After getting him settled in the guest suite, they return to their condo to see if they can offer him something more substantial to eat than the McDonald’s he has been subsisting on for days. Nirav excuses himself to take a shower, claiming the man who sat next to him on the flight must have had bloody whooping cough.
“There isn’t much in the fridge,” Kavita tells her father as she peruses its anorexic contents. “How about grilled cheese?”
“Fine,” he shrugs.
From the fridge, she pulls out margarine, sourdough, and cheddar, and lays them out on the island, where he father is perched on a stool, looking as though he’s eating at a diner counter. She starts buttering a slice of bread.
“So,” she says at last. “You want to talk about it?”
“What is there to say? I’ve told you everything already.”
“You haven’t told me how you feel.”
“What does that matter? It is what it is.”
“It matters, Dad. You have to let these things out. Otherwise they can eat you up inside.” She can appreciate how hypocritical she sounds.
Her father frowns into his glass of water.
“You’ve had blow-outs before, but you’ve never left.” Leaving the home and the family that has been the centre of his existence for the past thirty years goes against everything she knows her father to be, everything he believes in, everything he has built. As a young man, he left his home once before, and if that kind of amputation had to be endured, once in a lifetime was enough.
“I can’t go back there, not ever.”
“But it’s your home.”
“Not anymore. Some things are unforgivable.”
Kavita grills her father’s sandwich in silence, recalling the London incident. She knows exactly what her father means. When the sandwich is perfectly brown and crispy, she slices it, and places it in front of him. He hands her one half, telling her that she has gotten too skinny, khaana, eat. Reluctantly, she takes the sandwich. They chew in silence for a while.
Once he is finished, he drinks half the water in his glass, and seems ready to talk. “When I started my own family,” he tells her, “I promised myself I would provide my children with everything. A good home. A good education. The safety and security I never had. Every decision I’ve ever made, I made with you in mind.”
Kavita knows this to be true. Generational and cultural indulgences like “me-time” or “man cave” or “mid-life crisis” were concepts as foreign to him as infidelity and divorce. He chose to work for the government because it was a good job if you wanted to raise a family. He was home every day by three o’clock, in time to make them after-school snacks. He never invested much in friendships or vied for promotions or conferences at work, because those things would take time away from his family. Kavita couldn’t speak to how he was as a husband, but he was a good father.
“Look at how things have turned out,” he continues. “I have devoted my life to my family, and now I have nothing.”
Kavita stops, mid-chew. Looks at him with glossy pain in her eyes. Remembers the words her mother uttered weeks earlier: I’ve already lost the most precious thing in my life.
“You haven’t lost everything, Dad,” she says.
“I don’t even have a place to live. I tried to make a place for myself in this country, this world, but it didn’t work. Now I have to try something else.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have been reading about Buddhism, lately. Buddha understood suffering.”
“Okay….”
“There’s a monastery out east. They accept students. You can live there while you study.”
Kavita remembers the day her father borrowed her laptop and the page he left open on the browser. She had been right back then. He had been planning his Great Escape. “Are you telling me you want to go there?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes for me to understand what has happened to my life, and what it all means.”
“Dad, please don’t go. Not now.”
“Your mother doesn’t want me around. My son is gone. You have your own life, Kavita. A husband to take care of. Life is pushing me in a new direction.”
“I…” she stutters. “I don’t know what to say.”
“There is nothing to say. I have already contacted them. They have accepted my application and invited me to stay.”
“When did you apply? While I was gone?”
He pauses. “No, before.”
“So, even if you and Mom hadn’t fought, you would have left us?”
“Our family is broken, Kavita,” he says, as he peers deeply into her eyes. “There is nothing left to leave.”
Kavita stares at him, moon-eyed, unsure of the man sitting across from her. I don’t have your magic, she thinks to Sunil. I can’t make people stay.
Suddenly she can’t stand to be around her father any longer, as if the threat of his desertion has already thrust her away. She marches to the front door.
“Where are you going?” he calls out.
“To check on Mom.” She pulls on her jean jacket and sneakers.
“While you’re there, can you get a few things from my room?”
Blaze climbs. Up. Up. Up. She squeezes her fist, spearing her nails into her fresh scar.
“Kavita?”
Shuts her eyes tightly. Waits for the release.
“Beti?”
She squeezes harder and harder.
“Are you still there?”
But the pain isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to stifle Blaze. It burns, burns, burns. If she stays a moment longer, it will burn her alive.
She rushes out the door, its gusty thwack echoing along the hallway in a ripple of sound that chases and overtakes her, as if it were pain.