The Stolen Girl (11 page)

A
year
after Aarti held Vani when she cried, a year into Vani’s friendship with her employer, a letter arrives for Vani, the first that she has received. She holds it to her nose when one of the other servants hands it to her and fancies she can catch a whiff of the hauntingly familiar scent of the village, which for her is the smell of churned mud, gossip and emerald fields basking in the sun.

They do not like Vani much anymore, the other servants, now that she is ‘in the inner circle’ – their taunting moniker, now that she is sleeping on the floor of the young mistress’s room, now that Aarti has optioned Vani to herself.

‘Be careful,’ they tell Vani, eyes flashing, words dripping with vitriol. They cannot hide the glee from their voice, the pleasure of anticipation as they regale her with stories of how Aarti has sacked other servants, mercilessly and thoroughly, refusing to give so much as a letter of recommendation, just because they did not iron her dress to her exacting standards, or because they hurt her hair while combing it.

‘She’s mercurial; she can turn on you, like a pet tiger which has developed a taste for human flesh,’ they say, spitting the paan they have been chewing loudly into the basin.

Vani is a defector now, no longer one of them.

‘What we talk about stays here, understand?’ they warn, their voices sharp, their gazes flinty.

She nods, the churmuri she has been eating tasting of earth in her mouth. The banter, the including her in their conversations is gone now. It stops the moment she enters the kitchen where they all meet up after their work is done. She is the drop of ink seeping through milk, turning everything murky and unpalatable in its wake. She clutches the letter which the cook, who sorts through the post, has thrown at her, and she runs away to the relative safety of her room.

Why didn’t I lock the room that day?
Vani laments for the hundredth time. Because she did not think anyone would enter, more fool her. Aarti has the run of all the rooms in the house; she can enter anywhere, anywhere at all. And even if she had locked it, Vani tells herself, Aarti would have knocked in that imperious way she has and Vani would have had to open the door.
Why didn’t I sob softly?

Vani misses the company of the servants, their sympathy and their small kindnesses – the giving of extra ladoos with her tea because she is ‘wasting away’, the regaling her with jokes to make her smile – little acts that had warmed her right up. She does not belong anywhere; she is balancing precariously between two worlds.

And yet a part of her is pleased that
she
has been taken into Aarti’s confidence. Vani understands Aarti, feels a strange solidarity with her employer. She is able to see beyond Aarti’s facade of stern, brittle woman to the child beneath. The girl who yearns for love, who is lost, lonely. Vani can identify with that because she feels the same.

Ensconced in her cot, door locked this time, she holds the letter close. She fancies it smells of the village despite the distance it has travelled – the fresh green of the fields, the soft milky white of burgeoning paddy, the raw red of muddy earth, the sparkling silver of monsoon rain. She slits it open.

The voluptuous Kannada script is neat, careful as if someone did a few drafts and this is the best version, to send to the ‘big house’.

‘Vani,’ it reads and she sees her name and aches for the tiny house that was her home, the small garden that was her mother’s pride and joy, the gurgling stream, her mother’s arms, her father’s shoulders from the top of which she fancied she could see to the edge of the village and beyond. ‘Charu aunty is very sick and asking for you. Please come.’

Aarti doesn’t want her to go but Vani begs and entreats, pointing out that it will only be for a week, promising that she’ll be back before Aarti notices she’s gone.

Aarti gives in finally, after making sure that Vani will, under no circumstances, stay away for longer than seven days and Vani sets off for her village. It is like coming home and it is like visiting a different continent. The coconut trees waving in the sun, the dust swirling on the mud road, the rows of huts, they tease her with their familiarity, they revel in their nonchalance. The village is the same, lounging indolently beside the twinkling river that glimmers and winks in welcome.

That river.

As soon as she enters the village, the images she has kept at bay, the bloated, unrecognisable visages of her parents swim into view. She blinks them away, walks briskly to Charu’s house the long way round, so as to bypass what used to be her house – her parents’ and hers.

Charu is a shadow of her former self. Her room smells musky, of disease, with death hovering close. She smiles weakly when she sees Vani, cupping her face with trembling fingers, her touch light as the caress of a peacock feather. ‘My, how you’ve grown. You look beautiful. They would be so proud.’ The ghosts of her parents linger between them, shimmering within the curtain of their tears.

