Chapter 34
Idropped Tara off and returned to pack a quick bag. Amar was scheduled to leave for Mumbai, but I requested he stay back. I would need his support. Sangita had stopped responding to medication, and even the painkillers weren’t enough now. She was in constant pain and ready to give up. I was partially responsible for her being in this state—alone and unloved. My insides churned as I drove to the airport for a 2 a.m. flight.
During the long flight, I made a mental list of things I would need to take care of—hospital formalities, legal ones, social obligations, the cremation, last rites. I was prepared for it all, except for the one thing that really mattered: facing Riya. How does one console a child who is about to lose the only parent she has known?
When the wheels touched down in New Delhi, there was no change in Sangita’s condition. She was still with us, Amar informed me. A small consolation. As I entered through the giant doors of the intensive care unit, I spotted Riya and Amar on a bench in the hallway. Amar rose promptly when he saw me, and Riya’s eyes lit up. I walked up and put an arm around her shoulder. She let her head rest against my chest for a moment before pulling herself upright.
“You should get some rest,” I said.
“No, I want to be here when it happens,” she declared, pushing her palms under her thighs and leaning slightly forward, eyes fixed on the door to her mother’s room.
Amar beckoned me away from her to the large windows.
“What’s the status?” I asked.
“She’s on a ventilator.”
“What does Vishal mamaji say?”
“Any time now.”
“How did she deteriorate so rapidly? I was here three days ago.”
“Her pain is too much to handle.”
I raked a trembling hand through my hair. He patted my shoulder and said, “We’ll wait.”
We didn’t have to wait long. Sangita passed away in her sleep that night, painlessly, thanks to the morphine. Riya hugged me as she wept. She stayed close while I finished up the paperwork at the hospital. I asked if she wanted to inform Sangita’s parents. She shook her head.
“They never came to visit. We don’t exist for them, Mumma said.” Sobbing, she pulled a letter from her pocket. “Mumma wrote this last week. She asked me to give it to my father when she was gone.”
I kissed the top of her head and took it from her.
We gathered Sangita’s belongings and followed the ambulance to a crematorium. According to Hindu customs, it was the prerogative of the husband or the son to light the pyre. It was also their duty to perform the last rites for the transition of the soul into the other world. But Sangita had neither. She had a beautiful daughter.
I asked Riya what she wanted. She was a brave child, but a child nonetheless. I didn’t want to impose on her to perform the last rites, nor did I want to take away her agency to decide otherwise. It was a tricky line to walk.
The electric cremation was simpler, with no spectacle, no smell, and no sound of the cracking bones. As Riya, Amar, and I bid farewell to a beautiful Sangita whose life I had ruined, I wept without shame, not caring about the few other families who were there cremating their own loved ones. I had taken away her love and left her to die in loneliness. Riya held my hand tightly as she wept, and I let all my grief and guilt flow out with hers. Her gut-wrenching scream tore through my heart when Sangita’s body slid into the chamber and the fire gripped it in a hungry embrace before the lid closed shut. I held her firmly against me, almost carrying her back to the car.
We returned to Amar’s home, showered, and had a light breakfast that Taiji had prepared. Riya refused to eat, just as she refused to go to bed. I sat with her on a couch in the living room until she fell asleep against my shoulder. I laid her down and covered her with a light blanket.
“I’ll take her to get her things when she wakes up,” I said to Amar.
“It will be difficult for her to go back home and not see her mother.”
“Do you think I should go alone?”
“No, we should let her decide,” Amar said.
“I must get lawyers to sort out the status of that house. I think it’s still in my name.”
Amar put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about that right now. Those things will happen in time. Just take care of Riya. We’ll manage the other things. Dad’s lawyers will get all the formalities sorted.”
I hugged him. “Thank you for everything, bhai. I owe you big.”
“Keep Tara happy, and we’ll call it even.”
“That’s the plan.” I smiled back.
We strolled into the dining room, where Taiji had laid out tea and snacks. When we were alone again, I said to him, “She told me about the pregnancy.”
He nodded. “Good.”
“You should’ve called me immediately.”
“You had already left India when she told me, and she didn’t want me to approach you about it. She feared you’d think it was a ploy to get money from the rich guy who had ditched her.”
His words stunned me. “What?”
He shrugged. “You were in bad shape, Sameer, but so was she. I guarded her secret the same way she did mine. You wouldn’t have heard it from me, ever.”
“I see, professor.”
He shrugged.
“I can’t believe fate gave me another chance after I blew the first one so spectacularly.” I threw my head back with a sigh.
“Don’t mess this one up. You won’t get another.”
Our eyes were instinctively drawn toward the living room.
That evening, I took Riya back to her home. She wept continuously as she gathered her life into bags to be carried across the ocean to another country, to a home she had never known. The only consolation, she repeatedly told me, was that her mother had trusted me, and she trusted her mother’s judgment. The driver helped us load her bags into the car as she said goodbye to the house she’d grown up in.
On our way back to Amar’s, I told her about the rituals surrounding death that I had seen in the family and asked if she wanted to perform any.
“No,” she said. “But I would like to scatter her ashes in the river.”
I nodded. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”
“If I choose not to perform any rites, will her soul suffer?”
