Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
When I land in sweltering Mumbai, there is a private car waiting to take me anywhere I want. Despite everything, he’s arranged it for me on the other side of the world. Even if I’ve gutted what there was between us.
“Where do you want to go?” the driver asks.
“I—” My eyes look out the window toward the overcast sky. It doesn’t matter if the sun is hidden, with enough pollution pumped into the air, the city is still hot and humid. “I need—” My hands clasp together and I take a deep breath. “The hospital. Please . Take me there.”
After reciting the specific address, there is nothing else to be said. When the plane was landing, it had flown closely over the largest slum next to the airport. A stark reminder I’m home. Traffic is dense and loud as we merge onto the highway and shove our way into the city.
When I’m finally dropped off, I make short work of registering at the front desk of the hospital, and finding the room Uncle is staying in before his surgery.
My clothes have become wrinkled and sweaty, but no one has stopped me from being here, so I must either appear desperate or confident enough.
“Uncle?” My voice is brittle as I step inside his room.
He’s sitting upright on the bed, his usual pointed turban traded in for a more casual cloth wrapped around his head. A bruise circles his right eye, and the edge of another peeks out from the edge of his white gown like a gruesome blink.
His eyes widen. “Rita?”
Noor and Kiren turn around. They’re here too. They’ve made sure he wasn’t alone.
I hold on to the wall. “I-is the surgery over?”
They didn’t have to operate. The hip will heal on its own after proper recovery. He’s made it through.
Those are the words I hear when my friends gather around me. I’m taken to a chair I sink into, and all at once, the last twenty-four hours ram into me like a truck finally released.
With my friends and family around me, I shiver and then—finally—weep.
They only keep Uncle in the hospital another day for recovery.
Further rest is advised to happen at home.
Discharge paperwork is filed, and the list of medical expenses is tallied.
This stay will certainly crush most of my savings, if not all.
All that I’ve done to get ahead in Barcelona will be gone, but I’m breathing a sigh of steely gratitude.
At least I can pay because Uncle surely can’t.
As I ready myself to negotiate with the clerk in the main office, Kiren and Noor crowd behind me.
From the corner of my eye, I see their wallets are out.
“No, I can’t let you pay,” I argue. “It’s not going to happen.”
“Try to stop us,” says Noor, wrestling to get ahead of me.
Kiren flanks my other side. “He’s our uncle too. Whatever the cost, we’re figuring it out together.”
The clerk is a petite woman in a silk sari whose bindi bridges the gap between her long, rounded eyebrows.
For a woman who administers bills and likely deals with traumatized, worn-down families, she’s certainly in a good mood.
A folder is handed to me. “It’s taken care of,” she says. “The payment is already made in full.”
I hold the folder against my chest. “By who?”
“Anonymous donor.”
Is it him?
If so, how did he know?
Noor and Kiren are whispering the same behind my back. Mutely, I walk over the front entrance. Uncle is waiting in a wheelchair. The attendant who brought him down leaves so I can take over. We exit the hospital by going down a ramp.
“We’ll hail a taxi,” says Kiren. “Let me haggle it down. I’m the best at it.”
There’s no need. The same private car that dropped me off to the hospital in the first place is waiting outside for us. The driver is a sun-darkened man in uniform. He’s holding his flat top cap under his arm, but quickly puts it on when he sees me. “Madam. Right this way.”
Is that how Luke figured out where we were? This driver reports to him? My hands tighten on the wheelchair handles. “I can’t afford to pay you.”
“It’s already taken care of, madam.”
The next few minutes, I try to dismiss him, but he doesn’t go. He says it’s his duty to take us wherever we need to go, and how this is the best job he’s had in a long time with the pay large enough to cover his daughter’s tuition for her last year in medical school.
Kiren and Noor are smiling. Uncle doesn’t say much, but I know he’s curious. In the end, it’s the way he’s grimacing in discomfort in the wheelchair that has me accepting the ride.
Now, I’m certain it’s Luke. He’s here without being here.
I’m so stiff, I’ll snap. I fold a hand over my heart and will it to be reasonable. To ignore the pain a little longer.
The drive home is long and circuitous. Mumbai traffic is a congested pit every hour of the day, but we don’t feel the time being in the back of an air-conditioned vehicle with ample leg room. Uncle has fallen asleep, and my friends also stay quiet after seeing the many yawns I try suppressing.
Home is a two-bedroom apartment rented in a crumbling, five-story residential building.
With Dad still in rehab, Uncle has been able to take his own room, and I have my own, albeit both are only big enough to fit our sleeping cots.
The neighbors are middle-class families, most of them parents with children.
They come from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds, so you’ll often hear different prayers imbuing the air in the mornings.
Inside, the walls in our apartment might have flaking green paint, but everything else inside is as carefully maintained as possible.
Any rips on the couch have been meticulously sewn back together with pride, the potted plants are trimmed, and delicate china plates are displayed in a grandiose wooden cabinet passed down from our ancestors.
Below the furniture are blanched white tiles that reflect enough light to brighten the space so that even at night it looks to be glowing faintly.
It makes me sad that I feel like it’s smaller than I remember.
