by Leah Franqui
“You don’t have to say that. I didn’t make it.”
“Are you a good cook?” Arjun asked her, his face open and curious. He looked at her with interest, as if he really wanted to get to know her. But behind it there was calculation, Swati could see. She leaned back. Why had he said yes to her invitation?
“Not really. I don’t enjoy it much. I think to be really good at something, you must enjoy it,” Swati said calmly, without apology.
“I enjoyed your cooking as a child,” Arjun said, chewing.
“That would have been the last time you tried it. I don’t think I have had you to my house for over a decade,” Swati said, punctuating her words with a bite of paneer tikka.
“May I ask you something?” Arjun said, taking a sip of water.
Swati nodded, wary.
“Do you like my mother?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“As a person. Do you like her?”
Swati took a sip of water, wondering what to say. She decided to be honest. There was nothing about this conversation that Arjun would share with others, she knew, and even if he did, what did it matter anymore?
“I used to. She was my closest friend.”
Arjun nodded, once, and leaned forward. “Do you know what she used to say about you?”
Swati shook her head at his question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“She called you the martyr. That everything you did or said was to prove how good you were, how much you could sacrifice. She thinks you are a sanctimonious bore.”
Swati’s vision blurred and filled with red rage for a moment, and then she breathed deeply, willing herself to calm.
“Well. I doubt she thinks that anymore,” she said shakily.
“Does it matter what she thinks?” Arjun asked.
“It does to you. Your parents fund your life, don’t they?” Swati asked, conscious that she was lashing out, not sure she cared. She wanted to curl up and die. She knew that Bunny must hate her now, but that she had always judged her so harshly? What was she to think about that?
“That doesn’t mean I worry what they think. It means I make sure they only think one thing of me. That I am a dutiful husband who has made a terrible mistake, and I will atone and atone and atone for it. I will whip myself in the streets, I will fall at Neera’s feet, I will do what is right. What they know is right.” Arjun described the litany of his tasks in a monotone, and Swati wondered at his detachment. “I know what I have to do. And I know what I want to do. And they only need to know one of those two things. May I have some more water?” Arjun asked.
Swati, stunned by his words, by how well she understood them, leaned over him to fill his glass. As she did so, her body stretching over his, he leaned into her, his chest brushing her arm. She looked at him, and knew, knew, that he did want her, insane as it was. She knew in that moment that these two things she felt, wanting him and not liking him, were not at odds. They were in harmony. Wanting him without caring for him meant that she could have him and let him go. She could have Arjun and let him go, and still be a mother, a mother-in-law, a Marwari woman, a daughter, a good person. The thought, the power of it, the potential, was dizzying.
If someone had asked her the day before what desire felt like, she would not have been able to answer them. Now she could have described the contours of need, the flavor of want, metallic and desperate in her mouth.
“You see, I am trapped. But I am also free, because I know what my cage is, and I know how to line it.”
Swati smiled, thinking of the way in which a man could be trapped, the size of his prison. Perhaps it was true, that he had no other option, but his entrapment was a joke compared to the cages of the women she knew. Compared to her own. Even now, she was dependent on others for money, on the benevolence of her child. Without Dhruv’s support she would have never left. Without knowing that he was there, she would have done nothing. People called her brave, ignoring her safety net.
“You are free,” Swati whispered.
“So are you,” Arjun said.
She nodded. “In a way,” she said.
“Do you want to know why I told you about my mother?” Arjun asked, his voice hypnotic.
Swati felt herself leaning into him. “Why?”
“I wanted to see you angry. I want you angry.”
“What for?” Swati asked.
“Think about what she would say if she found out,” Arjun said tauntingly, tantalizingly.
“You want something to happen here to spite your mother?” Swati asked, her voice scandalized.
“I’m sorry, I—”
Swati stood, cutting off his stammering with her hand. She turned and walked to the bedroom, feeling her hips moving, swaying, thinking that the curves of her body could light her clothing on fire if she let them. She looked back. “Well? Aren’t you coming?”
Within seconds his arms were around her, holding her from behind, and it was like her dream, but more, with smells and warmth and realness, and she could feel her pulse at her wrists and neck and the backs of her knees and between her legs. She turned in his embrace and kissed him.
She was doing something she should not have been doing, and he was right, it was all the richer and sweeter for that.
Twenty-Four
When Rachel returned home from a day spent in South Mumbai, where she had gone on an architecture walk and sweated out days of water and taken the train both ways and could feel a layer of the city’s grime and dust on her skin like a wet suit, she found the remains of an entire lunch spread out on her table, a gleeful feast for flies.
On her way to the train that morning to go to South Mumbai, everywhere she had looked, people were in motion. The city was a rolling, rioting thing, pulsating and rippling with life, so bright and constant that sometimes it hurt her eyes, like the bright fluorescent pebbles people put at the bottom of fish tanks. She was looking out for the things Richard had told her about, for the Deco-style apartment buildings; the knife sharpeners, who peddled their skill, as well as a display of an assortment of knives for sale, on their bicycles, a dangerous endeavor; and the tiny shrines tucked into trees. She looked for beauty, hoping that the intention would be enough, and found that it was, in its way. How much of life had she missed because she had already decided what was in front of her and had been blind to anything that didn’t fit? She saw ugliness in Mumbai, yes, but also joy, and she thought about how blind she had been because she was only looking for the one and not the other.
