by Leah Franqui
Swati shook her head. “I have no money. I have never worked. What will I do? Who will hire me? What if I can’t do it? What will happen then?”
Rachel didn’t know how to respond. She had never once doubted her own ability to support herself. She had never felt without support, from her family or internally. Never had a moment without the knowledge that she could have the life she wanted, that whatever she did, short of murder, there would be people who would care for her, help her. That she could always help herself. But for Swati, support was conditional. Do this, get that. Behave, or get nothing. Be what you are expected to be or there is no place for you anywhere. Swati had walked away from one home only because another existed for her. She could not see a third choice for herself, because there was no other space where someone would take care of her. And she did not know, really know, that she could take care of herself. Rachel realized then that for all her admiration, she had not really known, not really seen, what Swati had been giving up when she left her husband, and now the weight of it hit her and she struggled to breathe.
Swati was suddenly in front of her, patting her hand. Rachel looked up at her and felt her jaw clench the way it did when she was about to cry.
“I don’t want you to go,” Rachel whispered.
Swati smiled, with real joy. “Of course you do. Everyone wants their mother-in-law to go,” she said, and Rachel laughed, a rusty, watery chuckle. She opened her mouth but had no idea what she should say, and never would, because at that moment the door to the apartment opened and Dhruv walked in.
It had been almost two months since she had seen him, Rachel realized, noting how his hair had grown and his face looked drawn. There would have been a time when she would have gone right up to him, smoothed his unruly curls, run her hands along the lines around his eyes. There would have been a time when she would have ripped his clothing off and left it trailing behind them on their way to the bedroom, or just a wall. There would have been a time when seeing him would have made her happy. But this time was none of those.
“Mum. I need to talk to you. Rachel, can you—”
“I think I should stay,” Rachel said, standing.
Dhruv looked at her, his eyes sparking with anger, but Swati grabbed her hand, and she knew she had made the right decision. Dhruv shrugged, dismissive, and dropped his bags, shutting the door behind him.
“I’ve booked you a flight for tomorrow morning. You are going back to Kolkata, and we will forget that all of . . . this, ever happened.” Dhruv walked over to the kitchen to pour himself a drink, never once meeting Swati’s eyes.
Swati was digging her nails into Rachel’s palm so hard Rachel wondered if she would break the skin.
Dhruv walked back into the living room, whiskey in hand, and looked at them. “You leave at nine a.m.,” he said.
“No,” Swati said, more a breath than a word.
“You should pack.”
“No,” Swati said again, a little louder, a whisper now.
“Dhruv, let’s talk about this,” Rachel said. Who was the person looking at her? He sounded like his father, or like some stereotype from a movie, a cartoon figure, the generic “disapproving male.” Where was the person who had told her how much he admired her strength, who had described dowries as insane, barbaric? What line had he drawn between his mother and the rest of the world?
“There is nothing to talk about. She will go back to Kolkata and beg my father, her husband, for forgiveness, she will say it was madness, some demon, some black magic, I don’t care, but she will return to him and forget this insanity. That she could even consider meeting someone else, betraying him, it is vile. She will forget all this, now.”
“No,” said Swati, and Rachel heard her this time, and looked at her, eyes wide.
“Your mother is allowed to do whatever she wants, Dhruv,” Rachel said.
“Just because they tell you things like that in America doesn’t make them true. We have values here, Rachel,” Dhruv said, his tone hard. “I am sure my mother doesn’t want to shame our entire family like this any longer. That is why she will listen to sense and go home.”
“No,” Swati said, and this time Dhruv heard her. He turned to her, then looked away, his cheeks red and his jaw clenched. “You can’t look at me?” Swati asked gently.
“I thought that he beat you, Mum, I thought that he was cruel, but you just left him to spread your legs for other men, like a bitch in heat—”
SLAP. Swati, fast as lightning, slapped him clean across his face, her aim true, her face fuchsia with rage. Dhruv looked shocked, as did Swati, but it was Rachel who spoke, her face a mirror of Swati’s own, enraged.
“How dare you? What kind of filth are you, to say that to your mother? What kind of man are you, to judge her that way?”
“She is my mother, she is my responsibility—”
“She is her own responsibility, Dhruv,” Rachel said.
“You don’t understand anything! You never have, you don’t understand where you are, you don’t know what this is, so you should shut up!”
“People all over the world get divorced all the time—”
“That’s fine for them! But that’s not for us! We don’t do that, we don’t do things like that—”
“That is patently absurd. Your mother is literally doing that!”
“Not anymore. I’ve let this nonsense go on too long, I’ve waited and waited for her like Papa said we should. I’ve sent someone to fetch her, hoping it would be less . . . humiliating, if she made the choice. But now that’s over, I’ve made the choice, and she has to go home. It has been decided, Rachel. She is going back.”
“No,” Swati said again, looking at her hand like she couldn’t understand what it had done, slapping him. “No, Dhruv. I am not going back to your father. That is all over now, do you understand me?”
“Then what will you do?” he asked, his voice like acid. “Where will you go? Because you cannot stay here.”
