by Leah Franqui
Rachel did. Swati dreaded her return, dreaded what would come with it. An argument, with Rachel saying so many things and asking so many questions and not understanding the things that, to Swati, went without saying. She tried to keep busy, eating her lunch, watching a soap opera, but the show was typical, Indian families in conflict, daughters-in-law who were snakes to their in-laws or mistreated by them. Either bitten or biting, or both.
No one was ever happy for long in these shows, the specter of pain was always on them, and yet they all stayed together, in their television mansions that no one Swati knew really had. Even the wealthiest of her friends didn’t live this way, in marble palaces with never-ending sets of rooms and constant events requiring changes of clothing. She had always enjoyed these serials, relished their constant complications that were both endlessly unique and always the same; she had been comforted by them. But now she felt far away from them; she saw them with critical eyes that had no patience for the dithering emotions the characters lived on.
You should just leave, Swati thought as yet another character wailed about the unfairness of her life, the cruelty of those around her, the longings of her heart. After all, I did it, and look at me now. If she, Swati, a conventional Marwari housewife, had done it, why couldn’t these fictional women? Because no viewer would want to see that. No one wants to see a family destroyed by one person’s selfish needs. Remember what Bunny said?
She still hadn’t told Bunny, or anyone back home, what she had done. She couldn’t, after that phone call. What could she say? The priest was the only person who knew, and he was barely lucid most of the time. Essentially, she was in hiding, cowering from the world, worried about what her daughter-in-law would say to her about a cook, worried about if she should be more worried about money. What a spineless creature she was.
Rachel came home that evening, after the cook had gone, after the maid had come by a second time and was busy giving the floors their second scrub of the day, and stopped in the doorway, neither entering the apartment nor leaving it. Swati had been bracing herself for a confrontation all afternoon, and she was sitting on the couch, her body tense, her jaw firmly set. She was steeling herself, trying to be firm. She could not, would not, let Rachel dictate to her. It was against the natural order of things, and more than that, Swati had not left her husband, her life, all that was right and settled, just to let someone else push her around.
“How was your lunch?” Swati said, trying to start off in a pleasant way, trying to make it clear that nothing had to be discussed, really.
“How was yours?” Rachel asked pointedly.
“Very nice,” Swati said, trying to smile. She could feel in her cheeks that it was more of a grimace.
“Well. As long as you got what you wanted,” Rachel said, her voice spiteful and a little slurred.
“Are you all right? You sound different.” Heatstroke could make people sound that way, Swati had heard. Foolish American, walking around in the sun like that. Everyone knew it was bad for you. It was October, after all, and the swirling showers of the monsoon had given way to a heat that made the city sluggish and sweaty, with people pushing through humid air, wishing they could shed their own skin just to feel a little cooler. It was Swati’s first October in the city, and it felt like high summer in Kolkata, a humidity so fierce it weighed you down even when you were sitting.
“Just had a few drinks,” Rachel said, making it sound like an accusation.
“Oh. At lunch? Someone could have seen you,” Swati said, shocked. Drinking. In public. What if Akanksha had seen, someone who knew Swati, who knew Rachel was connected to her? Or one of Dhruv’s colleagues, one of their wives? It was bad enough that Rachel had wine in the house, but at least that was private, no one could see. To be out in the world, being that way, it was against everything Swati thought a woman should be. Her face froze with shame.
“Well, we were all foreigners. You know it’s all right for people like us to do things like that. Dhruv even said so, that it was fine for me to drink, as long as I was just with expats,” Rachel drawled. Her voice was firmer now, and anger sang through it.
Swati bit her lip so hard it almost bled. “If people saw you—”
“The place had a lot of windows. I’m sure people did.”
“Oh, you don’t understand! This could, this could—”
“What? Swati, this isn’t the eighteenth century. No one cares what women do in public.”
“Here they do! I could never, I could never have done such a thing. I wasn’t allowed to leave my house alone, I couldn’t speak to other men, I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t have anything that other people didn’t let me have! And now you think you can just go and do whatever you want, but—but I couldn’t. People did care, people do care, they are watching you, they are judging you, they will never stop and it will rule your whole life.” Swati was yelling, raising her voice, but she didn’t know how to stop, how to control herself. You have spent your whole life controlling yourself, a voice hissed in the back of her mind, a snake that sounded like her mother, and her grandmother, and every woman she knew, apart from Rachel. How dare you stop now.
“No. It won’t,” Rachel said, almost gently. “Because I don’t let it.”
“Don’t you know how this will reflect on us, on Dhruv? It could impact his work, our family’s reputation, the way people see all of us.”
“Don’t you think people have better things to do than think about me?” Rachel said, and Swati could only shake her head at this utter nonsense. People thought about each other, that was most of what people did.
“You are only thinking of yourself. There are consequences to what you do here. If they see Dhruv has some immoral wife, what will they think of him? How can they trust him?”
“What about having some wine at lunch is immoral?” Rachel asked, her tone condescending and crisp.
If Rachel didn’t understand that, even, what could Swati say to her?
“How can you be so blind? For a woman to do that, it shows that she has no shame. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand anything about you,” Swati said, her voice low.
