One Hundred Shades of White by Preethi Nair

Author:Preethi Nair [Nair, Preethi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007438198
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2003-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

The whole night I lay awake thinking what I would do and the next day I decided to go to the hotel and see him. They were staying at Lancaster Gate, just around the corner from where he first brought us, nine years ago. Five hard years I fought, fought to make life better; anything could have happened to us. What kind of a man did that to his family? A man with no conscience, bereft of any feeling. I would move if I had to, taking my children with me, before letting him catch a glimpse of them.

I left early in the morning. Ravi was worried about me, but I said there was something that I urgently needed to sort out. Sitting on the tube, I was shaking, tears rolled down my face as I thought about the day I left my mother, the day he made me leave her, the afternoon I told my children he had died, Satchin sobbing, Maya lying crying on the roadside, endless hours at the factory whilst they sat and waited for me. The couple sitting opposite me looked embarrassed and began talking to each other. I thought I was doing my very best for my children and if I had to make that awful decision all over again, I would do what I did back then.

I wiped my tears as I arrived at the hotel and called up his room. He was expecting me, he said, and it would be better if I came up. He opened the door and my fists lunged at him with odious rage. He grabbed them. ‘Why?’ I screamed. He had no answer. ‘Why?’ I shouted again.

He said nothing; he did not even attempt to make pathetic excuses. I sat on the bed and began to sob hysterically. He came to touch me and I flung his hand away. ‘Don’t you ever touch me.’

‘You cannot see the children,’ I cried. ‘They think you are dead and I wish you were. It has taken us years to find security. They think of Ravi as their father and you cannot take that away from them. Promise me. Promise me!’ I screamed.

‘I cannot simply walk away from them,’ he answered.

‘You can’t do what?’ I shouted. ‘You left them, left them with nothing.’

‘You don’t understand, Nalini, it was difficult, you were difficult.’

I spat at him.

I asked him what it would take for him to disappear and promise never to come back.

Fifty thousand pounds. I bought a promise for fifty thousand pounds. Money that I could only raise by selling my shop, the business, everything we had worked for, dreamt about. He left that evening with an assurance that I would wire the money into his account as soon as I had it. If it wasn’t done within the month, he would return, this time to see the children.

I am ashamed to say it, but I sold myself twice to him, twice he robbed me of my dreams. We are tested on the things we most fear and I failed miserably.

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