The Ungrateful Daughter

CHAPTER TWO

After a minor fight with Ryan for the squishiest cushion in the living room, I settled on the less squishier one – yeah, I let him win – with a copy of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, reading it for the hundredth time, trying hard not to think. Just as I was getting swept away by the Afghan breeze, the doorbell rang.

“Renah!!!” shouted Liya. She is Abba’s brother’s daughter and my favorite cousin.

“Yaaay!” I exclaimed excitedly as Ryan hugged her tight. Though we were several years apart - twenty one, to be precise - we always shared a strange connection.

“Kite Runner? Again?” she asked, eyeing the book on the sofa.

“It’s worth a hundred reads,” I replied, defending my favorite book.

“Where’s your Ammi?” And just as she asked, Ammi came rushing from the master bedroom.

“Oh, Liya! It’s been so long!”

“Yeah. How’re things?”

“Perfect,” replied Ammi.

All three of us settled in the living room with coffee and snacks. After a while, Ammi rushed to the kitchen to prepare special food for Liya and Ryan went outside to play with his friends in the neighborhood.

“Something wrong?” enquired my cousin. I raised my eyes to hers, perplexed.

“No, I’m alright,” I replied.

“Well, if you don’t wanna talk about it, that’s okay. But if you want to, go ahead.” I have never met someone this understanding. She rested the gaze of her dark brown eyes on me, as the sunlight that flooded the room highlighted her freckles and painted a golden hue on her hair.

“It’s not much. A guy was troubling me in the street for the last few days. And today...” I narrated the entire incident to her.

“Renah, what you did is absolutely right. Such people deserve retorts.”

“Ammi thinks I shouldn’t have said that,” I replied, silently wondering whether or not to tell her about Ammi’s comment on my resembling my sister. Rhea wasn’t exactly a pleasant household name.

“I still stick to what I said. At times, we suffer in silence for so long that at some point, we start to forget our own worth. There’s nothing more dangerous than letting other people decide our worth, Renah. No matter who they are.”

“Ammi said I’m turning out to be like Rhea,” I muttered, putting an end to the inner debate that had been going on for the last minute.

I think I saw something make a brief appearance in her dark brown eyes before disappearing without a trace. I waited for an answer, gazing intently into her eyes.

“Who’s Rhea?” That was when we realized that Ryan had returned and was listening to our conversation.

“A friend,” smiled Liya as I stared at the floor, biting my lower lip. If there’s anything more dangerous than letting others decide our worth, it is lying to a child, I thought. There has never been a child satisfied with a single response. Unaware of it themselves, their minds begin a quest to grab the answers from their surroundings. And more often than not, they manage to get their answers. To top it all, they lose their trust in the world.

As expected, Ryan didn’t question us further. He joined us, his curious look no longer lingering on his face. But for some reason, I knew that it hadn’t ended there. And again, I wished I knew what this “friend” had done that had gone so terribly wrong. It wasn’t long before this wish came true.

~

That night after dinner I was flicking through the pages of a magazine with Abba by my side. Ryan had slept earlier than usual.

“What happened today?” he asked. Clearly, Ammi had told him. Anyway I narrated the incident one more time.

“Don’t worry, Renah. It’s not your fault,” he said once I finished.

“Ammi was angry.”

“It’s still not your fault. You were just passing by in your school uniform and that man had no reason to talk to you like that. Ammi was just scared and concerned about you. We don’t want you hurt.”

“He would have hurt me anyway.”

“But you dealt with it in the most perfect manner possible. The world is not a very pleasant place. That’s why Ammi was scared. I’ve talked to her.”

I was about to say what Ammi had told me but then thought better of it. There was no point in bringing up her name and hurting him. Just then, Ammi entered the living room and shot us a cold, hard look. I had always felt that Ammi was envious of my bond with Abba.

Like every other night at home, that night too I stepped into my room – the room I shared with Ryan – to hear the shout of a swear word from our drunken neighbour Kannan’s house. I never heard his wife’s voice – maybe she never bothered to shout at him. I went to bed that night happy for a million things – happy that my Abba was nothing like the drunkard next door, happy to have him on my side, happy to know that he understood me when Ammi didn’t. ~