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NAINA WAS WALKING slowly, the dull pain in her left hip not easing up. Placing her hand on her hip, she worried if she was limping. She shouldn’t have been so keen to try that particular exercise—what was it called again—pigeon pose, and not listened to Carolyn go on about all that “finding the zone between comfort and discomfort” stuff. The pain shot through her like a bolt of lightning, and she stopped on the street. After it passed, she took small hesitant steps toward a deli and bought a bottle of Advil.
As Naina quickly swallowed four tablets with a Diet Pepsi, her thoughts drifted to Mridula, one of the women who used to come to the health education workshops at the South Asian nonprofit in New Jersey, and her mortal fear of Advil. She was convinced that her teenage son’s bad grades were because he regularly took ibuprofen for his migraines, and so she banned it from the house.
Now, all of it seemed so far, yet not quite murky. Every impression, every memory, was indelibly marked in Naina’s mind, determined to stay. And reappear more frequently. So many layers, the disjointed pieces of a lived life, on top of each other, parallel to each other, never obliterating each other.
Naina was on her way to an opening of Zarina Sultan’s work at the newly opened Lalit Kumar Gallery for Indian contemporary art; the artist was a well-known Indian painter who made vivid and poetic art about women and the conflict in Kashmir. And Naina was also excited to be seeing the gallery for the first time.
Lalit Kumar Gallery was a large space on the ground level of 29th Street, and through the tall glass doors, Naina could see a large number of Indians—the largest gathering of Indians she had seen since leaving New Jersey. The ornate patterns of Indian fabrics glinted at her, sumptuous and resplendent, at odds with the damp bleakness of the New York evening. She saw intricately patterned jamevar shawls flitting and fluttering, long kundan earrings dangling and dancing, silk kurtas with zardozi embroidery flowing and flaring. And then there were the few white people in their nicely fitted black dresses and brown jackets. Naina refreshed her lipstick, feeling discomfited. These were well-to-do Indians her own age and older, and she was dressed in just black slacks, a maroon silk top, and a tie-dye scarf. Luckily, she was wearing ruby-and-gold earrings. She lingered at the steps, the pain in her hip pushed to the back of her mind. Everybody inside looked like the married type. This wasn’t like the other openings of Indian artists she had gone to. They had generally been smaller affairs in intimate, less grand galleries, where the crowds consisted of hip second-generation Indians in their twenties and thirties wearing jeans with a hint of the “exotic”—chunky Indian jewelry, nose rings, Mexican-craft-designed footwear, African print clothing—and telling her how they wished their mothers were like her.
Naina was right—most of the attendees were married, but, near the bar, she met Vipasha, a breezy and friendly single woman, an investment analyst who was originally from Ranchi and now lived in a Tribeca loft with the array of paintings she had collected over the years. She said, flinging her dyed bronze hair to one side, she was still looking for the right man and until then had no choice except to be satisfied with the art in her apartment. Vipasha seemed to know everybody at the opening, particularly the single women. Vipasha introduced her to Bandhini, a lively grandmother from Calcutta who had divorced her British husband and now lived on the Upper East Side. She claimed to be the executive director of the Indian Society for the Arts—an organization Naina had never heard of—and spoke of singledom as a real boon for older women.
“Oh come on, who wants to be cooking and cleaning for an old man at this age,” she said in an Indian accent with British overtones, wrapping her orange and green jamevar shawl around her stout, salwar kameez-clad frame, looking like a big mother hen painted orange and green. “When the time was right, kids were needed, they were important. But now, I like doing what I like. And the silence. And all old men do is complain, chutter putter . . . they are like babies who always have some ache or pain and expect you to act like Florence Nightingale and take care of them. Bas, bas, enough is enough, raising two children was enough. Who wants a third?”
And then there was Aparna, a political correspondent for Time magazine, in a beige kurta with kantha embroidery from her native Madhya Pradesh and jeans. She had a big shock of white hair, untidy black eyebrows, and an attitude.
“There’s no need to beat around the bush like that,” she snapped when another woman, with a sparkling diamond on her left hand, asked her if she had any family in the U.S. “I know what you’re asking, am I married? Why didn’t you simply say that? And to answer your question, I’m not and I like it that way . . . jeez, it’s the twenty-first century and all people care about is bloody marriage.”
Naina’s favorite person was Soma Iyer, a divorcee from Bombay, who seemed to be about her own age. Soma was tall, willowy, and had straight long black hair, the kind Naina used to have before she chopped it off in the interest of efficiency and convenience. She emitted a firecracker-like air of self-confident glamor and feline sexiness. The world did not turn around Soma, she turned the world around with her pert charm. They got along instantly and soon they were talking and laughing about their first impressions of America when they had arrived more than thirty years earlier.
