by Leah Franqui
She picked up her phone and walked out to the balcony, dialing.
“How are you?” he asked when he picked up. She didn’t recognize his voice for a moment, almost thinking someone else had answered for him, and the knowledge of that made the hair on her arms stand straight up.
“I’m all right. I miss you,” she said. This both was and was not true.
“Have you figured out my plan yet?” Dhruv asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
“No, you never told me!” she reminded him, trying to keep it light, trying to find the spark between them that had flared up so well in the past.
“You should know by now. I’m sure Mum has met him.”
“Him?”
“I asked Bunny auntie to send her son to bring Mum home.” Rachel almost dropped her phone. She imagined that she had done so, that it had slipped out of her hand and crashed on the cement below. Dhruv had continued talking, but she could barely hear him because of the roaring in her ears.
“I knew talking to him would set her to rights. His wife has left him, you see, and I knew if Mum just talked to him she would see what a mistake that all was.”
Dhruv sounded happy, triumphant, even. Rachel wanted to burst out into laughter but was more worried she would burst into tears. The very idea that in Dhruv’s mind sending a man who had had an affair to convince Swati to return to her husband made no sense. And given what had just happened, what Swati had just done with Arjun, sealing her separation and compounding his own infidelity, this plan was absurd.
“Oh” was all Rachel could say.
“What? Hasn’t he met her yet? What a bloody duffer he is. I told him—”
“She’s met him,” Rachel said, still struggling to find words.
“Ah. So then? She must be packing to go home with him, mustn’t she? It’s nice, I will get to see her with Papa before I come back to Mumbai. Maybe you should come with her?”
“I have work” was all Rachel could manage.
“But, that’s not something important, is it? Come, come to Kolkata, it will be fun! I won’t have much time, with work, but you can help Mum reacclimate and get to know Papa better. I’m sure we will all be laughing about this in days, come, come.”
“No,” Rachel whispered.
“I’ll book your flights—”
“No,” Rachel said again.
“All right, well, if you can’t come, can you make sure Mum gets to the airport all right? I don’t trust Arjun, he’s too—”
“Dhruv, stop. Listen to me. This is not— Your mother is not going back to Kolkata. Your . . . plan . . . did not work.”
There was silence on the line.
“What are you saying?” Dhruv asked, his tone dangerous. “I knew I couldn’t trust him, bloody Arjun—”
“It’s not him, Dhruv. He’s not responsible for your mother getting back together with your father. That’s just not something she wants to do. You have to accept that.”
“I thought you wanted her to leave. You were so adamant—”
“I did! I do. But this isn’t the way. Not if she doesn’t want it.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“How can you say that?” Rachel didn’t know how to understand the person on the other end of the line, how to reconcile him with the Dhruv she knew. But how well do you really know him? she asked herself.
“She’s being silly. I’ve talked it over with Papa—”
“You’ve talked through your mother’s future without her?” Rachel asked.
“Well, he’s the one paying for it,” Dhruv snapped. Rachel reared her head back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say it like that,” he said.
“But you did mean to say it,” Rachel stated. She knew it wasn’t really a question, for either of them. There was silence on the line.
“How could this not have worked? I knew she needed someone from her old life to jolt her back to her senses. Did I pick the wrong person?” Dhruv asked, frustrated.
Rachel smiled bitterly. He had no idea. “She is in her senses, Dhruv. She knows what she wants. Why can’t you trust that?”
“Because this isn’t the way things are supposed to be! Because she’s being insane! What will she do with her life, be alone forever?”
“Maybe she wants to meet someone, Dhruv! Maybe she wants to try something—someone—new!”
“My mother would never do such a thing.”
“Maybe she already has!” Rachel regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. She could picture them, floating in the air in front of her, like bubbles that a man in Washington Square Park would blow, huge and glistening with rainbow brilliance, until they popped, leaving the person nearby wet and soapy.
“You must be joking.” His voice was tight.
