Rachel thought about the teenager with braces who had been her usual cashier in New York, at the tiny overpriced corner grocery shop where she had paid far too much money for milk and olive oil and zucchini for the eight years she had lived in the neighborhood after graduating college. The girl was a student and gossiped with her fellow cashier, waiting apathetically as Rachel counted exact change or decided which cheese to buy. When Rachel asked her opinion, the cashier had disdainfully told Rachel that she didn’t eat dairy because of her skin, that it was bad for Thai women, according to her mom. What she wouldn’t give for that girl’s disdain now.
The problem with moving was that it made you alien, Rachel knew. Everyone was a stranger, and you were the invader, the outsider, the one desperate to achieve closeness with others. You were the only one in need. At Dhruv’s urging, Rachel had met up with one or two expat wives like her, women she had found online or through friends of friends. She had joined an expat Facebook group before she moved to the city, and that had led to a few others, and now she was a member of multiple groups, which threw events and had chatty members who had lots of opinions about subjects Rachel had little interest in. People asked about where to find a summer camp for their six-year-old, or if it was better to vacation in Goa or Kerala, and at which beach and which hotel, and plugged their new business ideas and wellness sessions with earnest abandon. Rachel didn’t think she would have much to say to the people discussing these things, but facing the reality of making friends as an adult in a new city, she tried to go to the meet-ups and participate online.
She hated feeling so needy, so grasping, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be friends with the people she had encountered, not them specifically, that is. But she did want someone to talk to.
She should have, she realized later, been more careful what she wished for.
The ring of the bell came just as she had given up on the vegetable man and was looking in their crisper to see what she could throw together for dinner. Aren’t I a Susie Homemaker here in India, she thought ruefully as she opened the door. However, instead of a man in a cotton shirt and trousers holding bags of vegetables, she found her mother-in-law, Swati, holding a large suitcase with a determined yet petrified look on her face.
“Swati!”
Her mother-in-law winced at the sound of her own name. “You should call me Mum,” Swati said automatically. The fear had drained from her face, leaving only the determination. Correcting other people has that effect, Rachel thought through the shock of seeing Swati at her door.
Rachel had been told before that she was expected to call Swati “Mum,” but she couldn’t do it. Even the respectful epithet Auntie would probably have gone over better than Swati’s own name, but Rachel couldn’t really manage that, either. There was something about it that implied a familiarity, a closeness, that Rachel, who had met her mother-in-law only once before, had yet to feel. She thought it was strange that you implied closeness, intimacy, to signify respect. Surely, they were opposites? But just like everything else in India, this was something different, something Rachel would have to get used to. She had started hating that phrase a day into her relocation and hadn’t stopped since. Every time she heard it, it felt like an indictment of her own inability to change. She was trying, she was, but who could change everything all at once? Who could move that quickly?
When Rachel had asked him about his parents, Dhruv had told her that for the first five years of their marriage, Swati and Vinod had observed the tradition of never addressing each other by name, but only referring to each other as my wife and my husband, or even that one said in a respectful way, in Marwari. The way Dhruv had said it, it sounded like he found it romantic. Rachel had been horrified. What was romance without intimacy?
So Rachel called her by name anyway, even though Swati looked as if Rachel had slapped her each time she said it. Rachel was trying to be adaptive, or at least subservient, to Indian culture. After all, she knew it would not bother to adapt to her, any more than a rock in a river becomes water. But this was a boundary she refused to cross. In fact, it gave Rachel a strange kind of thrill to disturb Swati this way. It was an assertion of her own feelings about names, the fact that she only liked to be called Rachel, nothing else, not even Rach. It was one thing she got to carry with her from home of herself, a thing she could control.
But whatever Rachel called her, the woman was standing in her doorway, in Mumbai, half the country away from Kolkata, with no prior warning.
“Is everything all right?” Rachel asked quietly as she ushered her in. She wondered if Swati would actually tell her if there was something wrong. She did not know her mother-in-law well, but the one thing she knew with certainty was that Swati was extremely conscious of other people and what they thought of her. According to Dhruv, she believed the worst of most and didn’t hesitate to comment on other people’s breaches in decorum, and therefore assumed they would be as quick to judge her own.
Swati had forgotten to roll her suitcase into the apartment, Rachel realized as soon as she shut the door. She opened it again, to allow her mother-in-law to grab it, but Swati had already sat on the couch, her kurta and salwar billowing and crinkling in an expensive way.
Later, Rachel wondered if that had been the moment when her life had truly changed, rather than the moment of Swati’s arrival. If she had made Swati get her own suitcase, would everything have been different? Might life have taken, for the both of them, an entirely different path?
She would never know. She wheeled it in, surprised by its weight. It was almost as big as Swati herself. How long was she planning on staying? Why was she even here?
When Rachel had first met Dhruv, somewhere in the whirlwind of the six months they had spent dating before they got married, they had compared cultures like children compare baseball cards. Now she remembered one conversation, with mounting panic, when Dhruv had described how Indian family members sometimes appeared unannounced, staying for days, or even months, with no communication about whether or not it was appropriate. It wasn’t just, as she had first assumed, the prerogative of those who couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel. Relatives, rich and poor alike, stayed with their family members, inconveniencing them, as Rachel saw it, as a custom. Dhruv had recounted stories of uncles who had stayed for weeks, displacing him from his bed and room, and the dance of discomfort around gentle inquiries as to the length of the visit, carefully calibrated so the guest wouldn’t feel offended, usually so delicate that they communicated nothing at all. These had been funny to her at the time, and she had laughed in the safety of a New York bar over a glass of wine, bathing in Dhruv’s warm gaze.
They no longer amused her.
Swati still hadn’t said a word. Rachel sat beside her warily, and the older woman, her plum lipstick fading at the center of her lips, vivid in the outlines, looked at her helplessly.
“Would you like some water?” Rachel asked politely. Swati nodded yes, so Rachel got her a glass of lukewarm water, which every Indian Rachel had met seemed to prefer, and watched as the woman drank it without putting her mouth on the rim of the glass, letting the water flow down her throat without spilling a drop. Everyone here in Mumbai did that, never touching a drinking vessel with their lips. Dhruv had said it was to avoid contaminating it with one’s mouth, a holdover from the purity and pollution laws that had governed the country for so long through the caste system. Rachel, who had not known her mouth was a contaminant, could not manage the art of drinking without putting her mouth on the rim of the glass or bottle; it made her choke and splutter and spill. She worried, though, when she drank water in India, that she was disgusting in the eyes of those who met her. She had started covering her glass with her hand when she drank, hiding the way her mouth hit the vessel.