“Don’t be silly,” she said gruffly, putting her arm across Armaiti’s shoulder. They walked down the street this way, much as they had done since childhood. “I hope you go to America. And I hope you find whatever you are seeking over there.”
The tears were rolling down Laleh’s cheeks as she sat at a traffic light, and she was glad for the Maruti’s tinted windows. She turned on the CD player and the second verse of “The Boxer” came on. As always, the forlorn lines made her imagine what Armaiti must have felt like when she’d first arrived in America. How friendless, how scared and lonely Armaiti must’ve been during those first months in America.
Lai la lai
Lai la lai la la la lai
Lai la lai
Laleh was driving fast now, flying past the old Art Deco buildings and overtaking the other cars. The rolled-up windows and the soft whir of the air conditioner muted the honks of the vehicles that she passed. She turned the stereo up even louder, so that the music fell on her like a heavy rain. The day’s last sun drew its streaks of scarlet across the sky. Laleh’s heart felt like a building about to collapse under the weight of the emotions she felt.
I am leaving,
I am leaving,
But the fighter still remains . . .
She and Armaiti used to sing the last verse at the top of their lungs. The lyrics to “The Boxer” were burnt into her soul, were part of her DNA, and after all these years they still got to her, a testimonial to a battered, bruised resilience that she was beginning to understand better and better the older she got. It was a wonder that they had loved this song so much in their teenage years—what part of it could have possibly spoken to them? How could two fifteen-, sixteen-, and then seventeen-year-old girls have understood the quiet resignation, the tentative pride, the longing for home, that lay at the heart of this song? After Armaiti had left for America, Laleh would think of her when she heard the lines about the bleeding New York City winters and the pocketful of mumbles, and worry about her friend. But today, in the car, she heard the song differently, and thought of Armaiti in a new way, as a survivor—But the fighter still remains—hanging on, waiting for them to reach her.
The song reached its soaring climax, the lyrics giving way to the Lai La Lai’s, a rising tidal wave of sound that gave the song its anthem-like power. Laleh imagined it—the two of them, Armaiti and her, and then a whole generation, soaring, transported, being lifted on the shoulders of those Lai La Lai’s, marching together, resisting, fighting back, defying death together. Her melancholy was so pure and acute it tipped over and became joy.
Her hand reached involuntarily for her cell phone, even as she eyed the clock on the dashboard. Eight-fifteen. Which meant it was ten forty-five in the morning where Armaiti was. Her right hand was dialing Armaiti’s number even before she had completed the mental calculation.
“Hello?” Armaiti’s voice was husky, as if she was still asleep.
“I’m so sorry,” Laleh said, “Did I wake you?”
“For you, Lal, I’ll wake up even from the dead.”
There was a short, brittle silence as they both digested what Armaiti had said, and then, to Laleh’s relief, she heard Armaiti’s characteristic giggle. “Sorry. That was a bad joke.”
Laleh smiled through the lump that was forming in her throat. “Only you, Armaiti.”
“So. All packed? Where are you?”
Laleh groaned. “Not even close. I’ve left it until the morning. I’m at Marine Drive,” she added as she spotted a red Honda City pulling out of a parking space and eased up behind it.
“Marine Drive.” Even over the miles, she could hear the wistfulness in Armaiti’s voice. “The Queen’s Necklace. Is it as beautiful as I remember it?”
Laleh’s eyes shone with tears. “Imagination is always better than reality, right?” she murmured.
“Is Adish with you?” Armaiti asked.
“No. I just came by myself.” She hesitated, her reasons for this sudden pilgrimage to the sea a little unclear even to her. “I just needed . . . time to think. Alone.”
“What’s wrong?” Armaiti said immediately and Laleh smiled to herself. Has anyone ever known me as well as Armaiti? she wondered and then felt a twinge of guilt at what she imagined was a betrayal of Adish.
“Hey, talk to me. What’s on your mind?” Armaiti’s voice was urgent in her ear.
“Oh, we had an argument this morning,” Laleh said. “Adish and I.”
“About your coming?”
