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A COUPLE OF weeks after meeting Jai, Naina woke up early on a Monday morning with a blithe feeling, as the late spring sun flooded into her bedroom from the big windows, illuminating her plain white sheets with dancing shapes. Ever since she was a child, she had relished the intensity of the sun—much to the chagrin of her mother who feared Naina’s skin might become too dark—and she would often play alone in the severe heat of a New Delhi summer afternoon because no one else wanted to be outside.
That spring, the sun had been particularly parsimonious to New Yorkers, and only on this last Monday in April did it appear for the first time in full incandescent splendor, as if trying to make up for previous lapses. Naina sprawled diagonally on the bed and soaked up the sun, her mind entering a delightful state between sleep and wakefulness. There was an air of languor that induced the sort of dreaminess she had regularly indulged in since she was a little girl. Alas, now, because of her job at an art gallery, a regular stream of social and cultural events, and the requirement to read as much as she could about art, there had been less room for reverie. Still, Monday was her day off and she could afford to linger in bed a bit longer. Today, after weeks of running around, she had nothing on her agenda.
Her thoughts drifted to the cleft-lipped Turkish immigrant to South America, Riad Halabi, who owned a store called The Pearl of the Orient in Isabel Allende’s book Eva Luna. Over dinner, Jai had mentioned the book was good, and afterward, she rushed to buy it. She was surprised when Jai had told her about Turks going to South America, but then, she had never been to South America herself. Or to Africa or Australia or the Middle East—except for a two-day stopover in Dubai. In Europe, she had only been to London and Amsterdam. But she had been to the Caribbean with the family plenty of times, to islands with glittering waters and soft sands so alike she could hardly tell them apart.
She imagined Riad Halabi with a handkerchief, always covering his face to hide his deformity, learning Spanish and peddling wares in South America. And then returning to Turkey, brimming with hope and marrying that slothful, vulgarly sensual Zulema. That Zulema who, despite all her husband’s compassion, ended up betraying him by going to bed with his nephew.
Once again, Naina was in familiar skies, suspended somewhere between the sun and the clouds, floating just like she would do on a reed mat at the back of her house in Delhi or while staring at the garden in Jersey. In Delhi, there had never been any music when she dreamed, but during her fanciful flights in Jersey, there was always music. It loosened her thoughts, made them flow like slow-moving streams, and unlocked vivid images from her brain.
With a good deal of effort, she sat up, did a long stretch with her arms, and got out of bed. She was still a bit tired. Oh, the body. The merciless body. Keeping track of every year and every intemperance. Doling out punishments accordingly, like one of those super strict teachers at St. Therese’s Convent School in New Delhi.
Couldn’t she ever just forget about her bloody age?
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NAINA SWITCHED ON a CD of an experimental rock band called Explosive Beast she had recently bought, a group her tabla player friend Rob had seen perform on the Lower East Side. It was part of her effort to get up to date. Before, she only listened to music by the likes of Beethoven, Asha Bhosle, Simon and Garfunkel, or the Beatles, read books by writers like Charlotte Brontë, D.H. Lawrence, and Anaïs Nin, and knew little about art made after the 1920s. But now, living in New York and being involved in the contemporary art world, she soon learned that some of her tastes were old-fashioned, even sentimental, and that deeply distressed her. Her friend Alannah had called her “quaint” and “charming” a couple of times and although she knew her friend meant the words affectionately, she did not see them as compliments. Even reading Eva Luna seemed to broadcast that she lived in the past when she so desperately craved to belong to the present.
Gala, the intern at the gallery, had seen the novel lying on her desk and exclaimed, “Oh my God, you’re reading that. I went through an Allende phase when I was a freshman years ago and so did my aunt.” Gala had said those words lightly, talking about the book as if it were some sort of fad, like wearing bell-bottoms in the seventies. Naina immediately hid the book in her bag, but Gala’s words had spun more fluttering cobwebs of doubts inside of her.
But if Jai had spoken highly of it—the dashing, far-from-old Professor Jai Silverstein of Columbia University—it couldn’t be that dated, could it? The notion instantly assuaged her concern.
