The World We Found

by Thrity Umrigar

  Why had she been stupid enough to leave Iqbal a note? A dangerous pity had made her do so, the thought of him coming to an empty house and no explanation too bleak for her to bear. When she’d spotted Iqbal at the airport, her first thought was that Mumtaz had betrayed her after all. But already she knew better. Sweet, guileless Mumtaz. How could she have been suspicious of Mumtaz, of all people? If anything, she had betrayed Mumtaz. Would she ever understand? How would she react when she found out that her sister-in-law had flown forever, that she was never returning to her cage? She hoped Mumtaz would heed her advice and never confess her role to Iqbal.

  Nishta looked down at her hands and for an instant imagined that she saw claws instead of fingers. Was she really this strong? This tough? To deceive not just her husband, but the woman who had been a younger sister to her, who had risked her relations with her entire family, to help her? To use Armaiti’s illness as a ladder with which to climb out of the dark pit her life had become? Could a woman, a human being, turn her back on so much, give up everything that once belonged to her and that she once belonged to—husband, parents, in-laws, home, city, country—and still be called human? Or was there another category for people like her, would she suddenly sprout fangs and horns, would she be consigned to a new category of beast, another species—rudderless, rootless, homeless, stateless? How many metamorphoses must she still go through? First Nishta, then Zoha, and still it wasn’t enough? Was her evolution still unfinished? Who else must she become? Who else would she become?

  She shivered again. But just once. She realized she had been holding her bladder and now she let go and peed. And as she peed, she felt warmth seep back into her body. As the shaking stopped, it felt as if her body, its true shape, was being returned to her. This is the last time I’ll be peeing on Indian soil, she thought, suddenly, implausibly, and the realization was accompanied by a sadness sharp as glass and an excitement bright as a diamond. Yes, it would be hard, building a new life in a new place. Who knew if she would succeed, who knew whether she would ultimately regret what she was throwing away? But one thing she knew for certain: it would be her life. The failures, the regrets, the successes, the joys—they would be her own. It would be her name on her life, from now on.

  She flushed the toilet and came out and rubbed her hands vigorously at the cracked porcelain sink. She had her hand on the outer door of the restroom, ready to rejoin Kavita and Laleh, when she remembered something. She turned around and went back in toward the stalls.

  “Life happened,” Kavita concluded and Laleh opened her mouth to argue, to protest that Kavita’s answer was too easy, not sufficiently critical of the social forces that ground human beings into the dust, when a figure moving toward them caught her eye.

  It was Nishta. She was wearing a red T-shirt and blue denim pants. The outfit was poorly tailored and Laleh noticed that Nishta’s soft belly jiggled through the thin cloth of the T-shirt as she moved. But what took Laleh’s breath away was Nishta’s hair. It fell like a thick, dark waterfall down her face until it stopped, at her upper back. Even as she watched, Nishta was reaching up to gather her hair into a ponytail. There was something unfamiliar—and heartbreakingly familiar—about the gesture.

  Beside her, she heard Kavita breathe a soft “Oh my.”

  Both of them rose involuntarily as Nishta reached them. Laleh cocked her head, a bemused look on her face. “No more burkha?” she said.

  “No more burkha,” Nishta answered. Her voice was expressionless but her face looked as if it were made of liquid wax, melting and freezing and melting again from multiple, contradictory emotions.

  “How do you feel?”

  Nishta thought for a moment. “Naked . . . exposed . . . scared. And free.”

  Laleh smiled deeply, looking into Nishta’s eyes. “What’d you do with it?”

  Nishta’s eyes shone. “I dumped it. Into a dustbin in the bathroom.”

  The dustbin of history, Laleh thought. Some things deserved to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

  A half hour later they are boarding the plane. They are traveling business class—Adish had bought Nishta’s ticket, refusing to hear about Mumtaz paying for it. They settle into their seats and almost immediately, it seems, the stewardess offers them a drink. Kavita orders a gin and tonic—earlier, she has confessed to being an uneasy flyer, a fact that Nishta finds oddly gratifying—while the other two sip on orange juice.

  They hear and feel the rumble of the plane’s engines. Laleh tries Adish’s cell phone one more time but there is no answer. Nishta longs to borrow the phone, wanting to check in on Mumtaz, but something makes her hesitate. She is afraid of what she might find out. So she tells herself that she has to start practicing letting go right now, from inside this giant steel beehive, from this place that is already both India and not-India. She looks out the small window into the blackness of the night outside, and realizes she has already begun her new life. Her body will simply have to catch up with its new reality, her brain will have to learn to selectively remember and not remember.

  Beside her, Laleh glances at her wristwatch. “Half-hour late, already,” she mutters. “Guess we’re on Bombay time.”

  Kavita speaks as she chews on a piece of ice. “I don’t care. Just as long as we make up the time. I’m so anxious to see Armaiti, I could fly this plane myself.”

