by Leah Franqui
“Now you add the tomatoes. Are they chopped?”
There was silence for a moment. “You didn’t tell me to chop them,” Rachel murmured.
“I forget that you are not my maid.” Her maids at home always knew what she needed for the recipe.
“I’m sure,” Rachel said. Swati smacked her arm lightly, to show that she hadn’t meant anything by it, and as Rachel chopped, the tension hovering between them dissipated, and they could go back to the more serious business of eggplant.
“You are wrong, you know,” Rachel said as they watched the dish cook, the flavors twining with each other in the pan. “It’s not me that makes Dhruv so happy.”
“Of course it is!”
“No. It’s not. I’m not saying I don’t make him happy at all. But what you were seeing, that, like, giddiness, the thing that makes him truly feel that way, is being here. Being home. Having control over everything, being in a place he understands.”
“I see.” Swati studied Rachel, who had kept her gaze on the saucepan, stirring the dish gently. “Do you feel happy here?”
Rachel looked away. “He was so certain that I would be happy, and I believed him, I think. He can be very persuasive. He talks, and you want to believe him, so you do. But I didn’t know it would be so hard. That I would miss my life so much. He’s the only thing anchoring me here, and he’s gone. I miss that certainty. Without it, I feel lost. I was lost in New York, lost in my life, I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and then there was Dhruv, and he knew exactly what he was doing, and I wanted some of that for myself. Only he’s gone. And I am just the same.”
“He will return,” Swati said, at a loss for what else to say. It was so intimate, she didn’t know what to do.
“Of course. I’m just . . . being silly, I guess. It, it smells great. Should we make roti with it?”
Swati nodded, taking out the flour and instructing Rachel on how to mix the dough.
“It reminds me of Magda, actually. Isn’t that dumb?” Rachel said.
Swati shook her head, disagreeing. “Why should it be dumb?”
“She is, like, waiting and waiting for her husband to come back to her. The only difference is that she doesn’t know if he ever will. And that she has a Gypsy curse on her and runs a small tavern and serenades guests at night and is a single mom and her husband is stranded on a desert island teaching his new lover Romanian so they can communicate. But other than that, it’s the same.”
Swati laughed. “Magda has faith,” she said.
“Is that enough? Just to have faith that things might change? Or should we do things, to make them change?”
Swati didn’t know how to respond. Her whole life she had been like Magda, having faith that her life was the way it was supposed to be. Then, one day, her faith was lost, and she was now doing it all for herself. Which was better? She didn’t know yet.
“Sometimes I look at Magda and I think she’s amazing. She endures so much. She’s so strong. And sometimes I think that she’s an idiot. I felt like I was enduring New York, so I left. But now, I don’t know. Is everything to be endured? I mean, I know I don’t dig ditches or live under a violent dictatorship or anything, I know. But I just mean, proportionally. Why is endurance so important? Especially when it’s optional?”
“Maybe it’s all you can say about some people. That they endured.”
Rachel nodded, and weighed out a small piece of dough.
As they rolled out the bread, Swati watched her. Swati had known that she herself was running away from home to solve her problems. But she hadn’t realized that in a way, Rachel had done the same. They were both escapees, and those kinds of stories never really ended well, did they? Especially when Rachel didn’t seem to know that that was exactly what she had been doing. People who escaped things were living on borrowed time. Were they?
Twenty
That night, Rachel couldn’t sleep, and tossed and turned under the fan instead, her body heating and cooling unevenly, her brain alight.
Ram Arjuna had called and asked her if she could come in for more recording sessions the next day, and her friend Adam was visiting from the United States on a work trip and she was planning to see him. It was an unexpectedly full day, the kind she wanted, the kind she missed. She had just complained to Swati about her empty life, and here it was, full. But something about seeing Adam worried her. They had been friends since they were children, and she didn’t know how to hide anything about her life from him. What would she tell him about Dhruv, whom he liked, about her marriage, which he said he liked as well, about the life she was living that was such a mess, which he thought she was so brave for trying to live, even as he had worried for her, doubted that she could cope with it? His words, his doubts, had hurt her most out of those of all her friends, and now she wondered if that was because she had known they might be valid.
