HOLIKA CALLED ME Sunday afternoon and asked me to meet me her at Preeya’s apartment at eight o’clock. I asked if it was necessary to come alone. Her clipped tone and two succinct words, “not necessary” told me all I needed to know.
Preeya lived in an apartment complex in the Alakananda section of Delhi where, like so many of the complexes and communities in middle-class areas that couldn’t afford armed guards, the locked gates served as the line of defense against the hoi polloi of the streets. Preeya, not Holika, schlepped down the five flights of cement steps and led me up to her duplex apartment on the top floor. Duplex sounds too fancy: it was two floors with small rooms and a staircase. With peeling paint on the walls and water stains on the ceiling, it reminded me of the cheaply renovated railroad apartment in Manhattan where I lived for years before I met Sarah. In the kitchen, big enough for one person to turn at forty-five-degree angles without banging into a wall or an appliance, a shy woman “servant” named Meena bowed her head when I said hello, and Holika put slices of a Domino’s Pizza on plates for the four of us. Meena wasn’t your typical “servant,” although she came from the Dalit class. Preeya rescued her from her home city of Lucknow, where the woman’s husband had “beaten her down like a dog with the threat of worse to come all too likely.” The woman’s family refused to intervene, so Preeya interceded.
Holika edged her way out of the kitchen, bottle of beer in hand, and for the first time in front of me she wore black-framed glasses instead of contacts. She pecked me on my right cheek. Her usual grand smile and warm welcome were nowhere in the vicinity. The playful banter replaced by a solemn, “Let us sit in the dining room.”
Books stacked six feet high served as the dividing wall between the living and dining rooms. Three plants, a pile of floor cushions, a futon mattress, two political posters on the walls, and a wicker chest with a tiny TV and a boom box consisted of the room’s entire contents. Past the books, a round wooden table with four folding chairs occupied the space of the cramped “dining” room. Behind the table the only windows, with two cracked panes, looked down into the gated parking lot. On the floor, beneath the windows were two huge satchels overflowing with papers. Upstairs were the bedroom and an office space.
We sat on the chairs and she opened the beer and asked if I wanted a glass. I scrunched my nostrils. The smell of the beer ranked low on my list of sensual desires. “I’m used to not sleeping but it’s not the same as drinking and dancing till all hours. After the lights and buzzing in my ears faded, the silence hurt more.”
She moved Mahasweta Devi’s Bitter Soil, which sat on the table, and placed it atop another stack of books. She poured the beer into a glass that she took from a cupboard behind the table.
“Myself, I have had two long nights.” Dressed casually in a dark blue T-shirt and baggy jeans and without much makeup, she looked weary with dark circles visible beneath the glasses around each eye and a puffy bag under her left eye. I wanted to touch her eyes and magically lift the weight as if I were some mystic who’d meditated while standing on one leg for thirty years.
Preeya and the young woman carried in the pizza on four separate dishes. After we finished eating, Preeya and the woman each picked up a pile of papers from one of the satchels and carried it upstairs. I offered to help but they refused. Holika didn’t move from the dining room table into the living room.
She pulled a cigarette from the pack Preeya had left on the table and held it between her thumb and two fingers. “I know you disapprove.” She waited a few seconds, then flicked the unlit cigarette on the table. In one of those odd limbo moments, instead of looking at each other, we watched the cigarette roll to see if it would keep going until it fell off. It hit a plate and stopped. “Neil, this may not be a good time, because of where your life is now, and do not think me insensitive, but it is best because I am not so young and I will need to have a baby—soon. Only one.”
She paused and seemed to wait for my reaction to the news, which although we’d never spoken about it and I feared it might be coming, still startled. I cringed and tensed my gut muscles.
“My sister who will forever remain intentionally immature and superficial, will soon be married to some suitor my uncle picks out. Ratish will not wait much longer either. It will most certainly please my uncle and guarantee my inheritance, my heritage.” She picked up the beer glass and took a long swallow before speaking again. “I am now formally engaged to Samaka.”
I couldn’t tell if Holika’s repressed yet dulcet tones, spoken through taut lips, were sincerely joyless or if she were hiding her joy so she didn’t make me feel worse. Not for what she was gaining but for what I’d lost; what never again would be mine. I uttered a restrained “congratulations.” More than that would’ve been disingenuous. I wasn’t proud of my lack of enthusiasm but I wasn’t ashamed either.
“I love Samaka in my fashion. I love my uncle. He is the opposite of the demon that his rivals claim. He is a complex man. Many a man would have divorced my Aunt Deva or worse because she could not conceive. He has his beliefs—and they are often pigheaded—but he is faithful to his belief.”
“Does your uncle know you’re a spy in his house?”
“No,” she couldn’t deny what she herself had told me, “and yes. One of my long nights was spent with him and Ratish arguing over his involvement with that despicable Hal Burden.” She repressed a beer burp so it slipped imperceptibly from her lips. “Do you see those satchels?”
She pointed to them, and I nodded.