  “She coming to the airport?”

  “Can’t say. Diane said it would all depend on how she feels.” Kavita has been talking to Diane almost daily the past two weeks.

  The plane’s doors slam shut a few minutes later. Nishta experiments with the buttons on her seat, raises and lowers the leg rest. She thinks of Armaiti waiting for them at the other end of this journey, willing them toward her, across oceans and mountains, reeling them in like a kite. She contemplates for a second how much lovelier this trip would be if they were going to America for a happy occasion—Diane getting married, say—but then yanks her mind back from its path of sentimentality and wistfulness. She is suddenly, profoundly, tearfully grateful to Armaiti for the invitation, for thinking of them, her, for wanting them, her, the gift of them, as her dying wish. It is enough that Armaiti is waiting for them at the other end. It is enough that she is still alive.

  Already she is feeling herself become a nomad, a vagabond, a ghost occupying a no-man’s-land. I could live here forever, she thinks, on this giant ship in the sky. The cold synthetic air, the impersonal buttons and lights, the regimented routine of eat-drink-sleep, the anonymous feeling of sharing a flying house with hundreds of strangers, it all agrees with her, she discovers. She tells herself to remember this feeling, the ease with which she is slipping into a new fate. It is evidence of her toughness, a toughness that she will need to wear like a bulletproof vest in the months to come.

  The sound of the engines rises to a shriek-like pitch. The screen in front of her features a pretty woman telling her about floatation devices and oxygen masks. Nishta stifles a laugh. Where were you and your safety instructions during my married life? she asks the woman on the screen. The past few weeks? That’s when I needed rescuing.

  But she was, wasn’t she? Rescued, that is. Whisked away from her life, from this city of a million memories that is now receding furiously behind her as the jet tears down the runway, as if the plane wants to escape the past as much as she does. Lifted, she was, like a teacup, and placed into this flying saucer. She grimaces at the pun.

  They are climbing now, into the night sky, and the lights of Bombay look like a weak constellation of stars. She wants to blow them a kiss—or, more precisely, she wants to blow them out, suck in her breath, make a wish, and then blow out those lights, as she trades the known world in for the unknown.

  She looks down until the thick cloud cover snuffs out every light below. Bombay, the city where she was loved and where she loved, is no more. She looks out for another moment and then leans back in her seat. She takes Laleh’s hand in hers.

  I am here, she thinks. We are he
re. We are all here.

  Acknowledgments

  Deep gratitude and thanks to the following, who light my path every day:

  Noshir and Homai Umrigar, Eustathea Kavouras, Gulshan and Rointon Andhyarujina, Roshni and Dhunji Dastur, Judy and Kershasp Pundole, Diana Bilimoria, Kim Conidi, Barb Guthrie, Barb Miller, Noreen Chambers, Perveen Freeland, Hutokshi Rustomfram, Anne Reid, Wendy Langenderfer, Arkady and Natasha Lerner, Cyndi Howard, and Barb Hipsman.

  A blown kiss to those who have left this world, but not my heart:

  Ketty, Jeroo and Jamshed Umrigar, Harriet Kavouras, and Mani Chandaru.

  Hugs and kitty kisses to Kulfi and Baklava, for curling in my lap and keeping me company on days when the writing was slow.

  For the children in my life—Feroza Freeland, Anna Lerner, Bini Iranpur, Sara, Abbey, and Elizabeth Florian, Madison, Thomas, and Quinton Likosar, and Maime and Josie Blados—you reassure me that the world will remain a beautiful place in your capable hands.

  This book benefited greatly from the input of Dr. David Peereboom, oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic’s Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center. Thanks to Phillip Canuto for introducing me to Dr. Peereboom.

  Thank you, Sarah Willis, for reading the book in manuscript form. Thank you, “Pen Gals,” for reminding me that writing is holy work. Thanks to Luis Alberto Urrea, whose definition of “the trembling ones” inspires my work.

  A special thanks to Claire Wachtel, Marly Rusoff, Michael Morrison, and Jonathan Burnham who make everything possible. A shout-out to the folks at HarperCollins, for their talent and hard work. Thanks to my colleagues at Case Western Reserve University, whose brilliance, good humor, and camaraderie I cherish.

  About the Author

  THRITY UMRIGAR is the author of four previous novels—The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for nearly twenty years, she is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and of the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize, and a 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

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  Also by Thrity Umrigar

  Fiction

  The Weight of Heaven

  If Today Be Sweet

  The Space Between Us

  Bombay Time

  Nonfiction

  First Darling of the Morning

  Credits

  Jacket photograph © Getty Images

  Textured background © Alamy

  Jacket design by Christine Van Bree

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE WORLD WE FOUND. Copyright © 2012 by Thrity Umrigar. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062098078

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