by Leah Franqui
“So, I hear you are quite the rock star!” he said, sipping on what looked like a latte.
“What does that mean?” Rachel asked.
“You’re ahead of the rest of us. In the soap.”
“Oh. Yes, I guess so. I’m going slow on my sessions until everyone catches up.”
“Ohhhh, pressure!” Richard put his hands up like he was fending off invaders. “You know, I’m really an actor,” he continued.
Of course you are, Rachel thought. “I think you told me.”
“I’m getting all these roles as villains, it’s great. That’s why I’ve grown this mustache.”
“At least there’s a reason!” Rachel quipped, reaching for her coffee.
“Apparently it’s a requirement here, for white villains.”
“I thought you just had to be white,” Rachel said under her breath, but he heard her and laughed anyway.
“Oh, but it’s fun. It’s so fun. You know, I have to tell you something, I was never so happy before I moved here. You know?”
Rachel looked up at him, into his smiling face with, yes, a bushy mustache, those open, sincere features, and read nothing but joy there. She wanted a piece of that joy, wished he could give her some of what he had so easily in excess.
Some part of her had hoped that she would be happier, more content, in India than she had been in New York. That she would undergo some spiritual awakening, or that her life would be a series of adventures, that her days and weeks would stretch on filled to the brim with discovery, and she would be happy. She had been run-down in America, unsure of what she wanted for her life. So she had run away from it. She had married Dhruv because he offered her an escape, but she hadn’t thought enough about the thing to which she was escaping. She had hoped that Dhruv, and by extension, India, would give her purpose. But nothing could give her purpose; she had to take it. How odd that people at home thought she was so brave, when she was the biggest coward she knew. She hadn’t liked her life, so she had left it. Dhruv was an escape hatch. And it wasn’t India’s job to make her happy. It wasn’t India’s fault that she wasn’t.
“Would you excuse me for a moment?” Rachel said, and left before he could answer, making her way outside, where she could buy a cigarette, or just breathe fresh air—either way, have some freedom, if only from her own self-loathing. She checked her phone and opened a message from Swati. You aren’t here. Are you all right?
No, she wrote, because, of course, she wasn’t. But then she erased it. Getting coffee. Back soon.
It was nice, though, to have someone checking on her, someone who cared enough about her in India to ask where she was. Even if that someone was Swati.
Rachel, after she paid, decided to ask Richard to show her his favorite parts of the neighborhood. He was delighted, far too delighted, but she gritted her teeth. If Swati could jump into the unknown and learn to think differently on the way down, she, Rachel, could endure the joy of someone who could show her something new. They took a walk, and he pointed out houses made in the Goan-Portuguese style, tucked off the street behind clouds of bougainvillea and vines, beautiful bungalows that were windows into another time. He showed her his favorite, a powder-blue miracle on a corner of Perry Road with a red roof and yellow trim, which proudly titled itself Peace Haven. This was the sort of thing she had imagined she would do with her husband, who would give it meaning, tell her what it was, help her appreciate it. Instead, it was with a stranger whom she didn’t like very much, and she had to find the meaning all by herself. About time, she thought grimly.
Then she made her goodbyes to Richard, who bowed and namasted all over her and implored her to meet him soon for chai and conversation, felt a little unsteady as she walked through the humid haze of the midmorning back to her apartment.
You said back soon, a new text from Swati read. The words were followed by a little emoji, one that people used to express praying or begging. Rachel, who associated emojis with teenagers, smiled.
I’m taking a walk, clearing my head, she typed out. She had actually thought she would go home right now, but she might as well walk, burn off the alcohol and the emotion from the night before, use her body. Crossing the intersection, her phone buzzed in her bag with Swati’s response, but looking at one’s phone while crossing the street in India was asking for death.