Explosive Beast, however, did not create the kind of music that made her thoughts flow like slow-moving streams. Instead, their discordant rhythms of guitar chords and drumbeats fused with twitchy techno ripped her thoughts into jagged bits and jerkily tossed them around until her mind felt like a sea gone mad. She had tried so hard to like it, sometimes playing it on tired nights even though it gave her a headache. Only now could she somewhat appreciate its haunting, psychedelic quality. But just for an ephemeral gasp of time.
After ten or fifteen minutes, she changed the CD to classical Spanish guitar by Andrés Segovia. This, she could appreciate wholeheartedly. It was mellifluous and soothing as one note gave way to another like a string of water droplets continuously flowing into a river. Again, her thoughts ambled along smoothly.
She made herself a cup of peppermint mint tea and ate one of the newfangled protein bars for women, filled with dates, nuts, and other things she hadn’t had before—like spirulina and chia seeds. The fog of exhaustion was clearing. Age wasn’t everything. The body may not be charitable, but it was still somewhat malleable. Even in her early fifties, she still had a good amount of energy, which had only increased ever since she started to work out.
She left half of the bar. It tasted like hard, synthetic grass on her tongue. As she reclined on the living room couch, she saw the sun pouring in through the window like a mimosa-laced elixir, despite the medium-sized red brick apartment building opposite her. This normal New York City view of an apartment complex with its multiple windows often offered glimpses of its inhabitants: an unknown man dancing alone at night, a woman teaching a child to cook. Such a lack of privacy, however, was something Naina still wasn’t quite accustomed to yet. But she could always create a view she liked with her mind’s eye.
Over the years, Naina had conjured up all sorts of things. She had envisioned a love affair between a Native American woman and a married early settler, and what America might have looked like had the country been settled by the Italians instead of the British and the Dutch. She had imagined what it must have felt like to go around the world undetected like those women covered from head to toe in Saudi Arabia, and what her life would have been like if she had become a hippie whipping up a frenzy in Haight Ashbury.
At other times, especially during dreary winter days, her reveries became more sensual, made more acute by the distance of their realization. She fantasized about the sun caressing her body like a flickering, formless tongue; about rain-drenched mud beneath her feet; about the sweet smell of the frangipani flower she remembered sniffing in summer evenings when she was a girl.
Never, in all those years, had she shared her fantasies with anyone. Not with her mother, who was always consumed with the servants and being the neighborhood busybody; nor with her father, who despite being more of a romantic like herself, was often lost in sentimental Hindi songs or Urdu ghazals; nor with her brother, six years younger than she was, perpetually playing cricket if he wasn’t eating, sleeping, or in school. By the time Harish entered her life, her imaginings had become such a private pleasure woven into her mental fabric that it did not even occur to her to share them with him. And in her gut, she knew her husband, though he was a man with a tender face and a gentle disposition, was just like her mother and brother. With their eyes fixed on measurable, palpable goals, they’d have no interest in hearing about some chiffony universe whose link to the real world they couldn’t perceive. They would see musings like hers as vain, inane, and if taken to the extreme, insane. A person’s mental faculties, as far as they were concerned, were tools to slice the tangible world into manageable, easily discernible chunks.
Amaya was the only one in her family who somewhat understood her. While her daughter could delve into the world of the subconscious, imaginings for her were merely a means to understand the real. Was Jai like that too? Naina didn’t think so. Something in his eyes, the light that emitted from those amber irises, told her he could transcend the world of corporeal sensory experiences; that he could delight in the diaphanous beauty of the forest of dreams. She smiled to herself, dangling her feet off the sofa, so she could get more sun on her legs.
A short while later, the sun was overshadowed by a veil of clouds. Naina was annoyed. It had been bright for less than two hours. The Sun is God, the nineteenth-century English painter Turner had supposedly said. She craned her neck upward so she could watch the sun, straining itself behind the clouds, from the window. Where had she read that Turner quote? In a romance novel years ago. She recalled how she used to read Mills & Boons in secret as a teenager so her mother wouldn’t find out, and when she first came to America, she had been so disappointed to discover that there were no Mills & Boons here. They were only sold in England and in the British colonies, she had been told. So she had to settle on Harlequin Romances which never seemed to be the same without those elegant London settings and refined British English.
