Chapter 27
Any dust that had coated the road before the rain was gone, everything fresh and shiny. A small Fijian boy wearing blue shorts and a green T-shirt waved at me as I passed a village. I saw him race across the road in my rearview mirror, to retrieve a ball that he’d kicked to the other side.
No other cars even in the far distance, the road empty but for the two of us.
I turned the corner…and there was the tree split in the middle. As instructed, I took that exit off the main road. And kept on following the shopkeeper’s instructions as the landscape became ever more green and rural.
I hit the gravel road fifteen minutes into it, but the car hugged it with ease, no hint of a wobble. I was suddenly glad it wasn’t as shiny and new as advertised. It meant any fresh dents caused by stones flying up wouldn’t be noticeable even on close inspection.
Around me, I saw only crops I couldn’t identify, interspersed with patches of verdant forest.
No houses or people.
When I did eventually stop, it was because I was getting a spinal adjustment from the potholed and bumpy road and needed to stretch out my back. Unclipping my seat belt, I pushed open the door to get out. The air felt cooler than it had by the shop, all that green cutting down on the heat.
A small and scuffed-up blue truck loaded with what looked to be freshly cut taro—a root vegetable to which Diya had introduced me—rumbled over from the other direction while I was stretching, and stopped right beside me.
The man who leaned out was Fijian, somewhere in his twenties, his hair tight curls buzzed close to his skull, his skin bronzed, and his T-shirt a faded gray.
“You break down, brother?” he asked. “Gonna be dark soon. I’ll give you a lift home.”
“No, car’s fine. My back just needed a rest from the road.”
His laugh was huge and warm. “You should drive this truck, man—thing is twenty years old. It’s all bump, bump, bump.” But from his grin, he didn’t much care. “You American?”
“Accent that obvious?”
Another grin. “Where you going?” he asked with a bluntness that would never fly in a city but was likely expected in a place this small and rural.
“The Prasad place,” I said, using the same verbiage as the man in the shop.
The truck driver frowned for a minute. “Ah, right, big place by the water. Nice, man, nice.” Lifting his hand, he said, “Got to get these ready for the morning market.”
Big place by the water.
It could’ve described the home that had gone up in flames. The Prasads re-creating the home they hadn’t been able to let go of even after so many years in another country? Because of Ani? Was she buried here?
I frowned. No, that couldn’t be it. The family preferred cremation. I knew that because Diya and I had found it morbid that it was in the boilerplate wills we’d signed, each of us having to put down what we’d prefer when the time came.
“We don’t bury our dead,” Diya had said, her gaze pensive. “The idea of being buried underground in a small box…” She’d shuddered. “I’d far rather burn up and be done with it.”
The comment haunted me.
Jumping back into the car, I continued on.
Thirty minutes later, right when I thought I must’ve passed it already, I saw the top of a large house just emerging from the thick green foliage in which it nestled. I spotted banana palms, along with flowering vines and a tree with huge glossy green leaves, among many others.
The foliage was so dense that all I could see of the house was the tip of the roof even as I came closer and closer…
and that was when I realized why the shop owner hadn’t told me to turn off at a certain point.
Diya’s family home was right at the end of the road, only the ocean beyond it on the far side.
I felt cobblestones under me as I brought the vehicle to a stop in a front yard draped in the thick shadows of early evening, and when I stepped out, I saw that the grass had been kept under control.
By that caretaker? The cousin-brother something?
The two-story house, while free of the encroachment of what felt like a forest now that I stood inside it, was shuttered and silent and in urgent need of maintenance. Large flakes of paint had come off the frontage, while mold grew on the upper level.
The tropical environment might’ve done even more damage over the years if the building hadn’t been formed of concrete—I’d seen a couple of similar structures on my drive, houses far more stable than the dwellings of rickety wood and corrugated iron that dominated the rural landscape.
This was a rich person’s house.
The entire property was also a haven of cool, the tropical heat ameliorated by both the plantings and the breeze coming off what I knew to be a secluded beach behind the house. Not visible from ground level as with the Lake Tarawera property, but only a short walk through the foliage.
Despite its beauty, however, this place felt desolate, a ruin in the making.
