My Sir say he has sold house and garden, all the flowers the lawn and the marigold also. We are moving to another one place, in far way land. He told me, soldiers live there. I asked to him, with who we fight?
‘Are you following?’
I nodded.
‘They were shifting out of Coonoor.’
After my thangachi cousins stopped coming, in faraway place where soldiers live, children came. My appa never came to new big house. Not one time.
I make friends with white people, I not speak much but I listen lots. Sometimes I think of appa, where he is, my thangachis.
Are they marry? I ask My Sir about my father, he living? He answer all questions, not that one.
My Sir got smallpox. Catherine Brown also die. Bhumi alive.
‘They must’ve been really close friends? Were they cousins?’
‘I don’t think so. Nana didn’t say so.’
I took Andrew’s phone from him and flipped the pictures back and forth a couple of times, reading from a photograph. I returned the phone to Andrew, who placed it on the table before getting up to get us another round of drinks.
Who was this Bhumi of the beautiful name?
I had so many questions about Andrew’s family, though. Did Catherine see her grandchild, Sarah Ann, Andrew’s mother?
Did she know about Noelene’s affair?
Andrew had barely placed our drinks on the table than I grabbed mine. I didn’t need it; I wanted it.
I wondered about his father, and then my focus shifted to Noelene.
Which mother doesn’t ask her unwed, pregnant daughter that question? The one who had walked down a similar path, I guess.
I closed my eyes and settled into the settee.
My earliest memory of Andrew, which was from after I had adequately dealt with the attraction, was that of a man trapped in a boy’s body. There was a sagacious stillness to him, which at that age was annoying. I was no more than a girl myself. Whatever the situation, wherever he was, he rarely lost his mind. He had an answer to every problem – big, small and exaggerated. He scythed through the smoke of my anger or fear and arrived at a solution that made me seem small. Almost everything I told him was met with an ‘it’s okay’, when it was really not okay and it would never be okay for the next hour. Maybe.
Naturally, I’d rebuke it; he was belittling my issues. Embroidered or otherwise.
Sitting here beside him now, emptying my glass too quickly, his story played out before me. Catherine was his great-grandmother, whom he knew nothing about. Noelene was her daughter, who had raised her grandson single-handedly. Andrew had taken all that was tossed at him, every truth and unanswered question, and let it rest within. Until he smelted it into his inner steel.
‘Since when have you been seeing the grandson?’ Andrew asked, changing track like one who owned the road.
So, this is what it was all about. Andrew Brown’s version of ‘Truth or Dare’.
I shrugged off the thoughts in my head and focused on the question. I had the perfect antidote. I narrated how and when we had met. Ravi had been there for me at a very difficult stage in my life. I underlined it with a french fry.
I noticed Andrew twitch. I hadn’t answered his question, only because I didn’t really know the answer myself. I’m not sure Ravi knew it either. My response had fewdetails. Which wasn’t much unlike my relationship with the ‘adopted grandson’.
Ravi and I were like a pair of well-worn footwear on irregular feet, comfortable, so not easy to put away.
‘You met him the day of Auntie’s accident?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Thoughts of that day still filled me with a dread I cannot describe. I have spoken about it to my father, who told me that with the passage of time, he was able to appreciate what they shared, how fortunate he was, that we as a family were. I know I’m lucky to have had a mother like her, I was privileged, she took care of everything. But that feeling, a heavy fog that clogged the arteries, hasn’t cleared over the years.
I looked up at Andrew. He was waiting for me to talk, finish what I was saying or what he wanted me to say, but I had said enough.
