Mehendi Tides

by Siobhan Malany

  Her dad listened.

  “There was this guy in India,” Kate said softly, looking into the cascading water again, “a cousin of Nasreen’s. He was eighteen. I liked him. I liked him a lot.” She smiled. “He was so carefree and interested in exploring the world. I wrote to him and thought about him over the years. He never wrote back. Then I saw him in March, at the Eid celebration at Nasreen’s. He came out of nowhere. I felt like I was sixteen all over again.”

  She looked down again at her hands.

  “He gave me this…this jewelry box. It’s beautiful, but I don’t know what he meant by it. I’m not sure if he really cared for me or if it was in my head. I felt foolish.” She covered her eyes.

  Her head felt light and dizzy from dehydration and lack of sleep.

  “Well, any man who makes you feel foolish is not worth it. That being said, seeing someone after so many years, Kat, it takes time to reconnect. How do you really know he doesn’t care or never cared? Was there anything in the box?”

  “No. It was just an empty box. I can’t help thinking that what attracts me to him may be the very thing that makes him unattainable. Doesn’t matter now. He went back to New York.”

  Ian appeared at a loss for words.

  “It wouldn’t have worked, like Nasreen said.”

  “You are getting a little over my head,” her father said.

  “I have been thinking of mom a lot lately, Dad. I know she’d have the answers.”

  “I know I don’t have all the answers, Kat. But I do know that you are strong, stronger than you think to get through everything.”

  Her father placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “My daughter, tough as nails and soft as velvet. Now let’s go grab dinner.”

  IT WAS LATE when her father dropped her at her apartment before he headed back to Rockfield. She immediately dialed Nasreen’s number, not caring about the time of night.

  “You missed her,” Mustafa’s voice echoed in her head. “She flew out last night. She said she tried calling several times.”

  Kate scanned the kitchen frantically. On the floor was a yellow sticky note. “Nasreen called” was scribbled in her roommate’s handwriting. Kate crumpled the sticky note in her fist.

  “She is on her way to Pakistan. She seemed really concerned that she couldn’t reach you,” Mustafa said. “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate responded vaguely.

  “This has happened quickly. The Pakistani paperwork went through and there is a baby boy available for adoption at the orphanage. But that is not it! There is a baby girl too. Twins!”

  “Twins?” Kate asked astonished. “Will the babies be split up?”

  “Nasreen wants to adopt both! Twins!” he shouted into the phone again, this time sounding nervous. “I was still preparing to adopt one.”

  “Sounds like you should prepare for two,” Kate said impatiently. “I’m sure it will break Nasreen’s heart to split up the babies and only adopt one. She is a twin after all!”

  “I know,” Mustafa said, resigned. “I got Nasreen on a standby flight right away. She was stressed packing. I haven’t seen her like that. Nerves, I guess.”

  Kate cringed remembering her and Nasreen’s confrontation.

  “When will she be back?”

  “A few months.”

  “A few months?” Kate yelled into the receiver.

  “At least. We do not have American papers for either baby. But she can stay with relatives. She will have lots of help with the babies. Maybe too much,” he chuckled. “I should get my work done now, right?”

  He sounded so lost and uncertain, traversing on foreign ground. Kate recalled Mustafa’s words as she eavesdropped from the stairs, “I can’t bring a child into our lives like this.”

  And now there were two.

  “KATE?” KRISHNA’S FATHER, Suneel appeared at the door in faded blue, wrinkled kurta pajamas.

  “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” Kate asked, glancing at her wristwatch. It was 10:15 in the morning.

  “No,” Suneel responded. “I was just watching TV. Please, come in.” His speech was slow and deliberate.

  “Is Krishna here? I really need to speak with her,” Kate said rapidly.

  Suneel didn’t respond for a moment, still processing the question as if the words confused him.

  “Yes. She is here.”

  Kate stood awkwardly in the foyer. The house smelled stale.

  “I don’t want to interrupt if she is meditating.”

