There’s Something About Mira

Chapter Twenty-Five

I ’m going back to Reva’s house. I’ve been waiting all night to send that text to Krish. I finally hit send on it and get out of bed.

Despite the deeply luxurious hotel mattress, I haven’t slept well. Not in a restless way, but in a filled-with-anticipation way. It takes me twenty minutes to shower, pack, and make my way to check out. It’s seven o’clock. My flight leaves at noon. If I make it to Park Slope by eight and leave by ten, I’ll still make it.

On the train I check my phone to see if Krish responded.

Please don’t. That’s his response from twenty minutes ago.

Wasn’t asking. Just letting you know. Already on the train, I type. Then I call Druv.

He’s in surgery, so I leave a message. He left me one earlier telling me how much he misses me and that he’ll be at the airport to pick me up. Something I know won’t happen, because he just started a complicated lumbar fusion and there’s a good chance it will go eight to nine hours. He also said that he’s upgraded the Two Moms and me to business class for our wedding shopping trip to India next month. He sounded so excited about it that I smile. I like that he leaves voice messages in the age of texts. I like the sound of his voice when he’s excited.

Then I call my mother, and she spends the entire conversation raving about Druv and how generous he is and how lucky I am. She doesn’t ask about my trip, or the ring, or Rumi. She’s assumed that I haven’t reached out to Rumi because she ordered me not to. She’s that certain of my obedience.

As soon as we get off the call, she WhatsApps me a hundred and twelve pictures of bridal lehengas and bridegroom sherwanis from the designer we’re going to meet in India. She and Druv’s mom have already filtered these down before sending them to me.

I’ll look at them on the plane ride home, I message back.

Why can’t you look at them now? What’s more important than your wedding?

Instead of answering, I check Krish’s messages. He hasn’t responded. This doesn’t surprise me, but I have no time to think about it because the train pulls into the Seventh Avenue station, where Google instructs me to get off.

The station is as crowded as Chicago on Saint Patrick’s Day. Suitcase in hand, I dodge the crowd and set off on the path my phone maps for me to Reva’s home. It’s cloudier but slightly warmer than yesterday. It’s strange to walk these streets without Krish by my side. I have to be more present and aware. It’s stunning to me how easy it was to trust him.

As I turn the corner onto Reva’s street, I see a figure leaning on a motorcycle next to the rainbow-stepped house. Did I just conjure him out of thin air?

His hands are dug deep in his pockets, and he doesn’t move. I think he’s going for a disapproving vibe.

“Hi!” I can’t help but smile. It’s just so great to see him again. “Why do you still have the bike?”

“I was going to return it this morning, but then I had to rush here.”

He didn’t have to rush here. But I’m glad he did.

“What are you doing?” he says, jaw tightly clenched, obviously not glad about anything.

I turn up the steps. “Finishing what we started.”

“We did that already. We returned the ring.”

“There’s more. I want the whole story.”

“Mira,” he says, still on the street. “You don’t have to do this. I’ll write a different story.”

“No, you’ll write this one.” I’m about to ring the doorbell.

“Please, can you come down? Please.” There’s an odd desperation in his voice, and I stop. He clears his throat. “You’re right. There’s more. I haven’t told you everything.”

I come back down the steps.

“Can we walk?”

I nod, and we start walking. He’s quiet, and I don’t push.

“I didn’t come to you just to write a story.”

I stop walking and turn to him. He looks like he’s swallowed a storm again.

“Please tell me you weren’t actually stalking me.”

I know exactly how he’s going to react, and he does. He huffs a humorless laugh. I’m still relieved it wasn’t that.

“There’s something about the ring that I haven’t told you.” He looks off balance. Like he can’t believe he’s saying the words. There’s been a lot of that between us.

“Krish, it’s okay.” I squeeze his arm. He grabs my hand and leans on it. I don’t think he has any idea what he’s doing. He’s lost deep inside himself. He lets my hand go and sits down heavily on the ledge of the sidewalk.

I lower myself next to him. “Breathe. In for four and out for six.” I count the breaths and breathe with him.

I expect him to scoff at that, too, but he does as I say.

“Shit, that actually works,” he says after a few cycles of breathing.

I wait. This isn’t going to be good. I know that. I hate how distraught he looks. “Just say it, Krish.”

“I have the other ring.”

