The Stolen Girl (27 page)

She whips her hand out, encircles his wrist like a handcuff. ‘Don’t you dare!’

‘I won’t, Aarti, don’t you worry. Your secret and your reputation are both safe with me.’ His voice bitter as mustard seeds. ‘What I will do is stop this movie ever seeing the light of day.’ He swallows, rubs a hand across his forehead. ‘Anyway, I did not come here to argue with you. I wanted to ask you to stop searching for them, Aarti. Let Vani be. She wants this child. Let her have Rupa.’

‘How can you ask me that? Have you forgotten how much you loved Rupa,
your
child? Aren’t you angry with Vani?’

‘I miss Rupa, of course I do. I miss her every single day. But…Vani will be a good mother to her. Let them be.’

‘Don’t you want to find your child?’

‘I want my child to have a good life. Vani is her mother.’ Aarti flinches at this and Sudhir notices. ‘Whether you like it or not. Vani has made a choice, to bring Rupa up away from us. I have decided to respect that even though I wish I had known. I wish she had aired her concerns with me. I wish…’ He rubs his hand wearily across his eyes again, takes a deep breath. ‘I want the best for Rupa. I do not want her to feel hounded, to have to live in fear. Please stop. Don’t let the hate destroy your life.’

‘She stole the family I wanted. She took
everything
from me.’

‘Please. Stop. Let them be. Let them get on with their life.’

‘What about
my
life? What about the life she has stolen from
me
?’

Even though she will not admit this even to herself, Aarti
misses
Vani. Vani always brought out the best in Aarti. Vani made Aarti feel better about herself. Compared to dowdy, meek, quiet Vani, Aarti was the superstar she did not quite believe herself to be. In Vani’s starry-eyed gaze, in those early days, she could do no wrong.

Without Vani to underline her successes and triumphs, she is nothing. Nobody.

And so, Aarti does not stop. She spends all her time and all her money trying to find them because without Vani and her child, there is no meaning to her life.

T
his is what I know
:

The colour of remorse is blue. Inky blue like the darkest hour of night just before it fades to grey and is streaked dusty pink by the brushstrokes of dawn. It tastes bitter, like morning breath after a night of excess. It is the sensation in your mouth when you’ve just been sick. It has a charred tang like rice left too long on the stove and forgotten. It feels like an assault, blue-black welts blooming on battered skin. It is the dirty navy of burnt bridges. It is spilt ink on your best dress. It is the smell of lost chances, missed opportunities. It feels desperate. It smacks of failure. That is remorse for you. Failure couched in an armour of regret, a sheath of ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’.

The colour of loneliness, on the other hand, is white. Silvery white like morning mist that evaporates at the slightest whisper of a touch. The doomed arctic white of winter, icicles and frost, its frigid tentacles creeping, skulking, pouncing when you are at your lowest. It is omnipresent; enveloping you in a filmy white halo, igniting aches in you, yearning for the vibrant but elusive cornucopia of company. It tastes of wistfulness, insubstantial, like eating air. It smacks of desperation, the white hangdog smell of longing. It is thick air sagging languidly in a room, populated by laments and cravings, weighted down with melancholy, un-punctured by sound, untouched by laughter, undisturbed by gaiety.

T
he lawyer calls
. ‘You lied,’ he says.

‘Why did you lie to me?’ her daughter had asked the other day and her heart had stilled.

‘I did not lie,’ Aarti replies, injecting the colour and texture of ice into her voice. ‘Rupa Shetty is my daughter.’

Despite trying her hardest not to, her voice quivers. She looks around the tiny room she is reduced to, the plate of biscuits sitting on the wobbly table representing the hope, the bribe to get her daughter to love her. Her anticipations and dreams for a family like the one Vani had described to her, countless evenings, reduced to this. A girl with Sudhir’s passionate eyes and Vani’s delicate features looking at her accusingly, suspiciously.

‘
I
wanted her.
She
didn’t. She ran away when I asked her to have my child.’ Her voice trembles, it shudders, it refuses to do her bidding.

