Chapter 3
The next morning, Simran hurriedly dabs concealer at the dark splotches under her eyes before heading out.
Her neighborhood is three long avenues bustling with bikers, and children, and dogs on leashes in and around the rows of two-story homes and small businesses.
Heading to the streetcar station a few blocks away, she looks into the window of the wine bar where her book club meets every month—and the cheese shop next door that they raid after a couple hours of heated discussion and too many glasses on empty stomachs—before walking past the lot that hosts a farmers’ market in the summer and becomes a tiny ice rink in the winter, where Leo taught her to skate last year.
She likes the meandering pace of the streetcar—she doesn’t sleep well so mornings are always slow—and especially the glimpse of the wide, blue yonder of Lake Ontario as the train turns onto King Street.
Today, the lake goes unnoticed. She thought, like every year, getting through her birthday was all she needed.
Simran checks her phone for the millionth time. No reply from Kavitha.
She gets off at her stop and forces herself to focus on her job—the small team at the international students’ office of the Toronto university she works for is perpetually under-resourced and over-tasked.
She enjoys it but her boss, Paulie, doesn’t like her and keeps subtly implying that he can end her contract whenever he wants to.
Sometimes, in her head, she calls him Puli, the Tamil word for tamarind, a wonderful fruit that doesn’t deserve to be associated with her supervisor except that it is extremely sour, and so is he.
Just as she turns into the small garden area outside of her office building on Front Street, her phone rings, and when she looks at the screen, she nearly drops the phone.
Kavitha is calling.
“Childhood” and “Kavitha” are synonymous for Simran.
Growing up, they spent the school year on opposite sides of the world, with Simran in Chennai and Kavitha and her sister, Geeta, in New Jersey.
But those summers when Kavitha would come back to India are the nexus of her best memories: running down to Marina Beach and playing in the tide; Simran laughing so hard at Kavi rapping Jay-Z’s “Beware of the Boys” that she fell backwards out of her chair, which only made them both laugh harder; playing infinite rounds of gin rummy on rainy days with her neighbors Payal and Kamal.
There was nothing like those two months of endless, sun-sticky days that Simran, a prickly only child, got to spend with her cousin and best friend rolled into one.
“Hello?” she answers cautiously. Is Kavitha calling Simran for the same reason Simran sent that message yesterday—because she misses her too?
She’s scared to hope. It could be a butt-dial.
Her stomach drops, remembering all those missed calls from five years ago. Maybe someone is in the hospital again.
“Hello, Simran,” her cousin says.
A pack of joggers passes behind her. “Hi, Kavitha.” She has no idea what to say next. “How are things?”
Simran needn’t have worried.
“Things are … things. Come to Geeta’s wedding,” Kavitha says with no preamble.
“What?”
“I’m calling to tell you to come to Geeta’s wedding.” Kavi’s voice is rigid, almost clenched.
Simran clears her throat. “Kavitha—”
“She’s your cousin, and Rishi is one of your oldest friends.” Kavi sounds so measured, so pragmatic, so unlike her. “And I don’t want to spend the whole wedding watching my mother and father explain to everyone who asks why you aren’t there. They don’t deserve that.”
Her words press into Simran and grate against her. There are many things she deserved too, while in that house, that she didn’t get. “Look, I—”
“It’s been seven years,” Kavitha says.
Simran is quiet as she sits on the lip of the small fountain.
Little droplets of water tap at her back and arms. There’s a feeling taking shape within her and she’s surprised to recognize it as guilt.
This is a big deal; it’s the first wedding they’ve had in years, the first in her immediate family.
Geeta, Rishi, and her uncle, Ashok, were collateral damage when Simran had fled Iyer House for Toronto without telling anyone.
Leaving Kavitha behind had felt bad in the moment, but it was nothing compared to how terrible it would feel as the days stretched into weeks, then months, and eventually years where she didn’t know what her favorite person was doing or whether there were any new foods she’d tried or if she’d finally gotten that handbag she’d been saving for.
“I’m sorry but I can’t,” she says. “I have commitments here.”
“You can’t? You mean you won’t.” There’s a disappointed sureness in Kavitha’s voice now, and Simran’s heart sinks thinking of how little affection her cousin has left for her.
Both are true—she can’t and she won’t go back to that house.
She cannot be around her aunt, not after the way she acted following Simran’s parents’ death, not after the way she’s acted ever since.
