We were almost done with the food.
‘You should eat something. I’ve eaten two dosas; you barely took a bite.’
‘Maybe later.’
I felt Andrew’s palm on my back as we approached the cashier. We paid less than 100 bucks for two dosas and two sugary coffees.
‘She’s an only child, I think. Her mother passed away early, and her father didn’t remarry,’ Andrew said as he got us back on the highway.
‘Her father was a teacher.’
‘She was married off to Ronald Brown. They moved to Bengaluru; they were from Coonoor obviously…’
Andrew stopped talking. He drove some distance, 10 minutes or maybe 20, before pulling up. He was breathing heavily.
‘Bhumika Velu is Catherine Brown, right?’ He was looking at me, into me, like the answer was written somewhere inside of me.
I was nodding. ‘I think so.’
He pulled out his phone and started going through the texts one by one. ‘Ronald Brown contracted smallpox and died. They moved to Bengaluru, too??’
He was cross-checking their stories.
‘It’s so obvious. How could I have not known? The notes all but spelt it out for me.’
Andrew’s hands were gripping mine tight; they were pale almost. He apologized and let out that intensity on the steering wheel. His knuckles were white.
‘Bhumika never saw her father again.’
That really bothered me. How could he claim to love her and not let her father visit them or she visit her father? Love? A prisoner in your palace.
Andrew’s face was taut.
After a while, he asked, ‘When did you find out?’
‘The first time you read it to me, I thought something was amiss.’
Andrew nodded.
‘I must’ve read those notes some three or four times when I discovered them,’ he said. ‘It was those notes that brought me back to India because even though I didn’t think it was my great-grandmother’s then, it gave me a starting point from where I could begin my search.’
Andrew wanted to walk around the place, know it and understand Catherine Brown’s life. No… Bhumika Velu’s. ‘I have been here twice as a child, for a wedding and something else. I can’t quite remember what that was.’
I could hear him breathe.
‘With Noelene?’
He nodded.
I wanted to say something funny to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
‘She’s Bhumika to you?’ I was addressing him, he who doesn’t shorten names.
Andrew nodded.
‘I’m guessing Noelene didn’t think of her as Bhumika, more as Catherine.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘She only referred to her as “mother”.’
