by Leah Franqui
“Isn’t it upsetting how arrogance can be weirdly attractive?” Rachel asked, trying to sound innocent.
“Nonsense,” Swati said stoutly. “I don’t see him that way.”
“How do you see him, then?”
Swati looked away at Rachel’s pointed question. “I’m not saying he’s not good-looking. He always was a good-looking boy, even as a child,” Swati said, firmly establishing her age and place next to him. “But to send him here to get me was an act of madness. I can’t imagine what his mother was thinking.”
“I guess he wasted the trip,” Rachel responded.
“I guess so,” Swati said, but she smiled mysteriously.
Sitting in the cab, Rachel looked out the window as Swati slept next to her and the car sat in Mumbai’s never-ending traffic. Outside, the city raged and dozed and moved, always a kaleidoscope of action, as all big cities were, but as Mumbai especially was, a writhing mass of humanity grinding and struggling against itself, an endless multiheaded snake, a hydra of a city eating itself and fighting itself day in and day out.
The dark was beginning to fall, although it was early, only six p.m., and Rachel realized with a start that it was autumn, actually, even though it didn’t feel like it; that’s why the light was fading. The weather never changed much, and she had forgotten that time was moving on regardless. She was getting older, every day. She had lived in Mumbai a day longer every morning. And Swati lived with them longer every minute. But the city was indifferent to Rachel’s problems. It had enough of its own.
Sitting alone in the apartment that evening, long after Swati had gone to her bed, Rachel lit a cigarette and leaned over the balcony, blowing smoke out into the pleasant evening. It was cooler, and Rachel had donned a pair of long pajama bottoms. The feeling of wearing something that covered her calves felt alien after so many months without it.
Dhruv wouldn’t be home for at least another week. He had texted her dutifully that he had finally started wrapping up the project, that he had had a good talk with his dad, that he was ready to come home. He was so busy, he was sorry they couldn’t talk, all the normal things. He would tell her his plan soon, he promised over text, once it had worked. So many things that Rachel had to wait for. She had a thought: He couldn’t have been behind Arjun’s coming? No, of course not, that would be insane, Dhruv would never do something that stupid.
Sometimes, a small, sad part of Rachel wondered if perhaps he was having an affair. Arjun had had an affair, Swati had explained, with someone he had met at his tennis club. Why did people do that? Why did they have to betray each other, to make the problems between two people seem like they were really about someone else entirely? It was the coward’s way, she thought. To throw someone else in the middle of your own fire.
Dhruv wasn’t having an affair. She knew that. He just liked his work. He liked his life in India. She had never seen him happier. Before he had left for Kolkata, she had not seen him come home defeated or worn through, the way she used to be with her job in New York. He hadn’t entered their home like a character from a television show, all filled with loathing, desperate to loosen his tie, to shed the office behind him. He came home buzzing, elated with the thrill of loving what he did. Loving helping other businesses run faster, better, more efficiently. Every day was a series of puzzles Dhruv got to solve, with pleasing money-saving solutions as the reward for his efforts. The puzzles had become harder and more complicated in India, and he reveled in it. It excited his brain. It made him happy.
It would hurt her, yes, if Dhruv wanted to be with another woman, but it would be something she could understand, Rachel thought, inhaling her cigarette deeply. It would be chemical, physical, emotional. But what made Dhruv happy, this life, that was perhaps the biggest way he ever could have betrayed her. He was happy here, really happy with his life. She could see their future in Mumbai stretching out, past the three years of his contract, into an eternity of his being happy and her not. And Swati, what would Swati be doing then?
It was almost four p.m. in Philadelphia, half a day away. This was the time her mother typically took a break for a cup of coffee, and Rachel dialed her number, hoping to catch her.
“Hello?” Her mother always sounded confused when Rachel called her from her new number. Rachel supposed her mother only had the ability to assign her daughter a single phone number and would be confused by this until the day she died.
