Honor: A Novel(37)

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, yaar. It was a long time ago.” Mohan shook his head. “Besides, she wasn’t a Gujarati. So my parents would’ve probably had a heart attack. It’s just as well.”

“You wouldn’t have defied them?” Smita heard the judgment in her voice and knew that he had heard it, too.

“Yah, probably,” he said. “If it had come to that.”

They fell into another silence. After a few moments, Mohan said, “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You never married?”

She shrugged. “No. It never took.”

He made a small, enigmatic motion with his head, the meaning of which she didn’t get. “Did you ever date a desi guy?” he asked after a moment.

“No,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “That is, I went on a few dates that my folks set up. But in my line of work, you know, I don’t meet too many Indians.”

“Huh. And you don’t meet boys outside of your line of work? Like, at parties and all?”

She smiled, acknowledging the dig. But how to explain her nomadic existence to Mohan, rooted, steady Mohan? What would he make of the packed suitcases in her austere Brooklyn apartment? Would he disapprove of the hook-ups she had with the correspondents she met in far-flung places? What would he think of the expensive Sunday brunches she shared with her single friends in New York, during which they lingered over mimosas, complaining incessantly about how all the good guys were married or gay? Would he be bemused or impressed by their chatter, the fact that they talked almost exclusively about indie films and politics and the latest exhibit at the Met? God, how stereotypical her life in Brooklyn was. How American.

She realized that he was waiting for her to answer. “I don’t really go to a lot of parties,” she said.

“And what about your parents? Were they not pushing you to get married?”

Smita pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “They would’ve liked me to, sure. Mummy, especially. Wanting to marry off their children is part of the DNA of Indian parents, right?”

“Why just Indian parents? Don’t all parents wish this for their children?”

Don’t take the bait, Smita said to herself. “I guess.”

After a minute, she said, “Tell me something. Are you sorry you let Nandini talk you into accompanying me? Instead of being with Shannon?”

“Not at all. Shannon sounded so good when I spoke to her yesterday. They already have her doing physiotherapy. And this is a new experience for me, going on a story with a journalist. Although I’m not sure I should go in with you when you interview those brothers. Because I will want to kill them.”

“That’s the thing about being a journalist,” she said. “You can’t let your emotions get in the way. I have to be able to interview them without judging them.”

“I honestly don’t know how you can do that.”

But she had done it many times. Smita told him about her first tough assignment, as a young reporter in Philly. How she’d interviewed the two straight men who’d gone into a gay bar, left with a much younger guy, and then brutally beaten him and left him for dead. The boy, from a small town thirty miles from Philly, was nineteen years old and had screwed up his nerve to visit a gay bar for the first time in his young, closeted life.

“Did he die?” Mohan asked as he swerved to avoid a pothole on the road.

“Yes. After a week in the hospital. His pastor-father refused to visit him because that would’ve meant ‘condoning’ his sexual orientation.”

“I didn’t realize America was so backwards, yaar. I mean, we see pictures of those gay pride parades and all on TV.”

“Well, it’s still easier to be gay in the big cities than in small-town America. But things have definitely changed. This is from when I first became a reporter—from before I was an old maid.”

“What was the hardest story you’ve ever covered?”

She sighed, a hundred memories flitting through her head like macabre slides on an old View-Master. War. Genocide. Rape. And that was not counting the everyday outrages like domestic violence, the battles over transgender rights, or the abortion wars. Or stories like Meena’s, caused by twisted, patriarchal notions of family honor.

Smita hesitated, not wanting to confess this other thing to Mohan: As horrific as Meena’s injuries were, they were not the worst she’d seen. Not even close. And yet, Meena’s isolation—her complete dependence on a mother-in-law who hated her and blamed her for her son’s death—had triggered a corresponding loneliness in Smita. Perhaps it was as simple as this: She could cover heartbreaking events in Lebanon and South Africa and Nigeria and not feel complicit in those because they had not happened in her own country. But despite her American passport, despite the many miles between her American life and her Indian childhood, there was no denying it—sitting with Meena on that cot, she had felt complicit in what had happened to her. Listening to Meena’s slightly slurred speech, Smita had felt a mix of emotions, felt both American and Indian, a victim herself, but also someone who had escaped in a way that Meena never would. There was no way, however, to unspool this for Mohan without slitting open the yellowing envelope of her past.

“Smita . . .” Mohan said. “Actually, forget it. You know, we don’t have to talk about sad things, yaar. Let’s change the subject.”