Tom Hanks was the first driver Jezmeen spotted at the end of the lane when they hurried out of the hotel. He was polishing his wing mirrors while bobbing his shoulders to the beat that thumped from his speakers. Jezmeen flung open the door and buckled herself into the backseat. “We need to get to Chandigarh as soon as possible,” she said.
“Your price, madam?” Tom Hanks asked, poking his head in the open window. “There is a last-minute booking fee—”
“Anything,” Jezmeen said. “Just get us there as soon as possible. I’ll give you the address in a minute.” The tattered pieces of the card were in her pocket. She took them out and began fitting them together on her lap while Tom Hanks put her bags in the trunk.
“Jezmeen, hold on,” Rajni shouted. She was hobbling along the lane and wrestling to release the wheel of one of her suitcases, which had got stuck in a gutter. Two turbaned men sitting on a low bench outside a juice stand got up to help. “Hurry, hurry,” Jezmeen said through gritted teeth as she watched them pull the suitcase free. Tom Hanks got into the driver’s seat and shot the car out of the lane like a rocket.
Jezmeen screamed, “Tom Hanks! Wait for my sister!”
“Oh, sorry,” Tom Hanks said, peering over his shoulder. “I thought we were trying to get away from her.” He pulled the car into reverse. They flew backward down the lane and arrived at Rajni’s feet. The men leaped out of the way and hollered at Tom Hanks, who apologized with a wave. “Just get in, Raj,” Jezmeen urged. Tom Hanks threw Rajni’s suitcases into the trunk, got back into the driver’s seat, and off they went.
“We didn’t even check out properly. Did you take anything from the minibar?” Rajni asked once she was buckled in.
Jezmeen didn’t answer her. She was reading the address on the card. “Restoration Road, Women’s Clinic,” she said to Tom Hanks. “Do you know where that is?”
“I’ll find it, madam, no problem. Have I mentioned that using the GPS service requires an additional fee?” The car hurtled out of the lane and onto a major road. Jezmeen gripped the sides of her seat.
“We’re trusting this guy with our lives again?” Rajni asked under her breath, and then she cleared her throat. “Tom Hanks, I know we need to get somewhere urgently but we also need to get there alive, understand?”
“Yes, madam,” Tom Hanks said. The car slowed down and Tom Hanks resisted overtaking the truck in the next lane. A cow at the back of the truck stared balefully into their window.
“Thank you,” Rajni told Tom Hanks. She turned to Jezmeen. “Now what the hell is going on?”
“Shirina’s on her way to that women’s clinic and I think I know why.”
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
“Did she tell you?”
“No,” Rajni said. “I just put it together. Her swollen fingers, the nausea, the weight gain. Honestly, I can’t believe we didn’t notice it before. Sehaj didn’t exactly deny it.”
“You talked to him?”
“I was on the phone with him just now. He didn’t seem to think Shirina’s pregnancy was any of my business, though.”
“That’s because it’s a girl, and they’re making her terminate it.”
Rajni swallowed and stared at Jezmeen. “How do you know?”
“You remember that older woman from the baths, the one who was with me and Shirina when she slipped yesterday?”
“You said she said something that freaked Shirina out.”
Jezmeen nodded. “I left my phone in the baths this morning, so I went back to get it. She was there. She saw me and said, ‘Tell your sister she should really be careful. When I was expecting my third child, I slipped in the kitchen and they had to bring the midwife over right away because they thought I was going to give birth right there.’ I said to her, ‘My sister isn’t pregnant,’ and she just gave me this look like I was completely daft. I said, ‘She can’t be pregnant. She would have told us.’ The woman said, ‘Must be a girl, then.’ So then I asked her what she meant by that, and she sort of waved me off like she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It only took me a moment after that, and then I wondered how the hell I didn’t see it before.”
“I didn’t figure it out either,” Rajni said. “And I spent years looking for every little sign of pregnancy in my own body when we were trying for another baby. I guess I just thought that if she was pregnant, she’d be shouting it from the rooftops like I would have wanted to.”
All of Shirina’s strange behavior made sense. All those moments during the trip: Shirina avoiding the little girl on the train, which was weird because she was usually so nice to children. That stricken look on her face as well, when Jezmeen mentioned the statistic about female feticide in the villages. Then there was that strange outburst after the awakening ceremony. “Do you think she wanted to talk about it to us at any point?” Jezmeen wondered aloud.
“She did ask me if Mum regretted having daughters,” Rajni said. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to say. All those years of wanting another child, sometimes I’d break down and confide about it to Mum and she’d flippantly say things like ‘Just be thankful—the next one could have been a daughter.’ Or, if I said we wanted to try again, she’d say, ‘Make sure you don’t have a girl.’ As if I could control the outcome! It frustrated me, but Shirina must have grown up hearing things like that and thought her whole existence was a burden.”
