The Taste of Ginger(45)

“That’s fair,” I said. “I haven’t been the best advocate in the past. But during my time here, I’ve seen the way you balance each other, and until now, I hadn’t.”

“I’m not going back tonight,” she said, staring at the notebook.

“I’m not asking you to. Is it okay if I sit?” I asked, slowly approaching her the way Nana had taught me to approach the peacocks that came to the garden at Lakshmi when I was a little girl.

She nodded, and I sat in a chair near her side of the bed. I imagined her father had been keeping vigil over her from that chair.

Once seated, I said softly, “I just think you and Neel should talk. You left without doing that, and he’s really hurt.”

She glared at me. “He didn’t have a child ripped out from his insides.”

“I know. But he did lose a child. You both need each other now more than ever.”

“He apparently just needs to work, and then everything will be fine.”

“He’s not going back tonight.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“He’s not,” I repeated. “He’s going to stay until you are ready. We both are.”

I could tell she wasn’t sure how to process this new information.

Eventually, she said, “I can’t imagine either of you will last long here.” Then she turned back to the notebook on her lap.

“What are you working on?” I asked, motioning toward it.

She looked down at it before answering. “A letter.”

I nodded, knowing from her hollow eyes that it was a letter to Uma.

“How are you holding up?” I asked.

“Fine. I’m almost done with the antibiotics,” she said, her expression cold and unwavering, like a stone statue.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh.”

“You can talk to me if you want. I can only imagine how difficult this must be for you.”

The breeze from the air-conditioning unit caused goose bumps to pop out on my arms as I adjusted to the cold room.

“I’m fine,” Dipti said, crossing her arms.

She had a slight edge to her words that I recognized well—it was the same tone I used when I wanted people to leave me alone.

I leaned toward her and put my hand on her forearm. “I know things are hard right now, but please don’t blame Neel. He loves you, and he loved the baby. He had to make an impossible decision.”

She jerked away from my touch as though I had burned her skin. Pain flickered across her face.

“I’m fine,” she repeated and looked at the door, making clear she wanted to be alone.

I slowly rose and made my way to the door. Before leaving, I turned around and said, “Please don’t shut him out.”

When I returned from seeing Dipti that afternoon, for the first time since arriving in India over two weeks ago, I found myself alone in the bungalow. With so many people staying there and a constant rotation of servants who’d been hired to help with the wedding, it was the first time that the only sounds in the house were of my feet shuffling across the marble floor in my champals. Neel had gone out with my parents to buy some last-minute things like spices and nasta for Dad to take home with him. He was now the only member of our family who was flying home that night. Hari and Laila were on their honeymoon in Udaipur. Virag Mama and Bharat were at the office. Indira Mami must have been out running errands. Even the servants seemed to have made themselves scarce for the moment.

I gathered the bangles I had borrowed from Indira Mami for the wedding and took them to her closet, which was a room off her bedroom with wardrobes along three sides. I used to play dress-up with her jewelry as a young girl and knew she didn’t mind me opening the wardrobes. A quick tug on the closet door reminded me that the cabinets in the house were always locked for fear that the servants would steal or looters would break in. It took some getting used to for me to keep everything under lock and key and never leave clothing or my laptop or earbuds lying around. Virag Mama and Indira Mami didn’t want to leave any temptations in plain sight.

There were horror stories of servants who had been with families for years learning their secrets and then robbing them and taking the money back to their families in the villages they grew up in. It saddened me to think that the caste system forced some to steal from the people who employed them to help feed their families. Equality was not even a topic of discussion in India, let alone something people strove for. Unlike in America, in India, the presumption was that the caste you were born into reflected your karma from past lives, and a life better lived meant that you’d elevate in the next life. Of course, the opposite held true as well. The fear of the unknown was enough to keep an undecided like me on the karmic straight and narrow as much as I could manage.

Indira Mami kept a large ring of dozens of skeleton keys on a clasp that tucked into her sari, and they jingled with each step she took. When we were kids causing mischief around the house, we knew to disperse and pretend we were behaving as soon as we heard that sound. Those keys were always on her. She had given me a small key to open the key box that hung on the wall in the foyer. I rummaged around the ones dangling on the hooks, until I found the spare set for her wardrobes.

After trying several keys in her closet, I heard the latch release, and the large cabinet door swung open. Indira Mami’s colorful bangles were organized on red velour rods on a higher shelf. I pulled a stepping block over to the cabinet and removed a rod that had space on it. When I slid the bangles back in their place, I noticed the thick cardboard boxes I had seen as a child—the ones that held old family photos.