The Direction of the Wind: A Novel(74)

Even if her family didn’t accept her, they had to accept this child. Rajiv was the most compassionate man she had ever met. If he wouldn’t take her son, then she would have to curry favor with her parents again. But she knew Rajiv would take them both. Vijay was Sophie’s brother, and Rajiv would never deprive her of that. Nita had a lifetime of sins to atone for, and she knew she had to do whatever it took to do so. The people in her life whom she had abandoned deserved that from her. She deserved that for herself. She had to leave this world a better person than she had been for the past six years.

As she felt the cold floor against her legs, she was reminded of one of Rajiv’s favorite proverbs: Pavan ni disha na badali shako, pan amara sadh ni disha badali shako. The direction of the wind cannot be changed, but we can change the direction of our sails. He had constantly said that to Sophie. Trying to teach her to accept what life threw at her and to adjust her responses. He had said it often, and Nita had wondered if he was saying it as much to Nita as to Sophie.

She looked at Vijay, shivering in her arms, and vowed to him that she would change their lives. She would get them to India and away from the drugs. She would get clean. She would become the mother he and Sophie deserved. She had allowed the wind to blow her about for far too long, and she was finally ready to adjust her sails. They just had to hold on for ten days.





45


SOPHIE


2019


Dao squeezes Sophie’s hand tightly, as if she is drowning in the ocean and Dao is pulling her to safety. “I’m sorry you didn’t know. It seems your mother was a woman of many secrets, and I’m so sorry to be the one to deliver them to you.”

Sophie feels claustrophobic in this tiny office and shimmies away from Manoj’s hand, which is lightly touching her back to offer her some comfort. There is too much to take in! She has a brother. She cannot even comprehend such a thing. Nita had left when she was so young that Sophie had never contemplated siblings the way her friends had. Hers was the only one-child household among their social circle, but she was the only one without a mummy, so it made sense to her. The math added up. Having a dead mummy and a new brother did not create a balanced equation. And Dao said Nita was going to go back to India. So maybe she would have been in Sophie’s life. She jolts as she wonders whether she was wrong and Nita wasn’t coming back for Sophie and instead was planning on coming back with this Vijay person and building a future with him. A do-over life because she’d been so unhappy with the one she’d built with Sophie and Rajiv. Sophie doesn’t know Nita at all. She can hardly predict the whims of such an enigma.

“When did she die?” Sophie finally asks, trying to decipher the first time Nita was out of Sophie’s life due to death rather than choice.

Dao leans back and closes her eyes, concentrating hard on the answer. “I think it was about seventeen or eighteen years ago. Vijay was four years old at the time, maybe five, if I’m remembering correctly.”

“She was still so young.” The words croak out of Sophie’s mouth, and she feels her voice wavering, the emotion of what she is hearing setting in. “I would have been only ten or eleven years old then.”

I was young enough to still need a mummy, Sophie thinks and wonders why hers hadn’t returned to her. She braces herself for what comes next. She’s relieved that her emotional state is so numb from everything else she’s heard that the new blows cannot pummel her further. She looks to Manoj, and he remains stoic, a quiet, unjudging pillar of support.

“I think she had a hard time with all of it. Being here and away from home, that is. Mathieu started off as a savior to her but quickly became a warden of sorts. She felt trapped with him but also felt like she had nowhere to go and maybe like she deserved to be in that bad place. Karma and whatnot. Still, after she got pregnant, she tried to clean up her act, but it was a hard thing to do when Mathieu always had drugs around and was high, and the baby was colicky, and sometimes she was so tired from working and caring for him that she just needed to slip into oblivion for a short while before picking it up and doing it all over again.” Dao’s eyes dampen as she recounts these memories. “She decided she was going to leave him. Leave Mathieu, that is, and go back to India. Take Vijay with her. She said she could give him a better life there. Her family could help her care for him. It all made sense to me, considering she had come to Paris to follow her art dreams and all of that had fallen by the wayside. The little she had shared about her life in India seemed a lot more glamorous than the one she’d been living in Paris. But then a few days after she told me she was heading back, she had one last bender, and it was, unfortunately, one too many. Even when she was determined to move forward, the addiction she’d developed would not let her go. She overdosed, and Vijay sought out a neighbor to help him ‘wake Maman up,’ but she was already gone at that point.” Dao wipes the tear sliding down her cheek. “I wish I could have done more. It seemed like Paris had been a prison sentence for her and she was finally getting her reprieve, only to have everything taken away from her.”

Sophie wishes she could go back in time to the point at which all she knew was that Nita had died in a car accident on her way home from caring for Ba. That perfect image she had of Nita—the woman who died in furtherance of her attempts to help others—is now shattered and replaced by this. It was the cruelest twist of fate she could have imagined. Nita had given up her life with Sophie and Rajiv for this dismal existence that Dao just described. And it had taken her years to consider returning home. Years, and another baby.