It embarrassed her, how when she held her life up to Swati’s, it was clear how impressive the other woman was, how much braver she had been than Rachel. Rachel, who judged Swati for caring about what people thought, was herself obsessed with her Instagram likes, policing her own conversations with her friends in an effort to represent the perfect life, the perfect marriage, the fact that they had all been wrong about her and Dhruv. After lunch, troubled by her conversation with Swati, troubled by her own thoughts, she had posted a photo of her and Dhruv, happy and tipsy the night he proposed, trying to remind herself, and the world that knew her, that they were good together, right together. Didn’t they look wonderful? Didn’t they look happy, her ring sparkling, his grin broad and certain?
It had been a high performer. She hadn’t talked to Dhruv in days.
She should call him, make him have a real conversation with her, express her growing fears, her unhappiness, the distance she could feel between them. She should sort out her marriage, her life, and then when she saw Adam she could tell him how well they were doing, how India had made them stronger, how they had triumphed, how he was right to admire her, to think her brave.
But then she would just be doing it for Adam, doing it to perform for him, to show him he was wrong, because she wanted him to be wrong. She wanted to be back inside the photo, where she had felt a happiness so strong it was intoxicating.
Now every time Rachel thought about talking to Dhruv, telling him that she was unhappy, she felt a spurt of anger. How did he not know it already? She did not want to tell him a thing about her; she wanted him to know, to look at her and really see her. Everyone talked about love all the time, but what was love, really, other than being known? Being seen and understood? Rachel was, she knew, in her heart of hearts, testing Dhruv like a lady testing her knight, asking him silently to prove his love for her, to know her, to come home and fire the cook and get his mother an apartment and make the choices that would make her happy, the choices she had asked for.
And why wouldn’t he tell her his grand plan? Why didn’t he want to talk to her about his time with his father, his feelings about his parents’ marriage, any of the important things happening to him? You couldn’t solve people’s relationships the way you solved an efficiency problem for a factory. Surely he saw that, didn’t he?
Her greatest fear, the one she kept behind a door deep inside herself, the one she looked at only when it was very late and she was at the bottom of a glass or the end of a pack and couldn’t hide anymore, opening the door only the smallest crack to peek at it, was that she would tell Dhruv she was unhappy, that she would demand that their lives change, that he change, and he would not deem her worth changing for. She was testing him now, waiting for him to notice her, to notice the way she felt, because the idea of telling him, forcing him to make choices, was terrifying. What if he failed? What if he didn’t think it was even worth trying?
Her thoughts chased each other around all night, until she finally fell into a fitful sleep. She dreamed she was strangling someone and woke up clutching her own throat.
The sun rose late the next mornin
g, reminding Rachel that technically it would soon be winter, despite the unchanging weather. She ate her breakfast on the balcony, and, leaning her cheek against her hand, she looked out onto city and the sea, that view that had been so attractive to Dhruv, the one he was never there to see. She grimaced, her mouth twisting at her bitter thought.
She wasn’t being fair, she knew. She knew and told herself over and over again, This is not fair to Dhruv, you are not being fair by suffering in resentful silence, by being angry that he isn’t here, that he doesn’t seem to be thinking about you at all, and not telling him that. Not giving him a chance to explain, writing him off without asking for what you need.
When he came back, it would be different. She would make sure of it. She would tell Adam that everything was fine, and it would be fine. Saying it would make it fine; his belief would become her reality. She would live by what other people thought, hoping their thoughts would be so strong that they would make them come true.
