Dil or No Dil

by Suleikha Snyder

  And, as far as she was concerned, it was absolutely perfect.

  “I’m fine, Adam. More than fine.” She rose up, twined her arms around his neck, and smiled into the matching curve of his gorgeous lips. “Believe me, I can’t wait for the encore.”

  A Taste of Blessings

  Dedicated to my late father—the best baba an offbeat Bengali girl could ask for.

  For Tiya Chatterjee, coming home for one of her community’s most joyous celebrations, Durga Puja, means coming home to her mom’s disapproval, nosy aunties…and a crush on a man who shouldn’t even be on her radar.

  For divorced father-of-two Arnav Biswas, the three-day festival is a chance to keep his culture alive for his kids—not an opportunity to flirt with a beautiful woman who isn’t meant for him.

  Fortunately, fate has other plans for Arnav and Tiya, who must learn that giving thanks to a powerful goddess means acknowledging the unstoppable power of love.

  Chapter One

  Shoshti – the kick-off of Durga Puja,

  in which the goddess Durga

  is welcomed home

  Ugh. Suburbia. Her fists clenched around the steering wheel of the giant SUV as she merged onto the exit ramp. Land of shopping malls, chain restaurants and perfectly plotted subdivisions with pretentious names. Everything in Tiya rebelled against the plastic façade of an ordered civilization. Unfortunately, her parents still lived in the subdivision she’d been raised in―Stone Creek, home of forty multistory houses, no aboveground pools and a neighborhood watch that probably still thought Baba was a prowler.

  In the wintertime, this part of Ohio looked picturesque, like a Currier & Ives print, all snow-dappled hills and houses decorated in wreaths and Christmas lights. But now, in late October, the suburbs were just tired and stripped of joy and “over it.” Like a 24-hour diner waitress at 2 a.m. The trees were half-naked, the carefully kept lawns all brown and dying. Keeping up with the Joneses boiled down to who had the biggest pumpkin and the best candy haul for Halloween next weekend.

  Tiya wouldn’t be here for the “friendly” competition. After the next few days, she’d be full up on cultural togetherness―not to mention several helpings of spicy khichuri, begun bhaja eggplant fritters, and enough goddess-blessed sweets to keep her dentist busy for two years.

  The goddess in question was Durga, the embodiment of Shakti, the ultimate feminine power. Every fall, Bengali Hindus around the world gathered to praise her. From Kolkata to Kentucky, it didn’t matter. More than ten Bengalis meant a blow-out was in order. In her parents’ particular neck of the Bengali woods, more than five hundred people from the tristate area congregated each year to eat, gossip and maybe fit in some prayer.

  Even now, the day before, Tiya knew her mother was alternating between finalizing which saris she would wear and calling five of the friends she’d see tomorrow to find out what they were wearing. Ashima Chatterjee was a social butterfly―and a leader of their social hierarchy. She had clothes to coordinate, people to shun, and targets to dish dirt about! Plus, she probably had huge trays of homemade confections crowding her kitchen counters, ready to transport tomorrow morning. It was all very busy.

  From past experience, Tiya knew her baba, a retired chemist for a huge Cincinnati-based makeup company, would already be at the venue. Uttam Chatterjee was the kind of person who volunteered on six different organizing committees and didn’t know how to sit down. He was an active 72 and, “he has wheels on his feet,” her mom liked to say. He’d be at Tiya’s old high school already, puttering around the gym and the auditorium and micromanaging decorations until one of the younger Indian “uncles” sent him home.

  The uncles. At the thought, she felt her heart stutter. The obnoxious talk radio that was the rental’s default station faded to a buzz. She’d tried not to think about what coming home for Durga Puja really meant. But there was no escaping it, was there?

  “Tiya, do you have news for us?”

  “How are things in Chicago? Are you dating anyone?”

  “When are you getting married? I want to dance at your reception!”

  “Tiya, what are you waiting for? Uttam-da and Ashima-di won’t be young forever, na? Give them grandchildren!”