“You would make your own mother homeless?” Swati asked, her voice punctured with pain.
“You have a home. It is yours. You have someone who has pledged to take care of you, someone waiting for you. He will have you back. You should go to him,” Dhruv said. He was ordering, but also pleading, and Rachel heard the little boy in his voice, saw his confusion, his disgust with himself, how he wanted his mother to agree, to make it all better, to make it all go away.
Swati nodded, once. There was nothing more to say, she knew. She could see Vinod in her son’s face. She had always said that Dhruv looked like her, but now she knew that wasn’t true at all. She turned around to leave, but Rachel’s hand was still holding hers, and it held her back.
“What about what I want, Dhruv?” Rachel asked, her voice icy and calm.
Dhruv looked at her. “I have given you everything. This home, this life, I made it. I have already given you everything.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“But you took it,” Dhruv said, confusion in his voice.
“I thought it was a gift.”
“It is, it was, Rachel, I don’t know why you are inserting yourself in this. You have to trust me, I am doing what is for the best—”
“And why do you get to decide that?”
But Dhruv looked at her like she was speaking another language. “I am the one who knows India,” Dhruv said.
“Your mother also knows India, and she still made her choice,” Rachel said.
“And now I am making a different one. The right one.”
“Who said there is just one?”
“You are getting upset. You aren’t making sense. Everyone is growing emotional, and there is no need for that. We will talk about this later.”
Dhruv went to the kitchen, and Rachel watched him go, something bursting behind her eyes. She knew now that she had been wrong to be impressed with his worldliness, with the way he had lived in other places. Because he hadn’t really lived in them at all. He had simply
put things in compartments, let himself be something different in one place with the knowledge that none of it was permanent. He had been happy to live a certain way in America, but now that he was in India, he had to think differently, act differently, be different. He had changed with the shoreline and left the person she loved behind. No, he didn’t. He was always the same. I just thought it was romantic, refreshing, new, the way he took charge, the way he decided things. And now I don’t.
“Are you happy here?” Rachel asked suddenly.
Dhruv looked back at her, his face twisted.
“Are you happy with the way we are here?”
“Rachel, now is not the time.”
“Please. Please. Just answer me,” Rachel said, her voice close to breaking.
Dhruv tossed back his whiskey and went to get himself more, and Rachel let go of Swati’s hand, following him.
“PLEASE,” Rachel said, trying to control her voice.
“Yes. I am. When I’m not trying to make my mother see reason, yes. I am happier here, happier than I ever was before,” Dhruv said. He held his glass out to her. “Pour me one, would you?”
Rachel looked at the glass and watched as Dhruv let it go, confident that she would catch it. But she didn’t. After all, what was another broken glass now? After so much had been broken?
“What the fuck—”
“I am not happy here,” Rachel said. Surely he must know that, mustn’t he? But he looked shocked, truly shocked. He had not seen it, he had not known. And wasn’t that everything, right there? That her happiness meant so little to him he had not noticed when it was gone. She would have thought her heart would have broken, but instead, it became a rock in her chest, and she knew then that when Swati left, she would be leaving with her.
“You have to give it time—”
“You are happy here because you get to make all the decisions. Where we live, what we do, who lives with us, who leaves. It’s all you. But the truth is, you were like that in New York, too, and I liked it, because I thought it meant you knew what you wanted, and if I could be close to you, then I could take some of that certainty for myself. But I can’t. It’s not me being certain if you just tell me what to do. If this is our best, for you, if this is the best we can be, then we aren’t anything at all.” Rachel was gasping as she finished speaking, but she felt lighter than she had in days. She had finally said something real to Dhruv, something she really truly meant. She felt free.
Dhruv looked at her, over the broken glass between them, and she saw that he did not understand, that the pain in his face came from not understanding at all. And she could not be with someone who understood so little about her, not when she saw so much about him.
“I don’t know what nonsense you are saying, Rachel, but I can’t talk about this right now. When my mother leaves, everything will be back to normal, you will forget this.”
“No, I won’t. We don’t have a normal, Dhruv. Or rather, we do, and this is it. And I don’t want it,” Rachel said.
“You are being ridiculous,” Dhruv said, looking away. “I won’t talk to you when you are like this.”
Rachel smiled, her cheeks aching, her heart plummeting through her stomach like a stone. “If you can’t support your mother, you aren’t worth my respect,” Rachel said. “Isn’t she allowed to be a person? And if you can’t talk to me, listen to me, then what is between us?”
He didn’t say a word. And Rachel turned, and walked away. She didn’t have to fight the urge to look back. She knew there was nothing left there to see.
“ ‘I cannot believe that I am getting everything I ever wanted. I never thought I would be so blessed,’” Rachel said as her eyes followed Magda’s mouth. It was her final day of recording. She had told Ram Arjuna that she had to finish, and fast, and her days had been a blur of recording. She had run through so many episodes so fast, she almost felt she was Magda, she felt like she could anticipate some of her lines without reading the English translations. Ram Arjuna was very impressed with her. She was impressed with herself. But mostly, she was grateful, grateful she could sink into the character’s life and forget her own.
