Chapter 11
Secrets never stayed buried in small towns.
They managed to slide beneath doors and seep through cracked windows. They travelled over garden fences and in knowing glances exchanged across shop counters.
By mutual agreement, James and Asha valiantly tried to pretend everything was the same. That was perhaps what doomed them in the end.
Because before, there had already been something between them—a tension which was almost palpable. James had never hidden the way he watched her.
The possessiveness in him had existed long before he first climbed those stairs in the dark.
It had shown itself in ugly little ways.
He still walked into the pub after work and searched for her with pale eyes, while coal and rain clung to his skin. He still laughed at the same bawdy jokes with the rest of the miners. He still drank at the same corner of the bar with the same men.
Asha still kept her eyes lowered when the customers got handsy. She kept her love bites hidden beneath high-necked dresses, like secret kisses she wanted to treasure.
She did not slow down one bit and James knew better than to offer to keep her. She still wiped tables and carried plates balanced carefully along her arm.
Nothing had changed and yet everything had.
Mavis noticed the tiny details with her eagle eyes. The missing button on James’s work shirt reappearing overnight, sewn back with neat dark thread instead of hanging loose for weeks as it usually would.
The stubborn stain on his shirt had disappeared. His clothes began to smell faintly of the soap Asha used.
There were no filthy jokes to the other men at the pub.
One of the women who had started working the odd shift made a comment to James.
“So that’s done then,” she muttered one evening while drying glasses.
James answered, but his tone was distracted as his eyes watched her serving the new lad at work. He did not realize the glass in his hand was close to cracking.
“What is?”
She only smirked and walked away.
Then there was the landlady.
Mrs. Burton had eyes like a hawk and the soul of a prison warden. She knew if a mouse let out a silent fart in her building.
At first, she merely watched Asha with a strange look in her eyes when she knocked on the door to collect the rent.
Then came the comments.
“Oh, you’re cheerful today.”
Or—
“Late night, dearie?”
Always with that thin little smile.
Asha learned not to respond. Just smile and hurry away.
But the real change came elsewhere.
Down the road from the pub sat the new Indian grocery shop she visited once or twice a week.
It smelled of cardamom and onions and sacks of rice stacked to the ceiling.
The owners had never been warm exactly though they hailed from the same part of India as her, but over time their youngest daughter, Shanti, had softened toward her.
The girl was perhaps sixteen, pretty and shy, with long plaited hair and keen to chat in the language they both knew. Sometimes she slipped Tanay pieces of jaggery when her mother was not looking.
Sometimes she reminisced about food she missed and the temple festivals. They wondered whether the monsoon rains truly came down so heavily this year that the streets flooded waist-high.
For Asha, those brief conversations became precious. It fed that secret part of her that missed home. Then, one afternoon she walked in and immediately knew something was wrong.
The girl stood near the shelves arranging tins. Normally she would smile and talk like she couldn't wait to get the words out. Today she did not look their way. Her nervous eyes darted once toward Asha before dropping instantly to the floor.
“Shanti,” Tanay chirped happily, reaching for the sweets jar.
The girl did not answer.
“Shanti?” Asha tried again, a question in her voice.
Fingers fumbled clumsily with a tin.
Then the girl’s mother appeared from the back room so suddenly it almost startled her.
“Shanti,” she snapped sharply, all the while looking at Asha like she was a criminal. “Inside.”
The girl fled without looking up. Asha stood very still. The older woman wiped her hands on her apron slowly. For a moment neither spoke.
Then the woman sighed.
“A cat drinks milk and closes her eyes,” she said with an air of finality, “thinking nobody sees her do it.”
Heat flooded Asha’s face. For a moment, everything seemed to spin.
The woman avoided her eyes as she continued stacking vegetables.
“This is not India,” she murmured. “But that does not mean you can forget people are watching.”
Asha swallowed hard.
“I did nothing wrong.”
The woman’s lips were stretched thin with disapproval. Lines of fatigue bracketed her mouth and forehead.
“Maybe not.” She glanced toward the street. “But they will still punish the woman first.”
Asha stood there in a daze. It was true, every word. She knew what was unsaid. She was a bad influence for a young girl.
She nodded once, unable to speak. Then she gathered a protesting Tanay’s hand quickly and left without buying anything. Outside, the cold air burned her cheeks and the breeze dried her tears.
Halfway back to the pub, she realised her hands were trembling.
***
That evening, James noticed something was wrong immediately. He cornered her near the back steps while the others shouted over cards and beer inside.
“What happened?”
“Nothing," she whispered through dry cracked lips.
“Asha.”
There was a demand in his voice but she didn't look up. She kept pulling a frayed thread from her apron like her life depended on it.
Finally, she whispered, “People know.”
James sighed. The others had been ribbing him about getting lucky.
“Who?”
“Everyone… soon enough.”
He stared at her for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed once under his breath. It felt like a knife through her heart.
“Sweetheart,” he huffed, “half the town’s probably been waiting for this since the first time I walked you home.”
Her face crumpled slightly.
“You think this is funny.”
“No.” His expression went soft. “No, it isn’t.”
She looked terrified of what came next.
She had lived her entire life understanding one brutal truth—a story she tried to escape when her employer's son in London turned his interest in her direction.
The job that had seemed like a lifeline when she was down on her luck and pregnant turned into a nightmare.
