A Change of Heart Read online

  She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t speak her past.

  She shook the bag of lemon drops at him. “Lemon drops are great for headaches.”

  “Is that your medical opinion?”

  “No, that’s my mummy opinion.”

  He bowed his head and gave her the last word, taking the bag from her and popping one into his mouth.

  “You don’t have to take care of me, you know.”

  “I don’t carry debt well. You took care of me yesterday; now we’re even.”

  “Actually, you took care of me last night, so you’re plus one.”

  * * *

  Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t carry debt well.

  He had lied. He hadn’t been looking for her everywhere when she walked to the pharmacy. The car he unlocked and threw his bag into was small and red with two doors. Not the monstrosity they had driven yesterday.

  When he held the door open for her, she just stood there, sure she’d collapse to the floor if she moved.

  “It’s going to get pretty cold as we head north. You don’t want to drive in an open car.” He left the door ajar for her, got into the driver’s seat, and started the car, forcing her to move.

  They sank into their seats and back into silence. He burrowed back under the shell that had been snapping on and off him so fast and relentlessly it was making her head spin. It was just as well. Because no matter how much she told herself she could do this, do anything she needed to do, in this moment, she could not open her mouth without breaking down. Not even to thank him.

  This is not how she had expected to feel when they left the motel and its decrepit surroundings behind. She didn’t know how she knew they were decrepit. There was none of the obvious decay of such places back home, but something about it couldn’t hide the fact that money and privilege didn’t reside here. Or maybe her heart just recognized beaten-down and forsaken things.

  For all his silence, Nikhil’s hands were a little steadier on the steering wheel today. He’d had nothing more than another mug of black coffee for breakfast. She had no idea how he survived. Apart from those poppy-seed muffins, which smelled like old ink from her uncle’s table, and a few morsels from the junk food stash, she had never seen him eat.

  Instead of filling his stomach, she had actually watched him empty it out a few times.

  She remembered the feeling only too well. She had thrown up everything she ate for so long after what those bastards did to her, she hadn’t realized that she was pregnant until she was six months along. “It’s too late to get rid of the baby,” the doctor had told her with such regret that she had changed doctors. How could she let a doctor who thought of her baby that way bring him into the world?

  Another pang of longing to hold Joy hit her. Between the memory of Joy’s voice from when she’d called him this morning—trying so hard not to let her see how badly he wanted her to come home—and this car they were driving in, it was time for her to shut down all the rawness she was allowing herself.

  The only blessing was Nikhil’s silence next to her.

  She tried to shut out all thought, focus on her breath, and center herself. But today, she couldn’t manage it. The longer they drove in silence, the harder it became. Between a past she couldn’t seem to put away, a present she couldn’t control, and a future she couldn’t avoid, she couldn’t shut her mind down. She wanted to shake Jen for all the things she had said. She wanted to kill Nikhil for living up to each one of those things.

  “How’s your head?” she asked, resisting the urge to twist her fingers together.

  He shrugged. She gripped her hands together and tried to accept that his silence was going to be impenetrable.

  “What happened to you?” he asked, just as she was easing back into the silence again.

  “I knew you’d had too much to drink, so I asked the receptionist where I could find some Alka-Seltzer and the place was two miles away.”

  He threw her an unsure look, trying to gauge whether she had really misunderstood his question, and decided she knew exactly what he’d been asking. He let it go, nonetheless. “So this car helps, then?”

  This time she shrugged.

  “Does it help to talk?”

  She should have said no and shut him down, but she couldn’t. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Want to try?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Tell me about Joy.”

  Despite herself she smiled. “What do you want to know about him?”

  “I don’t know. What’s he like? Is he a handful?”

  She almost laughed at that. “No, quite the opposite actually. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

  “He’s a lot like his mother then.”

  “Oh no, he’s nothing like me. He’s affectionate, full of love. He’s a cuddler; he loves to be held. It’s really hard to be sad around him. He’s also incredibly funny and wise.”

  “And this is your seven-year-old we’re talking about, not his dad, right?”

  Her gut clenched.

  She usually told people Joy’s father was dead. That he had died in a car accident in Calcutta. Which is why she had moved to Mumbai. She usually enjoyed filling in the details of his death in colorful and gory detail, at least in her own head.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I was making a joke, or trying to make one.”

  “I know.”

  “So, tell me more about Joy.”

  “Think of the most perfect little boy you can imagine. Sometimes I think he’s more perfect than any child should feel the need to be. He’s caring and kind and sees beauty in everything.” She wrapped her arms around herself and imagined his body melting into her, his baby breath collecting on her neck. “Even the smallest little things, like a twin pod in an orange, or a centipede crawling on our floor, the smallest little thing just excites him so much he almost explodes with it.

  “We had a sparrow lay three eggs behind the railing in our balcony earlier this year. Every single day for a week, he would run home from school and run to the balcony to see if they had hatched. And once Raja . . . he, umm . . . lives with us, told Joy that the eggs were close to hatching, Joy just refused to leave the balcony.