In such a busy city, Rachel’s own lack of direction seemed wasteful, foolish. A slap in the face to all the people around her who had places to be, jobs to accomplish. She mocked the city with her aimlessness, and the people who brushed past her all seemed to judge her with their eyes. Where was there to go in a city with few sidewalks, where every street was filled with potholes and families living between bent trees, where walking was pain, not pleasure?
Where are you walking? Swati had asked. What should she tell her? She could lie, of course, but why? Carter Road, she wrote. Perry Road led into it, and now that she had started looking for beauty, looking for something she liked in the city, why stop?
She posted a photo of the blue house on Instagram, with a brief caption: Living in Mumbai can be really hard, and I could use some peace sometimes, lucky I found this place. Still performing her life. But at least a little more truthfully.
She made her way to Carter Road, a street that curved along the ocean like a lover, spooning the shore. The Mumbai municipal government had built an area for walking. Of course, the area itself, a footpath, as Indians called it, a lingering term from their British overlords, was what Rachel called a sidewalk, the kind she had associated with all streets before coming to India. But an area that was comfortable and easy to walk in, an area designed for walking was, in fact, rather rare in Mumbai, and she had seen many a car and driver waiting patiently along Carter Road for the car’s owner, who had been driven over to the area for an opportunity to walk, to return. The idea of needing a separate place to walk baffled Rachel. Why not just make every sidewalk and road a place you could walk? But of course, that would only benefit people who could not afford a car, or a motorcycle, or a rickshaw, or even the bus, and if those people couldn’t afford any of that, they probably couldn’t afford to protest, either.
Looking out at the ocean, she thought, I should have had some water. She leaned against a wall that had an advertisement on it, a cartoon of a woman, her mouth open in a scream, clutching her neck, as two men on a motorcycle, a broken gold necklace in one of their hands, speed away. beware of chain snatchers, the image warned her in no uncertain terms. Rachel smiled and gave in to the impulse to check her phone. Swati usually wore a chain like that, a mangalsutra, a wedding necklace, but Rachel was certain if someone took it from her, she wouldn’t mind so much.
She kept walking along the sea, stopping to buy a fresh coconut from a street vendor, who used a machete to make a small opening so she could sip the water from the large green fruit. She didn’t particularly enjoy the liquid, not quite sweet, lukewarm from sitting out in the heat of the day, but she vaguely remembered some fitness post on a friend’s profile about its many benefits, hailing coconut water as the new wonder drug, and it was better than buying a water bottle, then disposing of it in a trash can along the way, for it would surely just join hundreds of others littered on the rocky shore below. She finished her coconut and passed the shell back, declining the offer of the flesh.
The water was slate gray, with no blue sky to brighten it in reflection. Instead, the sky was white, the day saturated with haze, the sun unable to penetrate through the smog. Nevertheless, other pedestrians passed Rachel with wide-brimmed hats and umbrellas shading them, while teenagers sat in the shade, their limbs covered by layers of clothing that made Rachel feel overheated just looking at them. She wondered idly why they weren’t in school as she passed them by, and then forgot them when she saw a familiar figure sitting stiffly on the next bench.
Swati was back in her Indian clothing, Rachel noticed as she sat down beside her. Her hair was wet, too. She must have showered.
“You l
ook different,” Rachel said pointedly.
“Just because I bought some Western clothes does not mean I will not also wear salwars,” Swati said.
“I understand,” Rachel said.
The silence stretched out between them, punctuated, of course, by the thousand sounds of Mumbai itself, the honking horns and the repetitive chants of street sellers and the chattering of people, the constant, never-ending press of people, and then somewhere, above all that, the sound of millions of people working and doing, of birds chattering, of the wind, of the ocean. But between the two of them, there was silence, even if the rest of the world refused to participate.
“I am worried about you,” Swati confessed. “You just left this morning. You seemed sad last night. I was not sure what you might do.”
