Epilogue
Eleven months later
Simran watches as the key of her childhood home in Chennai is placed in the palm of a stranger.
The tall man in wire-rim glasses thanks Kamal’s mother as his wife urges their two young daughters to stop running around the front garden and tell the Kumars how excited they are to live so close to their school and friends.
Simran steps back from the interaction—it’s no longer hers to be a part of.
This house technically hasn’t been hers for years.
The Kumars, out of respect for her and her family, hadn’t changed a thing, renting it out as is until they’d received an offer to buy it a few months ago.
It had felt like a sign. A chance to say goodbye that she hadn’t gotten seventeen years ago, one she hadn’t been able to find since.
“Please, go ahead. Take all the time you need,” the new owner says, gesturing to Simran and Veena perima.
Knowing that she’s seeing this house for the last time, Simran stands on the second stair of the verandah where her family used to have breakfast on Sundays.
She walks through her old bedroom, through the living room, through her father’s study, all the places she’s been picturing and dreaming of for years now.
She opens the Godrej wardrobe where her mother’s saris used to hang and smiles at the familiar metallic groan when she closes the door.
She cries in the kitchen when she spots a broken tile that’s never been fixed.
She hopes it never will be. Her aunt shows her the space by the window where she’d rock Simran to sleep.
They do one last round, going to each room as they say goodbye not just to her parents but to the people they’d been in this house.
Leo’s outside in the garden and as Veena perima goes to talk to the new owners, Simran beckons him over.
“I have something for you,” she says to Leo as he steps onto the verandah.
His eyebrows go up. “Shouldn’t I be the one giving you things?”
She takes his hand. “Not till tomorrow at least.” She folds his fingers to make a fist and then pulls a heavy gold object out of her pocket, slipping it over his wrist. Her father’s watch, a piece of family lore she’d never even known about till her aunt had told her.
Veena perima had kept it in her safe all these years and given it to Simran last month, when they’d pored over her parents’ wedding album on one of Simran’s weekend visits to Iyer House.
“This watch has been in my mom’s side for generations; my father used to wear it.
The tradition is to give it to the first man who marries into the family. ”
Some dreams will stay steeped in loss and sorrow and never come true, like the wish both she and Veena perima had for her to get married in this very spot.
But they have so much more now than just dreams. They have these links to their memories—the record player, this house, the items they finally unpacked from the garage.
She has her aunt’s stories about her parents and the ones she shares, with her aunt, with Leo, with her cousins.
“Thank you,” Leo says, his voice wobbling a little, as he runs his finger lightly over the dial. He looks at her, lips pursed with emotion.
“It looks so right on you,” she says, throat tightening.
Her parents should have been the ones to give it to him; she’ll never stop feeling their absence.
Her therapist keeps reminding her that won’t go away.
Grief is many things: a wall, a net, a weight.
But it’s also a tether that brought her back to the people she lost and the ones she still has.
She doesn’t want to get this heavy, not today. Leo picks up on the shift in her mood and nudges her. “You know, Simran, you’ve already got me. You can stop flirting with me.”
She breaks into a smile. “Pass.”
A few minutes later, Leo, Veena perima, and Simran say goodbye to the Kumars and the new family. As they walk to the gate, Veena perima takes Simran’s hand and she pretends not to notice the tears on her aunt’s cheek. Just before they exit, they turn and look back.
“Come to think of it,” Veena perima says, her voice back to her default haughty tone. “The color of this house has always been too dull. I hope they finally paint it.”
The next day, her thirty-second birthday, Simran sits on the sandy shore of Marina Beach, just as the dawn breaks and the sun peeks over the horizon. She thought saying goodbye to the house would hurt far more than it does. But just because it’s not hers anymore doesn’t mean it’s not still home.
Or at least a part of home. Because a part of home is Iyer House now. A part of home is her apartment in Manhattan with Kavitha. A part of home is Toronto. A part of home is always wherever Leo is—so currently, sitting on the beach next to her, knees up, digging his toes through the sand.
“Happy birthday?” he asks her. The first rays of daylight streak through his hair and turn his eyes golden. “Or sad birthday?”
She thinks of how far they’ve come in just a year and takes his hand. “Mostly happy. But maybe a little sad too. Can it be both?” she asks.
He gives that smile, one side up, then the other. “That sounds right.”
Her phone chimes with a video call request and she holds it up to answer.
“Happy birthday!” Rishi and Geeta say in unison.
“Thank you!” Simran replies. “I can’t believe you guys are calling me so early. It’s still yesterday in Connecticut.”
“Well, the baby’s up, which means we are up.” Geeta’s voice is exhausted and exhilarated.