Still, it was the very nature of the city that made her feel that she was a waste of space, she sometimes felt. Everyone was in motion, everyone had something to do, somewhere to be. Her uselessness stood out in sharp relief.
On the train back, as sweat dripped down between her breasts and shoulder blades and coated her legs, she had watched the women’s car go from empty at the beginning of the line at Churchgate to as packed as seemed physically possible by Dadar. There, hordes of people descended the train to transfer from a local to an express line, shooting up to the northern suburbs, which were no longer suburbs, hadn’t been for decades, but were still titled that by many. The stop was long and made the train feel hotter, and Rachel longed for it to move, so the open windows would blow a breeze on her body. She was in a corner, trying to take up as little space as possible as woman after woman squeezed back into the train for the local stops and onto the benches.
Despite the crush of people, women who sold hair clips and earrings and herbs and hijras, and transgender women who blessed you for a few rupees, made their way up and down the cars, plying their trades. If the women’s car was packed, the men’s cars must have been unbearable, and yet people still needed to sell their prayers and wares, still found a way.
When she had first come to Mumbai, Rachel had had a sense of what she now knew, looking back, was anger, anger that this didn’t work better, that the country didn’t work better. Instead of stop signs, the roads had speed bumps, because the gover
nment knew that drivers wouldn’t honor the signs but would be forced to slow for the bumps. People wouldn’t put toilets in their homes, because it would contaminate them to have people defecating inside the home, near the family shrine, but walking on Juhu beach in the morning Rachel watched grown men shitting on the shore. There were so many things that seemed to need improvement, things that she thought should be better.
Now, though, she realized how wrong she had been. The mystery wasn’t that it didn’t work better. The mystery, the miracle, was that it worked at all. The city’s normal was her strange, but her mistake had been in seeing it as wrong, not different. She had been seeing everything the wrong way around, she knew. She had looked to Dhruv for certainty, instead of building her own; she had admired a piece of him, not the whole of him; she had wanted life to be different, but hadn’t defined what different meant. She had gotten what she had asked for, and blamed it for being wrong and not herself for picking poorly.
The route from Bandra station to her apartment was long, but she made it anyway, dodging goats as she walked through an area near the local mosque and holding her breath as she passed by the butchers, who displayed freshly slaughtered mutton along with whole goat heads, their hair intact, their eyes glassy. Then she hit the main road, with its posh, sleek cafés and bars, its boutiques, and marveled again, as she did every time, that it all existed together. It was amazing, really, and she felt a kind of admiration for the first time overriding her discomfort. She hadn’t had to look at her phone once for directions, she realized. She knew the neighborhood now.
As she walked, scents in Rachel’s nose moved from sewage to savory crispness. She passed a stall that she had seen when she went to work, one of the thousands that dotted Mumbai’s streets, a lean-to of sorts, made of reclaimed plywood and tarps stretched across the top. This one had clearly gotten some of its building materials from some local race, because stretched across the front of the stall was an admonishment to run for a reason, which always struck Rachel as simultaneously funny and sad. Behind the stall, the street seller was sweaty with the heat of the day and his work, frying batch after batch of onion fritters scented with cumin. She could smell them in the wind, delicious and sizzling even as he scooped them out of the blisteringly hot oil.
She had passed this stall every time, she had watched people shove the fritters in their mouths, their fingers coated in oil, their faces creased in delight, every time, and done nothing. She who loved food, who had been willing to murder her mother-in-law over having a cook come, had been confining herself to fresh lime sodas and Swati’s papaya parathas, to learning to cook one thing through Swati’s commands. Why hadn’t she tried more, on her own? What on earth had she been waiting for?
She stood in line behind a man whose pants were fighting a valiant battle with his potbelly, and losing, and in front of a woman who had looped the end of her sari over her head and was mumbling to herself and counting out change. When she got her turn, she put her finger up for one, but he gave her two. She fished in her wallet and presented the fritter seller with a hundred-rupee note, which made him grimace and groan and shake his head. Rachel looked at the woman beside her, whose painfully thin shoulder blades jutted through the veil of her sari and the thicker material of her choli blouse as she counted the same four rupee coins over and over again, clearly hoping they would eventually add up to something more. Rachel caught the seller’s eye meaningfully.
“It’s a tip,” she said, smiling brightly, and took her food, leaving her change, ninety rupees, behind. She picked up one of the fritters and, shutting her eyes and mind to all the warnings about eating street food in India, all of her own reservations about the cook who had prepared these and what kind of hand-washing situation he might have had, what kind of bathroom situation he might have had, she reminded herself that the hot oil would probably kill most of what could kill her, and took a bite. It was heavy, greasy, savory, cumin-scented heaven, and she cursed herself for finding it only now.