Afterwards, Vani cannot help it; she walks past her old house, now occupied by another family, children playing hopscotch in the courtyard, raising an avalanche of reddish gold dust, the hibiscus flowers her mother had planted in full bloom, the bright purple of regret, the cashew tree replete with yellowish orange fruit, bees buzzing, pineapples ripening, guavas turning yellow in the late afternoon sunshine, the smell of ripe fruit and rank sorrow. Vani cannot picture her parents in that house. She cannot see herself there either. Vani runs. She runs into Nagappa’s wife’s arms and is anchored by them while she sobs.

Later, Vani goes to the crematorium. She stands there as the pink-spattered twilight sky darkens to red, sun setting in the horizon, a mellow crimson-dusted gold ball. Rats scuttle amongst the half-burnt wood; stray dogs hunt for scraps. Mosquitoes whine and feast on flesh that has become inured to the city. She stands on that desolate ground, seeped in mourning, tainted by grief, smelling faintly of smoke and something else, something ethereal, not quite animate, the air swirling with particles of ash, a black cloud thick with the organic matter of hundreds of bodies that have been cremated here over the years, and asks her parents for a sign.

A lone bird swoops, black wings silhouetted against pinks and golds. Another bird joins it and they plunge down, so close that the air from their beating wings brushes her face, whispering solace. The birds look at her, once, before they fly away. She gazes into their glittering opal eyes, their wings flapping in unison as they blend with the darkening sky, and she feels at peace for the first time since she set foot in the village. A part of her has been worrying that her parents were stuck here, in this bleak crematorium while she waited in Bangalore, hunting for signs of them in the clouds. But now, she knows. They are at peace. She felt it in the flutter of the birds’ wings, read it in the look in their eyes. She understands that her parents are happy wherever they are and the knowledge soothes her.

She spends the next day at Charu’s side. Charu recounts for Vani in her halting, laboured speech, the story of how Vani’s parents came to the village as newlyweds, how they wanted many children but were so happy and excited when, after many miscarriages, Vani came along. And as Charu talks in her gasping voice, weighted down with illness in that room smelling of impending death, Vani can hear her mother, as clear as if she is in the next room. She sounds happy, her lilting tone threaded through with laughter, as she replies to something Vani’s father has said.

Vani does not walk past her old house again, preferring to take the long way back to Nagappa’s house, where she is staying. She pretends not to hear the delighted shouts of the children who now live in her old house, playing lagori in the dust, the smile in their mother’s voice as she calls them in for a snack. She makes out that she does not hear the children launch at their father when he gets home from the fields, telling him stories about their day in breathless voices, his laughter as he asks them to slow down. She pretends not to see the lives being led in her old home.
I belong there, not you,
her head screams and her heart feels drenched with longing for the past.

Vani has mixed feelings about being back. She has no place here, in this village, anymore. She doesn’t belong. She is lost, more so than in that big house with the hostile servants and the inscrutable girl who is her employer and also, oddly, her only friend.

On the third day, one of the elders comes running, panting, to Charu’s house where Vani is sitting, holding her hand. ‘They want you back. You have to go at once, an emergency.’

Vani was meant to stay a week at least. But she leaves on the overnight bus bound for Bangalore, panicked, worrying the whole way, unable to sleep. Has something happened to Aarti? Aarti’s parents? What emergency would warrant Vani having to go back immediately when they have at least a dozen other servants catering to their every need?

The noise, bustle and dust of Bangalore welcome Vani like an old friend and the village is a bittersweet memory. An alien family creating memories in
her
home, trampling on the ghosts of her father and mother and her childhood self. She cannot bear to think that those children she saw playing in the mud will have the same house colouring their reminiscences as she does, the same house as gatekeeper to their recollections, as the backdrop to their dreams.

And so she returns, to the servants and their hostile stares warring with pity. To the mansion furnished with every luxury but lacking in warmth and love, which nevertheless feels more like home than the village. To her little room at the very top where she does not sleep anymore. To her prickly employer, whose deepest secrets – her bulimia, her insecurity, how lonely she feels despite her fame, how all she wants is to be loved – only Vani is party to.