Nothing is as it seems, nothing belongs to her, not really. She had wanted the two people whom she loved to stay close to her, always. She had wanted to bind all of them together by means of a child.

She failed.

‘The DNA test has proven beyond a doubt that the child is Ms Bhat’s. I have the papers right here.’ The lawyer’s voice is crisp, shiny smooth, like pebbles roasting in the sun.

‘I could not have children. I was infertile. It was
my
idea. I wanted the child. It is
my
name on the birth certificate.’ The acrid taste of lost hope, disintegrating dreams in her mouth.

‘Ah, yes, that. A crime might have been committed there,’ the lawyer’s voice: pebbles dropping, one after the other. ‘Why is there no mention of the surrogate in the birth certificate? In the official documents?’

‘The child is mine.’
But she is not here. No one here but me.
Loneliness her only friend, the one that has stuck by her all these years.

‘Is there any document where Ms Vani Bhat signed away her maternal rights to you, where she agreed to be the surrogate?’

She closes her eyes, thinks of the pact they made when they were girls with everything ahead of them, the future a gift waiting to be unwrapped, seized, lived to the hilt. The yellowish-grey piece of paper fragile and fraying from overuse. Her signature and Vani’s.
We are sisters, bound by a bond thicker than blood. Bound by friendship.

‘No,’ her voice barely above a whisper.

‘I am sorry, Ms Kumar. This doesn’t look good for you. You might have to serve a sentence for perjury. And then there is the matter of having wasted police time and resources searching for a child who is not legally yours, actioning the extradition orders, getting Ms Vani Bhat arrested... For these offences, you will have to pay a hefty fine at the very least. Also, Ms Bhat might bring charges against you...’ The pebbles have settled. The voice is soft, quiet like mud, dry and powdery beneath bare feet.

They once danced barefoot on dry mud, she and Vani, she recalls. Vani was shocked that Aarti had never done it, never been barefoot.

‘Come on,’ she had said, holding Aarti’s hand, dragging her along.

Aarti had followed Vani’s lead, had dug her heels into the mud, allowed it to swallow her light brown feet, baptise them red with dust, savoured the feeling of warm filth caressing her feet. A sudden spidery flash, a low growl. The heavens had opened, without further warning. And they were wet, dripping, the dust thickening to sludge, squelchy beneath bare feet, oozing from between Aarti’s toes, her feet sinking where she stood, mired in soggy earth.

Vani had thrown her head back and laughed, had opened her arms wide and twirled. Aarti had watched this girl in her pink and emerald salwar kameez, a colourful moth, the water falling off her in slanting swirls as she danced in the shimmering curtain of rain.

And Aarti had done the same, offered her face up to the sky, opened her hands and pirouetted in the pouring rain and it had felt wonderful. She had felt free. As if she was throwing away her old self. All the need, the hurt, the long, lonely days spent aching for her parents to notice her. She had opened her mouth to the warm drops kissing her lips and tasting like blessings and she had felt happy.

Happy.

She lies on the bed, closes her eyes, the phone forgotten, the lawyer’s voice, ‘Ms Kumar? You there?’ a distant echo.

D
arling Diya
,

You must have heard the results of the DNA test by now.

‘Then why,’ you must be thinking, ‘did they have to arrest my mum? Put us both through all of this. How could Aarti claim I was her daughter?’

In these pages, hopefully, you will find answers to all of your questions. My story and yours. The unvarnished truth.

Looking back, I can see, Diya, that I was weak. Picture this: a young girl, cruelly orphaned, thrust into a big house full of strangers in an alien city. The young mistress of the house – a supermodel, the girl everyone fawns over – extends her the hand of friendship. And she takes it, awed. Amazed. Blown away. She has been chosen. She is special.

I realise now that any time during those years I could have walked away, but I was afraid. I did not know the city, the people. I did not know anyone except Aarti. I believed when she told me I was nothing without her. I believed blindly and stayed put.

