by Veena Rao
“They are no friends of yours,” declared an indignant Alyona. “They should have been here to show their support.”
“They are wolves in friends’ clothing,” Amma would have said. But Tara wouldn’t allow those who weren’t in her apartment to affect her equilibrium. She was suddenly reminded of what Amma had told her a long time ago, weeks after they had arrived in Mangalore. Exasperated over Tara’s fearfulness, Amma had said: “Remember this Tara. You are a Kshatriya. You belong to the warrior caste. Hold your head high. Always.”
Tara had pulled her shoulders up that day, but her spirits had sagged like a punctured balloon. She had so many things to deal with in a new town, she couldn’t even count them—lizards, spiders, a dungeon-like kitchen, new people, and the worst of all—a new school. She had wondered if Amma had gotten it all wrong, and she were actually at the bottom of the caste pyramid.
“Hold your head high, Tara,” she reminded herself, as she invited her friends who had taken the time to be with her to light the tealight candles. Together they created rows of sparkling light outside the doorstep, on the mantle, the breakfast ledge, across the coffee table. The collective glow of the candles was magical, as if there were a cosmic revelation hidden there.
She packed Ziploc bags of biryani and curry for Alyona, and sweetmeats for Ruth and Dottie to take home. The rest she divided into sandwich bags for herself to have over the course of the week, for lunch and dinner.
Tara was not a believer in the caste hierarchy; that humans are born unequal. But Amma’s words to her six-year-old daughter now held new meaning. Not because Tara was born a Kshatriya, but because she needed to feel whole.
Tara still did not enjoy finding bugs in software. But her paycheck paid her apartment rent, filled up her car with gas, and enabled her to eat out with Alyona every weekend. But it was always at the back of her head that she had to find a way to get back to writing. Sometimes, she dreamed of holding her own hardbound book, her name in bold engraver’s font. She subscribed to twelve issues of the New Yorker magazine. She scoured the Internet for writing courses in Atlanta. She found one at Emory University, but it was too late to register for their upcoming term. She brought home Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft from the library. She read it, and then stayed up all night crafting a short story about an Indian restaurant manager who falls in love with an exorbitantly priced painting of an aristocratic woman. Pleased with her creation, she emailed it out to online literary journals.
Her mood was sullied in the morning, after she found a rejection in her email. Strong storyline, the editor conceded, but the principal character was too one-dimensional, the treatment of the story too simplistic. Read books on character building, was the editor’s all-knowing advice to Tara. She logged out of the new Gmail account she had created for her literary work and snapped her laptop shut.
The next evening, at the library, she came across a Marie Claire feature written by a New York Times bestselling author: a personal account of despair and persistence through basket loads of rejection letters from publishers, and her ultimate triumph when a little-known literary agent had agreed to represent her.
Inspired, she wrote again. Submitted again. When the rejections filled her inbox, she wrote again. Submitted again. When her first short story got published in the Rosebud online literary journal, it felt like the sweetest victory, as if she had won the Man Booker award.
It shocked her that she thought so little and so fleetingly about Sanjay these days. She felt no anger, no pain, no neediness; every emotion she had ever felt for him, she had left behind in her suburban dream.
He appeared briefly on her mind one evening, on her drive back home from work on I-85 south, when a billboard caught her eye as she passed Jimmy Carter Boulevard. Instinctively, her foot hit the brakes. Her steering wheel trembled, as it decelerated from sixty-five to fifty mph, causing the black Mercedes Benz behind to almost bump into her. As the driver changed lanes and whizzed past, he pulled down his window. He shook a fist in her direction. Shit! Tara looked ahead, shaken. She would have to come back to see herself on the billboard, now in bridal wear, looking demure, a red silk dupatta covering her hair, a second-time model for Raj Jewelers.
It brought back memories of the storm that the first photo had brought into her life, and before that, her desperate hopes for Sanjay to see the advertisement and find her beautiful and worthy of him.
