Mina sat down beside her and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. She’s stronger than we think. At least now you can put the lies behind you.”
Chapter Thirty
Mina’s arm was wrapped around Shoban and she was rubbing her shoulder. The touch made Shoban’s stomach churn even as it made her feel grounded again.
Rage roiled in her chest, pressing out against her ribs, a continuous state for her now. It had been three months since Bram had shoved himself into his room, into his marital bed, and into his wife’s body.
Thinking about it like that, from a distance, was the only way Shoban could bear to live in her skin, and to not put a bullet through Bram’s brain.
I was drunk. I don’t remember anything. She’s lying.
His excuses had been endless.
But she’s my wife.
Finally, that last one, his truth.
Shoban had screamed but he had slapped a hand across her mouth, the pads of his fingers pushing up against her nose, cutting off her breath, and torn through her underwear and her flesh.
Jumping off the couch, Shoban paced the clinic’s waiting room as Mina watched her, eyes filled with the wretched guilt that had become permanently lodged there.
Shoban would not have made it through these three months without Mina.
Mina had found her on the palace cliffs. She’d been sitting on the rocks and staring at the ocean the morning after, bruised everywhere, but with only the bruise that split her lip visible to the world.
Shoban had pushed herself out from under Bram after he passed out on top of her. She’d taken herself to the shower and washed off the blood but hadn’t been able to wash off the violation, no matter how scalding the water. Pulling on a white kurta over jeans, she had walked out of the palace and to the cliffs as the sun started to break the horizon.
She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there when Mina found her on her morning run. On the night of the wedding, sometime after Shobi had left Mina outside the balcony, Mina and Shree had put a heavily drunk Bram in one of the rooms in their suite, where they had believed he had fallen into an inebriated stupor. How Bram had let himself out of there and made it into Shoban’s room, no one seemed to know.
Mina had apologized and apologized, but it wasn’t her fault.
When Mina and Ma-saheb asked Shobi what she wanted to do, all she could think was I want to put a bullet in his head.
She couldn’t remember if she had said the words out loud, but the intense full-bodied numbness that she couldn’t shake off had been both a blessing and a curse.
Pressing charges wasn’t an option. Shoban had no witnesses, and no judge would hear a marital rape case. Bram had been sent off to a rehab facility in Switzerland. A banishment, a peace offering, a cover-up, Shoban wasn’t sure which.
Mina had let Shree and Ma-saheb return to California, to her three children, without her. She refused to leave Shoban’s side, sitting with her day and night as Shoban said nothing. All Shoban could get herself to do all day was practice cricket at the palace pitch. Run and toss. Run and toss. Over and over and over. With Mina sitting cross-legged on the grass watching her.
The numbness hadn’t turned to rage until Shoban had fainted one afternoon while running down the wicket, the sun turning her skin clammy where her hairline edged her forehead. Just one day before she crossed over into the second trimester, the doctor had declared Shoban pregnant.
How an act that ugly, that violent, could result in such a thing, Shoban couldn’t believe. But she and Mina had made their way to the family planning clinic in Goa where they took care of such matters with discretion. It was the very last day in the pregnancy that the doctor would perform the procedure.
Grotesque feelings so acrid she could taste them swirled inside Shoban, but she had no names for them. Her ability to decipher her own feelings seemed permanently lost. Unable to curb her restlessness, she sat down next to Mina again. Mina took her hand and resumed her stroking, which, God help her, was actually soothing.
The woman sitting across from them in the waiting room smiled at them. “A girl, ha?” she said, throwing a glance at Shoban’s stomach, a camaraderie in her voice. A demented sort of commiseration shone in her bespectacled eyes.
She was dressed in designer jeans and a silk blouse, and her hair was blown out and highlighted. “How many do you have already?” she asked, not needing an answer or even acknowledgment from Shoban and Mina. “I have two.” She widened her eyes, as though such horrors were entirely incomprehensible. “Now, until we know it’s a boy . . .” She twirled her manicured hand around the clinic, indicating the fate of her unborn girl children.
The gesture made the white walls spin around Shoban. A typhoon churned up her guts. She sprinted to the bathroom and brought up everything she had ever consumed. At least, that’s how it felt.
It was the first time she was throwing up and it would not stop. Cramps locked her belly, her lungs, her calves, her toes. Everything spasmed like bubbling hot lava, desperate to leave her body.
With a soft knock Mina came into the bathroom and bent over her, pulling her hair back as Shoban vomited again and again.
When the heaving died down, exhausting itself, they sat on the stall floor, face-to-face.
“What if it’s a girl?” Shoban said, the words scraping her throat raw. “What if it’s a girl?”
Shoban wasn’t sure if her tears came first or Mina’s. But they sat there and cried, two women who knew how unwanted they had been.
That’s when Shoban first saw her, felt her. Her baby girl. Inside her. So very beautiful. With large too-forgiving eyes, and tiny too-loving hands, and a heart that had no vileness in it. None at all. And Shoban knew with the deepest certainty that she would bring only beauty with her. A beauty without which Shoban would never heal. Never feel whole again.
Without a word, Mina took Shoban’s hand and they walked out of the clinic. Words didn’t find them again. Not in the car, not as Mina pulled the Jeep onto the beach and they walked and walked until the day turned to night.
In the months that followed, Mina returned to Woodside and Ma-saheb came back to Sripore. Then Mina came back for the delivery. The two of them taking turns to stay by Shobi’s side.
Baby Ashna came into the world exactly on her due date, screaming as though she wanted to wake the dead and just as beautiful as Shoban had imagined. A thick head of silky black hair, puffy baby eyes that stretched clean across her round face, and a mouth so pouty and determined that the sight of it made Shoban cry and cry as she pressed her to her breast.
“Let’s take her to America,” Mina said, pressing her close and unabashedly inhaling her baby smell. Her own Trisha was two. Unlike Shoban, Mina had craved and cherished being a mother. Unlike Shoban, Mina was born to be a mother.
Shoban wanted nothing to do with America. The idea of living anywhere but here in India was entirely incomprehensible to her.
“I want to go back to playing cricket,” Shoban said that first day they went back to the palace from the hospital with baby Ashna. The thought had been bubbling beneath the numbness for a while. Shoban had put off committing to the national team because she had believed she was off to Oxford; now she could see no other path for herself.
“Will they let you play now?” Mina asked.