Chapter 15
Eight days until the wedding
The next day, Leo and Ashok meet in the Chopras’ front yard at seven a.m. Back when Leo played hockey, he and his father would go on ten-kilometer runs in the off-season so he could stay in shape.
After Leo hurt his shoulder, hockey was off the table, as there was no way he could play without doing permanent damage.
It was tough, especially since Leo had been pretty good.
To have to willingly give up on something went against his nature.
It didn’t help that his dad seemed more devastated than he was.
But he kept up the running, even after his dad would no longer come with him.
It’s been a while since he’s done this with someone, and he’s looking forward to it.
He grins when he spies Ashok uncle, tall and jowly, like a beagle on its hind legs, walking over to the Chopras’ front yard.
“It’ll be nice to have a good run!” he says as he stretches. “How are you feeling?”
Ashok tries to mimic Leo’s stretch, pulling his foot up behind him, but it keeps slipping out of his hand. When he manages to hold on to it, he loses his balance and has to put his foot back on the ground. “Okay.”
Leo waits for Ashok uncle to say more. But he doesn’t, so Leo barrels forward. “Great! Let’s start easy. We’ll take breaks whenever we need. How does that sound?”
“Okay.”
It’s not okay. Even in the morning, the sun is high in the sky, beating down on them.
After thirty seconds of light jogging, Ashok uncle is bright red.
Leo tells him it’s fine—the first push is always the most difficult, but once you’re through it, it gets easier, if only because of the knowledge that you got through it once.
But after sixty seconds, a rattling wheeze emanates from the older man’s chest, sweat pours down his forehead, darkening the back and armpits of his blue T-shirt.
Leo knows he can’t continue subjecting him to this.
He slows beyond the already glacial pace they were keeping, bending forward and putting his hands on his knees.
He pretends to pant as he says, “Actually, I think I’d rather walk. Is that okay?”
“Okay.” If Ashok uncle has noticed that their run lasted approximately two minutes, he doesn’t say anything.
Running is Leo’s favorite form of self-care.
The rhythm of his feet hitting the pavement, the regulated breaths, the tight stance—it quiets his noisy mind.
But walks are for sharing ideas and ambling conversation.
From when he was a kid to as recently as last month, Leo goes on walks with his mother, meandering through the various parks in Toronto as she tells him anonymized stories about her patients.
Ashok uncle is ambling, but not talking, his hands clasped behind his back. The awkward silence gnaws at Leo. He has to fill it.
“Where did you grow up?” Leo asks.
“India.”
This answer doesn’t help. He pushes on. “What part of India?”
“Bangalore.” Okay, that’s a little progress. The only things Leo knows about Bangalore are that it’s the tech capital of India, that his company has an office there, and that it’s reverted officially to its precolonial name, Bengaluru. But he can work with this.
“What was it like?” Leo asks.
“Nice.”
He pushes on. “Is it hot there?”
“No.”
“Do you like New Jersey or India more?”
“Same,” Ashok uncle replies.
Through the course of the next twenty minutes, Leo asks increasingly detailed questions and gets nothing but monosyllabic answers. He has sweat more on this walk trying to get this man to talk than he does on his runs. What does he do now? He exhales heavily.
When they loop back around to the front yard, Veena aunty is waiting there, hands on her hips.
Leo’s spine immediately straightens as they walk forward and she gives Ashok uncle a once-over, inspecting her husband to ensure he has been brought back in one piece.
Then she says, “Okay, see you, same time tomorrow.”
Leo has another chance.
The next day, a series of metallic clangs followed by a crash pulls Leo’s attention away from his laptop.
He goes to the kitchen to see if Manjula aunty needs help but finds Rishi instead, chasing dried lentils scattered all over the floor with a broom as he swears under his breath. A cookbook lays open on the counter.
Leo watches him from the doorway for a few moments before asking, “Dude, what are you doing?”
Rishi jumps so high that the lentils he’s gathered leap out of the dustpan in his hand and go everywhere. Leo stops a few with his foot. “Shit,” Rishi says.
“Sorry, man. Here, let me do that.” Leo steps forward and takes the broom from him. “You handle … whatever is happening over there.” He gestures to the stove, where something foamy is bubbling over.
Rishi lets out a groan as he rushes over to turn the burner off. “I’m trying to learn how to cook Indian food.”
“Why wouldn’t you just ask your mom?” Leo asks.
Rishi shoots him a look over his shoulder.
“I tried! But she refused to give me proper measurements or timing. It was all ‘a handful of this’ and ‘don’t add the potatoes till the oil looks right.’ How am I supposed to know when it looks right?
” The dish that was bubbling belches out some yellow gloop, as if to underscore his point.
Leo empties the dustpan into the garbage as Rishi finds a rag to wipe up the mess. “And you decided to teach yourself to cook a week before your wedding just because?”
