Chapter Thirty-Two
Are you rethinking marrying me, Mira?” Druv’s question falls on me the way a knife’s blade nicks a finger, entirely unexpected and shockingly painful.
“No! Why would you say that?” Even as I ask, I know exactly why. The Two Moms have obviously relayed my threat from yesterday. “Okay, I know why. But what I said to my aie had to do with her giving me a hard time about going to Pune.” Thanks to the threat, I’m on a train headed to see Ashatai Athavale with Krish. So I’m not sorry for having used it.
“That’s what I thought,” Druv says. “But I think Ma’s really worried.”
I know he doesn’t mean that as an accusation, but it falls on me like one. I throw a glance at Krish, who is fast asleep next to me. There are deep shadows under his eyes and an angry bruise on his cheekbone. Unlike Vishal, Vasu’s brother acted on his threats. He set his goons on Krish, and Krish had to hide in the back of a freight truck full of live goats to escape. The thing I can’t figure out is why these men are still so afraid, all these years later. What did they do to Vasu that they don’t want exposed?
When Krish called me this morning, he was headed to Dadar station to take the train to Pune. He tried to convince me that he could do it alone. No way was he doing this without me. This is my search too.
“Mira?” Druv snaps me back to our conversation.
“I didn’t mean to worry her. I’m almost thirty, Druv. I shouldn’t have to use threats to be able to do what I want.”
“Of course. But you always take care of everyone’s feelings with such empathy. It’s one of the things I love most about you.”
Is navigating everyone’s feelings at the cost of my own really empathy? Nonetheless, Romona has done nothing but be kind to me, and she doesn’t deserve to be worried. “I’ll talk to Romona Auntie again and set her mind at rest.”
“Thank you. You know how much she loves you, right? That’s why she’s so freaked out at the thought of you changing your mind.”
No one ever freaks out about losing me. It’s me who’s universally considered at risk of being abandoned lest my good luck run out. Druv doesn’t sound like he feels that way, and neither did Romona when she wished me luck this morning. I’m not sure I like how worried they are.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Druv.” That much I can feel in my bones. “Please don’t worry.”
“I know,” he says. “So long as I have you, I know it is. Will you take care? You’ve never been to India. I don’t know how you’re so calm about traveling everywhere alone.”
I’m not alone, though. Saying that feels cruel, so I don’t. Druv knows I’m traveling with Krish. Maybe it’s time to tell him why this is important to Krish. But Krish and I have been able to share things with each other because our lives only intersect at this one point where we’re two individuals, able to share the unspeakable because no one else we know has any interest in the other’s secrets. I can’t break his confidence.
Instead I give Druv another truth that has surprised me. “It doesn’t feel like I’ve never been here. It’s overwhelming and chaotic, but I don’t feel lost here. I feel like I can navigate it. Please don’t worry about me.”
His answer is a laugh. “You’re part of me, Mira. How can I not worry when you’re not with me?” With that he lets me go.
Krish is frowning in his sleep, and I feel a bolt of something tender, almost maternal. Behind him mountains blanketed in green race past the train window. His neck falls forward at a painful angle. I’m about to straighten it when I hear aggressive voices and look up. Two men carrying field hockey sticks enter the train. They’re all the way across the compartment, and they’re making no effort to hide the fact that they’re looking for someone.
“Krish,” I whisper and poke his leg.
His eyes fly open, but he doesn’t startle.
“Some men just entered the train. They seem to be looking for someone.”
His gaze slides to them.
“Move very slowly,” he says and stands up, hooking both our backpacks on his shoulders.
I take mine from him, and as casually as we can, we start walking in the opposite direction.
As we go from this compartment to the adjoining one through the rickety connecting tunnel, I hear the men speed up behind us. Krish grabs my hand and starts to run. We race across the chugging train, past bored-looking passengers, as the cars get more and more crowded and noisy. When we enter one of the connected compartments, the aisle is blocked by a group of women sitting on the metal floor with baskets filled with vegetables.
They see Krish and shift their wares to let him through, but they’re too busy ogling him and giggling to notice me.
