Chapter 5: Rajan

EELA — 1944–1945

The plan was Billu's. Of course it was.

She presented it three days after Rajesh's death, sitting cross-legged on Eela's bed with a cup of chai balanced on her knee and an expression of such calm authority that Eela — who had not eaten in two days, who had not slept more than an hour at a stretch, who had cried so much that her eyes felt like they had been scoured with sand — found herself listening with the docility of a patient receiving a diagnosis.

'You can't go home,' Billu said. 'Your parents will make you give the child up or worse. You can't stay here — they'll discharge you the moment you start showing, which gives us four months at most. You need somewhere to go and someone to help you, and that someone is me.'

'Billu—'

'Shut up and listen. Tarun has a posting coming up — he's being transferred to the signals unit in Lonavala. There's a cottage attached to the quarters. I'll tell him I want to move with him. You'll come with us. We'll say you've been discharged on medical grounds — which, technically, you will be — and that you're recuperating with friends. No one will question it. People disappear all the time in this war. It's practically encouraged.'

Tarun. Eela had almost forgotten about Tarun.

Flight Lieutenant Tarun Deshpande was Billu's — the word she used was 'arrangement.' He was a decent, amiable man from a good Pune family, six years older than Billu, who had been courting her with a persistence that bordered on the devotional since their posting together at Lohegaon. He was kind. He was solid. He laughed at Billu's jokes and tolerated her moods and looked at her with the expression of a man who understood that the woman he loved was more complicated than he would ever fully comprehend and had decided that this was acceptable. Billu did not love Tarun. She had told Eela this directly, without apology, one evening in the mess when Tarun was on leave and the conversation had turned, as it sometimes did between women in wartime, to the question of what came after.

'He's a good man,' Billu had said. 'I'll marry him eventually. He'll give me a stable life and I'll give him children and we'll be perfectly content. It's not what I want, but it's what's available, and I've learned to work with what's available.'

At the time, Eela had found this pragmatism admirable. Now, hearing Billu deploy it in service of her crisis, she felt something else — gratitude so intense it was almost indistinguishable from terror. Billu was offering to rearrange her life — to accelerate a marriage she had planned to delay, to move to a town she had no connection to, to take on the burden of another woman's secret — and she was offering it as casually as she might offer a cigarette.

'Why?' Eela asked.

Billu looked at her. The calculation was gone from her eyes. What remained was something raw, something Eela had only glimpsed before in flashes — the unguarded centre of a woman who had built her entire personality around control. 'Because you're the best person I know,' she said. 'And because I won't let this war take everything from you.'

*

The cottage in Lonavala was small, damp, and surrounded by mist.

It sat at the edge of a military compound on a hill above the town, looking out over a valley that was, for most of the monsoon, invisible behind curtains of rain and cloud. The walls were whitewashed and streaked with green where the moisture had encouraged moss to colonise. The roof leaked in three places. The kitchen had a wood stove that smoked when the wind blew from the east, which was most of the time. It was, by any reasonable standard, a miserable place to bring a child into the world.

Eela loved it.

She loved the isolation — the way the mist wrapped around the cottage like a shawl, muffling the sounds of the compound and creating a world that contained only herself, Billu, the occasional visit from Tarun, and the growing presence inside her that she had begun, tentatively, to address. Not by name — she was superstitious about that, or perhaps just afraid — but by touch. She would lie in bed in the early morning, before the mist lifted, and place both hands on her stomach and feel the taut roundness of it, the warmth of her own skin stretched over the impossible fact of another life, and she would whisper: I'm here. I'm not going anywhere.

She loved the routine. Billu, who had married Tarun in a quiet ceremony at the Pune registrar's office the week before they moved, ran the household with military efficiency. Meals were at fixed times. Walks were scheduled. The midwife — a local Marathi woman named Sakubai who had delivered half the babies in Lonavala and regarded the concept of a hospital birth with open contempt — visited every Thursday. Billu attended every appointment, asked every question, recorded every answer in a notebook that she kept in the kitchen drawer alongside Eela's ration book and Tarun's service records.

'You're more thorough than Captain Mehta,' Eela said, watching Billu note down the baby's estimated weight and position.

'Captain Mehta didn't have a personal stake. I do.'

