Chapter Text
London, September 19th, 1989
In a farflung corner of West London there was a park, and in that park there was a bench, on that bench sat Lila Pitts, pretending to read yesterday’s paper as she conducted a surveillance operation. A distant church bell chimed 7 o’clock. Inside of her boots, her toes curled in anticipation.
Her parents would pass by any moment now.
They did every morning, Monday through Friday. Her mother—her birth mother—caught the bus there and rode it along the canal to work, and her father—her only father—would stop for tea and conversation at his favorite café after seeing her off.
Lila’s observation of them had started here, in the dew-damp grass and cool, foggy dawns of the park, but that wasn’t where it stopped. She’d tailed them all over the city in the weeks since she’d arrived. That hadn’t been her plan at the outset. She’d only wanted to catch a glimpse of them. Then she’d wanted to hear them speak to each other, and see where they lived, and learn who their friends were, and now she needed to know everything about them, right down to which brand of shaving cream her father favored and what spices her mother put in her pakora.
Lila knew, objectively speaking, that none of this information was particularly interesting. Ronnie and Anita Gill were modest people leading quiet lives, and if they’d been targets the Commission had set for her, she would have thought them a dreadful bore. But now, she hoarded every detail of this mundane existence like a fistful of precious gems.
They owned a video rental shop and resided in the flat above. It was located on a bustling Southall street where pedestrians competed for space on the pavement with mannequins modeling saris and women’s blouses fortified with shoulder pads, and where during football matches, the food stall where you could buy a jalebi or a cup of tea or a packet of tobacco would put their little battery-powered telly on the counter to lure in passers-by, and where the local grocer would set up a chair on the curb so he could function as the neighborhood watch and the neighborhood newsletter when he wasn’t educating customers on the superior quality of his produce. In the midst of all this, there stood Gold Star Video.
Ronnie—or Ronith, as he was properly called—could usually be found up front, switching from Punjabi to English to halting Gujarati as he offered his recommendations. The Hollywood and Bollywood titles mixed indiscriminately on the shelves, and at the counter, the snack assortment was arranged by the color of the packaging. Red orange yellow green blue indigo violet, a rainbow from left to right.
The first time Lila skulked inside, she had been poleaxed because she remembered that. She remembered being so small she was at eye level with the Bounty bars, and a conspiratorial male voice telling her, ‘Choose whichever one you like. Just don’t tell your mother we had sweets before tea.’
After many long afternoons of surveillance, Lila had concluded that Ronith was the parent she took after most. They had the same nose and eyebrows. They both took their coffee black and their tea with loads of sugar. They shared an affinity for the color red, and her father, much like Lila herself, was a bit of an eccentric.
“It’s not an action film, you see, it’s a study on how we construct an identity,” he'd explained one afternoon to his shop assistant.
Gold Star Video boasted a single employee, a gawky Sikh kid who came in two afternoons a week to sweep up and help with inventory. When business was slow, Ronith would pontificate about his film analyses, and Lila liked to come in and eavesdrop.
They spoke to each other in Punjabi, mainly. She found it quite simple to follow along, like she could in most any language provided she could hear both sides of the conversation and ‘applied her talents,’ as her other mother used to instruct her to do. But she got the sense that this was a little different to that. Like riding a bicycle again, after forgetting you’d ever learned how in the first place.
“Think of it. The protagonist is taken by this organization and treated as their property. They remake him to suit their needs. As time goes on, he recovers more memories of his life before them, but!” He’d shaken a finger. “He’s no longer that person either, is he? Too much has happened, he can’t go back to what he was. The choice then now is his—who will he be?”
He had nodded sagely. “It’s a freedom that can only come from pain and loss. People all over the world understand that. For example, you and I are immigrants, Maninder, and neither of us is quite who we were back in Punjab, are we? That’s why it’s such a popular film. It’s universal.”
“I think most people liked the fight scenes, Mr. Gill.”
“The fight scenes!” Her father had puffed up in his seat, windmilling his hands around in an inarticulate fury. “It’s not about the fight scenes! You are missing the entire point of RoboCop, Maninder!”
That was one thing Lila got from her mother: a weakness for dramatic men.
Anita was the calm and collected half of the marriage. A steadying presence with intelligent eyes and feet planted firmly on the ground. She never raised her voice, but people listened when she spoke.
That was her cross to bear in life. Her opinion was too valuable.
From the moment she sat down on the bus in the morning to the second she arrived home in the evening, Anita’s day was one long struggle to find a moment of peace. Lila had snuck after her a few times. She would take a seat at the back of the bus so she could study the neat, straight line of her mother’s braid as her head was bent over her book, and without fail, some garrulous neighbor or another would get on at the next stop and squawk, “Morning, Anita! Off to work, then, are you?”
It was all downhill from there. She’d arrive at the further education college she worked at over in Hayes, and a student would ask her to proofread an essay while she had her morning tea in the canteen. She’d find a quiet moment to slip into the courtyard and enjoy the air, and then a colleague out for a smoke would swoop in and begin relaying the troubles she was having with her boyfriend. At lunchtime she’d be asked to write a reference letter for a university application and to look over the lesson plan a junior teacher had come up with, and at 4:30, when she had one foot out the door, someone would be chasing after her saying, “You’re coming out for a drink with us, aren’t you, Anita?”
She bore it with a graciousness Lila could never come close to. In fact, she had a vague memory of hanging off of her mother’s shirt and moaning in impatience in the aisles of a grocery shop, because they had stopped to chat with someone and it was taking ages.
Was it Anita or her other mother that had happened with? She wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter, she supposed. Lila had the sense that she and Anita wouldn’t get on. She was a serious sort of person, this mother, all long skirts and sensible shoes. She packed her own lunches and saved shopping bags. She had the aura of a librarian about her.
No, Anita wouldn’t approve of her, and perhaps Ronnie wouldn’t, either. The person Lila was now would never have come to be if they had raised her, she thought.
Who would that person have been? She didn’t know. Couldn’t even imagine. But she would trail after her parents down the streets she must have once walked, listen to them speak to the people she, too, must have known in a past life, and she would wonder ‘what if, what if, what if?’
Here they were now. Ronnie and Anita, walking arm-in-arm up the path to the bus stop, as they did every morning, Monday through Friday.
Lila watched them from the corner of her eye around the newspaper. They were moving slowly today. Her mother looked downcast, and her father kept touching her hand.
She could just make out their conversation. It was one she’d heard many times already. Once a month, in fact.
“—was so sure this time,” her mother was saying. “It was nearly two weeks late.”
“There’s always next month,” Ronnie said encouragingly. “Like the doctor said, these things can take time.”
Anita raised her eyes to meet his. They were tired. “How much time is left, Ronith? I’ll be forty soon.”
“So we’ll go back to the doctor, then,” he said. He sounded upbeat and unconcerned, but there was something forced in it. “You know, my aunt Suvarna—”
Anita sighed and hugged his arm closer. “Yes, yes, had a baby at forty-six. I know.”
“Well, it’s a good story. It bears re-telling.”
Lila saw the reluctant smile her mother cracked before they were past her, and moving out of sight.
Objectively speaking, there was precious little of interest about her parents. Modest people, quiet lives. Rather dull, on the whole. But there was one thing about them that was absolutely fascinating.
It was September 19th, 1989. In twelve days, Lila would be born, and her mother was not pregnant.