“So is everyone, I guess,” Rachel said, thinking of Adam, thinking of all the friends who didn’t have Adam’s directness, or his courage. Did they get together sometimes and, over the course of the night, all mention her, worrying about her together like you would a cancer patient or an addict? Were they planning some kind of intervention? Or, more likely, less egotistical, and far more depressing, were they just getting on with their lives?
“You are unhappy,” Swati said.
Rachel laughed, short and sharp. It seemed such an understatement for how she had been feeling, how she felt now, looking at the sea pushing its way onto the shore.
“Will you talk to me?”
Rachel thought about it. How could she explain this?
“Do you know what I used to do, back in New York?” Rachel asked her.
“Did you do voice work, like you do now?”
Rachel smiled sadly. They really knew so little about each other. They lived in the same house, they were related now, by marriage, but the things Rachel knew about Swati wouldn’t fill a Post-it. She hadn’t wanted to learn, she supposed, when Swati had invaded her life. She had wanted Swati to modernize, to understand her completely, without bothering to understand Swati in return. But even before, had Dhruv said much about his mother? She had asked him questions about his family, he had told her about his childhood, but what had he said about Swati? She is a typical Marwari mother. What had that meant? What did typical mean at all? Now, looking at her own actions, her own disinterest in really learning more from Dhruv, or Swati, Rachel felt that she had done the intellectual equivalent of screaming at someone in your own language, hoping that volume would lead to comprehension. What a bastard she had been.
“No. I didn’t do voice work. I think they only hired me for that here because I have an American accent. In the States, I used to work for this company that made dinner in a box.”
“Food that is delivered?” Swati looked even more confused.
Rachel shook her head. “They take a recipe, and then they gather all the ingredients for the recipe, everything, oil, salt, everything, and put it in little tiny packages, exactly as much as you need to make the recipe, and they put it in a box, and they deliver it to you. So if you wanted to make dal, dal for two people, they would have one cup of lentils, two chilies, four cloves of garlic—”
“I use more chilies than that,” Swati interrupted.
“Right, but, they assume the average. See, they’re doing this for people who don’t already have a way to make things. So they give you each piece, perfectly portioned, so you can just follow a few steps and make something without having to think about anything, about buying groceries or anything. Dinner in a box. It’s very popular. I worked at a company that did that. I was the head of business development, actually.”
“That sounds wonderful.” Swati sighed. “So easy. They make everything easy in Western places. Why do things have to be so hard here?”
Rachel thought that all the time. How strange for her own thoughts to come out of Swati’s mouth, but for the wrong thing.
“Have you been outside of India much?” Rachel asked.
Swati nodded. “We took a cruise. UK. So cold, it was. But wonderful. Vinod did not like it. It was expensive, and most of the food was not Indian. But everything was beautiful, and it was very clean.”
Rachel smiled. “Well. Maybe you would love that product that I helped sell. But I didn’t. I didn’t like the company. I love cooking.”
“But then you should have loved it,” Swati said, looking confused.
“It didn’t feel like real cooking to me. It made it easy, like you said. But see, the thing is, cooking is work, but it’s good work. It’s something with your hands, something creative and scientific, it’s alchemy, modern alchemy. And that labor, it helps you respect it. It helps you respect the ingredients, and the dish, and the people who make food, because doing the work helps you see the—the beauty, the nobility in the work. I think some things are supposed to be a little hard. I like every part of cooking. I don’t need it to be easier.”
“Maybe that is because everything is easier there,” Swati offered.
Rachel nodded. It was a luxury to want things to be hard, she knew. It meant most of life wasn’t. “I think so. But, I didn’t like my job very much, in the end. I was happy to leave, to come here and finally have a chance to cook.”
“And then you didn’t,” Swati said, her voice soft.
“And then I didn’t.” Rachel smiled, bittersweetly, as she spoke.
“I wanted to teach you about living here. When I got married, I had to become a part of my new household, I had to become what my in-laws wanted me to be. I thought that that was what it meant to be married, that you become the thing your new family needs.”
