When Devils Sing(29)

The phone had been ringing. That was the memory that cut through it all, three years later. A high, persistent trill. On and on and on. Neera hadn’t bothered to move from her bedroom floor. She’d known her mom wouldn’t answer it, but a perverse kind of stubbornness kept her playing chicken with her drunk mom. Just how long could it go on before Kiran noticed?

On and on and on. Ringing and ringing and ringing.

Neera had been studying for finals into the late hours—quadratic equations, she remembered even now. The dull, inconsequential detail forever stuck in her mind.

Eventually, Neera lost the game of chicken. The ringing was just too annoying. She trudged into the living room, sighing to herself the entire way. Kiran was passed out on the sofa, five beers into the night. Her phone was on the coffee table, vibrating incessantly.

Neera remembered rolling her eyes. She’d delicately picked her way through the maze of beer cans to approach the couch.

“Mom, someone keeps calling.” She shook Kiran’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

Kiran grunted but didn’t move.

“Mom.” She shook her again, perhaps a bit rougher than she needed to. “It could be work.”

Without opening her eyes, Kiran swatted feebly at her. “Leave me alone.” Her words were slurred, her breath stale.

Frustrated, Neera unlocked her mom’s phone, scrolling through the log of missed calls. There was Ajay’s name, having called a handful of times earlier in the night. Then another number she didn’t recognize. They kept calling.

After what felt like minutes of jostling and shaking her mom’s limp body, Kiran finally groaned and sat up. She grabbed the phone from the coffee table, shooting her daughter a disgruntled look.

Kiran rubbed her eyes as she answered the call. A pause. “Yes … this is she.”

Before a tornado touches the ground, the air becomes entirely still. Forever after, Neera would remember that moment of stillness. The sudden absence of sound, the phone no longer ringing. Still on the phone, Kiran’s face contorted. Her bloodshot eyes went wide. Her mouth twisted in agony.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head violently. “No no no.” Her trembling hand scrambled to her mouth, tears spilling down her cheeks. The phone slipped from her grasp and fell onto the carpet with a muted thud.

Now, in Room 4 of the Colonial, years away from that tiny apartment and that horrible night, Neera squeezed her eyes shut. A swell of rage surged inside her, furious with her mom for sleeping. For scaring her.

For making her remember.

For everything.

She swallowed. Neera didn’t have time for anger today. No time for memories, either. Her audition at Lake Clearwater was in less than an hour and the car keys were missing. Any other day, she would’ve just taken the Cadillac, but now it was a burnt corpse in the parking lot.

Neera spun on her heel and speed-walked out of the room. There was a spare key for the Nissan somewhere in the lobby’s back office; she just had to find it.

Careening through the lobby’s entrance, Neera yelled, “Nani! Do you know where the…” She went quiet at the sight of her grandmother seated at the front desk, head wrapped in her signature silk chunni, reciting her daily Gurbani.

The sun’s early-afternoon rays filtered in through the window, reaching Nani’s brown skin, casting her in a warm glow. Her silk scarf glimmered around her head, tufts of dyed-black hair with bits of silver peeking out from beneath the fabric. Her lips moved quickly, voice barely even a whisper as she performed her paath, bent over a tiny Sikh scripture book with a worn leather-bound cover.

“Sorry,” Neera whispered, letting her grandmother be.

Disappearing into the back office, she scanned every surface of the claustrophobic room for the keys. At last, Neera yanked open the drawer of a steel filing cabinet and found a pile of mismatched keys—the spare Nissan key thankfully among them.

Neera shoved it into her pocket and started stuffing the drawer’s contents back inside. The edge of a photograph peeked out from underneath the crumpled mess of papers. It was folded and worn, browning at the edges. Neera paused. With hesitant hands, she slid the photo out from the stack, smoothing the folds to get a better look.

An old photo taken on a cheap, disposable camera. Her grandfather and Ajay standing in front of an unimpressive brick building. What made the photo notable were Nanaji’s and Ajay’s grinning faces, their joy clear as day. A look she hadn’t witnessed in her family in years.

Neera traced a finger over Ajay’s face. It was strange to see him so happy. The date on the back of the photo placed it four years ago, but Ajay still looked so much younger, not yet let down by the world in the way she remembered him.

Although admittedly, she didn’t remember his face well at all anymore.

Her uncle’s memory had become blurred and messy. The image of him that lived in her head wasn’t a smiling photograph or a sun-soaked day spent together. It was a clinical Polaroid dated from that night. The night of the ringing phone. The night he died.

It was his body lying on a steel table in a morgue, a sheet covering his bruised and bloodied skin.

It was his head blown partially off by the gunshot that killed him.

“Neera?”

She jumped at the sound of Nani’s voice. Her grandmother stood in the doorway of the office, chunni still wrapped around her head, eyes lingering on the photograph in Neera’s hand.