by Mira Jacob
“The kids would like to say goodbye,” Thomas said, and if she heard him, it did not change her position. Akhil was the first to go to her, leaning quickly over to kiss her cheek and then standing back. Amina did the same, running back to the bedroom doorway when she was done.
“Amma.” Thomas kneeled next to his mother.
Kamala joined him and had barely leaned forward when Ammachy’s hand shot out of the covers, snapping across her cheek hard. For a few seconds there was a terrible soundlessness, the round shock that left Kamala clutching her face. Then she put down her hand, exposing a red welt, and everyone began yelling.
“Ma!” Amina cried.
“You bitch!” Akhil exploded, lunging at Ammachy. “You fucking bitch!”
“Akhil!” Thomas caught him with quick arms.
“What? It’s true! Mom is so nice to her all the time, and why? So she can hear about how she’s too dark to matter? So she can get hit?”
“Calm down.”
“And you! The only thing Ammachy ever does is make you feel like shit! She doesn’t deserve you!” Akhil’s voice broke. “She doesn’t deserve any of us!”
Thomas tightened his forearms across Akhil’s chest and then began to whisper sternly, tenderly. It’s okay, Amina saw more than heard; you’re okay, we’re okay, until the whites of Akhil’s eyes stopped slashing furiously around the room, until he stopped struggling and just stood there, panting heavily, looking like he was going to cry.
“I need you to take your mother to the car. Can you do that for me?” Thomas asked, and Akhil bent to put his arm around Kamala, who was already rising on jittering legs. They left the room together. Thomas waited until their footsteps grew soft before turning back to Ammachy.
“You,” he said, his voice murderously low, and Amina crouched against the wall as he began to pace. “What is wrong with you? Hitting! My God! Is there any shred of sanity left in this house?”
Ammachy glared at him.
“You think the kids will want to come back after this, Amma? You think any of us will want to—”
“Out!” Ammachy screamed. “Go if you are going!”
“You don’t even enjoy it when we’re here! Has that occurred to you? You’re so busy thinking of how it should be that you can’t even appreciate—”
“Cowards!” Ammachy roared. “Traitors! Good-for-nothings!”
Thomas’s voice rose in a rapid, angry swirl of Malayalam, pushing Amina out the bedroom door and down the hall. The last words her father said to his mother were in a language that she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to. He was still yelling as she shot out the front door.
“What happened?” Divya cried, and Kamala, already ducking into the car with Akhil, said nothing. The servant girls stared openmouthed, Babu paced, and Preetham pretended to polish the steering wheel. Mary-the-Cook spat something on the ground, hands on hips, but even she took a few paces back as Thomas came barreling out of the house a few seconds later, his eyes wild and dark.
“Goodbye,” he said, nodding curtly to his brother.
“Thomas, please!” Sunil said, but Thomas was already behind Amina, pushing her toward the car door. She scrambled into the backseat with her mother and brother as Babu unlatched the heavy steel gate to the main road and waved the car through.
“Are you okay?” Thomas reached for Kamala’s face, but she leaned as far away from him as possible, her eyes turned to the road.
“Coward! You’re as bad as she is!” Sunil shouted at Thomas through the window. He ran after the car, banging the flat of his palm on the trunk. “You wait. Your own children will leave you and never come back!”
And then they were out, on the other side of the Wall and rolling back down the dusty road, past the beggar children, down to the train station, where the Kanyakumari Express would take them to Kovalam Beach. For three whole days, they would stay in a resort built for rich Europeans. Akhil and Amina would eat pizza and French fries and begin to fight again without the fear of their grandmother to unite them. Kamala and Thomas would exchange pleasantries and logistics, a palpable coldness taking root between them. But it was Sunil’s parting words that had done the most damage, and more than once Amina turned to find her father staring at her and her brother as though they had become unfamiliar to him already. Four years later, when Akhil died, she knew her uncle’s words were ringing in his head much louder than any consolations the minister offered.
BOOK 2
THE FALLING MAN
SEATTLE, 1998
CHAPTER 1
“I’ve got to go home Monday to see my folks,” Amina said, sliding into the wooden booth across from her cousin. Even early, it was crowded for a Thursday. She dipped her head to the cool pint Dimple had waiting, and swallowed.
“I’ve been here twenty minutes.”
“I’m sorry. I was talking to my mom.”
Dimple stared coolly at her. “You just went to see your parents last month.”
“Three months ago. And by the way, Bala Auntie wants you to call.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Amina.” Her cousin shook her head, glossy curls bouncing with candlelight. She plucked two cigarettes from the pack on the table and lit them, handing one over. “What now? You need to steam the rugs? Turn the compost?”
The last time Amina had gone home, Kamala had sent her to the roof to clean the leaves out of the rain gutters and for two days straight refused to pass on the phone, telling Dimple only, “She’s on the roof and not coming down.”
“No, it’s not that. Something is wrong.”
“Something is always wrong with your mother. What about you? What about that vacation you said you’d take?”
Amina looked around, avoiding her own reflection in the mirror behind her cousin. She hated seeing her own face right next to Dimple’s—all beak and long chin and awnings for eyebrows, where Dimple’s was a crisp, pert heart.