  “He spent every moment out of school there. He ate there, did his homework there, basically he’d just stare and stare at the sparrow sitting on her eggs until he fell asleep right there. One day he looks up at me and says, ‘Mamma, isn’t it funny, that I sit and sit on your lap, and the mama bird sits and sits on her babies?’” She smiled at the memory. “I had to carry him to bed after he fell—”

  She stopped short, and the strangest jolt sparked through her heart. Nikhil was smiling. Not the halfhearted, I-think-it-might-bea-smile kind of smile, but a wide, flat-out smile.

  By all that was holy, how on earth had she forgotten what those dimples could do to his face? Two full-fledged whirlpools dug deep into his stubbly cheeks and his eyes crinkled and shone.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what happened when the eggs hatched? Did he get to watch?”

  She swallowed. “Yes. First thing in the morning when he was brushing his teeth. He pulled me out of the kitchen, dragged Raja out of bed, he didn’t want anyone to miss it. We were both late for work that day, and I think he missed the first half of school.”

  “That’s amazing.” He was still smiling and it was like watching the sun break through clouds in bright, sharp columns of light. “That you let him miss school for that.”

  “Heaven help me, can you imagine if he had missed it? I had a good mind to crack the eggs myself at one point and let the baby birds out. I swear I lived in fear of it happening while he was at school that week.”

  “I don’t think Aie—that’s what I call my mom—ever let me miss school. I think I had perfect attendance almost all twelve years.”

  “You never got sick as a child?”

  “Well, I would have had to be in the hospital or
in a coma for Aie to let me stay home from school. Even then she would have rolled my bed into the classroom if she could. Education for my parents is like a religion. My mother is a teacher, and I mean she doesn’t just teach, she has the genetic composition of an educator, you know what I mean?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “What?”

  She found her hand pressed to her mouth. “Mine too. My mother was a teacher too.”

  “Great, so you’re familiar with the Homework Before You Get to Breathe theory of parenting.”

  * * *

  She giggled. Nikhil could never have imagined such a thing, but it sounded so natural on her he wondered why he was so surprised by it. That light that had engulfed her when she talked about her son lit her up from the inside.

  “And the All the Teachers Have a Direct Line to Your Mother curse,” she said.

  “Did she teach in your school?”

  “Yes, yours?”

  “No. She taught college, so technically she’s a professor, but some of my teachers had taken her classes in college, and let’s just say it’s not every child’s dream.”

  “You sound very close to your mother.”

  “Really? I was going for terrorized by her.”

  She giggled again. “She sounds like a wonderful mother. Are you an only child?”

  “Technically.”

  “Technically? So, you’re an only child but with siblings?”

  “I am an only child, but my parents practically raised my cousin—my mother’s brother’s daughter. She went to school in India and spent summers with us. So, she’s more a sibling than a cousin, and my dad’s sister’s son also spent his summers with us. I know it’s confusing.”

  “It’s not confusing at all. Your childhood sounds beautiful.”

  The Joshi household had been a zoo sometimes, always overrun with friends and relatives. But she was right. “It was pretty amazing. If you’re not big on privacy. Our house was always filled with guests.”

  Suddenly, he wanted to turn around. He couldn’t go home. Then he wanted to go home so badly, his foot pressed into the accelerator.

  “What about your mother?” he asked, mostly to step off the seesaw he found himself on.

  “Aama—that’s what I call my mother—taught English at the school in the city.” Ah, an English teacher’s daughter; that explained the impeccable English. “But we moved to the village after my father died when I was seven. At the village school she taught everything. Even after she got sick and couldn’t leave home, she tutored any child who needed help at our home. And she did it until her very last day.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cancer. Lung.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, it’s been a very long time,” she said, although she looked too young for anything to have been a very long time. He wanted to ask her how old she was, but what came out of his mouth was completely unexpected. “So how did your husband, Raja, you said, agree to let you leave your son and go chasing after a complete stranger by yourself?”

  Evidently it was the wrong thing to say, because the veil that was never too far away slipped over her face like liquid rock and solidified. It was as though the past few minutes had never happened. “Raja’s not Joy’s dad.” And then, just to make sure he understood that he had stepped on one of her land mines, she asked, “When was the last time you went home?”

  The silence stretched out for a few moments, and she tucked her hands under her legs, sitting on them.

  “I haven’t gone home since my cousins’ wedding,” he said. “A little more than two years.”

  He must have sounded the way he felt, because her tone softened again. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you more time.”

  Another sad silence followed.

  “Did Jen say anything about where the evidence might be hidden?” he asked her, because really, it was the point of this entire excursion, wasn’t it? “Do you have any idea what it is?”

  Her eyes were back in fully guarded mode when he threw her a quick glance. “All she said was that you would destroy everything from your life together but you would never destroy the thing in which it was hidden.”

  That did nothing to narrow it down. He couldn’t imagine going through Jen’s stuff, ever. As for throwing away any of her stuff, it was unthinkable.

  “So where are her things?” she asked when he didn’t respond.

  “Most of it is in my parents’ home.”

  “So are we going to your parents’ house?”

