum, I was doing my geography homework when you came in and disturbed me, searching for your hometown on the map,’ your voice was rising in that way it does when you are exasperated.

My lovely girl. I miss you so.

‘Tell me about your village. Don’t you yearn to go back, Mum?’ you had asked, after a bit.

‘I do,’ I replied.

And you cupped my face in the palm of your hands, very gently, like handling a fragile ornament. ‘A shadow invades your face when you think of your village, Mum. Does it hurt? Do you miss it that much?’

How could I tell you why I couldn’t go back? How could I tell you what I had done in order to have you, the bridges I had burnt?

‘Let’s save, Mum,’ you had said then, eyes shining. ‘I will save my pocket money too, and we’ll go. I would like to.’ Your beautiful hands tracing the path, the distance between England and India on the map. That distance, deceptively small on the map but unfathomable, unbridgeable because of what I had done.

Your hands, that’s what I focused on – chubby and perfect, the hands that held mine with such trust. What would you do if you found out? Would you turn against me? Have you turned against me now? That look on your face. No, I cannot bear to think that way, I won’t.

‘Perhaps one day,’ I had said to you then and you had looked up at me, and something in my voice had made you stop chasing the issue. You were, you are, so understanding, Diya, so much more than I deserve. You have been such a treasure.

I love you, Diya, and I hope that, despite what’s happening now, you don’t doubt this. I love you and miss you and will come back to you; that is a promise. And I will tell you in these pages why I did what I did.

All my love, my precious one,

Mum

D
espair 

Noun:
the complete loss or absence of hope.

Synonyms: 
disheartenment, anguish, desperation, distress. 

S
oft arms enveloping me
, leading me inside. I am shivering. I want to lose myself in the comfort of these arms, to forget, to disappear into before. I want these arms to be my mum’s, to smell like her: sandalwood and sweat – not of a strange flowery perfume that assaults me, bringing tears to my eyes.

I am led to the bedroom and when I spy the suitcase, spilling its contents like a gossip’s mouth dispersing confidences, I am undone by yearning. I want my mum, desperately, urgently. The ache is so deep and all-encompassing that I crumple. The arms support me, they heft my considerable weight. They lead me to the bed which doesn’t house the suitcase – my bed. I ignore it – I do not want to look at the suitcase open on the other bed or think of the argument I had with her just before…
Before
.

I walk instead to the kitchen, the path learned by rote, my feet guiding me even though my vision is blurred. The flat does not smell of hope and new beginnings anymore. It never did – who was I kidding? It smells of despair, the old overlapped with the new.

I remember writing ‘despair’ in my vocabulary book, realising what it meant, that it was very different from sadness, much deeper somehow, more hopeless. I remember wondering what would prompt someone to be in such despair as to be desperate. What sort of circumstances? Now I know. Now I feel it. Despair that starts in the pit of my stomach and escapes out of my mouth in a thin sound, strangely like that produced by a child blowing tentatively on a shiny new recorder for the very first time. I am keening, I realise, finally understanding, fully, the meaning of the word we used in English the other day.

I say ‘keening’ softly, concentrating on the feel of the word on my tongue and it is as comforting as a hard boiled sweet that softens in your mouth, releasing scrumptious juices that trickle down your throat, caressing it with their gentle sweetness. The word works its magic as words always do and I feel a tad calmer.

I love words almost as much as I love food. I always sit in the front for English, a fine target for paper rockets and pencils, but I don’t want to miss a thing. I am the best in English in my class no matter where I find myself, no matter that the school is new, my classmates new. I am not boasting. It is a statement of fact.

And yet, now, I have no words to describe what I am feeling. This numbness that has taken possession of me, this complete blank, this gaping chasm opening up inside of me. It allows me to think of words to describe the strange sounds I am suddenly making, to muse on how good I am at English, to think of anything but what just happened.

Because I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.

Footsteps behind me. I turn, hopeful.
Mum?

But it is just the policewoman, the owner of the soft arms and flowery perfume, the one who restrained me when I wanted to go to my mum… Anger, hot, stinging like Deep Heat spray. I welcome it. Better, much better than the strange emptiness I was feeling a moment earlier.

‘You could have let me touch her or go to her,’ I say, my eyes smarting.

‘She committed a crime. Against
you
.’ Her gaze liquid, watery; her expression so tender I want to hit her.

I will not accept it. I will not.

I make my palms into fists to hold in the rage that threatens to bubble out of me, and turn to face the fridge. I root around in the back of the vegetable drawer where Mum never looks and find what I’m after. A Dairy Milk bar. I had hidden it there the day I found a two-pound coin behind the sofa cushion, eating two of the chocolate bars I spent it on and saving the third for a rainy day. And if this doesn’t qualify as a rainy day, I don’t know what does.