At first, it was okay that no one in Iyer House talked about her parents.
After nearly a full month of condolences in Chennai, it was almost nice to move through this strange house in New Jersey with only her own grief on her shoulders, not having to endure the laments and sorrow of distant relatives.
She could even, in her most desperate moments, pretend it hadn’t happened, as if she were living with Kavitha for the school year before she’d go back to Chennai and her parents and the only life she’d ever known.
But then another month passed. Two. More. And it began to set in that nothing was ever going to be the same. She wasn’t going back. Her parents were gone. And the only thing more painful than talking about them became not talking about them.
So no, she will not be going back to Iyer House.
“Listen, what if you come up to Toronto after the wedding? Stay with me and we can play tourist. You can finally meet Liv in person. And Leo too.” She knows she’s jumping the gun but she can’t help it. Kavitha called her.
“Simran. Either you come to this wedding or we’re through.” Simran has heard Kavitha speak in this tone only once: the last time they talked to each other, five years ago.
An ambulance careens down the street, siren wailing, but it’s the finality in Kavitha’s voice that pierces Simran somewhere deep beneath her ribs.
The slimmest chance of reconnecting with her cousin in the last eighteen hours has felt better than all the years of silence.
She can’t cut the lone, tremulous thread she has to her cousin, can’t abandon all hope of spinning it back into something like the tight-knit sisterhood they shared years ago.
“Come home,” Kavitha repeats.
Her house in Chennai pops into Simran’s head—more than a memory.
It’s fundamental to who she is. That’s the home she needs to find her way back to.
Not Iyer House in New Jersey. She’s been thinking about it for months now, every time she dreams of her house in fitful nights of sleep.
She needs to see it again, for the first time since she left at fifteen, to feel the cool marble floor under her bare feet and sit on the verandah stairs where she ate breakfast every morning.
The house, tangible and standing instead of hazy in her memory, will be proof that a world with her parents existed.
Their things are still inside, packed up in boxes stacked against the walls.
She can sort through it all, like she should have done years ago, and maybe even bring some of it back.
If Iyer House’s highest crime is that it features scant traces of her parents, Simran’s Toronto life is no better.
Going back to Chennai has to be the next trip she makes. Then it occurs to her: Her aunt has the only key, taken when they moved Simran to New Jersey.
If she wants to go back to her home in Chennai, she first has to go to Iyer House.
And this way, there’s a chance to have Kavitha back in her life too. “Okay,” Simran says finally. She’ll go for the weekend—she can handle that much for her cousin’s sake.
“Really?” Kavitha says, and Simran thinks she hears a tremor of excitement.
“I can come in time for the sangeet next week.”
There’s a minute of silence on the other end before: “No.”
“No?” Simran repeats.
“No. You’ll come tomorrow.” Kavitha lets the words hang in the air, so reminiscent of her mother that Simran gets déjà vu.
This brand of short, nonnegotiable directives is a Veena Iyer specialty, no extra words to bargain with or argue against. “You’ll come tomorrow to attend all the pre-wedding events and help us prep for everything. ”
“Kavitha, I can’t. I’m so behind at work—”
“You can work remotely.”
She gives it one last shot. “Getting a flight for tomorrow is going to be crazy expensive.”
“That’s fine. I have lots of credit card points. I’ll buy your ticket,” Kavitha replies. “You can fly out tomorrow morning.”
“Kavitha—”
“I’m serious, senorita.”
Simran’s protest dies on her lips. Senorita. With that one word Kavitha has invoked a code that’s been sacred since they were kids. If she backs out now, it really will be over. “Okay. I’ll come tomorrow.”
Simran spends the rest of her day making arrangements—getting set up to work remotely for the next two weeks (though Paulie’s very vocally reluctant approval makes her uneasy) and asking a neighbor to water her plants, since Liv has already left for Europe.
She gives her birthday bouquet of red tulips to the same neighbor but not before pressing them to her nose for one last inhale.
She’s going to have to delay plans with Leo.
But she delays the delaying—she’ll text him once she’s back in New Jersey, to bask in the warmth of the last two nights just a little longer.
That evening, she unearths her Indian outfits, complete with coordinating jewelry and shoes, from the deepest recesses of her closet. She stares at the bright colors and the garments she hasn’t touched in years. If it weren’t for the venue, she might almost be excited to wear them again.