  “Oh. No. No. You are not interrupting at all,” Suneel articulated each syllable. “She is in the kitchen. You know we just returned from India?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, realizing she should inquire about the trip and make an attempt at small talk.

  “How was India? You spent time with family, yes?”

  “Oh, yes!” Suneel exclaimed. His face brightened. “It was good. We took a train to Gujarat to see my family. They are in North of India, you know? Then we spent time in Kerala with my wife’s family.”

  “That sounds nice,” Kate said.

  “Yes, was very, very nice.”

  She followed Krishna’s father into the living room. A large pillow, molded in a spoon shape, was propped against the arm of the beige couch and a blanket lay strewn on the cushion and trailed onto the floor. The coffee table was littered with several teacups, a heap of tea bags on a silver platter, a half-eaten bagel, and scattered newspapers. A stack of mail had tipped over and sprayed across the table.

  Kate glanced into the kitchen. She saw the back of Krishna at the sink washing dishes. She had earphones in her ears. The cord snaked down into the pocket of her apron. Dirty dinner dishes mixed with breakfast bowls were piled on one side of the sink and clean dishes dripping with soapy water were piled on the other side. Pots with dried drops of sauce on the sides were cluttered in the middle of the stovetop waiting to be washed.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “No, thanks,” she answered.

  Suneel walked slowly into the kitchen and tapped his daughter on the shoulder. Krishna turned and yanked the earphones from her ear.

  “Kate!” Krishna’s eyes widened in surprise upon seeing Kate at the entrance to the kitchen.

  She wiped her hands on the apron.

  “Where were you? Nasreen left for Pakistan. We called you. We were worried!”

  “I’m sorry. I had to leave town for a few days,” Kate said, feeling a pang of guilt. “I am back now.”

  “Nasreen is going to adopt twins!”

  “I know. I talked with Mustafa last night. It’s exciting. But she is going to be gone three months!”

  “So, we have to keep busy,” Krishna said, enthused. “I converted the downstairs bathroom into a darkroom. I’m printing pictures from our trip to India!”

  “You’re printing photos?” Kate was happy that Krishna was in good spirits after her trip.

  “I was just cleaning up first,” Krishna said, rolling her eyes. “I need to hire a maid,” she mumbled under her breath. “Obviously, my mother did all the cleaning. I will finish the dishes later,” she said, removing the apron and draping it over a chair. “Come on, I’ll show you some prints.”

  Krishna motioned for Kate to follow her downstairs.

  “I will make some tea,” Suneel replied meekly as he reached for the kettle on the stove.

  The basement was a large unfurnished space. Scrap rugs with fraying ends hid part of the concrete flooring. Behind a plastic curtain was a wall of wood shelving filled with aging books, board games, worn shoes, and a variety of trinkets that never made it into the display cases. There were light bulbs, linens, and tubs of outdated clothing.

  “My dad plans to finish the basement. My mom wanted an entertainment space for relatives and friends when they visited from India,” Krishna explained. “The idea was to corner off a bedroom on that side and finish the bathroom and tile this room, put in a stereo system, a TV, and serving area, even a
pool table…”

  Krishna paused, imagining the room transformed to what it should become, a place for a professor and his wife to entertain, a place to enjoy relatives visiting from the homeland.

  “But it will probably stay like this forever,” Krishna added, walking briskly through the utility room to the door opposite.

  Kate followed and ducked under the clothing hanging from a rod between the open ceiling boards.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “It will be a little tight,” Krishna said, opening the bathroom door next to the dryer with stacks of folded clothes on top.

  Kate squeezed into the bathroom corner between the faucet trickling over a tray of photos and a table of developing trays that straddled the toilet. The smell of silver nitrate was powerful.

  “You need to wear a mask in here!” Kate exclaimed, holding a hand to her nose.

  Krishna closed the door and snapped the string to a red bulb suspended from the rafters. She flipped a plastic bib over her head and tied it across her waist.

  “You get used to it.”

