by Leah Franqui
“Doesn’t matter.” Rachel started sweeping.
Swati could tell Rachel was sad. She had met her friend that evening, had something gone wrong?
“What happened?” Swati asked, lifting her feet so Rachel could sweep under them.
“Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it, I’m sorry.” Rachel sighed and then stopped, leaning back on her knees. Her hand was bleeding. “Fuck,” she said softly. Swati reached for her hand, and Rachel pulled back.
“I just want to help.”
“I know. Thank you. It’s better if I just deal with this myself,” Rachel said.
“What happened?” Swati asked again.
“Nothing. Nothing. I saw someone from home, and . . . Well. It was good. It was— It just made me sad.”
Rachel stood up. She walked to the kitchen and looked around, and then started opening up drawers and cabinets.
“Where is it? Where is the thing, the little, you put the dust in it, what happened to it? See, that’s the problem, that’s the whole problem, all these people come and do things here and then I can’t find anything, I don’t know where anything is, or how it works, nothing is where I leave it,” Rachel said, the level of despair in her voice far outweighing the subject of her words.
“You are getting yourself upset,” Swati said helplessly.
“I just, where is the thing? How do we clean anything, when we don’t have that thing? We are going to run out of glasses, we are going to run out of everything, and we won’t be able to make it better.”
Swati stood up and walked to the kitchen and took the dustpan out from where she had seen Deeti, the maid, store it earlier that day. When she came back, Rachel was trying to pick up the pieces of glass with her hands, making them bloodier and bloodier, cutting herself lightly across her palms. Tears silently slid down her cheeks, and she smelled like alcohol and sweat and exhaust. Swati carefully helped Rachel open her hands into the dustpan and swept up the rest of the glass.
When she came back from the kitchen, Rachel was on the balcony, smoking a cigarette with bloody hands. Swati walked over to her, watching her inhale in punishing motions in the moonlight.
“We can buy more glasses. We can fix everything we’ve broken,” Swati said.
Rachel smiled sadly but didn’t say anything.
“I did not know you smoked.” Bad girls smoked, Swati knew. But Rachel wasn’t a bad girl. She was just unhappy, wildly so. And why was it that men could smoke and be good, and women couldn’t? It was just like that, she knew. But it shouldn’t be.
“I didn’t much. Not before I came here. But somehow, I just have needed it here. I know I shouldn’t, but, I do.” Rachel leaned out, looking at the city.
“I am sorry that I broke the glass. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You became hurt.”
“I know. I know you didn’t mean it,” Rachel said. She looked out at the night.
“Whatever you say, I will listen,” Swati said.
Rachel looked at her. She took a deep breath and sighed. “I thought when I moved here that I would find the things I wanted, but I have only become more and more confused. I keep pouring things into my body to fill it up, to make it full of something that will make me feel less . . . alone. Less unhappy. But it doesn’t work. Smoke and rum and work and even people. None of it works. I’m not any less alone than I was when I started. Because the truth is, you can’t absorb what someone else wants, their certainty, it can’t become yours, it can’t take the place of you knowing what you need. And I don’t. I thought I would find it here. I blamed you, because I hadn’t. But you didn’t bring me here. Dhruv did. He took me to a place where there is nothing for me and he didn’t care, because he didn’t think beyond his own need. He thought I would want what he wanted because that is what I said I wanted. It isn’t his fault, either. It’s mine. I don’t want it to be, but it is. It has nothing to do with him, or you, at all.”
Rachel’s cigarette had burned away to nothing, and she threw it out and sucked at her fingers, at the burn it had left behind, as her words burned themselves on Swati’s brain. Rachel looked at her, with wide eyes and her hand in her mouth, and Swati knew that they were both shocked at how much she had said, how much she had revealed.
Swati knew she needed to find something, anything, to say. Something to make it better, to make Rachel understand that she, too, had nothing left but Dhruv, and her. She didn’t have it, though.
