“I’m so sorry,” she repeated as she rocked back and forth with him and wept. His body felt frail and delicate, like the beggars who’d used to pass by her house in India. “I’m so sorry.”
Vijay’s stomach grumbled, and she scampered to the kitchen, throwing open the cabinets and fridge to find something to feed him. The fridge had some soft cheese that had grown mold; the milk smelled sour. The cabinets had some condiments but no real food. On the counter were stale bread crumbs from the baguette.
“Why are you making so much noise?” Mathieu grumbled from the couch.
“Because our son is starving!” she barked at him, continuing to frantically open drawers and cabinets as if some food might magically appear.
Mathieu squinted and looked around the room with one eye open until he landed on Vijay. “He’s asleep. He’s fine.”
“He’s not fine! None of us are fine! He hasn’t eaten for god knows how long and doesn’t even have the energy to sit himself up.”
“Then why don’t you get him something?” Mathieu asked, his voice groggy.
“Putain! What do you think I’m doing? We have no food!” She eyed the brown paper bag that had their stash of heroin in it and flung it to the ground. “All we have are these damn drugs!”
Fresh tears sprang, and she fell to the floor. “It has to stop!” She gasped for air, but it wouldn’t come to her. She could not catch it in her mouth. Her breathing heavy and shallow, she said again, softly to herself, “It has to stop.”
While she knelt in the kitchenette, her body convulsing from her erratic breathing, she felt a small hand reach out and touch her knee. She covered it with her own hand, her gold bangles catching the light, and managed to smile at her son. “Beta, it’s going to stop. I promise.” She pulled him toward her and kissed the top of his head. “We are going home,” she said, with the fiercest of determination.
In that moment, she decided that no matter what happened to her, she had to give this innocent boy a better life. She could not do that with Mathieu. And she could not do that in France. She had to go back to Sophie and Rajiv and her parents and her life in India if she were ever going to feel whole again. She had to hope that they would take her back. That they could move past the hurt she had caused. At least in India, she had help, and Vijay could be taken care of even when she failed to do it herself. He would be warm and well fed and educated. He would have a chance at life. He deserved that. He did not deserve to suffer in the hell she had created for them.
Part of Nita had died the day she left Sophie, and the rest of her was dying now as she watched Vijay suffer because of her inability to control her own actions. She had been so broken and so lost in the depths of her mind for so much of her life. She couldn’t recall being any other way, and yet she knew the people around her—people like her parents and Rajiv—didn’t share those same struggles. She had convinced herself that she just had to find the right situation, and then she would feel the same contentedness that they felt. She had to change her circumstances and had gone to such great lengths to do it. But what she found on the other side of that was even more pain than she had known before.
It was only ten days until her anniversary with Rajiv, and she knew he would be standing at the Eiffel Tower, waiting for her, just like he had done every year since she left. Each year she had watched him from afar, but now she knew she must approach him and tell him she was ready to go back home. She had dreaded the thought of India for so long when she had first arrived, but now it felt like salvation. It felt like an escape, as much as Paris had when she had first left Ahmedabad. She had been young and immature and, above all else, selfish. She could not undo her past wrongs, but she could try to make amends in the future. If Sophie and Vijay had happy, healthy lives, then she would have done enough. She would have left the world with more good than the bad she had wreaked upon it.
Even if her family didn’t accept her, they had to accept this child. Rajiv was the most compassionate man she had ever met. If he wouldn’t take her son, then she would have to curry favor with her parents again. But she knew Rajiv would take them both. Vijay was Sophie’s brother, and Rajiv would never deprive her of that. Nita had a lifetime of sins to atone for, and she knew she had to do whatever it took to do so. The people in her life whom she had abandoned deserved that from her. She deserved that for herself. She had to leave this world a better person than she had been for the past six years.
As she felt the cold floor against her legs, she was reminded of one of Rajiv’s favorite proverbs: Pavan ni disha na badali shako, pan amara sadh ni disha badali shako. The direction of the wind cannot be changed, but we can change the direction of our sails. He had constantly said that to Sophie. Trying to teach her to accept what life threw at her and to adjust her responses. He had said it often, and Nita had wondered if he was saying it as much to Nita as to Sophie.
She looked at Vijay, shivering in her arms, and vowed to him that she would change their lives. She would get them to India and away from the drugs. She would get clean. She would become the mother he and Sophie deserved. She had allowed the wind to blow her about for far too long, and she was finally ready to adjust her sails. They just had to hold on for ten days.
45
SOPHIE
2019
Dao squeezes Sophie’s hand tightly, as if she is drowning in the ocean and Dao is pulling her to safety. “I’m sorry you didn’t know. It seems your mother was a woman of many secrets, and I’m so sorry to be the one to deliver them to you.”
Sophie feels claustrophobic in this tiny office and shimmies away from Manoj’s hand, which is lightly touching her back to offer her some comfort. There is too much to take in! She has a brother. She cannot even comprehend such a thing. Nita had left when she was so young that Sophie had never contemplated siblings the way her friends had. Hers was the only one-child household among their social circle, but she was the only one without a mummy, so it made sense to her. The math added up. Having a dead mummy and a new brother did not create a balanced equation. And Dao said Nita was going to go back to India. So maybe she would have been in Sophie’s life. She jolts as she wonders whether she was wrong and Nita wasn’t coming back for Sophie and instead was planning on coming back with this Vijay person and building a future with him. A do-over life because she’d been so unhappy with the one she’d built with Sophie and Rajiv. Sophie doesn’t know Nita at all. She can hardly predict the whims of such an enigma.
“When did she die?” Sophie finally asks, trying to decipher the first time Nita was out of Sophie’s life due to death rather than choice.
Dao leans back and closes her eyes, concentrating hard on the answer. “I think it was about seventeen or eighteen years ago. Vijay was four years old at the time, maybe five, if I’m remembering correctly.”
“She was still so young.” The words croak out of Sophie’s mouth, and she feels her voice wavering, the emotion of what she is hearing setting in. “I would have been only ten or eleven years old then.”
I was young enough to still need a mummy, Sophie thinks and wonders why hers hadn’t returned to her. She braces herself for what comes next. She’s relieved that her emotional state is so numb from everything else she’s heard that the new blows cannot pummel her further. She looks to Manoj, and he remains stoic, a quiet, unjudging pillar of support.