  In the red glow, the sights of India were illuminated as whites and shadows. Kate drew in her breath. Freshly developed, still dripping prints of India, images similar to the ones Kate lived and breathed ten years ago, were strung like lights from one corner of the bathroom to the other. The magnificent white of a Buddhist temple exploded across the photo paper clipped to a piece of string by laundry pins. The astonishing enlargement still shimmered with wetness.

  “Krishna! These are beautiful!”

  In one photo, children played in mid-leap, their faces blurred and exuberant, on a rooftop terrace bounded by buildings layered with grid windows, piping, wiring, and satellite dishes.

  In another, Krishna sat on a bench in a crowded market watching a man, his arm held as high as he could reach, pour a fountain of caramel liquid into a row of porcelain cups. The walls of the tea stall were constructed of recycled wooden crates with the names “Black, Darjeeling, and Assam” imprinted in black ink across the front and stacked five and six high.

  “You look like you are having fun.” Kate squinted at the photo, her nose just inches from it.

  “I love taking a pause to watch the chai wallahs do their thing. They are very entertaining.” Krishna chuckled. “I stocked up on Darjeeling tea too, my favorite. We’ll have some later.”

  “Where was this one taken?” Kate asked.

  She pointed to a tranquil setting, a simple sandstone structure with gliding platforms over a placid lake interconnected with narrow bridges.

  “In a village in Kerala,” Krishna answered. “It’s a short distance from where my mother grew up. My aunts told me my mother was always pleading to my grandmother to take her there.”

  “I can see how it was your mother’s favorite place,” Kate said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Here.” Krishna averted Kate’s attention to the next photo. “This is in Gujarat where my father’s family lives.”

  “Your dad said the trip was nice.”

  “It was,” Krishna said and then frowned. “The train to Gujarat was rather long, to be honest. I didn’t know what to say to my dad.”

  Kate looked quizzically at Krishna.

  “Anyway,” Krishna continued, “my second cousins are making vindaloo with vegetables.” She pointed to the two young women in the photo, one cousin was stirring the concoction in a tall tin pot on an open-flame stove and the other was dicing vegetables so rapidly that the hand clasping the knife blurred in the photo.

  In the background, tin pots hung from nails pounded into the yellowing wall and unlabeled spice jars were neatly lined in rows on the open shelving above a vast sink.

  “And, here, these are my aunts and my great aunt making roti.”

  Kate strained her neck closer to the drying print, as if to hear the women’s intimate talk as they sat in a circle on a floor mat rolling dough and flattening it, their backs against a barren wall. Even in black and white, Kate could imagine the vibrancy of their saris, in varied patterns and hues, billowing around them as the women leaned in. Their hands, so animated and unfocused in the camera’s shutter speed. Krishna had captured them mid-laugh, the women’s broad smiles revealing misshapen teeth.

  “These photos are amazing, Krishna!” Kate exclaimed again. “There is so much emphasis on shadows. I feel transported to India right here in this tiny bathroom.”

  The side of Krishna’s face was darkened by the red light, but Kate could detect pride, having been masked by stress and grief, in the way the corner of Krishna’s mouth quivered upward.

  “Look at this man. I can feel his stare,” Kate said.

  The man stood on an unpaved road in front of a bull cart stacked stories above his head with large burlap bags, the hay inside poking through the holes. His eyes, the same shade as the bull’s hairy backside, bore into the camera lens.

  Kate recalled the different types of stares she encountered in India. There was the stare of the idle man on the street, a look of bewilderment. The laborer and the merchant both had a stare of hope and anticipation that their limp hands would fill with rupees by a passing feringhee. The upper caste stared at her with guardedness, dressed in pressed polyester pants and shirts. They stood as street monitors with their hands clasped behind their backs. And then there were the stares of the soldiers, stares of indifference as they stood rigid, their hands grasping the rifle slung across their shoulders. These were the street stares of India—intense stares of deliverance.

  “These images were taken in the village where my father and his siblings were raised,” Krishna explained, pointing to the cluster of prints nearest the door.