“I’m sorry. I’m just, I’m really sorry. It’s late, and I’ve been drinking, with a white person, I promise, don’t worry, but you should ignore all that. I’m sorry. I think I better go to bed,” Rachel said, and turned, walking to her bedroom, to sleep, to wake up the next day, to pretend she hadn’t said any of it. Swati knew that for life to go on the way she always thought it should, she could let this happen, let all that messy emotion be swept away like the glass. But she didn’t want life to be the way it always had been. If she had wanted that, why would she have come here? So instead, she closed her eyes and said the first thing that came to her head.
“I think Arjun is very attractive. I—I dreamed about him,” she said, her whole body flushing. Her eyes were closed, but she didn’t hear Rachel walking away.
“Arjun, the guy we met?”
“Bunny’s son,” Swati said, grimacing.
“The guy who cheated on his wife. The one we met, at the mall.”
“He’s come here to take me home. He’s not a good man. Besides that, he’s quite a bit younger. He’s, he’s almost Dhruv’s age. I think that there must be something wrong with me. I never, never found Vinod to be this attractive, I never wanted him so much. I must be . . . sick, I think, to want this man I do not like more than my own husband.”
“Oh, Swati. No. Of course you aren’t. There is nothing sick about you at all.” Swati had her eyes shut, squeezed tight, but she heard Rachel’s footsteps again, coming toward her. Then she felt Rachel’s arms around her, hugging her. She didn’t like hugs, she felt stiff, but then she let herself give in to it, just a bit, and buried her head in her daughter-in-law’s shoulder.
“I’m having coffee with him, tomorrow,” Swati said.
“Well. Happy Diwali to you, then,” Rachel said, and Swati could hear the smile in her voice.
“I’m sorry about the glass,” Swati repeated.
“I don’t care about the glass, Swati. I just, I think that there is something wrong with me. With my life. It’s a bit broken, and I don’t know what to do.”
“You hate living with me, don’t you,” Swati said. It wasn’t a question.
Rachel drew back but kept her hands on Swati’s shoulders. “I do. But not because of you. It’s because of me. I would hate living with anyone right now, anyone who knows what they want in life, anyone who is happy here, because it just reminds me that I don’t. And that I’m not.” And Rachel smiled.
“What do we do, then?” Swati asked, smiling back, in spite of herself.
“Oh, well. For now, we go to bed. I will. I’m tired, and drunk, and—and—”
“Sad.”
“Yes. I’m all that. So I go to bed, and you do whatever, and then we wake up tomorrow and we, I don’t know. Make something else to eat. Talk more about your crush on Arjun. Discuss Magda’s future. Buy more glasses.”
“All that?”
“And more. Who knows? Good night.”
“I wish—I wish this was easier for you, Rachel,” Swati said, wishing she had something better to say.
“And for you, too, Swati. But, Swati? I might hate living with you. But I don’t hate you, at all.”
As Swati watched her daughter-in-law walk into her room, she realized something. She had never in her life felt so close to anyone as she did to Rachel in that moment.
Swati didn’t believe her, that there wasn’t something wrong with her for wanting Arjun. She didn’t believe that everything would be all right with Rachel from now on, or even that she, Swati, would never again feel that she was doing all the
wrong things, or anything like that. But she had revealed the worst part of herself, and Rachel hadn’t rejected her for it. She, Swati, had understood something about Rachel, that she was running away from her life, and she had been right. She had felt that they were the same, that they understood each other. They had seen each other. That was enough.
Twenty-Two
The next morning, her head pounding, her stomach heaving with embarrassment, Rachel decided to go for a walk.
She had tried running, when she had first moved to Mumbai, but she hated running under normal circumstances, and this—dodging and weaving between street vendors and beggars and potholes and open construction sites and canine defecation everywhere in the oppressive humidity—made it impossible. She had tripped, and fallen, and limped home, bleeding all over the well-kept marble in the lobby. She had felt regret for the women who came daily to clean it. She had also wondered, did they think about who might have caused this? Would they, the way she did, invent a dramatic scene, a shoot-out, a kidney donation gone awry, a lovers’ quarrel ending in bloodshed? Was she the only person who saw a coffee stain and imagined a catfight?
