‘Come child, wake up, we’ve reached your ajji’s village.’ Aunt Lathakka’s gentle but persistent voice pierces Durga’s sleep-fogged brain. She becomes vaguely aware that the rocking motion of the bus, which had lulled her into slumber, has stopped. She is conscious of chatter around her, of mild pressure on her arm, of being half-dragged, half-carried down the steps of the bus. Durga blinks, seeing a cluster of cottages mushrooming from pebble-peppered earth, flanked by velvet fields, and, glowering from the top of the only hill, an old ruin.
The bus rumbles off, raising an avalanche of dust. The few passengers left inside, who’d helped prevent her jumping off and trying to escape coming here, wave from the windows, their rotting yellow teeth framed against the rusty railings. ‘Bye, Durga. Be good now.’ Be good now. The caution Durga has heard all her life.
A lone rickshaw languishes under a peepal tree at the base of the hill, the driver slumbering on its hood, his legs stretched out over the front wheel, feet resting against the trunk of the tree. Aunt Lathakka, the family friend chosen to accompany Durga on the long journey to her grandmother, walks towards the rickshaw driver, beckoning Durga to follow. Durga, wiping sleep from her eyes and cowed by the ruin scowling down from the hill, is too worn out to protest.
Someone yells, ‘Hey, Lo, you are wanted…’ and the rickshaw driver jerks awake, squinting inquiringly at them.
A small crowd has gathered, Durga realises, as she turns to look at the retreating bus, wishing she had resisted Lathakka’s attempts to get her off it. She inhales the tang of body odour and oil, chilli powder and coconut, as the crowd presses close, their hot, curious breath on her neck, her cheeks.
‘Why are they all here?’ Lathakka asks the driver.
‘Hardly anybody comes to our village. You’re a novelty.’ He stretches languidly, scratching his sweaty head. ‘Where do you want to go then?’
‘The mansion.’ Lathakka jerks her chin upward, indicating the ruin, a brooding blue bruise blotting out the sun. ‘Durga is going to stay there, with her ajji, Sumathiamma.’ Her voice sounds determinedly cheery.
The gathered crowd, which, necks craned, is watching them agog, steps back as one. Dazed gasps. Traumatised shudders. Loud exhalations. A man swears. Women chant the names of gods. A little boy bursts into tears. The vendor dispensing tea and vadas, rice and fish curry, from a makeshift stand by the road, an expert at pouring frothy tea from a height, misses, the tea splashing everywhere, filling the grime-stained air with the cloying scents of cardamom, over-boiled milk and freshly minted scandal. The water in his rice pot, bubbling beside the pyramid of fly-infested vadas, dries, and the curry looks set to burn as he stares with the rest of the crowd at Durga and Lathakka, as if they have sprouted two heads and elephant trunks for noses.
‘You do know that it is haunted? Cursed? That a madwoman lives there?’ The rickshaw driver is the first to recover.
‘But…’ Lathakka begins, only to be cut off, rudely, by the driver.
‘There was a fire at the house many years ago. When the breeze careers down from the hill, it brings the acrid hint of ash, and if you listen carefully you can hear the tormented cries of the dying occupants.’ The driver’s voice has dropped dramatically and Durga, along with the assembled crowd, inches closer, the better to catch his words.
‘At certain times, if you go close enough to the ruin,’ he adds, his mouth smeared with spittle and trepidation, ‘you feel like you are suffocating from flame-licked smoke, as if your skin is on fire.’ The crowd nods in agreement. ‘Anyone who dares to step foot in there is sure to go mad.’ The driver tucks his lungi in decisively.
‘Why?’ Durga asks and is speared by the collective gaze of the crowd.
‘Why?’ The rickshaw driver shakes his head, melodramatically throwing his hands heavenwards.
‘Someone hanged themselves there. His body was only discovered, swinging from the burnt rafters, rotting and barely recognisable, when some boys ran up to the house as a dare. They smelled him first then saw a column of flies suspended from the ceiling, moving back and forth in the slight breeze,’ a balding man from the crowd explains, eyes wide.
‘No, it was his wife who found him – it turned her completely mad!’ The old woman standing beside the balding man jabs him with her bony elbow. Her words are squelchy, her lips and mouth stained red and dripping with paan, like the jaws of a feeding vampire.
‘So does this mean she was only half-mad before?’ The rickshaw driver snorts, swatting at the mosquito daring to alight on his arm.
