Honor: A Novel(95)
The man gave her a puzzled look before turning to his wife for an explanation. The woman, still holding the screaming child, spoke to him urgently in a language Smita didn’t understand.
“Sorry, ji,” the man said to Smita.
“It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine,” she said, and then smiled broadly to accentuate her words. She decided against heading into the restroom to wash out the coffee stain, not wanting to do anything to add to the parents’ embarrassment.
The man nodded and sat down across from Smita. He turned to his daughter, who was still fighting her mother. “Meena,” he said, “stop this nonsense immediately.”
Smita’s breath caught. “Her name is Meena?” she asked.
“Hah, ji.”
It’s a common name, Smita told herself. It’s like meeting someone named Mary in Ohio, for crying out loud. Probably half the women at this airport have that name. But then she looked down at the coffee stain on her pants. She had been burned. A girl named Meena had knocked hot coffee on her pants and burned her.
Smita stood up abruptly. Then, she slowly sat back down. This is ridiculous, she thought. You’re acting like one of those superstitious idiots that Papa loves to mock. The ones who see an image of Christ in a grilled cheese sandwich. You call this little spill a burn? After what you’ve seen? Shame on you for dishonoring Meena’s suffering. Now, get a grip. Pull the paperback out of your suitcase and distract yourself. All you have to do is sit still until you’re on that plane. Because—and you know this because you’ve done it a hundred times before—the cool, disinfected atmosphere of a plane is designed to make you forget whatever hot, humid, smelly city you are escaping from. It is designed to anesthetize you against remembering home.
Home? Had she just thought of Mumbai as home? The city that she had resented and feared for most of her life? A city filled with evil men like Sushil. But then, she argued with herself, hadn’t the same city also coughed up a Mohan? Hell, hadn’t it birthed and shaped the bones of a good and honorable man like Papa? How could she have let a man like Sushil blind her to this essential truth?
Out of the blue, Smita heard the laughter: Rohit and herself. Chiku and Anand, the boy who had lived one building over. And Anand’s little sister. What was her name? Tinka, that was it. Other children from the neighborhood, too, Christians and Parsis and Hindus, all gathered in the compound of the Harbor Breeze apartments, their heads tilted upward as they watched the rockets and comets explode in the night sky. As always, Papa had spent hundreds of rupees to treat the local kids to the fireworks display during the Hindu festival of Diwali. That was India, too—that nonchalance, that secularism, nobody blinking twice at that easy melding of different traditions and faiths.
The memories came faster, like coins falling into a slot machine: Mumbai flooding during the monsoons and strangers helping one another—men giving away their umbrellas to women, commuters rescuing those stranded in buses and trains, housewives serving hot tea and chapatis to the homeless families huddled on their street, teenagers wading through waist-deep waters to run errands for their elderly neighbors. Even as a child, Smita used to thrill to the camaraderie that infected the whole metropolis then.
Mohan would be one of those people, she thought, and she felt a sudden yearning to see that side of him, to discover Mohan not in the charged, explosive, compressed amount of time that they’d shared, but in ordinary ways: What were his favorite movies? Was he handy? What were his favorite foods? What size shoes did he wear? Mohan, as the ordinary hero of his everyday life. Mohan, who was waiting outside and would wait until even the contrails of her plane had dissipated. Smita knew—there was no way to love Mohan and not love India; there was no way to love India and not love Mohan. Because he was the best of what it had to offer. It was almost as though, by introducing Mohan to her, the country was trying to make up for what it had once taken away.
Smita caught herself. Enough of this sentimental claptrap, she thought. You are not one of those women who give up their jobs and identities to be with a man. This is the dangerous part of India—feudal, traditional, patriarchal India—that is messing with your head. You have worked too hard to get to where you are to risk losing it for someone you barely know.
But surely, she argued with herself, life was more than this relentless getting ahead? Surely, there was more to life than self-actualization and ambition and success? What was wrong with linking one’s happiness to that of another human being? Why should fifty years of peak capitalism eradicate something that the Eastern philosophers had taught for thousands of years—that life is about interconnectedness, interdependence, and yes, even sacrifice? Smita remembered how she used to try to boost Mummy’s spirits during the radiation sessions by telling her stories about her travels and adventures. Mummy, of course, was always proud of her achievements. But once in a while, she’d get a sad, embarrassed look on her face, as if she saw through the bravado to the loneliness at Smita’s core.
Maybe there were other options. Her first-person account about Meena’s death had generated a lot of buzz and earned her tremendous goodwill within the newsroom. Shannon was still incapacitated. She could ask Cliff to let her use India as her base for a few months while Shannon recovered. This would give her a chance to get to know Mohan better, and she could spend more time with little Abru. Because the fact remained that Meena had bequeathed Abru to her. Even Mohan knew this. She had allowed herself to believe Mohan’s beautiful lie about Meena intending him to be an equal partner.