by Leah Franqui
“A fellow tribesman! Tribeswoman! Whatever,” he said, taking a seat across from her at the table. He was wearing a kurta, the long tunic Indians of both genders wore, in a bright print, and a scarf, along with a host of necklaces around his neck. His wrists were decorated with the red and yellow thread from temples, proof of his recent offering.
I guess they aren’t all women. He’s really gotten into India, hasn’t he? Rachel thought, her mind curdling in judgment. There was a certain type of person, a non-Indian person, she had met when she moved to India, who was deeply in love with the country in a way that felt like a fetish to her. Cultural cannibals, she liked to call them, people so in love with another culture that they wanted to become a part of it. Expats in Paris who said things like My soul is French and really believed them, deeply. When it came to India, that desire for ingestion took the form of a devotion to faux-Hindu wisdom, declamations in praise of the “spiritualism” and “simplicity” of the people, and the burning of a great deal of incense. People who loved India, who said it that way, and went on to gush about the great beauty of daily life, were people Rachel tended to keep at arm’s length. She didn’t understand their devotion, and she didn’t like anyone who described some people as simple and others as complex. Wasn’t everyone complex, in the end?
“So, what brings you here to the land of the Raj?” He said it like a character in a period piece. “Sorry, just working on my accents. I’m an actor.”
Rachel nodded, groaning on the inside. Of course he was an actor. His very personality was a performance. “My husband,” Rachel responded flatly.
“Ah, of course. Well, you’ll be in good company with this bunch. Most of the people who come are women like you, dragged kicking and screaming here.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Hey, just kidding! So, are you loving it? Isn’t it amazing?”
“It is,” Rachel replied. There was no use sharing how she really felt with someone who asked Isn’t India amazing. They had already decided that there was only one way to feel. Her heart sank. If everyone at the lunch was like this man, she would have no one to complain to, no one to vent with.
“I’m Richard, by the way. But I go by Rishi, makes it easier.” For who? wondered Rachel, but she nodded politely, smiling. “I mostly come to this stuff for the free food.”
“Oh, I didn’t know it was free.”
“It better be! I’m not paying these prices!” He laughed loudly, pawing through the menu. “So, when’d you get here?”
Rachel dutifully recounted her voyage to India, well rehearsed through multiple retellings. Richard nodded along, and then his eyes lit up, looking past Rachel.
“Tina! You look fabulous. You never called me back about your brother-in-law, the producer.” Richard rose to greet a blond woman in her forties, who had arrived with a gaggle of other women. Rachel stood, uncomfortable. She didn’t know the other women at all. She had barely interacted with anyone other than her mother-in-law and Dhruv and his limited social circle in weeks. She suddenly felt self-conscious and embarrassed. She pasted a smile on her face. She was going to make a friend here, damn it. She was going to connect, find someone who could help her find something to do, or even just listen to her. She turned to a woman next to her with pale brown hair and a sweaty red face.
“Hi. I’m Rachel! It’s so great to meet you.”
Because it was. It had to be.
“I’m Betty,” the woman said, her accent some kind of Northern European. “Where are you from?”
“The US,” Rachel said. “You?”
“Holland. Tina is also from the States. Tina?” The blonde looked up. “You’ve met Rachel?”
“Oh, I’ve seen you in the Facebook group! You never say a word on anyone’s posts. Well, now you have to sit right down and talk to me. Sorry, Rishi, I will connect you with Dan, I promise, it’s just been busy, the kids have been down with a fever, although of course my mother-in-law thinks they’re dying. You know, Jenny asked for ice in her water and I thought Mummy was going to have a heart attack!”
“You call her Mummy?” Rachel asked, relieved. Obviously this woman also lived with her mother-in-law, and if the tone she used for mummy meant anything, she resented her. Bingo.
“Ugh. Yes. It was nonnegotiable.” Tina gestured to a waiter.
“What do you call yours?” a pale Asian woman asked. “Niko. From Japan,” she said, putting her hand on her own chest.
