Chapter 33
A rattle from inside Kamal’s house that felt like a drum in my head, the world too loud, too bright, the words the older man had spoken bile in my throat.
It wasn’t the boy.
Yellow hair and blue eyes…
…her dress all splattered with blood.
A thin and wrinkled woman in a loose floral dress followed the noise onto the porch. “You need to take your medicine.” She shoved a bottle into Kamal’s hand with those words spoken in Hindi, her tongue as sharp as the edge of a knife.
Grunting, Kamal said, “Fine, I’ll get the water.”
My mind was still roaring when the woman spoke after her husband was gone. “Only English?” The question was hard and flat.
I somehow managed to comprehend what she wanted to know, and found the right words to string together in my grandparents’ mother tongue. “No. I…understand Hindi. Speaking…not…so…” I just shook my head at the end.
That seemed to be enough for her, however, because she began to speak in rapid-fire Hindi it took all my concentration to follow.
“I never thought it was Diya beti—or that it was about a doll. She used to play for hours with Ani, shared all her toys. Diya loved Ani.” She sniffed.
“That brother of hers, now, he was a bully. No surprise after the way his own father bullied him.”
I stared at her, my focus snapping back into brilliant color. “You…” Halting, I fought to find the right words. “You…think…Bobby…hurt Ani?”
“Not my place to say. I’m not the police officer.” She picked up the ashtray and threw the butts into a little trash can under the table.
“Please,” I said.
Rubbing her back, she rose. “I’m just saying Diya beti didn’t talk too well even at five.
They wouldn’t take her at the school even when they took other children her age, said she had to start talking properly first. But Bobby sahib, oh, he could talk and talk—and that Shumi, she thought he was better than a movie star. ”
A roll of her eyes. “The girl would’ve parroted anything Bobby told her to say.
And I know my husband likes to talk about the blood on Diya’s dress, but the poor child could’ve just been standing there when it happened.
Or the boy could’ve put it on her on purpose.
He was vicious even back then, and Diya didn’t talk at all for days and days after. ”
“Meera!” A yell from inside the house as the tractor trundled over to this side of the field. “I can’t find the other pills!”
The woman turned on her heel but pinned me with her gaze before stepping inside.
“They’ll find out it was that Bobby who killed his family.
They haven’t found his body, have they? That’s what it said on the news.
Only signs of two people in the doctors’ house.
And the boy was so angry on the inside. Poor baby Ani just got in his way and he scared Diya into staying quiet. ”
She waved her hand at me. “You go now. Kamal will sleep again after his pills. Come later if you want, but he didn’t keep any papers if that’s what you’re after. Just what’s in his head, and the stubborn old goat won’t budge from the idea that it was Diya who did it.”
I rose shakily to my feet.
Was that it?
Bobby had lost it again?
Was that what Diya had been trying to tell me? That he’d done the same thing to the family that he’d done to Ani all those years ago?
Just lost it, gone psychotic.
I’d never seen the other man act the bully, but then I’d only known him a matter of weeks. Anyone could put on a mask for that long.
“Hello!” Yash called out from the seat of the tractor he’d brought to a standstill parallel to the road. “Come to see my father?” His biceps pushed against his black T-shirt, his beard short and neatly trimmed, and his smile friendly enough. “He’s in a good mood, isn’t he?” An amused laugh.
Shoving my brain back into gear, I walked over to the edge of the field so we could speak without shouting. “I’m Tavish, Diya’s fiancé.”
“Oh.” His smile faded into somber quiet as he leaned forward on the steering wheel before flowing from his first language into what was most comfortable for me. “How are they? Diya and Shumi?”
I folded my arms. “In the ICU.” It was all I could say and even that came out gritty and painful.
Dark eyes pinched at the corners, Yash just gave a clipped nod. “Cops have any idea who did it?”
“No, but your mother seems to think it was Bobby.” No filter, my brain in shock.
“Yeah, Amma might be right.” A vein pulsed at his temple.
“We were in school together—Bobby and me—when they lived here.” Lifting his left arm, he showed me a small scar on his inner forearm.
“He did that. Cut me with a sharp rock when I wouldn’t give him some jalebi Amma had got me from the market. ”
“Everyone else seems to have a high opinion of him.”
