Incense and Sensibility

by Sonali Dev

  “He’ll wake up. He has to.” Yash turned to her.

  Nisha had warned him to be careful about what he said. To not give her hope when the doctors were being so cagey. But doctors didn’t know everything. Who knew that better than Yash?

  “They aren’t sure they can keep him on the ventilator much longer.” Every time they’d met, Yash had noticed the spine of steel under her easy banter with Abdul. They were a powerhouse together. Now she had to be fierce enough for the both of them.

  “We’ll keep him on the ventilator for as long as it takes him to wake up. You don’t have to give in to pressure. I will make sure no one makes that call but you. If there is anything in this world that can be done to get him to wake up, I’m going to do it. I promise you that.”

  That did it, that made her shoulders slump. Just for a moment. Then she straightened again, eyes still dry.

  For a moment he thought she would tell him to stuff his promises. For a moment he thought she’d thank him. She did open her mouth to say something. In the end she just nodded, then she bent over her baby and stroked her cheek as Yash let himself out of the room.

  Chapter Four

  India had canceled the corporate retreat and rushed back home early because of her mother. Yash Raje had nothing to do with it. No, he did not. She would never change her plans because of some politician being shot. Even though that politician was her friend’s brother. Correction, he was her friends’ brother. Plural, not singular.

  Ashna, Trisha, and Nisha had all responded to her texts and assured her that they were fine and that Yash was on the road to recovery. That’s what the news said as well.

  It was a relief. Not just to her, but to all of California—all of America. Her relief was no different than anyone else’s. Being relieved was natural. The fact that the man’s tongue had been the first tongue to ever be in her mouth had nothing to do with it.

  Settling into the yoga mat in her room, she dragged a breath deep into her lungs and held it. Energy traveled all the way down her arms, her legs, filling up her fingertips, her toes. Then she released it. Emptying herself out. So it went for a while. Keeping time while meditating wasn’t her way, so she didn’t know how long it took. In the end when it released her she felt much more centered.

  The first thing she’d done after she got home yesterday was take Mom to the hospital, where they’d spent the day doing test after test.

  “That’s what you get when you go to a Western hospital,” her mother had said. Tara always said “Western hospital” as though she hadn’t been born and raised in California.

  West of what? India would have asked, if Mom hadn’t looked so fragile. She had lost twenty pounds. India kicked herself for not noticing. Her mother had always been on the thinner side. They all were. A lifetime of yoga and vegetarianism would do that to you. According to the doctor, the weight loss might not have been visible because it was mostly muscle mass loss. India should still have noticed.

  After rolling up her mat, she made her way up the narrow wooden stairs to the third-floor attic that housed the incense workshop and Tara’s room. The yoga studio and India’s office took up the first floor, with a public entrance in the front that opened into a lobby and a private entrance in the back that opened to the staircase that led up to the private apartment. The second floor was occupied mostly by the family room and open kitchen with India and China’s rooms tucked away in the back along with a guest room that Sid used when he was in town.

  As India entered Tara’s room she was flooded with the smell of incense. Naturally it was strongest up here, even though a hint of it always permeated the rest of the apartment and studio.

  Their family had owned this three-floor block since the early part of the last century. India’s great-grandparents had bought it to open a barbershop on the first floor and live on the upper floors. When the business grew, they had hired an immigrant from India who in his spare time practiced a strange form of stretching and breathing called yoga that they’d never heard of.

  The couple had become intrigued when their joint pain disappeared when Ram taught them some poses and helped them practice every day. The more they practiced, the more obsessed they became. They cleared a part of the barbershop and tried to get their neighbors to join in. Their efforts were met with suspicion and accusations of practicing pagan mystical arts, but it hadn’t stopped them from continuing to practice themselves.

  India’s grandmother had grown up in love with both yoga and the man who brought it into their lives. Ram was a good fifteen years her senior, and marriage to him had been not just scandalous, but also illegal. In the end, the town’s hatred had driven Ram out.

  After he left, Romona had found out that she was pregnant with Tara. Romona was the one who finally turned her parents’ barbershop into a yoga studio. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay were a vastly different place in the sixties than it had been in the forties, and Romona had been able to raise Tara, who had inherited her father’s black hair and brown skin, with only an undertone of disapproval from the neighbors and a steady supply of students to make a living.

  When she turned eighteen, Tara had traveled to India in search of her father. She hadn’t found him, but she had spent ten years in a yoga ashram in Jammu. She’d come home with Siddhartha, a four-year-old boy she’d adopted, and joined her mother in running the studio. Two years after that she’d adopted India from an orphanage in Bangkok, and two years after that China from an orphanage in Nairobi.

  India hadn’t known there was anything different about her family until a substitute teacher in her kindergarten classroom had looked at her with an expression India would come to know well as she grew up, and asked, Aren’t you one of that yoga teacher’s kids? The ones with the cleft lip scars adopted from three continents?

  When India had told Sid about it on their way home from school, he’d said, But India and Thailand are on the same continent.