  Kate studied the rawness of the photos.

  “My mother and father came from such different backgrounds,” she said. It would have shamed my mother’s family if they had met and wanted to get married in India. It would never have happened!”

  “Well, good thing they met on the Illinois prairie. Nobody really cares where you came from as long as you cheer for the right football team and know what detasseling corn means,” Kate said amusingly.

  “See here. This was the dwelling where my father grew up. It was part of a complex shared with many other families,” Krishna explained. “Just a place to cook and a sleeping room for all six of them!”

  Kate took in the simple kitchen with a clay stove that rose just inches from the stone floor, a table, and short stool. Several tin pots, jugs of water, and earthenware bowls were stacked on a shelf next to the stove. Light seeped in through the warped wallboards.

  “Off to this side”—Krishna pointed around her as if the bathroom space and her father’s childhood village kitchen were one and the same—“was the main stairwell in the complex. My father told me and my mother that as a boy, he used to sleep on the platform at the top of the stairs. There was a slight night breeze that swept in from the roof and space to sleep. He told us, his presence used to irritate the building’s cleaning woman, who lived on the roof, and she demanded rupees as payment for sleeping on the stairs. It was her turf! Of course, my father had no money to give to her and she never complained to anyone just stepped over him in the morning, I guess. My mother enjoyed those stories,” Krishna reminisced with a half-smile. “She wasn’t ashamed of him, of where he came from.”

  Kate stopped looking at the photos and instead turned her attention to Krishna, her face covered in a midnight hue from the shadow cast by the red bulb. She had changed since her trip to India. The grief was giving way to inspiration.

  “These images are your India!” Kate exclaimed.

  After several moments, Krishna said, “I really do enjoy photography. I enjoy capturing my parents’ stories in the images. Photographing our trip took away some of the pain.”

  “Then tell your parents’ story about why they both left India and how they met in America. It’s interesting.”

  Krishna fell silent, lost in contemplation.

  “What photos
are these?” Kate asked, peering into the sink, the faucet still trickling a steady stream of water over one tray.

  “Oh, gosh.” Krishna lunged toward the sink and snapped off the flow of water.

  “Those are probably well washed now,” she said, laughing absentmindedly.

  She poked at the floating photos in the tray with a pair of plastic tweezers.

  “I took these pictures of Mustafa and Nasreen the other day before she left for Pakistan. We took them in their backyard. Great light. Nasreen was definitely nervous though. You can see it in her face.”

  “Mustafa looks troubled,” Kate added knowingly.

  Heaviness flushed over Kate’s body, and she was almost too fatigued to counter the weight that felt like a cloak around her. She watched as the photos shuffled through the water, submerging and surfacing with the waves created by the tips of Krishna’s tweezers, Nasreen and Mustafa’s bodies and faces distorting in the ripples.

  “I thought I would enlarge a couple and frame them as a baby shower gift. Last photo before they become parents, you know? This one is my favorite.” Krishna held the photo up by one corner, letting it drip into the sink.

  Kate tilted her head in line with the picture of Nasreen and Mustafa embracing next to the mulberry tree.

  “They look happy,” Krishna remarked.

  “Do they?”

  “What?” Krishna appeared dumbfounded by the question. “What do you mean?” she asked, confused.

  “I don’t think they’re happy.”

  “Why do you say that?” Krishna asked, taken aback by Kate’s statement. “Sure, it’s been rough on them not to be able to bear children, but they are adopting. They’re getting through it and moving on.”

  “Nasreen brings a lot of baggage to their marriage that she hasn’t dealt with. She was raped, Krishna!” Kate blurted. “She has kept it a secret for so long!” Her voice rose to almost a shout, too loud in the close confines of the bathroom.

  The laundry line of photos swung in response to the force of Kate’s breath. Krishna stood rigid; a dark shadow cast over one troubled eye. She was still holding the tip of the photo. She flicked off the last of the water droplets before turning to clamp it on the line.