A Sister's Promise by Renita D'Silva Read Free Book Online Page B

as he lifts a palm to his cheek that now bears the imprint of her palm.
    Raj scrutinises Puja as if seeing her for the first time, his face, with the exception of the reddened cheek, the pale, dazed cream of a newly whitewashed room.
    In the traumatised silence, smelling of old secrets and new misgivings, an echo from the past she has kept hidden for years, resonates through the layer upon layer of armour that encompasses her heart: the scent of shock, the taste of tears, pink-tinged brine.
    I am no better than my da, she thinks.
    Her phone rings, shrill, puncturing the wounded atmosphere, colouring it with burnished sound, and she whips it out of her pocket, hand shaking, the offending palm stinging.
    ‘Hello?’
    A bruised heartbeat of static and then, ‘Puja?’
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    You spend almost twenty years building a wall, she thinks, swaying on her feet. You layer it, brick by brick with the silence of each month that passes with no communication with the past and then, like moss that creeps over the wall and travels to the other side, like ants that find the chinks in the age worn bricks and make their arduous way across from one side of the wall to the other , one voice leaps across the gap and bridges it—that cadence, that tone, as familiar as your own—capable of rousing so much love and so much hurt.
    A voice I have been hoping and fearing to hear, she thinks, as she lowers herself very gently onto the scuffed carpet of her son’s room, every time I have picked up the phone, every single day these past two decades.
    ‘Sharda?’ She squeaks—the only sound her vocal chords seem capable of producing.
    ‘It is you?’ There is relief in the question, and apprehension and agony—hurt mingling with angst. Above all, there is urgency.
    And just like that, the years that have elapsed since she last saw this woman, collapse like land assaulted by flood, washed away by the truant waves of a roaring, monsoon-incited ocean.
    ‘What is it?’
    She pictures the tangled coil that still connects them after a span of nearly twenty years and the distance of five-thousand miles. She wishes she could unravel the coil, smooth out the past, so there were no longer these bumps and hurts, no longer all the pain and guilt and allegations and misunderstandings, over which they are stumbling—a past like a thickly congealed river of tar that they must wade through to get to the other side, to reach each other.
    ‘It’s . . . my daughter, Kushi . . . she’s dying.’ Tears saturate Sharda’s voice, and flood down the telephone line.
    Puja closes her eyes. Sharda. I am speaking to Sharda.
    ‘Kushi needs a kidney, urgently. Mine . . .’ A sigh that is hijacked by a sob, ‘I have only one it seems. Please. She needs you. We need you. Come home.’
    Home . . .myriad nuances radiate from that one small word. Everything lost. Everything . . .
    ‘It is not my home. It hasn’t been for ages.’
    ‘I know that. I know. But . . . I can’t think what else to do . . . ’
    ‘So I’m your last resort?’ Not what she meant to say, but the words come out in a bilious rush, sharper then she intended, like sucking the juice from a raw wedge of lime. Puja bites down on her lower lip, tastes iron and salt.
    ‘Do you want me to beg? Then I will. Please, Puja, please help.’
    ‘I . . .’ Images from the past cascade behind Puja’s closed lids, images that over the years she has consciously tuned out, and tried to ignore. Hurtful words and angry recriminations: marinated in grief, caked in the dust of almost twenty years of dormancy, the ubiquitous orange powder that embroiders the air of the country she has denounced, of the life she has buried.
    ‘Kushi’s on dialysis right now, but I cannot afford to keep her on it for long,’ Sharda’s desperate voice, cuts into Puja’s musings, and brings her back to the here and now.
    Puja takes a deep breath, and steadies herself. ‘If it’s money you want . . .’
    ‘We don’t want your money