by Leah Franqui
When the last of Magda’s moments, a happy scene ending with a kiss, was over, Ram Arjuna looked at Rachel, smiling from ear to ear. He extended his hand to her, but she hugged him instead.
“Thank you,” she said. “This was wonderful.”
“You are very good voice person. I give you a call for next project?”
“I might not be here,” Rachel said. “But sure, give me a call. And send me your poetry, please. I want to read it.”
“Be well, Rachel. God bless.”
Rachel hugged him and walked off into the afternoon, sure her future held adventure. It had to, didn’t it?
Twenty-Seven
Swati had learned, as a young woman, to be good at packing. Once, as a child, she had watched her mother pack for her father, who was going on a business trip to Chennai. Her mother had packed in layers, thinking about when her father would need what. She had talked to Swati about everything that she thought might happen in her father’s day, every time he might need a handkerchief or a change of shirt, every time he might want to brush his teeth or oil his hair. Swati had learned to pack that way for her own husband, listening to her own mother-in-law as a young bride, who informed her that Vinod liked this shirt or that pair of trousers, that he would feel cool on an air-conditioned train on the way to Surat and need extra cologne once he arrived there and faced the scorching May heat.
But in all her years of watching her mother, and then becoming her mother, neither her father nor her husband had ever known how she spent her own days. Her father had never considered what her mother might need from dawn until dusk, when she might want a cool drink or a hot one. Vinod had never once measured out the tasks of her life and planned accordingly. Of course, she had never asked him to. She had never expected that he would. How different would her life have been if she had done so? If he had said yes? Neither of them, she thought, would have known how to do those things. How different life could have been if they had.
When she had packed to come to Mumbai, she had thought about what she would need, how many saris, how many salwar kameez sets, how many tubes of lotion to keep her face smooth, and which homeopathic medicines she would need to have. Now, though, looking at all the things she owned in the world, things bought with someone else’s money while she lived in someone else’s home, she had no idea what to carry with her. In myths, people walked off into the wilderness with a begging bowl and a pair of chappals, and the world was kind to them. But of course, those people were all men. Should she return to Vinod? Should she beg Dhruv to let her stay? Should she leave it all behind and just go? But where? And what should she bring?
She sat on the bed and heard a knock on the door. Her body tensed, then relaxed. Dhruv would be picking her up later for the airport, but not yet.
“It’s Rachel.”
Swati sighed and opened the door. Rachel had left that morning for her recording session, and now she was back, with excitement clear on her face.
“May I come in?” Swati nodded and moved aside. Rachel looked around the room. “You’re packing?”
“I have to go,” Swati said simply, and Rachel paled.
“To Kolkata?” Rachel said.
Swati shrugged.
“Please, don’t. Not if that isn’t what you want.”
“To think you should always get what you want, this is what a child does.”
“So is going where you’re told,” Rachel snapped back. Swati smiled and sat next to her on the bed.
“The only way to learn is to do,” Rachel said.
“That is why I am going back,” Swati said, taking Rachel’s hand.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m going back to Kolkata, but I am not going back to Vinod. I am going home, because that is my home. I am going to talk to him, to end our marriage properly. What I did, how I left, it was not fair to him. I know that. I thought it would be better to escape, but that is being a coward.”
“You are the bravest person I have ever met, Swati,” Rachel said.
“Thank you.” Swati smiled. “And that means I have to go back and settle it. I have to explain, we have to make arrangements. Vinod will support me. He is a good man. I will get a flat somewhere, another neighborhood, not too far. I will talk to the friends who are still speaking to me. I will make a life that is mine, in the city that is my home.”
“I thought we could go to Romania,” Rachel whispered pitifully. “Like Magda. Together.”
“How?” Swati asked logically. “I would need a visa, and we would need money, and what do we do there? What do I eat?”
“I thought it would be an adventure.”
