Where is Pakshi?

Maybe it was a subconscious thing that I ended Pakshi’s story on such a grand, distracting note as Part V … Part V wasn’t really “The End” . You see, Pakshi somehow disappeared – and I haven’t been able to find out why. Sometimes I lie awake at night agonising over how I could have let her slip away like that – was it my fault?

In June 2006, Pakshi was heavily but elegantly 7 months pregnant with a son. Her in-laws were, obviously, ecstatic – and suddenly Pakshi’s status rose from kitchen-girl/youngest, childless wife to celebrated and cherished carrier of a male grandchild. This meant new freedoms : a cellphone, enrolment in a driving course and being able to meet with friends more freely. Her response to this new regard was somewhere between guarded relief and cheeky triumph!

The drive up from Southampton to Newbury from where I’d hop onto the London Paddington train was fraught with such deep anxiety that I had to stop at a motorway petrol station to be sick. For two years I’d been trying to leave my ex-husband – and trying to make it work. But by March of 2006, the marriage was as good as dead and buried – and I was buried alive with it. Eventually, the fear of dying completely overcame my sick paralysis and June 21st was the date stamped on my SAA ticket back to Cape Town. I didn’t yet know, the day I last saw Pakshi, that I was indeed going home, but my buried heart knew and I didn’t know how to explain to this beautiful, gentle friend of mine I was going away.

Sitting across from each other in a darkish, yellowly-lit Indian restaurant in Southall, she teased me about my nausea – begging me with her eyes that I be pregnant too. Aloud, she daydreamed about how our children would be like cousins and how we’d visit each other for weeks at a time. The icy kulfi I tried to swallow in my unrealised shame was too cold, bitterly sweet – the clear noodles swam, insipid worms, in the pink, melting milk forcing my eyes shut, queasily.

“Lisa?”
“Yes, Pakshi?”
Her face was pinched in such earnestness – what was she going to ask of me? It had to be a favour.
“You are the closest I have to family here.”
I blinked. Raised my eyebrows.
“Please would you be with me at the birth of my son? I have already told my in-laws you would be with me. And you could stay for two weeks with me at home to help me.” And her eyes said, ‘I need you so badly. Please, please don’t let me down, my sister, my friend.’
How could I refuse? Her sense of familial isolation was something I knew more and more intimately with each passing week – I, too, had wondered over the years how I would cope without having my mother and family around me during such a devastatingly precious time…
“Yes. I will be with you.” And because she was wedged behind the table by her son-filled tummy, I jumped up to meet her there in a hug that said ‘everything will be all right’.

The next week and a few days slipped by excruciatingly -- trying to understand just HOW I was going to run away from this man I had lived with for 11 years, with no money at all to my name, but JUST enough to cover my ticket home. It all made so much sense – and yet seemed like the most frighteningly mad and impossible thing on earth to do. I telephoned Pakshi a couple of times at her home to tell her I had to leave. She never answered -- was she ever given the messages? Instead, I emailed her – something we did on a weekly basis anyway, but found almost criminal to do with the news I had for her.

The 21st of June arrived. At Heathrow, I saw a blonde check-in clerk – harshly pretty - berating a cowering man in front of not just his blushing, stupefied family, but in front of everyone within earshot. It was all just muffledness by the time it got to me – I said a quick prayer under my breath that I didn’t get her when I got to the front of the queue! The polite, unquestioning worm of travellers inched forward, watched by ruddy-cheeked police in their black bulletproof gear, their guns scanning the crowds like a probing, x-ray eye. The fluorescent light was cold, the air hot and thick with the smell of people coughing, crying, laughing, dusty rucksacks and shopcounter perfumes.

The acidic blonde beckoned me forward from the front of the queue – and my heart sank. Though she was South African, she was curt and NOT in the mood for South-Africans-Away-From-Home chitchat – and she weighed my luggage with a mean look on her face which looked like she was actually HOPING I’d be overweight! And, I was. Five kilograms. With my cheeks burning and my aching heart pounding, I begged her to please let me go through – that I was starting my life all over again with nothing but what I had in my bags.
“I don’t care. You can pay the extra or you can unpack right here.”
I was in such a deep state of shock already, that this completely broke me and I almost collapsed – but my friend, Melanie, got me under her control so I could at least get through this moment and get on that plane!! Every single item in my bags had been agonised over, again and again – and weighed against other things I should or could take – and having to unpack in front of this hard heart of a woman and a thousand staring strangers was one of the most humiliating moments in my life. I wondered, stupidly confused, what to leave behind and what to take. It was so, so hard…

In the end, I got through (literally and figuratively) and was home in Cape Town 12 hours later.

Within a few weeks of arriving home, I had found myself a fabulous job and had a car (FOREVER thanks to my dad and mom). Life was sweeter than I could have ever imagined it could be! I had been reborn – and every moment and freedom was almost too beautiful. I felt like I was 5 years old again, gazing about in wonder, curiosity and the most indescribable joy! There were so many new friends and so much going on, but still I sent off regular emails to my friends in England – receiving quick replies. Except from Pakshi. After awhile, her emails started bouncing back with a message saying her inbox was too full and could not receive any new emails. By that stage, I couldn’t even phone her – my cellphone had been swiped off my desk at work by a devious and invisible colleague.

Facebook lists a few hundred Pakshi Veturi’s – but none of them are MY Pakshi. How else can I track her down? Where is she now? Since about September of the year I left, I’ve had this revolting, ominous feeling down deep in my gut that Pakshi died in childbirth. It is nothing I can explain – and surely, these days, women don’t die from complicated childbirths? Surely not… She would never have cut me out of her life for leaving her and the UK. Her heart was too strong and too wise to do that. Maybe she ran away back to her family in India? But everything I have ever read or heard from Indian people is that divorce is not just taboo – it simply does not exist as an option. What ever happened to my Pakshi?