“What?”

Now, that I was not expecting. “What are you talking about?” That can’t possibly be true. “What do you mean you have the other ring?”

He takes another breath. His fists clench and unclench. His jaw, all of him, is wound tight. He’s lied to me this entire time.

I want to get up and leave, but I can’t move. I want the whole story. I deserve the whole story.

“Your video ... when I watched it ...,” he says. “I ... my mom ...”

“Start with her,” I say, and it’s not gentle. “Start with your mom.”

“That fight with my mom I told you about. I asked her about my birth mother.” He takes a breath. “It was my thirty-seventh birthday. My grandmother had just died and left me the apartment. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want anything that belonged to her, and my mother tried to explain to me how that was throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” A sad smile shines like pain in his eyes. “She used to love her old idioms.”

He goes quiet again. I wait.

“My parents never talked about my birth parents, not ever. I think I remember first identifying the need to ask about them when I was in elementary school. I never did, but it stayed at the back of my mind. Mom was ... she was sensitive. My dad always said she was a heart without an armor, exposed nerves. She could spend days in bed, unable to stop crying, when something sad happened to someone she knew. Like a neighbor’s pet dying, or like when my fifth-grade teacher got cancer. Every once in a while it would come back, my need to know. But I never asked. I knew how much it would hurt her, and I just couldn’t do it. Once I was an adult I put it away. I told myself it didn’t matter.

“Until that day when she told me how lucky I was to inherit something everyone covets. Something inside me snapped. She’d always acted like she was the lucky one to find me. She was the one person in my life who’d never told me I was lucky to be adopted. I don’t think that’s what she was doing then, but that’s what it sounded like to me. It’s what I heard.” He’s breathing hard, and his skin has turned chalky, drained of color.

“So you asked her about your birth mother.”

“Yes.” After a long beat of silence, he reaches into his pocket and extracts a white silk pouch.

He offers it to me, and I take it and open it. Inside is the exact same ring we returned to Reva. The other half of the set.

“She gave me this ring. It was the only thing she knew about my birth mother. It was the only thing my birth mother left with me when she abandoned me. I was livid at Mom for keeping it from me for so long. For not showing it to me sooner. I told her I’d never forgive her.” Tears shine in his eyes. “Then she was gone. And that’s what she took with her.”

He squeezes the bridge of his nose, and a soft sob trembles out of him.

I wrap my arm around him. It’s just for a moment. He gets himself together and looks at me again. “When she first gave it to me, I started to scour the internet for information. I was determined to use it to trace the person who’d given me away. Then the accident happened, and I never wanted to see it again. Until your video showed up in my feed almost exactly a year after Mom’s death.”

I press a hand into my mouth.

“I know. It’s a lot. All of it,” he says.

I just said those exact words to myself yesterday. I look over my shoulder at the town house with the rainbow steps. The uncomfortable interaction between Krish and Reva yesterday suddenly makes sense.

I look down at the ring in my hand. “You think she’s the one who gave you up? You think Reva is your mother?”

“My mother is dead. She died last year,” he says with some force.

I’m sorry, I want to say, for forcing him into meeting her. But I’m not sorry. Not even a little bit.

“I understand if you’re angry that I didn’t tell you. But you were a complete stranger.”

It’s not an apology. He’s simply addressing the issue. Also, he said were , and that of all things is what feels significant.

I don’t tell him it’s okay that he lied to me. I’m not sure yet if it is. Two days ago I would have said it anyway.

“What do you want to do now?” I say instead.

The look he gives me is split somewhere between surprise and gratitude, but he neither apologizes nor thanks me.

He glances down the street at the house. “I guess we have to go back and find out. Obviously she has no interest in reuniting with me. I think she recognized something in me. Maybe I look like my birth father or something?” He sounds sad but not distraught.

I put the ring back in the pouch and return it to him. We can either sit here and second-guess this, or we can find out for sure. I stand up. “Let’s go.”

Instead of arguing with me, he stands too, but he doesn’t move. “What if she’s not home?”

“Let’s find out. Come on.”

We march back to the house and up the stairs.

“Knocker or bell?” he says.

“Decisions, decisions,” I say.

He knocks and I ring.