“It’s—a hypothetical, I was just—”
“Has my mother had some affair? Is she, I can’t even say the words—”
“Would it be so bad if she was?” Rachel said gently. “She’s an adult. Surely she can make her own decisions, here.”
“How can you even say that? If she’s having some affair, it’s disgusting, it’s horrible, it’s a scandal, she’s not even divorced, what can she be thinking?”
“Dhruv, I didn’t even say she was. I’m not saying she is. But what did you think would happen? She left your father, it was a huge choice. It wasn’t silly or made lightly, she’s not insane, she did this big, brave thing, how can you treat it like it’s a tantrum? How can you not see that she might have wanted something different, something more?”
“This is unseemly. This isn’t done.”
Rachel hated that phrase, not done. Obviously, it was done, someone was doing it.
“This is wrong. If she’s even thinking about something like this, even considering meeting someone, it’s all gone too far. I shouldn’t have sent Arjun, I see that now, I’m the one who can fix this. I’m coming home. I’ll get on a flight tomorrow, I’ll be there by the afternoon. I’ve wrapped up here, I can do the rest from Mumbai. She needs to be brought to her senses, I need to come home.” Dhruv was speaking rapid-fire now, all his earlier sleepiness gone.
“You don’t need to do that. I was just speaking hypothetically, Dhruv, please—”
“I asked you to look after her, Rachel! And now you call and tell me that she’s going around with men. Did you put this idea in her head? Did you influence her, making her do this? How do you not see how wrong that is?”
“Dhruv, your mother is an adult. Adults meet, and marry, and then maybe that doesn’t work out, and they find something, someone, else.”
“That’s all right for them, maybe, but not for my mother. I can’t talk about this over the phone, Rachel. I’ll be back tomorrow. Look, I don’t blame you for this, you don’t understand anything here, I shouldn’t have left her in your care. This isn’t your fault, you just don’t understand. I will come home and sort it out.”
“Dhruv, listen to me, please—” But he wouldn’t and she knew even as she asked that he wouldn’t, that perhaps he never really had.
“I have to go, I have to book the flight. I will solve this. I will sort everything out, don’t worry. This will all be over soon, I promise. I will sort it. See you tomorrow.” And the line went dead.
Rachel had thought about her phone falling off the balcony. Now she wanted to throw it into the night, for it to smash apart everything Dhruv had just said to her. She looked out, but the darkness, punctuated with orange lights and smog, told her nothing. The only thing smashed apart was her.
Twenty-Five
When Swati woke up in the morning, she was surprised by how wonderful she felt. She had expected to have a pounding head, like Vinod always had when he had drunk too much, and a mind full of regrets, but instead, her body felt warm and tingly, as if it were covered in bubbles like the ones swirling in her mug of champagne the night before. Swati covered her face with her hand, trying to contain her giddy laughter, and found that her han
d was wrapped up in a dupatta. She vaguely remembered Rachel’s wrapping a dupatta around her the night before to hide her embarrassment.
She rolled over onto her stomach and spread out the wrinkled silk, thinking about the garment and how long she had been wearing it, not this dupatta, of course, but just one at all. When she had been a little girl, her mother had dressed her in starched cotton dresses, and stiff as they had been, her legs could move freely, her body could jump and dance and leap, not that she did any of those things, unless dared to by Bunny, who had always been bolder than she was. Then, when she had started wearing a salwar kameez with a dupatta, initially she had found that the length of fabric wrapped around her throat, light as it was, felt like someone was strangling her. She could feel it pressing around her neck, a pinch on her gag reflex, and her stomach rolled, preparing itself to throw up, every third minute. Eventually she got used to the feeling, and there were years of her life when she wore a dupatta daily, feeling naked without it hanging over her breast, shielding her from men’s eyes.
