She did that now, looking at Swati above her palm, but the woman didn’t seem disgusted. They sat in silence for a long moment, each woman stiff with tension, the suitcase an anvil that had landed in the room between them. Rachel longed for Swati to speak, for the vegetable man to come, for anything to happen. She was sure that Swati had not just dropped by, had not come all the way from Kolkata just to say hello. What she was less sure of was if this was a planned visit, something Dhruv had known about but had forgotten, or worse, had chosen not to tell her about. Rachel and Dhruv hadn’t been together for very long, but surely he would know that above all things, she hated being surprised.
Rachel felt a sense of rising panic as she considered that she was in no way prepared for an extended visit from her mother-in-law. They weren’t even prepared for an overnight guest. They had only one extra pillow, they would need sheets, she would need activities, and they would need alcohol, not for Swati, who did not drink, but for herself, as a response to said extended visit. Rachel sent a covert look in the direction of her kitchen. A half bottle of rum and a bit of whiskey remained, and if she wasn’t mistaken there was some white wine, local, bad, in the fridge. That was something. But as part of her brain dashed to the logistics of hosting, already imagining a thousand scenarios and ideas, another part of it couldn’t move away from the larger point: what on earth was happening?
“Your home is nice. Nice place,” Swati said.
Rachel looked around. Was it? They hadn’t been there for long, and it didn’t feel all that lived-in to Rachel. “Thank you.”
“The floor is dusty. You should wear chappals.”
“I don’t like them,” Rachel said simply.
“I wear them always,” Swati said.
“That’s nice,” Rachel said, unsure how else to respond. Swati looked at her like she was insane, and Rachel noticed then that Swati gripped her water glass so hard, Rachel wondered if she intended to crack it. She rolled it back and forth in her hands, her many rings, all for protection, blessed by one deity or another, clinking against the glass. In her ears were diamond studs, matching the one in her nose, and on her wrists were bright gold bangles, and the red and yellow thread Hindus used in ceremonies, the kind a priest tied around your wrist and you were supposed to wear until it fell off on its own. Rachel called it temple string and clipped it off her own wrist as soon as was polite after a ceremony or a visit to a temple, silently asking her rabbi for forgiveness for her forays into idolatry.
Swati’s outfit was wrinkled with travel, but the fabric was rich, the embroidery work elaborate, and the dupatta delicate around her neck. She looked, in short, like many women Rachel had met since moving to Mumbai. Rachel had started to recognize Swati as a type: a rich society auntie, a wife and mother living in comfortable cycles of managing the household, going on morning walks and afternoon teas, lunches with old friends who were in gentle, and not-so-gentle, competition with one another over whose husband was doing the best, whose children had the best marriages, whose lives reflected back the ideal in the strongest ways. This was a life of obligations, some pleasant, some not, and of caring for others, and of judging them.
They seemed to have comfortable lives, but comfortable could be a kind of imprisonment, or so it seemed to Rachel, and she always thought about these women, her mother-in-law included, as sitting in a living room bedecked with flowers, images of Krishna, and ugly pillows. There, Swati made sense. Transplanted into Rachel’s apparently dusty living room, with Rachel’s ironic Soviet propaganda poster of robust Russian women scything wheat hanging on the wall over her, Swati looked wildly out of place.
In her own home, in Kolkata, which Rachel had visited for the first time two months ago, just a month after her move to India, Swati had seemed to Rachel a queen in her court. With its heavy furniture and dark rooms, Dhruv’s childhood home had surprised Rachel, who thought leather couches and thick upholstered chairs would have been impractical and uncomfortable given the climate, but Swati was clearly proud of it. Cut fresh flowers warred with fake ones on every surface, and Swati’s salwar suits in hazy floral prints matched every room. Rachel’s father-in-law, Vinod, with his crisp dress shirts and frowns, had seemed an outsider, while Swati was stamped on everything. Rachel had not known what to touch, where to get a glass of water, how to move without disrupting something. She had come back to the room she shared with Dhruv each night to discover her suitcase and toiletries and books had been moved, every time to some different spot, making her feel that wherever she put anything, it was wrong.
She wished Swati would put the water glass down. Every time her rings rolled past it, she worried it would shatter. They didn’t have that many glasses; they couldn’t afford to lose one.
“Would you like more?”
Swati shook her head, rolling and rolling the glass. Click, click, click. The tapping sound echoed in the apartment, jangling against Rachel’s ears.
“Has something happened? Was Dhruv expecting you? He didn’t say anything, so I didn’t know you were coming, I’m sorry, I would have been more prepared.”
Rachel tried to speak slowly, which was not in her nature. Her in-laws had, when she met them, looked confused when she spoke, which Dhruv told her was because she had an American accent, but she privately believed was because they couldn’t speak English that well. She’d tried to suggest this to Dhruv and he’d been angry, and later she understood that it was an insult to say someone’s English was bad here. But why should it be good? Her Hindi was scant and horrible, and she didn’t speak a word of Marwari. She was thrilled anyone spoke any English, even just a little.
Swati shook her head again.
Rachel was frustrated. Was the woman going to be like this all evening? What kind of person came, without warning, and then refused to explain why?
Rachel’s life, which had been in a state of constant and uncomfortable transition since she had moved—since before that even, since preparing to move and meeting the many reactions, which ranged from disbelief to disapproval to the awed respect people give soldiers planning to enter a war zone, with ruthless manufactured cheer—suddenly seemed like a farce, a catastrophe, something that was happening to someone else. What was she doing, sitting on a couch with her mother-in-law in India?
“Swati. Please. What are you doing here?”
“I have come to stay,” Swati said simply.
After all those long minutes of confused silence, Rachel had thought Swati’s speaking would be a relief, but it had only muddied the waters more fully. Was this some custom Dhruv had forgotten to tell her about, or didn’t even know about himself? He didn’t seem to know so many of the customs; perhaps they were the domain of women, or perhaps he hadn’t been paying attention growing up. He had lived abroad for years, too; maybe things had changed. Surely, though, someone else would have said something to her, if this intrusion was part of an important tradition.
Rachel had read many books by Indian authors before she had arrived in Mumbai, trying to fill the gaps in her knowledge and in Dhruv’s descriptions with information. She had never been to India before she moved, and now she realized that perhaps that had been a good thing. Some part of her wondered, if she had visited, seen what it was like, understood the way her life would be, would she still have come? It was so foreign to her, so opaque, sometimes, that her mind rebelled against it. Having to accept it, to explore it and work to understand it, maybe that was the only way anyone could. It was better to come without a departure date.