‘Diya is the only person in this school who can use idioms in context,’ Mrs. Reid, my English teacher in Year 6 had announced to the whole school during assembly. I was bullied twice as hard that day but it did not detract from the warm feeling I carried around in my heart that whole afternoon, replaying Mrs. Reid’s words in my head, imagining the expression of the bullies when she said it, their faces tightening in anger, and perhaps jealousy.

When Mum had got home, I told her what Mrs. Reid had said and she had taken my hands and we had danced around the living room. ‘I am so proud of you,’ she had said. ‘Here,’ she had taken a twenty-pound note from the emergency jar and given it to me, ‘get some books, go on. Get ones that will challenge you, mind.’

And I had not spent even fifty pence of that twenty on sweets or crisps – had instead browsed second-hand book stores and amassed a treasure trove of books, which I then lugged to every single flat we moved to and which were the first items I packed whenever we moved.

I look towards the corner of the living room where the box of books sits. The pile of paperbacks has grown, multiplied. I use libraries for the most part, registering the day we move to a new place, but once in a while, when I like a book so much that I want to own it, I haunt second-hand stores and charity shops until I find it and, failing that, treat myself and buy it new, forgoing chocolate for a week or two to pay for it.

I sniff and pull the Dairy Milk bar out, tear off the wrapper and stuff the whole thing in my mouth. A profusion of chocolate and yet, it tastes salty, of sorrow. The sobs come around the chocolate and I almost choke on it. The policewoman puts her arms around me, but I shrug them away. I don’t want her useless comfort.

I bite and chew and swallow and sob and taste snot and hurt and regret and guilt. Did I cause this somehow? Why did I fight with her? Why did I refuse to move? If I had agreed, perhaps… I think of the police car idling on the curb when I ran downstairs. No, we couldn’t have escaped. They were watching, waiting.

‘Your
real
mother has been searching for you for the past thirteen years,’ the policewoman says softly.

I choke on the last chunk of chocolate and the policewoman rubs my back gently. I jerk away.

‘Shut up!’ I yell when I can breathe. ‘Shutupshutupshutup.’

My mum would be shocked at my language. I am quiet and well behaved for the most part, preferring to bury my angst in food and books. I am never intentionally rude and yet here I am yelling at a policewoman of all people – I could be arrested, for God’s sake. Good. I want to be. At least then, Mum and I will be in the same boat.

I open the freezer. Root around in the back of the fourth cabinet. Panic. Only when my fingers close around the tub I know is hiding behind the frozen spinach do I release the trapped breath. I pull it out – Häagen-Dazs Cookies and Cream – grab a spoon and eat standing up, stuffing my mouth even though I cannot taste a thing, even though I’m pretty sure I am ingesting my own tears with each gasping mouthful. I keep going until the hot flare of panic is doused by the cool ice cream, until the tub is scraped dry, until all I can feel, all I know is full, the heaviness of my limbs, the sigh of air as it travels down into my numb lungs, the drum of blood trying to make its way to the extremities of my dumbstruck body.

I think of Lily, wonder what she’s doing now. Probably watching television, worrying the cuddly toy she is never without at home. She misses it at school but wouldn’t dare bring it in – that would be issuing an invitation to the bullies who never leave her alone anyway on account of her thick glasses and frizzy hair, her timid demeanour, the habit she has of chewing her lower lip and bursting into loud, noisy tears at the slightest provocation. But these are the very things I love about her. They are what make her Lily. Underneath it all, she is incredibly kind, extremely generous and loving. Like me, she lives with just her mum, but her mum does not work all hours like mine.

I have told Mum so many times to apply for work somewhere with reasonable working hours. But no, she will only work at Indian restaurants recommended by the owner of the previous place she worked at. She works long hours for less than the minimum wage, no holidays, no sick leave. And we move every eight months or so, like clockwork. I do not want to accept what just happened; I do not want to acknowledge it – but it makes sense. I can see now why she didn’t work at other places like normal people, like I urged her to so many times.

And even though I don’t want it to, the memory of the time I was selected to represent my school in an inter-school essay competition inveigles in with the accompanying hot sting of hurt and loss. The representatives from the various participating schools were to be whisked away to Switzerland for a week, where they would take part in a host of competitions and debates. I had been so excited, so pleased, had waited up for Mum even though she was working the late night shift, even though I had to go into school early the next day on account of a trip to a museum, and had shown her the letter. I hadn’t been prepared for her face to fall, her eyes to water, not with joy but with dismay.

‘What is it?’ I had asked. ‘Mum, I was selected –
me
– from everyone in the whole school,’ I had said.

