The Taste of Ginger(43)

I went back to Neel and told him I would stay in Ahmedabad with him until he and Dipti were ready to go back together. He reluctantly agreed. As siblings, there was safety in numbers, and he and I had been through enough hard times together that we knew we could weather this storm as well. I knew my parents wouldn’t be thrilled about me being unemployed, especially my dad, but I needed to tell him.

Taking a quick breath, I rapped on the door. After hearing a low-murmured “Come in,” I pushed it open. My parents were in the bedroom Mom had slept in as a child. She always said it looked the same back then as it did now. Similar to the other bedrooms, there were no personal touches. The room was sparsely furnished, with a bed in the center flanked by two wooden end tables. On the far wall was a wooden vanity. A locked gray metal wardrobe was in the corner opposite the bed. Next to that was a white wooden door leading to a balcony. There were no photos or artwork on the walls other than the framed photo of Bhagwan that hung over the vanity. The only color in the space was the forest-green paisley-patterned rajai that covered the bed. It was such a contrast with their cluttered bedroom in Chicago, where there were so many pictures on the walls and so many baubles on the flat surfaces that my gaze never knew where to rest.

Mom was folding some laundry with the same careful precision I would have, while Dad was lying on the bed, eyes closed. He wasn’t snoring, so I knew he was awake.

“Can I talk to you?”

Dad opened his eyes and blinked a few times, readjusting to the light. Mom looked up from the neat piles of petticoats and underwear. The chair in front of the vanity was piled with clothes to be folded, so I sat on the edge of their bed with one leg crossed under me and the other dangling over the side. My parents looked at me expectantly.

“Given everything that’s been going on, I’m going to stay in India with Neel. He’s going to stay until Dipti is ready.”

Mom stopped folding. The creases on Dad’s forehead became more pronounced. He sat up.

Dad raised his eyebrows. “You can never even get one day off,” he said, referring to the number of times I’d used work as an excuse to avoid family events. “How are you going to get so many days off like this?”

“Actually,” I said slowly, “I quit my job.”

Mom remained still while Dad sat up. “Why would you do that?” He turned to my mother. “Why would she do that?”

She scrunched up the shirt she had been about to fold and remained silent.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “You knew about this, then? Hah?”

“Just listen to her, yaar,” my mother said, even though I could see the conflict dancing across her face.

My dad said, “You can’t just take a leave or something?”

I could see my parents thinking that their very successful and financially stable daughter was about to throw away their sacrifices. Because in the end, it was their sacrifices that allowed me to have the life I had. They had given up their posh upper-caste lives to become lower working class in America, trying to build their way back to the comfortable lives they’d already had in India. It was an immigrant story that was hard to comprehend but was common for many of the Indian families that had immigrated there, certainly for the ones in their circle. They had never shared that story with me, nor had I ever asked such a personal thing of them, even though I longed to understand.

The air-conditioning unit sputtered, and the cold air that had been gusting out grew warmer. Mom got up and rotated the dial to turn off the machine to keep it from overheating. The unit was probably as old as I was, still having that faux-wood paneling I hadn’t seen in America since I was a little girl. Mom propped the window open. With the unit off, we could hear people shouting in the distance and horns honking. A smoky smell wafted in: fresh roasted peanuts from a street vendor across from our subdivision.

My thoughts swirled. I couldn’t tell them that, as the only Indian associate at the firm, I didn’t have the liberty of speaking up. They wanted to believe that America had accepted their children, and if we didn’t let them have that lie, then they’d be left wondering if their sacrifices had been worth it. They’d be left wondering if they had made the wrong decision. It was a question that was cruel to ask because it could never be answered. I had given up nearly all my culture to blend into that firm and the life that came with it: eating the foods they liked and lying to my parents about the fact that I had stopped being vegetarian, celebrating their holidays and ignoring the ones I’d celebrated with my family in our home, dressing in cardigan twinsets and pearls, and speaking in a way that was comfortable to those in power. I had given up a lot of myself no doubt, but how much was another question too cruel to ask because I’d never know the answer. I could only acknowledge these transformations in hindsight, now realizing how brief life could be and looking into the past through a shorter lens.

“That job wasn’t a good fit for me,” I finally said. “I want to do something that has more meaning.”

“Meaning is something reserved for the rich,” Dad said. “We don’t have that luxury. You know how hard life is without money. We didn’t go to America and struggle so you could throw it all away like this! If you were going to do that, we should have just stayed here in the first place! If we’d stayed here, none of us would have struggled.”

I could hear the desperation in his voice, and I hated him thinking that his struggles—our struggles—had been for nothing. But I still knew that I had to put Neel ahead of that.