  She, Tiya Chatterjee, was 39 and unwed―living a “fancy” big city life in Chicago, where she worked at a small publishing house―and there would be single Bengali men at this shindig. Single men…and divorced men, too. Not that Mom or Mom’s matchmaking friends would consider the latter appropriate. Even if Tiya was herself on the far side of eligible, practically ancient and pushing 40, to them marrying a divorced man was still taboo. She was the only one who thought otherwise, who held on to a particular delusion. A 6’2, dark-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired delusion who she’d met when he was still married and she was a starry-eyed girl of 25.

  Arnav Biswas. All she had to do was think his name, and her cheeks went hot and her thighs tingled. She’d been wildly attracted to him for 14 years and pretty much shoved it down into a tiny little box. He had a wife. He had kids. He had to be one of those out-of-reach guys you knew you never had a shot at. Like Brad Pitt or Derek Jeter.

  But he’d been split up from Sumita for four years now. And she got semi-regular updates about his life from his older son, Shauvik, who was a sophomore at Northwestern and sometimes met her for lunch or dinner. She was half big sister and half cool mashi for the whip-smart twenty-year-old…and he was her source of crush fodder. “Yeah, Dad’s good. He and Shainik are superexcited about the puja this year. They’re doing a bunch of stuff. Make sure to hang out with them if you go.”

  That she’d end up ‘hanging out’ with Shauvik’s dad and little brother was a given. She always gravitated toward the uncles, rather than the women and children, during Bengali events. Because that’s where all the expletives, cigarettes and booze tended to be…but also the rousing political debates, the best jokes and a complete lack of judgment about whatever her hairstyle/piercing/tattoo situation happened to be at that particular moment.

  She’d first met Arnav―she refused to call him “uncle”―at one such confab, outside a Bengali New Year party. His family had only moved to the area a few years before, while she was away at grad school. And when she walked up to the group, crowded around the popped trunk of somebody’s BMW and passing around a bottle of Stoli, her senses had immediately zoned in on the new guy. Karthik Uncle, Sujoy Uncle, Amit Uncle and their assorted cohorts, she knew. But the tall, dark-eyed man with a thick shock of black hair and a rough-hewn face had been something, someone, completely foreign. An older Indian guy, obviously raised there, who made her pulse stutter and her feet almost tangle in the hem of her sari. Charisma had rolled off him in waves, and she’d watched him tip the Stoli back and swallow like it was a porn clip on the internet.

  Naturally, she’d swiped the bottle and knocked back her own shot. But it hadn’t been the vodka that burned. No, it was his gaze. The way he carried himself―a little lazy, mixed with a lot arrogant. And his low, raspy voice, which he used to interject questions as she caught up with everybody and swore them to secrecy about her little nip.

  Fourteen years. Then 10. Then five. Then three. She visited southwestern Ohio as often as she could, going to pujas and festivals whenever they coincided with a trip. She kept her ties, honored her roots…and held on to one incredibly foolish fantasy.

  She could pretend she was a jaded, Americanized, brat who hated being back. She could lie to herself that Mom and Baba had forced her to come home for a religious occasion. But the truth was much simpler. She’d missed them. She’d missed this. She’d missed him.

  As Tiya pulled into the driveway of the two-story brick house where she’d taken her first steps, played her first piano and kissed her first boy, all she could be was glad to be home.

  Chapter Two

  The sneakers pounding down the stairs made him wonder, for the umpteenth time, if he’d suddenly inherited a whole football team’s worth of boys in place of his yo
unger son. But it was only Shainik who appeared on the landing, not at all out of breath and ready to head over to Blue Ash High School where he already spent too much time. He was eager, kind, thoughtful. Sometimes Arnav marveled at how such a paragon had sprung from his loins. He’d had no such civic and cultural sense at 16. He’d spent his off-time taking girls to Victoria Memorial and smoking hash in the balcony of various Kolkata cinema halls.

  Only the passing of 34 years could explain how he’d ended up on the Durga Puja committee for the sixth time. He was needed, respected, a valuable member of their local Bengali community. It boggled the mind.