How unworthy of her he had been all along. How blind she had been not to see it that way. She turned back to catch one last look at herself in her demure bride avatar. If nothing else, it served as a reminder to her to put a legal end to her marriage saga.
The divorce came quickly. It was uncontested. She asked for nothing, not even the meagre belongings she had left behind. The only thing she carried over to her new life was her legal status as a permanent resident of the United States. It amazed her how easy change had become, once she took the leap of faith.
Chapter 21
Tara pulled up a sling patio chair to a warm corner of her balcony which overlooked the road. She put her feet up on the chair, her long maroon, polka-dotted pajama-clad thighs taking on a V-shape. She rested her mug of tea on her right knee, holding it lightly. She enjoyed these peaceful Saturday morning moments, thinking up a storyline, creating characters, feeling their emotions.
She took a sip out of her mug and closed her eyes. She felt the warmth of the dappled sun on her eyelids. There was so much to be absorbed through the other senses when the eyes were closed. Birds chirped with enthusiasm. A car revved to life. She heard the patter of little feet running, a child’s voice saying, “Bye, Mom.” The mom responding with, “Bye, sweetie. Love you.”
She wondered why Americans felt the need to say I love you to their loved ones every single day. She wondered why Indians had so much trouble saying I love you. Amma and Daddy had never said I love you to her. Ever. She doubted they had even expressed their love for each other with those words. She wondered if she could manage an essay on this topic. But really, what did she know about love?
She’d see. She lowered her legs, slipped her feet into her pink plush bedroom slippers, walked lazily back into the kitchen, fixed herself a bowl of Quaker Oats in the microwave, and took it to the living room. She propped her legs on the edge of the coffee table, slipped a soft red cushion into the concave of the sofa to buffer her lower back, and set her laptop on her thighs. She worked on the bowl of oats as she waited for the laptop to boot.
She logged on to Hotmail first. She couldn’t remember when she had last checked her personal emails; it was at least two weeks ago. Nobody ever wrote to Hotmail anymore, anyway. She had lost touch with almost all her friends at the Morning Herald, and she didn’t use MSN messenger any longer. Still, her inbox was inundated with emails, the kind she either did not bother to open or deleted immediately. There was a notice from the library reminding her that Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy was due, a cell phone bill from AT&T, sale notices from Macy’s and Target, a 20 percent off coupon from Border’s bookstore. Ensconced between the mostly junk emails was one from C. Saldanha, which she almost deleted but chose to open instead, if only because the name Saldanha meant something to her. It was dated September 28, 2005, almost a week earlier. The subject line simply said, “Hi!” Junk, she thought, but opened it anyway. It read:
Twinkle, twinkle little Star,
How I wonder where you are!
She read the two lines, and instinctively knew.
Twinkle, twinkle little Star,
How I wonder where you are!
I saw you on I-85 this morning, sparkling like a diamond, causing accidents. You almost got me killed! I am in Atlanta for a few days. I hope I can see you.”
He had signed off with just his first name and cell phone number.
She put a hand to her chest when she Googled his number; it was a San Jose area code. The email had been sent exactly a week ago. Was she too late seeing his email? Was he back in San Jose?
She was shocked that he still remembered her, that he had recognized her on the billboard, that he had reached out, that he had retained his wit.
But did she want to write back? What was she to write, anyway? What was to come after Hi Cyrus? She shut her laptop and changed to go for a leisurely walk instead. She had hoped to develop her essay on the verbal and nonverbal expressions of love, but her thoughts kept coming back to the email.
“I don’t need this type of distraction,” she murmured. What she needed at this point was the peace to heal, to rediscover herself. Yet, her hand was pressed to her chest when she returned to her apartment, her heartbeat erratic. She had no idea how long she had walked, only that it was a sunny day and she was thirsty. Still, her feet took her to the laptop in the living room rather than the kitchen to quench her thirst.
