Chapter Twenty-Seven
F ull disclosure. I’m going to look for Vasu in India, I text Krish before we board the flight at O’Hare. Our route is Chicago to New York, then New York to Istanbul, and then to Mumbai.
Please don’t. I see his response just before we take off out of Chicago.
I wasn’t asking. Just letting you know, I type. I know you asked me to leave you out of it but I would feel wrong doing it without letting you know. Then I send him my flight and hotel details anyway.
He doesn’t respond. Not even the three dots, and I turn my phone to airplane mode.
There’s no response from him when we land in JFK, where we have to change planes. It’s a short connection. Just two hours. In that time, Aie and Druv’s mom want to try on every perfume in duty-free and get my opinion on each one.
They’re in full Girls’ Trip mode. They’re dressed in matching pink kurtis over jeans. I don’t remember ever seeing my aie this relaxed. Romona is so good for her.
I try to focus on their steady stream of excited conversation. Women are supposed to be the ones who dream about their wedding day from when they are girls, but I think Indian mothers dream about their children’s weddings from the day they’re born. Aie and Romona obviously have. I have to work hard to not let on how distracted I am. Reva sent me some information about Vasu’s brother while we were in the air, and I’m trying to use this time on the ground to do some research about distances in Mumbai and such. Our flight does not have Wi-Fi.
“What do you think, Mira?”
I smell the paper stick Romona holds out and make the mistake of letting out an impressed sound. Immediately she holds out three others and asks me to choose.
“I like the one that smells like jasmine. That one.” I point at the only smell that won’t give me a headache with its intensity.
Romona pays an absurd amount for the biggest bottle they have. Then Aie spends even more on a cologne for Druv. Which she makes me select. A vision of the two of them trying to outspend each other for the next week flashes in my mind.
By the time they’ve shared all the details about our plans, complete with pictures and names of designers, with the salesperson, it’s time to board our next flight.
Krish hasn’t responded to my last message. I know he told me he’s done with this, but my eyes still search the boarding area. Even after we’ve taken our seats—the Two Moms next to each other in the row in front of me and me in the window seat behind—my gaze keeps straying to the stream of already tired-looking passengers as they shuffle through the aisles. Obviously, he’s not on the plane. That would be an absurd thing to expect.
Our stop in Istanbul is uneventful. We eat our way through kababs and baklava in the lounge and can’t wait to get back on the plane and sleep.
Landing at Mumbai airport, on my first trip to India, is at once nothing like I expected and everything I should have imagined. Druv had used the word overwhelming to describe the experience of visiting with his family when he was a child (unlike us, the Kalras visited almost every summer). Overwhelming is certainly one way to put it. It feels a little like stepping into the eye of a storm, a sensory storm. The airport is grander than any I’ve seen before. Intricately detailed canopied pillars inspired by peacock feathers hold up an endless ceiling from which light fixtures hang like giant lotus blooms. Ornate statues and dramatic pieces of art are scattered everywhere.
Despite the air-conditioning, it’s humid and faintly dusty, and filled with people. So many people. I can feel my own skin—there’s a mist layered over it. I’m aware of my breathing without trying to be. I feel a strange rightness. Like I’m meant to be here. But also completely out of place in the most backward, sideways, upside-down way. This is the first time in my life that I’m in a public place of this magnitude where almost every person is racially like me.
I push our luggage trolley out of the airport into a blast of heat, dust, sound, and smell. Aie’s eyes fill with tears. She leans into her cane and just stands there for a moment. Romona squeezes her hand. Their bodies are not processing the sensory overload the way mine is. When Aie gives the taxi driver our hotel address, something about her is entirely different. Not even in our home or in the store has she ever seemed this natural, this unselfconscious. Her body language is so different she looks like a stranger with my mother’s face.
My gaze, which has been searching the crowd, sweeps it one last time. Krish hasn’t responded to my last message, and I don’t know what I’m expecting, but it’s not this kind of disappointment. I’m going to have to do this by myself.
“How does it feel?” Romona asks, cupping my cheek as the three of us settle into the cab.
Aie is silently sobbing as she takes in the sights. My parents have been back here only once since they bought the store and got their citizenship. I think about all the years—almost my entire lifetime—that she yearned to visit and couldn’t. She never got to see her parents before they died.
“It’s intense,” I say. “But it’s very exciting to be here.”
“It’s so different from when we grew up,” Aie says.
Romona and she go off into raptures about how much India has changed over the past thirty years. Gigantic steel-and-glass buildings give way to shanties and crumbling buildings in an endlessly alternating pattern.
When we arrive at the JW Marriott on Juhu Beach, I’m in a strange state. My body should be rested from twenty hours of sitting, but it’s also exhausted from it. There’s a buzzing in my brain that’s part excitement and part disorientation.
Romona’s sister’s son heads the hotel chain’s operations in India. The moment our cab drops us off, a uniformed employee greets us and leads us into the lobby, with its pillared view of the ocean across a network of pools. She informs us that this is one of their most premium properties. We’re handed tall glasses of coconut water, told how honored the staff is to have us, and upgraded to a luxury suite. Which means instead of two rooms, one for Aie and me and another for Romona, we’ll share a unit with a living room and two bedrooms with two bathrooms and a terrace overlooking the ocean.
I don’t know if I’m more relieved that I won’t have to be stuck in one room with my mother for a week or more stressed about living with my soon-to-be mother-in-law for that long.
“You okay with this?” Romona asks me. “I know you young people need your space.”
“Of course she’s okay with it!” Aie says. “It’s going to be so much fun.”
Romona waits for me to answer.
