Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  PART FOUR

  CODA

  CHAPTER 28

  The way you date as an Indian in America can be summarized in two sentences. In the eyes of your parents, either you are too old and you should be married already. Or you are too young and you shouldn’t so much as look at another boy or girl until you are ready to get married.

  Relationships were yet another thing that made Omkar resent his culture. He found himself straddling the divide between two cultures that couldn’t be more different if they tried. In American culture, dating could be casual. Parents let their children date young and didn’t seem to intervene when they did. In Indian culture, children were not allowed to date. Most Indian kids growing up in America were simply sent off to college socially stunted. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, therefore, that many of them failed to meet someone to marry on campus. Yet it always did seem to come as a surprise. When their son or daughter would turn 26 or 27, parents would panic and take matters into their own hands. There was nothing casual in Indian culture about forming a relationship with the opposite sex. The entire thing was a carefully orchestrated arrangement, which for the most part was conducted by parents. And marriage was considered to be the most important part of a person’s life.

  Omkar’s parents had met on their wedding day. Their parents had selected them as a match for each other with the idea that it would be the best thing for both of them. Like the vast majority of marriages in India, theirs was an arranged marriage. It had been several days of pre- and post-wedding ceremonies and parties. Now they fully believed that the blessings they had sought from God when they bowed before the holy script had been granted. Theirs was a happy marriage. Time had seen them grow to love one another.

  It was a fact that Jarminder reminded Omkar of daily. “Our marriages are much more successful than those of the Westerners, Omkar,” she would say. “Parents have lived longer, we know how the world really works. So we will make a better decision.”

  It always made Omkar queasy when she said it. Not because he disagreed with her entirely. In fact, Omkar was not against the idea of having a wife chosen for him, provided that he could meet her enough times beforehand to decide if he liked her or not. What scared Omkar was that he had liked girls before, none of whom met the criteria his parents had so clearly set out. He lived in desperate fear that one day he might fall in love with a woman to whom they would not consent … To find himself caught between the sense of duty he felt toward his parents’ happiness as well as the approval he so needed from them, and a woman his heart could not give up for either of those things.

  Omkar had not been allowed to date. His parents were afraid of him marrying a girl from another culture and they had not been the kind to hope that he would meet a nice Indian girl at college. Because they no longer lived in India, the pool of suitable matches for Omkar was small. They were looking for a girl who came from the same religion, caste and subculture. They wanted her physical appearance and her educational and/or professional accolades to be impressive.

  Being in America, they had no large community of girls whose parents they knew well. They also had no matchmaker. As a result, they had toyed with the idea of taking Omkar back to India to try to find him a wife, before deciding first to turn to computers to serve the role that a matchmaker might have served before. Their plan, the minute that Omkar graduated from college and secured his first salary, was to put him on the market.

  Neeraj and Jarminder had persuaded Omkar to cooperate in helping them to create a Bio Data profile on him. They were doctoring it and tempering their impatience by sending it to a few people they knew in the hopes that the day wouldn’t come where he would graduate and they would have to cast it out to a wider audience of families they didn’t know.

  A Bio Data was rather like a job application, except it contained all kinds of details about the color of Omkar’s skin tone, his star sign, religion, caste, hobbies, education, achievements and the details of what kind of female the family would prefer. His mother had designed it like the menu of an Indian restaurant, complete with a peacock feather and a reddish orange backdrop. He had just managed to squeak by without putting a turban on for the picture of himself on the upper right side.

  Omkar had done with Aria what most Indian boys did when they found themselves in love with a white girl: he had said nothing to anyone about her. He had snuck her into the folds of his life. He had hidden their romance under the disguise of late-night study groups and errands he needed to run for the sake of maintaining the upstanding reputation that he held in his parents’ eyes. But all that was about to come crashing down around Omkar’s feet.