‘On nights when the ruin is lit up by the ghostly orb of the full moon, it seems you can spy the phantoms of all the souls who died there, gliding through the rooms,’ the vendor, who has temporarily suspended pouring tea, pipes up.
‘Oh the goings-on in that house,’ says an ancient-looking lady, resting against the peepal tree trunk, her toothless gums clicking as they laboriously masticate paan. ‘Just because they were rich, just because they owned everyone in the village, they thought they could do anything.’ She spits with a resounding thwack into her spittoon, chasing away the buzzing flies that have congregated. They settle again, a black pestilence crowding the orange-brown gloop, once she sets it back down.
What did they do? What were the goings-on? Durga wonders.
‘The madwoman will bring seven years of bad luck. She’ll put a spell on you,’ says someone else, the crowd finding their voices as their consternation grows, their astounded gazes fixed on Durga.
‘Durga’s ajji, Sumathiamma, is there and she’s fine.’ Lathakka, Durga’s chaperone, finally speaks up, her voice faltering in the face of such vehement astonishment.
‘Ha! Who said so? Only an insane person chooses to live there, with ghosts and the madwoman for company,’ the rickshaw driver declares. ‘I go once a week with provisions, in broad daylight, and never stay long enough to be cursed or possessed. I have not seen the madwoman yet or any spirits, thank God.’ The driver strokes the picture of Lord Vishnu hanging from the front mirror of his rickshaw and kisses the hand that touched his god to ward off the evil spirits he might have conjured just by talking of them. ‘Sumathiamma is as mad as the old woman she looks after!’
‘Shhh… she’s perfectly fine, I’m sure,’ Lathakka says, trying and failing to inject some assertiveness into her trembling voice as she glances at Durga.
They have sent me to live with two madwomen, Durga thinks, swaying on her feet with tiredness. I don’t even care; I just want my ma and da to be okay.
‘Nobody in their right mind will go there – except Sumathiamma, who doesn’t count as she lives there. And the nuns. And me with supplies of course.’ The rickshaw driver spits.
‘Nuns?’ Lathakka asks.
‘They look after the madwoman during the day, administering her medicine and such. Not that she can be cured… She gets violent, you know.’
‘Oh.’ Lathakka looks at Durga again.
Durga stares at the ground, at all the shiny smooth pebbles, thinking how well they would have fit into her catapult – the new one; her earlier, better one having been destroyed in the accident – angry with herself for not bringing it along.
‘Good luck, girl. May the gods be with you,’ the rickshaw driver says fervently. The crowd grouped behind Durga joins in, so it grows into a loud, reverberating rumble. ‘Good luck.’
She pictures pelting the gathering with stones from her catapult, all these hangers-on running from her, screaming in shock. It makes her feel better, her heart, which she hadn’t even realised was beating too fast, settling somewhat.
‘So will you take us there?’ Lathakka asks the rickshaw driver, peering up at the ruin.
‘No way. It will be dark by the time I start back down the hill. Do you think I am mad as well?’
After much bartering, the rickshaw driver finally agrees to take them for three times the usual fare, greed winning out over the dread of curses cast by raging madwomen and the fear of being haunted by trapped ghosts.
And before Durga can protest, they are hurtling towards the ruin in the rickshaw. She shivers, huddling closer to Lathakka and resting a tentative hand on her knobbly fingers as they bump over the potholes on the dusty, untarred road. Her aunt smiles down at her, a wan stretch of her thin, colourless lips. Emboldened, Durga tries one more time. ‘Do I have to stay with Ajji?’
Her aunt sighs, an exhalation that seems to be coming from her very depths. ‘Durga, I am so sorry, we—’
‘I’ll be good, I promise.’
‘Oh, Durga…’ Her aunt looks as if she is harbouring a mouthful of bitter gourd. ‘With your ma and your da in hospital, it’s best for you to stay with family.’
Durga shudders at the mention of the hospital. Ma and Da’s bodies, hitched to machines. Pale. Unresponsive. She squeezes her eyes closed to shut out the images but they linger. The rickshaw smells of mould and dust, and as it judders over a gigantic rut, its door flap brushes against her face. She fingers the flap, yearning to tear it in two. But she has promised Lord Krishna that she will be good if he brings her parents back to her. So with great effort she pulls her hands away and sits on them.
‘You’re sending me away because I’m naughty, aren’t you?’ she asks, although of course she knows the answer.
