While Shimonthini readied for the next ritual, another ritual she did not believe in, Rupert went back to his rooms to check his emails. There were a few emails from his lawyers and his business associates. There was one mail from his adoptive brother who had agreed to let him marry in his parish church. This was all he had known for a family. For twenty-eight years of his life, he had believed his adoptive brother to be related to him by blood. Since his earliest days, he had known Henrietta to be his mother. She always told him that he had her blue eyes. Henrietta was half British and half French, an odd combination of the Allied forces united to fight against autocracy. That autocracy was represented by Bill, their father. William Monnet was a painter. He believed himself to be some odd relation of the real Monnet and thus inherited his talent. His misconceptions made him spend his wife's hard earned money travelling the world in search of inspiration. The few paintings he ever sold graced the patient rooms in economic clinics run by doctors having questionable qualifications. Perhaps his father's failures had been a cause of his aversion to art though he enjoyed fine tastes in every other form of talent. He was a great patron at the local museum back in New York through his hallways were graced by more sculptures than canvas.
Bill and Henrietta lived in DC, the capital city that held a lot of houses without names and a lot of its residents without identity. Henrietta served as a nurse at one of those decrypt Clinics where Bill would sell his paintings. Being the eldest of the three sons made him grow up quickly to partake in their parent's hardships. When Bill finally found a patron in a sixty-year-old woman who paid him more for his company than his talent he left Henrietta. The old woman was childless, with a lot of cats and welcomed Bill's youngest child Heinrich amidst her home. Henrietta who was left with two kids struggled to make ends meet. A year later when the government suddenly took a temporary interest in the unlicensed clinics Henrietta was out of a job. Another year later she was bankrupt. Her two children were taken away from her and placed in foster homes. She herself was put into a homeless shelter.
The foster home that Rupert found himself in belonged to a George Mornington. The Morningtons were originally from England and the owner of a commission of the East India Company. A fall out between his father and himself had caused Mr Mornington to settle in the States. He was married to a rich widow whose daughter was autistic. George Mornington inherited his father's business a few years after leaving England when he was bedridden from a paralytic attack. His own money along with that of his wife gave George Mornington enough leeway among Banks and the Judiciary. When his wife offered to take up a child as its foster parents George was a bit concerned about Teresa, her daughter. A few months later, however, Teresa had taken very kindly to Rupert and they formed an inseparable pair.
The eight-year-old Rupert struggled hard to fit into the prim and proper British family. He was too mature for his family who expected in him a wide-eyed child rather than a willing caregiver. He did run away on one occasion but the house he ran away to was abandoned. His foster mother took him back and had a talk with him. She promised to get his family together. By the time she could locate every one of them Henrietta was into drugs and was in jail for breaking and entering. Henry had had abusive foster parents and needed therapy. There was nothing Rupert could do for either of them on his own and so he did what seemed most logical to him. All that his foster mother wanted was for him to take care of Teresa in her absence. He agreed. Caregiving had been ingrained in him from a very early age. He and his brother Henry were just a year apart but Henry had always been his baby. What Rupert didn't count on was that the woman was suffering from cancer and by her absence had meant after her death.
Martha Mornington passed away in the Washington State Hospital with her twenty-year-old foster son Rupert Monnet at her side while her husband George Mornington was busy on a business tour of China. She named Rupert Monnet the sole heir to her property and the sole guardian to Teresa Williams, her daughter by her first husband. By this time George Mornington was raving mad, being cut out of the will. His financial situation did not leave him wanting but his social situation did. When a man is pushed to a corner he retaliates. George Mornington was no less of a man. What he started next was a string of affairs with women half his age. When one of his mistresses falsely claimed to be pregnant with his child it was found out that George Mornington had become sterile by suffering an accident at the age of nineteen.
Rupert took care of Teresa for ten more years till the time she went to be with her mother. Her death was ruled to be natural due to a genetically enlarged heart. By that time Rupert Monnet was a name to be reckoned with. Henry was out of therapy and a dabbling in theatre and music. Henry blamed Rupert for not saving their mother even when he had the means. Henrietta died in a prison riot.
By the time that Rupert was thirty-two years, he got news of his foster father being in the hospital with failing kidneys. His drinking habit had made him ineligible for an organ donation. Rupert out of gratitude to the Mornington family offered one of his own. The doctors suggested a DNA test to ensure enough alleles matched for a successful organ transfer. He was not ready to risk the lifestyle of an upcoming business tycoon for the death of a had-been-billionaire. The hospital was a private one. The DNA came out to be a perfect match. Rupert was his biological son. The news was huge and soon leaked out into the media. By the time all the uproar was squashed George Mornington suffered from multiple organ failure and was put on life support. He was thus rendered ineligible for organ transfer. The last thing that George Mornington did was sign an affidavit stating Rupert Monnet to be his biological son and heir. Only after that did Rupert start using his father's name.
A few months later William Monnet decided to pay a visit. He no longer painted pictures. His life went begging on the pavement outside the pub houses. His second wife had left him long ago to be with the Lord and Heinrich had abandoned him by the time he had turned thirteen. The older woman's outgoing lifestyle had left behind a large debt in place of the inheritance that he had hoped for. Bill never searched for his son but he came to tell Rupert the news of his life. It was a news he was willing to sell for a fair price which he did get and it set him up for the rest of his life. Rupert was not Henrietta's mistake. He was not her adulterous child with a business tycoon. He was her adopted child.
The next few years in Rupert's life was spent in searching for his brother and birth mother. One was hard to find and the other impossible to do so. Heinrich was by then part of a biker gang and working for a drug cartel in Mexico. Rupert tried to pay his way into mainstream life but wasn't successful in wringing the treachery out of him. Finding his birth mother was a different situation. Bill was kind enough to tell him that he was found abandoned in a church somewhere in Southern India. The rest of the information he had to gather from hired hands. He actually managed to home in on his destination not from a P.I.'s notes but from his father's old journal that he unearthed in the library in the family's old London home. But Rupert did not wish to find his mother just then. He did not want to face the woman who had abandoned him. Still, here he was, trying to prove to her that he would have been able to live the life she thought him unfit for. He did not deserve to be abandoned. But was Imli Mukherjee ready to hear?