Chapter 14
Malena
The flood of calls last night was my mom telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to be at home today.
So, first thing this morning, I got on the train and did as told.
Because I knew better than to play chicken with them when summoned.
It was the same old story: answer her calls, come when she demanded, listen when she spoke.
I toed the line, I skipped rope with it, but I never crossed it if there was even a chance of getting caught.
“I heard that the Gupta’s daughter—that one who had the perfect SAT score…
” My mom shook her head, her voice lowered like she was delivering grave news on a natural disaster.
“Well, she works at some restaurant as a cook after she ran off to Portland with that boy.” She scooped a mound of spiced potatoes from the bowl between us.
We stood side by side a few feet apart, each of us making our way through giant heaps of dough and masala filling, and I’d been dutifully nodding along as she gossiped about her so-called friends.
After our two-hour lunch where I served the chai like a “good daughter,” Pinky Auntie left, and I’d been in the kitchen ever since, assisting my mom in one of her cooking marathons. Today we were preparing a care package that would be shipped overnight to my older sister.
“Isn’t she a sought-after pastry chef?” I asked, even though I knew the Gupta’s daughter—Neha—was. I hadn’t seen her in years, but I’d started following her on social media after her family gave her an ultimatum and then stopped all contact with her.
My mom’s eyes flashed. “You think that’s what her parents left their homes and started all over in a new country for? So she could cook for strangers like a servant?”
“I guess not,” I murmured, knowing this was not the time to make a point.
“Her family is humiliated. She’s alone. When her life falls apart, nobody will be there to help her,” she added. “She did this to herself.”
That reminder felt like a warning.
I sighed and decided to change the subject, glancing down at the massive stack of parathas I was making for my sister. “Did Avani ask for all of this?”
“No.” My mom didn’t look up.
Irritation pricked me. Then why was I wasting a Sunday doing this? “Did she ask for any of it?”
My mom doted on my perfect older sister even more now that she lived across the country. Making me help gave my mom the fringe benefit of telling her friends that Malena was so dutiful and made all this food for her sister.
“No.” A hard smack with her palm cracked against my skull, and a ringing bounced between my ears. “Why do you always need to argue? Avani never argues.”
“Mom.” I grabbed the back of my throbbing head.
I didn’t say anything because good kids didn’t bring up the occasional smack from their parents. We pretended we deserved it, learned whatever lesson it was meant to instill, and moved on.
“Family doesn’t have to ask, family just does.” She pointed her spatula at me. “Imagine what people would think of you if they heard you speak like that…” She shook her head. “Selfish.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and went back to my work quietly.
“I remind you of these things to help you,” my mom emphasized. “Nobody wants to deal with someone who’s strong-willed and self-centered.”
I bit back the urge to defend myself, because I’d just be proving her point.
“Sorry,” I repeated. I finished the last paratha and brushed the flour and ghee off my hands. “I need to go; I should study for the MCAT.”
“You didn’t study this weekend?” My mom threw a look at my class schedule that she’d printed and tacked onto the fridge. “Your Fridays are open and you were at school all of yesterday. You should have been studying.”
“I was studying,” I lied. “But I want them to be perfect.” That was true, but I wasn’t worried. School came pretty easy to me, and I’d studied for the MCATs all summer.
My mom’s face paled, lines drawing a valley on her forehead.
It was the same look she had when Avani didn’t get into med school on her first try.
While some parents would feel dejected for their children, you would have thought Avani did it to them.
But all was set right again when she got in the following year, apologized profusely, and lived her life exactly as they prescribed. “Are you having trouble with school?”
“Of course not,” I answered firmly. “No harm in being overprepared.”
Her shoulders relaxed.
“We don’t need to worry about our Malena in school.” She grasped my chin proudly. “So smart.” The flip from menacing to motherly happened at breakneck speed, and I could’ve sworn the gesture eased the ringing in my head.
I washed a couple of spoons in the sink, then my hands, when Dad stepped through the threshold into the kitchen. “I’ll drive you back.”
“No, the train is fine,” I answered immediately. “I want to get some reading done.”