“ ‘How can he love me? He doesn’t even know me anymore. The girl I used to be is gone, lost in the ashes of the fire of my heart. Doused in the waves of the ocean that separated us. Love needs fuel, but I am empty. I want nothing more than to take care of my child and live in peace. Tell him that. Tell him to leave me in peace.’” Her eyes trained on Magda, Rachel watched the actress’s throat tighten in a telltale way and added a faint sob at the end of her line. It was a little off, but she knew that Ram Arjuna could edit it all back together, and that he would appreciate her anticipation.
Magda’s husband had, at long last, come back, but after years of waiting, she wasn’t sure she wanted him anymore. Rachel wanted to laugh, to smack her. She worried, too, that she might someday feel the same way, and it frightened her, so she decided to be angry, cynical, above the story, rather than affected by it.
Still tasting the supremely melodramatic line in her mouth, she looked up at the man next to her and was surprised to see tears in his eyes. Unselfconscious, Ram Arjuna wiped them away with one hand, patting his pockets for a cigarette with the other. Rachel smiled at him.
“So good she is, Magda, na?” he asked her, nodding his head at the screen. “Such life she has, but always soft person, gentle person. So many bad things, but she doesn’t get too hard.”
“Yeah, well, it’s that family, really. They’re out to get her!”
“She is good person, they not know what to do with a person like this. Greedy people.”
Rachel nodded in response, sagely. She and Ram Arjuna had become quite the experts when it came to the many relationships and characters on Magda’s Moment.
Rachel had returned to the voice-over studio that morning for a long session, and they had just completed their fifth episode of the day, which had ended with the startling revelation that Pytor had returned home to Romania, to Constanţa, the city where the soap mostly took place, with his new girlfriend, Mariska, in tow, to find Magda, who, in the year in which Pytor had been missing, had wept at his funeral after he had been declared legally dead and had had his baby with the help of Vlad—her primary helper at her catering business, who had gone insane and tried to rape her (of course), but it was all because of a brain tumor, and Magda had given a very moving speech at his funeral—burying the two men who had claimed they would love her forever within a few months of each other.
Pytor’s startling return—which, of course, wasn’t all that startling to Rachel, given the fact that she was voicing the woman he had been sleeping with for a year on the island—had thrown Magda’s life into disarray, but, with the fortitude that was her hallmark, Magda had vowed to her former husband (Did they even get a divorce? wondered Rachel) that although she had expunged him from her heart, he would not be exiled from baby Pytor Junior’s. Despite the benevolence of this offer, Pytor Senior, still smarting from Igor’s accusations of infidelity from so long ago, raged at Magda, declaring both his love for her and his hatred of her in the same breath.
Rough deal for Mariska, Rachel thought wryly.
“Coming?” Ram Arjuna asked. Rachel thought about refusing, but the room they recorded in was kept icebox cold, so she walked outside with Ram Arjuna, more for the warmth than anything else. She stood with him, they smoked together, and Rachel felt a strange companionship with her wiry producer, a kind of professional meeting of the minds that amused her, even as she relaxed into it.
“You do not think the show is sad?” Ram Arjuna asked her curiously.
“No, of course it is. It’s just, if all of this actually happened to one person, I don’t know. It would be hard to believe all of this could occur in one life.”
“Maybe to one beautiful person.” Ram Arjuna sounded contemplative, but Rachel had spent enough time with him to know that he was joking.
“Maybe,” Rachel agreed, smiling.
Ram Arjuna looked out into the distance, squinting. “When I get married, my wife is fifteen,” he announced, nodding once, confirming his own statement. Rachel didn’t know what to say. Fifteen. She had been in the tenth grade when she was fifteen, studying the Russian Revolution and the Crimean War and precalculus and reading The Things They Carried, and learning to drive, and thinking she was very grown-up, and not legally able to see an R-rated movie. And Ram Arjuna’s wife had been getting married. Swati hadn’t even gotten married that young.
“I am seventeen, and she is fifteen at that time. Those early years are very hard. We decide to wait for babies, we are too young, we do not know each other. But then, when I am twenty-five, she is twenty-three, we begin to try.” Ram Arjuna lit another cigarette. “But then we have a difficult time. A few times, my wife loses our baby.”
