by Veena Rao
“She doesn’t, does she? She doesn’t. I know Miss Hoity Toity doesn’t.” Tara fell off the sofa rasping, laughing, crying. She pulled herself up, swaying like a leaf.
“You are so undeserving, dear husband.”
She dragged herself to the shoe closet, found a pair of sandals, and ran out the door, banging it shut, unleashing her turmoil at it. She walked all evening, down the main road, into the by-lanes, on little mud paths, allowing her feet to take her wherever they pleased. She saw people jogging and walking their dogs. Some greeted her cheerfully; they were jaunty aliens from a happy planet. A family of three little kids played ball with their dad in a front yard—so happy, so normal. Nobody seemed to have stumbled upon secrets that tore their lives apart.
She ended up in a deserted little park in a clearing in the middle of a thickly wooded area. A seesaw and a couple of rudimentary swings were all the park had. A dirty, cold grill lay on one end of the grassy stretch with a wooden bench close by. Tara made her way to the bench and rested her tired feet. A couple of chipmunks scampered past her. She sat there, her mind bereft of thoughts, the ache in her heart unbuffered. A gentle breeze swayed the old swings, their melancholy creaking so in sync with her mood. She stayed by the creaking swings until the sun set, and she could hear the crickets in the emerging darkness. The tall pines that ringed the park had turned into dark silhouettes. Somewhere, a dog barked in a backyard. When she finally made her way back to the hollow nest that was her home, nothing had changed, except that the sad creaking of the swings was embedded in her brain.
Tara avoided Amma’s calls. They got more frantic after the third day, with more than a dozen missed calls and five voicemails on day four. On the fifth day, she picked up. There was no escaping Amma.
“Tara, is everything all right? Why haven’t you been taking my calls?” Amma’s high-pitched rush of words irritated her.
“Your dear son-in-law decided to take me on a honeymoon.”
“Really? Where did you go?”
“To hell. That’s where I am now.”
“Tara! What happened, darling?”
Tara ignored Amma’s question. “Amma,” she asked, instead, “What is it like to be loved?”
“Why that question, baby?”
“Because I wouldn’t know, Amma. I wouldn’t know. I was abandoned by my mother when I was just eight years old. My father couldn’t live without his wife and son, but he could live without his daughter. Now, my husband says he can never love me. How would I know what it is like to be loved?”
Amma’s voice trembled, as it did each time Tara upset her. “You know we love you immensely, Tara. Tell me what happened, darling. Did you fight? Don’t take his words to heart.”
Tara quickly disconnected, tossed the receiver down on the floor. She lowered herself into the leather swivel computer chair and waited in stillness. The guilt and remorse, they always came. When they did, some of her anguish dissipated. She called Amma back.
Chapter 11
On Sunday morning, Alyona’s day off, Tara knocked on her door with a request and a computer printout of a map. She had hated that she had to log on to the computer using LizSan to get the directions. Now that she knew of Sanjay’s Romeo to Liz’s Juliet, it didn’t require a great mind to deduce what LizSan stood for. He hadn’t even bothered to change the login name when she moved to Atlanta.
“Alyona, will you take me to the Hindu temple in South Atlanta?” she asked. Alyona, agreed without hesitation. “Let’s drop Viktor off at Derek’s first,” she suggested. “I’ve never been to Indian temple. This will be so much fun!”
Alyona drove twenty miles down interstates I-85 and I-75 with her usual spirit of adventure.
The temple loomed into view, sparkling and pristine, after Alyona made a sharp right turn off the highway, through the open gates, and into the almost empty parking lot. The white rajagopuram, the steeple of the temple, built in Chola architectural style, towered in its magnificent splendor in front of them. The forty-foot-tall rajagopuram rose up five tiers, each tier rich in exquisite detail. Tara noticed a sculpture of Lord Narasimha on the top tier, and Maha Vishnu in various poses at the lower levels.
