He had thought it would be one of his strongest cases.
The sunlight pouring through the small windows of the concrete house. The way the mother had stood up and closed the shutters, casting the room into shadow. The brass table glimmering in the dim room, his own hands sweating. The taste of the round, sweet dumplings on his lips—sugar and rose and milk.
A wooden Ganesh in the corner, removing obstacles. A TV against the wall, flickering with a Bollywood movie no one was watching.
“Preeta didn’t speak very much the first few years,” her father had said. “Until she was four, she was mainly silent.”
“We thought perhaps she was…” The mother grimaced.
“Mentally retarded,” the father continued. “But then at four, she began to speak. She said, ‘I need to go home.’”
“‘I need to go home and get my daughter,’ that’s what she’d say,” the mother added. “She’d say, ‘This is not my home, I have a daughter, I need to go get my daughter.’”
“And how did you respond?”
“We told her, this is your life now, perhaps you are remembering a different life. But she … persisted. And, also, she used unusual words.”
“Words?” He took another sip of sweet tea. “What sorts of words?”
“Odd words,” the mother said. “We thought she had made them up. Baby talk, you see.”
“I see.”
“So I looked into them, for the family,” their friend, the lawyer, said. He took some notes from his briefcase. “I thought it was interesting, you see. The case interested me.”
“And?”
The lawyer wagged a finger at Anderson. “You’ll never guess what I found.”
Anderson suppressed his impatience and smiled thinly at the lawyer, a plump-cheeked, cheerful man waving a sheaf of thin papers in his hand with a zealousness that Anderson knew well. “Yes?”
“The words are Khari Boli, a dialect from western Uttar Pradesh, over a hundred fifty kilometers from here.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Absolutely positive!” His attitude rankled Anderson a bit; nobody deserved to be that certain.
“And you don’t know this dialect?” He addressed the parents. They looked back at him placidly.
“Oh, no.”
“Any relatives? Neighbors from that region who might know it? Any acquaintances at all?”
“I’ve asked,” the lawyer said. “You can ask as well. The answer is no. They don’t speak that dialect here. I wrote it all down.”
He handed Anderson his notes. Anderson softened; they were not so unalike after all. The lawyer had documented everything, all the girl’s earliest statements, with dates. “I wish I could continue this work myself, but—unfortunately I have responsibilities.” He watched Anderson, his small eyes glowing. Another man entranced by the facts.
Anderson looked at the paper. All those Khari Boli words; utter gobbledygook to her family, and yet Preeta had known them as a tiny child.
The child understood words in a language she hadn’t studied or heard before: his first case of xenoglossy. There had been others, but this had been the strongest.
Pretty Preeta, with her glossy hair and sober eyes.
They brought the girl inside, but she didn’t speak. The father spoke, his elegant hands framing the words in the air as he explained, the mother passing another tray of roasted almonds and fruit custard and the round, rose-sugary dumplings he couldn’t get enough of.…
“She always cries in the evening, cries and cries. She says she misses her daughter.”
“She worries about her daughter. Who will take care of her? She says her husband is not a good man. Her in-laws are not good people. She says she wanted to go home to her parents, but they won’t let her. She wants to go home and see her daughter.”
The girl sitting at the table, listening silently to all this, her head bent down slightly like a penitent pupil, hands pressed in her lap.
“Did she give the name of the village in Uttar Pradesh?”
“Yes.”
Of course they’d go. He couldn’t wait, would have left that afternoon if possible. As it was, they had to wait until the morning. All five of them, crammed in Anderson’s rented truck, traveled across the countryside. It was only a hundred miles as the crow flies, but this was India: the trip took nine hours.
The in-laws had turned them away at the door. He had spoken to them at the doorstep for a long time, his head bowed in the heat, murmuring in his most respectful and persuasive manner, but they stood there with closed faces and heard him out and shook their heads.