“Guess that means Kavitha has to be up as well,” Kavi grumbles, coming into the frame in a third window.
“Put my niece on the phone,” Simran says. Rishi holds the phone up to the baby. She’s wriggling, her chubby hands demonstrating her newest skill: fist pumping as she gurgles enthusiastically.
Something happens to Simran whenever she sees her niece.
It’s not so different from the first time she heard Leo speak Tamil.
She feels parts of herself join and bind, fitting together.
Late in Geeta’s third trimester, when the arguments over what to name the baby had reached fever pitch (Leo and Rishi kept insisting LeBron James Iyer-Chopra was a great name for a girl), Veena perima had been the one to come up with the solution, suggesting a new family tradition, one where the aunt names the baby.
The afternoon that Veena perima called her to say that Geeta was having contractions, Simran rushed from her desk at Fordham’s international student office and caught the train to the hospital in Connecticut.
There, she held her niece in her arms for the first time as Kavitha told everyone the name she’d chosen: Vidya.
After Simran’s mother. And Simran, who still kept insisting she never cried, wept and laughed at the same time.
When Simran looks at baby Vidya, she doesn’t just see her family’s future. She sees its past too. Maybe her parents aren’t here anymore, but they still are. Because Simran is here. Because her aunt is. No one is gone forever as long as someone remembers them.
“Hi, Vidya,” she says gently to the screen. The baby wails in reply. “She’s as grumpy as Simran is,” Kavitha comments as she pads into the kitchen.
“How’s Annie, Kavi?” Leo asks. Kavitha shrugs noncommittally and Leo gasps. “No more Annie?”
“Maybe just less Annie,” Kavitha says, yawning again. “I have some oats to sow. Not wild ones. More like steel-cut.”
Leo grins nefariously. “Got it. But let us know when you’re ready to bring Annie or whoever to a family wedding and pretend you’re strangers so she can fulfill every single whim of your entire family and win them over …”
Kavitha snorts. “Who would ever agree to that?”
Leo laughs, sliding his arm around Simran. “Only a complete idiot.”
“Besides …” Kavitha says mischievously, “we’d need to have a family wedding first.” She drums her fingers along her jaw. “Do you know anyone who could get married soon?”
Simran groans and lightly pushes Leo. “You walked us right into that one.”
“You sound like your mother,” Leo tells Kavi.
At that moment, Vidya makes it known to all that she doesn’t appreciate her mother and father’s divided attention and they end the call with a plan to celebrate Simran’s birthday when she and Leo are back.
Daylight has fully broken and people are spilling onto the beach.
Children shriek as they touch the tide and run back up the shore to the waiting arms of their parents.
Vendors come by, and when one selling fresh ellaneer, straight from a hacked-off coconut, rolls his cart past them, Leo gets up.
Simran hears Leo tell the man in Tamil that he’d like one and sees the seller’s surprise at his fluency.
Leo plops down next to her in the sand. “Would you like your birthday present?”
“I can’t believe you had time to get me something,” she says, taking the coconut from him.
“Let’s just say it’s been in the works for a while,” Leo says. He pulls out his phone, scrolls quickly, and hands it to her. She takes in the fancy header on the email and reads it out loud.
“Dear Mr. Bridgers, it is with great pleasure that we inform you of—” She looks at him. “That we inform you of your acceptance to the Master’s Program for Advanced Linguistic Studies at NYU.”
“The company wants me to get more formal training, so they’re going to cover my degree while I work out of the Manhattan office.”
Simran turns her shoulders to look right at him. “You’re moving to New York?”
His grin is so wide, eye crinkles everywhere. “I’m moving to New York!”
She flings her arms around him. “Forget what I said, it’s a happy birthday!” she says to the space behind his ear and then changes her mind again. “Happiest birthday!”
For so long, Simran thought life was a straight line, moving in only one direction.
That once something was lost, it was gone forever.
It’s only in the last year that she’s understood how wrong she was.
Life is not a straight line, it’s not even a circle.
It’s a spiral, up, down, and all around.
Sometimes, you might even pass the same places as before.
She watches the waves break onto the shore before retreating, over and over again.
The tide moves out and it comes back, a different stretch of ocean than what came before.
Simran left this home behind, and now she has returned, also different than before.
She and Leo left each other and soon they’ll reunite for a life they’ll build together.
Her parents left this world long ago, but the man she loves is wearing the watch her mother gave her father, and now there’s Vidya with her gurgling laugh and earsplitting scream.
Maybe someday, there’ll be another baby and Simran’s father’s double dimples will be back in this world as well.
The world spins on and time moves forward. But goodbye is not the end. The hope for another meeting is infinite.