by Diksha Basu
“Let’s go now,” Radha said. “I slept on the flight. Let’s have a glass of wine and go buy a new bed.”
Mr. Das was being so gentle, so kind. She had missed him while she was in Calcutta. Only now was she realizing she wanted him by her side.
They had two glasses of wine with a prosciutto pizza for lunch and then Mr. Das suggested Restoration Hardware. Radha paused and said, “That’s too much for a bed. IKEA will do. They have surprisingly good beds. And you know I like the minimalist design.”
Was that the first hint, Radha now wondered. Did she know that this bed was not going to be shared for long? Why had she pushed for IKEA when she so loved Restoration Hardware?
But they had been having a nice time at IKEA, Radha remembered. Mr. Das made Radha sit down on a black swivel chair and pushed her past the office section. Radha laughed.
“I shouldn’t be laughing,” she said. “My mother just died. You know, when you walk to the back to collect the ashes, you can feel the bones of bodies crunching below the soles of your shoes.”
“I cremated both my parents, remember? And my aunt,” Mr. Das said. “Your mother spent too many years not laughing. Now you have to make up for that.”
Then he spun the chair and hit the ankles of an overweight white woman who was bent over checking the price on a filing cabinet. She fell forward and Mr. Das rushed over to help her up. She shouted at him to be more careful, then asked him if he worked there because she couldn’t figure out the price of the piece. Mr. Das said no, he didn’t work there and she shouldn’t assume that just because he was wearing a blue shirt. But since he had knocked her over, he felt the least he could do was help so he found the price of the filing cabinet for the woman.
Radha sat in the swivel chair and watched the interaction, feeling guilty that she had thought her marriage was floundering. She just hadn’t been paying any attention to it—neither of them had been. They had been busy.
A few rooms later, they were lying side by side on a king-size bed holding hands—something they hadn’t done in nearly two decades.
“I thought we were falling apart,” Radha said. “We were barely talking.”
“Life gets busy,” Mr. Das said.
Radha propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at Mr. Das. They were two middle-aged Indians in a suburban IKEA. The American dream.
“I almost made a mistake,” Radha said, feeling more connected to Mr. Das than she had in years. Feeling the need to confess to her almost-affair thinking it would bring them closer, thinking it would scare them into holding on to each other tightly because that’s what they knew and wasn’t it more comfortable to stick to what they knew at this point?
Mr. Das turned his face slightly to look at her.
“Meaning?” he asked.
“In India, in Calcutta. I was so lonely and so depressed, I almost touched another man. But, Neel, I didn’t. I didn’t touch him because it was you I wanted, you I missed. We had stopped talking but look at us, look at this—it’s still us. It always was us,” Radha said. She thought Neel would respond the same way.
“You had an affair? At your mother’s funeral?” Mr. Das asked, sitting up.
“No. I didn’t have an affair, that’s my point. I realized that I’m still…I still…I realized that you and I belong together,” Radha said. “And don’t sound so incredulous about the timing—funerals are when people are at their most vulnerable.”
“So you didn’t have an affair?”
A Chinese couple came to check the price on the bed. They had also obviously been fighting, the woman speaking in Mandarin through clenched teeth. The husband bent down to check the price while the woman stood over them, still talking. The husband couldn’t find the price tag and walked over to the other side.
“Four hundred and ninety-nine,” Mr. Das shouted at him. “Four hundred and ninety-nine. Move on.”
The wife shouted something more in Mandarin and walked off as the husband scrambled to get up and follow.
“No! Don’t you see?” Radha asked. “I came close to destroying what matters to me and it made me realize how wonderful our relationship is.”
“Why are you telling me this, then?” Mr. Das asked.
“Because we’d been drifting apart, Neel. And we need to acknowledge that. But not all is lost. What we have is good. Thinking about losing it scared me.”
Radha saw the back of Mr. Das’s head nodding. He leaned over and looked at the plastic-covered tag attached to the bed.