Durga has always been naughty, according to the people in the town where she has lived all her life, or ‘spirited’ as her parents like to call it. The list of her faults is seemingly endless. She asks too many questions. She doesn’t know when to stop. If she sees something as an injustice, she lashes out. She hates that girls are not treated the same way as boys, that they have to give in to the boys, allow them first choice in everything. She has a fearsome temper. She fights, she swears, she hits. She is not meek and will not give in. She refuses to behave like a girl. This is what her teachers, neighbours, friends and strangers all made sure to tell her parents many times over the years.
‘If Durga had been born a boy, she’d have been praised for these qualities,’ her ma had huffed. ‘She would have been hailed a born leader, and been looked up to and admired.’
‘Durga is energetic, that’s all. Lively and a bit strong willed. Her maternal grandmother was like that,’ Durga’s da – who strived to keep the peace – had assured everybody, a note of uncertainty creeping into his voice.
Things had reached a head when Gowriakka’s son, Rajesh, had to be hospitalised because Durga pushed him into a ditch. The townspeople had sent a representative, the most level-headed man in town – Baluanna – who had stroked his oily, balding head, tugged at his lungi and lamented to Durga’s parents, ‘What a shame! You have one child and she turned out to be like this.’
‘She’s loyal and has a highly developed sense of justice. Nothing wrong with that,’ Durga’s ma had replied, her voice stretched thin.
‘Ha! Challenging, you mean. Durga has gone too far now, breaking Rajesh’s leg. Don’t you see that you are doing her harm by defending her?’
‘She pushed him because he was making fun of poor Jirjamma, who has lost her mind since her husband passed,’ Durga’s ma had protested shrilly.
‘Rajesh was throwing stones at Jirjamma and calling her names,’ Durga had yelled from her hiding place behind the door, where she’d been eavesdropping. ‘Jirjamma tripped and fell when one of his stones hit her so I thought it only fair to let Rajesh know how that felt.’
‘See,’ Baluanna had said to Durga’s parents, shaking his head in consternation, ‘Durga is not even sorry for what she’s done. She has one screw loose in her head. We think you should take her to the mental hospital to be looked at.’
‘That’s enough! She’s fine, just high-spirited,’ Durga’s da had barked, scowling.
‘Well she’s getting out of hand. You need to do something and fast, or we will,’ Baluanna had muttered, shaking his head and sighing again as he took his leave.
When he’d walked far enough away, Durga had given her parents the slip and followed him. She’d hidden behind the mounds of spices, golden red and blushing orange, olive green and sunny marigold, at the market, trying not to sneeze at the chilli and coriander powder prickling her nose. She’d picked a thumb-sized stone from the mud and aimed with her catapult – the best one she’d made so far, with the V-shaped twig she’d found in Ashwin’s mango orchard. When Baluanna had jumped at the pebble pinging his shoulder and turned back to glare at her, she’d laughed, performing a little victory dance before running away.
That night, after her da had given her a talking to and Durga had apologised, her ma had said, ‘Durga, it was not right to aim your catapult at Baluanna.’
‘Baluanna didn’t want to listen to me. He had already made up his mind. Like all the rest of them. They think I’m bad and yes, I know I can be naughty, but it’s only when I get angry… I just hate seeing people being made fun of…’ Durga had been breathless, her throat dry after her speech.
‘They can’t understand anyone who’s a little bit different from them, that’s all,’ her ma had whispered in Durga’s ear. ‘You know, everyone thought Lord Krishna was naughty too when he was little. He got up to all sorts of mischief, stealing buttermilk and whatnot…’
Durga had breathed in her mother’s smell of coconut oil and sandalwood powder as she recounted stories of Lord Krishna’s antics. ‘Lord Krishna was just like you and look how well he turned out,’ her ma had said, winking.
‘I will pray only to Lord Krishna from now on,’ Durga had promised and her mother had grinned, kissing Durga on the tip of her nose.
Now Durga pulls the back of her palm, pinching her flesh between her fingers, twisting it until it turns red and sore, so it matches the ache in her heart. Her aunt awkwardly pats her arm. ‘There, there.’
The rickshaw lists precariously as it rumbles over yet another pothole before it rights itself, just. ‘I don’t even know my ajji. I only met her once, and I don’t even remember that time.’ Durga sniffs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She wants to hit someone. She wants to jump out of the rickshaw and run as far away as possible – back to the hospital, to her unresponsive ma and da. Her right leg moves up and down as if to a rhythm of its own and she fixates on it.
