One
When her mother-in-law came to ruin her life, Rachel Meyer arrived at a conclusion that she would never, afterward, be swayed from: namely, that the whole thing was entirely her own fault.
When the doorbell rang, Rachel thought, quite naturally, that it was the vegetable seller. He brought vegetables at five p.m. on the days Dhruv, her husband, called and asked for them. Rachel had tried to do it herself, but even though she had looked up how to pronounce each word in Hindi, they became garbled in her mouth and the man didn’t know what she was saying, and grew confused, and she ended up angry, her face hot and her voice an octave higher than it normally was, hanging up the phone in frustration. Dhruv had laughed so hard the time she had tried to say two lemons, do nimbu, but it had come out more like dough nipple, that he cried.
She had walked to get beans and onions and lemons and potatoes that day, sweating out her anger, mostly at herself, in Mumbai’s sweltering humidity, which embraced her in a voluptuous oil-slicked hug, the air heavy with pollution and dust. The streets were uneven, paved but patchy in points, and although there was, technically, a sidewalk, every ten feet or so it was occupied by things like a pile of dry palm fronds, seven bags of gravel, a tea stall, an old toilet, a family of four, making it hard to walk. Rachel walked in the street, peeking over her shoulder constantly, thinking, How would it work, walking here? How did anyone walk here, where the streets were a never-ending obstacle course? But millions did, she knew.
She arrived at the stand, and, pointing at what she wanted, she tried to say the names she had learned, but the vegetable seller was soon as confused as she was. She tried to apologize, but their conversation became a mutual avalanche of “Sorry, sir,” “Sorry, madam,” until she retreated home in shame. Later, she would learn that the vegetable seller mostly spoke Marathi, but by that point she was too embarrassed to try again.
When they had moved to Mumbai just a few months before, Rachel and her husband had picked a place with an ocean view. Well, Dhruv had picked it, of course, and she pretended she had had some say in the matter because he had shown her listings, as if she knew anything about Mumbai, where they should try to live, what it would be like in its neighborhoods, its clogged traffic, and its sprawling streets. All she had noticed was that the kitchens had no ovens.
Dhruv wanted a view, and Dhruv usually got the things he wanted, or decided he no longer wanted them at all, a quality Rachel found fascinating. Rachel didn’t know how he turned desire on and off like that. He had never lived in Mumbai before, having grown up in Kolkata, but the movies he had watched as a child featured laughing heroines in sweeping saris running down the beach hand in hand with handsome heroes who had feathered mullets and noble hearts, and that fantasy lived somewhere in him still. Dhruv had told her, in his marriage proposal two months earlier, that she would love it, the sweep of the sea in front of them, although for Rachel it seemed odd to live by an ocean she wasn’t allowed, for both modesty and health reasons, to swim in. She didn’t say that, though.
So Dhruv had gotten a room with a view, in an area called Reclamation, so called because it was built on reclaimed land. Before moving, Rachel had joked that it would kill her to live in a place with so little imagination. But actually, what ended up bothering her about the area, which was lovely and tree lined, was the smell. The fishermen, who lived nearby at the edge of the sea in shacks made of sheet metal and bright blue tarps, with walls made from repurposed signs and billboards, hung their catch to dry along the ocean, and around five p.m. the smell was intense, and the air became thick with the scent of drying ocean and withering flesh.
It was inescapable. Closing all the windows against it was no help at all, and it only made their apartment, large by Mumbai standards but still compact, stuffier. Rachel liked to keep everything open to catch the breeze and could not understand why the few guests who had come by preferred the air conditioner, which made their home a freezing, fishy box.
The scent, which had been so wretched to her at first, was almost familiar now that she had been there for a few weeks, and she welcomed it, because it reminded her of the time daily, letting her know that the vegetable man might be on his way. Sometimes Dhruv let her know when he had called to order something, but sometimes he didn’t, and since she was home all the time, it hardly mattered either way.
The vegetable seller had a cart with wheels that he set up daily underneath a mango tree on the end of their block outside their colony. Rachel had protested that she was happy to go pick up vegetables from him, or from the larger market, the way she had that one time the phone call had enraged her so, despite her mortification, but Dhruv had told her this would be better, and besides, it was how things were done, he said in a tone of voice that he seemed to have unpacked in India with his suits. She teased him, calling it his “Indian uncle” voice, and he grimaced, picking at the gray hairs at his temples, and then chased her around their apartment like Ashok Kumar in Shaukeen, an old Bollywood movie he had shown her.
So she didn’t go pick up vegetables. She did things the way Dhruv said they should be done, worried that if she did them wrong, the way they were not done, she would be doing something offensive or dangerous or stupid. Nothing bad had happened that one time, of course, other than her feeling like an idiot, but it was easier, she had found quickly, on the whole, to let Dhruv tell her how to live in India. And he certainly seemed to like it. So now the man came to deliver the produce Dhruv preferred, like fenugreek and curry leaves, bitter gourd and tiny eggplants for the curries she tried hard to make, which were never quite the way he wanted them, although he swallowed them gratefully. They tasted good to Rachel, but she never felt she could say that. She wasn’t the expert.
On the weekends they tried cooking together, but Dhruv was hopeless in the kitchen, able to tell her that it wasn’t exactly right but not how to make it better, something that drove Rachel out of her mind with irritation, and they would bicker and fight and make up and order something instead.
Dhruv had told her once that he liked her best when he had made her angry, when she was simmering with heat like a nice pot of tea. She didn’t know if that was a good thing to say to her or a bad thing. She did know that she didn’t like the idea that he was trying to rile her up, that he was observing her through a microscope of her emotions. Besides, she drank coffee.
So now she waited daily for the vegetable seller, or for one of his delivery boys. As fragile as the little business was, it seemed he employed several people, as Rachel had seen at least three other men come to her door with bags of eggplant and cucumbers, garlic and mint. She waited for them and greeted them happily, but they seemed dazzled by her, and when she paid, tipping them of course, they always tried to give her change back or ducked their heads when she told them in halting, mispronounced Hindi to have a nice day. She had no idea what she would do if they responded with something other than tikeh, “okay.”
She wished she could communicate with the vegetable man and his employees directly. She wished they could understand her, or that she could understand them, or that they would mime a joke or something, anything, to make it seem a little more like two people in an equal exchange, not a servant bowing to a master. She hated the way waiters and cashiers and just, well, everyone who worked in service acted like a servant. When she’d asked a coffee shop worker once how his day was going, he had paled and bowed and run for his manager, unable to understand what she wanted. Dhruv sympathized with her when she complained about this, which had happened often since they had moved to Mumbai three months earlier, but she knew he didn’t really feel the same way, and the soothing noises he made were the ones you use with a cranky child when trying to get it to sleep.