Again, she wondered if she should simply delete the email. But what was the harm in meeting him once, an opposite force reasoned. She was curious to find out where life had taken him, how he had turned out, if his eyes had changed color. Eventually she replied, after sending three drafts to the trash bin. The first one was too cold, the second one too friendly, the third just didn’t sound right.
“Hi Cyrus,” her email said. “So good to hear from you. I’m sorry, I haven’t been regular at checking my Hotmail. I just saw your note. Hope you are still in town. Would you like to do lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, Perimeter Mall tomorrow? Is 12:30 good? Looking forward to catching up. –Tara”
She had no reason to stay on Hotmail, but she did. In a few minutes, her inbox had a new email from C. Saldanha.
“Star, you are late but lucky. I am still in town. Can’t wait to see you tomorrow! How did you know I have a weakness for cheesecake?”
She smiled from ear to ear, lips stretched across her face. The cocky charm. He hadn’t lost it.
Tara drove over to Alyona’s apartment that afternoon, and gave her the news and its backstory, taking care to suppress the nervous energy that was spiraling inside her chest. When Alyona’s last relationship with Amir Rezaee, an Iranian who owned a Persian restaurant in Roswell, ended two months ago, she had vowed to stay off men forever. “Men are dogs,” she had proclaimed then. “I am through with dogs.”
Maybe Alyona was right. Maybe she just needed to hear from another person that she ought to stay away from Cyrus.
“Girl, you are full of surprises,” Alyona exclaimed “And Madonna face? Nobody has said nothing like that to me before.”
“It was a long time ago, Alyona. We were kids.”
“You are kids no more. You be careful, girl.”
Tara nibbled a fingernail. “I’m sure he is happily married. Maybe I’ll get to meet his family soon.”
“If he was married, he would not have contacted you.”
“Should I cancel the lunch?”
“Meet him, have sex if you want to. Just don’t fall in love.”
Tara shook her head in exasperation. “Alyona. I don’t plan to have sex, nor fall in love. I don’t need any complications in my life.”
“Yeah? Then why are you getting your hair done?”
“Why shouldn’t I look nice?”
Alyona bustled about setting up her tools to wash and tame Tara’s hair. “Why you bite your nails like rabbit? How terrible they look,” she admonished. As they waited for the dark golden mahogany tint to seep through Tara’s hair, she trimmed the nails to one length and buffed them until they shone.
Tara smiled at a memory as Alyona blow-dried her hair. Her thirteen-year-old self was taming her unruly hair with her fingers and pressing her lips hard to get color to them, before going in to spend time with Cyrus and the Saldanha gang.
The Saldanha gang. She had lost touch with them all when she changed schools after moving to Model Street. Her new school had been within walking distance of their new home, but figuratively, she had walked many miles before she could adjust to her new circumstances.
Her new school uniform—blue pleated skirt and white shirt—were of fine quality fabric and pressed to perfection by the iron-wallah. Her black leather shoes glinted in the sun every day. But she had no friends. The first six months, she sat alone during school lunch break, nibbling little conscious bites out of the four-tier stainless steel tiffin carrier in which Amma packed a full meal. When the other girls played throw ball during PT, she sat on the grass and watched. There were at least four other girls of her age group in the colony where they lived. She saw them every evening, hanging out on the steps of one house or the other, their voices loud and their laughter unrestrained. They reminded Tara of Annette, Michele, and Angela, but unlike her friends, this gang seemed unapproachable.
She tried to take pleasure in resting her head in Amma’s lap like old times, to have Amma run her slender fingers through her rough hair every night. But her heart had very blatantly shifted loyalties. It felt nothing except the overpowering pain of separation from Cyrus.
She returned to Shanti Nilaya of course, always day visits with her family to celebrate Ugadi or Dassera with her grandparents, but the visits were never long enough that she could slip out on her own. She hoped for a glimpse of him, craning her neck when their car passed by Second Bridge, but she was always disappointed.