Rishi is still scrubbing at the stove. “It’s not the cooking specifically, I think it’s more—I guess I’m thinking about what I want to pass on to our kids.” He stops and faces Leo, shoulders dropping as he leans back against the counter. “And then I just … spiraled.”
“About the terrible cooking?” Leo asks, grinning. “Understandable.”
“Oh, that’s messed up. I let you, a Raptors fan, into my house and that’s how you talk to me? You’d have jack without me.”
“Yes, nothing. Except”—Leo holds up a finger—“a championship trophy in the last decade. When was the last time the Knicks could say that?”
Rishi flips him off and then goes quiet for a few moments before saying, “I think I’m a coconut.”
“A coconut?”
“You know, brown on the outside, white on the inside,” Rishi replies, chuckling at Leo’s expression.
“I figure if I learn how to cook, not only will it save Geeta and me from ordering in for the rest of our lives but maybe I can connect to that part of me too. I don’t know anything about being Indian.
I was born right after my parents moved here.
” He fills another pot with water and sets it on the stove to boil.
“They only spoke English to me. They’d eat Indian food, but I’d get to have pizza and burgers and chicken tenders.
And don’t get me wrong, chicken tenders are elite.
But back then, it wasn’t cool to be Indian; kids used to do the Apu accent at me, that type of shit.
So I happily rejected it. Now I look back and it’s a huge red flag.
Just a really healthy dose of internalized racism, right?
” Rishi shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets.
“This probably sounds really lame to you. Like, you don’t think about if you’re American enough. ”
“I’m Canadian, so no, I definitely don’t. But I’m assuming you mean because I’m white,” Leo says.
Rishi’s face registers surprise. “Oh shit! I forgot you’re Canadian. But yeah, I meant because you’re white.” They both laugh.
“I haven’t ever thought about it but it doesn’t sound lame. It just sounds like you’re trying to figure stuff out. Have you talked to Geeta about it?”
“Kind of. And what she said made sense: It’s not like there’s such a thing as being Indian enough.
But …” He shrugs. “Geeta speaks Tamil and Hindi fluently, and she knows things about our culture. Our culture. Her family is so different from mine. And Sim grew up in in India. This stuff seems to come so easily to them. I don’t think Geeta’s ever thought of her Indian side separate from her American one.
To me, it feels like I’m split down the middle.
I guess I just don’t want my kid to one day feel like a coconut because I couldn’t teach them anything about their culture. ”
Leo’s surprised that Rishi is thinking about children so much, but he supposes that’s the great thing about marriage: You get to make plans for as close or as far in the future as you want.
“So you decided to make dal.”
“So I decided to make dal.” Rishi straightens up, slapping Leo on the shoulder. “I’m going to start over.”
“Can I help?” Leo asks.
Rishi gives him a skeptical look as he props Vegetarian India by Madhur Jaffrey up in the corner.
“I don’t know, man. Your people aren’t exactly one with the spices.
” Leo laughs and shoves him. “Who am I kidding, I can use all the help I can get.” They start over and move slowly, since they have to double-check the instructions every thirty seconds.
Leo’s thoughts, as they so often do, turn to Simran.
She’s had such a different experience than her cousins, growing up in India for the first half of her life.
Rishi said it seemed easy within her, but Leo doubts it’s that simple.
But maybe that’s why, despite her claims to the contrary, she seems more herself in Iyer House; this place and these people know her history.
She effortlessly slips in and out of the languages she speaks here in a way he’s never heard in Toronto.
Eventually they finish and look into the pot. The food has somehow taken on the texture of bad scrambled eggs; Leo, dal neophyte though he is, knows that it shouldn’t even have the texture of good scrambled eggs.
“Maybe we find another way for you to connect to your Indian side because I think the cooking is doing the opposite,” Leo says.
He and Rishi glance at each other before looking back down at the food and cracking up.
As they start cleaning, he asks, “Hey, how do I get Ashok uncle to talk? I’m never going to win him over if I can’t have a conversation. ”
Rishi shrugs.
“What do you mean—” Leo mimics him, lifting his shoulders to his ears. “He’s going to be your father-in-law. You’ve lived next door to him since you were a kid!”
“I don’t know what to tell you, man. The rest of the family is so loud, he’s always just in the background.
I think he might like it that way. I’ve never really spent time with him without the girls or Veena aunty there.
” Rishi pauses, seeming to consider this as he passes Leo a dirty dish.
“I probably should but it’d be too awkward now, after all these years. ”
Was that it? Was Ashok Iyer just another silent man, “ just built that way,” the same explanation Leo heard repeatedly about his father? Did he want to be quietly left alone, except that his lot in life was to be surrounded by a wife and children who were noisily over-involved?
That doesn’t sound right to Leo. He might be mistaking noise for affection but it doesn’t feel like it. There is so much warmth in the way this family runs towards and ricochets off each other.