The Taste of Ginger(41)
Mom’s eyes were wide, and she called after him, “You can’t leave India without her!”
The only response was the closing of the door to his bedroom upstairs.
17
Everyone in the bungalow, including the servants, had been tiptoeing around even though Neel had not left his room in over two hours. Servants absorbed the dysfunction of their employers like sponges, and they were politely staying out of everyone’s way while still finishing their chores. They probably knew more about each of us and our mannerisms than we even knew about ourselves.
I was in my small bedroom gathering up the meager belongings I had brought on the trip. My flight was scheduled to depart at four in the morning, a day ahead of the one Neel, Dipti, and my father were booked on. While I hated that Neel and Dipti were suffering so much, I was looking forward to going back to LA. There had been nothing but disappointment and heartache since I had arrived in India, and I welcomed the escape. That was what LA was to me now. An escape from everything bad that had happened in India.
The cellophane bags of Indian clothes crinkled as I laid them carefully in the suitcase. I had brought only a carry-on with me, but the bulky wedding clothes I’d bought had made it impossible for me to leave with the same luggage with which I’d arrived. Indira Mami had given me an old heavy blue suitcase that my family had left in India when I was a teenager. It was one my parents had acquired in a secondhand shop on Devon Avenue for our first trip back to India, and it was older than I was. My family didn’t believe in throwing anything away. A lifetime of seeing poverty all around them made even wealthy Indians frugal.
The suitcase sat on the edge of the bed, and I knelt on the floor arranging clothes in it. My mother came into the room and sat next to the suitcase. She looked inside it and bit her lip. I knew she was fighting the urge to suggest a better way to organize the contents than the way I had done it. She always thought her way was best.
“Preeti, you must talk to Neel.”
I sat back on my heels, giving my knees a break from the hard tiles.
“He hasn’t come out of his room yet. You know how he is. He needs to be alone.”
She glanced at the suitcase.
After a long pause, she said, “I don’t think it’s good for you to go.”
I stared at her, not sure what she was asking.
She continued, “You both are very close. It gives your father and me some peace, to be honest. He will only listen to you in this type of situation.”
“What do you want me to tell him?”
“He can’t go back to Chicago without Dipti. It’s too much strain for them. That type of action cannot be undone.”
I didn’t disagree with her. I thought about my failure to go with Alex when he first asked me to move to New York and knew that was why he had moved on. But I couldn’t tell her any of that. The saving grace in all this was that I hadn’t told my parents that I had quit my job and decided to go back to Alex, so they didn’t know that for a second time I’d been prioritizing Alex above them. The relief that my mother would never know numbed some of the pain.
“I’m not sure what I can say to change his mind,” I said, wishing I did have the answer.
“Maybe you both can stay together,” she said, her eyes hopeful. “You can miss a few more days of work, right?”
My stomach sank as she mentioned work. The old me would have lied to her. Carrie had convinced me I should try to get my job back anyway, and I had convinced myself to again repress feeling like an outsider at the firm, so she would never be the wiser if it all worked out. The air-conditioning unit in the window wheezed and sputtered, a sound I had become accustomed to in the past couple weeks, but I still turned my gaze toward it so I could look away from my mother and gather my thoughts.
“I can’t miss more work,” I said finally.
“Why? You never take any days off. Surely your boss can understand this has been a serious family matter.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s the thing . . . I need to go so I can get my job back.”
“Back?”
I nodded. “I quit my job last week.”
“Why did you do that?” Her eyes grew as wide as thalis.
“Because I couldn’t be there and here!” I said in a hard tone, instinctively ready to verbally spar with her. “It was either be here with the family or be there at work. Nothing else.”
Her face registered a range of emotions. I could see she was surprised I had stayed and sacrificed my job for the family, but I could also see she was terrified of me not having a job. It was the same range of emotions I had felt myself, so we at least had that in common.
Forcing a softer tone, I said, “I should be able to get it back. But I need to return to LA for that.”
My mother nodded, knowing that while she needed me to be in two places at once, a hemisphere apart, I could only be in one.
“I don’t want you to have the hardship we had in America.” Her gaze was steady.
“Believe me, none of this was planned,” I said, referring to more than she could ever know.
She sighed. “I don’t know what we will do about Neel and Dipti. But we will find a way.” Her expression turned resolute. “You cannot throw away your career.”
I looked at Neel’s closed bedroom door across the hall and feared the worst. In the half day I had left in India, I had to find a way to help him and Dipti. In the past couple weeks, I had realized their marriage was more than the biodata match I had always assumed it to be. They had a foundation and understanding for each other that was balanced in a way that my relationship with Alex probably had never been, and it took all this pain, including Carrie’s harsh but necessary words, for me to see that. I couldn’t bear the thought of them letting go of something that people, including me, spent their lifetimes searching for and often never found.