“Women athletes compete in the Olympics after childbirth,” Shoban said.
“That’s a great idea,” their mother-in-law said. “You have to find something to keep yourself busy. The commissioner of the Board of Control for Cricket is a cousin. You focus on your recovery right now. I’ll call on him.”
“I still want a divorce.” Shoban had no idea why she had waited so long to say it, but seeing her baby’s face had made her resolve stronger. She never wanted to see Bram again. Oddly enough, she couldn’t let herself think about Omar either. Missing him was a pain that sharpened all the things that hurt.
He hadn’t made any contact with her. She had no idea how much he knew and what betrayal he believed her capable of. Shoban was just too exhausted to sort through any of it.
One thing she did know: the idea of not having Mina and Ma-saheb in her life made her want to roll up in a ball and never get up. Given that her hands were full of baby, that was not an option.
Her mother-in-law picked up Ashna, who immediately grabbed at her aji’s pearls and spat up on her pristine white Chanderi sari. “We’ll talk about all that later. When you’re strong enough,” Ma-saheb didn’t bother to wipe the spit-up as she gurgled at her granddaughter with smitten eyes. “From now on only what you want will happen, beta.” Ma-saheb always knew exactly what Shoban needed to hear.
It was easy to assign manipulation to her actions, but Shoban had to believe in something and she believed that these women understood, and that their love was her only chance.
Shoban settled back into the palace. She told herself it was temporary. But it was the best place for Ashna. There were nurses on staff, and a bright and sunny nursery with the most beautiful carved rosewood cradle. Not that Shoban could let her baby sleep anywhere but in her bed, where Shoban could roll over on her side and nurse her when she woke in the middle of the night.
“No matter what happens, you’re never getting rid of me,” Mina said as they both lay on Shoban’s bed with Ashna between them and the quilted Kashida canopy bright above them.
Shoban had never gone back to Bram’s room. A new suite of rooms had been made up for her in a different part of the palace after her wedding night. Oddly, Shoban felt more at home in her rooms here than she had felt anywhere else in her life.
Maybe because Ma-saheb had kept her safe and sent her son away without lobbing one single doubt or accusation in Shoban’s direction.
Maybe because she and Mina had found each other here.
“If something happens to me, you’ll take care of her, right?” Shoban asked Mina, voicing a worry that had been eating away at her.
“I’ll take care of her even if nothing happens to you. Isn’t that right, Ashi-pishi? You’re your Kaki’s baby girl, aren’t you?” Mina blew into Ashna’s belly and she gurgled around a smile. Her first smile. The two women sat up, awed beyond words, and tried to get her to do it again. She complied, proving definitively that she was ticklish and not gassy, and consequently the most perfect baby on earth.
When Ashna was three months old, Shoban started playing cricket again. Until Ashna was two, Bram stayed out of their lives. His mother made sure he went from rehab in Switzerland to Paris to work with a cousin who ran a chain of restaurants in Europe. He had made his mother promise that he could come home if he stayed clean for two years.
By the time he came home Shobi had already made her way onto the national team. Women’s cricket was entirely ignored in a country obsessed with cricket, but that only made the flame that had always flickered inside Shobi grow into an inferno. The women on her team each came from struggle. They swallowed the neglect of their passion because it gave them power, even though no one bothered to acknowledge it.
Shoban learned their stories, the battles they fought to reject the expectations of their families. Expectations that they be demure and feminine in preassigned ways, that they might play their beloved sport only if they returned after to the kitchens and bedrooms, mothers and daughters-in-law and wives. The more Shoban encountered the stories of her teammates, the fiercer the monster inside her grew until a woman she barely recognized emerged from her.
Shining Shobi. It was the name her teammates gave her, because she never tired of pushing them to fight, to win, and to claim the power of their wins to fight on and off the field.
When the opening batsman (yes, that’s what she was called even though she was a woman) showed up at Shobi’s door one day, beaten by her father because she refused to comply with some directive of his, Shobi learned that the Raje name was the sharpest weapon she could wield. One phone call to the commissioner of police, and the dynamics of power shifted. Direct access to media, access to safe houses and charities the family ran, the ear of celebrities and influencers: it all rolled drop by drop into a wave of seismic force.
Suddenly, right at Shobi’s fingertips was the power to change things, to not bend, and it took root inside her, fast and strong. Or it simply watered the seed that had always been within her. Before she knew it, she became Shining Shobi, every iota of fear inside her burned away as though it had never existed, and one too many people looked to her for strength.
When Bram returned, with the belief that his short banishment had been sufficient penance, all Shobi could do was laugh. He was full of apologies, as though remorse were all it took to erase evil. A great reset switch that she would be complicit in flipping over her dead body. But she would not give up her new life either. They would have separate lives. The only thing shared between them would be Ashna, because the simple acts of hugging her and spinning her in the air had been enough for Bram to win their daughter’s love. Shobi had always sworn that Ashna would make her own choices no matter how young, that she would hone her own spirit as she wished.
Loving her father was Ashna’s right, and Shobi couldn’t snatch that from her even as Bram trapped them in a power struggle. As Shobi’s popularity in the media grew, Bram found new and increasingly exasperating ways to humiliate himself publicly. The more the family tried to curb him, the more creative he became in his wildness. Until finally, on a hunting trip, he shot a blackbuck, an endangered antelope, one of earth’s most majestic creatures. It was a repeat offense that came with a jail sentence, and not just a fine like the first time. A fine that would’ve crippled anyone not born with a diamond-encrusted spoon in his ungrateful mouth.
A weird sort of thing had happened in the two years when Bram was gone. Shobi had developed an internalized mechanism to shut him out. Maybe her subconscious knew that it was the only way to achieve everything she wanted to achieve without letting him take that away from her.
The more she shut him out, the less he was able to do the same. The numbness toward Bram, combined with the fire her work gave her, might have worked had it not caused the collateral damage that Shobi didn’t quite acknowledge until it was too late. Her Ashna.
Whenever Shobi’s work conflicted with something Ashna needed—unable to demand it because that wasn’t her—Shobi told herself she would have time to fix it. But Bram sought out the gaps between Shoban’s shrinking time and Ashna and stole her affection away. When other children had only the natural distance between generations to chart, to Ashna’s lot fell navigating the grotesqueness between her parents.