The Direction of the Wind: A Novel(26)

“How long have you and Mathieu been dating?” Simon asked as he filled both of their glasses, careful not to let any drops slide down the exterior.

“Oh, we, no,” Nita stammered. She took a breath and collected herself. “We are not dating. We just met when I moved here and became friends.”

Simon nodded, seemingly filing away her answer. “Have you ever been to the States?”

Her face lit up. “No, but I would love to go. I see so much of it on the television, and it all seems so glamorous.”

He laughed. “I’m not sure if I’d call it glamorous, but it has its perks. We are spoiled by things like water pressure.”

“I’m spoiled by what we have here,” Nita said.

The constant flow of hot water in the showers still amazed her. It was hard to imagine that America had certain conveniences that were even greater than those she had seen in Paris.

“If you aren’t dating Mathieu, then you should find a nice man to really spoil you.”

Nita wasn’t sure how to take Simon’s comment and cast her gaze downward, avoiding his eyes.

“It’s the Parisian way, after all,” Simon said.

“I suppose it is the Indian way as well.”

“Did you come here because you hadn’t found that guy in India yet?”

Nita thought of her husband, who had tried to give her everything society had told him he should: a home, servants, jewels, clothing, children. He just didn’t understand that what she wanted was different from what society wanted for her.

She shook her head. “I came because I knew if I didn’t come now, I would go my entire life without ever setting foot in this country. Days would pass, the same as the ones before, and I couldn’t let that happen.”

That much was true. The love she felt for Sophie had grown at the same rate as the resentment she felt for the life into which she had been born. That resentment had begun to spill onto her precious daughter, who had done nothing to deserve it. Nita could not see a future in which she could be the mummy that Sophie deserved. She loved her daughter as much as she hated being a wife and mummy and had no idea how to reconcile those two things. She wasn’t sure they could be balanced. That she could be fixed. In the months leading up to her decision to leave, she had realized she was becoming more and more short with Sophie. Scolding her when she was caught playing with Nita’s bangles. Brushing her hair harder than she needed to each night. Growing more irritated as her daughter asked questions about the French landscapes she was painting. Parenthood came naturally to many, but not to Nita. And she had felt like she was getting worse rather than better.

“There’s no time like the present, then.” Simon raised his glass in a toast.

She clinked hers against his and sipped from it, wondering what the present looked like for Sophie and hoping that Rajiv was finding ways to bring Sophie joy through this difficult time. Above all else, she wanted Sophie to be happy.



Nita sat on the leather sofa in Mathieu’s apartment, her sketch pad on her lap, untouched for the last several minutes. The pads of her fingers were blackened from the charcoal sticks she’d been using.

“Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas?” Mathieu asked her what was wrong.

She startled at hearing his voice break the silence.

“You look very far away,” he said, kneeling before her on the couch so that his gaze was level with hers.

She could smell the cigarette smoke emanating from his clothes and skin, the thin green sweater seeming to have trapped it all within its fibers. She placed the sketch pad down.

“Sorry,” she said, “my mind is somewhere else today.” She took a deep breath. “It’s just been very hard to find a steady job since I arrived, and I’m afraid of what will happen if I can’t make more money soon.”

He nodded. “Money is the greatest curse of an artist. We need it to live, but it takes away from our life.”

She wasn’t in the mood for one of his poetic musings. She was hitting a critical stage with her finances and was learning how necessary money was to survive. She had never thought about it like this because it had always been there. It was only when she had lost it that she realized how much power it held. And she had assumed that by now she’d have gotten a job that would have allowed her to extend her visa. How naive she had been. She’d never been in the position of worrying about whether she could be kicked out of a place that felt like her home, and that weight was exhausting to carry. There were so many things she’d never had to think about because they had been a given for her. And she realized she truly didn’t know what happened to people when they ran out of money and security. She pictured the countless beggars she had seen on the streets in Ahmedabad and shuddered at the thought of that being her life here. Homeless people were periodically seen in Paris, but not in remotely the same numbers as in India. She wondered if there really were that few of them or if they were off somewhere, hidden. Either way, she hoped not to find out, but she also could not see a way out of her predicament. She could not become fluent in a new language overnight, and the circular logic of needing a job to get a visa and a visa to get a job was hard to overcome. She had felt trapped in her life in India, but now she was learning a new form of being trapped and wondered if people were always trapped by something, no matter what they did or where they were.