“No. Not at all.” She hesitated again, questioning her own motives, wondering why she was telling Armaiti this. “He was upset because I—I feel responsible for your illness.” Now that she’d said the words out loud, Laleh could hear how foolish they sounded.
Armaiti made a sound that could’ve been a chortle. “How? What do you mean?”
“Well, I thought—maybe the concussion you suffered from the laathi charge may have somehow caused the tumor?” Cringing as she said it.
Armaiti laughed. “Oh my God, I’d forgotten about that. Laleh, don’t be stupid. That was decades ago. And my mother died of cancer, remember? If you want to blame anything, blame my lousy genes.”
Laleh felt her body go limp with relief. Armaiti didn’t even remember. “I know. I’m an idiot. Adish has been saying the same thing—that I was being absurd.”
“Lal. Darling.” Armaiti sighed so mightily it felt like a gust of wind in Laleh’s ear. “Can I say something? One thing I’ve learned is, none of this matters. Honest.”
Laleh switched hands. She had been pressing the phone so tightly to her right ear that it was throbbing with pain. “What do you mean?” she said.
“Lal, when I was in Florida, I felt like I finally understood something.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, it’s very silly, really. The kind of hackneyed, dime-store wisdom that you’re supposed to get when you’re . . . dying.”
“So tell me.”
“I divorced Richard five years ago because he had an affair,” Armaiti said. There was a flatness to her voice that Laleh had never heard before, as if she were reading lines from a book. “I never told you this, right? I was too embarrassed, as if his cheating on me was my fault. But guess what, Lal? Turns out Richard is the one who has done more for me these past months than anyone else—not counting Diane, of course. So all I’m saying is, everything that seems so important—our quarrels, or philosophical differences—in the end, it doesn’t matter much. You know? In the end, what matters is what remains.”
“I can’t wait to meet Diane,” Laleh said. “If she’s anything like you, I will love her . . .” She corrected herself. “I will love her, anyway.”
“She’s so excited to meet you. She’s even volunteered to help me cook a full Parsi dinner for all of you.”
“Armaiti. Don’t you go exerting yourself. The last thing you should do is cook for us. We will do all the cooking and cleaning after we land there.”
Armaiti’s voice was as innocent as a child on Christmas morning. “Well, I was thinking of making a few of my mother’s recipes. Remember my mom’s fried fish? And her sali murghi? You used to love it.”
Laleh groaned. “You’re a bitch.”
“Listen, you idiot,” Armaiti said. “If you think I’m not going to cook for my best friends who I haven’t seen in donkey’s years, you have another thing coming.”
“Two more days,” Laleh said with wonder, “and we’ll all be together.”
“Come to us safely.”
Laleh sat in the Maruti for a few minutes after hanging up the phone, going over the conversation. What had Armaiti said? In the end, what matters is what remains. A picture of Adish’s dimpled face rose before her eyes and she felt her chest tighten with love. How much good fortune had been strewn her way, starting with a man who still put up with her crankiness and irrationalities, who stayed loyal and devoted to her, as if she were the flag of his country. How absurd that she would bring even a dollop of gr
ief into Adish’s life. Really, she should be genuflecting with every step, giving thanks for all the riches in her life.
She gripped the bag holding the garland of flowers, opened the car door, and stepped onto the sidewalk. The sky was dark now and so was the sea as it crashed against the boulders. Laleh sat on the concrete ledge and swung her legs around so that she faced the water. She removed the garland from the newspaper bag and looked quickly to her left and right. Although flowers were biodegradable, she still felt a tremor of guilt at what she was about to do. Last year, while at the seaside with Adish, she had chased after a man she had caught tossing a plastic bag full of garbage into the water. The poor man, a servant in one of the nearby apartment buildings, had cowered as she’d lectured him about the ecology of the sea and then explained that he was merely obeying the orders of his mistress. Laleh had entertained the thought of marching up to the woman’s apartment to deliver the same lecture when Adish had caught up with her and talked her out of it.
