Chapter 25
Andrew and I hadn’t done road trips together until we trailed Hari Rao latterly. That would hardly count as a jaunt, but we were on the road for about eight hours on each of those two days.
Andrew’s eyes were on the road. He fiddled with the music system every now and then, changing stations and increasing and reducing the volume.
Apologizing every now and then, too loud or soft.
I was taking in everything my eyes clapped on – the dark sky, the green earth, a barking dog, a cycle parked at the side of the road.
Whose wheels were they? Where had he gone?
At some point, I settled deeper into the seat, my shoulders relaxed, and my eyes caressed Andrew’s profile. His body language had tempered, too.
We stopped for breakfast a couple of hours into our journey. Andrew had swerved into a place earlier but quickly steered us back on the road. ‘The dosas aren’t good here,’ he said.
I nodded. I didn’t really care what we ate and where; it was too early for food for me.
Andrew’s smile was warm when we stopped 20 minutes later; my expression was puzzled. I had been flicking through Bhumika Velu’s notes.
‘What do you know about Catherine Brown?’ I asked, seated opposite him.
Andrew had eaten his dosa and was finishing mine when I tossed the question at him. His face wore a quizzical expression when he looked up. ‘She’s my great-grandmother – Noelene’s mother.’
‘I know,’ I said, smiling. ‘What’s her life story? Where did she grow up?’
Andrew laughed. It had a nervous ring to it.
We were almost done with the food.
‘You should eat something. I’ve eaten two dosas; you barely took a bite.’
‘Maybe later.’
I felt Andrew’s palm on my back as we approached the cashier. We paid less than 100 bucks for two dosas and two sugary coffees.
‘She’s an only child, I think. Her mother passed away early, and her father didn’t remarry,’ Andrew said as he got us back on the highway.
‘Her father was a teacher.’
‘She was married off to Ronald Brown. They moved to Bengaluru; they were from Coonoor obviously…’
Andrew stopped talking. He drove some distance, 10 minutes or maybe 20, before pulling up. He was breathing heavily.
‘Bhumika Velu is Catherine Brown, right?’ He was looking at me, into me, like the answer was written somewhere inside of me.
I was nodding. ‘I think so.’
He pulled out his phone and started going through the texts one by one. ‘Ronald Brown contracted smallpox and died. They moved to Bengaluru, too??’
He was cross-checking their stories.
‘It’s so obvious. How could I have not known? The notes all but spelt it out for me.’
Andrew’s hands were gripping mine tight; they were pale almost. He apologized and let out that intensity on the steering wheel. His knuckles were white.
‘Bhumika never saw her father again.’
That really bothered me. How could he claim to love her and not let her father visit them or she visit her father? Love? A prisoner in your palace.
Andrew’s face was taut.
After a while, he asked, ‘When did you find out?’
‘The first time you read it to me, I thought something was amiss.’
Andrew nodded.
‘I must’ve read those notes some three or four times when I discovered them,’ he said. ‘It was those notes that brought me back to India because even though I didn’t think it was my great-grandmother’s then, it gave me a starting point from where I could begin my search.’
Andrew wanted to walk around the place, know it and understand Catherine Brown’s life. No… Bhumika Velu’s. ‘I have been here twice as a child, for a wedding and something else. I can’t quite remember what that was.’
I could hear him breathe.
‘With Noelene?’
He nodded.
I wanted to say something funny to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
‘She’s Bhumika to you?’ I was addressing him, he who doesn’t shorten names.
Andrew nodded.
‘I’m guessing Noelene didn’t think of her as Bhumika, more as Catherine.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘She only referred to her as “mother”.’
Obviously. Those turns had slowed my mind down to a crawl.
‘I think,’ I said, patting his arm, ‘she thought you’d finally get it…’
‘More like she wanted me to figure it out.’
I laughed. It was timorous.
‘It’s not the kind of life you want to talk about, not that she didn’t own her choices, but the uncertainties that it brought kind of destroyed her.’
That was a choice, I thought. A harsh truth.
‘I think she trusted I’d arrive at the truth.’
That was a bit heartless. My hand reached halfway to his shoulder before returning to my lap.
‘The only thing she told me about the notes was, “It’s all in there.” And that’s why, when you had me focus on her life story, I could connect the dots.’ Andrew was laughing now. ‘About time, don’t you think?’