Her aunt squeezes Durga’s shoulder. ‘Your ajji has agreed to have you now.’
After the accident, neighbours and friends had taken it in turns to look after Durga’s parents at the hospital and have Durga stay with them. But they quickly tired of Durga, their generosity and kindness evaporating like water left out in the sun – for Durga refused to be bossed around; she couldn’t pretend to be grateful to her hosts for their hospitality when she’d much rather be bedded down in the hospital beside her parents, keeping a vigilant eye on them.
The little house she’d shared with her parents had to be sold to pay the medical bills. And as Durga’s parents still showed no signs of recovery with each passing day, the elders of her town had gathered at Gowriakka’s house to discuss Durga’s situation.
‘Why can’t I be present when it is my situation you are discussing?’ Durga had asked.
‘Go play marbles with the other girls,’ Gowriakka had said sternly, hands on her substantial hips, not bothering to grace Durga’s question with an answer.
‘Why can’t I play cricket with the boys?’ Durga had retorted, imitating Gowriakka and standing, legs spaced apart, hands on her hips.
‘Why are you so contrary? Why can’t you do as you’re told for once?’ Gowriakka had snapped.
Durga had stayed put, whistling a Kannada pop tune as she’d squinted up at the sky, her feet scuffing the dusty, cracked ground.
‘Go on with you,’ Gowriakka had huffed, flapping her sari pallu against her face to combat the thick press of heat.
‘No,’ Durga had said, grinning at Gowriakka. ‘I want to hear what you have to say.’
‘Well you can’t. It’s an adult discussion.’ With a loud harrumph and a swish of emerald fabric, Gowriakka had shut the door, locking Durga outside.
‘But it concerns me.’ Durga had pounded on the door several times, letting out a string of swear words.
‘Enough, girl, or I will come and whip you right now,’ Gowriakka had snarled from inside.
Durga had banged the door three more times for good measure and just as it had creaked open, she had run away.
The boys had been setting up for cricket in the field outside the school.
‘Can I play with you?’ Durga had asked.
‘You?’ They’d laughed.
She’d snatched their ball, hitting and kicking and biting anyone who tried to get it back, knocking down the tree stumps they had dug into the ground for wickets with the stolen ball. Then, sprinting away with the boys in pursuit, she’d climbed onto the veranda where the girls had been in the middle of a game of marbles. She’d grabbed all the marbles, poking her tongue out at the outraged girls before running away.
Finally, her angst spent, she’d sneaked up to the open window of Gowriakka’s house and pressed herself against the wall, where she could hear every word, fingering the smooth coolness of the marbles in her hand, popping one into her mouth and tasting mud and the thousand fingers that had handled it before her.
‘We can’t keep her with us forever. She’s too wild, volatile. And how can we afford it, when all the proceeds from the sale of their house have gone to paying the medical bills?’ Gowriakka’s voice, sharp as the scrape of chalk on slate.
‘We advised them to send Durga to board at a convent when she started exhibiting her mad, uncontrollable streak – perhaps the presence of a punishing Catholic god would have tamed her – but…’
Mad? Durga had thought, almost choking on the marble, the tang of acid and rust in her mouth. I am not mad, she’d wanted to yell, but that would’ve alerted Gowriakka and the others to her presence and she wouldn’t have been able to hear the rest of what they were saying.
‘I think we should send her to her grandmother,’ Baluanna had said, his voice the harsh crackle of sandpaper. ‘Luckily it is the beginning of the school holidays. She can spend them with her grandmother. After that, we can decide what to do.’
No! I don’t want to go far away from my parents. I don’t want to live with my ajji. I don’t even know her.
Durga’s ajji, who’d famously fallen out with her daughter because of her choice of husband (who was of a much lower caste) and thus the colouring of her granddaughter (dark as mustard seeds), and had refused to have anything to do with her daughter and her daughter’s family since. Durga’s ajji, who defied everyone by going to live in a haunted house in her old age, to care for a madwoman.
‘What if Sumathiamma won’t take Durga?’ someone had asked.
‘As if she has a choice! She’s Durga’s only relative,’ Gowriakka had grunted.
Durga had opened her palms and dropped the marbles so they skittered onto the ground, puffs of apricot dust wheezing in their wake. Then she’d stuck her fingers in her ears and screamed, loud and hard and high pitched, until the door to Gowriakka’s house had juddered open, making the settling dust gasp with renewed vigour, and the elders had run out as one, rustling saris and fretting lungis and shock, the women tucking their pallus in, the men’s hands coiled into fists, ready to battle whatever evil force had taken their town captive.
