by Sonya Lalli
I was surprised to find Shay sitting against the back wall. Both of us went to temple so rarely these days that I figured she would have texted me about it beforehand to see if I wanted to go, too. She made room for me, and I sat down and closed my eyes. The priest continued chanting, the room echoing in unison. I had never had the patience to meditate, to practice yoga like Nani—but this time I didn’t mind. His deep voice soothed something in me. The long, reverberating vowels. I breathed in and out, and a few minutes later when I came to, the sharp lights lifting me back to the present, Shay was looking at me.
“Ma is making us go to India,” she said, a little too loud. An auntie in front of us coughed loudly, her doughy back rippling out of her blouse as she whipped her neck around to glare at us.
I leaned closer to Shay after the woman turned back around. “When?”
“In January,” Shay whispered. “To shop for outfits and gifts. Stuff for the wedding. Julien’s actually excited about the whole thing. He cannot wait to see the Taj Mahal.”
“That’s exciting.”
“Is it?” Shay argued. “No sleeping in the same room. No meat or alcohol. Having to dress like a monk. It sounds terribly exciting.”
I’d only been to India once—a two-week trip with Nani and Nana as a child: a quick collage of coddling distant relatives and rich goat curry; the smell of putrefied garbage and endless compliments about my fair skin, my light hair; pails of sliced mangoes and having to rinse my toothbrush with boiled water. And the memory, as vague as it was, polluted by the smog that seemed to settle into eyes and chests, still felt like home. The sprawling courtyard and the mango tree in my grandmother’s village an hour outside of New Delhi. Her talcum powder scent as I fell asleep on a bed beneath the stars. It was Nani’s history. Nani’s home. In its grounds, built of baked bricks and timber, it was my home, too.
But Shay hated India. It repulsed her. The people, the country, the heritage, the politics. The dichotomies of injustice: excess and poverty; humility and greed; men and, much further down—women. Growing up, Shay and her brother, Nikesh, had been dragged “home” yearly to their family’s estate in Rajasthan, a fortress of over thirty relatives. An extended family, an entire culture, which Shay grew to despise. She’d come over after every trip, throw both herself and a bag of gaudy souvenirs down onto my bed, and moan. Moan about her three weeks locked in a metaphorical interrogation room. The way they soaked her twine-like hair in coconut milk, stuffed her with sweet rasmalai and then faulted her for gaining weight. How she was rarely let outside for fear of a suntan or, slightly worse, being accosted by the local men.
Shay said the men there leered at her, smacked their lips, and tried to pull down her skirt. They would drive back and forth on scooters calling her names until she’d yell at the top of her lungs for them to screw off. They didn’t treat their own Indian women like that, Shay said to me, her smile limp; even though she spoke both Hindi and Rajasthani fluently, to them, she wasn’t really Indian.
I suppose neither was I.
The priest resumed chanting, and I spun Nani’s heavy gold bracelets around my wrists. I looked toward the front. Auntie Sarla was hovering beside the priest, assisting him as he poured holy water out of a silver tin. Shay’s engagement party was less than a week away, an elaborate affair in its own right, and over the past few weeks, I’d spent hours on the phone with Auntie Sarla helping her organize the party—answering her calls and running errands whenever she couldn’t get a hold of Shay.
“How did the fitting go?” I asked her.
“The lengha fit, but Ma said ‘not well enough.’” Shay shook her head. “I have to go back again tomorrow.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
She looked over, as if surprised. “Yes, oh my God—yeah. I need a buffer between me and Ma.” She smiled, and then leaned over and kissed me on the arm. “I wish I was getting married next week. Get it over and done with, you know?”
I nodded.
“Who needs an engagement party anyway?” Shay glanced at me. “But at least the ‘drifter’ will be there.”
“Who?”
“Asher. The guy I told you about, remember?” She sounded irritated. “Julien is picking him up from the airport right now. He just flew back from Bangkok . . .”
The auntie sitting in front of us turned around again, her glare forcing Shay’s voice down to a whisper as she nattered on about Asher. The photos he posted online of the lychee orchards on a trek near Chiang Mai. How she and Julien might now honeymoon there on his recommendation. I refrained from rolling my eyes as Shay spoke. Mom had gone to Thailand when I was in high school, and none of us had known she’d been gone until she was home again, arriving at the house in the middle of the night needing a place to sleep. Tanned skin and bleached hair, a backpack the size of a small child clamped onto her shoulders. A tattoo on her calf—a Hindi phrase inked in pitch black—one that was supposed to mean peace, but, Nani had claimed, meant nothing at all.
“—so is that okay?” Shay nudged me again. “I’ll introduce you guys.”
“No,” I whispered, turning to Shay. “I’ve been meeting enough men.”
“How was your date with Jayesh?”
“I didn’t go in the end.” I shrugged. “Maybe next week . . .”
“Oh.” Her voice conveyed her annoyance, like I should have already told her that detail. “Well, have you met anyone else—anyone I should know about?”