Tarun was posted away more often than he was present — the signals unit sent him across the country, sometimes for weeks at a time — and in his absence, the cottage became a world of two women. They cooked together — Billu was a capable but impatient cook, the kind who considered recipes suggestions rather than instructions — and they walked together, slowly, along the ridge above the valley, and they read to each other in the evenings from books that Lata sent in packages from Mahabaleshwar. Wuthering Heights was among them.

'Heathcliff is a monster,' said Billu, after the first reading.

'Heathcliff is in love.'

'Same thing, frequently. But I take your point — there's something magnificent about a love that destroys everything it touches. As long as you're watching from a safe distance.'

'You don't believe in that kind of love?'

Billu was quiet for a moment. The fire crackled in the stove. Outside, the rain had settled into the steady, soaking downpour that would continue, with minor variations, for the next three months. When she spoke, her voice was different — lower, more careful, stripped of the performative confidence that was her default register. 'I believe in it completely. That's why I'm afraid of it.'

Eela reached across the table and placed her hand over Billu's. The skin was warm. The bones beneath were fine and sharp. She felt Billu's fingers curl around hers — not the fierce anchoring grip of the billet, but something gentler, something that asked rather than commanded.

They stayed like that for a long time, listening to the rain.

*

Rajan was born on March 14th, 1944, at four in the morning, in the cottage bedroom, with Sakubai's hands guiding him into the world and Billu's hands gripping Eela's.

The labour was long — fourteen hours — and by the end, Eela was so exhausted that the pain had become abstract, a phenomenon she was observing rather than experiencing, as though her body had decided to conduct this final, brutal negotiation without consulting her mind. Sakubai was calm throughout. She moved around the bed with the unhurried competence of a woman who had done this hundreds of times and whose principal emotion was not concern but irritation at the baby's reluctance to cooperate.

'He's taking his time,' she said, pressing her hands against Eela's abdomen. 'Stubborn. Like his mother, I expect.'

'Like his father,' Eela gasped. 'His father was — extraordinarily — stubborn —'

'Save your breath for pushing, beti. You'll need it.'

Billu did not leave the room. She sat at the head of the bed, behind Eela, supporting her back, whispering encouragements that Eela could not always hear but could always feel — the vibration of Billu's voice through her ribcage, the warmth of her breath against Eela's ear, the steady pressure of her hands that said, without words: I am here. Push. I am here.

And then — the sound. The first sound. Not a cry but a gasp, a gulping intake of air that was so urgent and so alive that it silenced every other sound in the room — the wind, the rain, Sakubai's murmured instructions, Billu's breathing. Eela heard her son's first breath and felt the world reorganise itself around a new centre of gravity.

Sakubai placed him on Eela's chest. He was small, slippery, impossibly warm. His face was crumpled and red and his eyes were closed and his hands — tiny, perfect, each finger a separate miracle — were clenched into fists. He smelled of blood and vernix and something else, something that had no name, something that Eela would spend the rest of her life trying to describe and never quite capturing: the smell of newness. The smell of a person who had not yet been touched by the world.

'Hello,' she said. 'Hello, my love.'

She looked up at Billu. Billu was crying. In the year Eela had known her, she had never seen Billu cry — not when the casualties came in, not when her mother's letters arrived with their weekly laments, not when news of Rajesh's death had swept through the billet. But now, tears were streaming down her face with the uncontrolled abandon of a woman who had been holding something in for a very long time and could not hold it any longer.

'He's beautiful,' Billu said. Her voice cracked. 'Oh, Eela. He's so beautiful.'

They named him Rajan. Eela chose the name — close to Rajesh, close enough to carry his father's presence without announcing it. The birth was not registered. Sakubai, who had seen enough wartime births to understand the mechanics of discretion, recorded nothing. In the eyes of the world, Rajan did not exist.

In the eyes of his mother, he was everything.

*

The first months were a delirium of milk and sleep and the particular chaos of a newborn who seemed to regard the concept of a schedule with the same contempt that Sakubai reserved for hospitals. Rajan fed constantly, slept erratically, cried with a volume that seemed impossible for a creature so small, and produced smells that caused Billu — who had organised the household with such precision — to remark that she was beginning to understand why some species ate their young.

'You don't mean that,' said Eela, who was so tired she could barely focus.

'I absolutely do. Yesterday, I cleaned what I sincerely hope was mashed banana off the ceiling. The ceiling, Eela. He's seven weeks old. How does a seven-week-old get food on the ceiling?'

