When Omkar and Aria opened the door of the Super Sun Market, the air was heavy with the smell of onion and ginger. Omkar’s mother was crouching in the kitchen, using the floor as a counter. She was making makki ki rotis while a curry of mustard greens sweltered on the stovetop.
“Hello, Mama,” Omkar said, placing a pile of mint that they had purchased on the counter. Not knowing how to act around the two of them together, Jarminder barely acknowledged them with a nod of the head when they came in. Instead, she directed her energies to what she felt confident in doing: her cooking.
Neeraj emerged from his bedroom to join them. He was no longer bellicose. Though he still maintained something of a graceless attitude, a smile just peeked out from beneath the bramble of his beard when he greeted Omkar.
Omkar introduced him to Aria as if they had never met before. Though Aria found it strange to pretend as if nothing had ever happened between them, she went along with it. When Neeraj took her hand, he held it instead of shaking it. Without thinking, she responded by doing a miniature curtsy. It made her feel like an idiot. A dense awkwardness trespassed between them. In response to it, they all put their focus on the cooking.
Jarminder pinched off a piece of dough from the rest and rolled it in her hands. She smacked it against her palm while rotating it again and again until it was flat and circular enough to her liking. She placed it on an unoiled griddle and turned it from one side to the next. Just like a tortilla, the bread began to blacken in spots. Just when Aria thought that Jarminder was about to put it on a serving plate, she took the griddle off of the flame of her little gas stove entirely and held the roti with a pair of tongs over the open flame. The roti responded by puffing up so it was no longer flat, like a pancake filled with air. When Jarminder took it off the flame, she ladled a spoonful of clarified butter onto the roti and spread it across the surface with the back of the spoon.
Omkar took Aria over to the living room in order to show her some of the items in the house. He made her touch the yellow flush of the curtains, which had been sewn by hand by his grandmother. He showed her a pair of ornately embroidered fabric shoes, called jutti, on a shelf and joked that they were his mother’s best weapon in the house when he was growing up. He explained the portrait of Guru Nanak as well as the sheathed sword, which was mounted on the wall beneath the painting. There was no plan behind the decoration of the house. Oil marks still stained the wall in rectangles where pictures used to hang. The items that served as decoration had been added over the years one by one and as a result, it boasted no aestheticism. Like a nest for a magpie who had been collecting things, the house served as a personal treasure box for Jarminder. And Neeraj had let her do whatever she wanted with it.
Omkar pulled a photo album out of the bookcase and started flipping through it for Aria to see. Most of the pictures had yellowed; the plastic covering them had lost its flex. They cracked with stickiness when Omkar opened the pages. Aria found it painful to see so many years of a life that he had lived before her. She watched him lose his baby fat, learn to ride a bike, spend his first years in America and every birthday that had passed before she’d met him. She saw his aunties, who, according to Omkar, could give the FBI a run for its money when it came to keeping tabs on everyone they knew. She saw the faces of his brother and sister who had died. The tragedy had projected sorrow over their smiles.
“I thought your last name was Agarwal. Why does your name here say Singh?” Aria asked, pointing to the names written beside the pictures.
“Actually, it isn’t a last name, it’s a kind of middle name. Every man in our culture has the same middle name, which is Singh, which means lion. And every woman in our culture has the same middle name, which is Kaur, which means princess,” Omkar replied.
“Ooh, that’s sexy, the lion and the princess,” Aria whispered under her breath, softly enough so that Omkar’s parents wouldn’t hear her or see her wink at him.
When the food was ready, they all sat down at the tiny dining table beside the kitchen. Neeraj and Jarminder studied the lines of Aria’s face. They found it beautiful, but distrusted the motives beneath it. The conversation that happened at the dinner table was a concerted effort to avoid sitting there mutely. Though they had set the table with utensils, they ate with their hands instead. Aria copied them, leaving her fork untouched, which made them smile.
Omkar spent the time offering up details about Aria that he imagined would convert his parents to some shade of approval of her. Aria was so nervous that once she finished eating, she realized that she hadn’t even really tasted it. When their plates were empty, Omkar insisted upon doing the dishes, despite Jarminder’s protests. Neeraj turned on the television to watch a cricket game and sat in front of it, finding it hard to take his mind off of what was happening in the kitchen. Jarminder allowed herself to be consumed by a project that required her to carry things up and down the stairs from the store to their apartment at least a dozen times.