Does sending me so far away from my hometown, to this ajji I don’t recall having met, mean my parents will die? This is the question Durga wants to ask but cannot. The question that dies on her lips on its way out, dissolving along with spit bubbles on her tongue.
Please, Lord Krishna, no.
There are more questions. She adds them to the list she is making in her head.
The List of Questions I Don’t Want to Know the Answers to:
She hugs herself hard, trying to inject warmth into the embrace, failing to convince herself that it is her mother who is hugging her.
You’ll be alright, Durga, my spirited, amazing girl, she imagines her ma saying, wishing she could hear her voice, its soft, musical cadence, just once more.
Their rickshaw passes a lone hawker peddling paper cones of bhel from the coir tray resting on his sunken belly. The tray is packed with fat white globules of puffed rice, flecked with red onion and green chilli, coriander and tomato, cones fashioned from newspaper jostling for space on one side.
A whiff of spices reaches Durga’s nose, making her stomach rumble. She hasn’t eaten much since finding out she was being sent away, food turning to glue in her mouth as she worried about what was to come and, mostly, about leaving her parents behind, fighting the fear that something bad would happen to them the moment she left. But the something bad had already happened – and she had caused it.
She blinks back tears, looking resolutely out of the rickshaw. Her aunt strokes Durga’s back clumsily as they pass tiny abodes, women chatting to each other while they pick stones from rice, tired-looking men squatting in the dirt, smoking beedis and perusing the sky. The children playing lagori in the middle of the mud road clutch their altar of stones and their scuffed ball and dodge out of the rickshaw’s path, peering askance at the newcomers who dare disrupt their game.
The rickshaw leaves the houses behind and starts up the hill, groaning and grumbling. The driver urges his vehicle on, muttering to himself, sweat soaking his khaki shirt. Shouts and jeers, catcalls and whoops make Durga and her aunt turn and peer out of the little square of transparent plastic hewn into the black tarpaulin covering the back of the rickshaw. The kids playing lagori have stopped their game and are following the rickshaw at a safe distance. A procession of raggedy, dust-sheathed bodies. Inquisitive eyes.
‘Don’t you know the ruin is haunted?’ one of them yells, as they nudge each other and pull monstrous faces. Durga pulls faces back. Once again she wishes she had her catapult with her, so she could pelt them with stone bullets.
‘The madwoman who lives there puts a curse on anyone who dares enter,’ another shouts, his eyes dancing with delight at the thought.
Durga turns back in her seat and tugs at her aunt’s hand, finally gathering up the courage to ask one of the questions lingering in her mind. ‘Is it true? Is this why I’ve been sent here?’
Her aunt looks down at her kindly. ‘No, silly,’ she tuts. ‘And don’t believe that nonsense about curses either.’
‘Oh there’s a curse all right,’ the rickshaw driver huffs. ‘No boy child survives in that family. Everyone associated with that mansion is cursed with unhappiness, insanity, death. You must be out of your mind to go there, and I have warned you plenty. But it’s none of my business, as long as you pay me three times the fare like you promised.’ The rickshaw driver’s hair drips with sweat as his ramshackle vehicle brings them closer and closer to the ruin, which looms over the earth-tinged emerald fields, painting the mud below the dark black of clotted blood.
‘I feel angry all the time,’ Jaya says, her voice tinged with anguish. ‘The grief’s easing but it’s as if I carry this huge, fuming ball of ire within me. I wake up each morning with a sore jaw, having gritted and gnashed my teeth in the night…’ She sniffs, pulling a tissue from the box next to her and blows her nose vigorously.
‘Are you angry with anyone in particular?’ her therapist Dr Meadows’ mellow voice nudges gently.
Jaya chose Dr Caroline Meadows because of her beautiful name – bringing to mind dew-bathed fields dotted with plump black and white cows – and also, of course, because of the string of qualifications trailing in its wake.
‘With fate, with everything that’s happened.’ Jaya’s left shoulder itches, the shaggy upholstery of the couch she is resting against irritating her back. ‘But mostly… I’m angry with my mum.’
‘Why are you angry with your mother?’ her therapist asks.
