Chapter Thirty-Six
Reva asks us to open the letter and send her an image of it. It’s the fastest way to get it to her. So I take a picture on Ashatai’s phone and send it to her.
“Thank you,” Reva says when she calls us after reading it. Her voice is raw with tears. “I can’t believe you found her.”
We haven’t yet. The letter is thirty-four years old. No one mentions that. It doesn’t matter because we’re close.
“You can read it,” Reva says. “In fact, Krish, please read it.”
“I’m okay, thank you,” he says and leaves the room and steps into the balcony. He hasn’t said a word since he asked Ashatai if his birth mother was dead.
“Mira?” Reva says.
“I got him,” I say. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to come there. I’ll be there as soon as I can. What are you planning to do next?”
“The only way to find her is to go to Darjeeling,” I say, and Ashatai squeezes my shoulder in encouragement. “We’ll have to go to Mumbai first.” We need our passports to fly to Darjeeling, where the monastery is located.
Reva promises to let me know her travel plans, and I promise to keep her posted on ours. It’s late, and the phone stores are closed. It’s a good thing Ashatai is the most resourceful person I’ve ever met because she hands us a burner phone and arranges for a taxi to take us to Mumbai. I think I might be done with trains for life.
Ashatai agrees with Krish’s theory that the fact that we were attacked but not really hurt means whoever set those thugs on us—very possibly Vasu’s brother—just meant to scare us. Going to the cops will only alert him to the fact that we’re not ready to let things go and will send him after us again.
“Don’t worry about him anymore. I know people who can warn him off,” Ashatai says with chilling finality, and I feel the entire weight of all the people whose lives she’s changed.
As soon as we get in the cab, I call Druv at his office. I don’t know his cell phone number by heart, and his office number is easy enough to find on his website.
Obviously, he’s frantic with worry because my phone has been unreachable all day. I can’t believe it’s been just one day. It feels like at least a week. Finding the ring feels like it was a lifetime ago. I feel nothing like that person who was knocked down by a child on a New York sidewalk. I tell Druv that we were robbed but that we’re safe. Thankfully the only things in my backpack other than my phone were a change of clothes and toiletries. I obviously leave out the abduction. He’s having a hard enough time with the robbery.
“Are you done with this now?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
He sounds upset, and I don’t want to have this conversation around Krish so I ask him to let the moms know that I’m headed back to the hotel and promise to call him once I’m there.
When I’m done, I offer Krish the phone. “Do you need to call anyone?”
He shakes his head. No one knows he’s here.
I’m holding the letter, and his gaze falls to it. I hold it out to him. “This confirms she was your birth mother. I think you should read it.”
After hesitating for a moment, he takes it. I look out the window, giving him privacy as he reads by the dim light of the cab. Outside, the moonlight turns the mountains into silhouettes. I’ve read the letter. There is no number on the pain scale that could measure how I would feel if I were him.
When I look back at him, he’s folded the letter and is holding it in his lap. “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can go to Darjeeling.”
“How can you not go now? You came this far looking for her.”
“No. You came this far looking for her.”
That’s fair and unfair at the same time. “I did. But I didn’t make you come.”
He swallows. “Fine. But I should be able to decide when I stop.”
“Okay.”
For a long time neither of us says anything. I realize that this feels like the end of a search for me, like reaching a destination. That’s not true for him. No matter what we find, it’s not going to be the end for him. It’s going to be the beginning of something possibly incredibly painful. Something he may never be able to put behind him. This will never be over for him.
Just when I think he may not speak for the rest of the drive, he does. “You know the thing about being adopted that sucks?”
The question is not one I have any authority to answer, so I wait for him to say what’s dancing like pain in his eyes.
“That everyone had a choice—your birth parents, your adoptive parents—and you had none, and you’re the one who has to live with the consequences of everyone else’s choices.”
“Isn’t that true of all children? All babies?” I say without thinking. “My parents chose to have Rumi and me. They gave birth to us, then for the rest of our lives they made us feel like we had to make ourselves worthy of all the hard work they had to put into raising us so they could give us this life that they wanted, not just for us but for themselves. How one approaches parenting is about the person you are. The parents you get is a game of chance for everyone.”
“And yet when you’re adopted, you’re just someone your parents could give away.”
“You’re also someone your parents chose because they wanted you that badly.”
Those words seem to jolt through him. He doesn’t respond. He just sits there staring at his hands, then turns his gaze on me as though he’s waiting for me to say more.
“How are the millions of children whose parents had them without ever giving it a thought more special than someone for whom their parents stayed on a waiting list for years, praying, proving, bettering themselves? If Vasu had stayed with Namdeo, if Vasu had kept you in that ugliness, would that really be better?”
“I don’t know.” His shoulders start to shake. He swallows.
Then he reaches over and collapses against me. From the depth of his soul, he lets his pain out in heart-wrenching sobs. Krish, stoic, indomitable Krish. Krish, who hasn’t shown me a sliver of emotion in the time I’ve known him, is crying in my arms as though he’s been waiting his entire life to be able to cry.
I wrap my arms around him. For those minutes, I’m what holds him up. What makes it possible for him to keep breathing through the pain that’s choked him for so long. In being that, I’m also what I’ve wanted to be for as long as I can remember: someone whose humanity is complete because they’re connected to others. Someone who feels undamaged and enough. Someone with the power to make the unbearable bearable.
When the sobs stop, we sit there like that, his forehead pressed into my shoulder. Another moment when we’ve breached a wall with each other that has kept us safe from everyone else.
When he pulls away, his face is wet. That, combined with the swollen, bruised jaw, makes him so vulnerable, it’s like he’s stripped down to his soul. He takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. “You should have seen the look on my mom’s face when I said those things to her. I see her face in my dreams every night. I gave her that. In return for a lifetime of love, I gave her that.”
I squeeze his hand. “You were horrible to her one time. You were obviously a wonderful son all the other times. Do you think she took only that one conversation with her? Do you think she forgot the lifetime of love that you remember so well, that’s such a part of who you are? I’ve been awful to you. Is that what you’ll remember when you think of me? Is that what’s imprinted on your soul about me?”
He pulls my hands to his chest. “No,” he whispers. “It’s the hot-sauce breakdown.”
We both smile.
“And the motorcycle freak-out?” I say.
“And ripping sugarcane with your bare teeth. And how badass you were when you refused to be afraid of the guy who tried to steal the ring in New York.”
“You mean how I toppled over when he gave me one push?”
“That too. And how you feel everyone’s pain as though it’s your own.”
“Yes, it’s super fun being a pain magnet!”
“And yet you race headfirst into it.”
I pull my hand away. That’s a lot. All of it.
“I’m willing to bet my life that the last thing your mother wished was that you wouldn’t carry the guilt of that last conversation with you on top of your grief. I’ll bet she would give anything to let you know that it didn’t touch the love between you.”
“Thank you,” he says.
Then he looks at the phone, so I hand it to him.
He dials a number.
“Dad?” he says. “It’s Krish.”