“You bastard, I’m not a thing you get to keep. I begged you not to force me into this marriage. But you let them pack me up like a piece of meat and hand me to you. How is that love? If you knew what love meant you’d have cared what I wanted. You’d have seen that this could never work. Not just because I had already chosen my life partner, but because you and I have nothing in common, even without Omar.”
Baba stood, swaying on his feet so much that Ashna almost left her spot to keep him from falling over the coffee table and crashing through the glass. But he sat back down, unable to bear his own weight. His voice boomed. “Do not say that man’s name in my house. You hear me?”
Mom looked over her shoulder. “Keep your voice down! All that child needs now is to hear you bellowing at me. Already she hates me, blames me for this mess.”
Ashi didn’t. She didn’t blame Mamma. Mamma was not the one who had tied her parents up in this mess. Ashi had done that. She was the one who couldn’t be the kind of daughter who made her mother want to stay. She was the daughter who wasn’t enough for her father to give up whatever it was he got from his scotch.
“What is wrong with the two of you?” Her aunt walked into the room and Ashi had the immediate sense that everything was going to be okay. “I could hear you shouting from the driveway. Where’s Ashi?” She threw a glance at the window seat Ashi was hiding in and Ashi pulled herself back. “Seriously, Shobi, come on! Give a thought to what you’re doing.” She took Mamma’s hand and patted it comfortingly.
“She’s leaving again,” Baba said, barely making the words.
“That was the deal,” Mamma said. “We had a deal that I’d do three months here and three months there. But if he’s going to make such a tamasha every time, how can I do this? How can I?”
Mina Kaki tucked a lock of Mamma’s hair behind her ear. “You can’t argue with him when he’s like this. We’ll figure it out in the morning. But you two can’t do this with Ashna in the house. If you were going to have this conversation, you should have called me and I would have picked her up early. Where is she? Go look for her.”
“I didn’t mean to have the conversation. He started it.” With that, Mamma left to look for Ashi.
“Bram, come on. Let’s get you into bed.” Mina Kaki called out to Aseem, Baba’s valet, and he rushed into the room. “I’ve told you to call me when they start arguing. The next time you don’t call, your employment here will be terminated.” Her aunt was the sweetest person Ashi knew, but she could bring down a hammer like no one else.
Aseem made apologetic sounds and dragged Baba off the couch and into his study, where there was a daybed he used when no one could help him up the stairs to his room.
“I can’t find Ashi anywhere,” Mamma said, coming back into the room.
Mina Kaki stroked her arm. “I know where she is. Go up and calm down. I’ll take care of it. She doesn’t need to see you like this. Not just before you leave.” She tried to whisper so Ashi wouldn’t hear. She failed.
Mamma, who went to battle with everyone about everything, never argued with her sister-in-law. Especially not about Ashi. She left and Ashi quickly wiped her cheeks on the flannel sleeves of her pajamas. It was her first grown-up pair, pink plaid instead of the soccer ball and lollipop prints she used to wear. Mina Kaki had taken her shopping for them. Mina Kaki shopped for all her clothes, and Ashi had wanted pajamas just like her aunt’s.
“Is it okay for me to come in?” Mina Kaki asked from the other side of the curtain.
Ashi let a sniff escape.
“I’m going to take that as a yes.” Even so, Mina Kaki parted the curtain slowly, careful to allow Ashi a chance to pull it back if she wanted. But Ashi wanted nothing more than to crawl into her aunt’s arms right now. She was cold. The cold was trembling inside her chest.
Mina sat down on the window seat next to her and ran a hand over Ashi’s head. “I’m sorry.”
Ashi wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault, but if she said anything she would never stop crying and she couldn’t do that to her aunt. So when Mina Kaki pulled Ashna’s head into her lap, she went easily.
Then, despite her best effort, she proceeded to wet her aunt’s linen pants with her tears as her aunt stroked her hair.
For a long while they sat there without words, just the solidity of her aunt’s lap beneath her cheek and the comforting rhythm of her hand on her hair.
When the tears slowed and Ashna sat up, Mina Kaki met her eyes, her warm, clear brown gaze fierce. “The only thing I want you to remember from anything that you heard today is this: It is not your fault. None of this is your fault, beta.”
SOMETIMES ASHNA WONDERED how time hadn’t touched her aunt at all. The Mina Kaki of her childhood had seamlessly transformed into the Mina Kaki of the present day. If anything, she’d become more energetic, thanks to her obsession with running marathons. Even her hair was the exact same color—rich, perfectly highlighted auburn—and the same length, a sharp-edged bob that skimmed her jaw, and no one ever saw her until she was impeccably dressed in perfectly fitted linen pants and tailored blouses. Their mother’s seeming perfection was a point of amused frustration for her daughters, Trisha and Nisha, but to Ashna it was such a comforting cornerstone that the world fell back in place anytime she saw her aunt.
It wasn’t like Mina Kaki to open the front door herself, but Ashna had called ahead instead of texting, which meant her aunt had heard something in her voice, which in turn meant that despite the placid calm on her face, Mina Kaki was freaking out on Ashna’s behalf. Her overprotectiveness toward her children was legendary. Ashna wasn’t certain of much, but the fact that Mina Kaki considered Ashna and her cousin Esha her own was an undisputable fact.
“I’m fine.” Those were the first words she said when her aunt dropped a kiss on her cheek.
“I can see that.” Mina Kaki would never do something as inelegant as rolling her eyes. She didn’t need to because she could achieve the exact same effect with her tone. She had been a Bollywood actress before she married Ashna’s uncle and moved to America more than thirty years ago, and her voice inflections were impressive things. “I’ve had tea sent to the upper floor. Let’s head up there?”
The Anchorage, her aunt and uncle’s estate, nestled in five acres of redwood forest in Woodside, was much more the home of Ashna’s childhood than the bungalow she lived in. Ashna dropped off the bitter melon in the kitchen and followed her aunt up the stairs.
When Ashna had moved here from the Sripore palace at ten, a room decorated to match her room in Sripore had been waiting for her on the second floor. Ashna had lived here during the week and gone to school in Woodside. She’d spent the weekends with her father in Palo Alto. She’d only moved permanently into the bungalow after she returned from culinary school in Paris two years after Baba’s death.
Her room in the Anchorage remained untouched to this day, same as her cousins’ rooms. Although they all had their own places now, her aunt refused to entertain the fact that the Anchorage was not their primary home.
Yash, her aunt and uncle’s oldest child, had been the first to move out. Or rather, he hadn’t moved back home after college, as the traditionally Indian part of Mina Kaki’s heart had wished. Yash was currently running for governor of California. So, the hope was that he’d be moving into the governor’s mansion soon. That certainly made up for some of Mina Kaki’s heartbreak over not having her children live at home.