“Why is it so crowded in here?”
“Because the fucking Internet assholes have found the place and raised the price of everything. What happened to Bali?”
“Something is wrong with my dad.” Amina took a short drag of the cigarette as concern darkened Dimple’s face. Of all the parents, it was Thomas—who had defended her worst high school escapades and protested strenuously against her eleventh-grade exile to reform school—whom Dimple loved best.
“What do you mean? Like, sick? How come my parents haven’t called?”
“No one knows yet.”
“It’s a secret?” Dimple’s eyes widened.
“Of course not.”
“What kind of sick?”
“There’s just some … I don’t know. He’s incoherent or something. My mother says he’s talking all night.”
“Talking?”
“Telling stories.”
Amina’s cousin rolled her eyes, her face slackening. “For the last hundred years, yes. What’s the fly-home emergency?”
“My mom thinks something is wrong.” Amina swiped a stripe of condensation off her pint. “Anyway, I just want to go check in.”
“What does your dad have to say about it?”
“My mom doesn’t want me talking to him about it over the phone.”
“So he hasn’t told you anything is wrong.”
“Yes, but that isn’t the—”
“And when did you last talk to him?”
“Last week.”
“And did he seem normal?”
Amina shrugged. “I mean, it’s my dad.”
Dimple squinted as she exhaled. “It’s a trap.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s a way for Kamala to get you back home. Where she can get you married.” She pointed at Amina with her cigarette. “Before your uterus dries up.”
“Oh, Dimple, stop. She hasn’t brought up anyone in over a year.”
“Proof!”
“No, this isn’t that.”
“Why not? Because the idea of your mother making some stupid plan
without your permission is unthinkable?”
Amina took a sip of beer so she wouldn’t have to answer. Kamala had set her up with various Syrian Christian men (or, as she called them, “Potentials”) a total of twelve times. Eleven without Amina’s permission.
“Because she wouldn’t try the same bullshit over and over until it worked?”
Amina cleared her throat. “This isn’t that, I swear. And anyway, there aren’t even any good Suriani boys left, remember? She’s given up.”
“There were never any good Suriani boys. We’re a failed culture.” It was one of Dimple’s favorite theories, how thousands of years of obsession with a Christian God in a subcontinent of more dynamic religions had petrified the Syrian Christian community, turning them into what she alternately called “the stalest community on earth” or “India’s WASPs.” Amina braced for a full-on rant, but instead Dimple just blew a sharp plume of smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“I know what you’re saying,” Amina conceded. “But this is too low, even for my mother. She would never pretend that Dad was sick.” Dimple reached across the table to cup Amina’s jaw and leaned in so close that Amina could smell her familiar, flowery perfume over the smoke in the bar. “Fool,” she whispered, not unkindly.
Amina leaned back. The war over her soul and future had raged between Kamala and Dimple for too many years for her to take it personally. The bar was filling up, crammed with baggy pants, fleece jackets, messenger bags, and sneakers. Dimple scanned the room unhappily.
“Do you think it’s really going to last?” she asked. It was the question that came up every time the cousins went out lately, her tone alternating between sarcastic and despondent. No one had been more discouraged by the rise of the Internet than Dimple, whose complaints ranged from having her neighborhood gentrified to having the gallery she ran compromised by what she described in fundamentalist tones as “the corruption of the quality image in the digital age.”
Less vocal, if not actually less pessimistic, Amina was equally worried about the Internet, if only for the fact that it put her on the outside of something she feared might be generationally altering, like the civil rights movement or Woodstock. As “kids” just a few years younger than she flooded the city, scooping up armloads of vintage furniture and spreading through the neighborhoods on scooters, she clutched her trusty Leica, feeling like she was holding on to a wagon wheel in the face of the Industrial Revolution.
“I hate them,” Dimple said before Amina could respond. “I hate what they do, I hate that they make more money than I ever will. Did I tell you someone suggested that part of the gallery be ‘webcast’? What does that even mean?”
The cousins watched as a grinning guy in a baseball hat waved a twenty at the bartender.
“So how are things with Damon?” Amina asked.
“Over.”
“I thought it was going well.”
“He moved back in with his ex.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s fine,” Dimple said with a shrug. “Honestly, it saved me the trouble of having to get involved.”
Five months older than Amina and therefore “well into age thirty,” Dimple had been quietly moving through Seattle’s supply of eligible men with a carnivorousness that occasionally scared Amina. It wasn’t the number of men her cousin saw that unnerved her (truth be told, Amina had probably slept with more men, more often) but rather the impatience with which Dimple went through them, bringing them to meet Amina at bars and tuning out when they spoke, frowning like she’d ordered the wrong thing from a menu.
While some might interpret this as indifference, Amina knew the opposite to be true. Never mind how many relationships Dimple opened or ended with a shrug; the one thing she really wanted—and had always wanted, even in high school, when she turned scaring boys away into a kind of performance art—was someone worth sticking around for. At this point, the only thing more humiliating than having another relationship fail would be for Amina to openly acknowledge it.