“Her name,” Rachel confessed, feeling like a schoolgirl caught doing something bad. The women at the table all gasped appropriately, and Rachel felt a little lighter.
“Tell us how you get away with that. I think Prabhav would beat me if I tried,” said one woman dryly.
Rachel giggled. “I know. It’s a mortal sin.”
The collected women chuckled appropriately, and Rachel realized no one that she had met in India before thought she was funny. At least, they had never laughed at her jokes. Having people do so was like getting a glass of water when you didn’t even know you were thirsty. Now she was desperate for more.
“Tell us, though, how did you actually manage that?” Betty asked in wonder.
“I just did it and I never hesitated. I went in, guns blazing, and said Swati,” Rachel said with mock seriousness. More laughs. She wanted to bathe in them.
“Like John Wayne,” Niko said reverently. “Very American. I like his movies.”
“What was that about movies?” Richard said, looking up from his phone. Rachel grimaced and, to her surprise, saw the exact same expression on Tina’s face.
“Of course, I say her name a lot now because she just moved in with me,” Rachel revealed, like the narrator of a horror story. The eyes around the table widened, and Tina took out the drinks menu.
“Just now? Good lord. Tell us all about it, honey. I think we need sangria first, though, right, ladies?” Rachel could feel her whole body suddenly relax. Despite her reluctance, she had come to the right place. For the first time since Swati had crossed her threshold, she felt at home.
“—so then she just closes the door in my face. Just like that.” Rachel punctuated the ending of her story with a long sip of her sangria, her third. She could feel the effects, her head buzzing pleasantly, her words free. There was silence around the table, and every eye was wide. Wordlessly, Tina reached out and grabbed Rachel’s glass, refilling it.
“We should have gotten you gin,” Betty said, and the women around the table all nodded in agreement. They had been joined by a few more, Hilary from the UK, Fiza from Dubai, and Sofie from Singapore, who herself was a French transplant, and Richard had, midway through Rachel’s story, abandoned the group for a last-minute audition, although not before taking down Rachel’s number and telling her, rather cryptically, that he might have work for her. Under other circumstances, Rachel would have grasped on to the promise of a job like a rottweiler, but she was too enmeshed in her own story, and finally having a willing and eager audience who not only wanted to hear it but understood it.
“So now you have a cook,” Niko said.
“I love my cook,” Fiza said, shrugging. She was a chic Emirati with an impeccable folded silk head scarf and a disdain for everything on the café’s menu. She had condescended to drink the sangria, but that was about it.
“But that’s not the point,” Hilary said, her mouth pursed. A pale British woman in her forties, she had “tucked in,” as she’d put it, and was scanning the table for more food. “The point is that Rachel doesn’t want a cook.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, the word feeling like a prayer. “I don’t care what other people do or want. I just want to do what I want to do in my own house.”
“Your husband’s house,” Fiza pointed out. Rachel looked at her. “Well, he pays, doesn’t he?”
“Stop playing devil’s advocate, Fiza,” Tina said fondly. “You know if your mother-in-law tried this you would throw her in the gutter.”
“I’m a slave to that woman,”
Fiza retorted. “Last week she insisted we make plans to go to Mecca this year. Her darling son has to clean his soul. Meanwhile she cooks these filthy things in the kitchen, dirty oil, goat blood everywhere. Is it a kitchen or a slaughterhouse?”
“Well, they have a different idea of clean,” Niko said.
“They?” Rachel asked, suddenly on alert. She wasn’t sure she liked where this was going, sangria haze or no.
“Indians,” Niko said simply. “Why are they so dirty? Look what they do.” She gestured outside to the filthy street.
“They have this inside-outside thing,” Hilary said, nodding. “In their homes it has to be spotless, but you can shit in the street and it’s fine. They draw a line between personal and public and dump everything in the public place.”
“That’s because they don’t really care about each other,” Fiza said.
“I mean, I don’t think you can say that literally every Indian person doesn’t care about anyone else,” Rachel said hesitantly, looking around the table, but everyone, it seemed, did think that was a fair thing to say.