“I used to love going to the supermarket because the lady at the checkout counter, well to be quite honest she was no lady, would start telling me all about her terrible boyfriend, using all kinds of colorful language the minute I put the milk down at the counter,” Soma said in a voice that suggested she was beyond caring what people thought of her. “Me, a sweet newly married woman, had never heard talk like that in my life, but I have to say I was quite keen to learn.”
“I used to get so spooked by answering machines, my goodness, the sound of people’s voices, no complete sentences actually, coming out of thin air,” Naina said. She laughed and sipped some red wine. “That was just too strange.”
The whiff had now become stronger. What perfume was that? Michael Kors, Naina guessed. Soma seemed like the kind of woman who would never be without perfume.
Soma, too, had moved to America in her early twenties because of her husband. He came to New York University as a law student. But unlike Naina, Soma had a love marriage with Ram, a man she had met in college in India. Her parents were dead set against marriage because she was Maharashtrian and he was Tamilian, but they went ahead and got married in a small temple outside of Bombay. The early years of marriage were great, Soma said. They lived in a tiny apartment near Washington Square Park, went to free concerts, ate different types of cheap international food, bought furniture from flea markets, and reveled in the bohemian free-spiritedness of the time.
But Ram changed after he graduated. He ended up becoming one of the leading immigration attorneys in New York and the airy bohemian hardened into an inflexible, proud bourgeois.
“All of a sudden, he wanted to live in Westchester, drive a fancy car, wear stuff from Brooks Brothers, and go out golfing all the time,” Soma said. “I mean, when we had no paisa, we would talk about going to places like Thailand and Africa and Brazil, but when he made some paisa, he wanted to stay far away from the Third World, except India of course, and only go to London, Paris, and Rome.” She made a sneering sound. “Bloody upstart.”
“Did you ever think of getting married again?” Naina asked, feeling such an affinity to Soma that she was able to pose such a bold question to a virtual stranger.
“I did . . . I dated a little . . . but it was hard with a young bachcha at home, but once Araan was at college I did go out with some people,” Soma replied. “Then I had a couple relationships that didn’t work out and now there’s someone I’ve been with for a few years.”
Naina looked at Soma, sipping a glass of red wine, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears, and speaking with unflappable candor about her marriage, divorce, and, most importantly, post-divorce dating. She was surprised. She had rarely met Indian women of their age, who spoke so openly about things like that . . . and to another Indian woman they hardly knew. If it were an American or European woman discussing such things, Naina wouldn’t have batted an eye. In fact, even if it were an Indian woman talking to an American or European woman, it wouldn’t have been that surprising because Indians assumed Americans and Europeans whirled in and out of different beds their whole lives. That they were like ships who quickly changed direction with the slightest shift in the wind, which was why they always seemed to be at sea.
But there was an unwritten rule that governed communication between Indians in America; show your best side, talk about your accomplishments, and avoid mentioning anything irregular or controversial. And the best thing to do if you had so-called embarrassing problems such as marriage troubles, mental health matters, or financial woes that you absolutely had to share, was to talk them over with an American. They would not judge you.
Even Naina, come to think of it, had exposed herself in the most intimate way to her American friends, Alannah and Mara. Suddenly aware that her twenty or thirty seconds of silence after Soma had finished talking about her boyfriend Deepak might be interpreted as some sort of disapproval, Naina took a sip of wine, adjusted her scarf, and said, “Deepak sounds really wonderful. I’d love to meet him sometime.”
“So what about you?” Soma asked. “Have you thought of getting married again? Or maybe you’re already in a relationship?”
Naina fiddled with her scarf again, not sure how to answer that question. She hardly knew this woman. “Uh, well, you know, I’ve never given it much thought.” She laughed nervously.
“Not yet that is.”
Naina fingered the straps of her handbag. “Yes . . . So how did you and Deepak meet?” She was bursting with curiosity—how did older Indians date?
“No one believes me, but we actually met at Barnes and Noble. I was looking for Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics and so was he. There was only one copy left at the time and we started arguing about it.”
“I see,” Naina said, disappointed. How incredibly ordinary.
Naina noticed the lights were dimming, people were starting to leave, and she had yet to see Zarina Sultan’s paintings. Oh well. She would have to come back to see them another day.
About twenty minutes later, Naina was alone and her hip started to ache again. She carefully swallowed an Advil without water. She watched the light rain come down in a hush from her taxi. If it weren’t that cool, she would have opened the window and put her hand outside and cupped the rainwater. It had felt so good to speak Hindi again after such a long time and slip into the familiar sing-songy rhythms of the language. The sing-songiness that extended to the way Indians spoke English as well. The rhythms of most of her life. The rising and falling inflections embossed on her brain. The words, rounded and always laced with some drama—unlike the slender, efficient, crisp, and staccato utterances that came out of the mouths of the British upper classes—had been aching to get out of her head and come out of her mouth.
