Chapter 30
Hospital lighting is severe and unforgiving.
Every wrinkle of anxiety in the Iyer-Chopra-Gopal clan is on full display.
The bright colors of their outfits are like a shout at a funeral and anyone who passes the area where they’re congregated takes at least a second glance.
After some paperwork, they are told to wait in the seating area, but Veena perima goes to the narrow hallway outside the room Ashok peripa is in and everyone follows.
She, Manjula aunty, and Kavitha sit in a row of three connected plastic chairs as Simran leans on the wall next to them.
Rishi stands as Ravi uncle paces back and forth.
Geeta has gone to see what she can find out.
Even more unsettling than the antiseptic smell or the constant ring of the telephones is that Veena perima is staring silently at the ground.
Anguish heaves inside Simran; she’s never seen her aunt like this, her straight, proud neck loose and hanging.
Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Geeta returns and she shakes her head at everyone’s expectant faces.
“They’re running all the right tests but they haven’t determined whether it’s a heart attack at this point.
” Kavitha gets up so she can sit. “It takes time. We just have to wait.” But as she lowers herself into the chair, hand pressed to her belly, Simran hears the words she is quietly muttering to herself: “He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. He has to be okay.”
The tension is like a stifling, smothering blanket.
Rishi murmurs that he’s going find coffee and water for everyone.
Veena perima stands and starts to walk towards a hospital staff member but Geeta grabs her by the hand.
“Amma, I know it’s really hard. But there’s nothing we can do yet.
In fact, bothering them might hold up the process more.
” Even through her own worst worries, Geeta plays the role of the comforting authority.
Veena perima sits back down in a daze, no further protest. She begins quietly blubbering to herself, in Tamil and Hindi and English and even Marathi. Geeta puts her arm around her mother as tears slip down her cheeks daintily and Kavitha goes to stand next to her.
“You know, girls,” Veena perima says, taking the hand that Kavitha holds out.
“Your Appa seems very shy. When we first moved here, he would ask me to talk on the phone for him because they always said they didn’t understand his accent.
Which is wrong. You can understand him easily, he just talks too quietly.
But no one was patient enough to listen.
Still, we made our life here, a good life.
He doesn’t talk to others but he talks to me, all the time.
I’ve not spent one night away from him in thirty years.
What will I do?” Kavitha squeezes her hand and Veena holds their clasped fingers to her cheek.
Simran tries to picture it: Veena Iyer—then Veena Swaminathan, short and young and just as domineering.
Before she’d gotten married and moved to the U.S.
, Veena perima had been Simran’s most frequent babysitter since she lived with them in the Chennai house.
She recalls one of the photos from their wedding hanging upstairs in Iyer House, Veena perima in her bright red sari and heavy gold jewelry, cradling six-month-old Simran in her arms, and her uncle, just as tall, the gray in his hair jet-black, his jaw sharp with youth, looking down at both of them.
“I remember the last time we were here for Appa …” Geeta says, perfect features crumpling.
“Don’t think about that now, Gits,” Kavitha says.
A hollowness funnels through Simran, of guilt and memory.
She hadn’t been there the last time. Earlier, she’d had that bitter thought that no one had withstood what she had, but she’d rather stay alone in her sorrow for the rest of her life than have anyone she loved go through this.
Muttering an excuse, she dashes away from the group, practically running through the waiting area to escape outside, where she hopes it might be easier to breathe.
It isn’t.
She rarely allows herself to think of the day her parents died and the ones that followed but now she can’t stop the memories from punching a hole through her.
Something she’s said to herself over the years, enough to turn it into a comforting thought, is that her parents died on the spot in the car crash.
There was none of this terrible purgatory of waiting in the hospital, on a tightrope between life and death, between hope and despair.
She supposes she’s thankful for that, at least.
But one moment, she was a normal kid thinking about what she was going to wear to Ria Rathore’s birthday party the following week.
The next moment, nothing would ever be okay again.
She can still hear it ringing in her ears, the “oooh”s of her classmates when the principal came to pull her out of class, as if she’d gotten in trouble.
She had laughed with them but his face was so grim, she knew immediately something was desperately wrong.
The next twenty-four hours are a blur—she only remembers sitting in the neighbor’s house, not speaking until a day and a half later, when Veena perima and Ashok peripa finally arrived off the eighteen-hour flight from New Jersey.
Her aunt’s face was blank but it looked scrubbed raw and shook with tremors, as if she might have been crying for a very long time, as if she had barely been able to make herself stop.
The following day, her parents were cremated.
Simran has still never seen anything as vivid as the fire of the funeral pyre; she remembers thinking it was deeply unfair that something so alive signified that her parents were not.
She didn’t cry very much during that time but everyone around her would break down while hugging her or patting her cheek.
She was startled to realize their tears were as much for her as her mother and father.
Because her parents were dead and that was terrible, but she was still here without them and that was tragic.
She’d sleep on and off and every time she’d wake up, it would be like washing onto shore after a shipwreck.
For a split second, she would forget what had happened and then it would come like a wave, crashing over her, and she’d drown all over again.
Sometimes, when she wakes from dreaming of her home in Chennai, it still happens.
After the thirteen-day mourning period, the logistics began to take over.
Simran could no longer stay in India with no grandparents or immediate family there.
She’d have to move to New Jersey to live with her aunt and uncle.
Systematically, they moved from room to room in the only house she’d ever lived in, going through every possession of her parents.
They threw out her mom’s collection of Stardust magazines, packed away the clock in the living room, the one with the elephants that they’d gotten on a trip to Kenya.
The four-poster bed was given to the cook’s newly wedded niece.
Photo frames came off the walls. By the end, what was left of her life was in three suitcases bound for New Jersey.
The rest was put into boxes that were stacked taller than her and left in the house.
She understands, in retrospect, why this had to happen.
But for that fifteen-year-old child, leaving her home was like another death.
Slowly but surely, the physical proof that her parents had once been here, even though it was just for a short time, dwindled down to the two portraits in the study of Iyer House and a record player.
Death is cruel and unrelenting but this slow forgetting, the slipping away of the exact details of their living, hurts infinitely more.
She remembers that her mother’s hands were always so soft, and her father’s laugh shook like a rattle—but she can’t remember how they felt, how it sounded.
Every day is one day further away from the world they existed in and it has pulped her heart.
Those months at the end colored her whole childhood and so she’s lost that too.
The happy times are no longer untainted, instead recalled with a ticking clock.
Her birthday party when she was ten—five years left with her parents.
Her fifteenth, which she spent with friends instead of them—the last one her parents would be alive for.
The favorite pair of jeans her mother had bought her, the pair she was wearing on the day they died, the pair she never wore again.
She paces, willing the memories away. In their place, she’s sick with new, terrible pictures of what might happen to her uncle and what that would do to her cousins and her aunt.
She, of all people, knows what a worst-case scenario looks like.
She knows if it were to happen, the pain might never lessen and this family would be incomplete forever.
Ashok peripa, gone before he can meet his grandchild.
Never to hear Kavitha tell him who she really is and give her his blessing.
The rocking chair in the living room, still and empty without him.
The gaping space next to Veena perima at dinner, on every occasion, with every piece of good news from now on.
“Simran?”
She squints at the figure in shadow, the sun behind him. “Kamal, hi. What are you doing here?”
He holds up a small black object. “Veena mami left her phone at the house; I thought she might need it.”
Simran takes it from him. “Thanks.”
He steps towards her, blocking out the sun so her face can relax. “I’m not going to ask if you’re okay because I know the answer. But I’m not going to leave you alone right now either.”
She is grateful for the presence of anything besides her own thoughts. “Let’s sit?”