Sophie lets Dao’s words sink into her. It seems senseless that Nita stayed away if she felt so lost. Sophie, too, had felt lost after she left, and they could have found their way home through each other rather than spending the rest of their lives apart. Sophie will never know what motivated Nita to stay away for so long or what caused her to decide to come back. There is some comfort in knowing that she had planned to return, though. Sophie was wanted, and she just needed someone in Nita’s Paris life to tell her that she hadn’t been forgotten. There is no worse feeling than thinking your mummy has left you, and the feeling has gnawed at Sophie until this moment. She feels herself start to release tension that had woven its way into every fiber of her being since she had found those letters.
“I thought she had left because of me,” Sophie says softly, not realizing until the words are out that she had felt that way. “That I must have done something to make her unhappy. To make her go away.”
Dao shakes her head emphatically.
“How can you be so certain?” Sophie asks, her voice small and innocent, just like she is six years old again. “She didn’t even mention me for all the years you knew her.”
Dao stands and moves toward the wall on which the canvases rest with their backs to the room. She brings them over and turns them so Sophie can see. Sophie’s eyes drift to the one of her as a little girl with Nita’s bangles strewn around her and a look of disappointment on her face because she knew she would be scolded. She remembers that day so well and is surprised to see a painting of it. She had been five years old and had snuck into Nita’s wardrobe room and pulled all the bangles from their neat rows and jumbled them in a pile on the floor, a colorful mess of glass circles in varying thicknesses. Nita’s face had been soft initially, so Sophie didn’t realize she had done anything wrong. And then Nita’s face grew dark, and she jerked Sophie up from the floor, chastising her for having made such a mess. “Your papa likes order,” she said. “You must never disturb that!” Sophie had sulked away with tears in her eyes for having disappointed her parents. She heard the gentle clink of the bangles as Nita sorted them and put them back neatly in rows organized by color.
The other was of her sitting on the hichko in the front yard of their bungalow with her small feet barely dangling off. She must be three or four years old in that painting. She has spent so many hours on that bench swing since that time. Sophie has fond memories of Nita sitting with her chai on the hichko, and ever since she left, Sophie has sat on that swing to feel closer to her, the same way she stared out the kitchen window where Nita had kept her easel in the bungalow.
“She had painted many more of you,” Dao says gently. “I could not keep them all. Simon took some with him. Not sure what happened to the rest of them. But you were constantly on her mind. I think that’s why Nita felt so unsettled here. She tried to follow her dreams while leaving her heart with you in India. A dream without heart is nothing at all. She did everything she could to get back to you. I really believe that. In the end, I think Mathieu saw that she could change and rise above the addiction, and he knew he couldn’t, so he did everything he could to keep her at the bottom with him. He tried everything to shake her confidence, from gaslighting her, to yelling at her, to trying to keep her financially dependent on him. She had a lot of forces working against her, and even in perfect circumstances, addiction is hard to recover from.”
Sophie feels Nita’s pain as if she had experienced it herself. She cannot grasp Nita spending the last years of her life with someone who wanted nothing other than to keep her down. And even worse, her heart breaks that Nita wasn’t strong enough to leave someone like him and rebuild herself. She knows Nita had fire in her, and for someone to enter her life and dampen that spirit is unfathomable.
Sophie gingerly touches the canvases. Nita had real talent. She had so expertly captured the emotion Sophie had felt on that day when she was caught playing with the bangles. Sophie may not be able to fully describe her feelings with words, but this painting speaks volumes. Sophie begins to understand why Nita’s art was so important to her, but she still does not understand why she couldn’t have pursued her dreams with Rajiv and Sophie. Sophie knows she needs to accept that there are questions, many of them, to which she will never have answers. The thing she understands better now is that Nita was deeply troubled and unhappy, suffering from addictions, and those things did not have to do with Sophie. Those addictions prevented Nita from making logical, reasonable choices for herself or anyone else in her life. The best Sophie can do now is make sense of the information she has and find a way to move forward.
Dao then reaches into the top compartment of the suitcase and pulls out a small red velour bag. Sophie instantly recognizes it as an Indian jewelry bag. She has many at home and in their safe-deposit boxes. Dao unzips it and pulls out some gold bangles and hands them to Sophie, who slips them onto her left arm. Four thin gold bands with tiny diamonds embedded in them. They jingle back and forth as Sophie traces her fingers over them. She closes her eyes and absorbs the familiar sound.
“She wore these every day,” Sophie says, more to herself than Dao. She remembers them on Nita’s arm. She remembers the sound of them growing more pronounced as Nita neared her and swooped her up in her arms to carry her to her room for bed.
“She did. It’s a small miracle that Mathieu didn’t pawn them during one of his benders, but I suppose the only reason he didn’t is that he would have had to pry them off her. After her death, he banished everything that reminded him of her from the apartment, so I’ve held on to all this stuff since then. I thought I’d be giving it to Simon and Vijay when they were ready, but seems fate had another plan.”
She next pulls out some worn photographs: pictures of Sophie that Nita had kept with her after she left India. It warms Sophie’s heart to see that Nita had not abandoned all memories of her. The pictures are creased and tattered at the edges, and Sophie hopes that it is because Nita loved those photos and held them often. There are a few pictures of a baby she does not recognize, who must be her little brother. She still cannot believe that she has a sibling. A part of Nita lives on in another person the way a part of her lives on in Sophie.
As Dao continues with the contents, there are also a few pairs of jeans and sweaters, clothing Sophie had never seen Nita wear in India and now has a hard time imagining. At the bottom of the main compartment is Nita’s wedding sari, zipped into a pouch like the saris Sophie has in her closet back in Ahmedabad. Beneath that is a parrot-green sari. Sophie recognizes it instantly as the one Nita was wearing on that last morning when Sophie saw her before school. It was that day, she realizes. Nita sent Sophie to school in the ricksha with the other kids, and she left India that very same day. She lifts the sari to her face and holds it against her skin. The fabric feels smooth and cool, just as it did when Sophie hugged Nita goodbye twenty-two years ago, not knowing it would be the last time in her life that she’d feel her mummy’s arms around her. Sophie breathes it in. It smells musty from having been packed all these years, but underneath that is the smell of sandalwood and rose petals that had once been so familiar to her. She locks it in, the way she had done with her papa’s shirts, so that this time, she never forgets.