Chapter 21
ABSURDLY, SIMRAN’S MOTHER looks almost childlike in a hospital gown.
It’s the morning of her surgery. Simran waits with her in the OR lounge, unable to stop herself noticing how odd her mom looks without her kara and kirpan, her grey hair covered with a surgical cap instead of a turban. She looks like a nobody.
Her mother speaks first. “Stop biting your hangnail. It’ll bleed.”
Simran sighs. Of course that’s what her mom is thinking while they’re holding hands.
“And those jeans need washing. Look at the scuff marks. Did you even eat breakfast?”
“Mom.”
“I’m serious. You need to take better care of yourself. And stop slouching—”
Simran starts to pull her hand out of her mother’s grip, but the grip tightens. Simran looks up at her. And although her mother doesn’t say a word, her stony expression giving nothing away, Simran understands everything in that moment.
“Mom, the surgery will be okay,” she says gently, and that mask cracks. A bit.
“I’m afraid of what they’ll find.” Her mother’s voice wavers, suddenly as stripped down and vulnerable as her appearance. “I shouldn’t have waited so long to see the doctor.”
“You—you waited?” Simran stammers despite herself. Her mother’s never gone into detail about how the diagnosis was made.
“I was embarrassed, you know. That I was having bleeding again at my old age. I hoped it would go away, and now I learn that when this cancer is caught early, surgery usually cures it.” Her mother’s lips tremble. “Shame. That is the reason I might die.”
Simran’s throat clogs. It’s a horrible thought, that all this could’ve been prevented, but she tries not to show it. Her mother is scared enough already. “It can still be cured. Remember the pamphlets? There’s radiation, chemotherapy—”
“They say you lose your hair with chemotherapy, Simran.” Her mom’s voice comes out in a rush. Clearly she’s thought about it. “I don’t want that. You...You know what it means to me.”
There’s nothing Simran can say to that. She does not offer to get rid of hers in solidarity.
It’s the last thing her mother would want.
The image of her mother’s long hair, cultivated over a lifetime practicing Sikhism, falling out in chunks, in the drain, on the floor, is gutting.
It would be a destruction of her spirit more than her body.
Her mother smiles wanly in the silence. “Your father would cry if I said such things to him. I knew you wouldn’t. You would just...understand.” She sighs. “Your father’s right. You are so brave.”
Simran blinks. But her mother’s gaze is steady, as if delivering compliments to Simran comes easy. And—she remembers Jassa’s words—maybe it does.
A cough comes from behind them. “We’re ready for you now, Mrs. Aujla.”
Simran finds she doesn’t have any words left.
Their gazes connect, large brown eyes that Simran inherited.
They hug. She manages to keep it together.
At least until her mom is being led away by one of the nurses, and the other pats Simran’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry, hon. We’ll take good care of your grandma. ”
Simran flinches. The nurse doesn’t notice. No one seems to notice how fast Simran flees as soon as her mom is gone.
Simran’s father rises off the couch as soon as she returns home. “How’d it go?”
“Fine. She’s in surgery now.” Simran clears her throat. “I’m—I’m going upstairs. I’m tired.”
He doesn’t stop her, although she feels his worried eyes on her back.
She’s nearly at her bedroom door when her phone vibrates. She’s so numb, so keen on a distraction, that she picks up instantly. “Hel—?”
“Finally!” TJ says. Simran closes her eyes momentarily. Of course it’s TJ. “If it weren’t for Chandani confirming you were alive, I’d be putting out Missing Person ads by now. What is going on with you?”
Simran clamps down on the hysterical laugh that wants to rise. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Now please stop siccing Chandani on me.”
“No,” TJ says pleasantly. “She gives me more deets than you ever will. For example, what’s this about some crush you have?” Simran’s heart leaps in panic, at least until TJ says, “Jesse, or something?”
Simran exhales. She’s not sure why she thought TJ was about to name someone else. “Jassa,” she corrects, and when TJ snickers, corrects her again. “And it’s not like that.”
“Okay.” TJ sounds amused. “What’s it like, then?”
Simran turns her eyes to the ceiling. For a second, she imagines trying to explain.
Well, it’s like this, TJ: I didn’t think of him that way until I found out my mom has cancer, and she approves of me dating him.
And now I can’t tell if my feelings are real or if I’m trying to make myself feel them. Want to unpack that for me?
