Chapter Four
It’s obvious that my brother isn’t the one who wanted to pick me up from the airport. I’m glad his stubbornness doesn’t work on his boyfriend, who happens to love me. The drive from LaGuardia to their semidetached house in Queens is barely twenty minutes. It’s one of those beautiful early-May days that make you forget that the skies here could ever be gray, or that the sidewalks could ever be sprinkled with snow. The untainted spring air gives everything a crisp freshness and reminds me of Chicago, and that causes a prickle of homesickness in my heart.
As though he senses this, Saket, the love of my brother’s life, twists in the passenger seat and reaches for my hand in the back seat. “We’re so glad you’re here,” he says. “We’ve missed you.”
Rumi, who is driving Saket’s golden Mercedes convertible, rolls his eyes. But there’s a smile deep inside them, a joy that’s entirely new to my twin’s personality, and I soak it up.
“Me too,” I say. I love Saket Dixit.
Yes, that’s his name, and unfortunate as that is, it’s the reason they’re together. The first words my brother said to him were You’re actually called Suck-it Dick-shit? and then he laughed for a good five minutes straight because that’s the kind of heartless monster my brother is. To Saket’s credit, he’d been so mesmerized by the laugh, he’d asked Rumi if he actually did want to suck it. The rest, as they say, is history. A long bloody history of coming out when you have the Salvis of Naperville for parents.
Saket, on the other hand, doesn’t have a coming-out story. He doesn’t even remember telling his parents. They knew before he did. Sometimes I wonder how people like Saket and Druv, who’ve only ever been showered by unconditional acceptance by their parents, could ever understand people like Rumi and me. But it’s their deep sense of being enough that seems to capture us.
Saket Dixit is relentlessly and inescapably lovable. And my brother is felled all the way to his soul. I keep Saket’s hand (perfectly manicured with frosty pink-tipped nails) in mine as we drive past the idyllic homes with their front steps leading to quiet porches, each almost identical yet unique. My brother pulls into the garage a little too fast, and Saket claps as though we’re on a plane and Rumi just stuck a flawless landing. Then he pulls Rumi’s face to him and kisses him, hot and quick, before using his thickly kohl-lined eyes to wordlessly tell Rumi to relax.
My brother gives him a tortured smile that I feel deep inside me, because, well, it’s our twin curse to feel each other’s pain and joy.
“I wish you were staying with us. I’m also kinda jealous of the Ritz-Carlton, Ms. Fancy-Pants.” Saket leads me into the house.
“Whoa! Forget the Ritz!” I say as we step inside. It’s impossible not to gasp at the dramatic, luxuriant beauty I’ve just stepped into. A low white linen couch is artfully scattered with embroidered cushions in jewel tones. Woven rugs tell stories in color. An unbroken band of clustered paintings stretches across the living room walls and into the dining area and around the walls of the entire floor. I follow it in awe.
“Mom helped pick out most of the furnishings.” Saket’s mother is Binita Dixit, designer to the stars. Zendaya wore her on the Cannes red carpet last year. “But the art had to be me and Rooh. They’re pieces we’ve picked up from street artists over the years. No investment art for us. Yuck.” He shakes the offensive thought of art as commerce off his shoulders like a bad feeling.
Saket’s family owns one of the biggest jewelry brands in the world. They have stores in every major city from Mumbai to Berlin to Dubai. Saket runs their flagship store on Fifth Avenue.
“This is absolutely gorgeous,” I say, still trying to grasp the decadent artistry of it all.
Rumi follows us in. “It’s true. Some stereotypes are based on fact. American desi gays have impeccable taste.” He wraps Saket in a hug from behind, and I try to picture this with Druv. Will I ever be someone who won’t cringe at being wrapped up like this?
“How is Dr. Drum-Roll-Please?” my brother asks.
I smile what I hope is a dreamy smile. Because despite my complicated feelings about back-hugs, Druv is perfect, and I tell Rumi that.
“So perfect he missed your engagement-shag trip?” Saket spent part of his childhood in London, and Rumi has obviously picked up his Briticisms.
I’ve been waiting for my brother to start, so I’m almost relieved to get it out of the way.
“So perfect he wanted our girl to have some fun by herself,” Saket says. “Dr. Drup-Dead-Gorgeous, am I right?”