Jezmeen sighed. “I wish we’d paid more attention. We spent so much of this trip wondering if something was up with Shirina but not actually addressing it with her.”
“I thought everything was fine,” Rajni admitted. “She was just being Shirina—uninvolved with us and wholly devoted to her in-laws.”
A thicket of bushes was coming up, and in the far distance, a cluster of blocky new houses—an extended family building their empire, Jezmeen thought. “What was it that bothered Mum so much about us being daughters, though?” she asked. “She couldn’t inherit her father’s land, but that’s kind of irrelevant for us, isn’t it? It’s not like we were denied any land. Dad didn’t have any, and the rules about inheriting land were different when she was young anyway.”
The question made Rajni shift uncomfortably in her seat. She looked out the window, suddenly disinterested in the conversation. Jezmeen followed her gaze. In a clearing between the straggly trees on the edge of the road, there were scattered patches of sunburned farmland. Plows and livestock dotted the horizon. The hottest afternoon hours were approaching, and even though they were speeding through the Punjab countryside, Jezmeen had a sense of everything slowing down.
“Madam, the air-conditioning is all right?” Tom Hanks called. Before waiting for an answer, he turned it on full blast. Air burst from the vents and scattered Jezmeen’s cards onto the floor. Rajni was too distracted by her thoughts to notice.
What was she being so secretive about? Jezmeen picked up the pieces of the card and stacked them together. It seemed she understood very little about her sisters, even though the purpose of this journey was to bring them together. She couldn’t remember a recent time when she and Shirina banded together the way they used to when they were little. Even their trip to the market in Delhi together had the feeling of two old friends reluctantly reacquainting.
“You know, I never told anybody this,” Jezmeen said. The memory, even though it happened so long ago, still hurt to recall, but if Jezmeen wanted the truth from her sisters, she had to start with herself. “When I was about eight and Shirina was five, there was one Saturday that we really wanted to go to the park. You were out at some university thing. It was the first warm and lovely day of the year, and we had this idea that we’d have a picnic. I think I’d seen a family on television sitting on a checked blanket and eating baguettes and I thought it looked very sophisticated. We kept pestering Mum to take us, and she was tired. She had just started commuting to that hotel housekeeping job in Central London, and she was always exhausted when she got home. So I came up with the idea to go by ourselves. We took a couple of slices of bread from the pantry, and the two spotted bananas on the fruit bowl, and we sneaked out the back door. It didn’t last very long—the woman who worked at the newsagent’s noticed us wandering around on the main road and she marched us back home. Mum’s reaction was so extreme, though.”
“What did she do?” Rajni asked.
“She didn’t speak to us for the rest of the day. Like she literally didn’t acknowledge us—no food, nothing. We were gone for all of twenty minutes, but something about us leaving like that really upset her. She didn’t even seem angry. It was more like she just . . . gave up on us.”
“How did you manage to eat, then?” Jezmeen noticed that Rajni was listening closely. Her hands were clasped tightly together.
“We didn’t. We waited for ages, and searched the fridge but we didn’t know the first thing about cooking, so we couldn’t eat whatever was in there. Eventually Auntie Roopi came around to hand us some mail that had been delivered to her place by accident,” Jezmeen said. “We told her Mum was sick, and we needed something to eat. She didn’t ask any questions but she had a quick chat with Mum and offered to have us over for lunch. She said she had ordered fish ’n’ chips because her daughter was going to have friends over, but she’d decided to go to a movie or something, so there was extra. Mum just went straight back to bed.” Jezmeen sighed. “Mum had other breakdowns like that, where she suddenly just switched off and didn’t want to deal with us. Anytime Shirina and I got into trouble, it was because of some scheme that I had cooked up. Sometimes she told you what we had done, and then you’d lay into us as well. After a while, Shirina started distancing herself from me and just focusing on being a good daughter so Mum wouldn’t neglect her anymore.”
Jezmeen shut her eyes. The truth had been bubbling beneath the surface for a long time, and it was finally coming out. “It was because of me that Shirina wanted to get out of our home, and distance herself from all of that tension. She was advertising for a new family when she put her profile up on the matrimonial site. It’s my fault she ran off to Australia and . . .” She blinked back tears. “I should be saying all of this to Shirina.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Rajni said. “Listen—”
“I know, you’ll say she made her own choices,” Jezmeen said. “But I could have looked out for her more. I spent the past decade focusing so much on my acting career that I completely forgot about my sister. No wonder Mum probably thought having daughters was a burden.”
“For the record, having children is difficult,” Rajni said.
“I didn’t exactly make it easy. It was my fault that Shirina grew up hearing Mum saying things like that.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“It was.”
Rajni shook her head. “No, it wasn’t. Jezmeen, listen. The way Mum felt about having daughters? That was because of me.”