Segovia finished playing the guitar and she got up and put on another CD, this time of West African drum music to rouse her from her languorous state. The fast-moving beats seemed to express the amorphous urgency spinning inside her these days. She was not young and not going to live forever.
Her thoughts drifted to how, in her mid-thirties, her fantasy world became larger and more erotic. She’d picture herself as Martha Graham doing some sort of provocative dance, as an alluring pre-Raphaelite damsel with wild tresses posing for a painting, as a Mughal-era courtesan trying exotic positions from the Kama Sutra—which she had embarrassedly bought and stored at the bottom of her underwear drawer. Although she had enjoyed reading about archetypal romantic heroines like Madame Bovary or Lady Chatterley, she had never seen herself as one of them. She had felt some affinity with the characters and sympathy for them, but that was all. Unlike those heroines, she was neither miserable nor desperate, nor had she ever conceived of doing something dramatic or drastic, except in her sojourns to a dream world.
Still, there had been times—quite a few in fact—when she had yearned for a more exciting and glamorous life. But she never could figure out how that could happen without disrupting the familiar rhythms of her daily existence, so vital that they were almost like a second heartbeat, ticking away yet barely heard.
Naina looked around at her apartment, which she had decorated in a minimalist, Zen-inspired style. Normally, it seemed invitingly serene compared with her colorful, elaborate home in New Jersey. But at that moment, the white walls, the tall rice paper lamp, the small shoji screen, and the Chinese scroll painting, felt foreign and pretentious. As she hugged two pillows covered with a delicate bonsai-tree pattern, she shut her eyes, suddenly longing for her roomy suburban home and its red-walled study, which she had done up with Mughal-style miniature paintings, and for her faintly scented plum-colored irises in her large garden. She could never forget that smell—ephemeral, fragile, and sweet. Like a baby. And, sometimes, like a funeral. She loved irises with their long, proud stems and their petals extending outward, curving like the graceful, open hand of a dancer.
Both she and Harish had loved gardens. Harish had been an excellent gardener, which was rare among the Indian men she knew. He knew how to make the best compost by using the right amount of coffee grounds, coffee filters, vegetable and fruit scraps, and dried leaves. It was the coffee grounds that made the compost so good, he would say, as he sipped a cup of coffee. Even good soil needs caffeine to wake up, he would jest.
Harish had generally let Naina decide which flowers to plant. She would drive to a nursery along the Jersey Shore to pick up the seeds—something she looked forward to every year—which she and Harish would then plant together. For almost three decades, they planted crab apples, marsh marigolds, roses, Eastern red columbines, geraniums, tulips, and, on Naina’s insistence, jasmine. Harish had told her jasmine would never grow well in New Jersey; Naina, however, refused to listen. She kept watering the plants in the hopes that they would miraculously blossom—but Harish turned out to be right.
It had been so long since she had been in a garden. Too long. Now, the only flowers she saw regularly were the ones at her corner deli. The previous day, she had seen beautiful buttercup-colored tulips hiding under large clusters of roses and chrysanthemums. Tulips had been Harish’s favorite flowers and he always paid extra attention to them.
She lay down again and closed her eyes. She saw Harish, in a plaid shirt, casual pants, and a cricket cap, carefully trimming the stems of tulips with his garden shears as he softly hummed. She could never figure out what he was humming, but she thought she could hear strains of ABBA, Boney M, Bee Gees, and Bollywood songs from the sixties. She wished the image in her head were real and she could walk across the garden, watch the sun’s rays falling on those tulips and listen to that familiar hum again.
