“That was sweet of you,” says Dahaba.
“See. Nothing to worry about.”
A phrase from Samuel Beckett, “a stain on silence,” springs to Bella’s mind as she thinks how best to move on.
Salif again comes to the rescue. He is adept at changing the thrust of a conversation, helping to veer it away from controversy. He says, “Let’s help put the groceries in the fridge and then let’s prepare a light lunch.”
While he puts the shopping in the fridge, Bella, happy to do so, chops onions and puts them to brown in a frying pan then begins slicing mushrooms. Something tells her that there is something else brewing — and that Salif is not the culprit, the author of whatever devilry they’re not telling her about. He is staring at his fingernails, grinning in triumphant mischief, and Dahaba, nervous and dying to say something or revisit a scene, bites hers to the quick. Salif and Dahaba are looking away from each other in a bid to avoid eye contact. Bella will give them a few minutes, and if neither tells her something, only then will she ask. She pretends that everything is okay and stirs the mushrooms and onions, then adds spinach to the pan. She turns the chicken over, poking it with a fork. She washes the salad thoroughly, making sure there is no sand in it.
To keep Salif busy, Bella asks him to please make the dressing and, to this end, hands him half a lemon, some mustard, balsamic vinegar, and oil. He gets down to business, enlisting Dahaba to crush some garlic and find the pepper grinder. They all fall silent, but Dahaba can’t seem to relax; she seems to need to say more about last night. “How dare they do it here, in our house?” she bursts out.
Bella says to Dahaba, “What is it? Tell me.”
But Dahaba won’t speak, it seems, until she receives the go-ahead from Salif. Bella plays the waiting game. Finally Salif gives his sister the signal, subtly indicating that she can go for it.
“I came upon them doing it,” Dahaba says.
Bella acts as if she doesn’t follow.
Unbidden, Dahaba continues, “The door ajar, their noise breathy, you know, and their bodies shapeless. Does that make sense to you?”
“Why did you come downstairs last night?” asks Bella.
“I was hungry,” Dahaba says.
“Did you find something you could eat?”
“I couldn’t bear the thought of eating anything after seeing them.”
“You are not making sense.”
“I was no longer hungry; I was angry and returned to my room.”
“I can’t make sense of what you are telling me.”
There is no look sadder than the look of innocence in ruins, Bella thinks, as Dahaba sits apart, sadly remembering the scene involving her mother last night.
Then Salif says to Bella, “Then she came to wake me.”
Abandoning the making of the dressing, he joins Dahaba where she is because he can’t bear the thought of his sister being so sad; in this moment, he is in a protective mood, and he caresses Dahaba’s hand reassuringly, as if saying to her that all will be well. They are in a world of their own, a world to which Bella has no access. This is the chasm in her knowledge about them, the gap in her understanding of them — the cause of her anxiety, her exhaustion.
“Did you go down to see for yourself?” asks Bella.
“Of course not,” Salif says.
“He didn’t have to,” says Dahaba.
“I know what is what,” he says.
“You do, eh?” says Bella.
“And have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge too.”
“I needed to speak of what I saw,” Dahaba says.
“I can see that,” Bella tells her.
“I felt lost.”
“I understand.”
A sudden wildness enters the look in Dahaba’s eyes. And she bursts out, “How dare they do it here, in my father’s house? How dare they, so soon after his passing?”
“What did Salif say when you told him?” asks Bella.
“He didn’t want me to disturb his sleep.”
“I bet that upset you too,” comments Bella. She catches a ghost of a smile around Salif’s mouth. “Up in Lapland, little Laps do it”—the line comes to her, unbidden, and she finds herself grinning too.
Bella dishes out the food and they all sit to eat.
Years ago, she remembers, Salif used to delight in hiding Dahaba’s favorite toys and then telling her that burglars had taken them away. After she had cried her heart out, Salif would give them back, claiming to have saved them from the thieves. One April Fool’s Day when Valerie was out for the afternoon, Salif gave Dahaba a fright. Pretending to be weeping, he told her that he had just received the sad news that their mother had died in a car accident. When Valerie returned to a hysterical Dahaba, Salif laughed it all off, saying, “Don’t you know it was just a prank?” Nowadays, whenever he tells her a fib, Dahaba retorts, “You can’t fool me; it’s not the first of April.”
Bella says, “But what is it that happened today?”
Dahaba says, “Because he knew about it.”
“Darling, you are not making sense,” Bella says. “What did Salif know? Tell me from the beginning and do it slowly so I can follow you.”
Bella reasons that Dahaba is a tabula rasa girl. Assuming that what she knows is known to others, she always begins stories somewhere in the middle.
Salif steps in. “Dahaba came to my room, upset at what she had seen. She woke me up. I told her to let me sleep. She wept. Unable to go back to sleep, I told her about a YouTube video our cousin Dhimbil had come upon and forwarded to me. It shows Mum and Padmini in some compromising positions. So there we were: Dahaba upset with Mum and Padmini; and Dahaba furious with me because not only wouldn’t I wake up and hear her out but I also hadn’t shared what I knew about Mum and Padmini. That is the long and short of it.”
“Yes, I was angry that he hadn’t shown me the YouTube,” says Dahaba.
“I meant to spare her the agony of knowing,” says Salif.
“I’m not a baby,” Dahaba protests.
Salif says, “With some folks, you can never win.”
“Listen to him gloating,” says Dahaba, getting angrier.
For a while, they eat their meal in silence, even though Bella fancies she can hear the thoughts turning in their heads. It doesn’t rain in this household, she thinks, it pours.
Bella says to Salif, “You still haven’t told me how you got into a row with your mum? What was that about?”
“Mum came into the row later,” Salif says.
“How do you mean, later?”
He replies, “Dahaba told Mum how upset she was over seeing them doing it. Mum tried to explain things to her calmly. Everything was cool until Padmini had the gall to refer to Dahaba as an evil little ghoul roaming the house in the night in hopes of finding fault with how the world works.”
“Then what?”
“Then I lost my cool.”
“Did Padmini use those words?” Bella asks.
“No,” Dahaba says.
“Be a good boy and tell it in her words.”
Salif speaks with care and precision. “She described Dahaba as an evil owl wandering in the darkness on the pretext of locating what evil there is in the world we inhabit.” He seems pleased with himself, his attitude that of someone who has passed an endurance test. Dahaba nods her head in support of him.
“Imagine thinking I am evil,” she says.
“You’re not evil and you know it,” Bella says.
“An evil owl,” Dahaba says.
Bella assures Dahaba, “You are a wonderful girl, and you do not possess even an iota of wickedness.”
Dahaba shrugs. “Why did they blame me?”
“Maybe they were shocked themselves,” Bella says. “You mustn’t take any of this to heart. These sorts of misunderstandings happen in families, but you have to let them go.”