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She tried to remember exactly what her mum had said on the phone. That it was too difficult to remember. She’d said it was her fault too—but that was classic victim blaming. Reeva felt a wave of compassion for Saraswati, who’d lived with so much violence. She’d said that Reeva was the one who was most affected by it—and of course she was; it was her cat and she’d seen the whole thing. All the clues were adding up. Their mum had specifically said that Hemant wasn’t an easy man to live with. That was the understatement of the year. Plus, it explained the dreams she was having. The dreams that had started ever since she’d slept in her dad’s bed. And it wasdefinitelya legitimate reason for their mum to leave their dad in such a dramatic way; who’d want to stay married to someone capable of killing a harmless little being?
Reeva shuddered as she imagined someone telling her now that Fluffy Panda had been killed. She’d be heartbroken. And appalled by the psychopath who’d done it. Only the psychopath in this situation was her dad. The same dad she’d been falling in love with this past week. Reeva’s breath quickened. Her head was pounding. She felt like she was having a breakdown.
She was at her dad’s funeral. She was meant to be grieving him. But how could she when she’d just realized that he wasn’t the kind, generous, stubborn, lovable man she’d thought he was? He was the exact opposite. An angry, out-of-control man who’dlost his temper in front of his wife and children, taking the life of a little black cat.
It was too much. Reeva felt nauseous. After everything she’d been through lately, this was too much. Her hair was falling out. Her boyfriend was alone with his famous ex in LA. Her sister was pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s baby. And her dad had murdered her cat.
—
“And now, wehave Hemant’s oldest daughter, Reeva, here to do his eulogy.” The priest gave Reeva a welcoming smile as he gestured toward the microphone.
Reeva blinked at him, dazed. Surely they didn’t expect her to do the eulogy now? She had a few bullet points of a banal speech in her pocket—a speech she’d written back when she was convinced her dad was a fundamentally good man who’d just made the mistake of marrying her mother. But there was no way she could read that out now. It was all a lie.
“Beta, they want you to go up. Go on.” Her kaki nudged her.
Reeva stared at her. She had to stop this. She had to tell her sisters what she’d just discovered. But how? The entire hall was silent and staring at her. She didn’t know what to do. Sita had turned around to look at her—she was mouthingWhat the fuckand gesturing for Reeva to get up. But she couldn’t. Not after what she’d discovered. She was too broken and confused and shocked and... angry. She was fuckingfurious.
“Go on!”
Kavita Kaki elbowed her so hard that Reeva winced. She stood up, without really realizing what she was doing. Before she knew it, she was standing at the center of the dais looking out at all the faces in front of her. She recognized most of them fromthe evening prayers. Her family was in the front row. Sita and Nitin with the twins in between them. Jaya... and Rakesh. He was sitting right next to her. She hadn’t even noticed him come into the room because she’d been so engrossed in her conversation with Kavita Kaki. But there he was, holding Jaya’s hand, looking inappropriately handsome in a black suit with a crisp white shirt. Reeva felt like her legs would collapse. How could he just sit there casually at her father’s funeral, giving Reeva a small smile, while his child was growing inside her youngest sister? Reeva had thought she’d be okay seeing him, now that she’d practically forgiven Jaya, but seeing themholding handswas unbearable. All she could think was that she should be the one sitting next to him, with her hand in his and his baby inside her.
“Come on,” hissed Sita from the front row. Reeva jolted. She’d forgotten she was meant to speak. Fuck. She had no idea what to say. Maybe she should just read the most boring parts of her speech and get it all over and done with. But it all felt so fake. What if she just made something up about being too emotional to do the speech and sat back down again? Or she could always google a vague poem about death and read that out from her phone. That was probably the most appropriate way to get through this.
But Reeva was tired of pretending all the time. Lately it felt like she was constantly swallowing her thoughts and blocking her feelings for everyone else’s sake. She’d deliberately forced herself to be the bigger person every single day during this last week with her sisters. She’d tried so hard with Jaya, even accepting her apology—and now here she was, holding Rakesh’s hand, rubbing it in her face that she had Reeva’s future, while Reeva was left with... what? A lowercase boyfriend and no Indian blind dates because she was too tall?
Reeva stared out at the expectant faces in front of her and felt a wave of anger wash over her. She felt tears of frustration gather in her eyes. She brushed them away and heard a ripple of sympathetic murmurs. They were all assuming Reeva was too upset to speak. But Reeva wasn’t upset. She was angry.
