Chapter 8: Queen B

EELA — 1946–1948

The war ended and nothing changed.

That was the cruelest part — the expectation that peace would rearrange everything, that the world would snap back into its pre-war shape like an elastic band released, and the discovery that it did not. The soldiers came home. The uniforms were folded. The ration books continued. And Eela's son was still living with another woman, calling her Amma, growing into a person she was only permitted to witness in quarterly instalments.

She returned to Pune after the disbandment of the WAC(I) and moved back into her parents' house with the careful, cheerful demeanour of a woman who had nothing to hide. Her mother noticed the change in her — 'You've grown up, Eela, you're not the same girl who left' — but attributed it to the war, which was a convenient explanation for every alteration in every person who had lived through it. Her father, preoccupied with restarting the business after the wartime disruptions, was simply glad to have her home. Vijay was still in Burma — or rather, in the chaos that Burma had become — and the family's anxiety about him provided a useful distraction from any questions about Eela's own four years of service.

She found a teaching position at a primary school in Deccan Gymkhana. The children were five and six years old — small enough to be astonished by everything, young enough to believe that the world was essentially good — and she loved them with a ferocity that surprised her. She arrived early and stayed late. She decorated the classroom with paintings and maps and a nature table that the children contributed to with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of collectors who had not yet learned to distinguish between a rare butterfly and a dead beetle. The headmistress, a formidable woman named Mrs Apte, told her she was a natural.

'You have the gift,' Mrs Apte said. 'Some people teach because they know things. You teach because you love children. There's a difference.'

Eela accepted the compliment and felt the knife of it twist inside her. She loved children. She loved one child in particular. And that child was sixty kilometres away, learning to walk in another woman's house, speaking his first words to another woman's face, reaching for another woman's hands when he stumbled.

*

She visited Rajan every two months. The journey from Pune to the house in Kothrud took an hour by bus and then twenty minutes on foot — a walk she came to know so well that she could have done it blindfolded, navigating by smell alone: the marigold vendor at the corner, the bakery that made nankhatai biscuits, the temple with its incense, the particular dusty sweetness of the lane where Billu and Tarun lived.

The house was modest — two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small garden — but Billu had imposed her personality upon it with the same relentless efficiency she brought to everything. The walls were painted in colours she had chosen herself — sage green in the sitting room, pale yellow in the kitchen. The furniture was arranged with mathematical precision. The garden was immaculate — roses, jasmine, a tulsi plant by the door that Billu tended with a devotion that bordered on the religious, though she was not, as far as Eela knew, religious about anything.

Rajan was two when he first called Billu "Amma" in Eela's presence. They were in the garden. He had fallen — a small tumble, the kind that produced more surprise than pain — and he had reached out his arms toward Billu and said the word with the absolute certainty of a child who knew exactly who his mother was. Billu had scooped him up and kissed his forehead and murmured something soothing, and Eela had watched from the garden bench and felt something inside her crack — not break, not yet, but crack, a hairline fracture in the structure she had built to contain her grief.

She said nothing. She smiled. She drank the chai that Billu brought her and ate the Shrewsbury biscuits that Billu had learned to make — Billu, who had never baked anything before Rajan, had become an accomplished baker, producing the buttery Pune specialty with a skill that Eela's own mother would have envied. She played with Rajan in the garden, building towers of wooden blocks that he knocked down with delighted shrieks, and she breathed in the smell of his hair — still that impossibly sweet child-smell, soap and grass and warmth — and she left at five o'clock and walked to the bus stop and sat on the bus and pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the window and wept.

*

It was Dolly Bhatia who planted the seed.

They had kept in touch — Eela, Dolly, Lata, and a handful of other women from the WAC(I) — through letters and occasional reunions. The first post-war reunion was in Bombay, at a hotel that had been requisitioned during the war and was now attempting, with limited success, to return to civilian standards. The carpets were threadbare. The food was institutional. But the women were magnificent — sunburned, loud, trading stories of what they had done since demobilisation with the competitive enthusiasm of athletes comparing medals.

Dolly had not changed. She was still sharp, still blonde (definitely dyed), still equipped with the particular talent for observation that made her simultaneously invaluable and dangerous. She found Eela at the bar — it was always at bars that Dolly found people, as though she understood that alcohol lowered the defences she needed to penetrate.

'You look tired, Chitale.'

'It's been a long year.'

'Teaching, isn't it? Must be exhausting. All those little runny noses and sticky fingers.' Dolly sipped her drink — gin, neat, a choice that somehow suited her. 'How's Billu's arrangement?'

The word — arrangement — landed like a slap. Eela kept her expression neutral. 'Rajan is well. He's growing beautifully.'

'I'm sure he is. Billu always did know how to look after things. People, babies, situations — she collects them. Polishes them up. Makes them hers.' Dolly's eyes were sharp over the rim of her glass. 'You do know that, don't you?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I think you do. I think you've known since Lohegaon but you won't admit it because admitting it would mean acknowledging that Billu isn't the saint you've made her into. She's using you, Eela. She's using your child to keep you attached to her. As long as she has Rajan, she has you. That's how she works. That's how she's always worked.'

The words were poison. Eela knew they were poison. She knew that Dolly's motives were suspect — Dolly had never liked Billu, had resented Billu's authority and charisma and the way she drew people into her orbit with apparently no effort — and that listening to Dolly was like drinking from a well that might be contaminated. But poison, she also knew, sometimes contained truth. That was what made it so effective.

'Dolly,' she said, with a calm she did not feel, 'you've always underestimated Billu. She didn't take Rajan from me. She saved him. She saved both of us.'