Aria stood next to Omkar with a cold glass of mint chaas in her hand. She sipped on the freshness of the mint, cumin and green chili in the cream of it while watching the look of worry play across the side of his face. Omkar spoke low enough that his parents couldn’t hear him over the chatter of the television. “I’m sorry if all of this is a little weird. Some of this stuff we do is kind of stupid. When we moved here, my parents never got it that we live in a different country and they just kept doing the same stuff they did back home in India.”
Aria was surprised by his apology. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “Omkar, you should never be ashamed of your culture. It is so cool. You guys are like exotic warriors or something. You guys have been telling me about your culture all night and it’s been making me think and I don’t think we even have a culture. I mean, unless you call backyard barbecues and football games a culture.”
Omkar laughed and said, “That’s the thing: you never think you have a culture until you leave the place where your culture is the only culture. If I took you to India, you would all of a sudden know what American culture is. It’s like a fish that spends his life swimming in water. The fish doesn’t know how to tell you about water until he is suddenly in the air.”
Omkar’s culture was like an exotic spice that ran through his veins. Aria could smell that spice in every word he spoke and in everything he did. She found it erotic. She felt the stoic power in the line of men and the sensual mysticism in the line of women that had lent their lineage to him. Unlike her, his belonging was never questioned. He could resist that belonging, he could try to talk and act like something else, but it was something he could not wash himself clean of. The culture he came from was like a flavor that permeated the way he felt to her. It was so much a part of who he was and perhaps even part of what she loved so much about him.
“Can you drive me back to the lot tonight?” Aria asked.
Omkar shot a confused and dejected look down toward her. “Why do you want to go there?”
Aria was equally confused. “Because you know I don’t have anywhere else to stay,” she responded. To her, it was obvious that the reconciliation between Omkar and his parents would mean they wouldn’t be spending the night at the hotel again. And given their culture, it was obvious that she couldn’t stay with him there.
“No, you don’t understand. It’s OK; Mama’s been doing something to fix things,” Omkar said and yelled for his mother. Jarminder shouted something back up the stairs in Punjabi. “Just a minute and I promise I’ll show you.” Omkar said, leaning against the counter with a satisfied look on his face.
Jarminder arrived at the door and motioned for Omkar and Aria to follow her back downstairs. She opened the door to the storeroom feeling a mix of anxiety and pride.
It was no longer the barren cement room that Aria remembered. The floor had been covered with mismatched carpets. A twin mattress had been laid on the floor and a bed had carefully been made with lavender-colored sheets and pillows. The cement foundation ridge that ran through the room now acted as a mantle for an ornate statue of Ganesh, with its head of a white elephant and body of a human with four arms. Every wall had been covered with unfolded saris. Their colorful and opalescent silk lifted and billowed when the door opened. A frail stream of smoke, carrying the scent from a stick of sandalwood incense, rose from a little bronze incense burner near the door.
Aria could not believe what she was seeing. “You can stay here. My mother made it up for you,” Omkar said.
“Are you kidding me?” Aria asked.
Jarminder thought the question implied that Aria had been insulted that they would put her in a storeroom and so she sought to justify herself. “I’m sorry, it’s just that we don’t have any more rooms upstairs.”
“No … No … It’s lovely,” Aria said, realizing that Jarminder had misinterpreted her. Ignoring the air of formality that she’d felt until then between herself and Jarminder, as well as the way Jarminder went rigid when she did it, Aria rushed in to hug her. “Are you totally sure?” she asked.
“Yes, yes, we’re sure,” Jarminder said, wobbling her head back and forth instead of up and down. “The sheets are new. If they are stiff, I can just wash them,” she said.
Aria was quiet in disbelief. “I’m going to stay down here with her to talk for a bit, Mama,” Omkar said, indicating his readiness for her to go back upstairs.
“OK, you can use the bathroom upstairs, but no hankypanky,” Jarminder said, pointing her index finger at Omkar.
Aria sat on the end of the bed, listening to the stairs creak as Jarminder climbed them. Omkar sat down next to her. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she said again, looking to Omkar for an explanation about the strange turn of events.