I hadn’t told Shay about Arjun. I knew she would harass me for a play-by-play if I did, and force me to explain in detail how I could be so sure after one date that Arjun and I wouldn’t work out. That I wasn’t ready—or maybe didn’t want—what he had to offer. She’d accuse me of comparing him to my ex, or self-sabotage, or say a dozen other go-to phrases she’d probably picked up from a handbook on “how to manage lonely best friends”—and I didn’t feel like another sermon when I’d had plenty from Nani.
So I shook my head, pressed my lips together for a moment, and turned back to face the priest. “Nope. There’s no one else.”
SIX
Nani and Shay left right after the puja, but I stayed behind to help the volunteer caretakers water the flower beds and trees lining the temple grounds. When I arrived home, I found the driveway full of cars I didn’t recognize, and when I opened the front door, I could hear Nani and her friends downstairs in the entertaining room.
I lingered in the foyer, evesdropping on Nani, Auntie Sarla, and the others speaking together in Hindi; Auntie Sarla’s shrill exclamations steadied by Nani’s voice, low murmurs of what I sensed to be assent. I’d never learned to speak Hindi properly, and only knew the most basic nouns, verbs, and phrases, but it was everything else that made the language so identifiable to me; it was a language of pitch and tone, emotive cadence and expression. As their voices ricocheted up the stairs from the entertaining room, even though they weren’t saying my name, I could tell they were talking about me.
I leaned against the wall and slid down onto the floor. I flattened my legs and felt the cold linoleum on my bare calves. I leaned back, and my hair caught onto the fibers of the wallboard, the way it always had when I’d sat in this spot as a girl.
What exactly was Auntie Sarla saying about me?
That every day I was letting another potential husband slip through my fingers, and not getting married like her Shaylee? That I was twenty-nine, and with each breath, each step, inching closer to thirty?
Without saying hello, I went upstairs and stretched out on my bed. Soon after, I heard that someone had started playing on the harmonium, and the disharmony of singsong voices blared upstairs through the vents. I focused on the glow-in-the-dark stickers I’d stamped onto the ceiling as a child, now just flecks of mild green.
Except for the dirty laundry on the floor, Nani had left everything exactly as it had looked the day I moved out. The vintage te
a-stained map I had framed. My bookshelf, an antique maple hutch well stocked with Puffin Classics and novels from garage sales and the clearance shelves of supermarkets. The mash-up of throw pillows and raw silk curtains that we’d sewn together. I had been a hopeless student of basic domestics and slammed my foot on the treadle like I was race car driver, and she’d had to undo every stitch I made with her Hobbycraft sewing machine.
I thought about going back downtown. I had client meetings to prep for, recycling to take out, groceries to buy. But I knew I wouldn’t do any of that. I knew that if I went back downtown, I would just sit on the chaise lounge by the window and close my eyes in the sun. Listen to the faint noises of families walking their dogs and buying gelato. The teenagers shuffling aboard the streetcar with H&M bags and neon headphones. I yawned, and before I could decide one way or another, the doorbell woke me up.
“Nani?”
I could still hear the harmonium’s music, Auntie Sarla’s voice shrieking over the rest of the voices. The doorbell rang again, and I pulled myself off the bed and down the stairs. I opened the front door, and squinting into the afternoon light, it took me a moment to realize who it was.
“Depesh?”
“Raina, hey.” Depesh was at least six inches taller than the last time I’d seen him, and not nearly as scrawny. His muscles were more defined now and filled out his shirt, his dark wash jeans. The black, wayward curls I remembered on him as a kid were flattened and slicked behind his ears.
“Wow.” I crossed my arms. “I haven’t seen you in forever! You grew up nice.”
He rolled his eyes.
“How old are you now—sixteen, seventeen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen. God, you make me feel old.”
“Well, you look exactly the same, Raina.”
I led him into the family room, and sank into the couch. He looked around the room, his hands on his hips, and then tentatively took a seat in Nana’s armchair.
Depesh had once been like a brother to me. His mother had been diagnosed with MS when he was ten, and I’d spent the summer after my junior year of college babysitting him. His parents—a rotund lady I called Sharon Auntie, and her husband, whose name I still hadn’t figured out—had spent long days at the hospitals, at clinics for drug trials, three-day trips to Boston or San Jose for experimental procedures. So Depesh and I baked cookies and played Monopoly, went to the park and watched television until our eyes hurt. At the end of the summer, his parents moved him to New Jersey to be closer to a specialized facility, and I hadn’t seen him since.
Depesh’s hands were perfectly still and straight on his lap, and he stared at them.
“Do you want some tea?”
He shook his head, and looked up. “Just picking up Ma.”
“Oh, I didn’t know she was over.”
He nodded. “Your nani is like the only one who’s been able to get her to leave the house.”
“Wait.” I sat up. “You moved back?”
He nodded. “We’ve been back a month already.”
“Nani didn’t tell me”—I racked my brain, trying to remember—“or maybe she did, shit. I can’t remember.”
“It’s okay.”
“She calls me a lot. Sometimes at work I put her on speaker and drift off . . . God, am I a terrible person?”
“No, you’re not.” He laughed nervously. “But what do I know? I haven’t heard from you in, like, a decade.”