“So, you were punishing me? Giving what you had gotten?” Rachel asked, curious, not angry.
“Maybe I was. But I thought you would see that this is the right way to live. I thought I was helping you.”
“If you think that, you don’t know me,” Rachel said.
Swati shrugged. “I do not know you,” Swati agreed. “But I will try.”
Rachel looked out at the ocean again. “I love that Mumbai is on the water. No matter how sticky it is, you get that breeze from the sea.”
“When I was little, my parents took me here. I had never seen the sea before, and I did not understand how it could be so big. I was upset, because the water came but then it went away again.”
“The tide,” Rachel said.
Swati nodded. “I was very small. I did not understand that things come, and they go. I wanted the same wave to come back and stay with me forever. Now I want things to go away, I want to escape them. I wanted to be the shore, and now I want to be the water. I did not think I would change so much.”
“I thought I would change more,” Rachel said.
Swati smiled. “You have time.”
Rachel reached out and took her hand, and together they sat and watched the sea come, and go, until the gulls’ cries and the day’s heat and the demands of Rachel’s stomach became too great for either of them to stand.
“Let’s go home,” Rachel said. “You can teach me to make you lunch. And I can help you figure out what to wear for your coffee. Because whatever it is, it’s not going to be this.”
Twenty-Three
Something had changed in Swati as she looked out over the ocean, Rachel’s hand in hers. Something had opened up in her; a part of her that she had kept in a box with the lid on tight had gotten out, burned the box, and now was dancing in the sea. As Swati waited for Rachel to serve her lunch, she looked out at the city from the balcony, an image of herself dancing burning bright in her thoughts. She smiled. The idea should have mortified her; the very fantasy of her being in public like that, her clothing wet and sticking to her body, would have devastated her months before, imaginary though it was. Now she blushed, yes, but she felt excitement, lust, roll through her hips and groin.
The food had turned out well. Rachel learned fast, and she liked to do things the hard way, which infused them with a flavor Swati remembered from her childhood, the care of hand-ground spices and slow tempering. Today they
had made South Indian food, idli and sambar, and Rachel’s sambar had turned out to be well balanced, substantial, the sour and savory elements intertwined. Swati had eaten too much, and protested when Rachel urged her to don one of her new dresses, which clung more to her stomach.
“You have to show Arjun what he is dealing with,” Rachel told her firmly. Rachel’s attitude about this coffee date confused Swati. She knew that her feelings were inappropriate, grotesque, even—at least, they would be if she dared act on them. Why was Rachel pretending that this was some sort of opportunity to impress Arjun, a man Swati should have wanted nothing to do with? Rachel’s enthusiasm made Swati regret her confession from the night before.
“Last night I was very tired, I maybe said something that is not true,” Swati said, trying to fix it. “About Arjun, I mean.”
“I just meant, doesn’t he want to take you back to Kolkata?” Rachel said, smiling. “Isn’t it important to show him what an independent, self-sufficient woman you are? Cute clothing can’t hurt.”
“Oh. Yes. That is true,” Swati said, smoothing her hands over the material, not sure she should be enjoying the feeling of it on her body, the knowledge that she looked her best in a modern way in which she never had before.
“Do you want me to drop you off?” Rachel asked. Swati shook her head. She knew the way, and she needed to use the ride to compose herself. Rachel nodded and wished her luck.
Swati went out into the day for the second time, only this time as another version of herself, modern, her long dress in a swirl of block prints bridging the gap between its Indian material and its Western shape. It fluttered out the side of her rickshaw as they charged down the hill and then up again, through Bandra into Khar, where Arjun was waiting for her. The idea of his waiting for her, thinking of her, in any way, consternated Swati, and she tried to reconcile how horrible it was that Bunny had sent her son to fetch her, and how confusing her physical reaction to that son was. She couldn’t, so she tried chanting hymns instead, thinking about God to avoid thinking about man, until she reached her destination.