“It’s me, Mom,” Rachel said, lighting another cigarette. That’s two for today, she thought, idly wondering if she would smoke more or stop, if two would be too many, if a pack wouldn’t be enough. She had no sense of her own body these days, no idea what she wanted or needed.
“Rachel! What’s wrong?” This was Ruth’s response to an unscheduled call. They usually texted to set up a time to talk; it was rare for Rachel to just dial out of the blue.
“Nothing, Mom. Just wanted to say hi.”
“You sound . . . off,” Ruth said, her voice cracking over the line. Amazing, though, that these days you could pick up a small device and talk to someone half a day away. Someone who was sitting down to lunch as you were preparing for bed. Someone living in your past.
“I’m okay,” Rachel said. She took another drag, and the smoke burned her lungs in the way she had always hated but was finding herself looking for more and more when she smoked. That indication that she was doing something bad to herself. That something was wrong here. That she was not, in fact, okay, no matter what she told her mother, what she told the world.
“Are you sure? It must be late,” her mother said, her voice tentative, quavering. Rachel knew that if she told her mother how she felt, how worried she was about emptiness, how lonely she was inside her marriage and outside of her marriage, how her only real connection these days was to an older Marwari woman she barely liked, the mother-in-law who had invaded her home like a Central Asian raider, her mother would understand. She would say the right things, or the wrong things, and she would say come home and Rachel wouldn’t know how to say no.
“It is late, I just couldn’t sleep. Had coffee too late in the day.” Well, that was true. “But I’m fine. Really. Just missed you.” Half a lie. She did miss her mother. She was not really fine.
“And how is, um, Swali?” Her mother still had trouble with Indian names.
“Swati.”
“Right, sorry. So sorry.” She really was sorry, Rachel knew. Ruth’s own mother had been an immigrant, and Ruth had grown up with people who didn’t speak English as a first or even a second language. She really was sorry, always, when she couldn’t pronounce a name. Ruth even said it more softly than the rest of the sentence, a habit Rachel had picked up as well. It wasn’t some sort of liberal guilt, as Rachel’s friends had jokingly accused her of in college. It was decades of Ruth’s hearing her mother’s name mispronounced, imbuing in her a determination to get it right.
Dhruv had loved that about Rachel, or at least said he did, the way she worked so hard to pronounce the almost completely silent h in his name, the way she failed every time, the way trying was important to her. Rachel shut her eyes against the memory.
“So? How is she?”
“Oh. Well, Swati is good, I think. We went shopping today. I didn’t have any voice-over work to do, so . . .”
“That woman loves to shop,” Ruth stated, and Rachel could hear the smile in her voice. She wished she could see that smile in person so badly she nearly choked on her smoke.
“She said she doesn’t, but the proof is in the pudding.”
“Well, good for her. I hope she’s still charging her ex-husband.”
“I don’t know what their financial arrangement is, actually. Anyway, they haven’t actually divorced yet.” She lit another cigarette. That was three.
Had Swati even filed papers? Did she need a lawyer? Rachel had no idea where she was in the process.
“Dhruv is mostly handling it. He’s still in Kolkata, I guess he’s making arrangements with his father.”<
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“That sounds very vintage.” Ruth said vintage like other people would say horrible. “All the men deciding everything. But I guess it’s his parents, so . . .”
“Yeah. I guess.” There was a long pause, mostly because Rachel had no idea what to say next. She was letting Dhruv dictate the parameters of her own life; imagine how vintage her mother would find that. There were so many things on the tip of her tongue, but they hit the roof of her mouth and disappeared down her throat with the smoke.
“This must be so hard for you, Rach,” said her mother, and Rachel could hear the kindness, the pain for her, through the phone. It is, it is, it is, she wanted to say.
“It’s sort of customary here, if you can believe it. In reverse. People live with the husband’s parents.”