“This one is good enough,” he said. “We don’t really need a new bed anyway. Let’s get this one.”
He took a small pencil and scribbled down the number of the bed and got up and followed the sign for the exit. Radha was up on both elbows, looking at him. When they got down to the warehouse to pick up the box for the bed they had chosen, it was out of stock.
“What a waste of a trip,” Mr. Das said.
Three months later, by the time they went to Yale for Tina’s graduation, the divorce papers were on the kitchen counter and Radha had signed the lease for an apartment in Manhattan.
In her Manhattan apartment, the bed was from Restoration Hardware.
* * *
—
“IT’S NICE ALL BEING back here. Even though Tina will barely talk to me,” Radha said. She picked up a slice of toast, folded it in half, and dipped it in the tea.
“Don’t keep it in there for so long, the toast will get too soggy,” Mr. Das said.
“Yes, yes. I know your obsession with not letting soggy toast fall in the tea,” Radha said. “Did you enjoy the party last night? Quite a flashy wedding your sister is throwing.”
“It was beautiful,” Mr. Das said.
“I didn’t see you all night,” Radha said.
“I know, it was quite crowded, wasn’t it?”
“You met that woman?” Radha asked.
“I had lunch with her yesterday. Mrs. Sethi,” Mr. Das said. “Jyoti. She’s kept her late husband’s name, which got me thinking—how come you never changed your name back?”
“My career. I’m known as Radha Das; it would be too confusing.”
“David Smith doesn’t mind?” Mr. Das asked.
“You all really don’t need to say his full name every time. Anyway, it’s never come up,” Radha said. She drank some more of her tea. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not,” Mr. Das said. “There are millions of people named Das in the world. It doesn’t have to connect you to me.”
Tina came out of her cottage then, saw her parents sitting on her father’s porch like normal parents, and was about to immediately rush back into the comfortable darkness of her room when her mother shouted out, “Tina! Come sit with us. I’ll call for some black coffee and extra toast.”
Radha reached forward and called for Rajesh. Tina walked the fifty feet or so to her father’s cottage wondering where everyone else had vanished. Marianne’s bed was still made from the previous day.
“Did you just wake up?” her mother asked. Tina nodded and her mother continued, “Don’t waste your days sleeping, darling. This trip is hardly a week long.”
Tina ignored her and looked at a short, skinny woman in a brown sari watering the plants. A small baby was attached to her back in a sort of sling, a monkey cap covering most of its face. The woman was wearing earmuffs and humming loudly and watering the plants. She looked young, in her early twenties at most. The baby behind her freed a hand and grabbed at her hair that was pulled back into a bun. The woman laughed and removed the baby’s fingers from the tangle of her hair and called him mischievous over her shoulder. The baby settled on holding her gold necklace and she went back to watering the plants, both of them smiling.
“I hardly saw you last night either,” Radha said. “Where did you vanish?”
“I stepped ou
t. I got sick of the wedding and the flashy display of wealth.”
“Our communist,” Mr. Das said.
“Our communist who lives in an apartment with dimmers,” Radha said and both her parents laughed.
“This”—Tina waved her hand around the grounds—“isn’t all there is to India.”
“Nobody said it was, darling,” Radha said.
“I spoke to a homeless man in a wheelchair last night,” Tina said.
“There was a homeless man in a wheelchair at the reception?” Mr. Das asked.
“Never mind,” Tina said.
“It’s nice to get a moment to be just the three of us sitting here,” Radha said, looking out at the Colebrookes lawn. A small group of sparrows skittered around on the gravel driveway.
Rajesh came over with three coconuts with straws in them.
“Good morning, good morning, lovely family,” Rajesh said. “I thought you might like some fresh coconuts. Mrs. Das, you look so beautiful.”
Radha smiled as Rajesh placed the coconuts down in front of them.
“Are you married, Rajesh?” Radha asked.
“No, ma’am. I’m not interested in marrying,” Rajesh said. “Not my thing.”