When I met Ram, when I started spending time with him, that car our palace, I should have left, run away with him. But I was naïve. I did not identify love when it was staring me in the face.

All those hours Ram and I spent together in that car, we should have woven dreams, populated our future with them. But we stuck to the bounds of propriety and were unhappy separately, alone with our thoughts. Ram told me later that he was garnering the courage to profess his feelings for me. While I, unaware that the comfort I felt with Ram was the blossoming of love, ruminated on how to escape Aarti's friendship that had long since become a noose.

I was unhappy, I felt tied, trapped. And yet, I let myself be bound closer instead of gradually breaking each tie. Instead of slipping away, I slipped further into the net. Aarti told me she couldn’t function without me. She told me she would die without me, she showed me, by leading herself to death’s door. I believed her.

And then. And then you came along. And everything changed…

You made me grow up finally, my sweet. You transformed me into this person who actually does things instead of thinking about them. You made me pull myself out of the rut I had let myself get sucked into, you gave me gumption, a backbone. You made me into the person I was always capable of being but had been too afraid to become. You gave me the courage to finally bid adieu to my parents, to stop being someone’s daughter and someone’s servant, someone’s friend and someone’s sister. You made me a mother. You changed me.

And so I left. I left without looking back. I escaped a life of being a nonentity and entered another life of being another kind of nonentity. But at least here, I had you. At least here I was able to bring you up the way I wanted for thirteen blissful years until my past caught up with me.

Here is a truth: not a day goes by that I haven’t felt guilty – not about what I did, but the way I did it. I feel terribly guilty for what I put Aarti and Sudhir through, for denying Sudhir, who loved you so completely, his daughter, for denying you the love of a father and the warmth of a family. I have made so many mistakes, caused so much hurt. At the time, Diya, I could not think of what else to do. I was flailing, lost, backed into a corner. And so, I took you and I ran.

It is only fair, I tell myself, when I am missing you so much that I gag with yearning, longing for one glimpse of you. It is only fair that now I am denied seeing you, being with you for a bit so I get a taste of the pain I doled out to Sudhir and Aarti.

‘You have a visitor,’ the guard says, unlocking the gate.

It is the lawyer, I think.

My lawyer is busy getting the extradition charges dropped. But he’s warned me that I might still face extradition for the possession of false documents.

‘What about Diya?’ I asked when he told me.

It seems, darling, that you will be eligible for citizenship by virtue of your having lived in the UK for most of your life, since the UK is the only home you know. And since I am your sole guardian and I did what I did out of love for you, my lawyer thinks that if my case comes up for trial before a kind judge, we might be able to swing it so I can live here with you. If not, Diya, if you are willing, after I have served my sentence, we could go live in India for a bit? We could go to my village, perhaps. Stay for a while in the little cottage by the babbling stream where I spent my childhood, see how you like it.

So, I go to see the visitor, thinking it is my lawyer. But it is a girl. A young girl who has shot up in the time I have been gone, slimmed down. The girl I have watched grow and take shape, the girl I have watched come into her own. The girl I am so proud to call my daughter. My girl.

You are here. In front of me. There is a woman with you and she looks at you with affection, and I am happy. She is small and stout and it is obvious that she cares for you.

You hold your hand out, and I take it. I pull you into my arms like I have yearned to do every minute we have been apart. I hold you close and breathe in your smell, basking in the pleasure, the cherished warmth, the familiar beloved comfort of your body. My girl. My baby. My love.

T
he colour
of acceptance is yellow. The yellow of daffodils heralding spring and the promise of sunshine. The yellow of new beginnings. The yellow of life budding in trees bare and shorn by an icy winter. It smells like spring. It is the assurance of summer. It is biting into the first ripe mango of the season, yellow juice dribbling down your chin. It is the colour of smiles on kids’ faces. It is marigolds nodding, sunflowers waving like old friends. It is the sun thawing a heart frosted over by loneliness, icy with hate and blackened by revenge. It tastes of forgiveness, minty and fresh. It is a clean slate wiped free of past mistakes. It is the sound of laughter, the chatter of birds, a sign that the worst is over, the potential of things to come. It is tentative, it is hopeful – not quite orange, but getting there.

