Page 7 of Watching You

Body Three of Eight

There was a car following her. Divya Singh thought it was the same car she’d peered into earlier in the supermarket car park, but she couldn’t be sure in the dark. It was the same colour and roughly the same size, but she paid very little attention to the various makes and models.

She’d been looking for someone to point her in the direction of the bus stop.

The route had recently changed thanks to a new building estate, and now she wasn’t sure how to get to where she needed to be.

If the car creeping along behind her was the same one she’d peeked into, the lamplight and silvered windows had conspired to prevent her from seeing if anyone was inside, and she’d shuffled away deciding to walk the two miles home instead.

Her bag wasn’t too heavy and, for once, it wasn’t raining.

Fifty years living in Scotland and she still couldn’t bear the cold or the grey sky.

Her husband-to-be had travelled from Scotland to meet her in New Delhi full of promises of a better life, their families in harmony, and her parents had been attracted in no small part by the idea of their twenty-year-old daughter marrying an accountant who would send money back to help support them in their old age.

Scotland had been nothing more than a dream when their marriage had been arranged, and there had been a summer honeymoon period as she’d discovered the captivating beauty of Edinburgh, the friendliness of the Glaswegians and the wild freedom of the countryside.

But then the rain had started and it seemed not to have stopped for more than the odd day ever since.

She imagined a time when her husband might agree to spending what remained of their lives in India, with some relief from the arthritic pain in her hands and toes, and the joy of blue skies, at least beyond the city smog.

But her husband’s family was in Dundee, and Divya knew the chance of her seeing India’s streets again was diminishing by the month.

The car was right behind her. Divya wished she’d bothered learning to use the awful mobile telephone thing.

Now her husband was in France with friends at some sports tournament, their son was in London working every hour he could to support his three children who were all at university, and she was alone walking down the sort of street where all the houses were set back from the road with tall shrubs shielding the inhabitants from having to see the real world beyond their front gardens.

She considered whether or not the driver might simply need directions. That was possible. Perhaps they were just as lost as her. If she stopped and looked back perhaps, rather than following her, they’d draw up next to her and speak.

No, her brain said. Don’t do that. You know better. Keep walking. Or better still, walk up a driveway into one of those nice houses, ring the doorbell and explain that you’re lost and concerned. Someone will help you. Most people are kind.

Only that hadn’t always been Divya’s experience of life.

Moving from India to Scotland had been a baptism of fire, and anyone who thought racism was a thing of the past had never lived anywhere as a minority.

More often than not it was teenagers shouting insults or calling her names, but there had been women who should have known better at the school gates, whispering foul things, excluding her from coffee mornings and forgetting to include her son in birthday invitations.

Then there’d been a GP who’d asked endless questions about her hygiene and her sex life, as if she were some alien species he was investigating.

A neighbour who hadn’t managed to learn her name after a decade.

A bank where she was spoken to in notably less friendly, polite terms than other customers.

Then there was the odd person who assumed anyone not white was a criminal.

Sometimes those people had spat at her. Sometimes they’d beaten up her son.

Divya didn’t want to knock on a stranger’s door.

All of which, it turned out, was no longer a problem.

The car that had been following her had pulled over and stopped, and she was now some way ahead of it.

The driver had obviously been looking for a specific address.

It was hard to see house names – they didn’t have anything as lowly as numbers on that road.

Divya turned a corner into an avenue that was even more sparsely populated, with just a handful of houses set widely apart by their vast gardens and so far back from the road that the homes were hidden behind trees.

She let out the breath she’d been holding in a dramatic burst of air that misted up in the chill evening.

Even May in Scotland could be cold. She wished she’d worn gloves.

The shopping bags were wearing little creases into her palms and her shoulders were aching.

As the worry dropped away, Divya realised where she was.

She’d once attended a school prom meeting at the house in the distance, having offered to join the decorating committee.

Her son had pestered her to get involved, and she’d offered in spite of knowing how it would go with little groups of women who were already close friends, not wanting anyone else in their subcommittee with their in-jokes and side-eyes.

The memory wasn’t a good one, and she felt ashamed of her negativity.

Scotland had been good to her husband and her son.

As a family they’d lived comfortably enough, even if there seemed to have been a natural cap to how high her husband could climb through the company ranks.

Her son, though, had grown up in a new world untroubled by the colour of his skin and without the accent she’d brought with her halfway across the world.

He’d been sporty and that brought a solid group of friends which had attracted girls.

He’d enjoyed Edinburgh but longed for London.

At eighteen, he’d headed for the London School of Economics and never looked back.

And if she didn’t see her grandchildren all that often, she really couldn’t complain.

Her own parents had barely ever seen her son.

That was the price of progress and generational success.

Still, her son’s wife was good about sending photos regularly.

There wasn’t a shelf or a windowsill in her home unadorned by silver-framed photos of a child clutching a trophy or a certificate, celebrating with their team or in costume on a stage.

Those photos hadn’t a speck of dust on them, so often did Divya pick them up and polish them.

It was about time she visited. Her son invited her all the time but she was worried about being a bur—

The car hit her so fast, she didn’t even have time to close her eyes as she flew through the air.

Thus it was that Divya Singh saw one of her sensible shoes go flying off into a tree.

She saw a kitchen roll from her shopping shoot across the road like a rocket.

She watched her handbag open in the sky above and scatter tiny precious things, each catching glints of headlights and shining momentarily, beautifully, like man-made stars – a lipstick her granddaughter had given her for Christmas that she’d never been brave enough to wear, a mirror that was her mother’s, a keyring in the shape of India that brought her strange comfort for a plastic trinket.

She felt her arm, as if it belonged to someone else completely, fly through the air to smash into her face and break her nose before she could even hit the ground.

The crackle of her fracturing pelvis was a gunshot that boomed up her spine and echoed through her skull.

And when her head whipped back on her neck sufficiently fast and so brutally that she’d never have walked again even if she’d survived the impact, she could see the ground beneath her from the most unnatural angle imaginable.

The force with which she hit the ground set off a series of miniature explosions inside her body that would rupture organs and push ribs into lung tissue.

Divya wondered what her granddaughter’s wedding dress would look like.

She imagined her son getting the promotion he was working so hard for, and heard his voice on the telephone as he called to give her the news.

She felt her husband taking her hand and telling her that she had been a good faithful wife, and that he’d loved her every day even if he hadn’t said it enough.

Divya felt the warmth of the Indian sun easing the pain from her joints, and finally she was back there, chasing through the bustling streets with her sisters, laughing at nothing, with her whole life ahead and the sure knowledge that everything would be well.

Everything would be well. Everything would be well.

Divya Singh, devoted wife, mother and grandmother, died with blood in her mouth and a smile on her face in a patch of just-fading tulips.