  It’s how India had learned that adults, even teachers, didn’t always know everything. To India, their family was how families were supposed to be. Many years later, when China was in her rebellious phase, she had asked Tara why she had felt the need to adopt children from three countries.

  I took a lifelong vow of celibacy. How else was I supposed to have children? That had been Tara’s answer.

  “India?” her mother said, bringing India back to the present.

  India was sitting on her mother’s bed massaging her feet. Chutney, their pug, was squeezed into Mom’s side snoring in long whistles. She barely stirred as Mom moved her so she could sit up.

  Now that Mom was awake, India scooted closer and lifted one foot into her lap and started to massage in earnest.

  Tara moaned a long, satisfied sigh. “That feels wonderful. You have magic hands, baby girl.” She shifted her stance and India could tell her back was hurting.

  “Did you take ibuprofen this morning?”

  “I drank the turmeric milk you made me.” The whites of Tara’s eyes were almost as yellow as the turmeric milk, and she looked exhausted. Anyone who knew Tara would know how terrifying that was.

  “That was hours ago, and it’s not going to stop the pain.”

  “Why don’t you rub some of your eucalyptus oil blend on my back? That usually brings the pain down,” Tara said as though speaking to a class full of students.

  The next thing India knew, Tara was elbows-deep into a story of how her guru in India had brought down someone’s fever by hanging onions from their ears.

  India smiled. All had to be well with the universe so long as Tara was telling her bizarre stories, right? Nodding along, she handed Tara a pill and some water.

  “Great men cured fever with onions, we have little white pills for aches.” Tara’s sigh was deep, but she took it, which was telling.

  “The doctor’s office hasn’t called with results yet,” Tara said. “I know you’ve been obsessing over it all day and dying to ask me. Wouldn’t I tell you if they had called?” She
took India’s hand. “You’re a silly girl to come running back from Costa Rica to take care of a mother who is fully capable of taking care of herself.”

  But Tara hadn’t taken care of herself. India wouldn’t have had to come home if Tara had gone to the doctor herself, or if China weren’t so wholly preoccupied with Song right now. China had barely spent a half hour with India since she’d returned. Plus, there was the feeling that had flared inside India after she’d heard about the shooting. What exactly it meant, she didn’t know. She wasn’t even sure if it was the shooting or Mom, but something had told her that she had to come back home.

  “Once we get the results and figure out what’s going on, I can still go back for the corporate retreat if I want. The organizers have a substitute, but they want me to try. There wasn’t anything to do there this week anyway except attend some dinner parties.”

  “And see one of the most beautiful countries on earth, at someone else’s expense.”

  “I go every year, Mom.”

  “You’ve only gone for the past two years. Because of the renovation. And you’ve barely stepped out of the hotel to see anything. This was your first chance to. How is Sid the only one of my kids who has any interest in seeing the world?”

  India picked up Tara’s other foot and started massaging it, gauging the tightness of the pressure points so she could loosen them. “You made us love our home too much.”

  Tara sighed and gave her a too weak smile. “My sweet baby girl. What did I do to deserve you? Well, I recognized the shape of your ears.” She reached over and stroked India’s ears. “Even as a baby your lobes reminded me of the Buddha.”

  They sat there like that for a while. India massaging Tara’s feet, Tara stroking her ears and reminiscing about her babyhood. It was heavy on the diarrhea stories, because Tara was Tara. But for all her love for the gross and the macabre, she never talked about the surgeries. With three children with cleft lips, there had been a lot of surgeries in those early years. Tara just never touched those memories.

  Tara’s phone buzzed. She made no move to pick up, so India reached for it.

  “Leave it. It must be someone trying to sell us something again. Or threatening to send us to jail if we don’t send money to the fake IRS.”

  Tara knew perfectly well that the doctor’s office was going to call today. When India answered, all Tara did was sigh heavily and lie back against her pillows.

  It was the doctor’s office. They wanted Tara to come in for the results, and they happened to have an opening in an hour.

  “Why would the doctor want to give you the test results in person?” India asked, helping her mother get dressed.

  Tara was trying hard to hide it, but her dragging movements were impossible to conceal given her usual energy. Even her vibrant green aura had turned muddy brown.

  From the rideshare, India called China, who was with Song.

  “We’re on our way,” China said without a second of hesitation. “See you there.”

  Tara and India smiled at each other as the car made its way down the short stretch of palm-lined road to Stanford Hospital. If you could call deep worry manifesting as a lip stretch “smiling.” A little like how gas manifested as smiles in babies.

  China had barely ever given a relationship the time of day. Even the family knew to give her space or she got crabby. Now she was joined at the hip with someone 24/7. And that someone had a life waiting for her almost six thousand miles away in an entirely different country.

  “Maybe Song will figure out how to risk her career for China,” Tara said, stroking the thick silver braid slung across her shoulder.

  India was all about trusting people to do the right thing, but she was not given to flights of fancy. Celebrities were ambitious and the ambitious always put their goals before everything else.

  “China has the high forehead of the blessed. It signals that she’s going to find her soul mate.” Tara said that about India too, and about Sid. It was her motherly hope finding anchor in superstition.

