by Leah Franqui
Rachel nodded. “I said it must be hard because I thought that was what you would have wanted me to say. I think it’s one of those things people say. That must be hard.”
“I wish it was hard,” Swati confessed. “But it is not.”
“Oh. Well—” Rachel hesitated.
“What?”
“It’s just, maybe that’s hard. That’s the hard part. How easy it is.” Swati nodded at Rachel’s words. They were confusing, but they also made sense. “What did Akanksha say?”
“Oh. Nothing, really. Nothing important.”
“Did she judge you?” Rachel asked, her tone curious.
Swati looked up at her. “Not like I thought she might. It’s not like America, people getting divorces all the time. We value marriage here.”
Rachel stiffened. “People value marriage everywhere,” Rachel said sharply.
“Then why so much divorce divorce divorce all the time?” Swati asked, genuinely curious.
“Maybe because we’ve gotten past the stigma. Maybe because it’s just easier than doing the work. Maybe because sometimes you make the wrong choice, and you want to start again. You are the one who would know,” Rachel said pointedly.
If Swati had spoken to her mother-in-law this way, she would have slapped her, she reflected as she looked up at Rachel’s face. So direct, this girl was, so disrespectful. But correct, as well. And wasn’t that what had inspired Swati? The way Rachel looked people in the eye, the way she cut to the heart of things? Isn’t that what Swati had wanted for herself?
“Yes. I am the one who would know,” she said simply.
Rachel sighed and got up to go. “Do you want anything? Water, or anything?”
“No,” Swati said calmly. “Only, Rachel?” She turned back. “Will you stay with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Here. Will you please stay?” Rachel looked torn. “Please?” Swati pleaded, mortified but somehow quickly desperate.
Rachel sighed and sat down on the bed. “Okay. For a bit.”
Swati smiled.
“What should we talk about?” said Rachel.
“We don’t have to talk,” Swati assured her. “You can lie down if you like, if you are tired.” Rachel shrugged and stretched out on the bed, rolling onto her side. Beside her Swati lay, mortified that she had asked and grateful that Rachel had said yes. Somehow it was nice to have someone there with her, an excuse for not taking the whole bed, a reason she would wake up in the corner that wasn’t just her own weakness, her inability to change.
For now, she didn’t have to change. She could just lie there and be.
Sixteen
With the advent of the soap opera recordings, Rachel’s life took on a routine that thrilled her. Her body felt like it was buzzing when she woke up in the morning, brimming with energy in a way she hadn’t felt for months. This is what purpose feels like, she reminded herself. To think she used to wake up every day feeling this way, and she had taken it for granted. Disliked it, even. Wished she didn’t have somewhere to be, wished every day were Sunday, wished she could stay in her bed, curled up next to Dhruv’s warmth on cold Brooklyn mornings.
Now, though, she woke up eager to be Magda. Magda lived a life lit with courage. She was forever willing to see the best in others, to be hopeful, to open her heart. It helped that Magda had a never-ending wardrobe of floral dresses, Rachel supposed. The character was supposed to be poor, but she always had new things to wear, and despite the frequent insults Magda bore from others, it all looked pretty good to Rachel, if not especially appropriate for the weather in Romania.
The show had jumped in time when her baby was born, probably because stories around newborns wouldn’t allow Magda to realistically look out at the sea mourning her lost love tragically, her hair floating around her in perfect waves. Magda had named her baby after her husband, which troubled Rachel, and she habitually declared that her baby’s love was all she needed in the world and that they would never be parted. I wonder what his wife will think about that someday, Rachel thought, sighing internally. Is that what Swati had thought, when Dhruv was a baby? She had never thought her husband and his mother were all that close. Her arrival, and his insistence on keeping her, had surprised Rachel for many reasons, including that one. But perhaps close was defined differently here.
She had used to think she was close with Dhruv, but since he had left for Kolkata the distance between them was more than the physical. Oh, he called, he texted her in between his meetings, but it was all the logistics of things, how was Swati, did Rachel have enough money, could she have the couch deep-cleaned. She asked him how he was, and he listed out the details of his day but nothing about his father except that they had fallen into a routine, with weekend evenings at their social club. The most intimate detail Dhruv had shared was that his father had indulged in two full pegs of whiskey, instead of his usual one, the other evening, indicating a clinical level of depression.
