by Veena Rao
She sought his arms, the beat of his heart against her ear, and believed him when he said time was a great healer, that her family would eventually come around, that they had to accept her decision to seek happiness for herself.
“They will welcome me with open arms once they see how much I care for their daughter,” he said. She nodded. Somehow, in his arms, her family’s reaction seemed to fade in its importance, like a miracle balm healing a knife wound instantaneously.
Chapter 23
Tara and Cyrus took care of the arrangements themselves, finalizing a time slot for the wedding, making sure the priest was free for the ceremony, buying bags of rice, lentils, and clarified butter to be donated to the temple kitchen, filling little goody bags with favors—white metal bowls, nuts, and Indian sweets—to be distributed to the guests. Cyrus and Alyona went flower shopping, looking for marigolds and roses. When they finally found the flowers, much to everybody’s relief, Alyona offered to string them into garlands to be exchanged by the bride and groom after the ceremony.
Cyrus’s dadda, Terrence, flew in for the wedding. Annette’s brother, James, came with his wife, Lily, and their two kids, eight-year-old Anna with the infectious smile and two missing teeth, and five-year-old Johnny, a cherubic mini-version of James. They all stayed in Tara and Cyrus’s new four-bedroom house, a noisy group of happy, excited people.
James and Lily helped Tara and Cyrus in the kitchen, with the cleaning, with the laundry. James towered over everybody else in the house. He was balding, sported a goatee, and wore loose Hawaiian shirts, which his wife said were a futile attempt to cover his beer belly; but he had the same quiet, gentle disposition that Tara remembered. Lily was the opposite—petite, talkative, gossipy, with small hands that kept everything around her neat. They seemed to get along fine, and James was happy that his best buddy had finally found his Star.
They were all in the large kitchen the evening before the wedding, sipping wine and beer, munching on trail mix, prepping for the chicken vindaloo and soft idlis fluffed with yeast, the kind Cyrus loved. The kids had made themselves scarce, which wasn’t difficult when they could play video games in the family room.
“To find you on a billboard in America, after all these years! That’s a miracle, man, simply a miracle,” James said, shaking his head, laughing, as they stood at the counter, slicing onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes for the vindaloo. He set the knife down on the board to pat Tara’s shoulder. “They ought to make a Bollywood movie out of your love story. I am so happy for my Cyrus.”
“Tara, dear, thank you for making my boy happy,” Cyrus’s dad pitched in from his post on the bar stool near the marble-topped kitchen counter. His gray-green eyes were a little glazed from too much wine, and his salt-and-pepper mustache, upturned at the ends, had specks of dust from the trail mix. He wiped a tear from the outer corner of his eye.
“Cyrus grew up without a mother’s love. There was only so much a father could do, you know. He deserves love. He deserves you.”
Tara rushed to give him a hug. He patted her back softly, wiping another tear from his eye. The wine was making her giddy, and the onions were making her teary-eyed, but it was something else too. She caught happy vibrations in her heart. She heard silent meaning in the words expressed—that Cyrus was lucky in finding her, that they loved and accepted her and thought she was the one for him.
The other people in her life who thought she was special and who she thought were special came to the wedding, too. Alyona came dressed in a blue Banarasi silk sari, a gift from Tara, her short hair in an updo and embellished with little white fake flowers. Ruth looked regal in an orange, Swarowski crystal-encrusted chiffon lehenga that swept the floor, also a gift from Tara. Dottie wore her navy-blue suit and white blouse elegantly. Cyrus’s friend Tony Kaputo came in a black suit with his pretty wife, Ashley, who wore a yellow chiffon sari. There were three others from Peach Street Games, two men in crisp black suits and a girl in a floral, off-shoulder dress, who stood in rapt attention as the priest tried to explain the significance of the rituals to them in English.