'Saved you?' Dolly's eyebrows rose. 'Is that what you call it? She married a man she doesn't love so she could play house with your baby. She moved to a town she had no connection to. She reorganised her entire life around your crisis. And you think that was selfless? Eela, darling — no one is that selfless. Billu wanted something, and she got it. The question is whether you understand what she wanted.'

Eela put down her drink and walked away. She walked out of the hotel and into the Bombay night — warm, humid, the smell of the sea mixing with the smell of frying vada pav from a street vendor — and she stood on the pavement and breathed and tried to unhear what Dolly had said.

She could not.

*

The coffee morning was Billu's idea. Once a month, the mothers from Rajan's nursery school gathered at one of their houses for coffee and conversation. Billu hosted with the effortless grace of a woman born to entertain — the coffee was always excellent, the biscuits always homemade, the house always immaculate. Eela had been invited to attend during one of her visits and had accepted because refusing would have been strange and because she wanted, desperately, to see how Rajan interacted with other children.

It was during one of these mornings that she understood what Dolly had been trying to tell her.

The mothers were sitting in the garden. Rajan was playing with two other children near the jasmine bush. One of the mothers — a pleasant woman named Sunita whose son was in Rajan's class — turned to Billu and said: 'He's the spitting image of you, Billu. Those eyes. Where does he get them?'

Billu smiled. It was the public smile — warm, modest, the smile of a woman receiving a compliment about her child. 'People say he looks like Tarun's side. The blue eyes are unusual — they run in the family, apparently.'

Eela said nothing. She sipped her coffee and looked at Rajan and felt the fracture widen. Billu had not corrected Sunita. She had not said: actually, he's not mine. She had not even deflected — she had actively claimed him, woven him into a story of genetics and family resemblance that erased Eela completely.

It was a small thing. A social convenience. A white lie told to a woman who would never know the difference and would not have cared if she did. And yet.

On the train back to Pune, Eela sat in the compartment and watched the landscape scroll past — the flat brown farmland, the occasional village, the bullock carts moving along the roads with the patient indifference of creatures that understood that hurrying was pointless. She thought about Dolly's words. She thought about Sunita's comment. She thought about the way Billu had said they run in the family with such casual assurance, as though repetition could make it true.

She thought about the way Rajan had looked at her when she left — standing in the doorway, Billu's hand on his shoulder, his blue eyes wide and solemn. He had said: 'Bye, Eela Aunty. Will you come back soon?'

Aunty.

She pressed her forehead against the window. The glass was warm from the sun. She could feel the vibration of the train through her skull, a steady, numbing pulse that almost — almost — drowned out the sound of her own thoughts.

The arrangement was no longer temporary. She had known this for some time but had refused to name it. Now, sitting on this train, with the landscape blurring past and the compartment smelling of dust and someone's tiffin — rice and dal, the universal smell of Indian travel — she named it.

I have lost my son.

Not to Billu. Not to Tarun. Not to the war or to circumstance or to the cowardice that had prevented her from telling her parents. She had lost him to love — to the simple, devastating fact that Rajan loved Billu and Tarun because they were the people who had raised him, fed him, comforted him, taught him to walk, caught him when he fell. They were his parents in every way that mattered, and she — Eela — was the woman who visited eight times a year and brought gifts and played in the garden and left.

She closed her eyes. The train rocked. The landscape disappeared.

And somewhere, in a house in Kothrud, a three-year-old boy was asking his mother — his real mother, the one who held him every day, the one who sang film songs to him at bedtime, the one whose face was the first thing he saw every morning — when Eela Aunty was coming back.

*

Keshav appeared in September.

He was a doctor — or rather, he was training to be one, a final-year student at the medical college in Pune who had been assigned to the school as part of a public health initiative. He was tall, earnest, and possessed of a kindness so transparent that it bordered on the naive. He brought vaccines and pamphlets and a smile that suggested he genuinely believed that healthcare could solve most of the world's problems.

'You're very optimistic,' Eela said, watching him explain handwashing to a group of five-year-olds who were more interested in the rubber gloves he was wearing than the public health message he was delivering.

'My mother says it's my worst quality. She thinks optimism is a form of stupidity.'

'What do you think?'

'I think optimism is a form of courage. It takes more effort to believe things will get better than to assume they won't.' He smiled. 'Also, I like the rubber gloves. They make me feel important.'

He was pleasant company. He took her to dinner — a modest restaurant near the river, where the fish was fresh and the conversation was easy. He held her chair out for her, which she found both charming and slightly ridiculous. He asked about her teaching, her family, her interests, with the genuine curiosity of a man who was not performing interest but experiencing it. He did not ask about the war. He did not ask why a woman of twenty-four, who was attractive and intelligent and employed, was not married. He treated her as though her present was sufficient, as though a person did not need a backstory to be worth knowing.

She liked him. She liked the simplicity of him — the way he occupied the world without complication, without the layered intensity that characterised her relationship with Billu. Keshav was a single note played clearly. Billu was an entire orchestra, beautiful and overwhelming and occasionally deafening.

They went on four dates. On the fourth, he kissed her goodnight outside her parents' gate — a brief, dry kiss, his lips warm against hers, his hand on her arm. She felt — what? Not the electricity of Rajesh. Not the fire. But something quieter. A warmth. A possibility.

She told Billu about Keshav in a letter. The response came by return post — unusually fast, two pages of Billu's precise handwriting, full of questions. What does he do? Where is he from? Is he kind? Does he make you laugh? And at the bottom, underlined: Be careful, Eela. You deserve someone who sees all of you. Not just the parts you choose to show.

Eela read the letter twice. The advice was sound. It was also, she realised, the advice of a woman who did not want Eela to belong to anyone else. The underlining was not emphasis. It was a warning.

She folded the letter and put it in the drawer. She would continue seeing Keshav. She would be careful. But not in the way Billu meant.