Finding Arun Read Online Free PDF Page B

bit, you know, like that family that
lives at the end of my street, the one that moved in last year.
Perfectly nice, but a bit … simple. All funny clothes and greasy
hair. I swear there are at least fifteen people living in there;
not one of them speaks English and they all stink of frying.’
    Aaron laughed harder at this ridiculous portrait of
a ‘proper Indian from India’, but Jez continued on unabated.
    ‘ You think that I’m joking, but I’m not. Last year
my mate Raj went to visit his family in Delhi. He said it was the
worst holiday he’d ever been on. He had to share a room with two of
his brothers and three of his
cousins, all of them just on a mattress on the floor. They didn’t
have proper showers or toilets; he had to go in a hole round the
back of the house and wash himself from a bucket. And that’s not
even the worst of it, he –’
    ‘Enough, enough,’ cried Aaron, gasping between
breaths and holding his hand up to silence his friend. He had
almost been reduced to tears and now he was doubled over in
hysterics, struggling to catch his breath.
    Jez lit up another cigarette and puffed on it
sulkily, seeming insulted that he was not being taken seriously,
but despite his ignorance his assertions had struck a chord with
his friend.
    When Aaron’s laughter subsided it gave way to a
comfortable and contemplative silence in which he found himself
questioning everything once more. He was certain that India and
‘proper Indians’ were not as Jez had described them to be, but he
couldn’t accurately picture them. He knew little about his
birthplace, except for the fact that it was the very reason he
never quite fitted in, in London, and far from holding any
attachments to it, he had come to resent it. The Rutherfords had
never taken him back and his mother had never seemed particularly
keen to talk about or to visit the place. If anything, she had
actively discouraged it, a fact that seemed to make more sense in
light of his recent findings.
    And then there was Kalpana. What did he really know
about her, except for what she had written in her letters? Was she
tall or short, fat or thin? Did they look alike? Would he recognise
her? He had often wondered about his biological mother, imagining
what kind of person she had been and what kind of mother she would
have made, but Catherine had always been reluctant to discuss her
and he had stupidly believed that it was because the memories of
what had transpired in India were too painful to relive. Instead
he’d made do with the little bits of information that he could
glean from anecdotal conversations and over the years he had learnt
to dismiss the more inquisitive thoughts just as quickly as they
had arrived.
    But things were different now. Now he had an
opportunity to learn the answers to all of those questions and
more. His mother’s deceit and Arthur’s secrecy could not be
reversed, but Kalpana was still alive and he could, if he wanted,
fulfil her wish to see him. Yet something was holding him back, a
feeling deep in his gut, a relic of former beliefs and allegiances.
For all the thinking that he had done over the past few days, Aaron
still couldn’t fathom why his mother would have kept something so
important from him and, if he were to be believed, from Arthur. In
spite of everything that he had unearthed, he remained convinced
that she must have had a legitimate reason for acting in the way
that she had. A reason he was sure that she would have shared with
him, if only he’d made it home in time. Catherine Rutherford had
loved him with every bone in her body and she would have done
whatever was necessary to protect him, even if that meant keeping
him in the dark on occasion. There was something about Kalpana that
he didn’t know, Aaron was sure of it, and it was that something
that made him reluctant to go in search of her.
     

 
SIX
     
    LEAVING Jez to his daily rituals, Aaron departed the
house for the first time since he had arrived. He