“My parents are good people, even though they don’t exactly act like it sometimes,” Omkar said. “They could never feel good knowing that you don’t have somewhere to stay. Plus I told them that I wanted to move out and get a place with you and they sort of freaked out. Indian parents can’t stand the idea of not living with their kids.” He giggled.
“Are you totally sure? I don’t want it to be weird for me to be here or whatever,” Aria asked again.
“Yes, my God, it’s totally fine, I promise,” Omkar said, although he knew he was failing to completely convince her.
He stayed downstairs with her until Neeraj yelled down to them, “Omkar, it’s time to go to sleep now, you have school in the morning.” It was his way of making sure his son wasn’t being irresponsible in more ways than one.
Omkar kissed Aria on the cheek and said, “Sleep well tonight. I’ll be thinking of you all night just up there.” He pointed at a corner of the ceiling before running up the stairs.
Aria waited until she could hear no more sounds in the house before tiptoeing upstairs, with all of the clothes she had in her backpack, and sneaking into the bathroom. Turning the water pressure on only halfway so it would be quieter, she let the hot steam asperse her skin. It was a feeling she had sorely missed.
She washed her clothes by hand with shampoo and threw them all over the bar of the shower curtain before soaping herself. It was the first time since running away nearly a year ago that she had taken a shower that wasn’t timed and watched by an attendant. The feeling of being able to enjoy the water and brush her teeth inside the shower felt like a luxury beyond measure.
When she went back downstairs, she draped the damp clothes over the top of the door and took out the little beaver statue that Robert had given her. She placed it by the statue of Ganesh. She did not realize the symbolism of having done so. She did not realize that the beaver was telling her that it, and she, had found home. Instead, she thought of Robert and all the other people at the car lot. She wondered whether they were OK or not. She wondered if they had all found some other place to stay. She reminded herself that the meaningfulness of her relationship to them might be entirely one-sided. Still, Aria made the decision that she would go back to the car lot the next day, when Omkar was at school. There was some closure she needed, even if it was to stand before the empty lot and to realize that she might never see any of them again.
Aria turned the lights off and lifted back the top sheets of the bed to crawl between them. Her body felt the shock of there being no plastic between herself and the mattress. Every time she had stayed in a new house like this, it had been in a foster placement or a group home. They always put plastic on the beds to prevent damage from potential bed-wetting. The noise and feel of the plastic always made Aria feel bad, as if they expected her to be like a stray dog that wasn’t potty-trained. “This is how other people feel,” she thought to herself.
She felt grief for the pain of her childhood as much as she was celebrating how good it felt to be trusted and welcomed enough that Jarminder had put the sheets directly on the unprotected mattress. The feeling of that trust that was placed in her put as much pressure on her as it took away. Pressure to stay in their favor. Pressure to earn her keep. Pressure to make them never regret it.
When morning came, Aria cracked the door open wide enough to see that she had awoken before the sun had risen. She wasn’t accustomed to going to sleep so early. While everyone else was still asleep, she forced some of her damp clothes back over the shape of her body and looked around the store for ways to repay the Agarwals’ kindness. But because Neeraj was so careful about the upkeep of his store, Aria could not find much to do. She took the window chalk markers and rewrote the fading letters that spelled “New Year’s Sale On Items” on the front window before organizing the piles of papers and items stacked behind the checkout counter. She wrote a thank-you note to Neeraj and Jarminder and left it there. Then she wrote a letter to Omkar telling him to meet her at the car lot after he got off of school and signed it with a heart. She made her bed and left the letter on it.
Once Aria had collected everything except her wet clothes back into her backpack, she left, holding the bell attached to the door when she opened it so it wouldn’t announce her exit. The air outside was crisp. The irrigation system in the neighbor’s lawn hissed from beneath the thick and newly cut buffalo grass when she passed it. One of the neighbors stopped her minivan with three kids in the back to ask Aria if she wanted a ride to the school bus stop. Aria thanked her, but declined, suddenly feeling insecure about how young she must look in comparison to how she felt and the life she had been living.
As the morning sun touched her with its un-sugared rays, she turned back to look at Omkar’s window. Thinking of this new chapter of her life with him, she thought, “Has your life already spent its shade and has it stained you?” She stopped on the side of the road to write the verse in her journal. She did not know if any love or hope could wash the shadow from a person. But she hoped that maybe Omkar could love her with that ineffable stain she felt because she knew that now, without him, life would always be so much less.