  You have more time for them than you do for me, his wife had often complained. It was part of why she was his ex-wife now. Ironic, since he’d gotten involved in Indian events in the area for Sumita and their boys. He’d wanted to give them something of the homeland, of their heritage…but it turned out that Sumita had wanted nothing more than to leave her culture, her religion―and her husband―behind. “If I had wanted to be so involved in desi things, I never would have left India!” she’d declared as soon as Shauvik began looking at colleges.

  Fool that he was, Arnav had thought teaching Shauvik and Shainik where they came from would please her. He was beginning to think that the only woman he could please was the one he and Niku were seeing tonight at set-up: the mother goddess, Durga, who had the power to vanquish the darkest demons.

  “Dad! Hurry up!”

  With a start, Arnav realized he was the one now lagging behind. Niku stood at the half-open door, jingling the car keys like a bell. “You are not driving!” he said automatically, grabbing back the ring and locking up before they left the house.

  At 5’10, with a shadow of scruff that faked at being a mustache, Shainik could almost pass for a man grown. But he was still very much a skinny, gangly, boy who’d only had his driver’s license since June. He’d chosen to stay in Blue Ash with Arnav and finish high school with friends rather than moving to the Bay Area with his mother. He was a good kid. A good son. Sometimes he even played the parent, urging his cranky old dad to eat better, go to the gym and “get back out there.” Shauvik was in on that plan as well. He’d threatened many times to open a Tinder for Arnav, whatever that meant.

  As he started the car and backed out of the driveway, he couldn’t help but chuckle. It wasn’t just Niku and Viku who worried. His love life―or lack thereof―would be of much speculation this weekend, for both Bengali men and women were lovers of gossip. The divorce had kept them chattering for months―no, years. Now, it was matchmaking time. He would be presented with names and locations of every pretty fortysomething Bengali Hindu divorcée or widow in the country. Somebody’s cousin, someone else’s friend of a friend, etc.

  He was lucky for, and also bedeviled by, how this warm community had joined “Team Arnav,” as his boys called it, after Sumita moved away. “You are a good man,” Uttam-da, one of the senior-most members, had told him while giving a hearty clap on his shoulder. “You will always have a family with us.”

  A blast of hip-hop, quickly tuned down to a respectable volume, pulled him from the memory. “Who all do you think is coming tonight?” Niku piped up from the passenger seat as he fiddled with the radio dials.

  Arnav reeled off the usual suspects―adding the honorific “uncle” to each name for his son’s benefit. Men of a certain age were his sons’ uncles, women their “mashi”s.

  “Tiya’s coming, right?” There was a distinct note of hero worship in Shainik’s tone, along with the hope. “Viku told me she’s flying in and helping out with stuff all weekend.”

  And then there was Tiya Chatterjee. She defied categorization. Uttam-da’s daughter, she was not old and settled enough to be an aunt and not quite young enough to be an elder sister. Left with no alternative, the boys both called her only by her first name―and she encouraged it.

  “Tomorrow for sure. Tonight, she will probably rest,” he said, even as his mouth went dry and he wondered just what else she might encourage.

  Arnav had met her fourteen years before, in the parking lot of a spring festival where the restless―and more reckless―husbands had gathered to smoke and pass around a small bottle of vodka. They’d all gotten quite rowdy, talking West Bengal politics and cricket. A young woman in a sari had strolled up, brazen as you please, plucked the bottle from his hands, and gulped down a shot.

  “That’s Tiya,” Karthik Mukherji had informed him as his jaw gaped like a fish’s. “Don’t worry. She’s a good girl. Everyone loves her.”

  Within moments, he could see why. Despite the short cap of hair, the multiple rings climbing up each ear, and the colorful tattoos on her arm, there was no disrespect in her demeanor. She laughed and joked in flawless Bengali. She greeted all her familiar uncles and honorary brothers and cousins by name, asked after their families, extracted promises that no one would tattle to her parents…and then sashayed back inside to the festivities, smelling of mint gum and mischief. He’d watched her hips sway in the peacock-blue silk, transfixed, thinking he’d just met a tropical storm in human form.

  Surely by now she’d been upgraded to a hurricane. And he still could not let himself be swept away. She was not for him. He was not for her. The spark of attraction he’d felt that first night…and during every encounter with her over the past decade…was like the last glow of a cigarette that needed to be ground beneath his heel.