SLAM! It took Naina a second to realize what the noise was. Every weekday morning, usually between eight-thirty and eight-forty, Laura, her neighbor who lived opposite her, would bang her door shut as she was going to work. Strange, the intimacies between strangers in New York City. She knew that the man in the adjacent apartment liked to vacuum after midnight, that the woman who lived above her liked to walk around her apartment in heels, and that the man in the apartment next to the elevator listened to a lot of Rolling Stones. She also knew that Laura’s kitchen was always a mess because her exasperated housekeeper had whispered it to Naina in the laundry room. The divulgence hadn’t surprised Naina though—Laura, with her untidy hair and food-stained shorts, looked like the kind of girl who wouldn’t clean her kitchen. Or be a good neighbor, for that matter.
During her first week in the apartment, Naina had decided to introduce herself to just a few people on her floor because Amaya had told her that New Yorkers didn’t believe in being too neighborly. So, she chose the four apartments closest to her own to pay a visit; she got boxes of chocolate chip cookies to give out. It was good to be acquainted with one’s neighbors—especially if one lived alone. What if something happened? And as one grew older, that something suddenly seemed not so far-fetched.
Her first stop was Laura’s. It was about noon on a Saturday, and she gently tapped on her door. When she heard no response, she knocked louder.
Finally, Laura opened her door with a jerk. “What’s the matter?”
Naina had been surprised by the hostility in her neighbor’s voice, but she forged ahead, introducing herself as quickly as possible while feeling foolish the whole time. She gave her the box of cookies to which Laura responded, “Gee, thanks” and closed the door. Naina had run back to her apartment. Was this what she had to look forward to in New York?
After calming her nerves, she approached the next two neighbors who were polite but disinterested. However, the fourth door she knocked on was answered by a German businesswoman called Karin who was subletting the apartment; she invited Naina in and talked to her for almost an hour, asking a flurry of questions about where to travel in India and giving her cups of green tea. But Karin went back to Berlin and now, if Naina wanted to share a pot of peppermint tea or borrow a cup of sugar, she had no neighbor to turn to.
“Don’t you know a damn thing about how companies are run?” That had to be Laura barking on her phone. It must have been almost eleven o’ clock. This was late for her. Thank goodness, Laura wasn’t home much. She was one belligerent woman and the sound of her booming voice ricocheting through the hallway caused the walls to tremble.
Silence resumed. The sun had become stronger, lighting every burgeoning leaf on the branches of the tall tree in front of her building, until the tree virtually glowed.
Naina noticed the only object on her coffee table was Eva Luna and it gladdened her. There was very little in the apartment that did not belong to her.
To Naina’s surprise, she had discovered living alone wasn’t the terrifying thing she had always imagined it to be. In fact, on the whole, she rather liked it. When Amaya had pleaded with her to move to New York to revitalize herself after Harish’s death, she had suggested they take a bigger apartment and live together. But Naina had refused. When she finally decided to move, she knew it would only work if she lived alone. Still, there were days, like today, when she would have liked to see Amaya spreading peanut butter on her toast, hear Harish making Turkish coffee, or step out of her door and talk to a friendly neighbor.
After moving to New York, Naina had longed to strip away the cotton balls of dreams with which she had insulated herself for so long and embrace the world. And she had, she thought, feeling a tinge of pride. And though it had been exciting, she also knew it had sometimes speared her and made her shrink from the inside. It was, as she told herself, the big city reminding you of your smallness, the closeness to the world giving you no choice but to accurately assess the proportions of things.
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HALF-AN-HOUR LATER, Naina felt a stab of hunger and she craved a doughnut. A soft, round doughnut covered with chocolate glaze and topped with powdered sugar. Yummy and so bad for you. No one she had met so far in New York loved doughnuts as much as she did, and the only person she knew who loved doughnuts even more had been Harish, the taste of melancholy becoming bittersweet in her mouth. During the early days of their marriage, he would bring home a big box of doughnuts and the two of them would sit in front of the television watching Family Ties or The Cosby Show and greedily eat them up. But, as the years went by, Naina realized she couldn’t consume scores of doughnuts without turning into a doughnut herself (Harish, on the other hand, had a metabolism that most people would kill for), and began to limit herself. Now, in New York, with the doughnut man just two blocks away, the temptation was much harder to resist. Still, she told herself, she had been relatively good, eating no more than five or six doughnuts a month since she had moved. Plus, the rest of her diet was generally healthy—though she had been drinking more wine than she should.