It’s a shock to see Reva when she opens the door. She’s almost unrecognizable. Completely different from the woman we met yesterday. Her eyes are red rimmed and swollen. Her almost-all-salt-with-a-sprinkling-of-pepper hair is in a lopsided ponytail, and she’s wearing an embroidered powder blue caftan much like the ones every auntie I know wears to bed. There’s no sign of the casually athletic badass from yesterday. Her gaze lands on Krish.

His jaw works. I think he’s following the breathing technique we just used. In for four and out for six.

She reaches out and touches his cheek. “You look just like her,” she says.

He looks at me, then back at her. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

Her chin trembles in confusion. Her eyes cloud with it. She steps aside. “I think you should come in.”

We follow her into the kitchen and to a breakfast nook nestled into a bay window overlooking a garden. It reminds me of Rumi and Saket’s place, and yet it’s completely different. There’s more history here than hope.

There’s a wooden box on the table. It’s filled with what looks like folded-up letters. A few of the letters are spread open, as though they’re in the middle of being read. Wadded-up tissues litter the table and the floor. Reva plucks a fresh tissue from a box and blows her nose and wipes her eyes. Then she gathers all the balled-up tissues and takes them to the trash under the sink.

“I’m sorry I’m a bit of a mess this morning.” She’s trying her best not to stare at Krish, but her eyes keep returning to him. “How can I help you?”

“The other ring you told us about, did you leave it with a baby when you gave him away?” That’s the question Krish chooses to open with, and it’s as good a question as any, given the circumstances.

Reva’s head snaps up, and a million emotions flash across her face. My pain scale registers another ten-plus reading.

Without answering, she drops into a chair. “Have a seat, please. Can I offer you some tea? Or coffee.” She points to a very complex coffee machine, much like the one Druv is addicted to.

“I’ll make myself some tea,” I say. “Can I make you some?”

She shakes her head and points at a cup on the table.

“Krish?”

“You sit,” he says. “Let me make the tea.”

He obviously needs something to do, so I pick out a black tea bag from the tea box, hand it to him, and sit down next to Reva.

He fills the kettle, turns it on, then picks up two cups from the drying rack and puts tea bags in them.

Time hangs. Every action of his seems to take up all the attention in the room. The muted tapping of a woodpecker feels loud and close in the silence.

“The milk is in the fridge,” Reva says finally. “I wasn’t the one who had the other ring.”

Krish pauses in the act of pouring milk into the tea. Then continues to finish the job and brings the cups to the table.

Reva picks up one of the letters, and a tear slips from her eye. I notice that the ring is back around her neck, on a plain black thread this time.

“Her name was Vasu.” Her voice does a painful wobble.

I take the cups from Krish, and he drops into the chair next to me.

Reva’s eyes skim the letters. “The rings belonged to her grandmother.” She takes a breath. “We grew up together, in a tiny town in India. Back when ... it was like a different planet back then. I’m sure it’s still hard, but back then it was ...” She looks at Krish like she’s gathering strength from his face. “My mother worked for Vasu’s family. A live-in maid. We lived in the servant’s unit behind the grand house. Vasu’s father was a minister—something like a senator here—the wealthiest, most powerful man in town. Vasu and I did everything together. The family sent me to the same school as her. We studied together, played together, ate together. She was ... she was my best friend, my ... she ...”

I hand her a tissue, and she dabs her cheeks and thanks me before continuing. “When we were eighteen, Vasu’s father sent us away to college. She went to Pune, and I went to engineering college in Mumbai. For two years we survived the separation by writing letters. And then ... then everything changed.” Her fingers stroke the pages spread across the table. “The way we felt ... we had no idea it was even possible. The world was so different then.”

On the buffet is a framed picture of her with a woman, their arms wrapped around each other against a turquoise beach. “It was stronger than anything I’ve ever experienced, our love. It came out of the blue, but also, it didn’t, you know.” Her voice cracks again, and she takes a breath. “I don’t even know why I’m ... why I’m such a mess. It’s been so long. I guess it’s the letters. I haven’t read them in years.”

Krish makes a sound, and I think he’s going to push her to spit out the rest of it. He doesn’t. He just waits, his body utterly still.

Reva is obviously not his mother. But she knows who is. It’s very likely this Vasu she’s talking about is. How is he able to bear this? I want to hold his hand, but I don’t.

“What happened?” I’m the one who speaks, because they’re both frozen.