Why should she keep up the pretense that she’d had a normal relationship with her dad when she’d just found out he was the opposite of normal? She’d dropped everything to come to Leicester to prepare for her dad’s funeral—but why? He didn’t deserve it. Any of it. He’d killed her cat. Reeva looked down at the open coffin. To think she’d painstakingly dressed his lifeless corpse. She should have let him go to the afterlife with his trousers on backward. The longer she stared at his body, the more she felt waves of irrational rage build up inside of her. She was so done trying to be sensible all the time. She didn’twantto try to understand why her dad killing her cat could be a total accident. She didn’t want to make excuses for him or accept that he might have mental health issues around anger that weren’t his fault. She didn’t want to ask Satya Auntie about his childhood and see if he was just acting out some pattern of trauma that he’d gone through. She didn’t even want to consider the fact that she might be wrong.
Reeva was done keeping quiet to make everyone else happy.
Instead, she was ready to tell the truth.
She took a step closer to the microphone.
“Hello, all. We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of my dad. Our dad, really—me, my sister Sita, and my youngest sister, Jaya. Sitting there in the front row.” She pointed at them. “We’re his only children, as far as we know.” There was a nervous titter of laughter in the audience, but Reeva barely registered it. She was on a roll.
“The truth is that we didn’t really know our father very well. Mainly because we didn’t actually know wehada father for most of our lives.” There were murmurs of confusion in the audience, as well as intense angry glares coming from her family in the front row, but Reeva ignored them all. “Let me clarify. We were told that we had a dad. Just that he’d died. When we were still kids. Only, surprise, surprise! He was alive all this time. For the last twenty-nine years of my life, my dad was living here in Leicester, but nobody bothered to tell me. Or my sisters. We only found out when he died last week, and our mother—oh, that’s Saraswati, the famous singer—bothered to tell us.”
“Reeva, what are you doing?” Sita’s voice carried up to the stage, lifting its way over the whispers and hushed conversations spreading through the room, but Reeva refused to look at her. Or Jaya. She was finally standing up for herself, and there was no way she was going to let her sisters stop her.
“Now, this makes it quite hard to do a eulogy for him, because we obviously didn’t know him, and what we did know about him isn’t true. At all. You see, I thought he was a lovely, normal, cat-loving father. But he wasn’t. He was... the opposite. I won’t go into it because there are children present. But what I am going to say is, I’m now quite glad he’s no longer with us today.” There were loud gasps of shock, accompanied by whispers that were no longer whispers. Reeva ignored them all and kept going. “I know people normally say rest in peace, but I don’t think that’s appropriate in these circumstances, so instead I’m going to say— What are you doing?” Reeva turned angrily as someone grabbed her arm. Her mouth fell open in shock. She’d expected it to be the priest or one of her sisters, but it was Rakesh. How fuckingdarehe? “What are you doing?” she cried. “Get off me.”
He whispered in her ear quietly. “Hey, look, I know you’re upset. Come down and we’ll talk properly.”
Reeva raised an eyebrow. “Uh, no thanks,” she replied at full volume into the mic. “I don’t fancy talking to the person who cheated on me with my sister. Oh, congrats on knocking her up, by the way.”
Sita appeared on the dais and pushed past her sister toward the microphone. “I think that’s enough from Reeva. She’s going through a very rough time with grief, so please excuse her. Thanks, everyone, for coming today. We are going to let Dad get cremated now. We all are so grateful you could be here, and I’m sure Dad would be too. It is a real tragedy he was taken from us so soon, but we hope that he will be able to truly rest in peace now. And we hope to see the rest of you shortly back at his house where we’ll be serving food and drinks. Thank you again.”
As the room started to bustle into movement, Sita turned to Reeva. She stood up tall and stared coolly into her older sister’s eyes as she spoke. “I guess you’re more like Mum than any of us ever realized.”
CHAPTER 16
Day 8
Reeva sat upstairsin her dad’s bedroom picking on a limp cheese-and-cucumber sandwich. Neither of her sisters was speaking to her, and she was keen to avoid all the other guests, so she’d been camping out upstairs on her own for the last hour with nothing but her sad sandwich for company. She’d tried to get her sisters to join her so she could explain everything to them, but they’d flat-out refused. Reeva could see why they were annoyed. She had objectively ruined their dad’s funeral and done the one thing they’d all agreed against: telling everyone the truth. But once her sisters heard the full story, they’d understand.
For the first time in her life, Reeva fully sympathized with her mum’s decision-making. Of course she couldn’t stay married to a man who’d done something so unnatural. She would have been terrified. If her husband had managed to kill a cat in cold blood, what could he have done to his young daughters? The death-faking was admittedly more dramatic than a divorce, but maybe her mum hadn’t wanted to relive what had happened; explainingthat your husband had killed the family pet was not exactly your average divorce court material. And Reeva was starting to see why her dad had gone along with it all: it would have been the only way to assuage his guilt.