Tara wore a red Kanjeevaram silk sari with heavy, gold-dipped silver work through its six yards. She had worn a green one with a red border the first time. Red was in now, said Lily, who had been entrusted the task of assembling the bridal trousseau, much of which she had accomplished with a shopping expedition to Bangalore. Alyona worked on Tara’s hair, taming it with iron and gel and spray, coaxing it into an updo, embellishing it with real flowers and a tikka, a gold chain with a pendant in the middle parting of her hair. She wore heavy gold jewelry for only the second time in her life. Lily had shopped for most of the collection in Mangalore, but one traditional choker necklace belonged to Annette, and to Cyrus’s grandmother before her. Tara had been hesitant to wear it until Cyrus’s dad convinced her that Annette would have wanted her to have it, that she alone was the rightful owner of this shining piece of family history.
Tara and Cyrus were married in a simple temple ceremony. The contrasts were many between her first and her second wedding. A thousand guests had borne witness to the first, an elaborate series of ceremonies amid the chanting of Sanskrit mantras and a ritualistic pyre. This time round, there were a handful of witnesses and a single ceremony that lasted twenty minutes. Then, she had been scared, stiff, sweaty, and tired. Now, her face radiated its own glow. Then, she had walked around the ceremonial fire seven times with a stranger to signify seven vows that were supposed to spiritually unite them as husband and wife forever. Now, she sat next to her best friend before an idol of Lord Ganesh, the elephant-headed God of all beginnings, the remover of obstacles. She didn’t mind joining her hands together in prayer, or repeating the shlokas after the priest, because Cyrus wanted a Hindu wedding. He’d had two church weddings, he said—an Indian Catholic Church wedding and an American Baptist Church wedding, neither of which had lasted. This time, he wanted to take his bride to be his wife in this birth and every birth, for all of eternity.
They were seated cross-legged on low wooden stools, their hands folded. A red silk dupatta covered Tara’s head for the ceremony. She touched the heavy gold choker. She could feel its weight around her neck, reminding her that she was now part of Cyrus, his family, his history. She stole a quick look at him. He looked so handsome in his beige, embroidered sherwani and red pants, a red stole casually thrown across his shoulders. His fair skin gleamed, and his eyes glittered like moonlit lakes. Her heart longed to kiss him. He smiled happily, boyishly every now and then when he turned to look at her. After the puja, the priest directed Cyrus to color Tara’s forehead with sindoor, vermillion, welcoming her as his partner for life. They exchanged rings, slim bands of gold, Tara’s set with a solitary diamond.
“I am dying to kiss the bride,” he whispered, after they had exchanged garlands. She clamped a hennaed hand over her mouth to stop the giggles. “There is no kissing the bride in the Hindu wedding tradition,” she said. “The priest will be mortified.”
The priest, a fair-skinned, young Gujarati man, looked up at her, part question, part smile on his face. She shook her head, and almost choked trying to stifle another giggle.
“Look what you did. The priest thinks the bride is a silly goose,” she whispered.
“This gander loves the silly goose,” Cyrus whispered back, a fist over his chest. She laughed openly this time.
Two days after the wedding, they went to Disney World in Orlando, the happiest place on earth, where Sara and Johnny suddenly came alive, and she with them. They went from attraction to attraction, Sara and Johnny talking nonstop in their excitement. They soared over Agrabah on Aladdin’s magic carpet, Tara working the controls that made them tilt back and forth, Cyrus ahead of them in the front row with Anna, who had the controls that made them fly higher and lower at her whim. Up and down, back and forth they went, Johnny next to her, screaming with joy, his young face lit with pure thrill. She closed her eyes, felt the wind in her hair. She saw a little girl of fiv
e or six on a tall red-and-blue, shoe-shaped slide, squealing with joy on its downward spiral, three other friends riding, screaming behind her. She turned around, straining her neck to peer into their faces. Their eyes were closed and their mouths open; the wind had blown their hair over their faces, but she recognized them. It was almost as if she were back at the place where she had been playing—in the grassy grounds of a clubhouse where happiness lived a long time ago—with Pippi, Leenika, and Runa. She opened her eyes and looked at the man ahead of her. The wind had forced his hair onto his forehead. She saw the sharp nose, the face titled upward to catch the wind, the thrill. Life had indeed come full circle. “Touch wood,” she whispered to herself. “Touch wood.”