“Papers that Preeya and I and others have compiled and are now putting on disc all about the deception between Environ and the government. All this talk of free markets and how it helps everyone is doublespeak. Roberson was right,” she smiled in acknowledgment that she had agreed with him. “It gives companies like Environ the freedom to do whatever they damn please. We are trying to stop it, but they have spent twenty million dollars in bribes in the last decade.” She picked up the cigarette and twiddled it between her fingers but did not light it. “My uncle claims his involvement will control what they do. Years ago, Siddhartha outlined a plan for solar power plants in the drought-stricken areas that would make them thrive. That’s what I want him to support. But …” she dropped the cigarette and again it rolled but did not fall off the table. “Uncle made a commitment that he will not try to stop me from doing what I believe in as he has done what he believes in.”
The deal with Environ, besides its environmental destructiveness, would benefit a few people and harm millions. Holika would talk of women’s reproductive rights, of which her uncle approved. In defiance of Vijay and Ratish, she was also organizing the villagers, speaking with prominent state politicians, working with lawyers to stop the deal that would destroy so many lives socially and deprive the Indian people billions of dollars.
“I hope it all works out as you hope.”
“You seem skeptical. We are no different from many families. Just the stakes are larger. I am more concerned for Ratish than for me. Later that night, well, he and I had a more vicious disagreement. He came home drunk again after he had gone out without his driver. He is going to kill himself one of these days.” She closed her eyes for a few seconds and shook her head as if warning herself to go no further. “It became unpleasant.” She stopped, and almost as a non sequitur, she repeated the family mantra. “It only ended because Uncle awoke and stopped us. My uncle is a patriotic hero, no matter how others slander him. He suffered tremendously, both financially and physically, while in prison during the Emergency.”
I didn’t need to hear the slogan to understand that Holika loved, respected, and feared Vijay. It was irrelevant and unnecessary to bring up the palpable yet unprovable heebie-jeebie vibes that Vijay sent my way at the party. Or that I saw that her uncle fell into her one large blind spot.
“That’s when all of us argued again over Environ. They have to see that because I am getting married it does not change my belief. Ratish believes like my uncle, that they must be able to watch Burden and his people. That if not, they will do whatever they want, and then leave just like Bhopal.” The explosion at the Union Carbide plant in 1984 had left thousands of Indians dead, thousands more sick, hundreds still dying years later, and the land seething with toxins. The Indians had tried to get full remuneration but to no avail. All these years later the lawsuits and fighting about who was responsible still rages. “If they are involved my uncle says he will have the power to stop that kind of murderous behavior. He can make sure all is done safely. I think we have to stop it before it starts and not test his power.”
Despite the political and familial talk and its importance, I thought that minutes before I wanted to spill my guts about fears of what awaited me in New York. I expected Holika to say, “No more sex,” which was fine, but I didn’t want to think about her having a child. I pictured her soon-to-be pregnant body, the baby coming out from her. And I felt only the need to listen.
While I envisioned her future, she still felt the need to explain her present.
“You do not have true insight into how hard it is to be a woman in this society, none.”
“Or in any society. In America it’s hard too. Just different.”
“Those differences count a great deal. We have great secrets here of infanticide and men who force their wives to have abortions when it is revealed the child is a girl. If you truly want to know, talk to Meena. But so few can or will talk about it because they become pariahs. We have millions of women now who have climbed out from under the system. But far too many millions—women with college degrees, even—who are still subservient to their husbands. Even for Preeya. Her brothers don’t talk to her. Her father refused to have her live at home. Her mother berates her every chance she gets. They consider her a disgrace, not a courageous and brilliant woman.” The same could be said of Holika. “Being with Samaka is good for me in so many ways.”
“I know and I wish you well. Better than well, the best.” Suddenly, I felt such tenderness for her, such warmth without jealousy or rancor. “He has no idea how lucky he is.”
“Neil, you remember I told you I never loved anyone as much as you love Sarah?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t believe you. Didn’t buy it that you were immune to Holika’s laws of physics.”
She smiled obliquely, signifying her belief in the ineffable physics of love.
“You were right to be skeptical. Because now I can speak of Siddhartha to no one, not even to Preeya. I tell myself that lie and sometimes I almost convince myself that he did not exist, which is what Samaka and my uncle want. That it was a mistake that has been erased.” Her tired eyes blinked fast, her small jaw clenched as her posture shrunk and her head tilted down. The inconsistencies of what she had said two minutes before, her secret life, weighed so heavily. I reached to touch her. She held my hand between her two hands. “I could more easily tell them about you than mention his name.”
I wasn’t too pleased with that comparison. Nor did I want it tested.
“Neil …” She gazed at me with such a bizarre spin in her eyes and sideways tilt of her head that I could’ve sworn she wished, believed for that second, that she talked not with me, but with Siddhartha, “I am doing what I must to do.” She reached her right hand to my cheek and barely touched me. I smiled wanly. She took off her glasses and rested them on the table, then leaned her head across the chasm between our chairs and placed her head against my shoulder. I held her hands in mine, feeling helpless and unable to comfort her as she had comforted me.