Home > Incense and Sensibility (The Rajes #3)(8)

Incense and Sensibility (The Rajes #3)(8)
Author: Sonali Dev

“She does. But there’s this dumb kid sister getting in her way because her brother won’t stop being a stubborn ass.” With that she kissed his cheek and hurried off, leaving him to enter the waiting room.

Arzu, Abdul’s wife, sat flanked by an older couple.

The man stood and shook Yash’s hand. “I’m Hafiz Khan, Abdullah’s father.”

Yash took the man’s hands in both of his. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said, looking at Arzu, whose eyes were so dry and stoic they should have been a sledgehammer to Yash’s numbness.

Next to her, in a baby carrier hooked to a stroller, Naaz was rolled up in a pink blanket and fast asleep. Her head was covered in a cap, leaving open nothing more than cheeks, a button nose, and tightly closed eyes.

“How are you?” Hafiz said, and the ice inside Yash went even colder. He was here, standing on his own two feet, the wounds in his shoulder and arm nothing more than a few stitches. While Abdul was hooked up to a ventilator, a head injury and major blood vessels and tendons in his neck torn and sewn up. His brain unable to process that his body was alive.

Yash bent over Naaz. She’s so beautiful, he wanted to say, but nothing came out, so he simply stroked a crooked finger along her baby carrier, too afraid to touch something so fragile.

“They’re not sure if he’ll wake up,” Arzu said, her strong voice at odds with the words she was saying.

“He’ll wake up. He has to.” Yash turned to her.

Nisha had warned him to be careful about what he said. To not give her hope when the doctors were being so cagey. But doctors didn’t know everything. Who knew that better than Yash?

“They aren’t sure they can keep him on the ventilator much longer.” Every time they’d met, Yash had noticed the spine of steel under her easy banter with Abdul. They were a powerhouse together. Now she had to be fierce enough for the both of them.

“We’ll keep him on the ventilator for as long as it takes him to wake up. You don’t have to give in to pressure. I will make sure no one makes that call but you. If there is anything in this world that can be done to get him to wake up, I’m going to do it. I promise you that.”

That did it, that made her shoulders slump. Just for a moment. Then she straightened again, eyes still dry.

For a moment he thought she would tell him to stuff his promises. For a moment he thought she’d thank him. She did open her mouth to say something. In the end she just nodded, then she bent over her baby and stroked her cheek as Yash let himself out of the room.

 

 

Chapter Four


India had canceled the corporate retreat and rushed back home early because of her mother. Yash Raje had nothing to do with it. No, he did not. She would never change her plans because of some politician being shot. Even though that politician was her friend’s brother. Correction, he was her friends’ brother. Plural, not singular.

Ashna, Trisha, and Nisha had all responded to her texts and assured her that they were fine and that Yash was on the road to recovery. That’s what the news said as well.

It was a relief. Not just to her, but to all of California—all of America. Her relief was no different than anyone else’s. Being relieved was natural. The fact that the man’s tongue had been the first tongue to ever be in her mouth had nothing to do with it.

Settling into the yoga mat in her room, she dragged a breath deep into her lungs and held it. Energy traveled all the way down her arms, her legs, filling up her fingertips, her toes. Then she released it. Emptying herself out. So it went for a while. Keeping time while meditating wasn’t her way, so she didn’t know how long it took. In the end when it released her she felt much more centered.

The first thing she’d done after she got home yesterday was take Mom to the hospital, where they’d spent the day doing test after test.

“That’s what you get when you go to a Western hospital,” her mother had said. Tara always said “Western hospital” as though she hadn’t been born and raised in California.

West of what? India would have asked, if Mom hadn’t looked so fragile. She had lost twenty pounds. India kicked herself for not noticing. Her mother had always been on the thinner side. They all were. A lifetime of yoga and vegetarianism would do that to you. According to the doctor, the weight loss might not have been visible because it was mostly muscle mass loss. India should still have noticed.

After rolling up her mat, she made her way up the narrow wooden stairs to the third-floor attic that housed the incense workshop and Tara’s room. The yoga studio and India’s office took up the first floor, with a public entrance in the front that opened into a lobby and a private entrance in the back that opened to the staircase that led up to the private apartment. The second floor was occupied mostly by the family room and open kitchen with India and China’s rooms tucked away in the back along with a guest room that Sid used when he was in town.

As India entered Tara’s room she was flooded with the smell of incense. Naturally it was strongest up here, even though a hint of it always permeated the rest of the apartment and studio.

Their family had owned this three-floor block since the early part of the last century. India’s great-grandparents had bought it to open a barbershop on the first floor and live on the upper floors. When the business grew, they had hired an immigrant from India who in his spare time practiced a strange form of stretching and breathing called yoga that they’d never heard of.

The couple had become intrigued when their joint pain disappeared when Ram taught them some poses and helped them practice every day. The more they practiced, the more obsessed they became. They cleared a part of the barbershop and tried to get their neighbors to join in. Their efforts were met with suspicion and accusations of practicing pagan mystical arts, but it hadn’t stopped them from continuing to practice themselves.

India’s grandmother had grown up in love with both yoga and the man who brought it into their lives. Ram was a good fifteen years her senior, and marriage to him had been not just scandalous, but also illegal. In the end, the town’s hatred had driven Ram out.

After he left, Romona had found out that she was pregnant with Tara. Romona was the one who finally turned her parents’ barbershop into a yoga studio. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay were a vastly different place in the sixties than it had been in the forties, and Romona had been able to raise Tara, who had inherited her father’s black hair and brown skin, with only an undertone of disapproval from the neighbors and a steady supply of students to make a living.

When she turned eighteen, Tara had traveled to India in search of her father. She hadn’t found him, but she had spent ten years in a yoga ashram in Jammu. She’d come home with Siddhartha, a four-year-old boy she’d adopted, and joined her mother in running the studio. Two years after that she’d adopted India from an orphanage in Bangkok, and two years after that China from an orphanage in Nairobi.

India hadn’t known there was anything different about her family until a substitute teacher in her kindergarten classroom had looked at her with an expression India would come to know well as she grew up, and asked, Aren’t you one of that yoga teacher’s kids? The ones with the cleft lip scars adopted from three continents?

When India had told Sid about it on their way home from school, he’d said, But India and Thailand are on the same continent.

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