Her final year in high school, he ceased to occupy her mind all the time. Yvonne became her best friend at school. The neighborhood girl gang of four was not so haughty after all. They included Tara in their group. She moved on to other infatuations—movie stars, a thick-mustachioed guy in the neighborhood who rode an Enfield Bullet and didn’t know she existed, and one summer, an IIT student with light eyes who came to spend a couple of weeks with his aunt next door. The infatuations lasted a few months each; then they waned without ever being realized. The searing intensity of her adolescent feelings for Cyrus, she had never experienced again. She didn’t think she could feel that potency again as an adult, not even for Cyrus.
When she pulled into the parking lot of the Cheesecake Factory and checked her face in the visor mirror, it still seemed too much: the retro gloss lipstick, the eyeliner. She dug into her purse and pulled out a pack of wet wipes, dabbed off the eyeliner, and patted her lips clean of some of the color. She checked her watch. It was past twelve thirty. She had to get in. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, held it, exhaled slowly. Then she walked toward the restaurant.
She had had a last-minute change of heart about a floral dress she had picked out the previous night. Instead, she wore a rather plain white blouse, a khaki A-line skirt, and flat tan ballerina shoes. She walked up to the hostess and hesitated. She didn’t know if he was already there. She tilted her head and scanned her eyes across the tables. How was she going to recognize him?
“Miss, are you looking for me?”
She whirled around. How could she not have recognized him? His eyes were the same, as was his dimpled smile. After twenty-three years. Only his hair was shorter, darker and brushed back away from his forehead. He wasn’t exceedingly tall, perhaps just a couple of inches taller than she. He looked lean in his khakis and dark blue polo shirt.
He held his hand out. She shook it, embarrassed that hers was cold and clammy. He covered it with his free hand, his skin warm on hers.
“Hi!” she said. Her throat felt dry. “I was looking for a graying, pot-bellied, middle-aged man, ha-ha.” She hoped she hadn’t sounded rehearsed. The words had tumbled out in a sudden release of nervous energy. He threw his head back and laughed. He had even teeth, and his dimples were deep.
“You dig pot-bellied men?” He looked around, still holding on to her hand. “Not hard to find one at the Cheesecake Factory.”
“No,” she said with a laugh.
Once they were seated, she had a sip of ice water. The pounding of her heart had come down a notch, allowing her to talk without seeming breathless.
“So, how did you recognize me?”
“Who doesn’t? You are a famous model.” The dimples were back.
“Oh, the billboard,
” she waved her hand dismissively. She told him she was a QA professional by day, that the modeling was a one-time thing.
“But how could you tell it was me? I mean, I was just thirteen when you last saw me.”
He tapped the left side of his chest. “That face, madam, is etched here.”
She blushed, drank a sip of water. He watched her, mirth in his eyes.
The server brought a plateful of fried calamari and their drink orders to the table, a classic margarita for her with salt on the rim and a chilled Bud Light for him. She took a sip of her margarita, the salt causing her face to pucker involuntarily. He watched openly, and laughed.
She cleared her throat. “But how did you get my email address?”
“I have my ways.”
“What ways?”
He took a swig of beer, rested his elbows on the table, and told her of his search. A couple of years back, during his visit home, he had come across an old copy of the Morning Herald in his Dad’s study. It was a comprehensive, well-researched article on the minuscule Parsi community in Mangalore. He had read the article, of course, but what caught his attention was the byline. The article was written by a Tara Raj. He’d called the Morning Herald office, only to be told that Tara Raj no longer worked there.
“And that was the end of my search, until last week, when I saw you on the billboard, causing accidents on I-85. I went straight to Raj Jewelers, who put me on to the photographer who had shot the campaign, and he gave me your email address after I promised to hire him for my wedding.”
“Wedding? You are getting married?”
“No.”
She slipped a casual glance at his sleek fingers—no ring. Of course, that didn’t mean a thing. Indian men did not wear wedding rings. She wondered if she should ask him about his marital status, but he beat her to the question.
“So, Tara, forgive me for sounding like an Indian aunty, but what does your mister do?”
