by Teal Swan
Neeraj huffed and sat up against the headboard with his arms folded. “She is a very good girl. We like her. But why are you thinking about this at your age? Why can’t you wait until your schooling is finished? Why can’t you behave your age? I do not believe you are ready for such a thing as you are proposing,” he said.
Jarminder was uncharacteristically quiet. She stared through Omkar instead of at him. It was not the first time Omkar had mentioned that he thought of Aria as a potential wife. Having seen Omkar and Aria together, both she and Neeraj had come to terms with the possibility that they would one day be married. The strength of Neeraj’s protest surprised her because it exceeded her own.
Neeraj continued. “Omkar, marriage is not a trivial thing. It is not something that you can pick up one minute and drop the next. I do not understand why …”
Jarminder cut him off by grabbing hold of the sleeve of his nightshirt. In Punjabi, she told him to stop. She scolded him for refusing to even hear Omkar out.
Omkar’s heart leapt. He had barged into the room expecting a fight from both of them, and instead, it seemed his mother was on his side.
“Omkar, we love you very much. We want the best for you. If you want to marry this girl, you’ve got to be completely sure of it. Why can’t you give it some more time? Why can’t you wait until after you finish school?” she asked.
“Mama, I have four more years to earn my master’s degree. I am not going to wait four years to marry this girl,” Omkar shouted.
Neeraj and Jarminder were calculating the impracticality of their request, given the reality that he had spilled out on the table. “You and Papa were married when you were even younger than me,” Omkar said, hoping to trap them into being unable to invalidate him without at the same time invalidating themselves. They said nothing, but both of them were reminded just how different the reality of marriage had been to what they had expected when they found themselves in the same position that their son was in now.
“At some point, Papa and Mama, you are going to have to trust me,” he said. “You have raised me right. You have taught me right from wrong. I am capable of taking care of this girl and if you don’t believe me, I’m just going to have to prove you wrong. Love should build things, not break them. You can’t say to me that you love me and break my heart. If you love me, I am asking you to give me your blessing and help me to build a life with this girl because in my heart I know she is meant to be my wife.”
Jarminder patted the bed with her hand for Omkar to come sit by her. She placed her palm flat against his cheek with tears in her eyes. Using his nickname, she began to speak. “Jeety, I may have no right to judge you, but I have a mother’s right to worry. Aria is from a different community, a different culture, a different race. This makes marriage more difficult. But your father and I will get used to it. Everything we have done, we have done for your happiness. And if you say that your happiness is to marry this girl, then you must marry this girl.”
Omkar hugged his mother harder than he had ever hugged her before and looked toward Neeraj, whose initial resistance had been worn down by seeing Jarminder cry. “Do you swear to me that if you marry her, you are not going to drop out or do anything else stupid?” Neeraj said. “If you say that you are in love with this girl, then you cannot jeopardize your future.”
Omkar shook his head. “No, Papa, you know I want to get my degree. I swear I am not going to jeopardize my future. I couldn’t do that without jeopardizing hers as well.”
Neeraj deliberated, keeping both Omkar and Jarminder on tenterhooks. “OK. I give you my consent. But Omkar, you have made promises to me tonight. To break a promise to your father would be absolutely disgusting ya?” Omkar cracked a half-smile at his father’s threat.
Jarminder got out of bed and walked over to the closet. Realizing that she wasn’t tall enough to get to the box she was trying to reach, she asked Neeraj to get it down for her. With it in her hands, she walked back to the bed and put it down where Omkar was sitting. She opened the box to reveal a miscellany of gold jewelry. Jarminder brought the pieces out one by one. She showed him the haar and ranihaar, two of the traditional necklaces she had worn on her wedding day to Neeraj, as well as the tikka, which was an ornamental piece of wedding attire that had been draped across her forehead. Omkar played with the little string of pearls attached to it while he listened to her explain each piece.
Out of the several gold rings that were in the box, Jarminder selected one of them. “This is the ring I have promised you. It belonged to Papa’s mother. I’m going to tell you what she told your father when she gave it to him to give to me … A ring has no beginning and no end. Because of this, it is limitless. The kara you wear represents your unbreakable attachment to God. And this ring will represent her unbreakable attachment to you. With your father’s and my blessing, may your marriage be eternal.”
She hugged Omkar again and cried before she handed the ring to him. Neeraj patted him on the arm. Unlike Jarminder, his sentimentality only smoldered beneath the surface of what he would willingly show.
Omkar’s parents didn’t sleep much that night after their son left their room. They held each other and allowed themselves to be tossed between the vacillations of worry and excitement.
Omkar also found it difficult to sleep. Given that the dark could not compete with his happiness, he switched on the lamp beside his bed and examined the ring. A thin gold band joined up to a larger piece of gold that had been cut into a marquise shape and bent in order for it to conform to a finger. The gold had been carved with such detailed, symmetrical filigree that Omkar could not memorize its design. Emanating from a ruby set deep in the center, four inlays of watermelon tourmaline extended to the perimeter of the ring, like petals.