She had noticed that his tone about his father had shifted. On the phone the other evening, as she had tried to tell him about Magda’s Moment, he had interrupted her.
“It sounds fun, Rachel, but it’s a bit dumb, right? Still. If it keeps you busy, that’s all that matters.”
Is it? she wondered. She didn’t like the idea of herself as someone who needed to be “kept busy.”
“Listen, I’m thinking that when I come back I should bring Papa with me.”
“Oh,” Rachel said.
“He wants to talk to Mum, and she won’t really talk to him, but maybe if she sees him it will be easier for him to communicate,” Dhruv said, warming to his plan.
“I thought you weren’t really talking to your father,” Rachel said. She wasn’t sure what else to say. She didn’t think Swati had any interest in talking to Vinod, but perhaps she did, perhaps she and Dhruv discussed it all the time, perhaps Rachel just didn’t understand.
“Oh, well. It seems like this might be a misunderstanding, this thing between them. I think if we could get them in the same room, it could all be sorted out.”
She should have been happy. Dhruv was talking about eliminating the problem in her life, Swati, and getting her back to Kolkata, settling all the upheaval. But in her heart of hearts, Rachel didn’t think that there was much of a common misunderstanding between them. She thought perhaps it was Vinod, and now Dhruv, who didn’t understand.
“I don’t know, Dhruv. Your mom is telling people about the separation. She seems pretty . . . set in her decision.”
“Who did she tell?”
“Well, Bunny found out—”
“Oh, that’s nothing—”
“And she told this woman Akanksha.”
“Oh.” He went silent on the other end of the line. “It’s just that Papa is so sure.”
“Well. I guess your mother is, too.” Rachel didn’t understand. Dhruv had been there when Swati had arrived, he had seen her determination, he had been ready to set his father on fire at the suggestion that he might have wronged his mother in some way, and now he was surprised?
“Well. Let’s see,” Dhruv had said, confusing Rachel more, and then he moved on to other things, telling her the names of people she should meet, someone she should become friends with. But can I drink in public with them? Rachel thought sardonically. They hadn’t spoken about that conversation after they had had it, and Rachel didn’t want to approach it again, but his rebuke, the surreal nature of it, still stung her. He must have been having a bad day, she thought, aware she was pretending in her thoughts again, just as he seemed to be pretending away his mother’s certainty about leaving Vinod.
Dhruv had been pushing her to meet more people he recommended, though; perhaps this was his way of trying to help her adapt, or of controlling her behavior. Rachel had gone a few times to expensive cafés in South Mumbai and in her own neighborhood, and met with coiffed women, the wives of Dhruv’s colleagues. They were well-heeled and chic, and they made Rachel feel, when she comp
ared herself to them, that she was grubby and poorly put together. She had nothing in common with them, and she always wondered what it was about them that made Dhruv think they would be good friends. The night before, she had asked him, and he had said they were good connections, good examples for her, and she realized he hadn’t been thinking that they would be good friends at all, he thought they would be good role models. And Rachel wasn’t sure why Dhruv thought that was what she wanted. Perhaps he thought it was what she needed. Either way, it was depressing.
Stretching in the morning sun, she looked over at his side of the bed. It was still so sticky and humid, she wouldn’t have wanted to touch him if he had been there. He had always been reluctant to be physically affectionate, and she had always been the one insisting, giggling as she forced him to hold her, as he groaned his mock dismay against her neck. Maybe he would have been happy now, to find that there was finally a time in which she didn’t want to be touched or to touch at all.