‘I am so very proud of you, sweetheart,’ she had replied, her expression that of a wounded puppy, ‘but you can’t go.’

No amount of persuasion would make her change her mind. I had begged, cajoled, promised to save up my pocket money, but she said we just couldn’t afford it.

Siobhan, who wasn’t even very good, had gone instead of me and had come back bursting with stories of the fun she’d had, taking care to recount them, always, in my presence.

I had sulked for six months, had saved every bit of my pocket money, had lost quite a lot of weight as I was not eating any snacks, and earned enough for the trip.

‘See, we can afford it,’ I had yelled, shoving the money at Mum, but by then it was too late.

Tears had oozed out of her eyes and dropped down her cheeks, her face frozen, a study in hopelessness. And I had stormed off and sobbed in our not-so-private shared bedroom, not bothering to smother my sniffles.

The same thing happened when the whole class went to France for a week – the whole class, that is, with the exception of me. That time I did not even bother to ask Mum. My classmates came back with tales of the wonders they had seen, the fun they had experienced, and I pretended I didn’t mind, that I had had a brilliant time monitoring the Reception kids the whole week.

Somehow, now that I’ve let one memory in, more clamour for attention. I remember the time the head teacher of the school before this one asked to see Mum. When I had relayed the message to her, she had been shocked, terrified.

‘Come on, Mum, it’s nothing bad. I’m a good girl,’ I had said. ‘Mum, normally it is the other way round; I should be the one worrying, not you,’ I had laughed.

We went together, she changing her outfit ten times, finally wearing a sari too grand for school. I knew people would tease me when they saw her decked out in a sequinned sparkly creation as if she was going to a wedding, but I hadn’t cared. I had felt proud walking up to school with my mum, showing her the lab, the gym, the music hut. She had been too panicked to see properly, wringing her sari continually, but her eyes had widened and she had said that it was all very grand. I put down her panic to the fact that she hardly ever interacted with anyone outside of the restaurants where she worked.

On that particular occasion, the head teacher had called her in to praise me, to tell Mum that I would be getting a special prize for my writing. Once she got the hang of his speech, the anxious expression had lifted from her face, the creased lines had ironed out, and she had beamed. Her whole face had transformed and even the headmaster had been gratified when she held his hand and said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ over and over again.

‘It’s not me,’ he had said. ‘It’s all your daughter’s hard work,’ winking at me.

Mum had been so proud of me that day. She had wiped her eyes with the pallu of her best sari and skipped out of school, her face glowing.

I can see now why she only used to go shopping late at night and was always looking over her shoulder when we were out together. I can see why she never went to the doctor, even when she was desperately ill that one time, preferring to self-medicate, picking something from the pharmacy at Asda. She always said she was shy because of her accent and that she never understood what the doctors were saying; they spoke too fast for her. It occurs to me now that her behaviour was strange, but then I never knew any different. I did not have friends to compare it with. It was what defined my mother, who she was.

‘If you worked at Tesco instead of an Indian restaurant, if you mixed more, you would understand their accent,’ I had said, mock exasperated.

‘I don’t need to mix; I have you,’ she had said, cupping my face fondly, planting a kiss on my nose.

‘But what about after I go away to uni, Mum?’

‘
Then
I will mix,’ she had said.

And now,
she
is gone.

Don’t think about it. Don’t.

I push these thoughts away and concentrate on Lily. I wish I was with her, snuggling on her worn sofa, she at one end, me at the other, basking in the soft pink glow of friendship, the heating cranked up to high, the stuffy amorphous cloud of blue-grey air, smelling of Glade and beef casserole, punctured every once in a while by our shared confidences and our laughter. Watching music videos on television and munching on chocolate, me cuddling one of her soft toys, as she says she doesn’t want me to feel left out.

‘Here, take this one. He’ll keep you company,’ she said the first time I visited, shoving a bedraggled beige teddy at me. ‘His name’s King. He’s my second favourite.’

Even though she’s only six months younger than me, sometimes it feels like there’s a world of difference between us. She feels so much younger somehow. She’s still into soft toys whereas I have begun having crushes on boys, although they don’t look twice at me, even the ugly ones. But she’s sweet and kind and gives me great big hugs and imparts secrets. She tells me her mum has a new boyfriend and that she doesn’t like him. She tells me she caught Shania making out with Toby, Alanna’s boyfriend, in the girls’ toilets and that is why Shania has been so mean to her recently. She sits with me at lunchtime. She shares her pocket money, her chocolate and her crisps with me. She shares my fantasies of the horrible fates that we wish would befall the bullies. She understands why I haven’t invited her back to my flat yet, even though I have been to hers like a million times. She gets it without me having to explain that I am embarrassed, that I am shy because I have never done it before.