She stared at the email message on her computer, her mind racing so fast that the words blurred together and no longer made any sense. Just three lines, but enough to make her life--the life she’d worked so hard and sacrificed so much to build--begin to crumble around her. She chewed nervously at the already nibbled end of her plastic pen, reading the lines over and over again and hoping that something would change in those lines. She rested her chin on the knee of one leg, its foot placed firmly on the cushioned swivel chair. The other foot she would tuck underneath her on the chair until her ankle hurt from her own weight. Her face was lit by the fluorescence of the screen in her dark bedroom, her eyes struggling with the words she read with her black rimmed wayfarer glasses.
Nyka was 36. She looked 45 when she didn’t wear her makeup. She only took it off when she was sleeping. Wearing makeup for her was as much as a routine as was brushing her teeth. She was single and had recovered from two heartbreaks and one surgery in the last ten years. She stayed alone in Mumbai, overlooking the vastness of the Arabian Sea through the heavily draped French windows of her suburban apartment. She did not remember her father and her mother stayed in Italy where she worked as a translator and lived off the money of a wealthy business man. The last she heard from her was four years back. Nyka grew up on her own in a boarding school which her Italian ‘father’ had sponsored. After graduating from school she worked as an administrative assistant for a couple of years before she could finally earn a scholarship to sponsor her studies in business management. Ten years since, she managed the advertising division of a Fortune 500 company in India. Her experiences in those ten years, had been the most defining, chiselling her into the woman she was today, giving her a definitive existence which her life before could never offer. Back then in her childhood she was no one’s daughter. She did not have a home to go to in summer holidays. She had no one who paid her a surprise visit that could pump excitement in her dull grey eyes. She had no one to fear. She was a free bird. Yet she seemed encaged in her own thoughts penning them down in an ordinary brown plastic covered diary that came to her as one of many supplies. These supplies came irregularly in heavily taped brown courier boxes from abroad where her ‘parents’ lived. For a few years, Nyka remembers now, she used to be excited about the gifts from abroad. They smelled of foreign lands. Her dresses had rich velvety or silky textures in delicate hues much against the bright cotton frocks her friends wore. As she grew older, she detested those boxes, and later dreaded them as the girls gathered around her and forced her to open them. They often carried clothes that were too small for her built, in styles that contrasted heavily with the conservative appearances of other girls reminding her each time, stronger than the previous, that she was no one’s child. As soon as she had finished school, she hoped to find a new life. A life that may not be ridiculed by others, where no one cared where she came from, who her parents were and why they were never seen. Miss Raina who was her Communications teacher was a support then. She sheltered her when she needed it the most, treating her like her own girl, though she already had five back home.
The mail was from the Indian Centre for Marrow Donors which had run an extensive search on their registry to find a matching bone marrow donor for treating her blood vessel damage. She had suffered a cardiac attack at the age of thirty four. The doctor had blamed it on a poor lifestyle. She had shrugged it off as a genetic disorder. The Centre, through that mail, had confirmed that they were unable to find a matching donor. They had further mentioned that the only hope for her permanent recovery would be if she could find a donor in her family. She had spent years to overcome this void in her life, of making herself believe that family has nothing to do with biological ties, that home is where she finds herself, even if the walls did not have pictures of known faces or voicemails from familiar voices greeting her when she walked in. It had taken a lot of effort to let go of hopes and possibilities, to let go of feelings and belongingness, to build this life resting solidly on the power of detachment. That mail reminded her that as much as she wanted to prove that she was no one’s child, there was someone who could fill up that void inside of her, at-least physically if not emotionally. She fumed as all the buried feelings about her family erupted again, making themselves seem more powerful than her ability to supress them and lay them to rest forever.
She could barely sleep that night, and the night after, and then there came the night where she popped some pills in and the night passed in oblivion. Colleagues at work enquired about her tiredness that surfaced despite the layers of makeup she wore. She mentioned jet lag and avoided further questions. She had built her life on lies telling her colleagues at work that her parents had passed away. Her dad had been a victim of a fatal road accident as per her mom’s rendition when she was a young girl. She had believed it for so many years, through her childhood, through her youth, until that night when she read that mail and a painful thought struck her mind – Just what if her father was alive? Was this a design of destiny or an act of fate to lead her to whom she belonged, to the blood that ran in her, to the man who gifted her the dull grey eyes, to the man who might have cried in loneliness just like her, who would have rested his beliefs on lies her mother would have told, if she ever did lie?
She flung open the dusty trunk from the attic which was untouched since a few years now. The dust made her nostrils tickle and she sneezed hard five times in a row. She felt weak in her lungs. Like a scavenger she reached out straight for the little brown diary. She ran her manicured fingers painted in a glossy pink over the brown plastic cover. She fought the tears that wanted to swarm her eyes. The pages had turned yellow and the diary smelled like how old books smell of reminiscence. She gathered bits of information about her father from the diary in which she had maintained some details as and when she had learnt from her reluctant mother a few decades back. She noted down some addresses, names of some people she could possibly call, some landmarks and company names she would find useful for her quest.