But Billu was besotted. She held Rajan with a tenderness that contradicted every sharp word. She sang to him — not lullabies but film songs, the same ones she used to hum through the wall at Lohegaon, and Rajan, who had been hearing Billu's voice since before he was born, would quiet instantly, his dark eyes fixed on her face with the concentrated attention of someone listening to something very important.

Tarun, when he was home, was gentle with the baby and awkward with the situation. He knew the truth — Billu had told him everything, and he had accepted it with the quiet fortitude of a man who had married a woman he loved on the understanding that love came with conditions — but the reality of another man's child in his cottage was more complicated than the abstract principle of helping a friend. He held Rajan carefully, as though the baby were made of glass. He changed nappies with a stoic determination that suggested he was completing a military exercise. And once, when Eela came into the kitchen at midnight to warm a bottle, she found Tarun sitting at the table with Rajan in his arms, the baby asleep against his chest, and Tarun was looking down at him with an expression so full of bewildered love that Eela had to turn away.

'I think,' Tarun said quietly, not looking up, 'that I would like to be his father. If you'll let me.'

The words hung in the dark kitchen. The stove was cold. The clock on the wall ticked. Outside, a jackal cried — that thin, rising note that Eela would hear for the rest of her life and always associate with this moment, with this kitchen, with the sound of a good man offering to love a child that was not his.

'You're very kind, Tarun,' she said.

'It's not kindness. I love him. I didn't expect to, but I do.'

She believed him. That was the problem.

*

She went home to Pune in August, leaving Rajan with Billu and Tarun. The plan — Billu's plan, always Billu's plan — was to tell her parents that she had been discharged on medical grounds and was recovering with friends. She would not mention the baby. She would spend a week at home, establish her story, and return. In the meantime, Billu and Tarun would move to their next posting with Rajan officially registered as their son.

It was supposed to be temporary. A few months. A year at most. Until the war ended and the world returned to normal and Eela could find a way to explain to her parents that she had a son, that the father was dead, and that the child had been living with friends while she recovered. It was a reasonable plan. Billu had thought of everything.

Except that Eela could not tell her parents. She sat at the dining table in the old house in Pune, across from her mother and father, and the words would not come. Her mother — small, precise, a woman who ironed handkerchiefs and arranged flowers with the same meticulous attention — was talking about the garden. Her father — tall, kind, preoccupied with the business — was reading the newspaper. They were so happy to have her home. They asked no difficult questions. They accepted her story about the medical discharge without suspicion because they trusted her, and because they loved her, and because it had never occurred to them that their daughter might lie.

She opened her mouth to speak. She closed it. She opened it again. Nothing came.

By the end of the week, she had said nothing.

By the end of the month, she had agreed — in a letter to Billu that she wrote and rewrote seven times — that the arrangement should continue. Just for a while longer. Just until things settled.

The arrangement lasted twelve years.

*

She visited every month, then every two months, then every quarter. The intervals widened not because she loved Rajan less but because each visit was an exquisite agony — the joy of holding him, smelling his hair, feeling his small body press against hers, followed by the devastation of leaving, the long train journey back to Pune with empty arms and a heart that felt like it had been removed and placed in a jar.

Rajan called Billu "Amma." He called Tarun "Appa." He called Eela "Eela Aunty" — a designation that Billu had chosen with what Eela wanted to believe was sensitivity and feared was strategy. He was a beautiful child. He had Rajesh's dark eyes and Eela's blue — an impossible combination that produced irises of a deep, shifting colour that changed with the light. He was quiet and serious and given to long periods of concentration during which he would sit with a book or a toy and examine it with the intensity of a scientist studying a specimen.

'He's like you,' said Billu, watching him build a tower of wooden blocks with architectural precision. 'He thinks before he acts. It's quite unnerving in a four-year-old.'

'He's like Rajesh,' said Eela. 'Rajesh thought before he acted too.'

Something crossed Billu's face — not jealousy, not exactly, but something adjacent to it. A tightening. A withdrawal. 'I suppose he was,' she said, and the conversation moved on.

The visits were the best and worst days of Eela's life. She would arrive at the house — they had moved from Lonavala to a larger place in Kothrud — and Rajan would run to her, arms outstretched, shouting Eela Aunty, Eela Aunty, and she would scoop him up and press her face into his hair and breathe him in — soap and grass and the particular sweetness of a child's scalp that smelled like nothing else on earth — and she would think: this is enough. This is enough. This has to be enough.

It was never enough.