“Look at your mother-in-law,” Tina said. “She doesn’t care about you. She did all this stuff expressly against your wishes. Honestly, I would believe this whole ‘leaving her husband’ thing is a front. She’s probably just angry she got a white daughter-in-law and is trying to break you two up.”
Betty shook her head in disagreement. “No, I don’t think so. She’s Marwari, no? North Indians are always looking to make paler babies. She wants you to have whiter babies for her. She wants to supervise, that’s why she’s come.”
“Guard your birth control!” Tina said, laughing. “She’s going to give you sugar pills!”
“I . . . I really don’t think that’s very fair,” Rachel tried, supremely uncomfortable. The comments about people’s being dirty smacked of a kind of anti-native sentiment that put her in mind of films set in the 1920s. And really, Swati hadn’t put any pressure on Rachel for grandchildren. Rachel had wanted to complain about Swati, yes, but this had taken a turn. But they were no longer listening to her. She had contributed her story, unknowingly, to their collection of “ways Indians are terrible,” and now her time was up.
“No, no, she’s going to make an offering to some dreadful snake god or something,” Fiza said, smirking. “I swear, they like to think they are so far beyond village life but it’s like they never left. Everything progressive about this country is because of the British, and what do they do? Throw them out and live in chaos for decades. It just goes to show that everything they said about Indians was right; independence bred disaster. I’m sorry, but it’s true, they shouldn’t have kicked them out.”
“Why, thank you,” Hilary said, taking credit for centuries of colonialism in one go. Meanwhile, Rachel’s face had drained of blood. She imagined what her friends at home would say about this, all this pro-colonial affirmation.
“Tell you what. Just cook some meat in the house, and watch how fast she runs home to Kolkata,” Fiza said, her eyes lit up maliciously.
“Serve it to her!” Betty chimed in, giggling.
“I don’t think that would be very . . . I just . . . I couldn’t do that,” Rachel said, feeling at a total loss.
“She’s fighting you for control of her son,” Tina said with authority. “That’s what they do. That’s what my mummy does daily. They just don’t think women are real people, they are extensions of men. Even the women think this way. She wants to make sure she has power through her boy, and you need to make sure you keep it in your corner. It’s a power play.”
“I mean, well—I think she left her husband to feel more like her own person. Don’t you?” Rachel said, looking around. Everyone was shaking their heads, looking at Rachel like she was a sweet but stupid child.
“It sounds like she just wants to cause problems. Maybe she wants money. That’s all most of them care about, really. Money, gold, nice saris, designer bags. I came back from the States and I had brought my mother-in-law a branded bag, a good brand, but one she didn’t recognize, and before the end of the week the whole family knew, and I was getting texts and calls, and she locked herself up in her room and said she wouldn’t eat because she wasn’t loved. My husband went to Dubai just to get her what she wanted,” Tina said, gesturing for the check.
“I mean, Swati isn’t like that,” Rachel said. Her heart was beating fast.
“Honey, they are all like that. They don’t know another way to be. They haven’t been taught to think, so they don’t. They say they’ve had such hard lives, but do they ever try to be anything different? They want this. They expect to be taken care of, all of them. It’s a national problem, but India basically just makes women into gold diggers. Why do you think they want to marry us? We are different. We’re fresh air!” Tina said, her voice rich with self-congratulatory confidence.
Rachel looked around the table again, at all these women who didn’t work, didn’t do anything, had copious helpers and servants to manage their homes and take care of their children, and felt sick. Their empathy toward her had turned into nastiness toward Swati, and Rachel suddenly felt intense guilt. Swati might have been making her life painful, but she was a good person. She had embraced her foreign daughter-in-law, she didn’t make her feel other; instead, she had told Rachel she was her inspiration. That must have been so hard here, where marriage was everything. Look at how these women, too, defined themselves this way. They were all wives, not married women but wives, the wife of someone. So was she. They lived in this country, but they looked upon it as lesser than them. And don’t you? a voice in her head whispered, drunk on cheap wine and speaking truths.
