Obviously. Those turns had slowed my mind down to a crawl.
‘I think,’ I said, patting his arm, ‘she thought you’d finally get it…’
‘More like she wanted me to figure it out.’
I laughed. It was timorous.
‘It’s not the kind of life you want to talk about, not that she didn’t own her choices, but the uncertainties that it brought kind of destroyed her.’
That was a choice, I thought. A harsh truth.
‘I think she trusted I’d arrive at the truth.’
That was a bit heartless. My hand reached halfway to his shoulder before returning to my lap.
‘The only thing she told me about the notes was, “It’s all in there.” And that’s why, when you had me focus on her life story, I could connect the dots.’ Andrew was laughing now. ‘About time, don’t you think?’
My heart was bleeding for the boy tasked with figuring out his family tree.
‘Do you know where she lived?’
Andrew had made some enquiries about Catherine Brown after he returned to Bengaluru.
While there were people who knew of the Browns, no one seemed to know of Catherine Brown’s antecedents. There was one gentleman who had told him that Noelene had two younger sisters, both of whom had died early. Andrew thought that was a possibility going by the size of the house;he could’ve had a different bedroom for every day of the week if he wanted.
On the way up, we stopped at a stall selling fresh carrots and cucumbers. Andrew enquired after the Velus, a schoolteacher named Tilakanathan Velu, whose daughter, Bhumika, had married an Englishman. The last part of the sentence was met with a flicker of recognition. Something heard, something learnt. A story that had come down from grandparents.
Andrew’s Tamil wasn’t as fluent as his Kannada, but he could get by.
‘Maybe we could walk around the barracks area, talk to people,’ I said.
The last hour of the almost eight hours on the road to Coonoor was a journey mapped in hell – 36 hairpin bends.
‘I wish Noelene had spoken to me about Hari Rao,’ Andrew said as he approached the first of the hairpin bends. ‘What happened and why it ended the way it did.’
I looked at him, surprised at the announcement; we were talking about his great-grandmother. Earlier, he had said he understood why Noelene hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
‘She was cold in her grave by the time I switched to media, but I was always interested in politics,’ he said. He was talking slowly, just like how he was driving. ‘I was living in Bengaluru. I might have run into the man.’
Even though Andrew had always planned on going abroad to pursue his education, there was the off chance he would return. Noelene should’ve sat the boy down and spoken to him. He had a right to know. Maybe she expected to be pushed, asked for the answer… but she should’ve known that the question would haunt him when there was no one to give him answers.
‘I have a feeling she wasn’t proud of something she had said or done to him,’ Andrew said.
I looked at him.
‘I have no evidence; it’s just a feeling. It’s because of how she relayed it to me, her tone maybe. There was regret, and it stood out like a column against the sadness that swirled around her when she spoke about him. She was distraught that he didn’t acknowledge her or their daughter, but there was more. They might have had something good, and she may have broken it with something she said or did. I don’t know,’ he said, slamming his palm on the steering wheel.
‘Are you mad at her?’
‘This half-knowledge is killing me.’
‘Is this because he recognized you?’
‘I don’t think it was me; it was my name. I don’t know of any other Browns living in Bengaluru.’
I nodded.
He loved his Nana and she him. They spoke a lot to each other, not that there was anyone else to talk to. But on the most important subject of his life, his roots, he and his beloved grandmother had steered clear of hard truths. She had held on to all that she had lived through, letting nothing show, and he, not wanting to cause her more pain than he thought she had already inflicted on herself, had stayed silent.