“Sorry,” I say as I stumble over a basket.
A woman smacks my ankles. “Can’t you see where you’re going, you witch!”
I throw a glance over my shoulder. The commotion causes the men to notice us.
Krish tugs my arm. “Come on.”
I run for my life.
We’re approaching the end of the train. I’ve never been so scared in my life.
“In the bathroom,” Krish says just as the train slows down and enters a station.
“They’ll find us in the bathroom.”
A crowd of passengers rises from their seats and rushes toward the exit. I pull Krish into the crowd. “Don’t let go.”
He presses close, and we start pushing with the crowd toward the tiny door. Thanks to the women with the baskets, our pursuers are all the way across the crowd. The moment we hop off the train and onto the platform, we grip hands like our life depends on it and start running.
We weave through the crowded platform, then up metal stairs that creak under the weight of the crowd and onto a bridge over the tracks. We push through the cracks in the crowd across the bridge and run down another flight of stairs, and we find ourselves in a market street. It’s lined with handcart vendors selling vegetables and ceramics and shoes and plastics and clothes. Sounds and smells and humid heat engulf me so tight my head spins, but we keep running.
We don’t stop until the crowd thins and the shanty town ends and we’re on a dirt road surrounded by open fields. There’s a lone structure at the edge of the road, four walls and a corrugated roof. We go around it and collapse against a wall, hiding in its shadows. It takes a good five minutes of catching our breath before we can talk again.
“What the hell happened in Yevla?” I ask.
He’d looked so exhausted when we met at Dadar station and got on the train that I’d decided to let him rest before he got me caught up. That was because I didn’t know we were going to be chased by thugs with hockey sticks.
“I didn’t think they’d find us here. I’m sorry.” He throws a look up and down the dirt road.
“I think we lost them. Tell me what you found out.”
He mops his forehead with his sleeve and fills me in. “A year or so into her marriage, Vasu told her husband that she wanted to leave him to be with the woman she was in love with and threatened to tell everyone if he didn’t let her go. Namdeo’s family, terrified of the scandal, took her back to her father, who was up for reelection.” His eyes continue to scan the surroundings for our pursuers. “Her parents locked her up while they came up with a plan to deal with her, but she escaped and disappeared. They hushed up the matter by announcing that she’d died in a road accident in Pune.”
“They didn’t even try to find her?”
“Why would they? It saved them the trouble of figuring out how to get rid of her.” He’s distracted with scanning our surroundings, and so am I, but anger gathers inside me.
“How do you know all this?”
“There was a journalist who, according to Vasu’s brother, was paid by their father’s political opponents to chase down the story. To try and scare me off, the brother told me how they shut journalists up. So, naturally I went looking for him. I found him in Nashik.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Barely fancy journalism schools have their advantages.” The sardonic dimple makes an appearance. “It’s been so long, it was amazing that he even remembered all this.”
“What does he think happened to her?”
The sun is bouncing off Krish’s glasses. He’s not wearing the ones that darken in the sun, and I can see his eyes. They’re burning with the same anger I’m feeling. “He believes they had her killed. The last place she was seen was Pune, at a safe house for women. She was never seen after that.”
“If that were true, how were you born?”
He makes an exactly face. “She disappeared in August of 1985, and I was born in February 1986.”
“So she obviously didn’t die.”
“Or she did and she isn’t my birth mother.”
“And the fact that you look exactly like her and have her ring is pure coincidence?”
He shrugs.
I point to his bruised face. “And the guys who hurt you?”
“Vasu’s brother trying to scare me into giving up on digging around in his family’s business. The same old story: family’s shame needed to stay buried, their honor intact. He has an election coming up. To prove he means business, he had some guys slap me around.” He touches his cheek.
“The a-hole!” I say. “All of them! A-holes!”
That makes him smile, of all things, which punches a hole in my anger. I’m about to smile, too, but then we hear shouts and footsteps approaching and turn.
The two men from the train charge straight at us, hockey sticks raised, and there’s nowhere for us to run.