I knew he didn’t mean to make me feel guilty, but I did. Depesh had been a kind, genuine kid—and I could still see that about him; in his eyes, his smile—it was impossible to miss. But he was different, too. He had been playful and silly when I’d known him. Exuberant. Brave enough to climb to the tops of the jungle gyms, face the tallest slides while I trailed behind.
Now he seemed awkward in his own skin. Nervous, unsure of himself. I realized that I didn’t know him anymore, either. For the past eight years, I’d basically forgotten all about him.
“Do you want to go get some ice cream?”
He rolled his eyes. “Raina, I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Maybe I want ice cream.”
He glanced over at me nervously. “Well, you could buy me beer.”
Nani rarely kept alcohol in the house, and the bottle of whiskey Kris stored beneath the sink was missing. So we slipped out the front door and walked a few blocks north on the wide suburban streets toward the strip mall nearby. He waited outside while I went in and bought two large bottles of beer, and on the walk home, we stopped at the park beside my old high school. A few other people were around—kids about Depesh’s age smoking weed by the basketball courts—and we picked a spot to sit a fair distance away in the grassy field.
I opened my bag, and then reluctantly handed him the beer. “I’m a bad influence on you. Don’t tell your mother.”
He laughed. “I’ll be legal in a few months.”
He twisted off the cap of the beer, and brought the bottle to his lips. He stared at it for a second before taking a sip, and I saw him wince.
“Do you like beer?”
He wiped his mouth with his hand, smiling. “Not really. I never really drank in high school. I wasn’t invited to the parties.”
“Me neither. But my best friend was, so sometimes I tagged along.”
“I didn’t really have a best friend . . .” Depesh looked down at his beer, and with one hand started to peel back the label. “Actually, down there I had trouble making friends.”
I put my hand on his shoulder.
He continued. “Jersey was . . . hard. And now I don’t know anybody here anymore, you know?” His fingers shook, and the label—partway off—split in two. “I’m starting university in a few days. That will be good.”
“It will be, Depo.” I smiled at him, and then took a quick sip from my own beer. It was already warm, tasted stale, and I set it down beside me. “And until then, you know you have me, right?”
“I don’t need your pity or anything.”
“It’s not pity.” I stared at him until he looked me in the eye. “I promise. I’m really glad you’re back.”
He nodded, and looked back at his beer.
“So, what classes are you taking?”
“Bio, chemistry, math”—he sighed—“you know, the usual premed stuff.”
“You want to be a doctor?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“So what if everybody else does? You should be what you want to be.”
He grew quiet, and stretched back on his elbows. It was hot, and the sun was in my eyes, scorching my face.
“I heard you’re getting married.”
My stomach dropped, and I turned to face him. “Who told you that?”
“My mom did.” He paused. “Is it that British guy? I heard something a while back about a British guy.”
So that’s what Nani and her friends were talking about in the entertaining room: that I was about to get married? How many in our community were preparing to shove me down the aisle, had picked out a punch bowl for a wedding gift, when I—when Nani—had yet to find me a husband?
I grabbed the beer and swigged it, drank until it was nearly half gone.
“So you’re not getting married?”
Slowly, I set the beer back down. The aftertaste was disgusting. “No. I’m not.”
“But there was a British guy? I’m not making that up?’
I pressed my lips together. “There was. We broke up when I left London.”
“I’m sorry. That sucks. But London—that must have been amazing, hey?” Depesh’s smiled brightened. “I would love to live in Europe—or go to Europe even.”
“Yeah, it was wonderful . . .” I trailed off. A moment later, I realized Depesh was still looking at me.
“What’s London like?”
“Busy. Diverse. In some ways, entirely overwhelming.” I shrugged. “Lonely, in other ways. Like any big city.”
“Lonely? But you had a boyfriend.”
I cleared my throat. “So you’ve never been?”
“No”—he shook his head—“I really want to, but we could never travel because Ma’s treatments cost too much.” He paused. “That’s actually why we moved back. Tuition to a good school down there was expensive.”
“Oh . . .”
“It’s a lot here, too, though,” he said. “I took out a loan, and I’m working part-time at Star Labs to save up.”
“Star Labs is across the road from my company. You can drop by sometime.” I picked up my bottle. “Like if you need beer, or something.”
He laughed.
“Or you can borrow my car if you want to take a girl out, or whatnot.”
He smiled at me vaguely, and put his hand out in front of his face. The sun cast a shadow across his eyes, his nose, and I couldn’t tell what he was looking at. After a while, he fished his phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
“Ma is wondering where I am.” He pushed himself up onto his knees, and wiped his hands together, grass and dirt falling from his palms. “We should probably go back.”
I nodded, and we walked back together in silence, my mind racing. In Nani’s eyes, my marriage was a done deal. But what if it wasn’t?
I stopped short at the foot of the driveway, breathing through the tightness in my chest.
What if I already knew that what Nani wanted for me wouldn’t be enough?
DATE #4
“So you’re Auntie Suvali’s granddaughter,” he said, without standing up to greet me.
“And you must be Rahul.” I shuffled into the seat across from him. He was reading the Paris Review, and bookmarked his page with a peacock feather. Then, as if on purpose, he set the magazine down on the table between us facing toward me.