While I help Uncle into bed in his room, my friends go into the kitchen to make chai. When they come back, I’ve already lit sticks of jasmine incense and taken long, meditative gulps of sweet, comforting, fragranced air.
As though this apartment is a very familiar hug, I ease into its embrace by sitting on the couch.
With the advantage of holding all my memories and how every inch of construction is one I could redraw in my mind if prompted, this place can’t be replicated or replaced.
The junctures between my bones lose their tension, as if no longer needing to stay alert.
I’m back. I’ve missed it so much. All of it.
Noor hands me a cup of chai. “I know you must’ve left Barcelona for Uncle, but will you go back?”
Kiren plates up biscuits. “That face says she doesn’t want to.”
“Barcelona is not like Mumbai,” I say, cradling my cup of warmth. “Not that—I mean—I don’t want to be unfair. The people living there are nice. Sweet. Incredible, really. I only wish I had been able to experience that more, but I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” asks Noor.
The list tumbles off my tongue. “Janice’s chores, always being stressed about money, then I was consumed with the meal kit competition, and then I lived with Luke. His apartment had everything. I didn’t feel like I needed to leave it.”
“I’ve never seen you cry like you did at the hospital,” says Kiren, lowering her voice. “What do you mean, always stressed about money? And what chores?”
“Tell us everything, puth.” Uncle has come out of the room. I rush to help him, but he waves me off and uses a walker to take himself to the couch. An age-spotted hand circles mine. “From the beginning, tell us everything. And the truth this time. Please, Rita.”
I think it will be like carrying stones I’ve lodged away for so long that they’ve increased in weight due to purposeful neglect.
A part of me believes I’ll smile my way through it again, softening pain, and smoothing away clarity like one does if you spill water over a painting that has yet to dry.
But I’ve already spilled myself to someone else and vomited messy feelings over him, and cried enough to swell my eyes.
I’m less scared of what that looks like now.
Still, I hesitate.
“We’re your friends,” says Noor. “Family, really. Each of us are the siblings we never got. If you fall to pieces, we’ll help gather you.”
Uncle squeezes my hand. “Things are less tough when you speak about them.”
I chew on my lip, and that makes Kiren’s eyes flash hot.
“You don’t decide what bothers me. I decide what bothers me, so trust that I’m listening because I care about you.
We’ve given you time before and not pushed.
We’ve waited for you to be ready to talk, but now I’m asking.
Begging. Share your problems with us, Rita. ”
Their warmth and concern radiate around me, and I want to cry again, caught up in how I tried so hard to protect the people I love, but in doing so, I’ve done the opposite.
“I never wanted anyone to get hurt,” I say.
“Not trusting us hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We don’t want you to feel guilty.” Noor puts a hand on my leg. “Just let us understand what you’ve been going through.”
“I’m so used to saying it’s alright,” I whisper, “but I’m not alright at the moment.”
And that’s how it starts. An admission of truth, that first mark on an otherwise closely guarded pool, ripples outward more and more. I start with Janice.
My friends and Uncle curse her.
Then I go on to tell them how I’d lost my job and recovered another by taking Luke’s offer. Words pour fast after that. It’s not all bad. A lot of it—the cakes, the teas, the ways he tried in the beginning to become my friend—makes us chuckle.
I’ve held back the good with the bad, I realize.
And I’ve robbed them of sharing their own related experiences.
Noor makes a comment about this banker she also dated who thought Sudoku was the best puzzle out there.
Kiren went to a pasta-making class once and left halfway.
Uncle—shockingly—says he similarly isn’t a fan of sweets.
When I get to the failure of the competition, I whimper as if getting cleaved in half again. There is a long period where I’m covering my face with my hands, and my shoulders fall as if burdened with inadequacy. “I’m not good enough.”
“You’re brilliant, Rita!” they all shout. “And you made it so far, and there will be more opportunities?—”
I’m not ready to feel worthy again, to rummage through the shattered dream around me and try to salvage what has survived.
Instead, I tell them about the conference.
The shiny baubles and glittering excess of the rich, how I tried to fit into that fancy mold and how I kept fighting my imposter syndrome for the sake of Luke’s deal.
When I get to the part about leaving, all I can do is summarize because I can’t speak properly about the fissures of my heart: “A tragic situation of two worlds coming together, colliding, and then careening apart because we’re too different. I didn’t belong there. And he wouldn’t belong here.”
Uncle and my friends look at each other, but they don’t say anything as if I’m not ready to hear it.
This moment is about listening. And they do it so well.
They take turns holding onto me, cradling my head, and feeding me: a bowl of masoor dal, a bowl of khichdi, spoons of yellow custard, a sugary soaked gulab jamun, more and more cups of chai.
We sit together for a long time, eating and taking turns helping Uncle, breathing in relief that he is going to be okay. He catches my eye and tells me he is proud of me, but that I don’t ever have to suffer alone again.
And so it dies a robust death.
My fake-cheer persona.
What replaces it is a vast, scary swell of trust and support.
My people—the ones who love and care for me—they’ll help hold me up when I need to break down, and I’m promising to do the same for them.