The girls walked up the steps to the shoe room where they left their footwear, and made their way into the main shrine of Lord Balaji. Tara was thankful there weren’t many people yet at the shrine. Even the priest was missing. She rang the bell outside the sanctum sanctorum, felt it reverberate in the chambers of her heart. She paid obeisance to the main deity of Lord Balaji inside the inner chamber before settling down on the red-and-gold-carpeted floor of the hall, folding her legs in lotus position. Alyona followed suit. Tara kept her eyes closed, while Alyona looked around mesmerized.
The temple was serene and smelled of camphor and sandalwood incense. Save for a couple who circumambulated around the navagraha, the nine planets, the main hall was empty. Tara had not been to a temple in years. She had no idea why she was here or what she was seeking, but for a while, she had left the turbulence of her life outside the temple door. She didn’t ask; she didn’t pray. She sat in the stillness, in the present, her thoughts at bay, and that seemed like a blessing. Her breath flowed easy, unhindered by the powerful emotions that had become the mainstay of her life in recent days. When they pulled away from the parking lot of the temple, a seed was sown, a purpose was born, a determination grew to make a new life.
Tara was thankful to the universe for putting Alyona in her corner. She often wondered where she would have been if she didn’t have her pushy, opinionated, but big-hearted friend by her side. In the next few days, Alyona helped Tara in a multitude of ways—a shopping expedition to buy a thin foam mattress, a single duvet, and sheets; a visit to Brad’s Driving School; and a stopover at AT&T for a new cell phone connection.
Since the night of Sanjay’s disclosure, Tara had been sleeping on the sofa. She didn’t belong with Sanjay; she couldn’t bear to be near him. With the new foam mattress, the study became her bedroom. She pushed the computer desk and swivel chair to one end of the room and made space to lay out her bedding at night. During the day, she rolled the mattress over, bound it with a plastic rope and stuffed it in her closet. Sanjay had said nothing about her moving out. Tara had not once looked in his direction; not a word or gesture or sign had passed between them. And yet she wondered if it pleased him that she had moved out of his way.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish, Mr. Sanjay Kumar,” she muttered indignantly, as she lay in her new bed, under the cheerful yellow floral duvet, near the computer desk which creaked occasionally. She couldn’t think of one logical reason why the desk should creak. It was not broken or unhinged—like her. Someday, when her heart wasn’t as burdened as it was now, she would get to the bottom of the mystery. Her thoughts took off at a tangent. She wondered how Amma might react to Sanjay’s brazen infidelity.
“We had a fight, and I am upset,” was all she had revealed to Amma. Her pain was hers to bear, the challenges hers to overcome. She couldn’t let her parents see how utterly unworthy Sanjay thought she was.
“Try to win him back, Tara. Try your best, darling.” That is what Amma would have said, if she had known. As if Tara even stood a chance against the enchantress of DCS Tech, with whom her husband had proudly proclaimed to be “madly, utterly, helplessly in love.” Amma didn’t know what it felt like to be rejected, to be called a mistake, to be made to feel small, ugly, and unwanted.
Invariably, Tara’s thoughts returned to Sanjay, who was probably sleeping on his back, his hands resting peacefully over the gentle heave of his chest. Were his last thoughts before going to sleep about Liz? “Madly, utterly, helplessly in love,” Tara repeated softly. Was he a different man with her? Was he soft, gentle, caring? Did he cup her face and whisper sweet nothings into her ear? Did he kiss her; hold her tenderly even when they weren’t having sex? Tara rolled over to her side, because the weight on her chest was making it hard to breathe. If wishes were horses. If turnips were bayonets. If Liz would drop
dead. If Liz would drop dead.
She pressed her cheek to her folded arm and willed her mind to change thoughts. She had to focus on bettering herself. Learning to drive was the first step, even if it meant using up all the money she’d earned. She was glad she had enrolled at Brad’s Driving School that morning, but the lesson had been terrifying. Her instructor Brad had taken her to I-285 and her heart had been in her mouth all the way.
“Stay in your lane, speed up, speed up! You are going too slow!” Brad’s constant bellowing jangled her nerves. The large trucks and trailers on I-285 were Godzillas. She had come close to veering out of her lane and almost hit an SUV, but Brad had swerved the wheel in the nick of time, leaving her in a cold sweat. Her sixty-minute lesson was a trial that had pushed all other worries off her mind. She hoped it wouldn’t be as scary tomorrow. But if it was, what choice did she have but to face her fear?
