The Taste of Ginger(34)

“We have tried in the past,” Mom said.

Her tone made me cringe, because despite my earlier hope, I knew renewing my relationship with Alex was choosing him over my mother. She pictured a life for me that was like the one Hari and Laila were entering, and even though I loved my parents, that was more than I could give them.

“You must try harder then,” Indira Mami said. “Does she know your nasib?”

I snuck a peek at Mom when I heard that unfamiliar word. Her jaw set into a hard line. Her eyes narrowed and shifted away from Indira Mami, making clear the conversation was over.

Nasib? I repeated the word in my head, trying to conjure up its meaning but unsure whether I’d ever heard it before.

Before I could think too much about what I had heard, I saw Hari and Laila on the mandap beginning their seven walks around the fire, signifying they were near the end of the wedding ceremony. I hoped they would have more in common than my parents did and end up finding real love instead of one born out of obligation. They deserved that. Everyone did. To me, the alternative would have been a prison sentence, especially after having felt love in the past. Even while Alex and I were broken up, I knew if I ever settled for something less, then I’d always remember what I was missing. I dabbed at the corners of my eyes with the end of my sari, praying that Hari and Laila would love each other with the passion and fervor that I knew was possible between two people. The love that I needed to get back.





15


The day after the reception, I found Neel sitting at the computer in Hari and Bharat’s sparse room. As in all the other bedrooms in the house, the only photo that hung on the wall was one of Krishna Bhagwan, the god most revered by my family. There were no personal touches like I had back in my apartment in Los Angeles. The room consisted of two beds, two nightstands, a table for the computer, a locked closet, and the air-conditioning unit that spewed out much-needed cold air.

“What are you doing?” I asked, plopping myself onto one of the beds, wincing when I met the concrete-like density. I lay on my stomach, facing him.

“Canceling plane tickets.”

He and Dipti had originally planned on spending a week in Goa after the wedding to have their babymoon before heading home and getting ready for parenthood. That trip didn’t make any sense now.

“When will you two go back to Chicago?” I asked.

Neel swiveled away from the computer and faced me. “I’m not sure. Dipti is still so emotional. But I think it’s best to go back home and get some sense of normalcy back in our lives.” He buried his head in his hands and groaned. “We were so proactive about setting up the nursery before this trip! It will crush her to see it.”

“Is there anything I can do? What if I fly ahead of you guys to get rid of everything?”

He looked like he was going to shake his head, probably out of instinct. He and I both had a hard time letting people help us. Probably part of our parents’ “take care of yourself and never have any obligation to others” philosophy. But then he paused and looked at the floor.

“You know what,” he said, finally looking up. “I think it’s not a bad idea for someone to do that. But it doesn’t have to be you. You probably have to get back to work too, right?”

I turned my gaze away from him, but he knew me too well.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, not wanting to burden him.

He rolled the rickety chair he sat on across the white marble floor, one of the loose wheels squeaking as he glided closer to me. “What’s wrong?”

Pulling myself up so I was sitting on my heels, I glanced at the open door and said in a low voice, “I quit my job.”

Neel’s eyes grew wide. He, too, glanced over to make sure no one could overhear us. “You did? When?”

“I’m not really sure when the technical date is. But I said some things to my boss before the wedding started . . .”

“Pree, why?” He pulled back for a minute, the color draining from his cheeks. “Is it because you came here?”

I emphatically shook my head. “No, I wanted to be here with you. You’d have done the same for me.”

“But you loved that job. You were great at it.”

“I never loved it. I liked that I was good at it. And I liked how much it paid. But I never felt comfortable at that firm. And I never loved the work.”

“What do you mean, you weren’t comfortable there?”

I played with the thick green seam of the rajai folded neatly at the end of the bed. Neel and I had not talked about our race and culture since those early years in Chicago when we were actively trying to assimilate. We knew what the end goal was, but we had never stopped to check in on each other about whether we felt we had reached it. The assumption was that by getting good educations and having successful careers, we’d transcended any suffering it took to get those things. We never discussed the parts of ourselves that might have been lost in the process. It was as if we both knew that if we tugged even a little at the thread, then the world we had built around us would unravel. Neither of us was the type to let that happen.

“It was just hard being the only Indian person around,” I said. “Law isn’t like medicine; it’s still a very white profession. I guess I thought that was a good thing in the beginning. Like if I could make it in a superwhite profession, I could make it anywhere.” I’d never shared any of these thoughts with anyone and had barely even admitted them to myself until this moment. “I wonder if maybe it would have been nice to not always be the only other in the room.”