“How about you?” her cousin asked. “Have you managed to have a conversation with anyone you’re sleeping with?”
Amina took another sip of beer. “Why start now?”
An old Van Halen song pumped through the speakers, and half the guys at the bar threw up rocker fingers. The cousins sighed.
“Let’s go,” Amina said.
It was raining lightly as they left the bar, the soft, ceaseless, rhythmic kind of rain that is Seattle’s lullaby. They stood out on the wet street while Dimple shook three cigarettes out of the pack, pressing them into Amina’s hand.
“Thanks.”
“Oh God!” Dimple clapped her hand to her chest. “I almost forgot! I told Sajeev we’d go out with him Saturday night.”
Amina groaned.
“I had to, Ami. He’s called twice since he moved here, and we keep putting him off. My parents are driving me nuts with all the messages they’ve been leaving.” She switched into her mother’s husky Indo-British whisper, and pursed her face into a perfect Bala Auntie. “Dimple dahling, please do take the fine young man out. Mary Roy is calling all the time only. Everyone is wanting to know how he is.”
That their dislike of Sajeev Roy was hardly fair didn’t stop the cousins from dreading him. When they were in kindergarten, it was his vulnerability that marked him, his constant thrashing at the hands of American boys, his eagerness to be part of their tight huddle. The girls had been relieved when his family moved to Wyoming, although their own mothers’ all-too-vocal admiration for his later successes (MIT undergrad, a degree in engineering) still rendered him unappealing.
“Can’t you just go for both of us? I’m really going to be beat.”
Dimple stared at her.
“Fine,” Amina said with a scowl. “But I’m working until at least ten, so it will have to be afterward.”
“Yeah, fine, whatever. You sure you don’t want a ride home?”
“Nah.” They had reached Dimple’s old blue Chevy van, moldering in the parking lot like a wet elephant. Dimple opened the front door and climbed in. She looked ridiculously small in it, like a child playing grown-up. Even with her seat forward as far as it would go, her legs were barely long enough to reach the brakes and clutch.
“Call your mother,” Amina said when her cousin rolled the window down, and Dimple nodded even though they both knew she wouldn’t.
CHAPTER 2
“Thanks for meeting with me,” Amina said, walking into Jane’s office the next day. Jane swiveled around in her chair, perfectly pressed into her black suit, her red pageboy swinging. She pointed to the phone cupped to her head and then to the chair across from her. Amina sat.
“Yes, but it was a bar mitzvah. How do you miss the hora?” she asked irritably. Amina turned her attention to the floor-to-ceiling view of the Puget Sound to keep herself from getting unnerved. It was easy enough to do in Jane’s office, the proportions of which (endless white walls, floor-to-ceiling windows) always made her feel like a gnat suspended in a glass jar.
The person on the other end of the phone was still talking when Jane hung up with a clatter. She frowned, repositioning herself in her seat. “I didn’t realize we had a meeting scheduled.”
“I’m having a family emergency and need to go home.”
“Emergency?”
“My dad’s not well.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Amina shifted, something about Jane’s relentless efficiency, her plucking gaze, making her feel like a liar. “It should just be a few days.” Jane turned to her computer, her mouth twitching as she read the schedule. She looked back at Amina. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No, wait—”
“This is unacceptable.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Sure, it’s your father. What does he have? Kidney stone? Diabetes? Lung cancer?”
“No, but—”
“You told me you would see this through.” She rapp
ed her desk with her index finger. “If I wanted someone to screw it up, I could have sent in Peter.”
“I’d leave on Monday.”
“Not to mention that I’ve already gotten two messages from Lesley expressing concern about your ability to handle her event.”
“Monday as in after the Beale wedding.”
Jane looked at her, coolly recalibrating.
“Monday through Friday,” Amina said, discreetly wiping her palms on her pants. “That should leave me pretty much clear, except for the Johnsons’ fiftieth-anniversary dinner on Thursday night.”
Jane turned back to her computer, pulling up the next week.
Amina cleared her throat. “Two messages?”
“Both ridiculous. I took care of it. But I need to know you’re on top of this.”
“I am,” Amina said, annoyance creeping into her voice. Jane looked amused.
“Looks like Earl is your best bet for Thursday. Peter is on vacation, and Wanda has an eighth-grade graduation party.”
“Eighth grade? Seriously?”
“I told you she’s hungry.”
Hunger, like loyalty and willingness to work unconventional hours, was a quality Jane valued in her staff. When she started the company ten years earlier, she had worked solo, talking her way into weddings by not charging for her time, just for her prints. It was a strategy that led her to build a devoted base within just a year. Now that Wiley Studios was a twelve-person operation, she was always looking for new growth opportunities. (“God willing,” she’d once murmured to Amina in a rare unguarded moment, “we’ll be shooting every event with candles on this side of the Cascades.”)
Not that Amina needed to prove herself to Jane as much as she had in the early years. If anything, the fact that she’d been given the Beale account was clearly a vote of confidence, even if the reality of dealing with Lesley Beale felt like a demotion.
“So what’s the Beales’ venue?” Jane asked, writing a phone number down on a Post-it.
“The Highlands.”
