The Vibrant Years(51)
Before Alisha could respond, Bindu held up her phone. “On here, in your hand, you can scroll through your choices, filter . . . filter by things that make you happy. And you can do it without having to hide it from anyone. And you’re acting as though all of this is a curse.”
“I never said it was a curse,” Alisha said gently, obviously seeing right through to the storm that had suddenly sprung to full, violent force inside Bindu. “But if it’s a choice, then I should be able to choose not wanting it.”
Bindu blinked and dropped onto the couch, winded by the outburst.
“Ma, you okay?” Filling a glass with water, Alisha came to her. “You don’t have to do this so soon after what happened with Richard.”
Bindu blinked again, and some of that trancelike anger inside her cleared. “Richard? You think this is about Richard? This isn’t about Richard. This is about the fact that someone like Richard can exist.”
Cullie spurted a laugh. “Except Richard doesn’t exi—”
“Cullie!” both Alisha and Bindu snapped.
“Stop it! Both of you.” Bindu glared at Cullie. “At your age, if I so much as looked sideways at a man I wasn’t married to, they called me a prostitute.” Then she turned to Alisha. “And at your age, I was widowed and expected to spend the rest of my life in the demure memory of my husband. Do you not understand what you have? What we as women have?”
Cullie looked like Bindu had slapped her. “Binji, are you crying?” She looked at Alisha so helplessly, and Alisha looked so lost in response, that Bindu was struck by the fact that they had never seen her truly upset.
No one ever had. How was that even possible? Her feelings had once been so huge, she’d had to work to breathe around them. Not just how she’d felt about Oscar and Poornima but about everything. How free her grandmother’s stories had made her feel, how stifling her mother’s rules had felt. The joy as she’d run into the ocean. The humiliation when Rupa, one of the actresses in Poornima, accused her of stealing her earrings when Bindu wouldn’t show the security guards the parijat garland she’d hidden in her bag for Oscar because she’d known they’d laugh at her if they found it.
It had all been huge. Her laughter, her tears, even her whispers. Everything loud inside her. Powerful. And now she couldn’t recognize her own raised voice.
Ashish, Alisha, and Cullie had always teased her about having a flourish for the dramatic, but they’d only witnessed the tip after her iceberg had been swallowed up by the ocean. She’d been method acting a role as herself for forty-eight years.
Eyes bright with worry, Alisha squatted in front of Bindu and tried to take her hand. But Bindu sprang up and slapped away tears that surprised her more than anything else.
There was a reason she’d put herself away. Big feelings hurt.
“Of course I’m not crying. I just wish you could understand how it used to be.” They would never know. Never get it. “This moment, the thing we’re trying to do together, my mother would have disowned me for this. She would have held me down and pushed poison into my mouth with her own hands. We have each other. We have these opportunities, and you two won’t stop being too scared to be vulnerable.”
For a full minute no one said anything.
Hypocrite, a voice whispered inside her. She cleared her throat. This portal into her past would take her nowhere but right back into the pain. Not just for her but for those she loved. It was not the same as what Alisha and Cullie were doing. “Cullie, what do you need to get this app business done?”
“Why don’t we go over what we learned and what we could have done differently,” Alisha said, trying to relay a silent message to Cullie to let it go.
Listen to your mother. Bindu sent her own silent message Cullie’s way. Letting it go, the way Alisha was so easily able to, was the only way to survive this world.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CULLIE
At its heart Poornima is the story of what life demands of us and a woman who dares to use it to claim what she wants.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Mom and Binji were making chai to dissipate the tension after Binji’s outburst. The smell of lemongrass and ginger mixed with their bantering over the right quantities of those ingredients and wafted into Binji’s bedroom. Cullie tried to let it calm her but failed. She stared at the mess of paper and Post-it Notes pinned all over the walls of the nook in Binji’s bedroom that Cullie had taken over. None of it made even a little bit of sense.
Her work was supposed to be her solace, her distraction technique when her brain started to vibrate with uncontrollable thoughts.
A massive wave washed over her, and she sat down on the bed and starfished her arms, giving up resistance and letting the anxious feeling pass through her. In for four, out for six. She slipped on her headphones and let the chants from Shloka ebb and flow with her breaths. Finally, when her Neuroband registered her body’s coming back into balance, she picked up her laptop.
“Are you sure a dating app is what you want to do next?” Mom asked, entering the room as though it were filled with land mines.
Binji followed her, still looking a little off balance. Her reaction earlier had been the weirdest thing. For the first time in her life, Cullie felt like maybe she didn’t know her grandmother as well as she thought she did.