“Hello!”
Heart kicking at the sudden interruption, I looked over to my right—to see a skinny Indo-Fijian man with hair so flawlessly deep brown that it had to be dyed, and a matching pencil mustache.
He’d come from somewhere beyond the banana palms to the left and wore a short-sleeved tan shirt with what might’ve been Fijian tapa prints on it, jeans, and flip-flops.
His thinness accentuated his wrinkles, but he wasn’t that old. Forty-five maybe.
And unlike me, he seemed perfectly comfortable in jeans.
“Hi.” I held out my hand. “Are you Ravi? I think I met a relative of yours over at the store about two hours from here?”
“Oh yes, yes.” He pumped my hand. “I saw him at Kushma’s niece’s wedding just last weekend.”
I had no idea who Kushma was, but smiled politely. “I’m Tavish Advani,” I began, preparing to explain my link to Diya.
But the man’s face lit up, and, wrapping his free hand around our already clasped hands, he pumped even harder.
“Namaskaram, Mr. Tavish! You are the businessman from America!” His speech was a seamless mix of Hindi and English that I had to focus to understand.
“We heard Diya beta got engaged!” His face fell as fast, his hands breaking away. “Is she…”
So, the news of the fire and the deaths had reached this isolated place. “She’s in the hospital,” I said. “Shumi as well.”
He shook his head, eyes looking down. “So sad. The crime is terrible these days.”
I didn’t say anything to that. “I came to get something from here. I thought…for the funerals—an important piece of the family’s past.” I’d thought about what to say, decided to leave it open-ended because surely there had to be something.
He made the slightly nasal ha sound that meant yes.
“I know the one you mean,” he added, linking my vague description to the specific.
“Dr. Sarita never took it with her the times she visited. Leaving a part of herself to watch over baby Ani. But yes, you should take it for the funerals. It was her mother’s, you know. ”
I couldn’t believe he’d just handed me such a brilliant opening. “I don’t know too much about Ani. She was a sister who died young?”
“Cousin-sister,” the caretaker explained, hyphenating cousin the same way the shopkeeper had done—the usage was one I’d heard before; it was cultural, cousins addressed the same way as siblings except when clarifying the relationship to others.
“I was working in Suva then,” Ravi elaborated, “but baby Ani’s parents died in a car crash. Terrible, just terrible. So young, both of them. Hitesh was Dr. Rajesh’s only brother, and so of course Dr. Rajesh and Dr. Sarita were going to look after baby Ani.”
He turned, began to walk up the stairs to the covered porch of the house. “Come, I have the key—I always keep it with me when I do my evening stroll, sometimes just go in and walk around, make sure everything is tip-top. You staying here? We keep it clean.”
“If you think it’ll be all right? I’m only here two nights.”
The caretaker shook his head again. “So sad. House is too big for one person. We can put our boys in one room for the night so you can have a bed.”
“Thanks,” I said, having the feeling the offer was sincere. “But it might be nice for me to stay here. I can tell Diya about it when I go back…maybe it would help her wake up.” My throat choked up, the last words barely audible.
Ravi blinked rapidly before clearing his own throat. “I’ll ask my wife to make you dinner, bring it over. You okay with spicy? Kushma likes using spice, but she leaves it out for her friend from Australia, so no problem if you don’t like it. She can make the recipe a different way.”
“No, I love it.”
Taking an old-fashioned iron key from his pocket even as I spoke, Ravi put it into the lock, turned. “Some caretakers, they just don’t do the work. They know the owner maybe won’t come back for years.
“But the doctors are a good family—they pay us well to be here full-time, and even pay our kids’ school fees every year and buy their textbooks, their uniforms, all they need for school. Dr. Sarita always says education is the key to a bright future. We take very good care of everything.”
He tapped the outside wall. “I told them, it needs paint, but they wanted to have a look personally, decide what to do—but they’re so busy it’s been two years since I told them and they haven’t managed to come here.”
It didn’t escape me that he was using the present tense in relation to Diya’s parents.
Hope? After all, their deaths hadn’t yet been confirmed…
even if the likelihood of survival was less than minuscule.