“I think you thought it would be an escape,” Swati said, smiling. Rachel looked down. She suddenly seemed very young to Swati. “I do not regret leaving Vinod. But now I have to make something new.”
“What do I do, then?” Rachel asked. “I wanted to make something new, here, but—”
“But you are leaving my son,” Swati whispered. She had heard the call through the door the night before. “What will I be to you then?”
“You will be what you are now. My friend.”
“So, I am your friend. And friends tell each other what they think, no?”
Rachel nodded at Swati’s words.
“Then this is what I think. I think we should both go home, and we will find what we want when we do. I want a life that is mine. I think you do, too. I think you will find that if you think about what it is you were trying to leave behind.”
“What if I go home and it’s just the same as it was?”
“Then maybe you can see what needs changing,” Swati said.
Rachel took her hand. Swati held on to it, thinking about its strength, this hand of a person she hadn’t known for very long, a person who now sat with her and offered her something no one else she knew had. What was it about people that made a stranger someone you could love, and a person you had known for all your life someone you didn’t know at all?
They would both be going right back to where they had started. But they would be going together, this time, though they would be oceans apart. And hard as together could be, knowing that she had someone she understood, who understood her, was far better than being alone.
Twenty-Eight
Rachel’s tiny studio apartment in South Slope was astronomical in price, but the kitchen was wonderful. Adam had joked that she was insane to rent it, with her precious loan money, because when does a culinary school student want to cook at home? But she did. Her hours at the school were long, and the freelance work she had taken on on the side, advising other food companies about their business development opportunities, kept her busy, but still, she cooked, whenever she could. She made Thai curries and Persian pulaos and cut butter into pie crusts. She roasted bones for broth and captured yeast for a sourdough starter and bathed poultry in brines and milk baths, as if each chicken were Cleopatra. She cooked everything she could, everything she had learned and wanted to learn. She failed, and tried, and failed, and knew in her many failures that this, this was what she wanted, a life of effort.
She emailed Dhruv monthly, and told him of her work, and he was confused, and proud of her. Their divorce proceedings would be over soon, and she had asked for nothing from him. She didn’t feel that she deserved it, and he didn’t protest. He told her of his life in Mumbai and described the women he was meeting for an arranged marriage. She knew that when he met one he liked, their conversations would end, but she would feel secure that he was getting what he wanted, the way she already had, and that gave her a deep sense of quiet joy.
All week she took classes, and then, on Sundays, she took another kind of class. Now she sat, waiting for the tinny sound of the Skype call. When it came, she smiled and accepted. As usual, all she saw at first was a nose, then a pair of eyes, and then the whole face emerged.
“Good evening, Swati.”
“Good morning, Rachel.”
They smiled at each other. Rachel
thought of her grandmother, decades ago, leaving a place and never going back. Now you could go in any direction and still hold on to something that you needed from behind you.
Swati was wearing a stylishly cut short-sleeved kurta. She looked chic, and vibrant, and Indian, in a modern way. She would show Rachel her purchases sometimes, sending her photos from dressing rooms and asking Rachel to weigh in. She planned her shopping trips around Rachel’s waking hours, and both of them found themselves unexpectedly enjoying the act of shopping together. That first trip, to buy pillows and dal, seemed so long ago and far away to Rachel now.
“How are you?” Rachel asked.
Swati grinned. “Well. I had my kitty party yesterday. They have kicked Bunny out of it.”
“My goodness. What a bunch of cats.” Rachel grinned.
“Apparently no one liked her much. They had been keeping her there for me. Now that I am back, she goes.”
“Bye-bye, Bunny!”
“And speaking of, you’ll never guess. Do you remember Arjun?” Swati blushed when she said his name.
Rachel rolled her eyes. “No. Remind me.”
“Oh, well, he and I—”
“I obviously remember the person you joined with, Swati! What about him?”
“He’s had another affair. An air hostess he met. They say he just has them to throw it in his parents’ faces, daring them to cut him off.”