Even Rumi laughs at that.
“Exactly,” I say and follow the two of them into the white-and-gold kitchen. The most beautiful glazed fruit tart sits under a glass dome on the mosaic dining table. Fruit is my weakness. Especially in baked goods. The table is tucked into a bay window under a gigantic skylight. I’m in heaven. This is where I want to come to die.
Rumi starts the espresso machine as Saket makes a production of lifting the dome and slicing up the tart. The kitchen fills with the aroma of fresh coffee, and every cell in my body relaxes as we sink into the most comfortable dining chairs I’ve ever had the pleasure of resting my butt on.
“If you tell me you made this tart yourself, I will murder my brother and marry you myself,” I say.
Saket wiggles his dramatically arched brows. “You’d have to get in line, sweetheart. We get that a lot!”
Rumi and I both laugh our identical laughs, and our eyes meet. He looks away. Saket’s sunniness might have brightened his edges, but the rage he’s always carried simmers close to the surface. Or maybe it’s just my presence digging things up.
Saket feeds a piece of mango into Rumi’s mouth, and his restlessness settles. We sit there like that, tucked into the nook, the orange rays of the setting sun flooding in through the skylight and bay window and tinting the absurdly extravagant kitchen golden. The tart is everything food should be, suffused with the pure essence of its ingredients, soulful. Saket didn’t make it. He knows this French patisserie around the corner. He has an eye for finding things, obviously. My Rumi is a jewel, but his anger and cynicism are a patina not many can see past. Saket has always seemed entirely unfazed by his thorny armor.
Rumi’s hair has grown out. He’s always had the most beautiful hair. Thick and so inky black it shines silver in the light. People say I have the same hair, but mine’s curlier, frizzier, the unrefined version. Much like everything else about our appearance. His skin, his eyes, all his features are finer, more artistic versions of mine, like I was the mold and he the finished product.
He’s cut his hair in layers. His jaw is shaved to smoothness. He’s more well groomed than I’ve ever known him to be, but it’s how comfortable he is in his skin that fills me up.
My heart cramps as a memory of him with a shaved head slashes through me. The bleeding cuts on his scalp from struggling as our father ran a razor blade over it. I push it away. This isn’t the time for ugly memories. This is a moment of unbearable beauty. Sunshine and flavors and aromas and smooth surfaces, and love. All our senses bathed and caressed and wrapped up at once. Seemingly healable.
The look Rumi throws me is all sorts of smug. This is the kind of life our parents didn’t even know to want for us. Even more than the more they’ve always pushed toward.
“Isn’t it weird how Aie and Baba always went on and on about us ending up with Indian people? Now here I am. Sak is not just Indian, he’s Marathi—even you, the golden child, didn’t pull that off.”
Druv’s family is from South Delhi. Culturally, a different galaxy from the outer reaches of the northeastern suburbs of Mumbai my parents grew up in.
“That makes it sound like you’re only with me because I’m Marathi,” Sak says, pretending to be offended as they link fingers and exchange another intimate look.
I’ve missed Rumi more than I can put into words, but it’s painfully obvious that moving to New York to be with Saket was the best thing he’s ever done. It’s something he almost didn’t do, because Saket wasn’t interested in any relationship that involved hiding. Which in turn involved Rumi having to look our parents in the eye and tell them he was in love with a man. Which in turn meant our parents declaring that he was dead to them.
Rumi’s reaction was more relief than sadness. Laying down a weight that had been crushing his spine crack by crack. He might’ve been done with me, too, when he left Chicago if not for Saket.
“I mean, it is pretty hot to be able to talk about people behind their backs in public in our own secret language,” Rumi says.
“Eighty million people speak it. Hardly a secret language, love.” Saket picks up another piece of mango from Rumi’s slice of tart and pops it in his own mouth, and I’m filled with that sense of wholeness I only ever experience when I’m around my twin, even when he obviously wishes I wasn’t here.
“True,” Rumi says, “but that’s not the point, is it?” Another spark passes between them before he switches personalities again and turns to me. “The point I was making with Mira was that you’re practically perfect, Sak, and my parents are assholes.”
His words hit me straight in a part of my heart that’s raw and vulnerable. Excuses for my parents’ homophobia leap to my tongue and fill me with shame. I push them away. He’s happy. Isn’t that all that matters? That and my brother coming to my wedding.