A
arti has got her wish
. It has taken thirteen years. But she has won. Vani is in prison and will be in there for a while, Aarti’s lawyer informs her. Even though the DNA test proved that Vani is Diya’s mother, she is serving a sentence for possessing false documents and living illegally in this country.

And yet, Aarti finds that there is no joy, no satisfaction of a job well done, like she had imagined she would feel at the culmination of this quest. There is no happiness.

Lying on the hotel bed, after taking the call from her lawyer, Aarti accepts that she sorely underestimated Vani, like she has been doing for years, ever since she met Vani, in fact. She thought Vani would give up the moment she was detained, that Aarti would grab her child and swan into a brighter future. Aarti had nurtured the fantasy that somehow the child would accept her as her mother – miracles happen don’t they? She had hoped for a little Vani to patch the Vani-sized hole in her life. A companion to stave off the loneliness.

But now she admits that she’s always known, deep inside, that there was no way Vani would meekly give her child up without a fight, not after she was brave enough to take her daughter and run, despite Aarti’s threats, despite what she had to lose.

And even though Aarti had known, deep down, that she would not get Diya/Rupa for herself, she had wanted this to happen. She wanted to teach Vani a lesson, to put Vani through the pain of loss, to punish her for what she did, to show her that she, Aarti, had not given up searching. She wanted Vani to feel hounded, to feel trapped. She wanted Vani to go to prison. She wanted Vani to suffer. All through that was her motive. To penalise Vani for stealing her child, destroying her life.

She hadn’t done it out of love for her child.

‘Don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself?’ Vani had asked that fateful day when she ran away for the first time, the day Aarti asked her to have a baby for her.

‘It’s all you know. To use others. To possess them. You don’t know what it is to love, truly love, selflessly love.’ Sudhir had accused before he left her for good.

Sudhir…he deserves to know.

She calls him. Tells him she is in London.

He interrupts before she can say anything else. ‘Let go, Aarti,’ his sigh is immense. ‘Give up searching and get on with your life before it runs away from you.’

‘She is lovely. Vani has brought her up well, like you said she would,’ Aarti says.

A pause and then, his voice awed, barely above an amazed whisper travelling five thousand miles to reach her via a telephone line crackling and sighing like a prickly old woman, ‘You found her?’

‘Yes.’

Sudhir is remarried now, to his make-up artist, of all people, an ordinary-looking plump woman two years older than Aarti. How Aarti had worried that he was having affairs with his co-stars! How she had envied them their beauty and their youth!

‘Does she look like me?’ His voice wistful, naked hope threading it.

‘She has your eyes.’

‘Not a day goes by that I… I miss her so.’

This is the closest Aarti has ever come to having a heart-to-heart with Sudhir, the closest she has come to seeing his soul laid bare in thirteen years.

He has a son with the make-up artist. No daughters apart from the one he lost.

‘Will you be seeing her again?’ His voice wistful, punctuated by longing, carrying down the crackly line.

‘I will come tomorrow,’ Diya had promised, but that was before the results of the DNA test came through.

‘I…I don’t know.’ Diya’s face looms before Aarti’s eyes, the way she stood in Aarti’s arms, a little stiff, a little unyielding, the way her eyes, Sudhir’s eyes, lit up when she smiled.

‘If you do, give her my love.’ His voice infinitely sad.

‘I am sorry, Sudhir, for the way I was,’ Aarti says. ‘For what I asked you to do.’

Aarti’s apology is thirteen years too late. Diya – the result of what Aarti asked Sudhir to do – staring at Aarti with her father’s eyes in this very room, trying to draw the truth from Aarti’s depths with the strength of that golden, unwavering gaze, interceding with Aarti on her mother’s behalf, never losing the belief that Vani was her mother even after Aarti showed her the birth certificate.

‘It’s all in the past now.’ Sudhir’s voice is as soft as snow falling under cover of night, gentle as absolution. ‘Have you spoken to her?’