“No.” My mom walked to the fridge. Inside were containers filled with some of my favorite foods—sambar and aloo bindi. Everything I missed when I was in New Harbor. “There’s jalebi at the top, everything else goes in the fridge.”
“Oh.” I smiled. The warm feeling of being cared for wrapped around me. I pulled a linen tote off the old wooden hook in the pantry and began filling it, my cheeks heating.
Lying wasn’t great, but things could be worse.
My parents cared for me. I had everything I needed and a lot of the things that I wanted—as long as they were pre-approved, of course.
I was lucky.
I wasn’t sure if my parents were the disowning kind, but my mom’s ease when sharing cautionary tales made me think they were.
Either way, I was too scared to find out, because I wouldn’t just lose them and the luxuries they paid for.
I’d lose everyone. Cousins, aunts, uncles. My connection to my culture. All of it.
I’d be treated like a contagion. I wasn’t ready for that.
The two-Malena system wasn’t perfect, but it worked.
I got back to our condo and slumped onto the couch, a giant pitcher of margaritas staring me down from our coffee table.
“I figured you could use this,” Cora explained as she brought in a bowl of chips and a few dips on a slotted platter. “The tequila was stashed in my room, waiting for your dad to leave.”
I smiled at how well-rehearsed we were. I always gave Cora and Sabrina a heads-up when I was coming back to campus because if my parents were dropping me off, they’d come upstairs, and my mom would snoop. She’d look for everything from alcohol to clothes she deemed risqué.
“Five hours of cooking.” I sighed into the well-salted rim and took a giant gulp. “Thank you.”
I folded my legs beneath me and wrapped myself in the chunky knitted blanket that Cora bought on a trip to Sweden last year.
“Oh, I meant to ask, what were you and Conrad doing it against?” Cora turned my cashmere sweater over in her hands, giving it a final look.
When I got back from the library last night, I gave Cora the run-down on my night—everything from the ride on Conrad’s motorcycle to navigating through the catacombs and stumbling upon the unsealed door.
“It was just a kiss,” I reminded her, and took my sweater back. A vibrant dark blue patch was smeared across the sleeve. That same paint was along my jeans too, lengthwise.
It must have happened in the basement, where I was knocking into about a dozen things.
“And it was against the books,” I added quickly, holding my sweater up to hide my blush.
A sly smile curled up Cora’s cheeks. “I approve.”
With the freedom of being away from home and an endless supply of random hookups at my disposal, sex was generally good, sometimes great.
But rarely was it the toe-curling kind I showed up to college expecting from having secretly read romance novels growing up.
Except for last night, and that was just a kiss.
I didn’t have to fantasize or force my imagination to concoct some steamy scenario in my mind to get my heart racing. Conrad had done that all on his own.
“Painted books?” Cora asked, snapping me out of my runaway thoughts.
I cleared my throat, reminding myself that I needed this award.
And Conrad was already reluctant about our deal, so it was on me to keep this fragile alliance from breaking.
This campus was riddled with hot guys; if I wanted a fling, I’d use one of them.
“It must have been from the basement,” I told her.
“There was a painting down there that was the same color pattern.”
She hummed and took a generous gulp of her margarita.
“There was paint on his clothes too,” I added, almost as an afterthought. Last night, between the kiss and my mom’s summons, our adventures in the catacombs and the Amherst Building’s library had been quick to fall to the back of my mind.
Cora looked up with a Cheshire cat’s smile. “Yeah, I bet there was.”
“It was a good kiss, but it was a fake one. So, stop that.”
“Stop what?” She peered at the fabric again and ran her fingers on the smeared colors.
“Whatever you’re thinking.”
“If you knew what I was thinking, you’d know that I was wondering how the hell a dusty old painting smudged your clothes.”
My ears perked up.
“Huh.” I hadn’t actually given it any thought while I was at my parents’.
I was too busy being “good Malena,” planning my study schedule for this week and thinking about when I’d proof a piece for Dillian.
