Read Online A Sister's Promise by Renita D'Silva - Free Book Online

school.’ Her voice softens suddenly, ‘I know this is all very confusing, especially after the evening you’ve had. I’m . . . I’m so sorry for hitting you.’ She hesitates and looks at him as if to say more, but then she rubs at her eyes wearily. ‘Try and get some sleep. Good night.’
    She leaves the room, closing the door softly behind her.
    I hate you, he thinks. A girl you barely know is ill halfway across the world and you are prepared to drag me over there, blithely making the decision for both of us, callously usurping my life without a thought as to how I might feel, what I might want, not caring that I’m leaving my life and everything I know, all that is familiar, behind.
    A picture forms in his mind of Ellie mouthing, ‘Hi’ through the bus window, and gesturing ‘I heart you’. Ellie—the one good thing in his life at the moment.
    It is instantly chased away by another wave of loathing toward his mother.
    I want to go to school tomorrow, see if Ellie meant what she said, not come with you to a country I don’t know and never meant to visit. And all this upheaval to travel to the other side of the globe, to visit a hospital of all places . . . and yet, when I was ill, you didn’t even stay. You didn’t stay. How can I forgive you?
    Sleep, so desperately craved just minutes ago, eludes him. India—the country he’s always hated, because it took his father from him. A provocative country full of surprises, now extending the consolation prize of aunt and cousin, in return for snatching his father. India, now showing him a different side to his mother. His mother, who has refused to give him anything of herself—except material things, certainly nothing like the love he has so craved—is now preparing to travel five-thousand miles to the hospital bedside of an unknown niece, jumping to obey the summons of an unknown sister and in doing so, uprooting his life and hers. His mother, who has always been a closed book, is now marginally opening and promising pages full of secrets. What more will he find? And does he really want to?
    Raj pulls the duvet over his head the way he did as a child. Breathing in the familiar smell of his sweat, alcohol fumes and stale cigarette smoke, he is assailed by new fears, clandestine worries and a vulnerability that he only unmasks privately, in the fusty dark.

KUSHI
THE BITTER TANG OF MEDICINE AND MALAISE
    I am trapped, I cannot move. My hands and upper body feel trussed like the mutton carcasses suspended in Abdul’s meat shack in Dhoompur. I cannot feel my legs. There’s something sitting on my chest, seizing it in a stranglehold.
    Where am I?
    I feel tiredness like an ache deep in my bones, a weariness so heavy it weighs down my eyelids. There is a harsh taste of nails in my mouth as if I have swallowed whole, one of the tumbledown rust buckets that pass for buses in Bhoomihalli.
    When the rush of blood whooshing in my ears dies down, I make out other sounds. The clatter of trolleys, the beep of machines, the smell of anaesthetic, the humming of electricity, sobs and moans and agonised entreaties.
    The bitter tang of medicine and malaise.
    I am in hospital.
    Why?
    Something scratches at the edges of memory, elusive, fluttering. I drag my sore eyes open, resisting an intense urge to close them immediately. The first thing I see is the framework of ugly apparatus surrounding me, contraptions holding me in place like the yoke on a bullock’s back. No wonder I feel imprisoned.
    My eyelids heavy, I move my throbbing eyes past the machinery hemming me in. Beside my bed, a chair and folded into it, is my ma, clutching a sheaf of papers, her mouth open, her eyes closed. Streaky grey hair escapes her bun. She looks as if she has aged ten years since I saw her last.
    I obey my sinking eyelids and give in to the exhaustion that holds my body captive. I close my eyes.
    Is this a dream? A strange, disorientating nightmare?
    I could open my mouth and ask Ma but what if no