My heart was bleeding for the boy tasked with figuring out his family tree.
‘Do you know where she lived?’
Andrew had made some enquiries about Catherine Brown after he returned to Bengaluru.
While there were people who knew of the Browns, no one seemed to know of Catherine Brown’s antecedents.
There was one gentleman who had told him that Noelene had two younger sisters, both of whom had died early.
Andrew thought that was a possibility going by the size of the house; he could’ve had a different bedroom for every day of the week if he wanted.
On the way up, we stopped at a stall selling fresh carrots and cucumbers.
Andrew enquired after the Velus, a schoolteacher named Tilakanathan Velu, whose daughter, Bhumika, had married an Englishman.
The last part of the sentence was met with a flicker of recognition.
Something heard, something learnt. A story that had come down from grandparents.
Andrew’s Tamil wasn’t as fluent as his Kannada, but he could get by.
‘Maybe we could walk around the barracks area, talk to people,’ I said.
The last hour of the almost eight hours on the road to Coonoor was a journey mapped in hell – 36 hairpin bends.
‘I wish Noelene had spoken to me about Hari Rao,’ Andrew said as he approached the first of the hairpin bends. ‘What happened and why it ended the way it did.’
I looked at him, surprised at the announcement; we were talking about his great-grandmother. Earlier, he had said he understood why Noelene hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
‘She was cold in her grave by the time I switched to media, but I was always interested in politics,’ he said. He was talking slowly, just like how he was driving. ‘I was living in Bengaluru. I might have run into the man.’
Even though Andrew had always planned on going abroad to pursue his education, there was the off chance he would return.
Noelene should’ve sat the boy down and spoken to him.
He had a right to know. Maybe she expected to be pushed, asked for the answer…
but she should’ve known that the question would haunt him when there was no one to give him answers.
‘I have a feeling she wasn’t proud of something she had said or done to him,’ Andrew said.
I looked at him.
‘I have no evidence; it’s just a feeling.
It’s because of how she relayed it to me, her tone maybe.
There was regret, and it stood out like a column against the sadness that swirled around her when she spoke about him.
She was distraught that he didn’t acknowledge her or their daughter, but there was more.
They might have had something good, and she may have broken it with something she said or did.
I don’t know,’ he said, slamming his palm on the steering wheel.
‘Are you mad at her?’
‘This half-knowledge is killing me.’
‘Is this because he recognized you?’
‘I don’t think it was me; it was my name. I don’t know of any other Browns living in Bengaluru.’
I nodded.
He loved his Nana and she him. They spoke a lot to each other, not that there was anyone else to talk to.
But on the most important subject of his life, his roots, he and his beloved grandmother had steered clear of hard truths.
She had held on to all that she had lived through, letting nothing show, and he, not wanting to cause her more pain than he thought she had already inflicted on herself, had stayed silent.
His father? How could Andrew not want to know who the man was? It was burning me. My eyes were on his fingers which were on the steering wheel. Then it hit me. My stomach tightened, to the size of a golf ball maybe and my eyes shut. Of course he wanted to know, but how? Who could he ask?
‘I should’ve spoken to Nana on some stuff,’ he said, as if he had read my mind.
And she should’ve asked her daughter who the father of her child was, I thought. What if Noelene had and Sarah Ann returned the question to her mother? If there was a prettier mess in all the world, I didn’t know it.
‘Especially after I discovered the diary. It’s just old paper, but imagine, I was holding something Bhumika had also touched… I didn’t know it then.’
I loved how he had ditched Catherine Brown for Bhumika Velu.
‘I wanted to come here, come here with you, and walk these roads,’ he said, pointing at the newly tarred surface of the barracks we were crawling up on before the GPS announced, ‘Your destination is on the right.’
I wanted to ask, ‘Why me?’, but we were on our feet and fishing out baggage.
We read Bhumi’s notes again after we checked into the hotel. We tried to visualize everything she had written about.
We were in my cottage; it was almost double the size of his. It had a garden with rose bushes. We were on the sofa. Andrew’s feet were on the table and my legs were crossed. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths.
I’m not sure if I dozed off, but it seemed like a good half hour had passed when Andrew tapped me on my shoulder. Then, together, we walked down the road she may have walked a century ago in the early evening light. The air was fresh, and it wrapped around me like a coat.