17

Leah got home from the Clissold Arms just after eleven. She slammed the door behind her and leaned against it, heavily, her body wilting with the relief of finally being home. The evening had been a resounding failure, a disaster in fact. Only Con and Ruby had turned up and they’d spent the entire night flirting outrageously with each other before disappearing back to the house at ten o’clock, presumably, Leah imagined, to have sex with each other. Toby had watched the whole mating ritual unfurl with undisguised anguish and Leah had tried desperately to keep a jolly stream of conversation going. Which was why she’d ended up drinking so much. She’d learned nothing about Toby’s housemates, other than that they had the hots for each other, and all she’d learned about Toby was that he was obviously miserably in love with Ruby, as he talked about her non-stop for the remainder of the evening and at one point had even looked like he might be about to cry.

As the silence of her empty flat descended on her she felt a buzzing in her ears and realized how drunk she was. She sighed and gazed round the flat. She hated living here without Amitabh. But then the thought of living somewhere else, of living with someone else, was just as depressing. She thought back to her conversation with Amitabh earlier that day, what he’d said about wishing he wasn’t Indian, him saying that he loved her. And then she did something ludicrous. She picked up the phone and she called Amitabh’s mother.

‘Hello, Mrs Varshney. Malini. It’s Leah.’

‘Leah?’

‘Hi, how are you?’

‘Leah. It’s very late.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m just …’ She sighed, and sat on the sofa. ‘I’m just, I don’t know. How are you?’

‘I’m tired, is how I am. I’m in bed, you’ve just woken me up and I’m tired. Is everything all right?’

‘Yes. No. It’s just. You know, what Amitabh said to me when we split up. Is it true? Would you really not want to have me as a daughter-in-law?’

She heard Malini sighing loudly down the phone. ‘Oh, Leah, Leah, Leah. What can I say to you?’

‘Say it’s not true. Say he was wrong. Say that you would be proud to have a girl like me as the wife of your youngest son.’

‘And so I would,’ she replied softly, ‘so I would if I were someone else. If I were Mrs Smith and my parents were from Berkshire and I went to church every Sunday, then there is no other girl I would like better for my son to marry. But that isn’t the case.’

‘But what if I converted to Hinduism? I could do that?’

‘It’s not about religion, Leah. It’s about family and lineage and caste and tradition. I can’t do anything about it.’

‘But, Malini, I love him so much.’

‘I know you do, my sweet girl. But there is a fact here that has to be faced.’

‘What’s that?’ she sniffed.

‘The fact is that if my Amitabh loved you as much as you love him, then he would marry you and be damned. The fact is that my Amitabh hasn’t finished looking yet.’