Aarti is not at home when Vani arrives. Neither are her parents.

‘Are they at the hospital? What has happened?’ she asks the other servants and they laugh in her flustered face.

‘She’s fine, gone to her shoot,’ they tell her.

‘But…’ Vani stutters, ‘something must have happened. She summoned me back urgently.’

They look at her pityingly and do not deign to grace her question with an answer.

Aarti’s room is in a state. Vani clears it up. And waits for Aarti.

When Aarti comes, after four long, agonising hours, she looks fine. She bursts into the room, her face lighting up when she sees Vani. She throws her arms around Vani, holds her close.

‘I missed you,’ she says at last, releasing Vani, holding her at arms’ length. ‘I couldn’t sleep without you beside my bed, telling me stories. I couldn’t do
anything
.’ Her eyes are shimmering.

‘Is that why you called me back?’ Vani asks. She is exasperated. She is touched.

‘I couldn’t function without you,’ Aarti moans. ‘I couldn’t eat at all, not a morsel. Which is not a bad thing, mind you.’ She stands in front of the mirror and peruses herself critically. ‘I might have lost some weight actually.’

If you lose any more you will disappear,
Vani thinks. Out loud, because Aarti is clearly expecting a response, she says, ‘I missed you too.’

Her employer’s face beams. She comes and puts her bony arms around Vani again. Aarti has to bend to do this. She is so much taller than Vani.

‘You are like my sister. I do not want to lose you ever again.’

‘You did not lose me,’ Vani says.

‘Let’s make a pact,’ Aarti’s eyes shine with enthusiasm.

In many ways, Aarti is such a child. Even though she is some years older than Vani, she feels like a much younger sibling.

‘Okay,’ Vani says, sighing inwardly. Knowing she does not have a choice.

Aarti has written it out already. ‘Read this,’ she says. ‘It is in English. I looked up some of the wording on the internet. We will both sign and I will keep it in a safe place.’

‘We, Aarti Kumar and Vani Bhat, declare that henceforth we are sisters, bound not by blood, but something even stronger: the immense and unbreakable bond of our friendship. We are family now and we will never willingly break this tie that is stronger than blood.’

This sounds like something a seven-year-old would write,
Vani thinks. She knows that this is not so much a pact as a ploy to keep her tied to Aarti.
She can and will break it but I can’t and won’t dare,
she thinks.
She is annoyed that Aarti called her back from Charu’s bedside just because she was missing her. She does not want to participate in this childish charade.

But Aarti’s eyes are glowing as she says, ‘Shall we?’

And so Vani signs it, thinking,
It’s just a game. A silly, innocent, kids’ game instigated by a girl who’s never really grown up and who’s never had much of a childhood – for which she’s making up now that she has a friend
, carefully printing her name in English like Aarti has taught her and then doing it again, joined up, for her signature.

After, Aarti makes three copies, one for herself, one for Vani and one spare, to keep safe with all her other documents.

Vani signs it, and she does not realise at that time what she is getting herself into. Or perhaps she does. But she is at a weak point. The village she yearned for has moved on without her; even the house she will always think of as hers is now occupied by someone else. This woman is all she has. She is beholden to her. And so she signs the pact, intertwining her destiny with Aarti’s.

Aarti does not send Vani back to the village again, citing the pact, citing how much she missed Vani the one time she went, telling Vani that she cannot manage without her. Not when Charu dies and the letter comes to invite Vani to the funeral, not when Vani’s other relatives pass away.

Life expectancy is not high in the village. People work too hard for very little return, the crop dependent on the whim of the monsoon. And there isn’t enough food to go around.

Vani looks at all the food squandered in that mansion, the food Aarti regurgitates after every meal, and she cringes at the wastage. In the village, nobody diets, they are all naturally thin. ‘You should stay a spell in our village; you wouldn’t have to be sick at all then,’ Vani said to Aarti once and she laughed, her sunken eyes meeting Vani’s in the mirror, a bubble of dribble staining her left lip. Vani tells Aarti these truths and she thinks she is joking.