The moonless acres outside his window contained a thousand people just living their lives. None was as happy as he. Through the floor, he could feel Aria in the room below him. He could feel the tempered busyness of her sleep. Omkar could feel the seed of his youth cracking. Inside it, the stirrings of the man he was born to be.
The oil of his mother’s tears lamented the death of his childhood. Though it was daunting, he found the pressure of love’s responsibility to be divine. The summer of his life now hung on a single answer … An answer to a question that Omkar had not yet even asked.
CHAPTER 36
Six yards of royal sheen sprawled out across the bedroom. Aria had imagined a sari to be an exotically sewn garment. Instead, it was simply yards of radiant fabric.
Omkar stood in the doorway, watching Jarminder fuss over which sari to give her. She settled on one that was the color of ripe plum with gold embroidery on its edges. She handed Aria a matching blouse piece and petticoat and told her to put them on in the bathroom. When Aria returned, Jarminder kneeled on the floor in front of her, three safety pins between her teeth. She took one end of the sari and began aggressively tucking it the entire way around the waistband of the petticoat. When she had made a full circle around Aria’s waist, she took the embroidered end of the fabric and began pleating it.
Watching her hands molding the fabric, Aria felt like she was peering through a telescope across the oceans to a different time and place. Jarminder’s veins netted her hands like the consecrated, colluvium-laden waters of the Ganges; the invisible scar of patriarchy evident in the way that she moved them. With the pleated end of the fabric held firmly in her hand, she twisted it behind Aria, pulling it across her right leg and over her left shoulder. Making sure that the pleated fabric fell just below Aria’s knee level, she stood up and took one of the safety pins she had been holding between her teeth. She pierced it into the fabric on the underside of the blouse just over Aria’s collarbone, fastening it to the fabric that she had just draped across Aria’s shoulder.
Again she took hold of the fabric, this time the embroidered top edge just beneath where she had pinned it. She pulled it tight down and across Aria’s back, around her hips to the front again. Jarminder tucked
the fabric into the petticoat, rolling it toward her to expose the underside of the petticoat. She took a second safety pin from her teeth, pinning the silky fabric of the sari to the cotton of the petticoat, and re-rolled it toward Aria’s navel.
Thinking she was done, Aria moved away from her to go look into a mirror. “No, no, it isn’t ready yet,” Jarminder said, afraid that Aria would see her work before it was done. Aria stood back in front of her. Jarminder kneeled down again and gathered the loop of fabric that was now hanging in the front of the skirt and straightened it so that the edges of the loop perfectly matched. Just as she had done previously, she began pulling the fabric back and forth between her outstretched thumb and fingers, making sure the pleats she created by doing so were the same width and length. She took the final safety pin from her teeth and used it to pin the pleats together before forcefully tucking the section she had pinned into the petticoat and standing back to examine her work.
Aria felt like she had been wrapped in a sensual cocoon. The way the fabric hugged and pulled at her curves made her feel statuesque. She stepped in front of the full-length mirror hanging in Jarminder’s bedroom. Wrapped in thousands of years’ worth of tradition, Aria felt more feminine than she ever had before. Even though she didn’t have a single drop of Asian blood in her veins, it was the mystic spirituality of her own femininity that was staring back at her from the mirror.
Jarminder took Aria’s face in her hands and turned it to kiss her cheek. Jarminder had been acting strange the whole morning. Unlike usual, she had woken up before Aria could slip out the door. She had made breakfast already and insisted that Aria join them. Any coldness that had been there before seemed vanquished. On top of it, she had suddenly insisted on giving Aria one of her own saris. Aria, who couldn’t understand the sudden alteration in Jarminder’s mood, humored the sudden sentimentality without letting herself expect it to stay that way.
“You look simply incredible,” Omkar said from the doorway. Seeing Aria in the clothes that the women from his culture traditionally wore made something churn inside him. Maybe it enhanced his sense of ownership. In the Western world, own had become a dirty word when it came to other people, especially women. It meant to have complete power over someone else and to control them. But Omkar understood what many men did not: that to exert power and control over another person was the complete opposite of true ownership. “Own people,” his father had told him so many times when he had not been acting responsibly enough toward them. To Omkar, to love something was to take it as a part of himself. And doing so automatically meant it belonged with him and to him and so it was his to take responsibility for. With this kind of ownership, he could not hurt the person who belonged to him without hurting himself. He could not oppose their best interests without opposing his own. With this true ownership, the best interests of Aria were his primary concern.
Though reluctant to accept the gift that Jarminder had given her, Aria walked downstairs to her room wearing it. She unpinned the fabric and unwove it, folding it back into an untidy square. Dressing back into her common street clothes felt strangely degrading.
Omkar knocked on the door of her room and let himself in. “Hey, can you take a cab and meet me today at Griffith Park when I get off of school, around like 5:30 or six o’clock?” He put $50 down on the bed beside her.
“Jesus Christ, Omkar … I can just take the bus there. You want me to take a cab that costs fifty bucks?” she yelled.
Omkar took the money and placed it in her hands instead. “Look, can you just do it for me today, just this one day, just go along with it? It’s probably going to be rush-hour traffic and so they charge more. If not you can just keep the rest.”
