Nayana had an evening flight but was already packed and ready to leave the house as soon as the mail arrived. She was waiting for her sister’s letter to come from Beth, watching for the postman from her office window. She’d written a note to Ramesh. Another impossible task, with only the wrong words to choose from. She’d hoped to express how grateful she’d been for his love and support all these years, but it felt trite. She attempted to express how much love she still had for him and always would have. She wanted him to know that she was leaving and unsure when or if she was coming back because she loved him. If he truly didn’t understand already, he would soon. And she was so very sorry for everything—she couldn’t seem to say that enough.
In truth, she had no idea what was going to happen in India or how long she would remain, and she wasn’t convinced she’d never return to England, or even to Ramesh, if he’d have her back. But she didn’t say this because she wanted to give him a way out, in case he wanted at last to be free of her. She wrote that she had been unkind to him in ways a man who loved her so well had not deserved. She knew this would hurt him deeply, but she hoped it would make moving on easier, if that was his choice. And also because she owed him the truth for once. She admitted that she had never had a home in England, only a home in him, and said this wasn’t fair to either of them. Finally, she begged him to accept that she was gone for now and to refrain from following her; she’d broken her own heart slowly, painfully, and completely in the last year, and she needed all her strength to recover. It wasn’t a long letter, and she didn’t dare mention the baby. She hoped he would interpret its brevity as a sign of her difficulty writing it and not a lack of love.
Twice she’d run downstairs thinking she’d missed the mailman. Twice she took the lift back up. At last the mail arrived. She hurried to the lobby, forgetting the mailbox key in the windowsill. She had to ask the mailman for her mail as it was being distributed. He didn’t refuse, but he was in no hurry. He handed her each piece as it came, continuing to dole out her neighbors’ mail as well. She anxiously sought out the familiar envelope in his pile until finally he said there was nothing else. Confined again in the narrow lift, she sifted through the few pieces once more, in vain. There was still no letter from India, but there was something else for her. She tore it open and immediately knew what it was, though she had no idea how to interpret the columns and numbers. That is, she didn’t want to. Alleged father. It was so cruel. She skipped to the bottom. A percentage anyone could understand: Probability of paternity: 0%. The alleged father, Ramesh Bhatia, is excluded as the biological father.…She felt her knees buckle slightly, and she had to take hold of the handrail until the doors opened again.
Inside their flat, she gathered her things and made her way to the door, not stopping for a last look or to ensure she had everything. Of course she didn’t. But there was no reason to wait any longer. Her bag’s wheels skipped along the tile floors, heavy with a few key notebooks in case she felt like working again. She replaced the test results in the envelope, which she set beneath her own letter for Ramesh, hating herself but seeing no other way. How could she face him now, with proof? Finally he would have her full confession. She dropped her keys in the bowl on the small table and let the door lock behind her. There was a stop she had to make. One last act before she left London. She would call a taxi for Heathrow from the salon around the corner. She didn’t want to deal with steps and trains and luggage. Nayana had to brace herself against the smell of peroxide. It had been years since anyone besides Aditi had touched her hair. The only other customer was sitting under a dryer with her face hidden in Hello!
“Have you got time for a cut?” Nayana asked.
“Let me see. Have I got time?” The woman was older than Nayana, someone’s mother, maybe even grandmother. She looked around the otherwise empty waiting area, then chuckled to herself. “Yeah, love, I’ve got time. Nothing but time.”
Nayana took a seat as instructed and pulled out the stick that had contained her hair in a heavy bun at the base of her neck. It draped the back of the chair. In the mirror, she could see the woman stop in surprise where she stood, holding a smock limp in her plump hand. Nayana’s heartache renewed itself. The woman approached Nayana slowly, lifting the mass of hair, then letting it slip lightly through her fingers.
“Cut it off,” Nayana said, indicating a place just below her jawline.
The woman was about to speak, to object, but stopped herself and set to work tucking a towel into the smock’s neckline. Nayana sensed she’d understood, at least well enough not to get involved. She took careful hold of her scissors and looked at Nayana once again.
“Right, love. We’ll give you a shampoo once we cut some of this off. You ready, then?”
Ramesh loved her long hair. She wasn’t punishing him by cutting it; he may never know. But she was making it easier to let him go, cutting him loose in case that’s the way it had to be in the end. Her face appeared gray under the sharp white light. She looked beyond herself, perhaps to her sister and a former version of herself, one who might begin anew. She nodded and already felt the burden of a great weight lifted.
“I’m ready.”
At the airport gate too early, Nayana put on her headphones and was shocked once again at the feel of such short hair, as though she had lost a limb. She pretended not to listen to the conversation of the only other passengers waiting, an elderly English couple on their way to India for the first time. She imagined arriving and seeing a nephew taller than she was, with the cracking voice of a teenager. But she reminded herself that Birendra was still a boy of eight. No, he had just turned nine, she realized. She’d forgotten his birthday on top of everything else.
For once she would not be returning to India for monsoon season. Srikant and her parents had all died during the summer monsoons. And her most recent visit was only possible during her summer break from classes. Had it really been almost ten years since their parents’ passing? Nayana and Aditi had both returned to Delhi from their respective homes, then they’d traveled together by train with their parents’ commingled ashes to the Ganga to satisfy their last wish: to be sent together downstream by their daughters. It was slightly unorthodox, but so had they always been. The sisters stood up to their calves in the rusty waters of the sacred river, each with an arm wrapped around the other’s waist, free hands clasping either side of the urn. They locked eyes and emptied the ashes under the heavy rain that had soaked their hair and clothes. Nayana had still been able to see herself in Aditi then: their long hair in wet dark clusters stuck to their faces; the damp petals of their floral wreaths clumped like golden fur collars around their necks, white cotton sarees clinging to their bodies. In the memory, Nayana suddenly struggled to distinguish between herself and her sister. And then she remembered the soft swell of Aditi’s pregnant belly, through which Birendra was making himself known to the world for the first time.
It was hard for Nayana now not to associate a downpour with death. She had asked Aditi that day if she thought their parents felt abandoned. Aditi shook her head. “I think they were happy together, so happy they couldn’t last two days apart, but mostly I think they were happy for us. I have Srikant and now this little one. You have your scholarship and a promising future in London.” Nayana remembered the sense that so much was possible back then; was that the same as happiness? They’d stayed there by the river, standing in the rain, quietly remembering their parents. But without them to bind Nayana and her sister to a shared past, a place—a home—Delhi was all but lost to them in the years that followed, just a city to provide a backdrop for their memories. Still, the following evening, seated on opposite sides of their parents’ bed, with hair still damp from the rains that had followed them back to Delhi, it felt like home. They sifted through their parents’ belongings, occasionally showing each other what they’d found. Aditi lifted up a saree for Nayana to see, conjuring a shared memory that would hover there momentarily above the bed like a dream. They would each take two with them to their distant homes, north and south, but the others had no place in their futures. Under one of her father’s jackets, Nayana found a small rectangular box. The cardboard lid collapsed as she attempted to lift it. Neatly folded inside was the paisley tie they’d given him for his fortieth birthday. A small golden clip was still pinned in place. Their mother had given it to him the same day. On the clip was a single rooster in profile walking along a path that had long since lost its gold plating. The sisters summoned their father’s words that day, in unison: A special-occasion tie. “From his three hens,” Nayana added nostalgically, and then they burst into laughter that brought them to their backs and once again to tears. It had been a decade of loss for both of them, but that was not the same as a decade lost. This isn’t a visit, she thought. Keep the lanterns lit, dear sister. I’m coming home.