“I know,” Rachel said gently. “I don’t understand you, either.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, their mutual incomprehension a cloud between them.
Rachel straightened and looked around the room like she had never seen it before. Swati walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of water, cold, the way Rachel liked it. She brought it back to Rachel, still standing in the doorway, who looked at it like it was a foreign object. Then, with a start, Rachel took the glass and polished it off in one long gulp, her throat working compulsively, her eyes shut tight. She wiped her mouth, and her eyes, and carried the glass to the kitchen. Swati watched Rachel look down at Deeti, the maid, who cleaned the floors with a rag, moving about in a scuttling position like a crab. The maid’s movements were hypnotic, her hands skilled and sure, her sari tucked between her legs and folded into her waist. Rachel stared at the maid for a long moment.
“So. You got a cook.” Rachel’s tone sounded mild, but there was something dark and dangerous under it. It was the kind of tone you might use to confront your mother’s killer.
“Dhruv wanted one as well,” Swati said, “so I found one.” She was daring her, she knew, daring her to say that it didn’t matter to Rachel what Dhruv wanted. She hated that she was doing this. A woman on one of her soap operas would do something like this. It was a trap, but she could not help herself. It was like coming here had awakened parts of herself, the parts that had hated being a daughter-in-law herself, that had vowed not kindness in the future but revenge. Rachel will have to submit, to adapt. It’s only fair. Why should her life be better than mine? She hated herself deeply as she thought these things. She had never thought she would be this way with her own daughter-in-law, but it was like watching her body move without her mind; it was already happening, she couldn’t have stopped it for the
world.
“I see,” Rachel said, her tone neutral. “Well, if that’s what he wants, then I suppose that’s what it is.”
“Yes, it is,” Swati said. She should have felt victorious. Rachel had conceded. Swati was getting what she wanted. She had asserted herself, taken what was hers. But instead, she felt hollow.
Rachel looked at the maid again. She laughed, but it was bitter.
“What is it?” Swati asked. “Maybe you should eat something. Geeta left food.”
“I was thinking. You know, these women at my lunch, they think Indians are so dirty. But how is that possible? Look how hard the maids work,” Rachel said.
“We aren’t dirty,” Swati said, offended. “Not Hindus. We keep our homes very clean.”
Rachel laughed again, the sound harsh. “Right. Not Hindus. Of course.”
“This is what they do, these women? Sit around and—and drink, and talk nonsense about Indians? They don’t have something better to do with their time?”
“Apparently no one does,” Rachel said. “Isn’t that what you think people are doing to me? Talking about me?”
“I am talking about people who matter.”
“And how do you decide who that is?”
This was a ridiculous question, and Swati said nothing. Rachel sighed.
“You should eat something,” Swati said again, trying to talk about something more neutral, but Rachel’s face only darkened.
“I don’t want your cook’s food, Swati. I don’t want anything at all.”
Rachel moved around Deeti with a quiet excuse me and began washing the glass Swati had given her. Everything about it—Rachel’s strange words; her murmured courtesy to the maid, who couldn’t even understand what she was saying; the act of washing the glass at all—filled Swati with confused rage.
“You don’t have to do that. She’s here, she will do it when she’s done the floors.” This was what the maid was paid for, this was her job. This was her benefit, her use, and Rachel was ignoring it, ignoring that a person who was literally at her feet was there to make her life better, easier, to do these menial things so that Rachel didn’t have to.
“But I want to do it. And I’m sure you know how important it is to get what you want. Don’t you?” Rachel asked, her tone sweet and poisonous. And Swati saw then that this wasn’t over. Rachel had not accepted the cook, she had not submitted, she was merely biding her time and planning her next move.
Swati wished she could say something, reach her, make her understand, go back and start all over, chastise her less for the drinking, tell her how to figure out who was important, teach her about reputations and how everything one did affected the way the world judged them and rewarded them, reach her in some way, but it was like a door had closed inside of Rachel, just like the one Swati had closed in her face hours earlier. So they stood there in silence, and after placing the glass on the drying rack, Rachel thanked Deeti and walked into her room, shutting the door gently but precisely behind her. Swati looked at it, her heart tight in her chest. It might as well have been iron for how possible it would have been for Swati to penetrate it.
She refused to be regretful for any longer, because it made her feel bad about her own actions, and so she decided to be angry. How could Rachel come back, smelling of drink, and be upset with Swati? She should be repentant, apologetic, instead of furious at her for making Rachel’s life better. What an ungrateful little cat. How could she be so unconscious of her actions, so spiteful, so willful? She was the younger person, she was the interloper, she was the one doing things wrong. Swati and Dhruv were family, Rachel was the outsider, in this country, in this home. She was the one who must learn what to do, listen to others, obey. Who was she to dictate? She was a daughter-in-law. Didn’t she know what that meant?
Swati stewed on the couch until Deeti left. Then she was in a perfectly clean apartment with dinner all prepared. Just what she had always wanted. But utterly alone. Better alone than with someone who knows nothing, she told herself. It sounded good, and comforted her not at all.