“What a nightmare,” her mother said matter-of-factly, cutting through thousands of years of Indian culture with a bald statement that Rachel herself longed to make.
“It is,” Rachel whispered, so softly that she wasn’t sure Ruth heard her.
“You know that your grandmother lived with her own in-laws for a year after she got married.”
“She did?” Rachel’s cigarette fell from her hand and she watched it, burning out on the balcony floor, wondering if she had any rum left in the kitchen. She walked into the apartment and began searching her kitchen, pinning her phone against her ear with her shoulder.
“She did. I’ve told you this, haven’t I?”
Rachel tried to remember. Ruth probably had said something about it, perhaps when Swati had first come to them, but maybe Rachel had missed it, or hadn’t wanted to hear about anyone who wasn’t herself. She found the rum. “Remind me, please.”
“Your grandfather had enlisted, and he had another year he had to serve in the army after the war ended, but he had married your grandmother—”
“A great beauty . . .” Rachel said dutifully, because that was the way that her grandmother, a vain and silly and wonderful woman whom Rachel had adored, had always made sure the story went. Although she was long dead, there were some things Rachel and her mother still always did because she would have wanted them so. Rachel’s grandmother had been a bit weak, in the way that women of means had been allowed to be weak in the past, had been supposed to be weak in the past, especially Russian women, which her grandmother had been, always talking about her nerves like a patient of Freud.
“The greatest,” Ruth agreed. That had always been Ruth’s father’s part, and Ruth had taken it on after his passing. “And anyway, she was a married woman, and she wasn’t going to stay in Tehran, despite the mansion and the servants, which I guess was a good thing in the end, I don’t know. Anyway, your grandfather sent her on to live with his parents while he spent the year in Egypt.”
“Guarding it from its own independence?” Rachel quipped. Ruth laughed, and for a moment it was like they were together and Rachel was home.
But she wasn’t.
“Exactly. So anyway, your grandmother had to live with my grandmother, who was, to the best of my recollection, a total bitch. And not very happy with your grandmother.”
“Everyone loved Saftah!” Rachel said, using the Hebrew word for grandmother as she had all her life.
“I think she was too foreign for my grandmother. Not American Jewish enough. Not what she had expected at all.”
“Lame.”
“Totally,” Ruth agreed.
“Although, I guess that’s what Swati thinks of me.”
“I thought you said she liked you,” Ruth said, her voice tense, on guard for a slight against her child.
“She does, she does. Just, I’m sure I’m not what she expected.”
“You’re better,” Ruth said, and Rachel could feel tears welling up in her eyes.
“That must have been so weird then. And hard. She probably couldn’t call home late like I do,” Rachel said, trying to contain her sadness, sipping on rum.
“Nope,” Ruth agreed. “Thank God I live now, and not then.” Rachel thought about her grandmother, alone in a new country, without the husband she had known all of three months. How out of place she must have been, how strange she must have seemed, how strange the world must have seemed to her.
“Of course, Saftah only had to deal with her mother-in-law for a year,” Rachel said, more to herself than anyone else.
“Well, Swati won’t stay with you forever, will she?”
And Rachel knew that if she told her mother the truth, she might as well just go home. But this was supposed to be her home now. So she lied.
“No. Not forever.”
She lit another cigarette.
Nineteen
Swati had been raised, the entirety of her life as far as she could remember, to be ashamed of her body.
Not the way it looked, for she had grown up in the shadow of the golden age of Bollywood, when India’s heroines were soft. Not large, not fat, but curved, with fleshy stomachs peeking flirtatiously over their tightly wound sari skirts or trousers. Nor had she grown up thinking she was ugly. Swati had always been appropriately pale, decently pretty, slim in her youth, and then, with marriage and childbirth, a socially acceptable level of soft, underneath layers of cloth, of course. She had thick hair—which had stayed thick, unlike the thinning strands of her hair-fall-obsessed peers, and she didn’t color it—and large eyes, and a nose that wasn’t too big. She threaded her eyebrows and her chin; her skin was clear and well moisturized. People who met her at a wedding when she was in her stiff silk sari and a respectable amount of gold, which for Marwaris was the equivalent of a minor king’s ransom, would always say, unprompted, that she was looking quite nice.