“Perhaps they should.”
“He is a coward, I think. Waiting for someone else to make his decisions for him,” Swati said, her voice a little sad, a little fond.
“Well. Luckily we’re not like that, are we?” Rachel asked.
“No. We are not.” Swati smiled widely on the we.
“And what else?”
“Same, same. I brought Vinod dinner yesterday. I tried something new, a steamed gourd preparation from Kerala.” Rachel had tried to get Swati to try some of the things she was making in school, but the most Swati would do was things from other parts of India. “He is well. A little lonely. I told him he should try to date someone.”
“Maybe you can give him pointers,” Rachel said. Swati rolled her eyes. “You’re an expert.”
“Hush. Enough of this. What are we making tonight?”
“It’s up to you,” Rachel said. Swati always pretended that she wasn’t sure what they would make, as if she didn’t have a plan and a set of ingredients standing by, as if she hadn’t already told Rachel what she would need at home before their Skype session. Rachel enjoyed it; it was like an interactive cooking show.
“Let’s make some chutneys. They are not all so simple as they seem. They use the scraps of things, and become something better than what they came from. Let’s try a recipe my mother gave me. I do not know how it will be. It is old, but I have never made it.”
“So it’s new, in a way,” Rachel said.
Swati smiled. “New, and old. I do not know if I will do it well. But I will try. You learn as you do,” Swati said.
Rachel nodded. You learn as you do.
And so, mirror images of each other from across the world, they took pieces of other things, other parts of themselves, of their lives, of the meals they had made and the things they loved, and apart, together, they made something new.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people who have helped this novel go from a thin idea bouncing around in my head, fed by a visit from my mother-in-law and my struggle to adjust to India, to a story ready to be out in the world. These include:
My amazing, always inspiring, and supportive agent, Julia Kardon, who continues to help me figure out what it is I’m trying to say. My wonderful and brilliant editor, Rachel Kahan, who helped me make this story as big and full as possible.
The hardworking and marvelous team at William Morrow, including Aja Pollock and Jeanie Lee, who have waded through my manuscript and found all its many errors.
The people who gave me their time and words as my first and second readers, Elizabeth Way, Emily Holleman, Victoria Frings, Anastasia Olowin, and Betsy Lippitt. You are so generous with your time, your words, and your love, and I am lucky to know you. To my fellow alumni at NYU, and my teachers in the dramatic writing program, who continue to inspire me as a writer and who continue to support me as I make stories. Also, special thanks to Palazzo Stabile, specifically Grete Ringdal, who fed me and kept me in the most beautiful farmhouse in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
The friends I’ve made and the people I’ve met living in Mumbai, who have accepted me, helped me, guided me, and forgiven me my mistakes and my ignorance. Also, to the many expat women I have met here, who are, I promise, nothing like they are in this novel!
And to my family. To my amazing cheerleader parents, Deborah Solo and Angel Franqui, and to my awesome brother and his awesome wife, Alejandro and Rebecca Franqui. To my loving and eternally accepting in-laws, Mridula and Raj Narula, who have always treated me as their daughter; and to Siddharth Narula and Shahana Mehta, and Shuchita and Chintan Jhaveri, who have never faltered in seeing me as one of their own. I am so lucky in the family I was born into, and in the family I have joined.
Most of all, to Rohan, who when I falter and worry and think about burning it all down—this novel, or anything else—is there, his very presence enough to keep me going.
About the Author
LEAH FRANQUI is a graduate of Yale University and received an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a playwright and the recipient of the 2013 Goldberg Playwriting Prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Award. A Puerto Rican–Jewish Philadelphia native, Franqui lives with her Kolkata-born husband in Mumbai.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
mother land. Copyright © 2020 by Leah Franqui. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © Ksenia Kuznetsova/Alamy Stock
Title page illustration by New Line/Shutterstock, Inc.
first edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293886-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293884-8
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