“But don’t you want to speak to your mother first? Just to understand what’s happening? She might be able to explain it to you in a better way than she could to me. Maybe if you let her sleep on it she can tell you what’s happening in the morning. Maybe that would be better?” Rachel said, tentative. Her mother-in-law’s English was better than Vinod’s, but there might be things that she wouldn’t say to Rachel, things that she might only want to say to her son. Or ways in which emotion was better expressed in a language she used daily, rather than one she trotted out for Rachel. Besides, with the rage pumping through him, anything Dhruv said to his father right now would be something he could regret later, and Rachel didn’t want that for him.
Dhruv agreed, reluctant and confused.
“She said she’s come to stay with us, so I can get some supplies and stuff. But I’m just not sure . . .”
“What?” Dhruv said, distracted, tossing back a drink.
“Well. How much I should get. Of the, um, supplies. Because it sounds like she plans to stay with us forever. But that—”
“Oh, no, that’s not right,” Dhruv said, and relief blossomed through Rachel’s chest. “We will work it out tomorrow, as you said. I’m sure she will be back in Kolkata soon. She won’t stay with us all that long, I promise.”
The relief withered away. Dhruv spoke like those were the only options, but Rachel had seen the determination in Swati’s eyes. She wasn’t going back to Vinod.
“But what if she doesn’t? Go back to your dad, I mean.”
“Let’s not even think about that,” Dhruv said firmly.
“Dhruv. Okay. Look, think about this. If—and this would of course be horrible—but if someone passed away. My—my dad, say. My mom, she wouldn’t come stay with us. That wouldn’t be something that happened.”
Dhruv looked at her oddly. “She wouldn’t want to,” Dhruv said.
“Right.” How was it that they were saying the same thing but didn’t seem to understand each other at all? “It’s just . . . Of course she can stay, of course, as a guest, but, she can’t stay forever. She can’t, Dhruv, your mother can’t live with us. Right?”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.” Hope? Surely it wasn’t a matter of hope, was it? “You know things are different here.”
“But, I’m still me,” Rachel said. “I mean, do you want her to live with us?”
Dhruv looked uncomfortable. “I mean, we wouldn’t have a choice. But it won’t come to that, Rachel, I promise. She’ll just go home, she’ll realize this is so insane and go home. Women don’t do things like this, not women like her.”
“Apparently they do!”
Dhruv winced, and Rachel felt horrible. This was so much for him. Thinking about his parents as people seemed like an entirely new concept for Dhruv.
“Look, we aren’t going to figure anything out tonight, right? I mean, not without Swati. Or a lot more rum. So let’s just go to bed, and you can talk to her and understand it all in the morning,” Rachel found herself saying, when all she really wanted to do was demand that Dhruv promise her that they would find Swati a lovely apartment for herself if—when—she showed him that she was serious, she wasn’t going back to Vinod. Because as much as Rachel wanted to think that Dhruv was right, that this was some sort of episode, and Swati would soon be back where she belonged, she had a sinking feeling that Swati wasn’t going anywhere.
On the spare bed in their second bedroom, Dhruv tossed and turned beside her, finally subsiding into an uneasy sleep at three a.m., while Rachel lay awake, watching him. Why hadn’t he just said Of course she won’t live with us? Why couldn’t he just have said it, so she knew they were in the same place, on the same page, attuned to each other? Instead, she lay in the dark, thinking about the phrase we wouldn’t have a choice and not understanding it at all. Of course they had a choice. Swati was a person, an adult. It wasn’t like she needed them to survive. Rachel pictured her mother-in-law as an errant toddler, playing with matches, sticking her finger in electrical sockets, licking lightbulbs. Ridiculous. If she was grown-up enough to leave her marriage, surely she could manage the task of living alone.
Rachel turned and watched Dhruv’s troubled face scrunch up in the moonlight, wishing she could soothe the strain on his forehead. He slept like a sick child, batting at the air. She wished she knew what to say, how to help. She wondered if she would have known if she were Indian. Would a Marwari woman know just what to say to her husband in this situation? To her mother-in-law? To herself? Would she have understood all this better than Rachel could have? Perhaps this was some kind of ritual test, and an Indian girl would have laughed at Swati and shooed her back to Vinod, and they all would have had a nice moment about it, and she would have proven herself as the right kind of person, the right kind of wife. Maybe this was all a game and Rachel didn’t know the rules.
But shouldn’t Dhruv have told them to me? She wanted to dismiss the thought as disloyal, so she shut her eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t, not for hours. Outside, in the colony, dogs without homes howled, and cats hunted and screamed for mates. Why didn’t people take care of these animals? The other day, while buying bananas in the market—for she found fruit easier to buy for some reason, maybe because they didn’t need it so much and she didn’t mind if she couldn’t get the right thing—she had seen a woman scream and throw a brick at a cat that was rubbing itself on Rachel’s legs. It missed them both, but what kind of person did that? She had looked at Rachel as though she was doing her a favor.
When Rachel did finally fall asleep, she dreamed of Swati’s chasing her with a pair of sandals, screaming at her to wear them, while Dhruv did nothing and a thousand women threw bricks at a thousand cats but hit Rachel’s legs instead. She’ll tire herself out, he kept saying about Swati, or any of the thousand women, Rachel didn’t know. But either way, he was wrong.
And when she woke up in the morning, she felt exactly the same way. He was wrong. Rachel knew it.
Five
When Swati woke up in the morning, she had just had the best sleep of her entire life. But when she remembered the task in front of her, to see her son, to face him, the memory of that wonderful rest was replaced with dread.
Would he be angry? Would he hate her? What if he simply bought her a plane ticket and ordered her to return home immediately? She tried to prepare herself for the possibility, tried to practice her firmest refusal, but her mind, contemplating that scenario, drew a complete blank. Dhruv was her child, yes, but he was a man, an adult. She couldn’t imagine saying a direct no to her son if he told her to go back. But she wasn’t going to go back to Kolkata, either.
In her entire life, she didn’t think she’d ever seen her own mother directly address her father for anything, ever. For anything she needed from him, for any question she had, she would tell it to the air, to the table, to Swati herself. “Swati, dinner is ready, and I’ve made the dal your father likes.” “Swati, the driver was insolent, and he should be fired by your father.” “Swati, I’m going shopping, and I will need money for that.” Then her father would hand over the money, or fire the driver, or eat the dal.