“Maybe. Or I might be a journalist.”
“You can be both. In fact, being an artist isn’t really a job. It’s a way of viewing the world around you. Seeing it creatively. Finding what makes it beautiful, you add to the beauty of the world.”
“I want to do that,” he said.
“And you will.” She caressed his face the way his mother used to. “You already do.”
XXX
Nayana had an evening flight but was already packed and ready to leave the house as soon as the mail arrived. She was waiting for her sister’s letter to come from Beth, watching for the postman from her office window. She’d written a note to Ramesh. Another impossible task, with only the wrong words to choose from. She’d hoped to express how grateful she’d been for his love and support all these years, but it felt trite. She attempted to express how much love she still had for him and always would have. She wanted him to know that she was leaving and unsure when or if she was coming back because she loved him. If he truly didn’t understand already, he would soon. And she was so very sorry for everything—she couldn’t seem to say that enough.
In truth, she had no idea what was going to happen in India or how long she would remain, and she wasn’t convinced she’d never return to England, or even to Ramesh, if he’d have her back. But she didn’t say this because she wanted to give him a way out, in case he wanted at last to be free of her. She wrote that she had been unkind to him in ways a man who loved her so well had not deserved. She knew this would hurt him deeply, but she hoped it would make moving on easier, if that was his choice. And also because she owed him the truth for once. She admitted that she had never had a home in England, only a home in him, and said this wasn’t fair to either of them. Finally, she begged him to accept that she was gone for now and to refrain from following her; she’d broken her own heart slowly, painfully, and completely in the last year, and she needed all her strength to recover. It wasn’t a long letter, and she didn’t dare mention the baby. She hoped he would interpret its brevity as a sign of her difficulty writing it and not a lack of love.
Twice she’d run downstairs thinking she’d missed the mailman. Twice she took the lift back up. At last the mail arrived. She hurried to the lobby, forgetting the mailbox key in the windowsill. She had to ask the mailman for her mail as it was being distributed. He didn’t refuse, but he was in no hurry. He handed her each piece as it came, continuing to dole out her neighbors’ mail as well. She anxiously sought out the familiar envelope in his pile until finally he said there was nothing else. Confined again in the narrow lift, she sifted through the few pieces once more, in vain. There was still no letter from India, but there was something else for her. She tore it open and immediately knew what it was, though she had no idea how to interpret the columns and numbers. That is, she didn’t want to. Alleged father. It was so cruel. She skipped to the bottom. A percentage anyone could understand: Probability of paternity: 0%. The alleged father, Ramesh Bhatia, is excluded as the biological father.…She felt her knees buckle slightly, and she had to take hold of the handrail until the doors opened again.
Inside their flat, she gathered her things and made her way to the door, not stopping for a last look or to ensure she had everything. Of course she didn’t. But there was no reason to wait any longer. Her bag’s wheels skipped along the tile floors, heavy with a few key notebooks in case she felt like working again. She replaced the test results in the envelope, which she set beneath her own letter for Ramesh, hating herself but seeing no other way. How could she face him now, with proof? Finally he would have her full confession. She dropped her keys in the bowl on the small table and let the door lock behind her. There was a stop she had to make. One last act before she left London. She would call a taxi for Heathrow from the salon around the corner. She didn’t want to deal with steps and trains and luggage. Nayana had to brace herself against the smell of peroxide. It had been years since anyone besides Aditi had touched her hair. The only other customer was sitting under a dryer with her face hidden in Hello!
“Have you got time for a cut?” Nayana asked.
“Let me see. Have I got time?” The woman was older than Nayana, someone’s mother, maybe even grandmother. She looked around the otherwise empty waiting area, then chuckled to herself. “Yeah, love, I’ve got time. Nothing but time.”
Nayana took a seat as instructed and pulled out the stick that had contained her hair in a heavy bun at the base of her neck. It draped the back of the chair. In the mirror, she could see the woman stop in surprise where she stood, holding a smock limp in her plump hand. Nayana’s heartache renewed itself. The woman approached Nayana slowly, lifting the mass of hair, then letting it slip lightly through her fingers.
“Cut it off,” Nayana said, indicating a place just below her jawline.
The woman was about to speak, to object, but stopped herself and set to work tucking a towel into the smock’s neckline. Nayana sensed she’d understood, at least well enough not to get involved. She took careful hold of her scissors and looked at Nayana once again.
“Right, love. We’ll give you a shampoo once we cut some of this off. You ready, then?”
Ramesh loved her long hair. She wasn’t punishing him by cutting it; he may never know. But she was making it easier to let him go, cutting him loose in case that’s the way it had to be in the end. Her face appeared gray under the sharp white light. She looked beyond herself, perhaps to her sister and a former version of herself, one who might begin anew. She nodded and already felt the burden of a great weight lifted.
“I’m ready.”
At the airport gate too early, Nayana put on her headphones and was shocked once again at the feel of such short hair, as though she had lost a limb. She pretended not to listen to the conversation of the only other passengers waiting, an elderly English couple on their way to India for the first time. She imagined arriving and seeing a nephew taller than she was, with the cracking voice of a teenager. But she reminded herself that Birendra was still a boy of eight. No, he had just turned nine, she realized. She’d forgotten his birthday on top of everything else.