  Neeraj walked from his bed to the bathroom, leaving Jarminder asleep under twisted covers. Not yet awake, his aging body felt stiff. There was so much less energy there to motivate his movement than there had been years before. His grogginess dulled the crispness of the way things looked. When he went to sit down on the rim of the toilet seat, he pushed his hair out of his face. It fell to the middle of his back. He scoffed with irritation, noticing that only remnants of toilet paper were stuck to the cardboard roll. Jarminder had finished the roll of toilet paper and not replaced it. It was one of those petty irritations that he had learned, over the many years he had been married, to let slide instead of confronting her about it. He stood back up and searched the cupboards for another roll. Another wave of frustration hit him and he muttered to himself, realizing that he would have to go downstairs to the storeroom to get another roll. He put his bathroom robe on and made heavy footsteps walking past Jarminder. It was a passive-aggressive attempt to make her feel guilty for the fact that he would have to go all the way downstairs because of what she had failed to do. But the sound did not wake her.

  He walked down the stairs the same as he did every day. The stale air in the shop was still. He made a quick survey of a shelf whose presentation filled him with dissatisfaction before opening the door of the storeroom.

  The sound of the door opening jolted Aria awake. Both Neeraj and Aria jumped, startled by one another. A deep freeze of shame washed over Aria’s surprise while his was replaced immediately by anger. He swore in Punjabi and then switched to English. “What are you doing here? Why are you here? I recognize you. Did you steal something? I’m going to call the police.”

  Giving her no time to answer, he walked toward the phone. Aria shot to her knees and started packing her few things into her backpack. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. She felt terrible that because she had stayed there, she and Omkar’s father had started off on such a vile foot. But she couldn’t afford to stay around to try to fix it. In case the police showed up, she decided to run.

  Neeraj was in the middle of dialing on the archaic landline phone that he had insisted on keeping in the store when Aria walked past him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything, I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes lowered in shame.

  “Don’t you go anywhere. Stop. Stop where you are!” Neeraj yelled, hanging up the phone and picking up a magazine to follow her out.

  The clang of the bell on the shop door when she unlocked it woke Omkar from his sleep. At first, he thought he had dreamed the sound. The wave of terror did not crush against him until he heard his father’s voice yelling on the street outside.

  Omkar nearly bowled his mother over as the sound compelled both of them to rush down the stairs toward the conflict at the same time. He already knew what had happened before he saw either of them. He was already chastising himself for it.

  “Papa, stop. Aria, don’t go, please, both of you … Just let me explain.”

  “This girl was stealing from us. I found her in the shop. What do you want me to do?” Neeraj said, pointing the rolled-up magazine in her direction.

  “I was not stealing. I was asleep,” Aria retorted.

  Jarminder stood on the sidewalk in her satin robe, shocked and confused by the situation.

  Omkar tried to de-escalate the tension. “Papa, Mama, this is Aria. She’s
a friend of mine. We were out so late last night that I decided to have her stay here. It wasn’t her fault. If you want to blame somebody, then blame me,” Omkar pleaded.

  “You expect me to believe that you made some friend of yours sleep in the storeroom? So stupid. Just how stupid do you think we are? Why are you covering for this girl? What is she to you?” Neeraj demanded.

  Omkar tried another approach, hoping that by appealing to their compassion, he might resolve the conflict. “Look Papa, she has nowhere to go. She’s not like me. She doesn’t have a good family to go home to. Her family treats her badly. You taught me to be a man who doesn’t just stand by and let bad things happen to people. You taught me to do something about it.”

  “You are not a man, you’re a little boy. You’re a little boy who lies to his family!” Neeraj yelled. He paced up and down, suddenly aware of the embarrassing position they were all in, standing out on the street in their nightclothes.

  Jarminder appealed to Omkar in Punjabi. She told him that he should know better than to lie to his family. She told him that it was not his place to interfere in another family’s business, especially the business of an American family. She explained to him that because an American family is so different to an Indian family, he could never really know what was going on. But even as Jarminder talked, she tried to ignore the nagging feeling that some other truth lay hidden beneath his explanation. You could call it a mother’s intuition. She could feel something between Omkar and the girl now standing before them on the street. She could feel it in the carefulness her son extended toward her.