Dhruv had spent the past few nights in a hotel, leaving the apartment to Rachel and Swati so they could calm down. It was funny, no one in her life had thought she would marry Dhruv, and now that she was leaving, he didn’t think she would do that, either. They hadn’t spoken for a few days. She supposed he was waiting for her to apologize. That morning, though, she had woken up to a call from him. It was fitting, she thought, even though he was back in Mumbai, that they would do this on the phone. They had communicated more by phone than in person since they had moved.
“I messed everything up, didn’t I?” he asked.
“I think we both did, actually,” Rachel said. It was true.
“I accept your apology. We can start again, Rachel. We can send Mum home, and—”
“No, Dhruv. We can’t. Maybe we shouldn’t have started in the first place.” There was silence on the other end of the phone. “You aren’t who I thought you were,” Rachel said.
“What do you mean?” Dhruv asked.
“I think that you think differently than I thought you did. I think you see the world in a way that I didn’t understand, that I didn’t see. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. I think you think you’re open, and I think you were, there. But here—”
“Here I become something else,” Dhruv admitted.
“Yes,” Rachel breathed. There was such relief in hearing him say it, in knowing that she wasn’t making it all up.
“I didn’t know I felt this way. That there were rules for outside and inside, for home and abroad, like this,” Dhruv confessed.
“But you do. You want the world to be a certain way. You want me to be a certain way. And you want me to know what that is, to follow your rules.”
“I guess, if I really thought about it, I thought you would want to. You love rules, Rachel. You seemed to love when I made decisions for us.”
“I thought I did. Maybe I’m not what I thought I was, either,” Rachel admitted.
“I thought we could have a good life here. I thought I gave you that.”
“You did. But it turns out, it wasn’t the one I wanted. And I’m sorry. I thought it would be. I really did.”
“We didn’t lie to each other, did we?” Dhruv asked plaintively.
“I don’t think we meant to. I think we were just lying to ourselves. We thought we could meet somewhere between us, but we each secretly thought the other person would be the one making the move. Didn’t we?” Rachel asked.
“You put it so well. But I hate it,” Dhruv observed, his voice choked. “Do you realize, this is the most we’ve spoken in months?”
“I do. And doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know?”
“I’ve been away—”
“That’s not really an excuse.”
“I have loved our marriage here,” Dhruv confessed.
“I know,” Rachel said, her mouth twisting.
“What does that mean?” Dhruv asked. Rachel wanted to say, Nothing, but she couldn’t. She had married this man, moved countries for him; she needed to be honest.
“I think I wanted to be a different kind of person. I think I married you hoping that it, you, this life, would make me a different kind of person. I think I wanted to change my life, and I saw you as the way to do that. I tried to change from the outside in. I thought that if everything around me was different, I would be, too.”
“I like you the way you are,” he said.
“That is the best part about you. But I don’t like me. I don’t like my life. And it isn’t up to you to make it better. No matter how much you give me, or what you tell me to do, it comes at a high price, and it doesn’t make a difference. I promise, Dhruv, and I really mean this: It’s not you. It’s me.”
“Maybe we can work on this. I can change. I can try, for you,” he said.
She smiled sadly, knowing he c
ouldn’t see her face, happy he couldn’t see her laugh, bittersweetly, at him. “If this was good for you, why would you want to change? You should have the life you want, with someone who wants the things you want,” she said simply. There was silence on the line.
“I feel I am my best self here,” Dhruv said.
Rachel felt so sad for him, she could hardly stand it. Or perhaps that was sadness for herself. After all, he was his best self. But what was she? There was only one way to find out.
“So then,” she said. Another silence. “I’m glad you’re happy.”
“I’m sorry you weren’t,” he said.
“I know,” Rachel said, because she did. She also knew that he had put it in the past tense for a reason.
“Goodbye, Rachel.”
And she thought that hearing that would make her feel something, the thing she had been trying to numb out for so long, but instead, she felt nothing but relief.
She had decided that she would travel now, go somewhere new, go with Swati. They would go to Romania, like Magda had, they would find themselves in the place that she had seen in the soap opera.
She kept her eyes on the screen, waiting for her line. Suddenly, the scene flashed back to Magda’s first wedding. When they came across a flashback, Ram Arjuna would have her record it all over again, and she worried, sometimes, that the audience would catch the changes each time. This time, though, she was glad to see this scene. She had done it so many times before; it was a nice ending, back at the beginning.
“And will you really love me forever? Do you swear it?” Magda asked, hope rich in her voice.
“I swear it on the ocean.” Rachel had learned in multiple repetitions that this was what Pytor responded to her.
“And if you stop loving me? Will you let me go?” Magda asked.
“Yes, I will love you forever, but if I stop, I will let you go.” But he hadn’t, time and again, and now, in the second wedding, Magda thanked him for it. Silently, as she spoke, Rachel thanked Dhruv, for the opposite. For letting go, even if it was in anger, in disgust. Because it opened the path for something else, anything else, and now she and Swati could go and find it.