For once she would not be returning to India for monsoon season. Srikant and her parents had all died during the summer monsoons. And her most recent visit was only possible during her summer break from classes. Had it really been almost ten years since their parents’ passing? Nayana and Aditi had both returned to Delhi from their respective homes, then they’d traveled together by train with their parents’ commingled ashes to the Ganga to satisfy their last wish: to be sent together downstream by their daughters. It was slightly unorthodox, but so had they always been. The sisters stood up to their calves in the rusty waters of the sacred river, each with an arm wrapped around the other’s waist, free hands clasping either side of the urn. They locked eyes and emptied the ashes under the heavy rain that had soaked their hair and clothes. Nayana had still been able to see herself in Aditi then: their long hair in wet dark clusters stuck to their faces; the damp petals of their floral wreaths clumped like golden fur collars around their necks, white cotton sarees clinging to their bodies. In the memory, Nayana suddenly struggled to distinguish between herself and her sister. And then she remembered the soft swell of Aditi’s pregnant belly, through which Birendra was making himself known to the world for the first time.
It was hard for Nayana now not to associate a downpour with death. She had asked Aditi that day if she thought their parents felt abandoned. Aditi shook her head. “I think they were happy together, so happy they couldn’t last two days apart, but mostly I think they were happy for us. I have Srikant and now this little one. You have your scholarship and a promising future in London.” Nayana remembered the sense that so much was possible back then; was that the same as happiness? They’d stayed there by the river, standing in the rain, quietly remembering their parents. But without them to bind Nayana and her sister to a shared past, a place—a home—Delhi was all but lost to them in the years that followed, ju
st a city to provide a backdrop for their memories. Still, the following evening, seated on opposite sides of their parents’ bed, with hair still damp from the rains that had followed them back to Delhi, it felt like home. They sifted through their parents’ belongings, occasionally showing each other what they’d found. Aditi lifted up a saree for Nayana to see, conjuring a shared memory that would hover there momentarily above the bed like a dream. They would each take two with them to their distant homes, north and south, but the others had no place in their futures. Under one of her father’s jackets, Nayana found a small rectangular box. The cardboard lid collapsed as she attempted to lift it. Neatly folded inside was the paisley tie they’d given him for his fortieth birthday. A small golden clip was still pinned in place. Their mother had given it to him the same day. On the clip was a single rooster in profile walking along a path that had long since lost its gold plating. The sisters summoned their father’s words that day, in unison: A special-occasion tie. “From his three hens,” Nayana added nostalgically, and then they burst into laughter that brought them to their backs and once again to tears. It had been a decade of loss for both of them, but that was not the same as a decade lost. This isn’t a visit, she thought. Keep the lanterns lit, dear sister. I’m coming home.
XXXI
Edward ordered a gin and tonic from the bar and sought out the nearest lobby phone. He felt underdressed in his T-shirt and faded blue jeans, under a chandelier as large and crystalline as the one above him and in a London hotel as smart as this one. It was his first time staying in such luxury as an adult, a huge step up from the shoe box he and Jane had found near King’s Cross when they came to London years earlier. He gave his room number to the bartender and raised the glass to his mother, thanking her silently for the money to take this trip. The decor in the hotel actually reminded him of the time he’d come home from school to find their living room transformed for a photo shoot. Back then, he hadn’t understood the extravagant costumes and set design. Redford and Farrow’s The Great Gatsby had just come out, with a screenplay by Coppola, and his mother had been passed over as costume designer. She’d been determined to attach her name to the moment somehow. The photo shoot was her response. Months later, when it received a sizable spread in Cosmopolitan without a single photo of his mother, she’d flown into a rage. He sat on the stairs and listened as she had the same impassioned phone conversation with at least ten sympathetic friends and drank almost as many gin and tonics.
He took a sip from his glass, noting the irony with mild discomfort, then crossed the room to the pay phone. He’d brought the note down on which he’d written Nayana’s last name as well as her husband’s first name. He spelled both for the operator. She asked for a postal code, which he did not have.
“Sir?” She sounded annoyed to be kept waiting or perhaps to have to deal with an ill-prepared American.
“He lives in West London, if that helps.”
“Please hold while I connect you.”
Even if he hadn’t just taken a sip of his drink, Edward would have been surprised into silence. He’d expected to get the number, not connected. And now it was ringing. A woman answered, and it might have been Nayana. She sounded neither too young nor too old.
“Yes, hello,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’d like to speak to Nayana Bhatia, please.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said after a moment. “You have the wrong number.”
He was about to apologize for the inconvenience when the woman spoke again.
“May I know who’s calling?” she asked.
“My name is Edward Almquist. Do you know Nayana?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “I do. She’s my sister-in-law.”
He’d called Nayana’s husband’s family home, it turned out. Nayana and Ramesh lived somewhere else. Her sister-in-law was polite but understandably reticent with Edward.
“My sister adopted Nayana’s nephew.”
“Nayana’s nephew in Kerala?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I’m sorry Mr. Almquist, but this is the first I’ve heard of any adoption. Is it possible you’ve got the wrong name?”