She rolled onto her back and draped the dupatta over her body, holding it tight over her chest, like a starlet in an item number in a Bollywood movie. Where was the guilt that she should have felt, the guilt she had felt, at wanting Arjun? He was her friend’s—former friend’s—son. He was a bad man, a man who had affairs. But she was a bad woman now, and she still wanted him, even after they had . . . been together, more, even, because she knew what it was like, she could compare it to her time with Vinod, and she knew now how lacking that all had been. She felt a stab of sympathy for Vinod. Neither of them had known how good sex could be. Neither of them had known it could, should, be good at all. She was sure that all her guilt and shame would return soon, but for now, she wanted to roll around in this feeling, take a bath in it.
Rachel hadn’t thought that she was horrible, or shameful, or foolish. Rachel had been happy for her, celebrated with her. Yes, perhaps Rachel was other, foreign, one of them, and her morals were, therefore, something different; and in the past Swati would have been certain that what was all right for people like Rachel was not all right for her, but now she took it as a comfort. She was not alone in her joy, and she did not have to surrender to shame.
A knock came at the door.
“Are you all right?” Rachel’s voice came through the door.
Swati nodded, and realized Rachel couldn’t see her when the knock came again. “Yes, yes, fine.”
“I just wondered if you wanted coffee. I made some. Half a cup?” Rachel asked. Swati looked at her phone; it was nine thirty, later than she had slept in years, really. She ought to get up, make Rachel breakfast, sort things out, tell Arjun she could never see him again, pray to the gods for purity, call Vinod, beg him to take her back, apologize to her mother’s ashes, become a respectable woman again, return to the right kind of life to have.
“Will you bring it to me in bed?” Swati asked, her voice soft with indulgence. She would do none of that. She did not want to do it, and so she would not. What an idea, for what she wanted to be a reason for anything big in her life.
She could hear Rachel chuckle through the door. “All right, princess.”
“Rani!” Swati said as Rachel opened the door and brought her a cup of coffee. Rachel shook her head in confusion. “It means ‘queen.’”
“Here you are, Your Majesty. Enjoy.”
Swati took the coffee, inhaling the steam coming off it happily. “I think the smell of coffee is better than the taste, even,” she confessed.
“I would have thought you would be hungover this morning,” Rachel said, “but you look fine. Very chipper.”
“Chipper?”
“Happy. Peppy. Bright.”
“Maybe joining is like a haldi,” Swati whispered, proud of her joke but shocked she was saying it out loud. Rachel just looked confused. “After a prayer, we anoint our brides with turmeric before they get married. It gives them a glow for their marriage.”
“They could probably skip it and just have sex, then,” Rachel pointed out.
“There is singing, and dancing. It’s very festive,” Swati said, defending the event.
“Sounds fun. We should have had an Indian wedding,” Rachel said, sitting next to Swati on the bed. Swati thought about the time she had had to beg Rachel to sit next to her, just weeks ago, the way she had felt so far away from this girl the day she heard about her. Change was a miraculous thing, really, if you thought about it.
“We offered to Dhruv to have one, but he said you didn’t want one,” Swati said, remembering her sense of disappointment, her worry that Dhruv’s bride would be someone she wouldn’t know at all. Such a funny thought. “We were supposed to have a reception in Kolkata, too. I suppose now we never will.”
“Oh,” Rachel said, her voice strange.
“What happened?” Swati asked.
“No, it’s just, well, he never told me that.”
“I see.” But Swati didn’t see, and clearly, neither did Rachel. “Perhaps he knew what you would think, so he just didn’t bother to ask,” Swati said, trying to defend her son, despite her own discomfort.
“Perhaps,” Rachel said.
It would have made Swati and Vinod very happy to give their only child a wedding. She had thought that Dhruv was being respectful of his wife and her wishes by saying no to an Indian ceremony, something Swati could well approve of, even if it confused her, because what woman was more beautiful than an Indian bride, but now she didn’t know what to think.
“Dhruv is coming home today,” Rachel said, her voice still strange.