She had spent years working for food and board with barely enough pay to put clothes on her son's back.
It was only when life took a turn for the worse that she had fled and ended up here in Wakefield. And for what?
“We need to stop this.”
James stared at her.
“No.”
Asha gave a short humourless laugh.
“I am not asking. I am telling you.”
“YOU still want me. This is bull-scutter.” His accent was making it difficult for her to follow.
“You think this is nonsense?” Her voice wobbled. “People are talking.”
“Let them talk.”
“That is easy for you to say.”
He took a step toward her.
“Asha—”
“No.” She backed away instantly. “No, James. Listen to me for once.”
Something in her face made him stop.
There was a kind of determination on her face that people have when they are about to cut off their own arm to survive.
“We were stupid and selfish,” she whispered. “It was an itch and it has been scratched now.”
“That’s not all this is,” he insisted, anger and panic creeping in.
Her mouth trembled. Then abruptly she grabbed his wrist. Before he could react she shoved her own arm beside his beneath the weak light spilling from the doorway.
“Look.”
James frowned.
“What?”
“Look at my skin.”
Her voice cracked like a brittle, dry branch snapping underfoot.
“Look at it.”
Her golden-brown arm almost glowed against his pale roughened skin dusted with black hair.
She squeezed his forearm tighter and held them side by side like evidence before a judge.
“Asha—”
“Admit it.”
He yanked his hand free.
“Admit what?”
“We are different!”
The words burst out louder than she intended but it was drowned out by the noise from the pub.
Asha pressed trembling fingers against her mouth briefly before continuing in a lower voice.
“You can pretend all you like, but people see this first.” She gestured bitterly between them. “Before anything else.”
James’s jaw was clenched.
“I don’t care.”
“But I do. And my son will when his classmates call him the son of the Indian whore.”
She looked up at him then, beautiful brown eyes glistening. The long lashes were clumped together.
“Are you planning to marry me, James?”
The question hit him so unexpectedly, he took a step back. He said nothing because the thought had never crossed his mind. He foolishly thought they would go on like this until they had enough of each other.
In his silence, she got her answer she always expected.
Asha nodded once.
There it was.
James opened his mouth, then closed it again. Because what was he supposed to say?
He had never imagined marriage in concrete terms. Never let himself think further than the next night. The next touch. The next stolen hour upstairs.
And she knew him well enough to see every hesitation flicker across his face.
“You will get bored eventually,” she said quietly.
“That’s far in the future, love,” he said, trying to gain some of the ground he had lost.
“Maybe not now.” Her voice shook as she soldiered on. “Maybe not next month. But one day you would wake up and realise what everyone else already knows.”
He stepped toward her again, angry now.
“And what’s that?”
“That you want a nice white girl to marry.” Tears finally brimmed over her lashes. “Someone you can take into town proudly. Someone your children will look like.”
“Asha—”
“And I will become what they already think I am.” Her laugh broke apart painfully like an earthen pot in the harsh sun. “The Indian whore who briefly warmed your bed.”
James flinched like she had slapped him.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why? Isn’t it true?”
“No!”
His voice thundered through the alley so loudly she startled. For a moment they simply stared at each other breathing hard.
Then James scrubbed a hand over his face violently.
“You think that’s what this was to me?”
“I think this world is not fair to women like me,” she whispered. “And I am tired of learning that lesson over and over.”
He looked at her for a long time after that.
A wounded and furious emotion moved behind his eyes. He wasn't ready for this...not yet.
Finally, he said flatly, “Fine.”
The single word hurt more than shouting would have.
Then he turned and walked away. And that hurt worse. Like her heart was torn from her chest.
Asha stood there listening to his footsteps disappear into the night.
Only when the silence settled fully did she realise she was holding her breath and let herself lean against the wall.
She could not cry. She had to finish her shift, she thought as she dried her tears with her apron. Tanay would see.
She went back inside mechanically. Mavis looked up from wiping tables. One glance at Asha’s ravaged face and her expression changed.
“You alright, love?”
Asha nodded too quickly.
Mavis stared another second.
Then quietly said, “Take the rest of the night. I’ll manage.”
Asha could not even remember thanking her.
Everything afterward felt dreamlike. Or nightmarish. She collected the boy from behind the counter where he had fallen asleep curled sideways.
He woke enough to mumble something against her shoulder as she carried him home. He was getting too heavy for this.
No James followed her home. No James paid for her ticket.
At the flat she moved automatically, lighting the stove and warming leftovers.
She blew carefully on spoonfuls, feeding her son while he did his number work. The show must go on even as she was falling apart inside.
She helped him wash and say his prayers.
Then she tucked him into bed beneath the blankets.
Tanay yawned sleepily.
“James coming?”
The question nearly destroyed her. Tanay knew more than he let on.
“Not tonight,” she managed.
He accepted it easily, already drifting toward sleep. Children adapted to disappointment faster than adults.
Asha waited until his breathing deepened before she crossed the room alone slowly.
The bed still smelled like him. His male warmth had seeped deep into the worn sheets. And into her very bones.
Her knees gave out suddenly. She sat down hard on the mattress and pressed trembling fingers against her mouth to stop the ugly sounds rising there. But the endless tears came anyway, sliding down her face one after another while her heart felt like it was being torn apart slowly.
But there was nothing she could do. This was the way it had to be.
When scandal came, men brushed it aside and carried on.
Women got burned at the stake.