“Go ahead,” Rumi says, studying me over his hand-glazed coffee cup. “Tell me I’m going to hell for not thinking of my parents as gods.”
“I’ve never said that.” I don’t idolize our parents, but that doesn’t mean I can erase all they’ve had to overcome to give us the life they did. Why is cutting them some slack until they come around such a terrible thing?
“You don’t have to say the words, Mira. Your actions are as loud as a wail in the night.”
“Dramatic much?” I say.
“Definitely dramatic,” Saket says and rubs my shoulders. They’ve been feeling like rock, and they immediately relax.
“Don’t you want Sak at your stupid wedding?” Rumi’s glare is relentless.
“Of course I do. He’s invited. You know how much I love him.”
“I love you too.” Saket gets up and stands behind me and starts to knead my shoulders in earnest. “What the hell have you been doing with these shoulders, sweetheart? They’re concrete.”
“You love him but not enough for him to be at your wedding as my fiancé.” My brother is in that place where he’s lost his ability to see past his feelings. When my patients are in this place where their pain imprisons them, it’s my job to dig a hole through those walls and insert a breathing tube.
“Then come home. Maybe if you bring Sak home before the wedding, Aie and Baba will get a chance to know him.”
“Right, and they’ll fall in love with him the way they’re in love with your straight-as-nails doctor. You’re an idiot, Miru. And absurdly naive. They would poison his dinner. Then I’d die of a broken heart, and it would all be very Romeo and Juliet.”
“Romeo and Julien. Or Ramu and Jay—the Indian gay version.” Saket keeps burrowing circles into my deltoids with one hand even as he reaches out and strokes Rumi’s puckered brow with the other.
“Plus they already told me I’m dead to them for being unnatural. So, no, I’m not coming to your wedding and pretending to be your natural brother.”
I don’t want him to pretend to be anything. I just want him to be there. “Can you imagine getting married without me there?” I ask. Until I was four, if you took me out of the same room as Rumi, I would scream and scream until I could see him again. They had to put us in separate preschools to train us to be apart. It took us half a year to stop crying all day for the other.
“I would absolutely understand if you chose not to come to my wedding because you’re only allowed to be there if you pretend to be someone you’re not.” Rumi obviously had an easier time with our separation.
“Saket is invited,” I say. “Why can’t that be enough?”
“Because it’s fucking not. Saket’s not going to pretend to be your random friend. The only way we will be there is if Saket gets to be in every single one of those idiotic posed family photos with my hand around him or on his ass if I choose.” He shoves his chair back and stands. “He will come as the other half of me or neither of us will.”
I turn to Saket. Tears are running down his cheeks and into his perfectly lined-up stubble.
“Don’t you dare say a single word,” Rumi snaps at Saket, who closes his mouth and swallows what he’s about to say. What he’s said before, that Rumi should go to my wedding without him because this is about me and no one else. Then Rumi turns to me again. “When will you grow a spine, Mira?” There’s so much disgust in his voice that I fold inward.
“Rooh!” Saket says. “Enough.”
Without another word, Rumi storms to the front door and leaves the house, slamming it so hard the bells on the doorknob jangle in protest.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and Saket wraps his arms around my shoulders. He smells of sandalwood and lavender, like cosmetics and hair product, but a little bit like my brother, too, as though he’s soaked some of Rumi’s spirit up.
“It will be okay, love. Everything will work out. Life has a way of falling into place.”
“Do you really believe that?” I say.
“With my whole heart. The universe is magic. It’s working to set things right. My dad used to say that. He had a theory that for centuries humans have tried to control the world by forcing everyone into matching molds by getting them to close their minds. It’s why the pressure of discontent has turned humanity into a ticking bomb. The only way to defuse it is to change one heart at a time. Every time a single person opens their heart, the magic gets stronger. And your heart is one of the most beautiful, most wide-open ones I’ve ever known, Mira. You’re filled with magic. All you have to do is let your fear go and believe.”
His words pierce me. The word magic burrows deep into me, all the way to the part where I hold all my pain. All I know is what life has shown me. I want to believe, but I don’t know how. This is the only way I know how to feel, as though this helplessness in the face of everyone else’s pain is my story and it’s the only one I’ll ever get to live.