Driving was just the first in a series of enormous challenges Tara had laid before herself. Once she had a driver’s license, she would look for a cheap used car. Then she would start a job search.
It took all of seven attempts for Tara to pass her driving test and get a license. Each time she failed, she had to pay Brad $75, her weekly earnings, for the trouble of taking her to the DMV. The first time, when the examiner asked her to step on the brake lights, she froze in the driver’s seat. She had no idea what brake lights meant. The other times, the examiner asked her to take a left or right turn at the next crossroad, and Tara kept going, as if her test were one straight path. Either her mind refused to cooperate or her jelly hands rejected her mind’s command to make a turn. The last two times, she had failed the zigzag and parallel parking tests, bumping into the orange cones until they dropped over. Each time she failed, she wept into her pillow, her tears draining her resilience.
“You need practice,” Alyona said, with the authority of a seasoned driver. She allowed Tara practice sessions in her Mini Cooper, supervised trips in the by-lanes of their neighborhood, gave her directions in a series of sharply barked orders. “Speed up, slow down, turn left, turn right.” She set up make believe cones at intervals—a wicker basket, a stool, a few bricks—and had Tara weave through them, or bring the car to a stop in a space between them, until she had perfected the techniques of zig-zag driving and parallel parking.
After two months of practice, Tara was coaxed to try the road test a seventh time. This time, Alyona took her to the DMV south of Atlanta, over thirty miles away. She had asked around, done extensive homework in finding a center that had no reputation for fussy examiners. It helped, psychologically at least. The examiner had a benign face, and that propped up Tara’s confidence. She turned when she had to, tipped over no cones, and brought the car to an almost perfect position while parallel parking. She came out of the DMV, a wide smile slathered across her face, eliciting whoops of joy from Alyona. She could finally drive. No one would comprehend how big a personal hurdle she had crossed. She had driven to the top of Mount Everest.
Derek had broken up with Alyona earlier that fall. The post-breakup routine was a set one—dripping tears on Tara’s empathetic shoulder, sipping her soothing cardamom chai or chamomile tea, and secluding herself in her apartment for a week. Then, Alyona was back to being Alyona. By December, she was going out with Brian McKenny, an energetic, buffed up Georgia native with sandy-brown hair, who owned an auto repair shop in Tucker. Again, Brian was everything that Derek was not, and she was in love like she had never been before.
It was Brian who helped Tara find her first car. He told Alyona about the white, two-door Mitsubishi Lancer, which had been offered to him by his pawnshop owner friend in Stone Mountain. Brian didn’t need the car, but he had checked it out, and it seemed to be in good running condition. Alyona wasted no time in taking Tara to see the car. The pawnshop was a shocking museum of guns, gold, and gadgets, and the owner was a surly Santa with a flowing silver beard, but the Lancer was a stroke of good fortune. The girls took it for a test spin around the block, Alyona behind the wheels, evaluating its mechanical wellness—lights, brakes, accelerator, tires, air, heat, music. The car smelled like cigarettes and cleaners but seemed to be in fine fettle.
They headed out an hour and a half later, Tara steering her Mitsubishi Lancer down the main street, nervous and excited. She was finally in control of something, even if it was an old piece of junk purchased at a pawnshop for $675.
Chapter 12
Tara tried to avoid Sanjay as much as she could; they lived in precise compartments of her design. She stayed in her room until he left for work, and retreated in there when she heard him open the front door at night. It was a cage, but the inconvenience was of her choice, and it wasn’t really all that difficult, given that he left early and returned late. She had enlisted Alyona’s help in getting a membership at the county library. It was a shame she had waited this long to do something so simple. Books brought the world to her cage, as they had done in her childhood.
At Shanti Nilaya, ironically, it was Zeenat, who did not speak or write a word of English, who was responsible for Tara’s acquaintance with books.
Grandfather Madhava caught Tara with the Beary girl on a Sunday afternoon, playing hopscotch behind the mango tree in the backyard. He silently confiscated their marker, a flat piece of stone, and gruffly ordered Tara back into the house.
