The Taste of Ginger(58)
I smiled, thinking maybe that wouldn’t be the worst job in the world.
24
When I returned home that evening, I found Neel slumped in his bed staring at his laptop screen. As he had as a child, he was burying himself in video games to avoid the world around him. Some things never changed no matter how much we aged.
“How was work?” He said the last word somewhat sarcastically.
I tried not to bristle at the edge to his voice. “If only photography could be work,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Was happy to even do it on Christmas. How was she today?”
He shut his eyes as if exhaustion had just overtaken him.
“Were you able to talk to her more?” I pressed.
He closed the lid of his computer, his head resting against the wall. “She’s in a bad place.”
“What did she say?”
He now opened his eyes, and I saw the hard look in them. “She is even more determined to stay here. She just mopes around in bed all day writing letters to Uma. That’s just not healthy.”
“If that’s what she needs to heal, then you have to support her in it.”
“I know you’re trying to help, but how can you possibly know how to deal with this?” he spit out.
I was taken aback by his tone. “I’m not saying I do. I’m just saying that people heal differently. Our family has never been one for emotional discourse, so if that’s what she needs, then maybe that’s why she’s with her family.”
He threw up his hands. “No Indian family is big on emotional shit! That’s the defining characteristic of being in an Indian family. We all grew up that way, and we’re all fine, right? Doctors, lawyers, we all turned out fine.”
He was right. The Indian measure of “fine” was your profession. By that standard, we were fine. But looking at the disarray my family had been in over the past few weeks, in terms of emotional well-being, it seemed we were all a long way from “fine.”
“Nothing seems particularly fine right now,” I said quietly, not sure if I was saying it to him or myself.
“No shit. That’s why I tried to go home! Then you convinced me I had to stay, or I’d lose my wife!”
I couldn’t recall a single time he’d lashed out at me like that. Maybe when we were kids and were fighting over the remote or something stupid like that, but never about something serious, and never as adults. I was too stunned to respond, but that was just as well because he hadn’t finished yet.
“All we do is mope around here, falling deeper and deeper into whatever depression cycle this is. I knew I should have gone home. What good is keeping my wife if I’ve lost my mind? Worse still, what good is losing my wife and my mind?”
His eyes were hard, but they couldn’t mask the pain.
“I was only trying to help.”
“You’re always trying to help, but the person you really need to help is yourself. How can you possibly give life advice when your own is such a mess? I was stupid for taking it. I should have known better. It’s probably no accident that I’m the one who bails you out of stuff, not the other way around. Do you ever think about how easy you had it growing up with all of us sheltering you from everything bad and making excuses for you?”
Tears pricked my eyes. I knew he didn’t mean the things he was saying, but they hurt just the same. When the person you loved and trusted most in this world said such harsh things, you couldn’t help but wonder if they were true. And for how long he’d thought them. There was a resentment in his tone that felt rooted rather than sudden. The words came out so easily. As if he’d uttered them before. Maybe to Dipti. Maybe to friends. But they weren’t new thoughts. Those took time to form, and these had taken no time at all.
There was no response I could give in that moment that would help him or me, so I stood up and went to my room and closed the door behind me before I slid against it and let silent tears fall down my cheeks. I had thought loneliness was losing Alex. I’d been wrong. True loneliness was losing Neel.
In the days that followed, I wanted to avoid Neel and process my thoughts, so I spent as much time as I could at Happy Snaps with Tushar. During that time, I learned that Tushar was someone who laughed out loud when he read something funny and savored every drop of the chai he drank three times a day. Just like Hari and Bharat, Tushar was overly formal and polite in the way that many locals seemed to be when dealing with people outside of their family. He never talked back to his parents, who called or stopped in the store several times a day, and he often raised an eyebrow when he overheard my casual way of speaking with my mother on the phone. Despite our differences, we settled into a comfortable pattern, and I looked forward to my time at Happy Snaps in a way I never had when I went to work at my old law firm. Being in the studio brought a sense of peace and calm to this otherwise frenetic and painful trip to India.
“I see you have given up your Western ways,” Tushar joked when I emerged from the darkroom on my fourth day at Happy Snaps with telltale streaks of finishing chemicals on my parrot-green panjabi.
After wearing jeans my first two days in the shop and having customers stare pointedly at me, I had decided to wear Indian clothing to hopefully not be pegged immediately as NRI. Spilling toner on my favorite pair of jeans a couple days earlier had also helped me arrive at that decision, and I had asked Mom to take me to get some daily wear that would allow me to blend in more with the locals. We didn’t talk about it, but I could see from Mom’s expression that she approved of this transition.