  Chapter Three

  There had to be a trophy for the highest amount of criticisms a desi mom could fit into one conversation. Her mother was a surefire contender for the honor. In the few minutes since she’d walked into the house and dropped her bags, she’d been informed that her hair was still too short, her latest tattoo vulgar, and the sari she’d brought for tomorrow completely inappropriate for the occasion.

  “You haven’t even seen it!” she exclaimed, trying to keep the exasperation to a minimum. After all, she still had a whole weekend in town. There was no sense in getting worked up so early in the game.

  Mom stared at her roller bag like it held uranium instead of a perfectly acceptable―and pricey―Mysore silk sari. Tiya was thirty-nine, not fifteen. She knew how to shop for event-appropriate clothes. It helped that Chicago had a huge, thriving, Indian community and its own Little India, Devon Street. She knew the shops there just as well as the ones on the edges of Boystown, where she’d gotten most of her ink.

  Her tattoos were a fight they’d been having for two decades. She’d sat for the first one at nineteen―a vibrant, green parrot on her upper left arm. “It’s my name, Mom.” “You can’t remember your own name without a picture? What kind of a creature did I raise?” Over the years, her tiya bird had gained a leafy tree to sit in and an orange-red sunburst to bask under. The tropical half-sleeve ended at her elbow. The “vulgar” new addition was simple script on her right wrist. “I want,” it said in elegant cursive.

  To want, to desire, was apparently uncouth. Tiya didn’t have the energy to unpack that right now―just her bags, up in her old bedroom. She was lucky that her parents hadn’t kept it a shrine to the buck-toothed mustachioed Tiya of yore. The walnut bedroom set and cheerfully flowered drapes were new. Some of her old chess trophies and piano awards sat on one shelf with paperback classics from her high-school English classes, but the room was otherwise sterile and guest-ready. It didn’t judge her changes, even if Mom did. She’d sleep easy here tonight when she got back from the school.

  She quickly exchanged her travel duds for jeans and an embroidered kurti top, grabbing her purse and keys before leaving the quiet haven and heading back downstairs. Her mother was waiting in the living room with a plate of samosas and a Diet Coke―equal parts sustenance and peace offering―and she dutifully consumed half the portions before moving toward the door.

  Before she could go, her mother put a hand on her arm, the big brown eyes so like her own filling with fondness instead of censure. “I am glad you are home, Choto Pakhi,” she said. Little Bird. A childhood nic
kname that hadn’t gone away and likely never would.

  Tiya smiled and squeezed her fingers. “I know.”

  Ashima’s love was sharp, like needles, but it was sincere―rooted in wanting the best for her only child. Still, if she had to choose between spending her first night at home dodging barbs and meeting Baba and various Bongs for set-up at the high school, Tiya was definitely picking the latter. It would keep her active, distracted, engaged and less likely to lose her temper.

  Blue Ash High was only a seven-minute drive, and she didn’t even have to get back on the highway. She’d driven to class in her baba’s giant boat of a 1991 Crown Victoria her entire senior year―somehow she’d survived the mammoth uncool—and the ‘70s era, grey stone and blue roof building didn’t hold too many bad memories.

  In fact, if she was being honest with herself, she would acknowledge that the two-story utilitarian complex was a home for memories yet to be made. This weekend would fill it with marigolds and incense and the giggles of little kids in bright costumes readying in the wings of the stage. Mashis in saris would replace cheerleaders in uniforms. Uncles and fresh-off-the-boat grad students would be swaggering around instead of basketball players. He would be swaggering around…but she wasn’t ready to think about that just yet, so she pulled into a parking spot by the auditorium entrance and pretended Baba was the only person she was really excited to see.

  They did video chats every Sunday, but she hadn’t seen her father in person since Memorial Day weekend. She would probably have held out till Thanksgiving or Christmas―which they didn’t even really celebrate―if not for the annual Durga Puja landing in the Cincinnati Bengali community’s hands this year. Their turn came every three years, alternating with Bengalis in northern Kentucky and eastern Indiana. Everybody saw it as a challenge to one-up whichever state had gone the year before.