Loses, Rachel thought, like an umbrella in a taxi. Why do we talk about things like this that way?
“We are very sad. But now is okay. Now we have my sons, my daughter. Very good. But sometimes back then, we think, how do so many bad things happen? We thank God for good things, but why bad things happen? God knows. We people not know,” Ram Arjuna said, shrugging philosophically. “But nothing like Magda!”
“No. Nothing like Magda,” Rachel said, trying to smile. Magda wasn’t real, she wanted to remind him, but she didn’t need to. He obviously already knew, far better than Rachel, what things were real and what things weren’t.
“I like this show. It teach me better English,” Ram Arjuna said, changing the subject.
“Sure, words like assault, funeral, depression, tumor—”
“Embezzlement!”
“A lot of variety, though,” Rachel said, grinning, trying to be light, trying to understand what it would be like to be married at fifteen, trying to understand what it would be like to be a different person in a different life and want such different things. Trying to find everyone and everything to be normal, for of course it was, just not her normal. Her head, tired of turning mental somersaults, ached.
“Maybe we will learn Romanian,” Ram Arjuna said optimistically.
“You will. I can’t even speak more than a few words of Hindi.”
“Nice line, no? Ashes of the fire of my heart,” Raj Arjuna asked, almost shyly.
“Really nice.”
“Thank you.” He grinned widely.
“Ram Arjuna! Did you write it? I thought a translator did the lines—”
“Yes, yes, shhhh. Translator do lines, yes, meaning, yes, but I am a poet, I write poem in Hindi, Marathi. So I think, maybe I can try this, make line a little better. Translation line is very simple, I think. But I understand what they are meaning, so I am giving this only.”
“It sounds beautiful, you did a great job.” Certainly it wouldn’t be the way Rachel might express herself on a daily basis, but it fit the soap to perfection. “I want to read your poems!”
“I will try translation.”
“Well, you’re already an expert,” Rachel said.
Ram Arjuna grinned. “I will send you my site. It has my poems, all there.”
“Thank you. I will show my mother-in-law, may
be she can translate.”
“Your husband, too,” Ram Arjuna reminded her.
Rachel nodded hesitantly. “He’s gone on business. Maybe when he comes back.” So much for Dhruv to do on his return, Rachel thought.
“Yours was love marriage?”
“Yes, it was,” Rachel said, smiling a little at the question. It still is. “Yours?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. I see her one day, she is walking home from school, she is frowning so hard, I want to make her forehead smooth, like butter. We get married three months from then only.”
Ram Arjuna’s devotion to his wife, the conviction of his choice, built on the weight of a fifteen-year-old’s forehead—Rachel couldn’t stand it for a moment. When had she ever been so certain of anything? She had been depending on Dhruv to do that for her. Why did she judge these other women, her mother-in-law, Indian women she met, who let life happen to them? Was she any different? Her eyes were watering, and she wiped at them like a little girl, angry at herself for crying.
“All okay?” he asked her, stubbing out his cigarette.
“Of course. Got some dust in my eyes. Shall we?”
“Chai first.” Ram Arjuna headed toward the chaiwalla, and Rachel walked back into the studio, sitting down and wrapping her arms around herself.
They had left the last image of the episode, with Magda looking like devastation incarnate, up on the screen. Rachel stared into Magda’s eyes, wishing they were real, wishing she could meet her in real life. Surely Magda, of all people, fictional character that she was, could make Rachel feel better about her own life. What was a marriage that felt hollowed out and empty compared to multiple assaults, giving birth to a baby in a barn without an epidural, or even the questionable fashions of 2015 Romania? Surely she wasn’t jealous of Magda, who, despite it all, loved Pytor with a devotion that was mythic in its intensity. Surely she wasn’t jealous of Ram Arjuna, whose adulthood had started so early, who had had such trouble having children, who now sat in a freezing box in a strip mall in Mumbai, writing poetry in between dubbing sessions.