Their house was a pristine, white, four-bedroom structure with a three-sided porch held up with white columns, a sloping gray roof, and a beautifully landscaped yard dotted with magnolias. Her fairy tale house. The backyard was large and overlooked a lake and woods beyond. In the middle of the backyard, in a giant oak was their magical getaway, a treehouse that Cyrus had commissioned a couple of months earlier, a little after they moved in, after he had asked her, during a conversation on fantasies, what hers had been as a child. To live in a nest, she had confessed, like a bird. His fantasy had been to soar in the sky, like an eagle.
Their fantasies came together inside the tree house, a ten-by-twelve-foot, oak-paneled room with a view of the lake that was fringed by wooded walking trails at the far end. When it caught their fancy, they sat in the tree house on little folding chairs, next to the stump of an old oak that served as coffee table, sipping hot tea. Sometimes, as the day’s light faded into darkness, they folded the chairs and stacked them in a corner, pulled out a thick red mattress, and fooled around. Sometimes, they made love in daylight, surrounded by singing birds.
Through the year, Cyrus spent most of his time in Atlanta, building and fortifying Peach Street Games. He still went to San Jose a couple of times a month, but only for a few days at a time. He was up at the crack of dawn for his yoga and meditation sessions. Then he fixed breakfast. She cooked dinner. At night, they lay curled on the couch, his arms around her, their legs entwined under a plush velvet throw, watching TV or a movie, midway through which his eyes would close, his chin sinking into her face, heavy in peaceful oblivion.
They hiked most Saturday mornings, through summer and fall, and then again in the spring. They traveled through Europe once, and around the States when they could. Between them, silence was never an impediment, conversation never a problem.
Tara still kept up with Ruth and Dottie, joining them for leisurely cafeteria lunches and trips of compassion. Alyona, however, was starring in a new love story, her resolve to never date having died at Tara’s wedding. This time it was Casper Eskandarian, a teetotaler who owned a bartending school in Doraville.
“Your beautiful story made me believe in love again,” she had sighed. “I want what you have, girl.”
Tara wanted that for Alyona, too.
Tara was sold on the immense benefits of yoga and meditation. Every Saturday morning, she and Cyrus drove up to Unity Church three miles away, where he taught basic yoga asanas free of charge to whoever was interested. Tara stretched, held poses, and worked out along with a motley group of young mothers, college students, a recovering cancer patient, and a seventy-five-year-old retired IRS employee. After yoga, they meditated collectively, stilling their minds, liberating them of thoughts, living in the present. She couldn’t help but marvel at how wonderfully unruffled and relaxed life seemed from her lotus position. She quickly learned the art of funneling her energies outward, in positive directions, at the bottom of which lay a tranquil core. When she closed her eyes, she was often in an exuberant flower garden, walking hand in hand with Cyrus, a sublime rainbow arching over them. Around them were Amma, Daddy, Vijay, and Cyrus’s family. One day, this too would come true.
Chapter 24
Tara quit her QA job to make time for writing. Her short stories and essays appeared in online journals, local magazines, even the London Review. The New Yorker proved elusive, but she’d keep trying.
Cyrus registered the Georgia branch of the Annette Saldanha Foundation, a charity he had hitherto run from San Jose. The foundation raised and dispersed funds to run the Annette Saldanha Home for Children in Mangalore. Cyrus’s dadda managed the home in India, identifying needs, allocating funds, supervising the staff. Dadda had sold Saldanha Motors—a fleet of buses that plied between Mangalore and nearby towns like Udupi, Karkala, and Kasaragod—to his competitor’s son, devoting all his energies to the family charity.
Annette Saldanha hadn’t been forgotten. Cyrus had made sure of that. It was her name on the charitable endeavor he and Dadda ran. In death, Annette had achieved a larger-than-life status, a saint-like aura. She was the dispenser of love, kindness, and hope. She gave new life to withered, fractured, abandoned little lives.
