Swati was rolling the glass faster and faster now.
Rachel reached out and stilled Swati’s hand. “Give me the glass, please.”
Swati handed it over, like a child, her lower lip trembling. Something is very wrong here, Rachel thought.
“I am leaving Mr. Aggarwal.”
It took Rachel a long moment to realize that Swati was talking about Vinod, Dhruv’s father. She calls him Mr. Aggarwal? Rachel thought, her mind whirling. Well, that’s better than nothing, I guess. “Oh,” she said helplessly.
“I have left my husband, and I have come to stay with you and Dhruv. And that’s all there is to say about that.”
Rachel dropped the glass.
Two
Swati Aggarwal did not start her day intending to leave her husband. In fact, such a thing could not have been further from her mind on that day, or any other day in the forty-one years of her marriage to Vinod. But somehow, leave him she had, and now she was sitting in her son’s dusty and strangely decorated apartment in Mumbai, watching her gori daughter-in-law sweep up broken glass.
She looked around at the posters on the wall. They were bright, and graphic, and they had images of men shaking their fists and a cat eating a mouse and all sorts of strange things, nothing pleasant like a flower. They were not things that she wanted to see every day, and she couldn’t understand why someone would have hung them. She could see Chinese letters on one, but it didn’t seem like something for feng shui, which her cousin Madhu particularly loved, and some other symbols on other images, in scripts she didn’t recognize. All the furniture was cold and simple, and there wasn’t an image of Krishna or any of the gods anywhere. Not even a swastika blessing the house. What a strange way to arrange a living room.
The windows were open, and outside black crows sat on palm trees. Swati wondered whose souls they had, knowing, as she did, that sometimes loved ones become crows that fly around your home and beg for bread. Perhaps the mother of the former occupant, waiting to see her children. Why did they keep the windows open like this? She could hear the stray dogs at the ground floor of the colony howling, startling the birds. They flew off, disturbing a pair of green parakeets that chattered and screamed. Who could live with the windows open, and all this sound?
Rachel scuttled like a crab across the floor, probably getting her knees dirty, as she cleaned up the glass. She really should be wearing chappals. She would get a piece of glass in her foot. Not like them. Who ever heard of such a thing, not liking sandals?
The girl straightened, and Swati thought about the first time she had ever seen her, the day Rachel had entered their home in Kolkata a few months earlier, the house she had lived in since she had first married Vinod more than four decades ago. The house she didn’t live in anymore.
He had never been a bad man, her husband. She couldn’t say that, wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t think it. But she had, she knew, endured him rather than cared for him. She worried for him even now, hoped he was eating well, hoped the shock of her leaving wouldn’t put a strain on his health, but her worry was an almost physical response, immediate, duty bound, logistical. Her fears for him were of shirking her obligation, not of losing her heart, and after so many years, she had thought that was more than enough, until her son had come home with his wife.
As Marwaris who had done well for themselves, who had worked hard and succeeded, when it had come time to send their son to college, they, like many they knew, had sent their child to America to study business. Vinod had a vision of Dhruv’s returning and helming the family grocery store, turning it into an empire. He saw his son as a dictator of dry goods, a sultan of salt, a prince of provisions. Dhruv, however, secured a job for himself in investment banking after graduating from Wharton and made it clear that grocery stores, and Kolkata, were not for him. He had visited regularly, yes—and set up for them wireless internet and iPads, installed credit card machines in the shops, and trained workers in computers—but only ever for a few days.
It had been disappointing, of course. Vinod had built something, and he wanted his son to cherish it. Around them, all the other families they knew had their own businesses, too, as was so common in their community, with its long history of entrepreneurship. Vinod would spend evenings with his friends at the Calcutta Swimming Club, a place where he had never even seen the pool, hearing about the way this one was working so hard for his family, that one was modernizing the factory, this one couldn’t stop fighting with his cousins, all working at the company, too. He would come home quiet, and drawn, and Swati would serve him tea and they would talk to each other about how successful Dhruv was, all on his own, how wonderful that was, and neither of them would really mean a word. Theirs was a lonely life, with no children, no daughter-in-law, no family living with them, and they clung to each other in those days, in a way that almost fooled Swati into thinking she had done it, she had learned to care for Vinod the way she had always hoped to do.
For a long time, Dhruv disappointed them in his love life as well. Dhruv had politely met the parade of girls she and Vinod had arranged for him, both in Kolkata and in New York, although of course Swati trusted the New York prospects less than someone she could see herself and evaluate. He was polite, and kind, and never spoke to anyone more than once. And then, just when she had begun to truly despair, when her son was thirty-six and unmarried, and therefore might as well have been dead or in prison or something, the way he was shaming them, he called and told her he had met someone, just six months earlier. She wasn’t Marwari, she wasn’t even Indian, and he was going to marry her. Dhruv just thought Swati should know.
They had not been able to attend the wedding. At least, that is what they had told people. In truth, they weren’t really sure if Dhruv wanted them there. He had announced that he and his fiancée (fiancée, the one he’d acquired without his parents’ ever meeting her, ever setting eyes on her, without a proper engagement ceremony, an exchange of gifts between family members, a woman with no people Swati could investigate, no family she could research, no tribe she could find), planned to marry at city hall in New York, in a fast and tiny ceremony, and there was no need for her and Vinod to undergo the long and difficult trip, which would be hard on their bodies and wallets. He said they could have a reception in Kolkata after they moved to Mumbai and it would be better to wait for that. Then he said that his new wife didn’t want such a thing, but that they were moving to India and would be sure to visit soon.
They had agreed, of course, what else could they do, when their son told instead of asked, and sat at home, worrying, wondering, desperate to know what kind of girl this would be, terrified to ask. They recounted, in hushed tones, horror stories of mail-order brides from Russia, large-breasted blond women named Bambi or Sandy from Texas who enchanted Indian boys and stole them away from their families, foreign women with no values and long nails. They huddled together, united in their anxiety, truly together. It was the closest they had ever been to each other, Swati realized later, and the least happy she had ever been.
Neither Swati nor Vinod dared hope that they might actually like their new daughter-in-law. Instead, they focused on finding her bearable. That, they felt, was the most they could hope for from a foreigner.
Then Dhruv and Rachel walked into their home.