Dhruv had been horrified, afraid she was going to be infected by something. Why have you brought me to a place that can so easily infect me, a place where everything is a cause for such intense fear? she had wondered. Maybe she should have said it. Maybe she never should have thought it at all. But she didn’t run, after that, again.
She looked at her hands, with their cuts from last night’s glass little red lines. Maybe she was infected now, maybe something had entered her last night. It could only improve her, she thought; nothing could make her worse.
She had the time to try walking for a bit. She had nothing to do that day. It might help her displace some of the heaviness weighing down her joints, the pit in her stomach. It might help her outpace her shame at her outburst the night before. Something about watching the glass break, remembering the day Swati had arrived, it was like she was back there again, but with all the knowledge she had now, all the things she had felt in between compressed and then stretched out over her, a rubber suit of feelings suffocating her in an instant. Swati came into her home and broke things. Swati came into her home and things were already broken. Swati came into her home, broken. They were all true and they made her sad in equal measures.
She felt, under her hangover, vulnerable. A calf freed of its amniotic sac. She felt the way she had when she told Dhruv she loved him for the first time, like an open wound, a thin membrane of scab just trying to cover it, but if you touched it, it would bleed all over the place.
The day was already swelling with humidity as she walked out of the elevator and into the morning. The tall trees shading her neighborhood had littered bright orange flowers on the ground, mixing with the dust of the road and sticking to the sidewalk. They looked like cartoon entrails. She felt bile rise in the back of her throat, but she contained it, just.
Her feet took her down the hill they lived on, around the twisting roads, past the shrines that looked just like Hindu shrines, all adorned with marigolds and candles and offerings of coconuts and milk, but housing Madonnas and Christs on crosses, not Ganesh or Shiva. Her street funneled into Hill Road, and she continued on, her lungs burning a little. Smoking had cut into her lung capacity, she knew, and she grimaced.
She decided she would make a loop, and she took a right on a street that would lead her back to Waroda Road, so she could double back toward her apartment in a leisurely twenty minutes. As she walked, the heat stirred up another wave of nausea, and she decided to stop for a lime soda, something that would soothe her. And maybe some coffee, too, douse her stomach in acid, punishment for its rebellion. She saw Birdsong Café, a pretentious place she loathed for dishes like quinoa biryani, which was usually closed for some film shoot but was now open, and the only thing on the block that seemed to be so, apart from a roadside chaiwalla. Given her feelings about Indian chai, she would have to take her chances with the pretense.
She walked up to the counter to order, smiling weakly at the eager young man in a black polo who looked at her with the kind of servile air she loathed.
“Um, a fresh lime soda, please, sweet, and do you have iced coffee? Not cold coffee, the one with ice cream, but just, like, coffee, over ice?” Previous experience had taught her to specify.
“Yes, madam, of course.”
She smiled at him, more genuinely this time, and paid.
“Hello! Look who it is!” came a voice from behind her. Rachel closed her eyes, hoping she was imagining it, knowing she wasn’t. Richard.
“What are you doing here? I thought you only had roadside chai,” Rachel said, turning, gritting her teeth behind her smile. There he stood, in an electric-green kurta and cargo pants, his hands clasped in namaste. Bastard.
“Oh, I usually do, I usually do. But today I wanted to honor my bliss, you know?”
Rachel had no idea.
“Here alone?” Richard asked, and Rachel knew what would follow her yes but was helpless to stop it.
“I am—”
“Wonderful! Right this way!” And he led her to a table from which they could see the road, with its bright street art right out front. Rachel looked at him and suddenly felt ashamed of herself. She judged him, but how was she better than him? At least he was open to India, open to others. Like Swati, she thought. She judged Swati, wanting her to be different, without really seeing how open Swati really was, how much she had risked in her life to make it her own. Rachel wanted Swati to be the way she wanted her to be; she wanted that of everyone. Richard, the expat wives, they should all conform to what she thought of the world, what she wanted. How was that different from what Dhruv had done to her?