“So they didn’t visit regularly?” I’d just assumed they had, with how much they talked about Fiji.
“They used to.” When he pushed open the door, it went inward without making a sound. “But last three years, only once. I think they did special doctor stuff, got busy.”
I had a vague memory of Diya mentioning extra certification but couldn’t recall the details. Not that it mattered now. “I don’t know how you’ll be paid until Diya wakes up,” I said. “Everything’s a mess.”
Ravi waved it off. “It’s no problem. The lawyer pays us from the rental money of their other house in Fiji. He’ll work it out.”
No wonder Ackerson thought this was about money. Diya’s inheritance kept increasing. “I didn’t know they had another property here.”
“In Nadi,” Ravi said. “Just a small one—would’ve been baby Ani’s. Was her parents’ place. After Ani died, Dr. Rajesh thought about selling it but couldn’t. Too painful. Last memory of his brother and family, you know?”
Inside, the Prasad house was cool and dark.
“I’ll open the curtains so you won’t have to in the morning.
” Ravi was already doing so. “Most days, we keep them closed to keep out the sun, and we put up the shutters, too, during hurricane season. The upstairs we only fully open up when the family visits. Dr. Sarita likes the view of the water from up there.”
A sudden pause, as if it had hit him that Sarita and Rajesh would never again wake in the upstairs rooms of this old house, never again admire the view of the Pacific Ocean rolling in to shore.
There was only so far you could go on hope when both doctors had been missing since the morning of the fire.
“Kushma,” he said in a quick, shaky burst, “she airs out the house properly once a month, checks nothing’s gotten inside, cleans the dust. I do all the outdoor work, keep the plants tidy, make any repairs.” He pushed open another set of curtains. “Here you go.”
The gray light of dusk poured over furniture from another decade that was worn but still nice enough for a family home.
Comfortable. A rich person’s house, but not a showpiece.
A true home. Small knickknacks sat on the shelves, and I spotted a pile of seashells on a windowsill, a stack of books on the coffee table.
“Here, I’ll turn on the light.”
No dust motes danced in the air in the creamy light that poured from the ceiling bulb, Ravi’s wife a conscientious housekeeper.
“It really feels like they were preparing to come back.”
“They always said they’d retire here—nothing like home, Dr. Sarita always said, and Dr. Rajesh would smile and nod.
Even though they were so successful overseas, they never got too important to remember this place.
They always brought my boys chocolate from New Zealand, said they’d sponsor them to study there later on if they got good marks in school. ”
The talkative man angled his head to the right. “I’ll show you the prayer place.” A pause, a touch of awkwardness. “You know about being clean before you touch the prayer statues? Full shower. And no eating eggs or meat while handling things?”
“Yes, my grandmother was Hindu.” She hadn’t managed to pass on her religion to her son or grandson, but I’d been around her enough to pick up a few things. “I won’t touch anything until I’ve showered.”
As in the Lake Tarawera house, the prayer alcove had been custom-built, a generously sized rectangle of space nestled in the wall.
It held a number of small brass statues of gods, and the shallow clay oil lamp that was the genesis of Diya’s name.
Tucked into the corner were several photos of a chubby-cheeked little girl along with a young couple.
“Baby Ani and her parents,” Ravi said. “Whole family, just gone. I think that’s what killed old Mr. and Mrs. Prasad.” He indicated the black-and-white photos on the other side. “Lost their younger son and daughter-in-law and then, only seven months later, their granddaughter.
“He had a heart attack not long after, and she just went in her sleep a month later. Five people, gone in less than two years. Everyone still in mourning for Hitesh and his wife, but then another funeral, then another and another. Bad, bad time.”
The tragedy of it crashed over me like the ocean I could almost hear, but held within it was the realization that Lake Tarawera, too, had involved five people. As if this family’s terrible losses came in multiples of five.
Music. A faint wind chime melancholy in its timbre.
My arms prickled with goose bumps. “Is that someone’s ringtone?” I asked, though I hadn’t seen any signs of a third person in the vicinity.
“No, that’s Ani,” Ravi said. “That little baby never left here. I think she plays under the mango tree.”