Annette had never been the love of his life, but she was the family Cyrus never had. He had admitted this to Tara once, a few months into their marriage, when they lay next to each other on the red mattress in their tree house. A part of him had died with the passing of Annette and her mother, Aunty Mariette. Growing up, they had been his anchors, their villa his home.
“I don’t ever remember spending an afternoon in my own house,” he had said, staring up at the wooden beams of the ceiling reflectively. “Every day, James and I were picked up from school by Uncle Lobo, who dropped us off at the villa. We three kids, we did everything together. I only returned home late every evening after Dadda got home, and even then, I wanted to escape, run back to be with my buddies, play some more, talk some more, argue some more.”
“What if Annette were still alive? I suppose you and I would never have reconnected.” Tara had turned to face him.
“I would have still searched high and low for you,” he had said without hesitation. “Annette and I should never have married. We both knew that going into it. We didn’t have a choice. She was pregnant.”
“If you both knew it was a mistake to marry, why did you even have sex, get pregnant?”
A long silence ensured. “He wasn’t mine,” he had said at the end of it. “My son, I mean. Biologically, he wasn’t mine.”
Stunned, she had searched his face for an explanation.
“Annette was a stubborn girl. She didn’t want to make the problem go away.”
“But whose baby was it?”
“Some fool from college who didn’t want to own up responsibility and face the wrath of his family.”
“So, you took responsibility?”
“Yes, what other solution was there? Mangalore is not exactly America. An unmarried mother would be ostracized there even today.”
“Does the family know?”
“No one else knows. Only Annette and I, and now you.”
“You are a good man, Cyrus Saldanha,” she had said, rolling into his arms, kissing the hollow of his throat. “And all this time I assumed it was raging adolescent hormones.”
“My hormones are raging now.” He had tightened his grip around her; nuzzled her neck. “It’s time that we tried for little stars of our own, no?”
She had grown stiff in his arms, mumbled something about needing a little bit more time to prepare herself mentally to be a parent. She was surprised with her reaction, because theoretically, she wanted children. Was she stalling because she wanted Cyrus all to herself for a while? Or was it the fear of failing as a parent?
His disappointment had cloaked her with guilt, but he had never brought up the topic again. Six months later, she told him she was ready.
He enveloped her in his arms, held her tight when she told him she had missed her period by a week. When her physician confirmed the news, he dazzled the dull room with his smile. Their joy lasted two weeks, until she noticed spotting following severe stomach cramps. A visit to the Emory emergency room made their fear of a miscarriage real. He cradled her in his arms that night, kissing her fo
rehead, sounding chirpy.
It was all right, he said. Miscarriages were common. They would try again in a few months, whenever she felt ready.
When the second miscarriage happened seven months after the first, eight weeks into her pregnancy, she was afraid she had run out of time. But he assured her it was okay. They’d take their time before trying again. They had fifty-three kids in Mangalore who called them Amma and Dadda.
Cyrus was going to Mangalore to be part of the tenth anniversary celebration of the home. Tara helped him pick gifts for the children—pencils, fancy erasers, candy, T-shirts. He had wanted her to join him, but her last conversation with Amma had come crowding back into her head. She didn’t feel ready to brave the hostility she would face in her community. She had been humiliated as an abandoned wife. She could only imagine the viciousness that would be flung at her, now that she had dared to divorce her first husband and taken a second, outside the community.
After Cyrus left, her social ostracism felt real.
“I may never be able to visit Mangalore again,” she told Ruth as they baked caramel cake for the church sale one evening, but all Tara craved was a slice of Amma’s pound cake.
“It is your family’s loss that they choose to stay away from your happiness,” Ruth assured her. “This is your home, and we are your family.”
“Your family don’t care for your happiness. Why you should care what they think?” Alyona fumed over a plateful of massaman curry and steaming hot rice at their favorite Buford Highway Malaysian–Thai place the following Saturday.
It wasn’t as simple as that, Tara knew. It wasn’t just her versus her family. It was also her parents versus the rest of the community. Perhaps Vijay was right. She had thrown her parents to the wolves and left them to defend their family honor while she stayed in the safety of Cyrus’s arms.