“So, honoring your bliss. What is that like?” Rachel said, trying her hardest to make the question as genuine as she really intended it to be.
“Oh, well, you know, following the needs of my chakras. Are you interested in Hindu practice?”
To Rachel, he sounded like a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, knocking at her door and trying to get her into a Mormon compound. She tried to ignore the image. “Only from an intellectual perspective.”
Although Richard had tried to talk about his beliefs when they had met for drinks previously, or in Richard’s case, a masala soda, Rachel had usually steered the conversation away from these topics. Could anything be more strangely appropriate to the last three hundred years of Indian history than a white man explaining Hinduism to a white woman as Indian men serve them? Rachel had thought, wishing they were both wearing pith helmets or something else that signified a return to colonial life. But now, inspired by her mother-in-law, of all people in the world, she was trying to change. “Tell me more, about what you think,” Rachel said, trying to mean it.
“Oh, but it’s much better felt, not thought,” Richard said earnestly. “What do you feel about Hinduism? What do you know about it, in your heart?”
Rachel wasn’t sure she felt anything about it at all. “I find Hinduism a bit opaque. There is so much ritual, so much history, but, what does it mean? When I ask people, my husband, my mother-in-law, why they’re doing something, they don’t know. They don’t know the reason, they don’t say, It’s because Vishnu likes this best, or It’s because in the Rig Veda there is this story and we do this to celebrate the story. Instead, they say, It’s just like that,” Rachel said, thinking back on the few rituals she had seen them do. Today was Diwali, celebrated in Mumbai but not the most important of the region’s holidays, though Swati had said she would be doing a puja—prayer—at home. Maybe Richard would tell her something that would make it all make sense.
“Isn’t most of the world like that, though?” Richard said, his voice unexpectedly mild. Rachel nodded, despite herself. She supposed it was, really. Her own religion, Judaism, which she barely practiced, was obsessive about the why, in theory, but there were people everywhere who didn’t care, who wanted ritual to soothe them. It wa
sn’t like she asked all the piercing questions of the Talmud herself, really.
“See, what I love about it is, it’s everywhere. Hinduism is essentially self and community defined, and its practice is as rigid or loose as the individual wants it to be. But it’s also open to you. There is nothing private about the way people practice their faith here. There is inside and outside behavior for everything in India, but not religion. It’s, like, the opposite of the West. That’s fascinating to me. It is freeing in a way Judeo-Christian thought isn’t, or maybe not freeing, but elastic. It can bend and stretch to fit almost anything,” Richard said.
“Except monotheism.”
“There is a theory that all gods are one god, Om,” Richard told her, sipping his drink.
“But, as an outsider, how does someone else enter into it? How do we know the rules?”
“You watch, and observe, and stay open to what is in front of you, and it will teach itself to you. You just have to trust that.” Richard smiled, like he wasn’t proposing life’s most impossible task.
Rachel smiled, too, ruefully. “Just that.”
“Exactly.” Richard looked at her with the glowing love of a devotee.
“So, do you like this place?” Rachel asked, changing the subject.
“It’s very hipster!” Richard said, looking pleased with himself. Just when she had begun to like him.
“I guess so,” Rachel said, looking around at the Indian-flavored tweeness of it all.
“I’m from LA,” Richard said, as an explanation.
“As in really from it?”
“Born and bred! So this is, you know, my familiar territory.”
“I hear they even serve an avocado toast here,” Rachel said, smiling.
“It’s delicious. Avocado, masala, chilies, limes. Should I get you one?”
“You’re going to think I’m insane, but I don’t like avocado.”
“Bite your tongue. I think that’s globally illegal these days.”
Rachel laughed at Richard’s moment of wit.