Chapter 17
Five days until the wedding
This morning, Ashok uncle is sporting nifty matching sweat-bands on his forehead and wrists as he and Leo set off on their walk without a word.
After the last couple of days, Leo’s decided to accept the silence.
It’s almost peaceful, listening to birds chirping and cars driving past and kids running around their yards and … no, this is unbearable.
Still, Leo doesn’t say anything. His attempts so far have fallen flat. This might be worse than climbing that ladder. This might be worse than yesterday’s chai incident.
“Okay,” Ashok uncle says out of nowhere.
It takes Leo so much by surprise that all he can reply with is “Huh?”
“It is okay,” Ashok uncle says. Multiple syllables! But what is okay? “You asked about the pace.”
He most certainly did not. But Leo’s not going to push it. “Oh. Good.” Now he’s the monosyllabic one. Say something else, Leo. Keep it going. “What do you think about turning here and going down Hudson Street to walk by the pond instead of Sherbourne Path?”
“Okay.”
The silence descends again. Then, after a few minutes, Ashok uncle says to him, “Put your hands like this.”
Leo blinks twice. “What?”
“Put your hands”—Ashok uncle holds both of his hands up, as if Leo might not know what he’s talking about—“like this.” Exaggeratedly, he clasps them behind his back as they keep walking.
Leo, unsure how to reply, does as Ashok uncle has demonstrated. And after a few moments, he says, “Whoa.”
Ashok uncle nods. “See?”
“I do! I see!” Leo says, feeling how his shoulders are pulled taut and how his hands joined at the small of his back force him to engage his core with each step he takes.
“It’s good for thinking,” the older man adds. “Okay!” Leo says.
When the silence returns, Leo lets it. These aren’t the wordless runs with his father or the chatty, distracting walks with his mother; it’s something new, a stroll, punctuated with occasional conversation. Okay. He can live with that.
As they round the corner to the street where the Iyers and Chopras live, Ashok uncle speaks again. “After the surgery … it is harder.”
Leo quickly understands. “Walking?”
“I used to play cricket in India. Then I came to America. There was no cricket here. So I stopped. I became slow. And slower now.”
“It happens to a lot of people,” Leo says.
Ashok uncle says, “So this pace is good.”
Leo smiles back at him. “This pace is great.”
Leo feels like he’s in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, tiptoeing through the back door of Iyer House into the kitchen, looking for Simran, hoping they might be able to pick up where they left off in the closet. A stern voice behind him says, “Eh, you! What are you doing here?”
He turns slowly, trying to buy some time as he scrambles for a reason. But it’s just Kavitha, sitting at the table, grinning at him over her laptop. “Gotcha.”
Leo’s laugh is a gust of relief. “You are too good at that.”
“Simran’s on a call in her bedroom upstairs,” Kavitha says, tilting her chair back on two legs.
Leo perks up. “Oh?”
“My mother is also upstairs.”
“Oh.” He notices the legal pad filled with scrawls next to her computer. “Are you working?”
“No, I have these two weeks off from mediating at the law offices of Misters Fox, Farrow, and Porter so I can mediate my own family.” She angles her chin at the huge cardboard box on the chair across from her.
“I’m supposed to be putting the rest of the party favors together.
” He walks over and puts the box on the floor so he can sit.
He glances around the kitchen, the countertops crowded and cupboards so stuffed, some can’t close fully. “And instead you’re …”
“Avoiding people like the consummate ambivert I am and catching up on my Letterboxd reviews,” she tells him. “When this is all over, I cannot wait to update my DDLJ review.”
“Are you going to mention that I’m basically a Bollywood hero IRL?”
“Oh, Leo.” Kavitha’s smile drops. “No.” He laughs. “DDLJ is often imitated, sometimes iterated, but never, ever duplicated.”
“Fair enough. You do that a lot? Reviewing movies like DDLJ?” he asks, gesturing to her computer.
“I like to provide my opinion in a snarky but respectful way. Like a public service. And not movies like DDLJ. There are so many movies from India other than Bollywood that people don’t talk about enough, all these amazing directors and films in other languages.”
“Right. Because there are twenty-two official languages in India, per the constitution,” Leo says.
Kavitha raises an eyebrow at his fun fact. “Okay, Wikipedia.”
Leo, still on alert for Veena aunty, keeps looking towards the living room. “I’m learning Tamil and Hindi, actually.”
“Oh yeah? I’ll make you a list—some of my favorite movies are Tamil ones directed by this guy.” She points to her T-shirt that reads “Show Me the Mani (Ratnam).”
“I’m up for it but the person you should be talking to is my sister,” he says.
“Is that Olivia? Simran’s roommate?” Kavitha asks.
“Of course, you must know her. You guys have probably met, right?”
Kavitha clears her throat. “No, actually. Obviously, I know who she is but we’ve never talked.”
He pulls out his phone as he walks around the table and takes the seat next to her. “She’s movie-obsessed. Let’s see if she’s around.”
His sister picks up on the second ring. “Leonardo, good timing! I am currently in possibly one of the most idyllic spots I’ve ever seen in my life and I was hoping to rub it in someone’s face,” Liv says.