When they had talked about moving to India, Rachel had, in her secret and shamefully UK-loving heart of hearts, thought of it as an adventure. While she knew she shouldn’t romanticize the days of the Raj, it had been difficult for her to imagine India as much other than languid British people sipping gin and tonics as they looked out onto massive tea plantations, unless she thought of it as Slumdog Millionaire. She didn’t know how to put the two realities together, in her mind, so she picked the one she preferred because it had sepia tones and 1930s costumes. Rachel had, she was realizing, thought of India from a singularly white perspective. Almost everything she knew about the country had been cultivated by watching Indian Summers and reading New York Times articles that distributed pats on the head and admonishments in equal supply. Her understanding of the place was split between a glamorized past and a dangerous present, both seen from the outside in. Now she had India all around her, and she didn’t know what to do with it, how to see it differently, how to meet it on its own terms, to understand it without judgment, to separate what she wanted from what she saw. How could she be objective? How could she separate what she thought from how she experienced it? The India around her from the life she wanted to have, the way she wanted to live?
When they had talked and talked about what it would be like to live there, Rachel had tried to make clear what she did not want, and Dhruv had smiled and nodded and assured her that their life in India, and anywhere else they went, would be just as they wanted it to be, as she wanted it to be. But the truth was, Dhruv made most of the decisions in their lives, something Rachel had secretly and to her great surprise found comfort in. It was easy to let him tell her how to live in India. It had, she was realizing, been part of why she had agreed to marry him and move here, for marrying and moving were one and the same for Dhruv; one didn’t exist without the other.
But now his mother was making those choices. She had decided what their life would be like here. Rachel had wanted to live in India, but not, she knew now, the way that Indians live. And Swati had ignored that desire. But worse, so had Dhruv. This was the problem with giving people the power to make choices for you; they just went right ahead and did it. Dhruv had put Swati in charge of their lives, or at least their home, and could not see the way in which that betrayed Rachel, and Rachel didn’t know how to tell him. It felt like reneging on bargains Rachel had only been half aware of striking but now was too afraid to challenge. What would happen if she did?
His firm had asked him to spend an additional week in Kolkata, but he thought it might end up being two. At this rate, he would miss the entirety of her time working on Magda’s Moment. In their last conversation about it he had all but confessed a total lack of interest, and Rachel had almost said, Well, your mother enjoys it, but didn’t. It might just have been a silly soap opera, but it was her job, the thing that was filling her life; it was giving her joy, something she had had in short supply thus far in their move, and wasn’t that worth something? Dhruv just told her to meet more people, ask them about what they did, maybe try to join their groups and activities, the charities they patronized, the things they did to fill the time. When he talked about Rachel’s life, that was how he talked about it, filling time, like her life was a vessel to be filled and emptied. Maybe that’s how he thinks of it, Rachel thought, and was shocked by the bitterness of that thought. Dhruv didn’t think of her that way, she was sure of it. It was only that he was starting to sound different now that he was back in Kolkata. But wasn’t he sounding different when you moved to India in the first place? that bitter voice hissed.
Rachel got up, trying to distract herself from her own disloyal ideas, creeping around in her head, by thinking about the soap. Despite Dhruv’s lack of interest, the world of Magda’s Moment became more complicated with each episode. The experience of recording her voice was surreal, not just because life on a soap opera was fairly surreal under the best of circumstances, but also because Rachel only saw Magda’s lines, so she had no idea what anyone was saying to Magda. She could sort of figure out what was happening through Magda’s reactions, or when she was voicing another character, but for the most part, she was only ever one part of any conversation.
Although she had started off just being Magda, myriad other characters had entered the show, and it was clear that Ram Arjuna’s strategy for these many people was simply to use whatever was in front of him. Rachel learned in her third session that he had hired only five people but that the series had literally hundreds of characters. So far, Rachel had voiced a prostitute, a babushka, a Gypsy, and several secretaries, as well as Mariska, a woman stolen by pirates and rescued by Pytor while he was in Egypt on business, who was falling in love with him, even as he began to doubt Magda’s faithfulness because of a series of incriminating letters sent by Igor, the scheming stepbrother.
But mostly, she was Magda, and she had to try to understand the other characters and give Magda’s lines the emotions they required without ever really knowing what the other characters were saying. She could only really know Magda, only really be sure of her. And she was good at it. Perhaps this was because being Magda was just like being in India, she mused. All around her people told her things, spoke to her, wanted things from her, but the only person she could really understand was herself. The only person she could be really sure about was herself.