“Aie is right. It’s going to be great.”
They both smile wide happy smiles, but they also look travel weary. It’s eight in the evening, and we left home more than twenty-four hours ago.
The attendant tasked with welcoming us has already sent our luggage to our room and asks if we’d like a tour of the hotel.
The Two Moms politely decline. They announce their need for a shower and a good night’s sleep. We have an appointment with the first designer at nine tomorrow morning.
I’m in need of a long shower, too, but I’m restless. I want to talk to Druv, let him know we’ve arrived safe and sound, but I want to do it without an audience. So I tell them that I’m going to take the tour and join them after.
Radha, my guide, picks up on my mood and makes it quick. Naturally everything is gorgeous and state of the art, and I’m totally not following along about the details.
Suddenly there’s a ball of panic in my chest. I thank her for her time and tell her that I’d like to stay on the deck and enjoy the ocean view for a moment. My hand is shaking when I call Druv. He’s in surgery.
What am I doing?
I’ve traveled all the way across the world to shop for my wedding. I should feel so much more invested in that than I do. My mind is entirely taken up with tracing a stranger’s lost love. I shouldn’t feel so incredibly invested in that. I have no idea how I’m going to get away from the Two Moms to manage it. The heat and humidity and twilit sky press against my senses. I’ve never felt like this in my life. I can’t reconcile all these feelings: balance and imbalance, belonging and disconnection, freedom and feeling stifled, all together, all at once.
I spin away from the pool and ocean, needing to move, and stop dead in my tracks.
Krish is leaning on a wooden column, hands dug into his pockets, heavy vibe of disapproval overlaid with something else I can’t quite place.
“Hi.” I shouldn’t sound so excited. I shouldn’t feel so relieved.
“What are you doing?” he says, jaw tightly clenched.
I step up to him. “Finishing what we started.”
“We did that already ...” He trails off and looks away from me and then back. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because Reva wants me to.”
“You barely know Reva.”
“I barely know you.” It sounds like such a lie.
“I thought we were friends.”
“Are we?”
“Of course we are.”
“Then as my friend, tell me why you don’t want to do this. Why you don’t want to find out what happened to Vasu when she might be your mother.” I catch his expression and correct myself. “Your birth mother.”
“Because she gave me up. She tossed me out like a piece of trash. Why would I go looking for her?”
“So you’re here to talk me out of this. Not to help me.”
“Can I talk you out of it?”
“No.”
“Why is this so important to you?”
“Because I know without a doubt that she didn’t toss you out like a piece of trash.”
His frown dimple makes an appearance. “You have no way of knowing that.”
“I know it, though. She’s a person who someone loved enough that they’ve worn her ring for forty years.” That’s the piece that won’t leave me. “I’ve seen bigotry and hatred in my own home. I saw the pain of a life destroyed in Reva’s eyes. Reva got away. Rumi and Saket live in a time when they could escape it. What if Vasu wasn’t able to?”
“So this is about your brother.”
“I don’t know what it’s about, Krish. But whatever it’s about isn’t simple, and I can’t imagine that it was fair. I have to know what it was.”
Before either one of us can say more, I hear the last voice in the world I want to hear right now.
“Miru?” my mother calls. “What’s going on?”
“Aie, what are you doing down here?” Her bobbed hair is wet, and she’s changed into a T-shirt and yoga pants, but she still looks exhausted.
“You were taking so long. Romona and I were starting to worry, so I came looking for you.” She throws a glance Krish’s way. “Hello?”
“This is Krish Hale,” I say. “He’s a journalist from New York.”
Krish offers her a hand, and she shakes it, confusion obvious on her face. “You know each other from before? You just ran into him by accident?” Her voice is filled with all the suspicion that defined my childhood.
“I’m working on a story,” Krish says. “Mira had no idea I was going to be here.” Two truths that add up to a lie.
“Mira is here to shop for her wedding outfits,” Aie says pointedly, polite but cold.
Her tone is wasted on Krish. Distant and cordial is his default setting.
“Do you know Druv?” Aie continues. “He’s an orthopedic surgeon. Specialist in spinal surgery.”
“That’s nice.” Krish looks impressed enough, albeit in his signature distant way, and Aie relaxes a little. “I actually know your son,” he says with a little more deliberateness. “He’s an impressive designer. His work on The A Game was brilliant. That play totally deserved the Tony nomination. You must be so proud.”
My heart has been stuttering in panic at my mother’s appearance. Suddenly something warm blooms around it. Warmth slides down my limbs. I wrap my arms around myself.
Krish slides me the barest look, but he misses neither my relief nor my mother’s stiffening.
I place a hand on my aie’s arm. “Druv’s mother must be wondering where we’ve disappeared to. I don’t want to worry her. It was nice running into you, Krish.”
“Likewise,” he says in his old-world way. “Good luck with finding the perfect wedding dress.”
“She has to find six,” Aie says, glaring at him with a mix of scorn and pride. She holds up a hand and counts off. “For the haldi, mehendi, sangeet, wedding, reception, and brunch. Aren’t you Indian?”
I can tell Krish is trying not to raise a brow at me that says Apple, tree .
“We have to go,” I say and drag her to the elevator.
“Does he think you’re marrying in a church that you need only one wedding dress?”
I really hope Krish didn’t hear that, but I don’t want to turn around and check. “He’s a guy, Aie. You know men don’t give much thought to weddings and clothes.”
“Thank God,” she says. “Imagine if we had to listen to men in that as well.”
I can feel Krish’s amused gaze follow us as we get into the elevator, and I wonder if he sees the relief filling my lungs like the heavy humid air.