Now she cast a quick look around her, then whirled the garland over her head like a lasso before releasing it. It flew over the boulders, the white of the jasmine gleaming against the dark, and then landed in the water. “For you, Armaiti,” Laleh said to herself. “A prayer for you. For a miracle to happen. For another ten, twenty years.” This had been her original prayer, the purpose of her trip tonight, but now, fresh from her conversation with Armaiti, she added another: “If not health, if not long years, then peace. And here’s a prayer for Diane. For our children. For all our children.”
Her thoughts were hot and inchoate as she felt the pinpricks of withheld grief across her face. And finally, rising like a whale from the murky waters of her sorrow, another prayer. “Forgive me,” she pleaded to Armaiti and then realized that since Armaiti had never blamed her for anything, there was nothing to forgive. The only person who had ever held a moment of youthful weakness against her, who had ever woven that moment into a lash with which she had bloodied herself, was herself. She narrowed her eyes to follow the movement of the garland as it floated on the water, and as she did so, the first of her tears fell onto her cheeks. “I forgive you,” she whispered to that idealistic but frightened girl from so long ago. “I forgive you.”
Chapter 23
Flowers. She wanted to buy enough to fill each room of the house with dozens of bouquets. Armaiti knew it would come across as ostentatious, that her friends might be a little shocked by such extravagance, but she couldn’t help herself. This was the last party she would probably ever throw, and she wanted it all—flowers and candles, good wine and food. Last night she had pulled out the old notebook in which her mother had painstakingly written down all her recipes in the months after she had left India for Harvard. She and Diane were going to revive several of those recipes for a feast the evening their guests arrived. Richard had suggested that they order in from Maharaja but she had refused. “I’m cooking,” she’d said flatly. “No matter what.”
It had given her something to look forward to these past few days, which had not been good ones. The blurry vision was now a fact of life. It was strange how quickly she was accepting each new insult that her body offered up. When she went out, she now used the motorized wheelchair that Richard had rented immediately upon their return from Florida. She was just so grateful to still be mobile, given how grim the doctor in the emergency room at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville had looked when Diane had taken her in after the episode at the beach. Since then, she had relinquished much of her care to Diane and Richard, and the strange part was, she didn’t mind it so much. The physical fatigue that was always present had blurred into mental exhaustion—she was tired of fighting her family. Instead, a quiet resignation had taken over. She recognized that everything they suggested came from a desire to protect her, to prolong her life by keeping her safe and healthy. She had once been a young mother herself and understood a thing or two about wanting to protect those you loved—even if that love occasionally felt like handcuffs. So be it. Since Florida, she had said those three words to herself over and over again: So be it. Thy will be done. She was through with fighting Richard, hurting Diane, asserting her will against theirs. They loved her. That was the only truth that mattered.
Plus, there was now one major imperative—she had to be in respectable shape when the others arrived. Diane, Richard, and she had come to an unspoken truce—she would follow their commands about everything that pertained to her health. In exchange, she alone would make decisions about the upcoming visit. This was her last hurrah, and father and daughter seemed to understand this. “It’s okay, Dad,” Diane had interjected when Richard had insisted that Armaiti not exert herself by cooking. “I can help Mom with all the actual work. She’ll just have to supervise.”
But before they could start shopping for food, they had to buy flowers. She wanted her guests to walk into a house that looked and smelled like paradise. They would be exhausted after their twenty-hour flight and the flowers would revive them. Sunflowers, Armaiti thought, as she moved around in her wheelchair at Whole Foods. Lots of sunflowers. And roses, of course. The hydrangeas she would clip from her garden. Oh, if only the three of them had come in the spring. How to possibly convey to them the scent from the rows of lilacs that bloomed in her yard? Armaiti reached out unsteadily for yet another bouquet. “Take it easy, Mom,” gasped Diane, who was pushing a cart that was already half full. “You know we’ve already ordered a dozen bouquets from Costco for tomorrow. We don’t even have vases for all the new ones you’re buying.”
Armaiti frowned. “So? We’ll just buy some cheap ones from the Dollar Store. I want at least five bouquets in each of their bedrooms.”