I was trying to be overly helpful since he was a little miffed about my jumping the chain of command with the feature. “What do you mean?”
“It’s still a little wet.” Cora pinched at the fabric and showed me her fingertip. It came away blue, and still a little glossy. “I’m trying to understand how the paint still hasn’t dried when it’s been almost twenty-four hours since you bumped into it.”
“That’s weird… The painting was in a frame and everything.”
“No way it’s smearing off like that on your clothes unless it was painted recently.
And…” She rubbed her fingers together as she stood up and walked to the kitchen.
Moments later, she was back with a paper towel, wiping at her hand.
She neatly placed my sweater, paint side up, on the coffee table.
“It’s an oil-based paint and all commercial oil-based paints have desiccants in them, so they dry in a couple of hours.
Nobody’s used desiccant-free paint since, I dunno, the nineteen-thirties? ”
Cora, on top of being a fine arts major, was a fellow chemistry minor. A brilliant one too, with her perfect grade point average and the offers she already had coming in for graduate school.
“Someone bought desiccant-free paint?”
“Which can’t be easy because it’s not shelf-stable for very long. The ingredients separate,” Cora pointed out. “It would be a giant waste of money, and that’s if you can find an arts supply store that stocks it. The more likely story is that they made it.”
“Why make oil paint?”
“Beats me.” Cora shrugged. “But it’s weird, right?”
My heart soared. There was a story somewhere in all of this, all I had to do was find it. And that was the most thrilling part. “Yeah.”
That, mixed with the door that should’ve been sealed… something was up. I should have taken a picture of that damn painting.
Maybe I could go back.
Or find where it was painted, and by who.
My mind raced, but before I could say anything else, my phone rattled against the coffee table.
Kash: Hey
Kash: I know it’s been a while
Kash: Wanna go out next weekend?
Cora’s eyes flicked up to me. “No.”
Cora was like an Olympic sprinter’s sports bra. Strong, flexible, and supportive. She was my biggest cheerleader when I decided on something, but, like a good friend, was the first to bring up concerns.
“What’s the harm?”
“He asked to date you, pretended like he wanted to, then ghosted.” Cora’s mouth twisted to the side. “Not to mention how rude his friends are to you. And you know about the data on completely homogenous friend groups.”
I sighed. “I know.”
Cora already gave me the lecture after last year’s Diwali party. She and Sabrina went with me and I left early, choosing to retreat rather than feel alone in a place I thought I’d fit into.
That night, back in our apartment, eating spicy ramen, Cora recounted how she’d had trouble finding her place here on campus as a freshman.
And how, when she confided in her mom, she’d ended up with pages and pages of research on the characteristics of racially, socioeconomically, or sexually homogenous friend groups—her way of telling her daughter that she was better off without people who weren’t accepting of her as she was.
I envied Cora for having a mom like that.
“They are insular, excessively judgmental, less creative as a whole, and more likely to encourage patriarchal values.” Cora listed off the main components, having memorized it by now.
That last part was definitely true, Sonali and her friends did not find our man-bracket as empowering as we did.
They practically recoiled when I told them about my sexual escapades.
It only got worse when I began sort-of-dating Kash.
“And you broke your flings-only rule for that little punk.”
“I wasn’t going to say yes,” I defended, my phone forgotten. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t be nice.”
Cora’s face scrunched with discontentment. “Why not?”
I laughed and finished off my margarita. “I dunno…” Sometimes I felt like if I could just make myself fit in with them, it would be proof that I belonged. Then maybe it would translate to approval from my mom, to being more like the good daughter Avani was.
“I’m not going out with him. I need to study anyway,” I said.
Plus, I had the annual fundraising dinner on Saturday night. I’d probably spend this week catching up on everything I’d ignored with getting so wrapped up with Scroll & Ivy. I wasn’t one to let my obligations fall to the wayside, but this article proved anything was possible.
The feeling was disorienting and sort of fantastic.
“Got it.” Cora squeezed my hand and graciously took the hint, pivoting to a new conversation topic. “But first, let’s finish these margs. I do my best studying a little buzzed.”