  “Omkar, go back inside. It’s time for your friend to go back home,” Neeraj said, walking back toward the door of the shop in an attempt to set an example. Omkar could feel the ghost of the truth inside him lurking in the corner of his being, howling to be heard. Each time it welled up, he pushed it deeper until he couldn’t suppress it anymore. Now facing the fate that he had been trying to avoid, Omkar found himself in a lose–lose situation. If he admitted the truth, he risked losing everything but Aria. But if he maintained the lie, he would have to continue to live it. There would never be a time in the future when they would suddenly be OK with her. The pressure of avoiding the potential consequences of them finding out had become unbearable. With an air of penitence, Omkar decided to tell the truth. His first words stopped both Neeraj and Jarminder dead.

  He turned toward his mother. “Actually, I have to tell you the truth. Aria is not just a friend. She is my girlfriend. Do you remember what you always told me, to listen to everybody but to do what I consider right? I have listened to you and Papa. I know why you think it is right for me to be with a girl who you would choose. But for me, Aria is right. I know what I am saying is going to upset you, but I can live with that. But the one thing I cannot live without is this girl.”

  Omkar walked over to Aria and pulled her by the hand toward them, as a statement of his commitment to his decision. “This is Aria Abbott. She is the girl I love.” He waited, like a soldier, for their resistance.

  Neeraj eyed Aria from top to bottom. Jarminder refused to look at her. Instead she looked Omkar straight in the eye and said, “No son of mine could make such a decision without our consent. I forbid it. I forbid this utterly and completely. You have to focus on your schooling. You are too young to know what love is, do you hear me? This can’t happen! Do you know how hard we have worked so you could have a better life – now you want to go and throw it all away on some girl?”

  “She is not some girl, Mama, she is the girl I love.”

  Jarminder turned her back on him as a demonstration of her disgust. “Do you even know her family? Do you even know what kind of girl she is? What kind of family lets their daughter spend the night at a boy’s house? We should never have brought you here. We should have stayed in India. We never thought that if we gave you a good education and all these opportunities, you would do something like this … That you would lie to us. That you would bring home a girl like this, a girl who is not one of us. A girl who does not even know our culture, who cannot speak our language, who we know nothing about.”

  She felt deafened by the death knell of the life that she had planned for her son resounding. As far as she was concerned, only hardship awaited her son if he were to take the path that he was headed down.

  “Mama, you don’t know her,” Omkar pleaded. “If you did know her, you would know that she is smart and she is beautiful and she is good and I love her.”

  Neeraj tried to find a middle ground between his wife and son. “Omkar, I know you believe you love this girl, but your mother is right. You are too young to know what love is. The game of love is slippery. And by lying to us, you have proven that you are too immature.

  “This has got to end now, Omkar. The kind of love that lasts is the kind that is slow to bloom. If love comes fast, it will disappear just as fast. Is that what you want? Do you want to throw your life away for something that will end soon anyway?”

  Omkar fumed at his parents’ blatant refusal to consider the reality of his love for Aria. As usual, the control they confused for love gave him no room to breathe.

  Aria was petrified. She was not the sort of person to stay where she wasn’t wanted, and being so obviously unwanted made her want to run as fast and far as she could. But Omkar held her tight and she let him hold her there, out of some dim hope that his parents’ sound rejection would wither. Aria had imagined that the only reason Omkar had made her sleep in the storeroom was because of his parents’ strict stance on sex; the reality now revealed made everything depressingly more clear. She said nothing, but continued to listen to them talk about her as if she weren’t there.

  “I can do nothing about it if you refuse to accept that I love this girl,” Omkar said. “But I’m disappointed in you. You have raised me to have an open mind, but now, when I ask you to have an open mind, you keep yours closed.”