“They won’t even have room for their suitcases. Besides, somebody might be allergic, you know?”
Armaiti tossed back her head and laughed. “Allergic? Darling, no one in India is allergic to anything. Just breathing that foul Bombay air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. You think a few flowers will bother them? I tell you, we Americans have become so soft and . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, and all Indians have cast-iron stomachs. And amazing immune systems. I know. Jeez.”
She smacked her daughter’s hand playfully. “Getting too big for your britches, Di,” she said.
Ten minutes later, they left the flower section, ignoring the incredulous looks the other shoppers were casting at Diane’s overflowing cart. “I want to pick up some cheese,” Armaiti said.
“There’s no room in the cart.”
“Okay. Go get me a basket. I can balance it on my lap.”
“I don’t want you to exert yourself, Mom.”
“Diane.” Armaiti stopped her chair in the middle of an aisle. “I want you to listen to me now. The next few days, I’m going to forget that I’m sick. Okay? At least, as much as my body will allow me to. I . . . these might be . . . I just want to have fun with my friends, okay? And if the price for that is a little bit more fatigue or dizziness or whatever, well, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.” She could see she was upsetting Diane and so she softened her tone. “I know you mean well, darling. But, please—let go a bit? Please try?”
Diane gave her a rueful smile. “Okay. But I want you to be healthy for when they get here.”
“Me, too, darling. There’s nothing I want more. Now, come on, look at the list. What else do we need?”
Laleh had just finished zipping the red suitcase when Adish came into the bedroom. “All packed?” he asked Laleh. “Bags ready to be taken downstairs? I want to load the van early. That way, no last-minute tension.”
“Yup. Have you called for the watchman to carry them down?”
“What do we need the guy for? Farhad can take one and I’ll take the other. Plus your carry-on.”
“You’re forgetting the bag I’m carrying for Nishta. She won’t have any clothes of her own.”
“Shit. I did forget about her suitcase.” Adish groaned. “Okay, Nishta’s suitcase makes sense. But you’re onl
y going for three weeks. How much stuff do you need to carry?”
“Well, who forced me to carry a marble Taj Mahal replica for Richard? The bloody thing weighs at least fifteen kilos, I swear. What’s Richard going to do with it?”
“He’ll love it. You’re going to be guests in their house, Lal. You have to take some gifts, no?”
Farhad ambled toward their room and stood leaning in the doorway. “Bags ready?” he asked.
“In a minute.” Lal turned back to Adish. “Well, at least one of the bags is over the twenty-two-kilo limit, thanks to your bloody statue.”
He shrugged. “Try and talk them into letting it go. Or pay the fine, what else?” He glanced at his watch. “We better leave a half hour earlier than planned. There might be traffic on the way to Nishta’s.” He unzipped her overnight bag. “How much room do you have in here?”
“Why? I still have to put some books in there.”
“Forget it. I need the space. I ordered a bunch of mithai for Armaiti. Jalebis, suterfeni, halva. We have to stop on the way to pick it up. And all that has to go into your carry-on.”
“Adish, are you mad? We don’t even know if Armaiti still likes those sweets. Or whether she can eat them.”
He smiled at her indulgently. “She will. Trust me.” He shushed her by holding two fingers to her lips. “Lal. I haven’t sent anything for Armaiti. Just indulge me.”
“You have your passport?” Mumtaz asked for the third time and nodded when Nishta pointed silently to her handbag. “Good,” she said nervously and then got up from the couch. “Oh. I almost forgot,” she said and opened her own purse. She took out a bundle of notes that had been folded over and secured with a rubber band. “This is for you, bhabi,” she said. “For spending in America.”
Nishta gasped. “I can’t. How . . . how did you get this? It’s dollars, yes?”
“I have a friend whose husband travels a lot. Bought from him.”
Nishta’s eyes widened with fear. “Did you tell them about me?”
Mumtaz shook her head vehemently. “No, Zoha, of course not. I told them it was for a friend. And don’t worry, they don’t even know I have a brother.” She held out the bundle again. “Take it. You will need some money there.”
The World We Found Page 21