The image of the doughnut kept calling her until she no longer had the strength to resist. The line in front of the doughnut man—an Eastern European who understood no English except the words coffee, milk, sugar, doughnut, and numbers up to twenty—was unusually short; there were only two people ahead of her, a chatty old lady who was trying to talk to the doughnut man despite him nodding and saying “no Ingles” and a young, curly-haired boy with a short, wide bag from which spilled out books with accounting titles and a black book titled Goya: Wrestling with Darkness. The boy was wearing khaki pants and a blue-and-white striped shirt fluffed at the waist, the same kind of preppy look that her son Karan had. But, Karan, an investment banker with a major Wall Street firm in Chicago, would not, under any circumstances, read an art book, she thought regretfully. What was this boy doing with the Goya? Did he look at it after he was done with his accounting books? Or before? Or was it a gift for someone else? Maybe for his mother or his girlfriend?
Goya held a special place in Naina’s heart because it was thanks to him that she got interested in art.
Strolling around her neighborhood, eating her doughnut, she remembered the very first time she saw reproductions of the painter’s work. Treasures Forever was a moth-eaten, creaky bookstore that time forgot on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and years earlier, she was browsing there when she spotted a coffee table book lying on the floor. The cover had a picture of Goya’s painting of the Roman God Saturn eating his own son. At first, she had been a bit unnerved by the devilish face, the frighteningly bulging eyes, the long, cannibalistic tongue, and the partially eaten body of a child. Still, she was curious and picked up the book, quickly wiped off the thick layer of dust with the handkerchief she always kept in her purse, and stared at that image, and then at all the other pictures in the book. She ended up buying the book and left it on the table in her living room in Montcrest. When Amaya opened it, she screamed—something she hardly ever did.
Naina bought other coffee table books on artists like Michelangelo, Raphael, Fragonard, and Rossetti, building up a solid collection of Old Masters over the years. But they were always stored on the top shelf of the tall China cabinet, away from the reach of the children and not in the face of visitors. When she looked at her art books, she sometimes played opera music—something she rarely listened to otherwise—and got swept up by the sumptuous grandeur and high drama of the paintings. It was only later, after her children had gone off to college, that she discovered Edvard Munch, thanks to a program on PBS, and became interested in early twentieth-century painting. She then decided to take some courses on nineteenth century and early twentieth century art at Rutgers University.
Taking the last bite of the doughnut, Naina paused to look at some Chiantis in the window display of one of her neighborhood liquor stores.
She could never forget the comments that a couple of their Indian friends had made when they discovered she was taking courses at Rutgers. One of their sons, an undergraduate at the university, had spotted her on her way to class and couldn’t stop staring. Naina pretended not to notice him and scurried away.
“What is this, Naina?” the boy’s mother, Mrs. Desai, had said. “Going to college same time as your children? It’s an interesting way to fight the loneliness that comes when the children leave the home, isn’t it?”
And, Kanchan Nath, known for her collection of gaudy gold jewelry, chimed in, “Naina, you really are too much. Your head will explode if you go around learning so much. I would get a bad headache if I had to go to college at this age.”
She had wanted to lash out at them and tell them that maybe a few headaches would do them some good, but the truth was she said nothing, smiling as if she just shrugged off their words.
As she waited for the signal to change from “Don’t Walk” to “Walk” on 31st Street and Second Avenue, she overheard two women next to her talking about some show at the Museum of Modern Art.
“I can’t believe they would have something so crappy up,” one woman said in a high and agitated voice. “I mean it’s the bloody MoMA, for God’s sake. Jesus Christ, everything is just becoming one giant corporation these days.”