Now, inside the apartment, she swatted flies off the lunch left on the table, trying to save as much of the food as possible. She cleaned up the table and did the dishes, wondering what had happened. It wasn’t like Swati to leave food out. She caught sight of her face in the stainless-steel cabinet and realized she hadn’t washed it; she was still grubby from the day.
She stepped into the bathroom and filled her palms with water, grateful that it was cold. The water was never hot, unless she turned the geyser on and waited twenty minutes for it to heat. Scrubbing her face with soap, she realized that it wasn’t enough; she was coated in dried sweat and pollution and dust; she needed to shower.
She thought about how alone she had felt all day, how utterly separate from everyone around her. The walking tour was the kind of thing she had hoped she would do with her husband, wished she could do with a new friend. She had even been a little sad that Swati hadn’t wanted to come. It was the kind of thing she would have liked to share.
Would Dhruv have even wanted to do a thing like the walking tour? Where was her husband now? In this, the longest time they had been apart since they got married, Rachel had realized how easy it was for her to forget about Dhruv, to forget, for little moments, that she was married. She had never known it, but she was like a goldfish when it came to him; she needed to see him or she would forget that he was there. It troubled her, how easy it was to forget her husband.
He had sent her a text, asking how his plan was working, but she had simply written back with a question mark, and then the tour had started. He had called, but for once it was Rachel who couldn’t answer him and she had derived unmistakable pleasure from that. She would talk to him later. She was too full of things now.
Rachel leaned her head against the bathroom door, suddenly bone tired. She ought to drink some water, she knew, and she had just put her hand on the doorknob, ready to get some, when suddenly she heard voices, one of them male. Who could it be? She put her ear to the door, listening intently. Part of her wondered why she wasn’t just walking out into her own apartment and figuring out what was happening, but another part of her couldn’t stand the idea of interacting with one more person after being saturated with humanity all day.
The voices were speaking in Hindi, but that didn’t tell her anything, and she looked at herself in the mirror, trying to gather herself. This was her apartment. She wasn’t going to cower from strangers in the bathroom, she was going to go out and greet them like a normal person. She nodded, pinched her pale cheeks, and opened the bathroom door to find Swati kissing Arjun, Bunny’s son, right in the center of the living room.
They were lost in each other, completely enmeshed in each other’s arms. This was not a first kiss, Rachel knew instantly, for they touched each other with equal parts hunger and knowledge. Rachel watched them for a long moment and then closed the bathroom door, carefully, silently. She turned the light off, shrouding the room in darkness, and then slid down the wall, sitting with her head on her knees, curling into a ball, and wishing, not for the first time that day, that she were a better person. Because a better person would have felt surprise, concern, elation, disapproval. Anything, that is, other than jealousy.
Rachel didn’t know she had fallen asleep until the lights flooded on and the door to the bathroom opened. Her arms were asleep, as were her feet, and she blinked up into Swati’s startled face, feeling pinpricks all over her body. She smiled weakly up at her mother-in-law and waved her arms around, trying to wake them up as she staggered to her feet.
“What—what are you doing here?” Swati asked, fear coating her face.
“I came back from the walk, uh, what time is it?” Rachel had left her phone, her only way of telling time, outside, in her purse. Swati must not have noticed it. She was distracted, Rachel thought, smiling slightly.
“It is half past nine,” Swati said, “I didn’t hear you come in, I—I was resting. Why, why were you sleeping in the bathroom?”
“Oh, I must have just do
zed off. I was exhausted, actually. I don’t . . . really know why. Walking in the heat, maybe,” Rachel said, stumbling over her words. She had been sleeping for three hours. Did Swati know she knew? Should she just say something?
“May I?” Swati said, gesturing to the bathroom. Rachel moved out of the way hurriedly, her limbs still achy from sleep.
Swati closed the door behind her firmly, and Rachel stumbled into the kitchen, dazed. She heard a noise from the bathroom.
“I’m sorry?” she said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. Oh dear. The door to the bathroom swung open with a bang, and Swati, her face on fire, her eyes huge and tearful, stood in the doorway. Rachel looked at her helplessly. Of course, Swati had been trying to test if someone could hear something from the bathroom. And Rachel had proved that they could.
“Did you—” Swati sputtered, the shock on her face clear.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Did you see us—”
“I . . . Yes.” Rachel could have said Who?, she knew. She could have pretended she didn’t know what Swati was talking about, that she had no idea what she meant. But why? Why not just talk about the elephant—the lover—in the room?
“Oh my God,” Swati said, her voice high pitched, her breathing labored. “I—I don’t know what to . . . I—”
“Swati. Please, just breathe, okay? Do you want some water? I’ll get you some water.” As Rachel spoke, Swati herself slid down the wall of the bathroom, unconsciously echoing Rachel’s position from just moments before. Rachel poured Swati a glass of water from one of the bottles they filled daily from the water filter and then knelt beside her.
“Here. Take it.” But Swati just shook her head, her eyes glazed over, so Rachel gently tipped the glass into her mouth, forcing her to drink. Swati sputtered and coughed, but when she looked at Rachel, she looked like herself again, and not the ghost who had collapsed on the bathroom floor.
“I’m sorry,” Swati whispered.