A Scandalous Secret. Jaishree Misra
well-fed at his own house.’ But the mere sight of Tim’s thin, gangling frame entering their home seemed to set Laura off on a reforming mission into the kitchen, where Timothy had of late become a habitual visitor, treated to the Shaw household’s typically robust and nutritious meals. ‘You may not think so now but this lad will make something of his life,’ Laura Shaw often said soon after Tim had gone, sometimes adding darkly, as though reading her daughter’s mind, ‘Do hang onto him, love – good boyfriends are like gold dust, you’ll soon discover.’
Sonya towelled herself dry before she wandered back into her room and opened her wardrobe to find something suitable for what promised to be a warm day. Was there a dress code for a dump-your-boyfriend-day, Sonya wondered, only half joking with herself. It was best not to look too scrummy, lest the dumpee’s pain was thus intensified. And not too plain so as to cause no pain at all! Sonya shook her head. Perhaps she did not need to agonize so much over splitting up with Tim. It was very likely that his imminent departure for Durham University would finish things off between them anyway, the distance between Oxford and Durham being not inconsiderable for a pair of penurious students. But Sonya had always liked clear lines and stated intentions and the last thing she wanted was to skulk around avoiding Tim when it was so much easier to just tell him the truth.
Would she miss him at some point, Sonya wondered, hooking together her bra while staring at herself hard in the mirror, trying to induce some guilt. Then she shrugged her shoulders. Given the way Tim had whinged on about her going off to Asia with Estella, she thought not. And it wasn’t even as if he presented a viable option! His delicate stomach had made him nervous of travelling abroad (a take-away from the Shalimar down the road invariably brought on the runs, from what he’d once let slip) and so Tim had never been seriously considered as a travelling companion for the two girls, despite both their parents suggesting it at some point. Besides, in a crisis, Sonya was sure that she and Estella would keep their heads a lot better than Tim ever would.
Twirling a pair of knickers on her forefinger, Sonya turned to examine her smooth, bare bum in the full-length mirror. Hmmm … not bad at all, she thought, finally recognizing – this recognition having come only well into her teens – how lucky she was to have her unusual golden skin tone that never required the hours on sunbeds and pots of tanning cream that so many of her friends were slaves to. There were some advantages to being of mixed race. Someone at school had, in fact, recently told her that the blend of Indian and European was one of the best because Indian genes, being not as strong as African or Chinese, provided just the right element of exotica to balance out the normal pallor of Caucasian skin without taking over. Her hair was darker than the usual mousy English colouring for one, and her skin came out in what she now knew was a lovely light coffee by June. Dad, being Welsh, had darker aspects to him and it was only when they saw him that people who knew nothing of Sonya’s adoption looked reassured. You could see their puzzlement at Sonya’s long dark tresses and tanned skin, so starkly different from her mother’s pale and rather washed-out blonde looks.
Sonya pulled on her knickers and a tee-shirt and looked more closely at her face again, searching – as she had been doing more and more of late – for traces of Indianness in her bone structure. Virtually everyone had complimented her on how beautiful she looked at last night’s party and Sonya had even caught herself the other day leafing through one of those glossy Indian bridal magazines in WH Smith, looking at the models wearing heavy clothes and make up and searching for some kind of commonality. There was certainly something about her oval-shaped face and high cheekbones that set her apart from the average English look but, on the other hand, not a single model in the Indian magazines had eyes like hers: their startling shade of blue was far from exotic.
Sonya had always known about her Indian blood, of course: Meg Hawkins, her first social worker, told her in as much detail as she was allowed at the time that her biological mother was of Indian origin and her biological father Anglo-Saxon. Although she knew very little further detail, Sonya had always imagined that her biological mother was the sort who lived somewhere like Southall or Tooting, a woman suppressed and cowed-down and forced into giving up her illegitimate but adored love child by a cruelly conservative family who hated the idea of a cross-cultural and mixed-race union. While she had briefly thrived on the drama of this storyline, that world seemed so alien to the cosy suburban English one in which Sonya had grown up that her curiosity (or, indeed, any desire at all to explore her roots) had been quelled many years ago.
And then she had met Chelsea. Or rather, met her again, since Chelsea had gone away to board after primary school. Sonya had always known that, like her, Chelsea had been adopted as a child, but they had never talked about this in any detail until they had bumped into each other at another old schoolmate’s birthday party, just a couple of months ago. In the course of their conversation, Chelsea mentioned having traced her birth parents to a council estate in Merton, describing the sense of relief that had swept over her at knowing how lucky she had been to be adopted. For reasons she could not explain, the story had intrigued Sonya and led to her contacting the Registrar General after her own eighteenth birthday in order to have a look at her birth records. It had been a mere lark at first, some far-off niggling curiosity about her antecedents. She had even told Mum (and the adoption social worker who had provided the initial counselling) that, like Chelsea, it was only her medical history that she was interested in. But the information from the agency that had arranged her adoption had taken Sonya completely by surprise, rattling her very foundations. Who would’ve imagined that her biological mother was a woman who lived in India, rather than Southall or Tooting, and – here was the really astonishing bit – that she had been a student at Oxford too, the very same university to which Sonya was due to go this autumn! It was not just the coincidence of this fact, but the idea that an educated woman had chosen to give her up that had been the really shocking thing to Sonya. Her birth mother was obviously one who’d had choices, not a suffering voiceless woman at all. Sonya could still recall the acrid taste in her mouth at that discovery, the shock and sudden hurt at the knowledge that she had not been prised away from her poor and defenceless mother’s care by overzealous social workers, as she had always imagined, but had, in fact, coolly been given away. That was the really galling bit: that the woman who was her natural mother had made such a cold and deliberate choice, never turning around once to look back at the baby she had abandoned in England.
It was anger that was propelling Sonya on in this search, nothing else. Pure unadulterated anger. She had tried to reassure Mum and Dad of that fact but it seemed to bring them little comfort.
‘Sonya darling!’ Sonya heard her mother’s high-pitched voice float up the stairs.
Sonya opened her bedroom door to shout back. ‘Up here Mum. What’s up?’
‘Dad’s on the phone. He’s in town and wants to know if you need one of those multi-plug thingies for your laptop.’
‘Okay, coming!’ Sonya said, hastily pulling on a pair of shorts before running down the stairs in long loping strides. It was best not to leave Mum with instructions on anything technical, Sonya thought as she took the handset off her mother. ‘Hey, Dad,’ she said, clicking the speaker phone on.
‘Darling, you will need an adaptor to be able to use your laptop and hair dryer while you’re abroad,’ Richard Shaw’s voice floated into the room. ‘I’m in Boots and can see some in the travel section. The one I’m looking at here – a multi-way plug – says “Thailand”, “Singapore” and … oh here, “India” among the list of countries so it should be all right. Apparently they use round-pin plugs in India.’
‘I hadn’t thought of all that,’ Sonya said, adding, ‘Thanks Dad.’
‘No trouble, darling,’ Richard responded lightly. ‘Clever-looking thing, this, like a Rubik’s cube except with buttons and pop-out pins on all the sides.’
‘Hope it’s not expensive,’ Sonya said, conscious of the fact that her parents had already had to lay out vast amounts on her holiday.
But her father’s response was typically dismissive, ‘Naaaah, just a couple of quid.’
‘Aw, thanks. You home for lunch, Dad?’
‘Yes. Ask Mum if