Reva shakes her head as if to clear it. “Vasu’s family found out. They convinced her to get married to some distant cousin from an equally powerful family. The last I heard, she was still with him. When I was admitted into a master’s program here, I wouldn’t leave without her, so my mother visited her. She told my mother she’d made a mistake with me and she was ashamed. She even returned my letters. If not for the returned letters, I might not have believed it. The pictures of her with her family that my mother brought back were happy. My mother had lost her job, I had to support us, and there was nothing left in India for me. So I left.”

Finally Krish speaks. “And the second ring?”

“She still had it the last I know. You obviously know where it is. Did she send you? Is she okay? Please, just tell me.”

“I don’t know her,” Krish says. “I was adopted. From India, thirty-eight years ago. My birth mother left a ring with me when she gave me away. It seems like it’s the other half of the set yours belongs to.”

Reva’s hand squeezes her temples. “That’s impossible. I suspected you were hers. But why would she give you up?”

Krish takes the ring out of his pocket and places it on the table between them. Reva removes hers from around her neck and with shaking hands fits the two rings together. It’s a perfect fit. The puzzle pieces lock together like they were never separated. The shree symbol on the inside matches exactly. Line to line, stroke to stroke.

Reva squeezes the rings in her hand, presses them to her chest, and folds over. For the longest time no one says anything. When she straightens and wipes her eyes, something in them feels shattered, cracked open. I can see all the way into her pain, old and calcified but fresh again. She gives Krish back his ring and reaches for the letters in the wooden box and starts rummaging through them. At the bottom of the box is a stack of pictures.

She shuffles through the faded sepia-toned prints and finds one that looks like it was taken in a studio, and hands it to Krish. The woman looks uncannily like him. The same thickly lashed beer-bottle eyes behind glasses; the same dimple in the center of one cheek; the same lighter coloring, wide lips, and square jaw. She’s wearing a purple-and-gold sari and heavy gold jewelry, and she’s holding a baby. Next to her, a man in a turban with a handlebar mustache looks proudly at the camera.

“Is that you?” I ask, because the baby looks nothing like Krish.

He shakes his head. “That’s not me.”

“But you’re obviously related to her,” Reva says. “Looking at you is like seeing her ghost.”

Krish says nothing.

“Why would she put him up for adoption if this picture were real?” I ask. I pick up the picture and study it. Something in the way she’s holding the child doesn’t fit.

“I don’t know,” Reva whispers.

“Did you never reach out to her again?”

“I didn’t want to put her in danger. It wasn’t safe for us back then. Her father had already fired my mother, burned down her house, and sent goons after me. He also hurt Vasu. I believed my mother when she told me it would ruin Vasu’s life if I didn’t let her go. I told myself she’d made peace with the situation. She’d made her choice.”

Except they’d probably lied to Reva.

“So she betrayed you, and she gave me away. Sounds like a peach,” Krish says, and Reva looks like he’s kicked her.

Something isn’t right. I don’t think Reva is lying to us, but the story doesn’t fit. I say nothing because it feels like a cruel thing to say to either of them right now, when the pain of age-old wounds is so tightly wrapped around them.

“If we were to try and find her, where would we start?” I ask.

“We’re not going to,” Krish says and stands. “Thank you for your time.”

Reva looks at me, and I can’t tell if that’s hope in her eyes or fear of what we might find, but it’s fierce and desperate and I can’t look away. “I think her husband’s name was Namdeo Sawant. My aie passed in 1990, the year I got my PhD. Just before I was supposed to move her here. Her funeral was the last time I went back to India. I tried to reach out to Vasu then, but she wasn’t interested. She didn’t answer my letters or take my calls. Her parents have been dead for years now, and her older brother is a politician like her father.”

“Do you have an address for her in Mumbai?” I ask.

“What are you doing, Mira?” Krish says.

“I can find it for you,” Reva says.

“That won’t be necessary,” Krish says. “Let’s go.” He picks up the cups and puts them in the sink and heads to the door. “Thank you again for your time.”

Reva doesn’t move. “Thank you for returning the ring.” She puts the ring back around her neck. There’s something reverent about the way she does it.

“Why do you still wear it?” I ask.

There’s exhaustion in her eyes and a deep sadness that feels as permanent and irreversible as the passage of time. “A matter of habit, I guess,” she says. “And so I never forget who I am.”