She pans the phone across a pristine vista of mountains and a small stream with a wooden bridge over it.
“Wait!” Kavitha says, bouncing in her chair. “I know that bridge! You’re in Interlaken!”
Liv turns the camera so it’s on her face again. “I am! How did you know that? Wait, are you Kavitha? Like the Kavitha?”
“Oh, I’m definitely going to make more people call me that. Yes, I am the Kavitha. And that’s the bridge in my favorite movie,” Kavitha says.
“In DDLJ! Simran got me to watch it and made me promise I’d come here and take pictures!” Liv says. “Which, duh, of course I would because it immediately became one of my favorite rom-com-fam-drams.”
“What?” Leo says at the same time Kavitha says, “How do you know that term?”
“Rom-com-fam-dram?” Liv asks. “There’s this movie blogger, Nava Rasa, who came up with it to describe the subgenre of Indian movies that have some romance and a little comedy and family drama in them. She’s brilliant.”
Kavitha jabs a finger into her own chest. “She is me! I am she!” Leo laughs and hands her the phone.
“Oh my god!” The video shakes with Liv’s excitement.
“I quote your Slumdog Millionaire review all the time: ‘I have to thank the makers of this movie for improving the way I see the world. Because I hated this movie so much, it actually made me hate other things less.’ Okay, I’m so sorry but I have to go on the DDLJ tour now—”
“Record every second of it!” Kavitha screeches. Next to her, Leo puts a finger in his ear and winces, hoping the noise doesn’t reach Veena perima’s sonar hearing upstairs.
“I will!” Liv says, matching her pitch. “When I’m back and your sister’s wedding is done, we are going to talk because I need to know your opinion about every single movie that’s ever existed, okay, thanks, byeeee!”
Kavitha grins at him after they’ve hung up. “You’ve got a very cool sister.”
“So everyone keeps telling me,” he says. “I like yours too.”
Kavitha’s face falls, just a fraction. Leo fights against the urge to come out and plainly ask why they’ve fallen out; it’s not his place.
“How much has Simran told you about us and what happened?” she asks.
He sits up a little straighter. “Not much, honestly. But she will when she’s ready.
” Kavitha scoffs under her breath, but Leo doesn’t say anything.
He keeps getting reminded they’re so different.
Simran would rather push everything down, when he wants it all out in the open.
You don’t learn things about people to file under good or bad, or right or wrong; they’re just ways to get to know them better, to love them more wholly.
“Look, it’s not my place to speak for her,” he says. But Kavitha is leaning towards him. She’s clearly as hungry to know about the years Simran was away from her as Leo is about the years before that. “But I could always tell there was something missing for her. She told so many stories about you.”
“What about my mother?”
Leo raises his eyebrows. “Your mother?”
“Or my father. Or my sister, anyone from my family.”
Leo stays silent. Simran mentioned her aunt a bit, but mostly how strict she was, and far less than Kavitha. She slumps back in her chair. “I missed her too, you know. But it’s not actually about her and me.”
It doesn’t feel right to keep talking about Simran and not to her.
His mother would tell him that he was engaging in unhealthy indirect communication.
Suddenly, both their heads turn at a noise coming from the living room and they go rigid.
Leo half stands but he doesn’t have the advantage of making a quick getaway.
The kitchen door swings open and he braces himself.
It’s just Rishi.
“Oh thank god,” Kavitha says, melting back into her chair.
“I was going to sneak in,” Rishi says. “But then I realized—I’m marrying into this family this weekend. I can see my fiancée when I want! Where is Gee?”
“Your fiancée is upstairs with her mother,” Kavitha says. “Ahh. Maybe I’ll stay here, then.”
To herself, Kavitha mutters, “God, I’ve become an administrative assistant for my sisters’ love lives. I really need to get a life.”
Leo’s laugh is mostly relief. “Can you imagine if Veena aunty had caught me here—with the wrong sister?”
“If I got reamed out for a relationship I’m not even in, I would scream,” Kavitha says, pulling a face that makes her look like Ashok uncle.
“Hey, Kavitha. What could I talk to your dad about that would make him open up?”
Kavitha drums her fingers on the table, thinking. “What about trees?”
His eyebrows knit together. “Trees?”
“Appa likes trees,” Kavitha says.
“What about trees?” Leo says.
“Yes, that’s what I asked you,” Kavitha says. “No, I mean, what about trees does he like?”
Kavitha looks out the window before she lights up. “They’ve got leaves!”
“Leaves?” Leo follows her gaze. “Did you just look at a tree and say the first thing that came to your mind?”
“Empirical findings are part of the scientific method,” she replies. He goes to bed that night with no success at getting alone time with Simran and no progress on Operation DDLJ either. The days are slipping by quickly and he’s trying not to worry.
As his head hits the pillow, Kavitha’s words come back to him: “It’s not actually about her and me.
” He’s beginning to get that feeling too.
For Simran to be okay, Kavitha’s only a piece of it.
She’s got to figure things out with all of them.
It’s not just Leo who has to find his way into this family.