“Nayana and Ramesh Bhatia. Her nephew is Birendra. My sister adopted him in December after his mother passed away.”
“Mr. Almquist, I hope this is some sort of mistake. Birendra, you say?”
“Yes.” She seemed to gasp, then she covered the receiver and spoke to someone else in a different language.
“Please excuse me, Mr. Almquist. You’re delivering a terrible shock.”
“I’m so sorry.” He felt light-headed and flushed. “You didn’t know?”
She said they had no idea about any of it. And then she explained that Nayana was not in London at all. Edward would need to speak to her husband about meeting with Ramesh. She would have him call Edward back when he returned from work.
Where was Nayana, if not in London? And how long had she been gone? So long that her family had not learned of her sister’s death months earlier? That seemed unlikely, yet there was no question: the woman hadn’t known. He returned to the bar, easily able to justify a second drink, although it was not yet seven in the morning in Los Angeles. He had a few hours to kill, but he couldn’t spend them all drinking at the hotel bar, especially if he was going to meet someone. But he didn’t want to give in to jet lag and fall asleep. Feeling warm from the gin, he wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck and set off to wander the city center. He had meant to be walking toward Big Ben, maybe for some sort of closure on his time with Jane, but he must have misremembered the way and ended up carrying on along the Mall, then turning and eventually finding the Thames in sight. It appeared even larger than it had in his memory. He walked onto a footbridge, and the city on either side of him seemed amplified as well. Or maybe he felt himself growing smaller in a country full of strangers. Maybe that’s what he’d wanted to feel anyway. Alone, as he had on the day Jane left him so many years ago. Alone in a place where no one knew him. Alone as he had been after his sister left home for college.
That house had sometimes been so quiet, so still, it was as if the air itself were locked in place, stifling. Before Maddy left, she would invite him into her room sometimes. Edward would watch as she flipped through a magazine or sketched in her journal. Mostly she drew houses. She’d wanted to be an architect then. The first time she told him so, he was six. Hovering by the side of her bed, he asked what she was drawing. She scooted over to make room for him and continued to sketch in quick strokes with her pencil. “It’s the house I’m going to live in someday,” she said. She had seemed so old in that moment to him. Maybe fifteen. He’d thought of her in her own house, a different house, and wondered if she would take him with her. “And that there,” she said, indicating a structure with her finger, “is an iron gate so I can keep out everyone I don’t want to come in.” She must have seen the concern on his face, because she smiled. “I’ll give you the key,” she said. “You can come visit. I’m going to be an architect so I can build my own house, and I’m going to live there alone. Maybe with a dog.” She’d added the last bit about the dog while gazing out the window, imagining her future.
He thought of Maddy at Birendra’s birthday party. Actually, he hadn’t been able to shake certain images of her, which he found himself conflating with others of their mother. Can a child escape one’s parents? He thought he had done this, though perhaps there were ways he was like his father, ways he would never know. Maybe Edward had never been single as an adult because he was trying to escape that solitude he felt growing up. And yet even with Jane, he had ended up on his own. The puzzles first, then the Cheers finale, which put an end to nights in front of the television together. It truly had been the end of an era. They’d stumbled along together for so long since, even the breakup hadn’t felt final. But now, with the Thames rushing beneath his feet, on a quest that held so little certainty, there was no denying it: he was at last on his own.
Naya
na’s brother-in-law had called the hotel while Edward was out wandering. He’d left an address for a pub in Shepherd’s Bush and a meeting time with the front desk. Edward paused at the pub entrance to take in the rich blend of ale, whiskey, and wood. He scanned the room and its handful of patrons for anyone who might be Mr. Bhatia. He was early. The bartender looked over briefly, then back to a soccer game on the television.
“Mr. Almquist?”
He was startled at the sound of his name behind him, so formally spoken.
“Mr. Bhatia. Please call me Edward. It’s very nice to meet you.”
“Raj,” he said and took Edward’s hand. He was tall and carried himself confidently. His features were sharp and striking. “Pleasure.”
“Thanks again for meeting me, Raj.”
“Would you like a beer?”
When Raj returned, Edward was still holding his wallet out.
“I’m sorry. I meant to offer,” he said.
“Oh, you’re all right. You might be buying the whiskey in a minute.”
They smiled politely, tapped glasses, and found a seat by the wall. Edward’s gaze fell to the wooden table between them, its unique pattern of scratches marking a particular history. Here he was, in London, with one of Birendra’s relatives and little idea what to say.
“I’m really sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. I know it was an upsetting phone call for your wife.”
“Yes, it was. I had just found out myself and hadn’t had the chance to tell her. So your sister has adopted Nayana’s nephew?” Raj said, though this was clearly not the question he wanted answered.
“Of course I didn’t realize this would be news to you. I had only intended to reach out to you—well, to Nayana—in hopes of connecting her with Birendra.”
Raj asked what had brought Edward to London. What could he say? That he wanted to feel anonymous in the place his relationship had been mortally wounded years ago? Or that he’d come all this way just to find Nayana? To find a high school sweetheart?
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