  Omkar’s confidence was quickly countered by his father. “Don’t disrespect us. Don’t talk to us that way,” Neeraj yelled, puffing up his chest and turning a shoulder to Omkar as a warning. “Whose son is this? We have not raised a son to act like this and to think this way and to talk this way. We have not worked so hard to give you this life so you could wreck it. We forbid this match, Omkar. I am your father and because I am your father, I can tell you that this girl is not right for you. And I expect you to respect that. Now come inside.”

  Neeraj motioned to Jarminder, who began to follow him back inside. Omkar hesitated a second before the futility of convincing them strengthened instead of weakened his resolve. Taking a final stand, he yelled, “Alright, I can see that you don’t respect what I have said. I can see that you do not respect that I love this girl. I can see that you do not believe you have raised a son who can love this girl. So maybe I’m not your son. Maybe you will disown me. I don’t care because I do love this girl, Papa, I love her whether you accept it or not.”

  When the pause led to no compromise on either side, Omkar told Aria to wait outside. He walked past his parents and back into the store. Neeraj and Jarminder followed him, relieved. Despite his last words, they were convinced that he was going back into the store because he had given in to their reasoning. However, in the time it took them to walk back up the stairs to put the conflict entirely to rest, Omkar had dressed in the first outfit he could find. He had grabbed all the things he needed for class; he had collected his wallet and was now looking for the car keys.

  “Omkar, Mama needs you to drive her to gurdwara this morning on your way to school,” Neeraj said, walking toward his room.

  Omkar was further enraged by the way the obvious conflict was swept under the carpet of their plans for the day. He lacked the tolerance to stay there a moment longer. Keys in hand, he walked back out of his room and straight past his parents, ignoring his father’s comment. It was a disrespect that he had never shown them before. It felt both liberating and catastrophic.

  Neeraj and Jarminder were so
taken aback that by the time they yelled out after him, he had already reached the bottom of the stairs. They followed him, but by the time they got outside, Omkar had already ushered Aria into the passenger seat of his car. They watched him turn on the engine and drive away.

  The pair took to arguing when Omkar’s absence left them nothing but each other to fight against. They were angry but Jarminder quickly collapsed into tears. Her anger at Omkar’s insolence could not compare to her fear of losing the only child she had left. She felt guilty. Maybe she even doubted herself for the things she had said. The fear that Neeraj felt could not be seen, though it was there inside him too. He held himself together like he had been trained to do. He looked at the empty road where his son had been and held his wife like a stem supporting a petal that was wilting.

  The guilt that had taken over his parents affected Omkar too. After apologizing to Aria multiple times, his voice had been stripped away by it. It blew through him like white smoke, snuffing out the air in his lungs. He could feel the numbness it carried in his left hand, which gripped the steering wheel, and in his right hand, which held Aria’s. He knew that the love he felt for Aria, and his choice to be honest about it with his parents, was right. He never doubted that for a second, which was why it was so confusing to feel so wrong about doing something that felt so right. The wrongness of displeasing his parents was ingrained in him, like salt in the ocean. He could not separate himself from that indoctrination, much as he wanted to.

  Despite what his parents had projected on him, Omkar had no plans to throw his life away. He had three classes to attend before figuring out their next steps, and so, once he made sure that Aria was willing to wait on campus for him to be done for the day, he drove them both to the crowded parking lot of his college. He bought Aria a container of breakfast hash and a pudding and led her to an open space on the green lawn just outside the cafeteria. He opened the lids for her. Watching her eat made him feel settled. Omkar was afraid that the way his parents had reacted to her would make her change her mind about him. He could tell that the impact of being so harshly unacknowledged and renounced had made her withdraw inside herself. It was true; Aria had been wounded by it. But it had also been the story of her life. It was a sensation she had unintentionally become an expert at holding, being passed from temporary home to temporary home, none of which was a family.