Why? Jaya pictures her mother, her favourite marigold sari dotted with tiny blue flowers hugging her slight frame, the tired lines etched into her gaunt face, her exhausted eyes.
‘I…’ Where to begin? ‘She…’ How to put into words a lifetime’s worth of upset, love and hurt? How to convey just how much Jaya misses her mother, how much she needs her – especially now – while at the same time being so intensely mad at her?
‘Okay, tell me this – how would you describe your mother?’
‘Solitary,’ Jaya says instantly, without having to think about it.
‘Why solitary?’ Dr Meadows leans forward on her desk, cupping her face in the palms of her hands. ‘Call me Caroline,’ she’d said at their first session but Jaya still thinks of her as Dr Meadows; it has a nice, reassuring ring to it.
Jaya swallows. ‘My mum… She kept people at bay. She had no friends. She rebuffed admirers. She was a quiet, self-contained, prickly person.’
‘You said solitary. Not lonely. Why?’
Jaya muses on this. ‘She was always on the go. She kept herself too occupied to be lonely, I think. But she was alone. Apart from me, she had nobody. And I always got the feeling she preferred it that way, that she actively sought this distance from people. But, despite my prodding, she never told me why.’
‘Did you feel she was too busy for you?’
‘No. Never.’ Another answer Jaya doesn’t have to think about. ‘She wasn’t warm, bubbly, outwardly affectionate. But she was there for me. I knew she loved me. That I came first, over and above everything else. But… she never answered my questions about her past. She was very closed, remote about everything to do with her history and mine.’ Jaya takes a deep breath. ‘I loved her. And I resented her.’
‘Ah…’
‘She was perpetually harassed, juggling two or three jobs, even after I had left home and she’d paid off the mortgage. I thought it was to fill the time. Now I wonder…’
Her mother. Always busy, forever working. Like Ben.
Ben… Jaya is here because of him. To salvage their relationship, which is reeling from sorrow, battered by jagged stabs of loss. She understands that work is Ben’s way of dealing with the grief that has ambushed them this past year. But why had Jaya’s mother continued to work all hours? What was she running away from?
‘It was only ever the two of us – my mum and I,’ Jaya says. ‘I didn’t have a dad or extended family. No grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. I pressed Mum about this countless times. But she was cagey and always had excuses handy.’ Shrinking from Jaya’s questions, sliding into herself, her gaze wide and wary and distant all at once, warning Jaya not to push.
‘Didn’t she tell you anything at all?’ Dr Meadows asks.
‘Nothing. And…’ Jaya releases a quaking breath. ‘And then she died, taking the secret of who my father is with her. Granted, I never met my father, but I had a right to know the truth. She denied me that. She…’ Jaya takes another tissue from the box and shreds it.
‘You never knew your dad?’
‘I don’t even know what he looks like. There were no pictures of him in our house, not one.’
‘We left them all behind,’ was Jaya’s mum’s paltry excuse. ‘There were more important things to bring when we were uprooting our whole life to come here. And here, while we were struggling to make ends meet, buying a camera was an unnecessary expense, taking pictures a luxury we couldn’t afford,’ her mother had said, in that voice that barred further questions.
‘What did she tell you about your father?’ Dr Meadows asks.
‘Precious little,’ Jaya sighs. ‘She said that my dad was a labourer who’d worked in Abu Dhabi and procured an opportunity to come here. They’d been here a year when he died of a haemorrhaging aneurysm. She was eight months pregnant with me at the time.’
‘Don’t you miss my dad?’ Jaya had asked her mum.
‘Of course I do,’ her mother had replied, but there’d been no trace of emotion in her voice, her face expressionless.
‘But don’t you wish you had a photograph of Dad,’ Jaya had persisted, ‘to remind you of him?’
‘I have it in my heart.’
If she hadn’t been upset, Jaya would have laughed at the irony of this woman, with her monotone voice, her blank face, her lack of sentiment, talking about storing pictures of a man she claimed to have loved in her heart.
‘Well, I don’t,’ Jaya had huffed. ‘I’d like a picture to remember him by, instead of him being a faceless unknown man who died before I was born.’
‘That’s enough now. I thought he’d be around. Didn’t think I’d be needing a picture to give you.’
And that had been the end of that conversation. No matter how much Jaya had pressed and begged, no matter how many tears she’d shed, how many tantrums she’d thrown, she’d never got anything more. Several times over the years Jaya had queried her mother’s story, all those pat explanations delivered in that flat voice that discouraged
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