“A girlfriend then?”
Rajesh smiled and lowered his eyes and shook his head.
“Are you gay?” Radha asked.
“Radha!” Mr. Das said.
“I love all humans, male and female, ma’am,” Rajesh said.
“So you’re bisexual?” Radha asked.
“No labels, ma’am. I fall for who I fall for, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Radha said.
“Enjoy the fresh coconuts. Coconut water is better for the skin than any facial,” Rajesh said. “Pure hydration.”
He looked at Tina closely and added, “But for you I would also recommend once a week yogurt, honey, and turmeric on the face for half an hour.”
“Okay, I did not ask for skin-care advice,” Tina said. “How much turmeric?”
Rajesh smiled at her and said, “Just a teaspoon. Half an hour only.”
A stray dog barked from the center of the lawn. Rajesh turned around in a panic.
“How on earth did that get in here? That Pushpa, I bet she let him in. Pushpa!” he shouted at the woman with the baby who was laughing in the direction of the dog and pointing it out to her baby. “Pushpa! You know we can’t let the dogs in here.”
He turned to the Das family and said, “That woman is determined to get fired. Just last month she was caught putting food out for the crows. Just imagine.”
Rajesh ran off toward the lawn shouting at the dog, trying to shepherd it off the lawn as Pushpa stood with the baby on her back and laughed at Rajesh chasing the dog around.
“I can’t believe we never came back after your malaria. If I’d known that would be our last trip to India together, I would have insisted we take a holiday to the Taj or to Goa or Cochin,” Radha said.
“I wasn’t going to go anywhere except back to America after being released from the hospital,” Mr. Das said. “That was a nightmare.”
He leaned back and looked in the direction Rajesh had gone.
“I was so glad to leave,” Tina remembered. “I just wanted to get back to America and go to the mall with my friends.”
“I remember that stage. You wore those awful pants from the shop with all the bare-bodied men on the walls,” Mr. Das said.
“Abercrombie and Fitch,” Tina said. “Track pants.”
“All your classmates had the same pair,” Radha said.
“You used to wear similar pants when I first met you,” Mr. Das said to his ex-wife.
“Good memory. Except mine were a pair of export reject ones from Lajpat Nagar,” Radha said. “At one-tenth the price.”
* * *
—
RADHA THOUGHT BACK TO the first day she met Neel Das, at Wooster college in August of 1979 in the cafeteria on campus. Neel was in the second year of his program and Radha had just arrived from Delhi, her first time in America. Radha had no interest in dating or getting married and had, since as far back as she could remember, wanted nothing more than to study and be independent and live life on her own terms. But then she took her orange plastic tray with her bland turkey sandwich and glass of milk and followed her friend Tanvi—second-year master’s in philosophy, originally from Bombay, assigned as a mentor to Radha—and sat down at the same table as Mr. Das and was immediately charmed.
He slid down the wooden bench to make space for them and looked at Radha and said, “A newbie. Fresh off the proverbial boat. Welcome to America. The portions are the size of your head here.”
He pointed at her huge sandwich and added, “My appetite has grown accordingly so feel free to give me whatever you can’t finish.”
Then he turned to his right and continued his conversation with Gautam, another Indian student from Chennai who had come to do a master’s in electrical engineering. Gautam, Tanvi, Radha, and Neel quickly became close friends. Gautam and Tanvi, always the two cooler ones with their bell-bottoms and their cigarettes, started dating while Radha and Neel tagged along. The four of them took a bus trip to Niagara Falls, during which Radha insisted on getting a separate hotel room for herself, despite her limited finances, because she didn’t want to share a room with Neel. Neel himself didn’t seem to care much, Radha remembered. He was too busy reading philosophy in a youthful bid to distinguish himself from all the other Indian men studying practical subjects. He didn’t smoke cigarettes but somehow this made him even cooler than the ones who did. Radha never had that confidence, and by the end of her first semester she was smoking an average of ten cigarettes a day.