“Ask people his own age if you want the truth. Not his friends. The others.” He put down his arm, rubbing absently at the scar with the fingers of his other hand. “He knew how to play nice for adults, too, be the perfect eldest son. No one ever believed us when we complained about him.”
“Your mother mentioned that his father was abusive.”
“Never yelled or anything that I saw, but back then, it wouldn’t have mattered.” Yash shrugged. “Doctor, you know. Big important man. Never spotted any bruises on Bobby, either, but one time I saw him crying because he’d scored ninety-seven percent instead of a hundred percent on a test.
“Not angry tears. Scared tears. A kid can tell, yaar.” He rolled the r in that last word the same way I’d heard my father’s friends use it when speaking to him; the direct translation was “friend,” but used this way…maybe “bro”?
“He punched me in the mouth when he realized I’d seen him,” Yash added. “Told me he’d kill me if I told anyone else.”
“I never saw any hint of that in their adult relationship.” If anything, Dr. Rajesh Prasad had struck me as an indulgent father…but I’d only ever watched how he related to Diya—she was my wife, my priority.
“Wouldn’t know about that.” The other man sat back up. “I hope Diya and Shumi make it. Tell Shumi that Yash Dayal says hi. Always thought it a shame she fell for that bastard.”
My instincts caught more than the obvious bitterness. “Your mother seems to think she was always sweet on him.”
“Rich doctor’s son, yaar, all the girls wanted him.” A hard wave before he carried on with his tractor, and I got into my vehicle.
Despite his apparent need for rest after his pills, Kamal was back in his rocker by then, his wife beside him. Neither waved as I pulled out.
—
I finally met Kushma when she brought me lunch. A slender woman with silky hair worn in a bun whose English was broken at best, she laughed without malice at my halting attempts at Hindi but seemed pleased that I wanted to put her at ease.
“Bobby?” she said in her preferred tongue when I asked about whether she’d known him growing up. “I was too old, already married by the time he was in high school.” Despite the words, her gaze was thoughtful.
“I did know him a little before,” she said a few moments later.
“After I finished school and couldn’t find work, I used to come help clean the house with my amma.
The doctors were so busy with the clinic and Mr. and Mrs. Prasad-ji, the elder ones, they were already looking after the children. So the doctors hired Amma to clean.”
I invited her to sit at the table, but she waved it off to remain on her feet.
“Bobby was a nice boy,” she said, the tray on which she’d brought me sautéed okra, dhal, steaming jasmine rice, and homemade mango pickles tucked under her arm.
“Funny, too—he used to do the dialogues of Dr. Sarita’s favorite actor.
That’s how everyone started calling him Bobby. ”
I absorbed that unexpected little piece of information with dull resignation for something that couldn’t help me.
“He even helped us mop sometimes,” Kushma added. “But mostly he was at school when we came, so I didn’t talk to him much. He always had a lot of school papers in his room—he studied hard.”
She had nothing much more to tell me when it came to Bobby, and when I asked about Ani and Diya, all she said was, “Oh, such sweet babies, they were. It was so sad what happened to Ani.”
“Would anyone else know more about the family?” I dared ask.
Kushma, already heading down the stairs, shook her head. “Most of the doctors’ friends went overseas already, and other people they knew from around here moved away to work in the cities.”
Despite the fact that Kushma hadn’t told me anything useful, she had given me one idea: papers.
I spent the rest of the day methodically searching the house for hidden journals, notes, paperwork of any kind that might shed light on the events that had taken place close to two decades earlier.
All I found was a box hidden in the closet of the upstairs master bedroom that held a small stack of photos, a bracelet of tiny black-and-white beads small enough to fit a child’s fragile wrist, and a birth certificate…for Annika Sonakshi Prasad.
Ani.
—
If I’d imagined I’d sleep easy again a second night, I was proven very wrong.
The house creaked and groaned, the wind chime shivered its sorrowful music, while the ocean’s pounding surf sounded like it was right on top of me. I tossed and turned, snatching bits of sleep here and there.
Only to fall into the past.
I dreamed of Susanne and how she’d been at the end, so emaciated beneath her glamorous makeup that she’d been bones and tendons held together by skin gone translucent.
She’d done a stellar job of hiding the ravages of the cancer our final night out.
No one at the bar to which we’d gone to drink her favorite champagne had blinked an eye at a woman they’d probably taken to be fashionably thin.
But Susanne had been far beyond thin at that point.