  When India didn’t respond, Tara patted her clasped hands. “Or maybe they’ll enjoy what they have for now and move on as richer people for having experienced love, even transiently.”

  If it was transient, how could it be love? Nonetheless, Mom was right, every experience did make you richer. That’s what India told herself when she couldn’t get a relationship to last more than four or five dates. It always felt transient, and that wasn’t what India wanted.

  She was pretty sure China wasn’t feeling transient with Song.

  “China has three friends,” India said. “She still drives the first car she bought straight out of college. She sleeps with the quilt she slept with as a child, in the bed she slept in as a child. She’s changed jobs once, and you know how hard that was for her.” Her sister was not given to moving on. She had never moved on from anything in her life. To her, love and loyalty were absolute.

  When they made their way to the consultation room, China was already there, Song by her side. As soon as she saw Tara, she ran to her and wrapped her in a hug. “Mom! You look terrible. Why didn’t you tell me it was so bad?”

  “It wasn’t until a couple days ago. How’s the new season? How was Yosemite?”

  The worry in China’s eyes didn’t eclipse the fact that she was glowing. Her flawless skin and dark eyes were even more sparkly than normal, veritable gemstones. Their joy was so contagious, India smiled at her sister and returned Song’s hug.

  The petite actress was wrapped in a hoodie three sizes too big and wore sunglasses indoors. Huge ones. The kind you might wear if you needed a disguise. Oh, and her hood was pulled up over her head.

  Some of India’s trepidation settled when Song took both of Tara’s hands in hers and complimented her on her flowy elephant pants. It was a particularly kind thing to do, given how her daughters had been so focused on how sick she looked that they had to have been making her feel several times worse.

  As they sank into the waiting room chairs—gorgeously modern but lacking in any warmth or comfort—Yash Raje’s face flashed on the TV hanging in the middle of the room.

  China jumped up and raised the volume. According to the news anchor, Yash had been scheduled to attend a rally that morning. And he’d just canceled his appearance at the last moment. It was the first event he had ever missed in his relentless campaigning. His energy levels had been dialed up to a hundred for months now, if not years. The person on TV seemed to think that someone trying to do an event five days after he had been shot was surprising. But who in their right mind thought Yash was like anyone else?

  “Have you spoken to Trisha or Ashna?” India asked China, who was looking as stricken as India was feeling. “Is he okay?”

  China squeezed in to Song and Song threw a nervous glance around the empty waiting area. “I spoke with Ashna yesterday. She said he was out of the hospital and she sounded like everything was okay.”

  “And the bodyguard?” India and Tara asked together.

  “He’s still critical.”

  India twisted in the stiff chair. “Ashna would not lie about how Yash is, right? I mean, it’s not like him to miss a campaign event. If he’s fine, he’s not the kind of person—I mean, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would miss a chance to speak to an auditorium full of voters.”

  China and Tara cocked their heads in unison and looked at India as though she had suddenly taken off all her clothes and exposed an unfortunately located wart.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, making the effort to sound less distraught than she had just sounded.

  Obviously they did not know what she meant.

  China blinked. “Why would Ashna lie about Yash being okay?”

  Fortunately India didn’t have to respond to that because the TV was flashing footage of Yash’s girlfriend and they all turned to watch again. Naina Kohli was practically perched on top of his gurney, screaming his name, spilling tears into his face. India felt her throat
constricting. Then the screen switched to a montage of pictures of the two of them doing all sorts of happy-couple things one might do if one had enough money to own a small country. The clothes, the chandeliers, the rocks in her ears, it was like thumbing through a catalog of a lifestyle magazine. Was this really the time for this?

  “That woman is gorgeous!” Song said on a worshipful sigh. “But she should switch to waterproof mascara.”

  China smiled smittenly. Song wasn’t wrong. Yash’s girlfriend was gorgeous with or without runny mascara. She looked like someone had engineered the perfect being using genetic material from Padma Lakshmi and Halle Berry with input from every fine-boned, perfectly proportioned woman who ever lived. As if the genetic lottery weren’t enough, she wore wealth and beauty with the effortless poise of someone who’d always had those things.

  She was also an activist who had dedicated her life to rural women in all corners of the earth, as the person on TV was detailing with that oddly benevolent expression news anchors always wore when talking about charities and tragedies. Anyone with even a modicum of sense would choose Naina Kohli over anyone else. By all accounts, Yash Raje was a man of great sense.

  The nurse called them in, and all thoughts of Yash and his lady love left India’s mind.

  They said bye to Song, and she pulled her oversized disguise hoodie lower over her face and left. India and China flanked their mother as the three of them went in to see Dr. Kumar. He was one of those doctors who smiled a lot. This was more disconcerting than you’d think in a doctor.

  “So,” he said, displaying eerily perfect teeth. “It’s not all bad news.”

  What kind of tone-deaf thing to say was that?

  “What is that supposed to mean?” China snapped. God bless her unfettered tongue.

  “We have confirmation that it’s not pancreatic cancer.”

  China sucked in a breath. Tara’s face turned into a mask. India shifted closer to her. Had they been expecting it to be cancer? Did Mom know they were looking for cancer?