Aria rolled her eyes at him. “OK, are you gonna tell me why I have to drive all the way across the city?” she asked.
“Because I have a party to go to near there. It’s kind of a cocktail party and we can bring a date to it. I want you to come as my date,” Omkar said. Aria furrowed her brow with confusion.
“OK … Well, did it occur to you that I don’t have anything to wear to something like that? Unless you want me to show up in camo pants?” she retorted.
“Good point. Here,” Omkar said, pulling another $50 bill out of his wallet and putting it in her hand as well.
“Seriously, this is ridiculous,” Aria said, trying to give it back to him.
Omkar clasped his hands around hers, trapping the bills inside of them. “Just stop now. Do this for me today, OK, please?” he asked.
Aria raised an eyebrow as a hesitant concession to his temporary insanity. He kissed her on the forehead and left the room to collect his things upstairs. Aria put the money in her pocket. Though she wanted to humor him, there was no way she was going to spend that much money on an outfit or on finding a way across the city.
Just ahead of her in the distance, buildings pierced the sky like steel daggers warning off the interfering clouds. In the hallowed halls of the city, people rushed in every direction. The spectral choir of cars on the network of freeways was muted by distance.
Aria was walking northwest in search of the first secondhand clothing store she could find. The street was littered with dollar stores and payday loan shops. A man pushing all of his tattered belongings in a shopping cart crossed the road where there was no crosswalk, without any concern for the cars on the street.
She stepped into a store whose windows were cluttered with manikins that looked like hookers. Each one was poorly fitted with cheap imported shirts or dresses. An Oriental man approached her when she opened the door. “Everything on this side for sale!” he said in broken English.
Aria nodded and walked over to a rack of dresses. She thumbed through the polyester fabric until she found her size in a white sundress, cased in sunflower print. She tried it on in a curtained alcove that the store owner was brave enough to call a dressing room. It was the first time she had worn a dress since she had run away from the Johnsons’. As jaded as she was about the world, the sunflower print made Aria feel the mirth that some people spoke of with regards to life. She liked how its warmth and innocence hugged her frame. Keeping it on, she went to the checkout counter and handed the store attendant the $50 bill. The man marked it with a pen to make sure that it wasn’t fake and, keeping just over $12, he handed Aria back the change.
Aria felt naked without her backpack as she walked down the sidewalk in her sunflower sundress and high-top sneakers, stopping to look at the window display of any store that had one. She had scanned the displays boasted by at least a dozen pawnshops before something she saw in one of them that shot a thrill straight through her. As if by divine orchestration, she recognized the metal tips of a line of tools in a little burlap case that had been unrolled so the customers could see it. Aria ran inside.
“Are those carving tools?” she asked, flustered by the ardor of her own excitement.
“Where?” the man tending the store asked.
“Over here,” she said, leading him toward the display in the window.
“Um, I don’t know, let me check,” he said, taking the tools in his hands to show them to the other man behind the counter.
Aria’s heart fluttered, seeing the man’s head nodding up and down. “Yep, they’re carving tools. They didn’t come in with a sharpener, though,” he said, walking back toward the window to put them back in the display.
“No … I’d like to buy them!” Aria said.
“OK, then come over this way,” the man said, reversing course toward the checkout counter. “That’ll be ninety-five dollars,” the man said.
Aria’s stomach sank. “I only have like eighty-eight dollars,” she said.
“I could sell ’em for ninety?”
Aria’s stomach sank even further but her sense of urgency trumped her shyness. “Dude, seriously, you don’t understand, I really only have eighty-eight dollars and I have to get these.”
The man ran his fingers over the blades, deliberating. The other man in
the store came over to where they were standing. “She’s got eighty-eight for ’em,” the first man said. The second man looked at Aria, cracking a smile most likely because of the amusement he got from how out of place it was for a girl wearing a little sundress to walk into a pawnshop and buy a wood-carving set. “OK, let her have ’em,” he said.
Aria placed every dollar and cent she had with her on the counter. The man slid the coins back toward her, taking only the bills before rolling the case back around the little tool set and putting it into a used plastic grocery-store bag. When he handed it to her, Aria looked at the clock on the wall. Trying to make it to the car lot before going to Griffith Park was cutting it close, but she had to do it.
Robert had found a tent again. When Aria peered inside it, he was napping, but the pressure of her presence startled him awake. Besides Darren, who held up a drunken peace sign when he saw her, everyone else at the lot had gone somewhere else for the day.
Aria kneeled down to place the rolled plastic bag on the floor next to Robert. “Hey, I gotta run, but I got something for you. I’m putting it right here,” she said. Robert twisted to look. “You don’t have to look at it now, just open it whenever.” She stood up to leave again.
Robert watched her shadow bounce across the outside of the tent as she ran off. She was already long gone by the time he managed to sit himself up and look inside the bag. When he unrolled the burlap case, an overwhelmed smile spread across his face. He thumbed the grain of the wood handles, whose previous owner had loved them glossless. He rolled them back up and hugged them close to his chest, lying back down again, like a child with a stuffed toy. Though Aria had disappeared before he could thank her, he closed his eyes and imagined her hearing him thank her anyway.
