Dao then hands her some blue airmail letters that are bound together with a thin white ribbon. Sophie recognizes Papa’s scrawl.
“I never opened these,” Dao says, handing them to her. “It seemed too private.”
Sophie takes the letters and knows these will be the other half of the ones she found in Papa’s closet. She will see what Papa wrote to his wife, who left them. Sophie puts them on her lap, knowing she needs a private space to read them, and Dao seems to understand without a word.
Finally, Dao hands Sophie a few white envelopes. “Here are the pictures Simon sent of him and Vijay from Los Angeles. His address is on them. It looks like the last I heard from him was six years ago. Vijay was just starting high school. Hard to believe he would be at university now, but I guess a lot of time has passed since we were all young kids just starting off in France.”
Sophie takes the photos and studies the young, light-skinned boy with dark-brown hair and light-brown eyes who stares into the camera. He has a shy smile, like he’s afraid to entirely commit and let someone see him fully. He is standing with a white man who is several inches taller than him, Simon, who has his arm around Vijay’s shoulders. Simon has an easy smile, and his emerald-green eyes have deeply embedded laugh lines around them. Even from photos, Sophie can see that his demeanor contrasts with Vijay’s more reserved stance. Simon looks jovial and happy, and Sophie is grateful that Vijay was part of a loving household, just as she had been.
“You haven’t heard anything for six years?” Sophie asks, looking up from the photos.
Dao nods. “Seems so. The older you get, the more you can’t understand where the time goes. Somehow you blink and years have gone missing.” She looks over Sophie’s shoulders at the photos in her hand. “I’d always left communication up to them. They were starting a new life, and I cared about Vijay, but I also understood the need to start over and leave everything behind. It’s what I did when I came to Paris. It’s what your mother did too. Sometimes a person needs to close a door to open a new one.”
Sophie stares at the photo, seeing parts of Nita and herself in Vijay’s face. The half smile and demure stance are like Sophie. His large eyes are Nita’s shape, even if his eye color is lighter than hers. She marvels at already having things in common with this stranger whom she did not even know existed two days ago. And now, he is the closest relative she has left in this world.
48
Sophie calls Sharmila Foi that evening from Le Canard Volant. She answers after a few rings.
“What’s happened?” her foi asks. “Have you found Nita?”
Sophie sighs. “Yes and no.”
“Is that her?” Sophie hears in the background, and then a click and another voice.
“Sophie, what are you doing? You need to come home right now!” Vaishali Foi says. “We are worried sick!”
With them both on the line, Sophie can share the news once, and launches into the story of Nita’s death many years ago, leaving out for the time being the part about Vijay and being intentionally vague about Nita’s addictions. Sophie knows those details will be met with judgment rather than empathy. After Sophie finishes her tale, Vaishali Foi is without words for the first time in Sophie’s life. Perhaps this journey was worth it just to experience that!
“She would have been much better to stay, clearly!” Vaishali Foi eventually says. “What a waste of Rajiv going back and forth all of those years.”
“What do you mean?” Sophie asks.
“She knows everything else, so you may as well tell her,” Sharmila Foi says to Vaishali Foi.
Sophie’s pulse quickens. What more could she not know?!
Vaishali Foi clears her throat. “Rajiv went to Paris to try and find her after she left. He jumped on a plane the next day.”
Sophie remembers him being away and spending a week with her fois before he returned.
“He could not find her,” Sharmila Foi jumps in. “Was silly to even try with no address or anything. It’s not like India, you know, you cannot just ask someone on the street and get a straight answer. He did not even speak the language, yaar. Then, when we found an address for some cheap hotel she was staying, he went there, but they said she had moved on. He used to send letters to her at that hotel because he could tell she was still getting them somehow.”
“I said he should put an investigator outside that hotel!” Vaishali Foi quips.
“Oy, yaar!” Sharmila Foi says. “For what? To kidnap her and bring her here? She is an adult. She wants to go, then she goes.”
“Maybe, but then we should know what is wrong with her to do this, yaar! But probably it wasn’t worth it: us spending more money chasing her, hah? Rajiv was already spending so much on these plane tickets back and forth.”
Sophie can hear in their voices that her fois have debated this topic many times in the past and have never agreed. She clears her throat audibly so they can be reminded of the purpose of this call.
“So, what I was saying,” Sharmila Foi continues in a loud voice, signifying she is ready to move on. “He told her he would come every year on their anniversary, and she could come back home with him. And he did! For years he made this silly trip every year. Waiting for her under the Eiffel Tower. She never came. It took us eight or nine years to convince him to stop and focus on you. You were getting older, and he needed to be home to care for you, not flitting off to Europe, chasing something impossible.”
Sophie remembers Papa having a “business trip” around that time every year and being gone for four days. She realizes it was the same four dates every year, and now she knows those last few years Nita wasn’t even alive to have met him. But those first few years, she wonders if Nita thought about it. And that last year, maybe that’s what she meant by going home when she had said that to Laurent at the bistro. Maybe that had been her plan when she told Dao she was returning to India. Maybe she was going to meet Rajiv that year and died before she could see it through. Sophie wonders what would have happened if she had survived and she had gone to Rajiv with Vijay in tow. Would they have all come back together? Would they have lived as one happy family in the house she grew up in? How would he have explained that in India? There are so many variables that it’s hard to imagine such a life, but Sophie does not think it would have been a bad one. They would have made it work. They would have had no other choice.
“There’s one other thing,” Sophie says, drawing in a long breath. “She had another child. A son. With a man she met here.”
If Vaishali Foi had been speechless before, she was likely in a coma now.
“She what?!” Vaishali Foi says.
“His name is Vijay,” Sophie continues.
“How could she do that to Rajiv?” Sharmila Foi eventually blurts out, wounded on behalf of her brother. “Thank Bhagwan that he is not alive to hear what she’s done to him!”
Sophie knows her fois are wondering the same thing she is: Why did Nita have another child if she couldn’t handle caring for the first one? But Sophie does not want to pull at that thread. There is no answer that will satisfy any of them. They all just have to accept it and try not to apply logic to it.