‘Of course I spoke with her. She’s…’

‘No, not Rupa. Have you spoken to Vani?’

A pause. As always with Sudhir, Aarti is blindsided, lost for words.

‘She is the one who deserves apologies.’

The click of the connection being aborted, the whine of the ring tone. Only Sudhir has ever dared to speak to Aarti this way. Only him. She feels a pang. For what might have been. If she hadn’t come up with her foolhardy plan, if she hadn’t persuaded Vani to have a child… Who knows? Perhaps Aarti and Sudhir would still be together. Then Aarti thinks of the fights they used to have. No, they brought out the worst in each other. They always have.

Lying alone on her single bed in an alien country in a run-of-the-mill hotel room populated with old regrets and new memories, she ruminates over Sudhir’s words. Thirteen years on and he still manages to surprise her, this man she once loved. He has forgiven Vani, the woman who wronged him, who denied him the daughter he loves, aches for. And now, he is asking Aarti to not only forgive and forget, but to apologise also.

She thinks of Vani, that girl she had loved, who in her mind had been her only family apart from Sudhir, even though, if she is to be completely honest with herself, she never quite thought of Vani as her equal. She loved Vani, but her relationship with her was always slightly derogatory; she treated Vani, she thinks, her cheeks burning, like a favourite pet. She recalls the note Vani had left behind, ‘I cannot stand being your possession…’

That had hurt. It had touched a nerve. Had she treated her friend like a possession?
Yes,
her inner voice concurs, the one that used to be so vociferous in the beginning until she shut it up.

Unbidden, the memory of the time Vani had brought the baby in to see her, dressed in a white jumpsuit, looms.

‘Why is she wearing that?’ Aarti had asked, as soon as she saw the baby. ‘I asked you to put her in the pink one.’

Vani’s smiling face had ironed out into the empty expression that was so common when she was with Aarti. ‘She’s changed now and she’s sleeping.’

‘No,’ Aarti had snapped, annoyed that Vani had not dressed Rupa,
her
daughter, in the clothes she had chosen for her. ‘Change her. Now. Then bring her back.’

Vani had walked away with the baby without another word and a moment later, the first wails of protest had reached Aarti as the clothes were wrestled off the baby and she awoke from slumber.

‘Do you miss her?’ Diya had asked in this very room and Aarti had not been lying when she said, ‘Every day. I miss Vani every single day.’

She misses the fun they had. The camaraderie they shared. After Aarti came back home that weekend and found no Vani and no child, what she missed most was noise, laughter, companionship. The joy of having a friend to share everything with.

How would Diya/Rupa have turned out if she had lived with her, grown up with Aarti as her mother? What would she, Aarti, have been like as a mother? She cannot bear to think of that. It hurts too much. What is the use of deliberating on what might have been?

This is what she knows: Diya – it is time Aarti started addressing her by the name she prefers, the name Vani chose for her – is lovely. Chubby yes, but that can be rectified. She is kind, well adjusted, fiercely loyal. A credit to Vani. It kills Aarti to admit it, even to herself, but it is the truth.

And now that Aarti is admitting truths, here is another: she, Aarti, had been ill for years.

‘Have you gone quite mad?’ Sudhir had asked her when she came up with her plan to have Vani create a baby for her.

After her spell at the clinic, Aarti realised that Sudhir’s accusation was not as preposterous as it had seemed, that it had a grain of truth in it. She had been messed up, mentally, for a while. Decades of abusing her body had taken their toll. Not only had the bulimia rendered her infertile, it had played havoc with her mind, so she was suspicious, neurotic and not thinking right.

Looking back, she has to admit that perhaps she wouldn’t have been the best role model for a child. Sudhir saw that. And Vani. Vani put up with Aarti the best she could, but she would not stand for the same for her child. And so, she ran away. She knew, even though Aarti didn’t, that Aarti wouldn’t kill herself. That Aarti was stronger than that. She must have known. Even though she was but a slip of a girl, she was wise, was Vani. And brave. What she did, Aarti has to admit, is the bravest thing she can think of. Vani was, she
is
the better mother.