One cold winter night, Tanvi and Radha were sitting in Tanvi’s kitchen having a glass of wine when Gautam tried to jokingly startle them. He banged his gloved hands on the window and with a loud crash the window shattered. The kitchen floor looked covered with icicles and everything froze for a moment. Tanvi sat motionless with her wineglass halfway up to her mouth, Radha turned to look out of the window where Gautam stood, hands still up where the window should be, cigarette dangling out of his mouth, eyes wide, and a few feet behind him, Neel stood, with no gloves and no hat, watching.
Then suddenly everything moved fast as the men rushed into the kitchen and Tanvi dropped her wineglass to add to the mess and blood poured out of a wound so close to Tanvi’s eye the others were certain she was going to go blind. They had to get to the hospital but none of them had bothered getting American driver’s licenses and the thought of calling an ambulance never even occurred to them. Gautam held Tanvi’s face and shouted apologies in a state of panic, while Radha lit a cigarette and then rushed to gather up the shards of glass to avoid more injury. Only Neel seemed to know what to do. He called a local taxi company and then he went to the bathroom and found a large towel that he soaked in water and brought out to Gautam to hold against Tanvi’s eye.
The car pulled up in front of Tanvi’s apartment. The driver put down the passenger-side window, looked at the four of them and the blood-soaked towel, and said, “Fuck, no, I don’t need any trouble from a group of curries,” and started his car again. But Neel went around to the front of the car and slammed his hands down on the hood and shouted, “We need to go to a hospital right away. Do you fucking understand? I don’t care that you’re too much of an asshole to have a shred of empathy, and I don’t care that you’re so fucking terrified of working for one of us someday that you call us curries. It’s cold and my friend’s face is bleeding and you will get us to the hospital right now.”
Radha remembered watching his face lit by the glow of the headlights, wondering how he didn’t feel cold while the rest of them shivered in their gloves and hats.
“And because I’m not an asshole like you, I’ll tip you extra,” Neel said,
his tone slightly softened. He motioned for the others to get into the backseat and he took the front passenger seat. The driver’s bag and coat were there so Neel had to sit holding them in his lap, and this intimacy between him and the driver made Radha smile.
They ended up at the hospital for over three hours and Tanvi got five stitches along her eye. At some point Radha and Neel fell asleep in the empty waiting room huddled under her jacket, her head on his shoulder, his head on her head.
* * *
—
“YOU WERE WEARING THOSE track pants on the night we went to the hospital with Tanvi,” Mr. Das said.
“I wore them all the time. I had a pair of sweatpants on under them that night because I was not equipped for winter in America,” Radha said.
“Whatever happened to Gautam?” Mr. Das asked.
“He moved to Cairo, I believe,” Radha said. “It’s still hard to believe Tanvi died so young.”
Mr. Das shrugged and said, “It’s sad but it’s not like we were in touch with her recently. Didn’t you two constantly fight about politics anyway?”
“A blind hatred of Muslims isn’t politics,” Radha said. “And the way she spoke disparagingly about India always bothered me, remember? She saw America as an escape. The last time I spoke to her she said I shouldn’t let Tina go to India in case she got raped. And then she invited me to a puja session in her house in Dallas.”
“And God still didn’t spare her the stomach cancer,” Mr. Das said.
“You told me to be careful in Delhi too,” Tina said. “And you always criticize India.”
“That’s different,” Radha said. “I say it affectionately—the way a child can criticize a parent.”
“But you never come here.”
“That’s because my life is in America,” Radha said.
“And you always wanted me to be American,” Tina continued. “You let me start wearing a bra way earlier than any of the other Indian girls.”
“That’s because I wanted you to be happy, Tina. I wanted you to fit in. We were raising you as a brown girl in America and those were the pre–Priyanka Chopra years. There was no Mindy Kaling. Or that YouTube woman. Nothing, nobody. I didn’t want you being made fun of. Adolescence is difficult enough.”