The morning when she took the first flight out to Sri Lanka where her father was claimed to be working last, she thought of the awkwardness of meeting him, if he did exist. Would he judge her? Would he question what prompted her after all those years to know who her father was? Would he dismiss her seemingly benign intentions if she ever tells him about her pursuit of a marrow donor? Would he be ashamed to be greeted by his past? Would he have long forgotten his past and built another life resting on pillars of truth or maybe some lies? Would it matter to him that she existed? Would it matter to him that she was dying a slow and silent death, like how her own identity had over the years? Would she identify him just by the way he looked? Would he have the same long neck, the dull grey eyes, the almond coloured skin, the steadfastness …? Amidst the drone of the airbus, the gentle music playing in the background, the dim light in the aircraft and the tiredness of her mind that had lately chased a lot of thoughts, she fell asleep.
After the two and half hour flight, the salty warm breeze of the island nation struck her as she stepped out of the aircraft. The sun had just risen over the morning sky and spread its warmth and sprinkled golden dust in the air. The airbus staff with their hair neatly pinned into buns and lips painted in the same crimson red exchanged pleasantries with the passengers as they disembarked from the aircraft. She had reached her destination. Did she know that she had also been greeted by destiny? She checked into a hotel which at night had its white façade light up in colourful lights, the green foliage around it losing its identity with too many colours. The bed in the hotel room was soft and it hurt her back rendering her some more sleeplessness. The day she arrived, she did not do much apart from waiting for the day to turn into night. She could overlook the Indian Ocean from the French windows in her room on the twentieth floor. It reminded her of her own home back in Mumbai. But here she felt calmer, like the ocean next to her, unlike the sea back home. A picture of the Buddha, calm and composed, hung on the wall above the bed. Its neutral colours spreading their calming effect on the beholder. The house keeping staff had placed some purple orchids next to the bedside, had folded a towel into the shape of an elephant and placed it on the bed with a little note that carried their name in cursive writing - We hope you enjoy your stay with us. She let a smile cross her lips.
The next day she felt more energetic. She waited in the lobby for her cab to arrive, aimlessly sifting through pages of the newspaper. She did not have a definite plan or a roadmap that would lead her to her father. The town where she was headed, was large and foreign. She had no details about the man she was trying to find. It would be highly impossible to find what she was searching for, yet the little hope that she kindled in her heart, egged her each time she thought of returning or giving up. She waited in the lobby, observing the other guests who walked in and out of the restaurant where they served a sumptuous breakfast each morning. There were some who were on business trips, some others on their family holiday, the kids chirping and the wives gossiping and the men browsing through local maps planning the itinerary. She watched them plunge comfortably in the sofas in the lobby with a sparkling floor and a large crystal chandelier that looked half as pretty in the morning as it did the night before. She could not relate to the news in the newspapers, and it didn’t grip her attention as it did every morning in Mumbai. She picked up a copy of some magazines that lay on the side table. Their pages had dog ears at the corners due to too much browsing by restless travellers who seemed to have killed time looking at those pages. Some of them had coffee mug crescents, some others had their lucky draw coupons torn, scratch codes revealed. As she browsed through the pages she spotted an advertisement for a Marrow Donor Registry in Sri Lanka, which claimed to have saved 98,965 lives until last month. There were testimonials of patients who had recovered. She wondered if the happy smiling faces was an advertising gimmick or was it for real. Would a recovery from a health condition provide happiness as much as it seemed in the picture? The advertising professional in her could see through the exaggeration and the digital enhancements. Yet she could see them happy as if life had started all over again for them with new dreams that were not delimited by health. She saved the number and dumped the phone in her bag, and with that she also dumped her the desire to reach out to them. She reminded her that she was here on a mission.
Her taxi arrived - a swanky white sedan, its driver dressed in an impeccable white and a chauffer’s cap, emblematic of the high life she lived. The golden buttons on his full sleeved white coat sparkled like the sun that greeted her on the morning when she had arrived. His smile was infectious, his mannerism had a hint of genuineness and didn’t seem to have been rehearsed in a drill. As they cruised away to search the unknown, she struck a conversation with him, his each response revealing the hard life he had survived. The more she spoke to him, the more she realized, how she was wrong, how she had missed to notice his dull grey eyes which she could now notice clearly in the rear-view mirror of the car. They told a different story from his smile. She looked at the passing paddy fields outside her car window, as they swept past her at a steady pace that her driver maintained. She wondered if that is how she had been living, sweeping past people, judging them in a fleeting moment and labelling them with little post-its in her mind as right or wrong, never giving them a chance again to redeem themselves. She had always been appalled by the callousness of her mother. It troubled her now for she feared that she might not have been the best judge of people. She conflicted her own opinion of a person within minutes of meeting him, because she had given him a second chance. She wondered, how many people she had deprived of a second chance and shut them out from her life. The fear of having misjudged many gripped her - her mother, her ex-boyfriends maybe, her ex-boss, a fellow employee, the list seemed to be getting longer…
That afternoon as she returned back to her hotel, she was greeted by a familiar face - the picture of the Buddha. He seemed to have comprehended the chaos in her mind that had drained her out. The peacefulness in his closed eyes and the gentle smile beckoned that there is no better place to find answers than within, that there is no better place to find peace than within. The search for the unknown seemed tiring and unyielding. It seemed to be unearthing fears that had no place in her solitary life. The soft bed seemed inviting today. The ocean glittered as the sun shone on it with all its splendour. The gentle breeze of the air conditioner swayed the white sheers on the window lazily. She dug for her phone in her satchel bag and dialled a number. She knew she was on a mission, not today, but forever. The mission to find herself for she was no one’s child.
“Welcome to the Sri Lankan registry of Marrow Donors. How may I help you?” answered the voice from the other end.