––––––––
A FEW DAYS later, Naina and Soma met at a dingy Indian restaurant on 28th Street. Once more, they spoke in Hinglish without conscious thought, seamlessly moving from one language to another.
“Soma, when my son Karan goes to India, he is constantly irritated . . . too much garmi (heat), too much mitti (dust), the ACs aren’t powerful enough or keep tootoing (breaking), servants always bhagoing (running) around you.” Naina took a bite of her samosa, feeling her taste buds lurch toward the sweet and tart flavor of the tamarind chutney she hadn’t had in the longest time. “You know, that sort of thing.”
“And when was the last time you went to India?” Soma asked.
“Five or six years ago. The year before Harish died . . . It had changed so much, I barely recognized it. I’m pucca going to back at some point soon. But this time, I want to travel. I actually want to see India. I want to go to Mysore, Kerala, Mahabalipuram, and Pondicherry. Not always be stuck in Delhi.”
“I really want to see the Northeast,” Soma said. “Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Mizoram, and vo sab. Shayad we can all go together?”
The two of them continued talking about travel in India as they moved from samosas to pakoras, chastising themselves for eating such heavy food, like gluttons. Still, they moved on to mutton biryani—grains of saffron rice and chunks of meat beaten into submission by pools of oil. Once again, they started recounting their childhood days in India.
“My dad used to love sitting alone by the radio on the veranda, smoking, drinking cups of chai, and listening to nostalgic Hindi music,” Naina said. “Remember that song ‘Gaata rahe mera dil’? That was his favorite . . . he would keep humming it all the time.”
“That sounds like a Bengali neighbor of ours,” Soma said. “Mr. Chakraborty. He would be sitting in a dhoti, smoking a pipe, and listening to Rabindra Sangeet while his biwi would keep bringing him roshogollas, one after another.”
Soma leaned back in the greasy plastic chairs even though there was not much space to lean back. “Ah, those were the days . . . long afternoons spent doing nothing. No groceries, no bills to pay, servants asking you how much cheeni (sugar) you wanted in your milk, hot samosas in the evening . . . Deepak and I often talk about how our children will never know anything about that life . . .”
Naina nodded in agreement as her mind drifted to those long summer days where every afternoon, from the age of eight to eleven, she would read and reread Enid Blyton’s stories in a quiet corner in the back of the house, imagining she was stranded alone on some island close to England, away from the dust, din, and constant congestion of relatives and family friends in India.
“Did you ever read Enid Blyton as a kid?” Naina asked.
“Of course.” Soma’s eyes shone at the memory. “What kind of question is that? Everyone did. All the bloody time. Remember Malory Towers? I used to keep hoping I could go to a boarding school in England and have friends called Darrell, Sally, and Gwendoline.”
Soon, Naina and Soma were going back and forth on whether they wanted dessert, but quickly succumbed. They decided on gulab jamuns, round brown balls of pure sugar, pure ghee, and pure delight.
“So tell me more about your daughter, Naina,” said Soma after biting into a syrupy chunk of her gulab jamun. “I wish I had a daughter . . . the things you can share with a daughter . . . they’re just different from a son.” And then Soma laughed, her sparkling laughter as joyful and carefree as a girl’s.
Naina stopped. Stopped eating her gulab jamuns, stopped talking, stopped feeling the warm air of familiarity between her and Soma. She tightly crossed her arms and looked down at her half-eaten gulab jamun. She felt as if her eyes had turned in their sockets and she was looking with the backs of her eyes instead, squinting at the gnawed dark balls. Her sense of sight was now in the opposite direction, peering at the sun-and-moon-bereft moors within.
“What’s the matter?”
Naina did not answer.
“Arree, kya hua? (What happened?)?”
“Actually, Soma.” Naina could hear her voice strained and thin, like severely skimmed milk. “Amaya . . . that’s my daughter . . . and I have . . . well, we’ve kind of a had a . . . a . . . falling out.”
“A falling out?” Soma said, her round black eyes narrowing into sharp ovals. “What kind of falling out? Why?”
Pain pierced Naina, a fleshy, pink pain. Suddenly awake and crying like a baby. She held her arms more tautly and pressed her lips together.
“Well,” Naina said. “ Well . . . the kind of falling out that two grown-ups can have.”
“What does that mean?”
Gosh, this woman was so nosy. Just like an Indian. What does that mean? What did anything mean? Naina wanted to close her eyes but didn’t. She exhaled deeply, as quietly and discreetly as she could.
“A relationship with an adult child is very different from that when they are children,” she finally said, slightly raising her head. “As I’m sure you know . . . So sometimes things can happen . . . I’m hoping it will be resolved soon.” She stroked the side of her neck. “If you don’t mind, I . . . I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“No problem. No problem at all, Naina. Sorry if I was being intrusive. I guess all of us have a nosy Indian aunty in us, don’t we?” And then she skittishly tittered in her girlish way again.