All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

Author:Anuradha Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

17

MY FATHER CAME back on a muggy day several months after he had left. Sometime before his arrival, he had sent a telegram saying only, Arriving Soon. Clean Rooms. Unsure which rooms he meant, Ram Saran spent a week spring-cleaning both the outbuilding and my parents’ old bedroom. He chased out lizards petrified high on the walls, put brooms through the glassy webs of spiders, dusted, mopped, polished, then put everything back as it had been and locked up.

The entire household came out when my father appeared at the door and shouted, “Anybody there?” I sprang out of the broken-down carriage in the back garden where I had been saving people from an exploding volcano with Sampih, a boy my mother often wrote about. Rikki bounded towards the gate, her tail a blur of joy. Dada was at the clinic, but Golak, Ram Saran, and Banno Didi and two of her children—all hurried out on hearing the sound of his voice.

I had already reached the front garden and seen what they had not. My father was not alone. There was a woman with him.

“Myshkin, come here, I am back.” My father held his arms out in a way he never used to. He looked awkward, like a picture-book scarecrow in a field with a carrot smile on his face.

The woman was holding a toddler. She kept rocking her whole body and crooning to it in a language I did not understand. The toddler whimpered, then wailed, sounding like the cats that fought at night in a corner of our garden. I stayed where I was. I could not bring myself to go towards my father, it felt as if my feet had grown roots and would never move again.

“Myshkin?” he called again. “Come, let me see . . . you’re taller.”

He advanced towards me and I stepped back, as shy as if he were a stranger. He put his head next to mine and an arm around me for a clumsy embrace. We were both stiff as tree branches. The bag on his shoulder fell to the ground when he bent towards me. I pulled away. He was gaunt, his hair was growing back from being shaven, he had a straggly beard, he smelled of old sweat. He did not feel like my father at all.

Noticing the gaping faces of Banno Didi and the others, he said, “This is Lipi, my wife. And her daughter, Ilavati. We will call her Ila, now she is my daughter too.” Before he could say anything more, Ram Saran began to shuffle off and then broke into a run saying something too incoherent for us to understand.

Dada came back from the clinic at a pace much slower than Ram Saran’s and found my father going through the house, remarking on this and that, the woman and her baby in the outbuilding. I stood at the edge of the kitchen courtyard, able neither to go any closer to the outbuilding nor to stop staring at it.

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