Swati feared that Rachel would complain to Dhruv, calling him from Mumbai with a litany of issues, complaints, injustices, and turn his mind against her, and she would get an earful from him. But more than that, she dreaded hearing from her son, as much as she missed him, because she did not want to hear her old life in Kolkata behind him on the phone. She did not want to hear about Vinod.
Her life had been attuned to her husband’s for so long that her disinterest in his existence now felt surreal and exhilarating. For years she had been yoked to his needs, attentive to his comings and goings, to what he ate and drank, to the rhythm of his pulse and the pace of his toothbrush morning and night. She had spent so much time thinking about these things that the ease with which she let these concerns go shocked her a bit. What a waste of my time, she thought, and what a shame I never told Vinod that this was what I was doing. He hadn’t made her do any of this, not really. She had just known it to be her duty. Now he called her back, evoking duty again, reminding her of her responsibilities, but really, most of what she had done could be done by someone else.
When she had been a young woman the world had been different, and she was necessary to the function of her household. But prosperity had earned her, and all the women she knew of her class, irrelevance to the running of a home. All the commands the priest had dictated as part of her wedding vows were being fulfilled by girls from villages far from Kolkata. What could Vinod really need from her anymore?
He hadn’t called her since Dhruv had arrived home. Perhaps he was trying to convince him that he should drag her back or talk sense into her. But Swati wasn’t worried. If Dhruv hadn’t sent her back already, he wouldn’t do so now, she didn’t think. He had never been very close with his father, they were too similar, both stubborn, both wanting to control things, have their own way. And Vinod had never really forgiven Dhruv for staying away, for not accepting the business Vinod had built as his birthright and his due. Vinod could only see the world the way he wanted to see it, and Dhruv hadn’t played his role. Not that they had ever discussed any of this. Vinod did not discuss things. She doubted he would be able to ask for Dhruv’s help now, after so much had gone unsaid before.
Well, if Rachel had called Dhruv to complain, apparently he hadn’t reacted to it, because Swati didn’t hear from him at all. She told herself this was good, but a twinge inside of her made her wonder if she had, indeed, hoped for something more, some piece of information, some news of Vinod she didn’t think she wanted, some sense that he was better off without her there. She told herself she was being silly. They were not the kind of people who discussed these things; why did she want to now?
The next day, when Geeta came, Swati asked Rachel what she wanted the cook to make her for lunch. Swati had warned Geeta about Rachel, telling her that her daughter-in-law was foreign, or as Geeta had put it, from another kind of village. Swati supposed that Geeta, who came from a village in central Maharashtra and lived in a nearby slum composed of pakka housing, cement shacks with sheet metal or tarp roofs, considered everyone a member of a different kind of village. The world was made of villages, if that was the way you saw it to be.
In Kolkata, all of Swati’s help had been from Odisha and Bihar, and they returned home for their festivals and traditions. Here there would be other periods of leave, other holidays to be celebrated back home in little villages all over the state. Here the help would eat what was native to them. Far from the lush and dangerous world around Kolkata, where a crop was likely to be flooded, or Rajasthan, the place that Swati’s community came from, where they had lived off the desert, finding food in sand—in Mumbai were a people who knew drought and drowning in equal supply. Still, Geeta had probably never eaten a salad in her life, at least, not one consisting of anything other than tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions, or fresh methi leaves and garlic. But Swati, hoping to make amends, hoping to move past that horrible conversation that had made her reveal h
erself in ways she hated, that had provoked her in a way that she was uncomfortable with, told Geeta that her Angrezi daughter-in-law liked her vegetables in certain ways, and Geeta had laughed at the descriptions but promised she could do her part.
“She can make you a sandwich, or whatever you like. You just tell me, and I’ll tell her,” Swati said, feeling benevolent. But Rachel just shook her head.
“I’ll make something when she’s done.”
“She will take a few hours,” Swati said. Didn’t Rachel know how long things took? The cook had to prepare food for the whole day; that would take time. The kitchen was hers now, her domain. Others couldn’t just enter it. Rachel looked at the kitchen, which Geeta had already made herself at home in, scattering onion skins and carrot peels about as she cooked, and sighed.
“Then I’ll go out,” Rachel said, and left.
And that’s what Rachel started doing every day. When Geeta and Deeti entered the house, Rachel left.
Swati waited, day after day, for Rachel to acknowledge how nice it was to have the house cleaned twice, to have fresh meals made daily, but she never did. She lived in the apartment without living in it, or so Swati felt. She didn’t eat the food that Geeta had made, at least not often. She didn’t leave dishes for Deeti to do or clothing for her to fold. Rachel made her own bed, put away her own toiletries, operating in the apartment mechanically, leaving nothing out of place. She was a ghost, determined not to be served, keeping her path through the day as an island in the sea of the home.
With each day, Rachel spent more and more time outside of the house, like a cat who came and went at will, whose only certain time of return was supper. Then she would come home, sweaty and dusty, sometimes clutching things she’d picked up along the way, sometimes empty-handed, whatever contentment or joy she felt from her wandering dying slowly as soon as she entered the apartment.