No, it wasn’t her looks that she had been taught, carefully and completely, to feel intense shame about. It was the totality of her body and its needs, other than hunger and thirst. The processes of her internal organs, specifically those used in reproduction, as well as the desires it might have held beyond those vital for survival. Her body was something that people should not see, something that was never to be revealed to anyone, something that, uncovered, was a source of great shame.
Growing up, her mother and all the women in her family had taught her this in a thousand ways. No one in Swati’s parents’ household had ever been, to her knowledge, completely naked for longer than the time it took to wash oneself, approximately three minutes. When bathing, Swati had been taught to bring the entirety of her clothing into the bathroom with her, so that the moment her shower had finished, she could cover herself in a towel, and then in clothing, shielding her flesh from the world. She had never changed in the same room as her mother. She had never changed in the same room as anyone. When she wanted to bathe, she had locked not only her bathroom door but also the main door to the apartment, asking the servants to step outside until she was done. She made sure every window in the vicinity was blocked by curtains, even those in other rooms. You never knew who was looking. Waiting. Hoping to catch you unaware, vulnerable. Well, the joke was on them, Swati had learned early, because they couldn’t catch you if you were never unaware.
And then there were her thoughts, which Swati dutifully tried to keep as pure as possible. Her mother had been constantly on the lookout for dirty thoughts, bad thoughts, rebellion at every turn. Swati’s mother had been obsessed with bad things and worried about them with every hour of her days. She worried about boys on the street and people planning to do black magic to their family and Swati’s father’s being hit accidentally by a bus on his way home from work. Nothing had ever happened to Swati’s father, and as far as any of them knew no one was planning to do them ill, but that didn’t stop Swati’s mother. It was her worry, she was sure, that kept them safe.
Swati tried her best to follow each of her mother’s rules to avoid badness, to avoid whatever strange and dark fate awaited dirty people. Despite all her vigilance, however, it had been sometimes difficult for Swati to ignore her body completely. Sitting in a movie theater at the age of sixteen, she had been
watching Kabhi Kabhie, when at one point in the film one of the actors, Rishi Kapoor, looked so intensely at the object of his affection that Swati found her entire body erupting in goose bumps.
The area at her groin, the part of herself that she was very careful to clean quickly to avoid touching it too much, for it was the dirtiest part of her, according to her mother, felt heavy and hot, like all the blood in her body was rushing right toward it. She shifted her legs, but that only made it worse, or better, because every little movement made her feel hotter, tenser, moving her toward a feeling, a swelling of something.
She shut her eyes, but all she could see was Rishi, looking at her with that intense look, and she wanted something she couldn’t explain. She got up suddenly, disrupting her parents, who were enjoying the movie next to her, and ran out of the theater, spending the rest of the film splashing cold water on her face and breathing deeply in the ladies’ room, trying to contain herself, contain her body. She could not go wherever that feeling was leading her. She did not know what it was, but it came from the part of her body that her mother feared the most, and therefore it had to be stopped.
She found her parents after the movie, telling them that she had felt feverish and needed air. She never saw a Rishi Kapoor movie again.
That feeling had risen up in her body again, in the intervening years, and over time she had developed ways to combat it. Avoiding the activities that created it, of course, was one solution, and so riding bicycles was out, as were undergarments that were too tight or rubbed against her too much. Even a bumpy bus ride was to be avoided, in the days when she still took the bus. Every once in a while, marital relations with Vinod inspired that feeling, but that was rare, and almost always fleeting, thank goodness. And the demand for that sort of thing had dissipated in the two decades before Swati left, making the likelihood of experiencing that feeling again very low.