After a long silence, TJ sighs. “You know you can’t avoid me forever, right? I’m coming home after my June exams.”
“I know. I’ll be at your dinner, like I said.” That gives her two more weeks to prepare some convincing lies. “Look, I have to go.”
“But—”
Simran hangs up and resumes biting her hangnail. Despite what she just told TJ, she’s spent a lot of time thinking about Jassa lately. Particularly since that afternoon in the gurdwara, working on the cipher with him. Things felt...real, during that.
She throws herself on her bed and flips open a notebook. Now’s as good a time as any to continue working on it. It felt like they were getting close that day.
She writes the numbers out as coordinates again; this time, she notes some of them are repeated. What if it is like frequency analysis? What if each coordinate represents a letter?
Excited now, she draws a table. The only numbers in the list are 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, and 9, so she makes the table six-by-six and uses those numbers as the headings for the rows and columns.
Which leaves her with...thirty-six cells to fill.
But the alphabet only has twenty-six letters.
What would be in the other ten cells? Numbers? Punctuation?
She realizes she’s chewing on her lip and forces herself to stop. Jassa is really getting to her.
Her gaze drifts back to the message accompanying the code.
Pack my bag with five raisin strudels today.
Slowly, she counts the number of characters in it.
Excluding spaces, thirty-six.
Ignoring the way her back aches from her hunched-over posture, she inputs the characters into the table, one letter per cell.
It fits. That can’t be coincidence, right? She glances at her list of coordinates. Only one way to find out.
But, to her dismay, her translation makes no sense.
She must’ve filled out the table the wrong way. There’s some angle she’s missing.
She doesn’t know when she falls asleep, but it’s dark when she wakes. There’s a note on her bedside table, pinned down by a plate of digestible biscuits.
Gone to see your mom, reads her father’s elegant script. She’s in recovery. We can visit her together tomorrow. Sleep, sher putt.
He signs it off with love. Simran pops a biscuit in her mouth.
If her mom were here, she’d admonish her for eating in bed, getting crumbs everywhere.
She’d look at the state of Simran’s room and tell her to clean or she’ll never be able to find anything.
Simran would sigh and wish her mother would stop coming into her room.
Well, she doesn’t anymore, a voice in her head says. You got your wish.
She doesn’t realize she’s crying until her tears hit the pillow. Instantly, she tries to wipe them away. This is ridiculous; the surgery went fine.
But it’s the future she’s scared of.
Despair she suppressed earlier, accompanying her mom, crashes down on her.
She wants to hit pause on time. She doesn’t want to witness her mother postsurgery, she doesn’t want to watch her beautiful hair fall out.
She doesn’t want to watch her father’s beard turn more white than grey.
She doesn’t want to endure the kind of inevitable suffering their family has yet to go through.
If only she could be like Kiran, and fly so far away she wouldn’t have to partake at all.
Impulsively, Simran reaches for her phone.
Nick picks up first ring, sounding irritable. “What?”
“Can I come in tonight?”
A pause, filled with background noise of loud music. “You were in two days ago.”
“Yes, but...” She racks her brain. “I should get ahead of things. Aren’t there still some Ace ledgers to decode?”
“Well, I don’t know how important—”
“They might be useful.” He remains silent, and she breaks. She can’t take more of her own dark thoughts tonight. “Nick. Please.”
Another pause. “Did something happen between you and Rajan?”
Where did that come from? Simran frowns. “No. I haven’t seen him in days. Why?”
“Because you’re both testing my nerves tonight.” Nick sighs. “Fine, you can come. But I’m warning you, your boy’s here, too. And you’re not gonna like it.”
“He’s—with you?” Simran grips her phone harder. “But you said you’d leave him alone!”
“Yeah,” Nick replies darkly. “But I can’t help what he does.”
Those words give her a very bad feeling. “Nick,” she says slowly, “what exactly is Rajan doing?”
Simran’s never been to this neighbourhood before, packed with multi-million-dollar homes, but she doesn’t need Nick’s directions to know which house she’s looking for.
The black gates have lion statues on them.
When she stops at them, a man walks to her side of the truck and flashes his phone light at her. “Who’re you?”
“Friend of Nick.”
He snaps a photo of her without warning and wanders off to text someone. A minute later, the gate opens. There are plenty of luxury vehicles already parked in the lot, but she spots Nick’s ice-cream truck at the end of the line and parks beside it.