“But that is wonderful,” Swati said, trying to get up. “I should cook for him, the cook isn’t back yet.”
“I can do that,” Rachel said, biting her lip. “It’s only—”
“What?”
“Something happened.”
“What,” Swati said, her heart a stone.
“I told him, I didn’t mean to, but it slipped out, I didn’t even actually say that it had happened, I said it hypothetically, actually, he was, he wanted you to go home to Vinod, he, he sent Arjun to take you home to Vinod, and I—”
“Rachel. Tell me what happened.”
Rachel closed her eyes tightly at Swati’s steely words. “I said something like, what if you’d already met someone. As a reason, as why you weren’t going back to Vinod. As a general statement. I didn’t know he would—I didn’t think he would—take it seriously.”
“You said that. You implied that. To my son.” Swati didn’t know what to think. How could Rachel have said this to Dhruv? Even if it was just something that had slipped out, how could she have let it? Why hadn’t she locked it inside of her, the way Swati herself had? The girl understood nothing. Of course Dhruv could not, would not, understand. Of course even the idea of it was repugnant to him. She closed her eyes, her face bloodless, trying to block out that part of her that questioned the things she had always known to be true. To want things, yes, to have them, maybe, but for others to know? For her son to know? For him to even think she might desire someone at all? The shame lay over her skin like a sheen of sweat, dripping down her arms and legs and polluting her bedsheets.
“I tried to tell him it was just . . . an idea. I didn’t say anything about what happened, but he, he was furious at the very concept, I couldn’t reason with him. I couldn’t understand him.” Rachel sounded so sad, her voice choked with pain and confusion, but Swati did not care.
“Get out,” Swati said softly. She had nothing to say to this girl who, in her blindness, her thoughtlessness, had betrayed her. How could Rachel not see, understand, the world around her?
“Swati, I’m sorry.”
“Get. Out,” Swati said, raising her eyes to meet those of her daughter-in-law. Rachel’s were bright with tears, but Swati did not have the energy to care for someone of such willful ignorance, not in that moment. And Rachel must have seen that, too, because she turned around and went. All Swati was left with was the cof
fee, fragrant and bitter. She sipped it and it felt, in her stomach, like a fist.
Twenty-Six
Rachel sat on her couch in her living room in her apartment in Mumbai waiting for her husband to come home, and thought how strange it was that any of that was true. She did not feel that she owned the things around her. She did not know how her body had gotten to this place or how she had become the kind of woman who waits for her husband to come home. Although she had helped buy the couch underneath her, spent her money on it, insisted on contributing, now she touched it as if it were an alien landscape, wondering what, exactly, it was.
She had spent many nights waiting for Dhruv since they had moved to Mumbai. They ran together, like still frames on a roll of film, a boring movie about a boring woman waiting for a man. She sat alone, as she had every time before. Swati was in her bedroom, which Rachel had finally let herself think of as Swati’s and not her own. The closed door signaled to Rachel that Swati had not forgiven her, but Rachel did not know what she should apologize for, not really. Wouldn’t Dhruv have found out eventually, maybe the next time Swati dated someone? Or had the woman intended to live her life cloistered from the world, treating their apartment like a convent?
The door of Swati’s room opened, a crack, then all the way. Rachel looked at it, her body still and sunk into the couch. Swati stood in the doorway and met her eyes, both of them grim. This was like waiting to talk to the principal, which Rachel had never had to do. This was waiting for punishment. What a bizarre and horrible way to think about her husband, as someone who could dole out punishment. How had she gotten here?
“There is nothing he can do to you, you know,” Rachel said suddenly, surprising herself. She hadn’t intended to say anything at all.
“He will send me back,” Swati said softly.
“He can’t just do that, Swati, you are an adult; he can’t make you do anything.”
“He can force me out of this house. And then where will I go? Who will support me?”
“You can support yourself!” Rachel said. Why was she making this so dramatic when it could be simple?