“I’m ready to die, Tavish.” A phantom whisper from the past. “And I’m going to do it on my own terms. A raised finger to the universe.”
Husky laughter that morphed into a hacking cough so terrible it jerked me to wakefulness. “Fuck.”
Susanne’s hollow eyes stared at me from inside my memories, the pill bottles scattered all around her as she lay on the cotton throw of her bed dressed once again in that glittering red dress she loved, her makeup flawless.
I’d never seen her that way, her nurse the one who’d discovered her body, but I’d read the coroner’s report.
And I knew Suzi W.
It wouldn’t have been pajamas or underwear for her. Only sophisticated, independent beauty, all the way to the very end.
“Nothing that’ll make me vomit, dear,” she’d told me when talking about her requirements for a painless drug-induced death. “How utterly embarrassing to go out with such a lack of style.”
Shoving off the thin sheet I’d been using as a blanket, my boxer briefs my pajamas, I picked up my phone to look at the time: four a.m.
I should’ve tried to go back to sleep, but I got up and walked out onto the front verandah instead…
and realized that I’d never been in darkness such as this.
The only light came from the small bedside lamp I’d turned on in my room.
A soft glow that was already attracting moths, their fluttery shadows as powder soft as their wings.
The rest of the world was pitch-black. No streetlights, no car lights, nothing but a blackness broken only by the starry pinpricks above. Even the wind chime had gone silent, the surf a distant thunder my brain had finally learned to tune out at some point during my fitful sleep.
Something croaked so close that I jolted.
More croaks came from everywhere all at once.
Then the lawn started to move.
Frogs. Tiny frogs going about their nocturnal business.
This was definitely not the city.
No, this was the place where a provincial cop had covered up a little girl’s death because the assailant had also been a child—but the child on whom he’d pinned the blame had been the wrong one.
Diya was petite even now. She would’ve been tiny back then, certainly not strong enough to bring down a rock on another child’s head with enough force to crack it.
Kamal had to have known that, too, so why had he never looked at Bobby?
…a good family…ruin their name…
Good old-fashioned chauvinism?
My brother, Raja, had never once been held to account for anything, but neither had I—at least when it came to my extended family. Inside the family, of course, it was a whole different story.
Raja had put the blame on me plenty of times when we were children. Though his subterfuges had been about petty matters, I could see how the same sense of entitlement could lead to the belief that the eldest son didn’t need to be held responsible for anything…not even murder.
It was always someone else’s problem.
Bobby, six years older than Diya, would’ve been plenty big enough to do what had been done to Ani. And Shumi, his ever-devoted follower, would’ve never betrayed him. No, she would’ve done exactly what he wanted.
Oh, you choose, Bobby. You always choose the best options.
Sure, my love, we can leave if you want.
Of course, darling!
Those last words, I’d heard over and over again. Bobby loved his wife’s masala chai and had requested she make it at least three times in my vicinity. It had struck me because all three times, they’d been guests in the Prasad home…but Shumi had never been treated like a guest.
The Prasads treated her as they did Diya—like a daughter.
She also referred to them as Amma and Pitaji, which to my ear seemed more formal—or maybe just more traditional—than the Mum and Dad that Diya always used, but the affection between the elder Prasads and Shumi was clear.
That part had given me hope that one day, I, too, would have a similar relationship with my in-laws.
Bobby, on the other hand, had treated his wife like she was at his beck and call. And Shumi had appeared more than fine with that. She’d jumped up to make the time-consuming chai at a moment’s notice—beginning with hand-grinding her special mix of spices.
The fact that she’d had all the ingredients at hand in the Prasad pantry had told me how often Bobby sat chatting to his parents while Shumi worked in the kitchen.
And still, I might not have noticed any of it consciously if I hadn’t had to force down more than one cup of chai—which I hated with a vengeance.
“They’ll take away your Indian card,” Diya had said with a giggle when I confessed to her after the first time Shumi handed me a cup of the chai she’d made with such love. “Are you sure you’re even half-brown?”
“Ha ha.” I’d tickled the bottoms of her feet in vengeance, sent her squealing.
Despite her teasing, however, she’d grabbed my chai the next time it was thrust on me and gulped it down while no one else was watching. “The things I do for love,” she’d whispered afterward.
What, I thought around the pulsating ache in my heart, had Shumi done for love?