When Faults Collide (Faultlines #1)
Read When Faults Collide (Faultlines #1) Online
Authors: Claire Granger
by Claire Granger
When Faults Collide
Copyright © 2015 by Claire E. Granger
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Book design by Emily Sibitzky
ISBN 978-1511773492
To my beautiful children, who prove
every day that miracles are real
.
When Faults Collide
“Do not be led by others,
Awaken your own mind,
Amass your own experience,
And decide for yourself your own path. ”
-The Atharva Veda
Chapter One
I ran my toes back and forth along the window seat, curling them in and out, the feel of the cool tiles distracting me from her voice.
“Vh aa rhaa hai, Asha,” (
He is coming, Asha,)
I heard her say, her Hindi much more formal than my own.
I continued to look out the window impassively. I drew my knees up to my chest and sighed.
She pursed her lips and shook her head, but conceded and walked away.
She says he’s coming. Just like my mother said he was coming. My entire life has been listening to women tell me that the elusive HE, my father that is, is coming.
Just like my mother, Mausee was wrong too.
I snorted at the title.
Mausee. Auntie.
Calling the orphanage staff by auntie and uncle is supposed to make us more comfortable and feel like family.
Family.
Well, I had family. My mother. She is gone, so is the idea of family.
He
is not coming because
he
does not exist. And since
he
does not exist, then I will never have family.
So I will sit here, go through the motions that I need to go through, until I am old enough to leave.
I could probably run away, since I appear to be one of the oldest kids here.
However, I am no fool.
At thirteen, there are only two options for me if I leave.
One is death. Dying from starvation or from a beating or from illness.
The other option would be going back to the chakala.
I am never going back there.
Suddenly it hit me again. The smells, the sounds — I was being taken back there in my mind.
I covered my ears and shook my head. It didn’t matter. I was being dragged back to that place and to the last memories of my mother.
The smell was the worst part. A heady mix of incense, sex, sweat, and the lingering smells of food.
There were no doors, just open doorways. Many of the other women hung curtains; my mother hung an old sheet that was mostly tattered and torn and did very little at its only job of concealment.
Of course, nothing could conceal the sounds. The sounds were by far worse than the smells.
The grunting, squealing, occasional laughter, sounds of pleasure, sounds of pain, crying, and the sounds of body parts and sweat combining.
Yes, the sounds were the worst.
My mother had given me a cassette player with headphones to drown it out with American music. One of her clients had given it to her as a gift and she gave it to me. It was a regular client, a British business man.
Lyle. I hated Lyle. He pretended to be nice, as if we were all good friends.
He got a kick out of how excited I was to get the Walkman. He said it was old technology but my excitement was a sign that I had good character. According to him, British kids had music players called iPods, and they would never even accept a gift like a cassette player.
The only pods I knew were pea pods, so I had no idea what he was talking about.
Lyle liked to talk to me. During many of his visits when he was finished with my mother he wanted to stay for dinner to talk with me.
He could pretend like we were friends, but I knew his type. He had the eyes of a predator and he smelled of bad cologne and cigars.
Since many of the other girls who lived in the chakala were working by the time they were my age, I think he assumed it was just a matter of time.
When I was eleven he started bringing gifts just for me. Books, cassettes, drawing paper, journals, pencils.
What I hated most was that I loved the gifts. A book was a commodity that kids who grow up in a chakala don’t often receive.
My mother knew how to read and write in English and Hindi,
which was as rare as a blonde-haired Indian.
My mother was beautiful, just as pretty as the women in Bollywood movies, and she was smart and well mannered.
She wasn’t the ugly, wasted trash that surrounded us.
Because she was so beautiful, and because she was smart, I never understood our life. As a small child it was all I knew, but the older I got the more confused I became.
My mother didn’t attract the regular clients that the other women did, either. Sure, she had men who tried, but all of her regulars were wealthy men. Many from out of town.
In fact, by the time I was ten, more than half of her clients had her come to them at their hotels.
While this may be common in other countries, here the men were expected to just visit the chakala and be done with it, the exception being the high-priced escorts that lived in luxury with the wealthiest men. While she certainly could have been, she wasn’t a high-priced escort. Towards the end though, she would regularly escort some of her clients to dinner and other dates.
She would come home and I would beg her for stories of how nice the men were. When I compared the life that the other women were living to the life my mother lived, hers seemed almost glamorous.
She always looked sad when I showed any interest and patted my cheek and told me that we would not discuss it. Then she would pick out a book for us to read and we would curl up on our straw mattress and read together.
One night she came home just as I was finishing our dinner — a simple meal of rice and lentils. She had clearly been crying and had the beginnings of a bruise on her cheek.
“Mama!” I had exclaimed. “What happened?”
I ran over to her, which wasn’t far to run in our one room, and reached up to touch her cheek.
She winced when my fingertips made contact and then sat on our mattress and patted next to her for me to join. I did.
She pulled me close and rested her chin on my ebony black hair and started rubbing my back.
“Asha, sweet girl, I need you to listen to me,” she began. “You are never to worry about me. Mama will always be fine. And one day soon, your father will come for you, and you will leave me and go on and do great things.”
My lip trembled and I grabbed her hand to distract me from the sob that began rising in my throat.
“Mama, I will never leave you, ever.” I said firmly. At twelve I had a fire in me and was stubborn as a mule.
She took my face in her hands, her dark brown eyes looking deeply into my bright blue eyes. The eyes that she says I got from my father; the only thing distinguishing that I was not completely Indian.
“Sweet girl, this is no life for you. You deserve to be in school, to have friends, to have nice clothes, and be able to live somewhere that you are not surrounded by the depravity and lowest part of humankind.”
So I finally asked her what I had wondered for several years but never asked before. “Then why are we here, Mama?”
She closed her eyes and her lip trembled. Then she exhaled as if she had been waiting on me to ask her that very question.
“We had no choice, my love,” she sadly explained. “When your father left, he did not know about you. I did not know about you yet either. You were just a tiny little bean in Mama’s belly. Your Baba, your grandfather, he was furious when we learned about you,
so he sent me away. I was alone and cold on the streets, and I needed to be somewhere safe with food to keep you safe and growing. That’s when I met Chandra.”
Chandra was my mother’s best friend at the chakala. She had been family to me before tuberculosis took her from this world when I was eight.
“Chandra introduced me to the chakala. There is no chance of work or opportunity for a young, unwed, pregnant mother in Kolkata. The chakala was the only place we could go.”
I understood what she said, but it was the first time she spoke of Baba openly.
“Where is Baba now, Mama? Could he have changed his mind?” I inquired.
She closed her eyes and a single tear fell from her cheek.
“No, sweet girl, Baba was taken from this world when you were only two years old. My Mama passed when I was a girl. So there is nobody else.”
“Well why did my father leave? Where is he now?” I asked.
“My love, your father had to leave. He had to go back to America. And some day, some day soon, I will tell him about you, and then he will come for you. But I am selfish, and I want you for as long as I can have you. Because my life without you is no life at all.”