“Have I not told you to stay away from that girl? As long as you live in this house, you will maintain propriety.” His voice was a growl, his face dark like a thundering cloud. An irritated grandfather was worse than a grandfather who treated her like one of the walls of the house. Tara disappeared from his view behind the veil of Grandmother Indira’s sari pallu, and stayed there through his dressing down.
“She won’t play with the rickshawallah’s daughter again,” Grandmother Indira weakly assured her husband, but it was Uncle Anand who miraculously appeared on the verandah to save Tara.
“Come with me,” he said, putting a hand over her shoulder, ushering her out of the house. “We’ll find you new playmates.”
He asked Tara to hop on his bicycle. They were going to Second Bridge, he said. She rode pillion, clutching the sides of her seat with an iron grip, keenly aware that the breeze was blowing her hair into a feather duster, and wondering who her new playmates were and how Uncle Anand had stumbled upon them.
But they arrived at a library. NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY, said the sign outside the door, painted in red letters on a white background. Tara was met with book-lined shelves covering three walls and dividing the room into three rows, and a small laminated checkout counter where the library owner sat, poring over the day’s newspaper.
“I think miss will like the Enid Blyton books,” he said in English, pushing his glasses down his nose to peer at them. Uncle Anand agreed and led her to the far end of the room, to shelves stacked with books by the English author. He picked The Magic Faraway Tree. The blue cover had an illustration of three children atop a tree.
“Here. This is your new friend,” he said. “Read this book. Then come back for more. Read. Read. Read. Learn about people in England and America. Who knows? One day, you might even go there.”
Tara nodded. She didn’t want to ever go to England or America. She wanted to go to Dubai, to be with Amma. The last books Tara had read were two thick volumes of the Fairy Tales. But that was in another life, a long time ago, when her own life had been a fairy tale, and her friends Pippi, Leenika, and Runa were impressed with her ability to string words and read whole sentences. She remembered the thrill of living the lives of Cinderella and Snow White and Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood over and over again until the stiff books had turned limp in her hands.
She felt the familiar stirrings of excitement when she looked at the cover of The Magic Faraway Tree. Three naughty children looked back at her from up a tree, beckoning her into their world, promising an adventure she would love. She came back the following week, completely smitten with Enid Blyton, and itching to say hallo and queer and sha
n’t. Soon she had devoured The Magic Faraway Tree series and graduated to the Famous Five and the Secret Seven books. She craved English tea and fresh-baked scones with strawberry jam every afternoon.
Several evenings, from her upstairs room, through the grilles of the rectangular window, Tara saw Zeenat waiting for her in the backyard. A couple of times in the morning, from the inner sanctum of the house, she caught Zeenat peeping into the verandah from the topmost step that led into the house. Tara could have disobeyed Grandfather Madhava again because he didn’t always keep watch over her, but she no longer felt the need for Zeenat’s company. Zeenat said things that made Tara sad; Julian, Dick, Anne, and George of the Famous Five only made her happy. It was easy to decide whose company she preferred. So she stayed indoors, hidden away from her only friend at Shanti Nilaya, until she stopped seeing snatches of a voile veil by the mango tree.
A couple of years later, when Uncle Anand started to go crazy, it was a bunch of American teen detectives, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Brothers, who rescued Tara from a life of near isolation.
It was the ten-day Dassera festival. Every now and then, the beat of drums filled the air, sometimes distant, like the roll of thunder, sometimes reverberating from close quarters. The beats came from huli vesha groups. A bunch of teenage boys from the neighborhood got together in troupes, and went from home to home, dancing the traditional tiger dance for a few coins.
When the first huli vesha visited Shanti Nilaya, Tara watched from the verandah as the troupe members, stripped down to their gold satin knickers, painted head to toe in yellow varnish with black stripes to resemble the national animal, pranced and twirled, crouched and leaped to the beat of the drum. Even their faces looked so remarkably tiger-like—painted whiskers and all. They had on headgear made of papier-mâché and raw wool that resembled tiger fur.
