The Direction of the Wind: A Novel(2)
Sophie flinches, feeling the sting of their words. Her fois have served as her surrogate mummies since hers passed away, but she knows they have never understood why Papa didn’t arrange her marriage earlier, when Sophie would have had her pick of the suitors. Their children had followed conventions when it came to beginning the marriage phase, and for the past three years they had begged Rajiv to make this a priority for Sophie so she didn’t end up with a half-wit, or, worse still, alone. Rajiv made the occasional inquiry, but ultimately no one seemed worthy enough for his only daughter, and he could not bear to part with her. After he passed, her fois made it their top priority to find someone to take care of her when all of them were gone.
But their task was not easy because Sophie is damaged goods in the Indian marriage market. A now orphaned spinster whose papa allowed her to focus on her education, obtain an accounting degree, and pursue a career rather than forcing her to learn the ways of the kitchen and management of servants. Her fois were relieved to have found a man from a good family willing to marry her despite her untraditional lifestyle. Sophie knows marriage is for the best, but as she thinks about her future surrounded by strangers and the fact that she will never see her papa again, the cloak of loneliness wraps more tightly around her.
“Maybe if Nita had been around, Sophie would have been raised to do the right things at the right times,” Sharmila Foi says.
Vaishali Foi scoffs, the keys at her waist jingling as she walks. “Like that woman could have taught anyone right. Look what she did with her life.”
Sophie pushes her ear closer to the wall. Nita was her mummy, but Sophie recalls so little about her now. Just a few distant memories: the heady smell of paint while she worked on canvases near the dining room window, the round red chandlo between her brows signifying she was a married woman, the way she would stare at the sky when she sat with Sophie on the family’s hichko in the front yard, that she brushed her hair with 101 strokes every morning and every night and did the same to Sophie, counting each one aloud. The main thing Sophie recalls about her mummy is that although she had never set foot in the country, she loved France.
That was why Sophie ended up with her French name. Nita had shunned the cultural norms that mandated that Rajiv’s mummy select Sophie’s name based on the location of the stars, and so Sophie has spent her entire life explaining to everyone in India why she doesn’t have a normal name like Swapna, Reena, Ketan, or Atul, like her cousins do. As a child, she often wished that Papa had been less progressive and lenient with Nita and had forced the traditional naming conventions upon her so that Sophie could blend in. She had hated saying her name aloud in school or at work and having people stare at her. She took after Papa and did not crave the attention of others, and living in Ahmedabad with a name like Sophie meant she went noticed more often than she cared to be.
After Nita died, Papa and their family barely spoke of her. With the passage of time, Sophie’s memories of her mummy started to fade, and with no one willing to speak about her, there was no way to revive them. Yet even though she remembers very little, Sophie still feels the urge to defend her mummy from her fois’ words. After all, who else is left to do it?
Sophie begins to move from the wall when she hears Sharmila Foi say, “I wonder how Sophie would have turned out if she hadn’t left.”
Vaishali Foi murmurs something Sophie cannot hear, and then, in a louder tone, says, “She would have filled Sophie’s head with all those crazy dreams of hers. She would have turned her into the same rebellious spirit who doesn’t know her place. The best thing for this family was when she ran away. With her gone, Rajiv at least could teach Sophie duty without disruption.”
Ran away?! Sophie’s mind reels. Her mummy died.
As Sophie mulls over her fois’ words, she scans her memories of the events surrounding Nita’s death twenty-two years earlier. She recalls that she had been too young to attend the funeral. But she remembers her fois coming home from it and putting a garland of vibrant orange marigolds around the framed photo of Nita that had been added to the puja room. Sophie presses her ear even closer to the wall, sure she has misheard her fois because she would have known if the story of her mummy was something different. In Ahmedabad, the streets have eyes and the wind has ears, so secrets like this would have been impossible to keep from her for all these years.
Sophie wants to burst into the room and ask them what they are talking about, but she knows better. She would only be chastised for eavesdropping. A good Indian girl should never speak out of turn is what they would say while looking at her disappointedly. And she has been that—a good Indian girl—for as long as she can remember.
If only Papa were still here, she thinks to herself as tears continue to prick her eyes, then I could ask him what they were talking about.
The burden of truly being alone in the world sits heavy on her heart. Because it had been just Papa and her in this big house for most of her life, they had developed a tight bond—closer than the average parent-child relationship she saw with her friends and cousins. He would never lie to her, and she never lied to him. It is what made her such an obedient daughter. She never wanted to disappoint him, so she’d never snuck out of the house with friends or tried alcohol that someone in university had gotten from a foreigner with a liquor license. Instead, she always behaved as was expected. And she will honor him by continuing to do that even though she desperately wants to tell her fois not to speak poorly about her parents when her memories are all she has left of them.