Now the series had a dedicated fan in Swati. The woman was obsessed, and Rachel found herself taking notes sometimes, to remember a plot point or a line that she thought her mother-in-law might like. In the week since she had started, she had recorded fifteen episodes in her three sessions. And there had already been so many twists and turns that Rachel could barely remember where the series had started. It was ridiculous, yes, but she was drawn into it. It was so filled with emotion, people overflowing with feeling. It was impossible to look away from something like that.
Dressed, ready to go, Rachel walked out of her building and hailed an auto-rickshaw, sipping on the iced coffee she had stored in a glass bottle. The city looked almost pretty to her that morning, the lush greenery of her neighborhood becoming bustling commerce as her ride made its way toward the highway via which it would zoom across the neighborhoods between Bandra and Malad, the road forming hills that bobbed up and down, following the railway lines north.
Leaning against the rickshaw railing, Rachel saw a restaurant that she had been to one evening, several weeks ago, for one of Dhruv’s work events. It had been on a Friday night, and some colleague or another of Dhruv’s had invited “the wives” out for drinks at a sleek and overpriced new place in Juhu. Dhruv had had a list of women for her to target, like a spy, she thought, trying to turn an asset, but Dhruv hadn’t seen the humor in that.
Although she felt bad thinking it, all of Dhruv’s colleagues, who were almost all men, seemed the same to Rachel. No matter how hard she tried to recall specific and exact details of their lives, they all ran together, with all of them polished and smiling, with slick hair and shining teeth and ill-fitting suits. These
events felt like a middle school dance, because the girls huddled in one corner and the boys in another, and as soon as she tried to break ranks she would be firmly but gently escorted back, her wineglass refilled, her place clear.
The bevy of Mumbai wives ran the gamut from perfectly groomed housewives and ladies with glamour jobs like makeup artists and interior decorators, who filled their lives with personal trainers and nutrition coaches and lunches and shopping trips, all interspersed with childcare sessions and arguments with their help, to diamond-hard professionals eager to point out how hard they worked, how different they were from their painted and primped counterparts.
She was a novelty act at these events, the white woman in a room of Indians, the person with the least-expensive jewelry on and nothing to compete for. She was neutral territory, but she was also, she felt, boring to them, for she had no gossip to share with them, she needed context for everything, and they couldn’t talk to her, not really, they had to explain so much, so she smiled and nodded and tried to make herself as small as possible and enjoyed the wine, which was better than what she usually bought for herself, observing the women around her trade barbs and compliments in equal measure.
The women were all perfectly nice to her, as were the men, but Rachel was aware all the time that she was doing something wrong, missing half of what people said, even though it was all in English. There were so many things she didn’t grasp, gaping holes in the conversation waiting for her to trip into them, reactions that she didn’t have, or had in the wrong direction, that marked her as other and confused her for days afterward.
She had known from the first one of these drinks events that she wouldn’t be making any friends in this crowd, no matter how strongly Dhruv advised her to, no matter how important he told her it was. She really did try, but she said the wrong things, asked the wrong questions, and didn’t know why. Maybe she would fit in better with these women now, now that she had a mother-in-law living with her, like most of them did. Or maybe they wouldn’t have understood her reaction at all, her shock and frustration at Swati and her presence in her life. After all, they lived that reality every day, too, they had been born into it, grown up expecting it, known what it would be. They might have no sympathy for the surprise Rachel had experienced, or the discomfort. They might tell her to get over it, to adapt. They might say, But life here is like that only. People said adapt, but what they meant was, Pretend that you like living this way. Pretend to be happy, pretend that everything you did before was wrong. Pretend this, now, is better. Was that what it was like for women who moved into an Indian joint-family system, living with their in-laws and with their male in-laws and their families, when they got married? Was that what it had been like for Swati? Rachel felt an unexpected twinge of deep sympathy. Was that what Vinod had asked of her? Wasn’t that what he wanted even now? For her to pretend her needs were a misunderstanding, for her to agree, to bend?