She was asking the wrong person, but this wasn’t the time for rationalistic expositions. “No,” I reassured her. “The soul is gone. It can’t suffer any longer. What you do from here on is for you, for the sake of the living. The dead have passed on. We can’t hurt them anymore.”
Fresh tears drenched her already tired eyes.
“Are there any friends you want to say goodbye to?” I tried to change the subject. “Any boyfriends?”
That got me a slight smile.
“Really? Boyfriend or boyfriends?” I asked. “And aren’t you a little too young for that?”
“Mumma would’ve been so mad if she heard you talking to me about this,” she said, then cried a little.
“So that’s a ‘yes’ to the boyfriend, then?”
She tugged at corner of her cotton top. “Not a boyfriend, exactly. But I like him, sort of.”
“Hmm, does he know?”
“I think he does, but we never talk about it.”
“Do you want to see him before we leave?”
“Yes,” she sobbed.
“You’re barely thirteen, Riya. You’ll meet many people in life who will make you very happy. Friends, family, lovers.”
“Eww,” she said from behind her tears.
“What?”
“How old are you?” She grimaced. “Who says lovers?”
“Hey, that’s a perfectly fine word to describe someone you love.”
“For your generation, maybe,” she scoffed.
“Oh, that’s what you think? You’re going to play the age card with me, are you?” I ribbed. “I’m not that much older than you.”
“You are old.” She ended the argument definitively.
We talked about the friends she wanted to see before we left. We decided to call them the next day and visit them. We also cooked up a plan to have her see her not-boyfriend and give them some alone time together. She suggested I drive them to a coffee shop or a mall.
At dinner that evening, she ate a little more than she had all day. She still broke down in tears every so often. I didn’t want her to be by herself at night, so I had a small extra bed moved into one of the larger guest rooms. After she fell asleep in the large bed, I slept on the extra bed near the door in case she needed me in the night, but she slept through the night without distress.
Early the next morning, we collected Sangita’s ashes from the crematorium and drove north toward the river Ganga. We scattered her ashes in the river, sans rituals, and had a quick lunch at a roadside restaurant before driving back. Then we began calling Riya’s friends to ask if we could stop by. It was rough watching the young girls lose their cherished friendships. I made small talk with the parents while Riya went into their rooms to chat and say goodbye. It was difficult to explain my relationship to her, so I introduced myself as her cousin. Given our resemblance, people bought the lie easily.
Then I accompanied her and her not-boyfriend to a nice, uncrowded coffee shop. I took my coffee and sat out of earshot. I called Tara, but it went to voicemail. I miss you. Coming back in two days. Can’t wait to see you, I texted.
When Riya was done talking, they got up and exchanged a brief, formal hug, which led her to cry a little. He put his hand on her shoulder. I let them finish before approaching. Then we dropped him off at home, and the driver took us to Amar’s.
“Amar is leaving for Mumbai tomorrow,” I said to Riya. “It will get a bit lonely.”
“He’s very quiet. Not like you. You’re chatty.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It’s good. I like chatty people.”
“You’ve decided you like me, then?” I asked cheekily.
“No, but I have no choice, right?”
“You always do, Riya. If you have even the slightest hesitation about coming back with me, tell me. I won’t do anything against your wishes. If you decide you want to come back to India after a year, we can work that out too. But I’m confident you’ll have a good time there. And you’ll love Tara. The two of you are so much alike.”
“Who’s Tara?”
My chest squeezed a little.
“Tara is my…well, you can sort of say she’s my girlfriend, but she’s more. She’s my strength, my life. She’s my lover,” I said and grinned wide.
“Ew, Sameer! You have to stop using that word,” she chided me.
I laughed. “How was your meeting with your not-boyfriend?”
“His name is Ayaan,” she said haughtily. “It was good. I told him I liked him.”
“Yeah?”
“He said he liked me too, but he thought I liked someone else.”
“Wow, a triangle at thirteen?”
“No, I don’t like that other guy. He’s an assho—sorry.”
“Don’t worry, I’m a heavy swearer myself. Big on the F word.”
She smiled. “This other guy, he’s rich, good-looking, and he thinks the world revolves around him. He’s insufferable. I can’t believe Ayaan thought I could be interested in someone like him.”
“I was him once,” I said.
Her eyes widened. “But you don’t seem that way now. What changed?”
“I met Tara.”
She looked at me with kind eyes.
“Does she make you happy?”
“Very.”
“That’s good. I want everyone to be happy, including you. I don’t want to see the sorrow I saw in Mumma’s eyes ever again.”
“Riya, I’m sorry about what I did to Sangita. And to you.”
“Mumma said she understood. But I don’t think I understand. Maybe you can explain it to me someday.”
“Tell me what happened with Ayaan.”
“Nothing much. I told him. We talked. He said he was sorry about Mumma and asked what I was going to do now. I told him I’d keep in touch over email. For the first time, I felt something in my stomach when he looked at me. Have you had that feeling?”
“Yes.” I smiled. “But FYI, I’ll be monitoring all your emails until you’re eighteen, young lady.”
“What? Absolutely not! I’ll never give you my password.”
“You don’t need to. I have hacker friends.” I didn’t.
She pouted. “You are worse than Mumma.”