“It wasn’t always like that, Susie,” the other woman said, her voice mellifluous despite her obvious displeasure. “MoMA used to be fabulous. The best of the best. Do you know how long I’ve been going there? Forty years. Forty years. This awful stuff is what’s fashionable these days. This is what they call contemporary art. This is what they show at all those biennials all over the place. What’s the poor MoMA to do?”
Once the light changed and the three of them crossed the street, the two women turned left, heading downtown, while Naina continued west. Regret needled her as she thought of all the years she had missed in New York. Those two women had been there for all of it, while she, living just outside the city, had not. They must have known Soho and Greenwich Village when it was inhabited by artists and writers instead of yuppies; they may have seen Picasso’s Guernica at the MoMA just before Tony Shafrazi defaced it in the seventies. They had probably experienced, firsthand, the hothouse atmosphere of New York in the eighties. Why hadn’t she come to New York more often? Before she moved here, she used to come to the city no more than six or seven times a year, many of those times by herself since neither Harish nor most of the people she knew liked to come into the city much.
She scolded herself for having been too intimidated by New York City traffic to drive in more regularly, remembering those precious days when she would come in on a Sunday to go to the Met or the Guggenheim, leaving the kids with Harish; she’d drive so slowly that the people behind her would honk at her repeatedly, daunting her further.
Someone like Jai’s mother would probably have never been intimidated, the bold lines and bright colors of Meena’s image filling up in her head.
“Hello, this is Jai speaking.” Naina heard a distinctly South Indian voice utter these words, and she turned in its direction. Of course, she could tell it was not Amaya’s boyfriend, but her arms became dappled with goose bumps. She remembered Jai’s voice so clearly; it was so tactile, like an entity that existed on its own. It was a shape-shifter, it could unfurl like a rug, compress like a tight fist, rotate like a wheel. She marveled at Amaya’s good fortune.
On the corner of 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, she stood in front of a store selling Peruvian textiles, admiring the dynamic geometric patterns of an orange-and-blue blanket. She wondered if Jai had been to Peru, a country that intrigued her. His work focused on Middle Eastern immigrants in South America and though she didn’t know whether there were any Middle Easterners in Peru, he might have been to the Andean country.
Naina’s mood now lifted—the bittersweet melancholy of an Edith Piaf song was morphing into the heartwarming haze of a Julio Iglesias ballad. She imagined Jai in the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, a small yet unmistakable figure climbing the steep steps alone, awed by the towering majesty of the stone structures around him. She pictured him wearing a shawl, orange and blue with a geometric design, just like the blanket she had seen, the garment adding a sumptuousness to his otherwise tall, lean figure. She had seen several programs on the Incan citadel on the Discovery Channel, and now she could easily envision him going into the Sun Temple and bowing down, his palms and fingers touching the giant slab of rock in the center.
Naina walked away from the Peruvian textile store, far from the quizzical stares of the people inside as she remembered Jai’s palms, small, compact, and downy with faint lines. Unlike his face, which was marked by scars, blemishes, and other signs of a life lived, his palms were like a baby’s. Barely visible lines suggesting a destiny yet to be written. She could feel the fibers inside her body waking up and moving. Scurrying to the left. Scurrying to the right. Climbing up. Climbing down.
Naina tensed her body to halt this flurry of motion, but soon relaxed it, allowing herself to enjoy these glimmers of pleasure capering around in her.
About twenty minutes later Naina sat on a bench in Madison Square Park. It would be nice to see Jai again. She should ask Amaya if he might be interested in joining them at a concert at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Alannah had given her five tickets for the concert that she had received from a religious uncle of hers—good seats, her friend had said. Of course, it was on Monday, short notice, and Jai must be such a busy man. And wasn’t it strange for a mother to be inviting her daughter’s boyfriend to something?
No, it was probably all right, she concluded a little while later. As a modern mother, she should get to know her daughter’s boyfriend well. He was clearly no passing fancy. And it wasn’t like she was some old lady he was being forced to spend time with. He was only about ten or twelve years younger than she was. A speck in time. And it wasn’t as if she were going to brazenly ask him herself. Amaya would invite him and only if she thought it was appropriate.