Chapter 23 #2
At the mention of his paternal grandmother, Rohit straightened away from the wall. The last time he’d received a call about a grandparent, it had been to inform him of his maternal grandmother’s stroke. His father’s mother was much heartier for an elderly woman. She made the best rotis.
“Is it a stroke?” The assumption scraped out of Rohit’s throat where an invisible hand had him in a choke hold.
Suddenly, he was transported right back to his second year of graduate school.
He’d been on his way to an operations strategy class when his mother had informed him of his nana’s stroke.
It had been mid-January, and he’d dropped his overloaded backpack with a thud on the frozen, snowy ground.
And now, in the middle of spring, he felt the same icy, January air pierce through his skin. His lungs burned.
“No,” Maisa said, shaking her head vigorously. “Dadi is okay.”
Rohit’s pressed a hand to his chest, careful to keep it out of Maisa’s eyesight.
“But…” Maisa added, and Rohit’s hand clenched into a fist. “Dad recently found out that she hasn’t been taking her diabetes medication.”
“What? Why?”
“She can’t afford it.”
Rohit clenched his jaw and tried not to show any reaction, but the urge to slam the back of his head against the side of the building was strong.
He barely heard Maisa’s explanation of how their dad had found out over the rising fire of something sharp and darkly acidic in the pit of his gut.
It swirled inside him, gaining momentum as it spread, igniting everything in its path.
Another medical bill to add to the list. Great. Would his family even notice if their needs burned him to a crisp? Probably not if it left a stack of cash in its wake.
That’s not fair , Rohit admonished himself.
Your family loves you. The self-reassurance doused his resentment, reminding him, as always, that their needs must come first: thousands of miles away, his family struggled to make ends meet while he sat in a bar, on a Wednesday, sharing after-work drinks with friends, regretting the decision to answer this damn phone call. He was a terrible person.
“I’ll take care of it,” Rohit blurted out.
“Oh, no, Rohit, I just wanted to talk about—”
“It’s fine.”
Maisa’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes widened.
“It’s fine,” he repeated, more gently this time.
“That’s not why I called.” Her voice was meek, but Rohit couldn’t bring himself to apologize for snapping at her. If he did, the resentment would build again and Maisa didn’t deserve it.
“Yes, but it’s what needs to be done,” he said instead.
“I’m sorry, Rohit,” Maisa said in a small voice. “I just…I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about this stuff.”
“You did the right thing. I’m glad you told me.
I’ll call you later, okay?” He barely waited for his sister’s goodbye before he ended the call.
He didn’t want to go back into the bar, not when the weight of another responsibility—another call from home, another bill, another obligation—scraped against the pit of his stomach like broken glass.
In the barely lit alleyway between the Leprechaun Trap and an all-you-can-eat sushi joint that had closed hours ago, Rohit felt trapped.
The warmth of new friends, laughter, and Cynthia’s fingers toying with his hair felt universes away now, thanks to the problems of a world he was no longer a part of closing in on him, permeating every single part of his life.
At this rate, he’d be stuck here forever.
“There you are.”
Rohit heard Cynthia’s husky voice before he saw her cautiously making her way toward him in the feeble light, her arms crossed over her chest. He was vaguely surprised to realize that the temperature had dipped with nightfall, or perhaps it was Maisa’s phone call that had left him so numb.
When Cynthia came to a stop in front of him, he immediately slipped off his suit jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“I came to check on you,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
Tipping his head backward, Rohit looked up at the sky.
He loved that he could always see the stars in Kelowna—there had been too much light pollution in Toronto and smog in India.
But the twinkling lights seemed impossibly far away in this moment, reminding him of his limits and the places he’d never reach.
“My life is always going to be like this, isn’t it?” he murmured, more to himself.
“Like what?”
“Everything I do is for a home I left behind. It doesn’t even feel like home anymore, but I can’t escape it,” he said. “Maybe my obligations to them would feel like less of a burden if I moved back in with them.”
When Cynthia didn’t respond for a long moment, Rohit looked at her and hated the worry lines that creased her forehead. He’d put them there. Had he kept his secret to himself, she’d never know the weight that was his to bear alone.
“I think we all wind up in situations that seem impossible to crawl out of,” she said slowly. “But eventually, we will. You will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you deserve good things,” she said, parroting the lines he’d said to her the first time she’d invited him to her apartment.
Rohit’s insides warmed as he reached for her, pulling her in so their foreheads touched and the sweet scent of sandalwood, strength, and Cynthia could blanket his senses and offer him a bit of a reprieve if not the freedom from his burdens.
“I probably don’t deserve you,” he said.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” A sly smile pulled at the corners of Cynthia’s lips, even more wicked and seductive in the dim alleyway. “?‘Sasha Tran, I want to hold your purse for you.’?”
Rohit couldn’t help but grin. He’d introduced her to Always Be My Maybe just a few nights ago and it was the most perfect thing she could have said to him in what, up until she’d found him, had been a horrible, devastating, and imperfect moment.
Even if she’d gotten the line wrong.