The Vibrant Years(37)
“He’s not your son-in-law anymore, Mummy,” Aly said without heat because no matter how many times she repeated the words, they fell on obstinately unreceptive ears.
“In the eyes of God, he will always be.”
Aly imagined her mother crossing herself and resisted banging her head on the steering wheel again.
“I feel like God’s a little less rigid than that.” The words were out before she could rein them in.
Her mother paused, unused to getting what she deemed back talk from her grown daughter. Usually, when they arrived inevitably at this point in their conversation, Aly changed the subject. With four of her mother’s siblings living in the same apartment building after retirement, it was easy to deflect the conversation to what was happening in one of the aunties’ or uncles’ lives. “He is a merciful God, but you cannot treat His understanding frivolously,” her mother said finally.
“I did not leave my husband, Mummy. He left me. Did you want me to chain him to my bedpost?”
Her mother gasped.
Aly almost gasped too, with the force of letting out the words that had been trapped inside her for so long. A fierceness beat in her heart. She felt like she’d thrown herself from a high-rise without hitting concrete, and the force of it almost lifted her off her seat.
“Don’t be crude, child. Worse, don’t use your crudeness to hide from the truth.” Her mother yanked her back to reality. “You refused to move to India with him. So technically you are the one who left him.” For someone who barely altered her tone no matter how brutally she wielded it, Mummy stressed the words you and him with the force of a bad actor.
After being in India for five years, Mummy was losing her American deadpanness. Americans tended to believe themselves loud. But they mistook their confidence and entitlement for actual largeness of mannerisms. You had to watch a Bollywood film once or attend one Indian party to know how wrong they were.
Aly could have told her mother that Ashish had known she would never move to India, which amounted to him choosing to leave her. She could also get into how he’d used returning to India as the final battle for power in their marriage, and she’d failed the test. But Karen was not the kind of person who allowed her opinions to be changeable. It would count as a moral failing.
“In either case, he’s only here for a short while. He’ll be back in India soon, I’m sure. So please don’t expect anything to change.”
“I don’t expect, I pray. His will be done.” With that Mummy went on her merry way, the crash of the waves on Varca Beach the last sound Aly heard before the phone went silent.
“I love you too, Mummy,” Aly whispered—fine, hissed—at the phone before tossing it onto the passenger seat.
The phone was about as moved by Aly’s declaration as her mother was by Aly’s feelings.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BINDU
Poornima turned out to be everything I’d ever dreamed it would be. But it destroyed something more beautiful than anything I could ever have dreamed of.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
I have an appointment, so you’ll have to eat by yourself,” Bindu said to her son as she poured water into the flour and started kneading the dough for rotis.
She couldn’t get herself to say the words I have a date to him.
What made it worse was that this wasn’t even one of her living-her-life dates. It was one of Cullie’s research dates from Twinge.
It had been a couple of days since Alisha had smashed a bottle of wine to celebrate Ashish’s return (and they called Bindu dramatic) and then allowed Cullie to create a dating profile for her (with a big fake smile plastered across her face). Ashish had pretended not to watch, his lips pursed in that way he’d always pursed them when he didn’t get his way, ever since he was a boy.
Well, good for Alisha for squeezing every passive-aggressive drop of mileage out of the situation.
Bindu wasn’t going to complain, because talking about the app had been a good way to avoid a conversation about Richard’s death. Turns out Cullie had told Ashish about it. Which is why he was here. Bindu wanted to be angry at Cullie, but how could she not have told her father? Ashish might have failed at being a husband, but he’d always been a good father. After the divorce, Cullie was the one person he’d constantly been in touch with.
That didn’t mean Bindu was going to fill Ashish in on the details. Neither about Richard nor about having coffee with a man they’d found on Twinge who made music videos in Bollywood and Hollywood. Like every other remotely successful person, he was now retired in Florida. It was a surprisingly good match, so maybe this app-shap business wasn’t as random as it sounded.
“You don’t have to make me rotis, Ma,” Ashish said in the voice that all his life had meant the exact opposite of the words he was saying.
She knew she had spoiled him. But wasn’t that the job of mothers?
Throughout his marriage, Bindu had watched as he helped Alisha around the house. Her mother’s heart had been so proud of every diaper changed, every dish rinsed, every plant watered. In retrospect, she was ashamed of her pride. Alisha had done all those things too, ten times over. And all she’d heard was people praising Ashish for what a good husband he was.
Dusting the flour off her hands before she started kneading the dough in earnest, Bindu gave the pot of fish curry a gentle stir before covering it and leaving it to simmer.