  “Yes. Why does that surprise you?”

  “I thought Americans didn’t live in their parents’ house once they were adults.”

  “Well, I never bought my own place because I never lived in the country for too long after med school.” And once he’d met Jen, her apartment had become their home.

  They talked like that. Jumping over each other’s land mines, skirting topics and details that were too painful and skimming over the ones that were more bearable until they found their safe places.

  Nikhil told her about med school and being a doctor’s son. She told him about Joy. Of all the things they could talk about, her son, Joy, seemed their safest haven.

  17

  Rahul says it’s not possible to run an illegal organs racket without having someone really high up involved. I know there’s someone on my staff who’s leaking my donor registry to them. How else are they finding the matches?

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  “Just find the bastard’s daughter and kill her.” Asif had had enough. He hadn’t worked his way up the ranks of the gang to have some useless politician hold a sword over his head. It wasn’t just his hands that were bloodstained. His vision dripped blood. The red haze through which he saw the world had become thicker and redder with every passing year, and fuck if now, when he was king of his world, he would let someone finger his arse.

  “Bhai—” Laloo was the only one of his men who would dare to interrupt his thoughts. When he didn’t lift his ghoda and blow the chutiya’s head off, he took it as permission to keep talking. “Bhai, she’s the only leverage we have. We kill her, we have nothing to hold over the bastard’s head.”

  He looked smug, as if Asif Khan, whose very name loosened people’s bowels until they were shitting their insides, needed some idiot to point out the most basic shit. He lifted his gun and pointed it at Laloo’s head.

  “Sorry, Bhai. Of course you already thought of that. Bhai thinks of everything.” He was trying not to look scared. Even his number-one commander believed that he was crazy enough to blow his brains out. This was power. His chutiya uncle should see him now.

  Asif started to laugh. Not because he was crazy, the way he let his men believe he was, but because the memory of sticking a Diwali bomb up his uncle’s arse and blowing it up before drowning him in a commode filled with his shit still made him collapse with laughter every single time.

  “You’re not the only one who can stick your junk up someone’s arse, chutiya. How does it feel now?” he had asked, and his uncle had pissed right there on his bathroom floor, with his wife and children watching. It was the last thing any of them had seen him do.

  “Three minutes. You have three minutes to find an alternative to killing the politician’s daughter,” he said to Laloo, smiling at coming up with that number. Why did people always go with five minutes, ten minutes? Bastards, so predictable! He started to count down. “Tick, tick. Tick, tick . . .”

  “K . . . K . . .” Laloo stuttered

  “What are you, Shah Rukh Khan from Darr? K . . . K . . . Kiran . . .”

  “Kidnap, Bhai, kidnap! We kidnap the girl.”

  He clicked off the ghoda’s safety and placed the muzzle on Laloo’s crotch. He started sobbing like a bitch. “You think that wasn’t the first idea that popped into my head?”

  He looked at the man’s pants. They were dry. He fucking needed to see someone wet their pants really soon. Life was getting too damn serious.

  Satisfying though
the idea of killing the politician’s fancy daughter was, Asif needed her to find the girl with the doctor’s red hair. She was the one he needed to figure out what the bastard was up to. So he could stop him once and for all. She was his key and the bastard’s daughter was his only path to her.

  “Follow the bastard’s daughter. Every moment. I want to know how she breathes, who she fucks, what her daddy does to protect her fancy arse.”

  It was a good thing people had children. It was the best leverage in the world.

  18

  Why do people assume that making a baby from your own DNA automatically creates a connection? I’ve never felt the need to meet my birth parents.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  Nikhil’s shoulders had been getting progressively higher and tighter ever since they had entered what seemed to be Antarctica, but with flyovers. The streets were edged with banks of blackened snow like flesh peeled back from knife slashes across endless white skin.

  By the time the fields gave way to neighborhoods and their car turned into a wooded street and rolled to a stop in front of the biggest house she had ever seen, he looked stiff enough to snap. She followed his eyes to the house. A perfectly round moon shone large and low in the sky, throwing a milky glow over the snow-blanketed roof.

  A blanket seemed to have fallen over his face too, turning it almost as dark as it had been when she had first seen him. But somehow without the smell of vomit and the drunken haze it didn’t have quite the same level of devastation. He turned and caught her watching him, but his eyes stayed flat, every hint of that elusive twinkle gone from the deep chocolate. The spots in his cheeks, where those transformative whirlpools reclaimed and trapped laughter in flashes, were also flat.

  Thanks to Jen, Jess had felt like she knew him even before she met him, but these past days had erased Jen’s words and replaced them with reality, and the reality of him was like nothing she could have imagined.

  She had never had a friend, never shared anything about herself with anyone. Truth be told, no one had ever shared any part of their life with her either. She hadn’t allowed it. Sweetie Raja was her best friend. She would do anything for him, but he was almost as private as she was. On the days when he happened to be home for dinner, they talked about their day and listened avidly to Joy’s stories. But she knew nothing of his past, his childhood. One look at his face didn’t carry the entire impact of his current mood.