She saw, suddenly, that these women were a mirror of herself and hated her own image in their faces.
“I don’t think my mother-in-law is like that. I just think she doesn’t know another way to be and that’s not her fault.” Rachel’s voice went up at the end, sharpened with emotion. The women all leaned back slightly.
“If you say so,” Niko said. “But she sounds like a real bitch.”
The choice was there for Rachel, she knew. She could agree, out loud or in her heart, and make Swati the enemy. She could see her, and India, as wrong, backward, bad. Or she could make a choice to open herself, her mind, and try to understand the woman who had invaded her home. Try to understand why she wanted a cook, why she used a thousand things to make tea, why she had left her husband in the first place. Swati had made her choices. It was time for Rachel to make hers.
Walking down the street, albeit a bit unsteadily, the sangria still seeping through her system, Rachel tried to quell her discomfort with slow, steady breaths. She had left on decent terms, she thought, covering her feelings with smiles and agreements to meet again soon, but she felt more alone than ever. She felt worn out and used up and sad. She was also annoyed. She had come to vent, to share, to laugh, and instead, she had ended up feeling alienated by the people who she’d hoped would be allies. But their attitudes, their confident prejudices, their dismissal of an entire nation’s women, it had just seemed so awful. She had come to feel a part of a group and left feeling like the greatest of outsiders. If she didn’t fit in with them, and she didn’t fit in with Swati, with Indians, then where the hell was she going to fit? How would this ever feel like home?
She checked her phone, realizing that she hadn’t for hours. She wondered if Swati had called with an apology, an explanation, or if Dhruv by chance had tried her back. He would have landed in Kolkata by now, and she wondered if he was going into the office or home first. He had told her he was hoping to avoid his father as much as possible, which made no sense to her; how would that help anything?
Instead of a message from her husband, though, all she saw was a message from Richard. Part of her groaned, but she remembered that he had said he might have some kind of work for her, which must be time sensitive, if he was contacting her so soon.
Have you ever done any voice-over work? Call me.
&nbs
p; She did, holding a finger in her other ear to combat the never-ending stream of honking emitting from the hordes of cabs and cars and motorcycles, and the twanging bells of the bicycles. Trying to talk on the phone on the street was an act of madness in Mumbai. Richard answered with “Namaste,” which almost made her hang up immediately. But she controlled herself and asked what this was about. It seemed that an American accent was a rather useful thing in Mumbai, although a British one would have been even better. Nevertheless, Richard told her he made the majority of his money in voice-over and dubbing work, although he had also been quick to list a series of walk-on roles he had done in Bollywood movies she had neither seen nor heard of.
Apparently work came in all the time, and he had become a de facto voice-over agent for native English speakers in India with non-Indian accents. She could be lending her voice to commercials for yoga pants and popcorn within the week, he told her. Of course, he charged a small finder’s fee, but Rachel didn’t care about that. The money wasn’t the point, a fact that made her feel guilty but exultant. As he described the work she nodded, hope fluttering in her chest. She would be happy to praise products and give voice to cartoons, whatever they needed of her. She would have something to do, something to focus on other than her own life and the woman who was taking it over, bit by bit. She would have an escape, and she would have something that could be hers. Something to tell Dhruv about, something to think about other than the confines of her own mind. She thanked Richard, sincerely, as she hung up the phone.
“Hello?” She didn’t usually hear hellos without an Indian accent, and looked up to see a white woman who seemed to be around her own age smiling at her.
“Hey! Sorry, just—this sounds awful, but are you a foreigner?” The woman spoke in British-accented English.
“Yes . . . ?” Rachel said, a bit wary. It was an odd thing to ask a stranger. The woman in front of her, though, looked quite presentable, assuaging some of Rachel’s concern. She wore a pair of slacks and a short-sleeved blouse, with a blazer stuffed into her Michael Kors tote bag, half falling out, and a pair of nice flats, slightly scuffed, on her feet.
