“Get in the car.”
* * *
—
Sunny drives home himself, too fast, too reckless.
When they pull through the gates into the compound and park, Ajay can feel Sunny’s heavy breath.
Still clutching the wheel, he turns to Ajay. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Sunny turns the engine off.
“Why did you ask about my mother?”
Ajay stares at the dashboard.
“No one ever asks about my mother,” Sunny goes on.
He lights a cigarette.
“She’s dead,” he says, blowing on the cigarette.
“Do you think about her?” Ajay asks.
Sunny fights his instinct toward silence.
“I used to think about her a lot. Now I don’t think about her at all.”
“I stopped thinking about my mother too,” Ajay says, “after I came to work for you.” He thinks about it. “Maybe even from before. But she exists.”
Both men are surprised to hear Ajay’s voice so clearly.
“And I remember her now.”
Sunny looks at Ajay as if he were a person for the first time.
“I didn’t even know you had a mother.”
“Everyone has a mother.”
“I thought she was dead.”
Emotion takes hold of him; it looks like he’ll break down. “I’ve done a wrong thing,” Ajay says.
“What thing?”
“When I was a boy,” he speaks the words with great concentration, “my father was killed. To pay a debt I was passed to a thekedar and driven to the mountains and sold. I was supposed to help my mother live, I was supposed to send money home. The man I was sold to told me my wages would be sent to her. He said she would have money and live a good life because of me. But the money wasn’t sent. I always knew it, but I pretended to believe. As I got older, I started to believe this lie. I decided my mother and my elder sister were fine. When I came here, when I started this job, I finally made money, I could do something to help them, but I abandoned them. I forgot.” He gathers himself. “When we saw Vicky-ji, I remembered them. Now I need to find them again.”
Sunny can’t take any more of this.
He throws the door open, climbs out, and Ajay is left alone.
14.
Ajay circles Sunny for the next few days. Sunny closing himself off, Ajay performing his tasks with clipped professionalism. But he can barely look in the mirror anymore. He can’t sleep at night for thinking of what he’s done. He returns to the edge of the field, running and hiding while his sister screams for him. He hears her now as she’s taken away. He sees that cockroach in the earth. His cowardice defines him. The little runaway. He knows why his mother sent him away. His appearance begins to fray. Sunny watches him the whole time. Ajay fears he will be sent away. Cast out of the Wadia home.
“You really want to find her?” Sunny says out of the blue one morning, when Ajay carries the coffee into his room.
He doesn’t hesitate to reply.
“I do.”
“How?” Sunny asks. “How will you find her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you even know where you’re from?”
“I think I grew up near that place we went.”
“The sugar mill?”
“I recognized the land.”
“That looks like a lot of places.”
“But I felt it, sir.”
Sunny weighs this up.
“I can’t let you go,” Sunny says. “I need you here. Things are going to happen soon.”
Ajay nods once, turns to the door.
“Wait.”
And Ajay does.
“Write everything you remember,” Sunny says. “Names. Landmarks. Schools, temples. The names of people. Anyone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll see what I can find.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“In the meantime, I need you by my side.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re flying to Goa tomorrow.”
* * *
—
That night Ajay sits up in bed and writes it all down. He writes everything he thinks he knows, the sight of the mountains from his hut, the shape of the fields, the school and the farmland and the temple, the long-forgotten names of places nearby, local names, the name of his schoolmaster, the name of his father and mother, and finally, finally, the names of the two big men, Rajdeep and Kuldeep Singh.
* * *
—
He hands the folded sheet to Sunny when they board the flight, as Ajay passes Sunny in first class to take his economy seat. Ajay can think of nothing on the way down but those two men, that place of his long-forgotten nightmares, all those things he spent his lifetime leaving behind.