Diya’s face swims before her eyes. The daughter she desperately craved for the wrong reasons. The daughter whose arrival caused the rupture of the very things she’d wanted. The daughter because of whom she lost both her best friend and her husband. The daughter she searched for mainly because,
only because
, Vani stole her from Aarti. How dare she? Vani, that mouse. And instead of giving up, Aarti found her purpose in life. To thwart the woman who had thwarted her.

But she is realising, too late, that this is not chess. And Diya is not a pawn. She is her own person. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her.

This should have been about Diya but it has always been about Aarti. Her feelings, her hurt. Her suffering. Her loneliness. What Sudhir said when he left her, the words that hurt her so, was the truth. She has done exactly what her parents did to her: treated everyone else like possessions, the only way she knows. Her mother’s face, the day she came into her dressing room, the day she apologised, appears before her eyes.

‘At least you have parents,’ Vani had said to her softly once during their late night chats, when dogs howled and cats prowled and friends stayed up exchanging confidences and making pacts, one lying on the floor on her mat swatting at mosquitoes that hovered, while the other slept in a king-sized bed with a mosquito cover and wished she had had her friend’s childhood and her friend’s parents.

‘They are horrible to me. You’ve seen how they are.’ Aarti complained.

‘They care even though they perhaps cannot show it.’ Vani’s voice soft in the darkness.

‘Pah,’ Aarti had laughed, hurt making her voice sound harsher than she intended. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. All they care about is the prestige that comes with being parents of the best model in Karnataka.’

‘They are alive,’ Vani had whispered into the dark smelling strongly of mosquito repellent, thick with memories of her absent parents. ‘Appreciate them; make your peace with them, before it is too late.’

‘You don’t know a thing about my parents,’ Aarti had interjected sharply, cutting Vani off.

Now she thinks,
I have travelled across the world in search of a girl on whom I have no proper claim. My parents and I live in the same city. They are alive. They are mine, like Diya will never be.

Her mother’s defeated face that day in that dressing room looms.
I have spent the better part of my life seeking revenge. Perhaps it is time I built bridges instead of breaking them, practised forgiveness instead of multiplying the hurt that has been done to me, perpetrating it further.

The expression in her mother’s eyes the last time Aarti saw her, the naked need supplanted by crushing disappointment, a mask of hurt, hovers
. They have lost their only daughter too.
It comes to her in a flash, the revelation.
They must be desperately lonely. Like me.

She picks up the phone. Rummages in her address book for her parents’ number. Even after all these years, she has kept it. She has.

It rings and rings. Seven rings, ten.

Then, ‘Hello?’ Her mother’s voice, tremulous, plaited through with the ravages of age.

‘Amma…’ she says, tentatively.

‘Aarti!’ Joy bursts down the line, piercing the regret-strewn space in that tiny room, dispelling the gloom, cutting through the emptiness. A glimmer of sunshine angles between the chink in the curtains and dances on the white sheets, staining them the sunny yellow of hope, of new beginnings. ‘Oh, Aarti, my darling, how
are
you? How have you been?’

‘I…’ She begins, ‘Amma, I…’ and bursts into tears.

A
t first
, Aarti does not recognise the woman who stands at the door to the Visits Hall accompanied by a prison guard, anxiously scanning the visitors to see who has come to meet her. Vani is smaller than Aarti remembers, her hair is shorter than she remembers and, Aarti realises with a shock, it sports quite a few grey strands. Her face is lined, the lines of a woman older and wiser than Vani. It is weary, mapped out with the cares of the world.

Vani’s eyes scan the room, brush over her, then away, then back again, her face doing a double take as recognition dawns. A smile sneaks into her eyes, an involuntary, unguarded, wholesome grin of delight at seeing an old friend, before being abruptly snuffed out as everything that has gone between them, the heft of all the years in between, the weight of the disservice they have each done the other, settles like a mask, a screen.