My Last Love Story (28 page)

“Zai’s sleeping. And I need to start dinner.” I was lying. I’d already made dinner this morning.

“I can multitask,” said Zayaan, sounding amused. He opened his eyes. Glee danced behind his black-as-coal irises.

“I hate it when you gang up on me.” I was sick of it, in fact.

Both of them needed to be brought down a peg or two.

“We’re not ganging up on you,” said Nirvaan, spinning the bottle sideways to test it. “We’re trying to loosen you up.”

“I don’t want to loosen up. I want to be…” I bit my tongue before
free
flew out. That just showed they didn’t need to loosen me up. Apparently, I was loose enough.

Nirvaan clapped his hand on the spinning bottle, abruptly stopping its motion. He looked up at me as I stared him down. I was very aware of Zayaan watching us.

Zayaan was the base of our triangle—strong, steady, immovable. I wondered what would happen if he shifted his stance. I mentally willed him not to shift the dynamic of our ménage.

“What do you want, Simeen?” asked Nirvaan, suddenly very serious.

In the fifteen years we’d known each other, he’d called me by my full name maybe a dozen times, no more. It startled me.

“You never tell me what you want anymore. You used to in Surat, all the time. You’d demand things from us, demand our time, our undivided attention, but for the past eight years, you’ve never once expressed a desire for something…anything. You’ve never shown me what is in your heart.”

My cheeks grew hotter with every word, every observation. I was dismayed that Nirvaan had seen through my silence. Horrified I was such a bad actress. And embarrassed that Zayaan sat between us, once again a witness to the inner workings of my marriage. But at the same time, I was glad he was listening. He needed to know where this could never go.

“You’re being silly, Nirvaan.” I smiled it off, like I had for years. “I haven’t asked you for anything because you always anticipate my needs. You’ve always known what’s in my heart.”

Nirvaan twisted his mouth, as if he’d tasted something sour. I’d disappointed him. Again. “Fine, have it your way. Let’s play the game. But, first, promise, you won’t cheat. Promise me when we ask you a question, you’ll give us the truth.”

Many months ago, Nirvaan’s doctors had apprised us on what we’d be facing over the course of the next year. “Maybe a year. Maybe less, maybe more. We can’t predict time frames with any certainty with tumors.”

We should expect seizures, headaches, incontinence, loss of appetite—thankfully, Nirvaan’s appetite was back with a vengeance—disinterest in life, discussions about death or meaning of life, making sure the family affairs were in order, balance and time lapse issues, confusion, anger. Not all together and not always, but we had to watch for these symptoms, which would get progressively worse as the cancer ate Nirvaan’s mind. We’d gone through most of these symptoms at least once.

My husband wished for a peek into my heart, so I gave him the unvarnished stark truth. “You want to see into my heart? Into my soul? Here’s a glimpse. I want you to live. I want you to fight for us.
For me.
I don’t want you to let go of me so easily.”

I wasn’t only talking about the cancer, and my husband quickly got it. So did Zayaan. No one had ever accused them of being dumb.

“I chose you, Nirvaan. To be mine, as my mate. Now, you can either choose to be noble, or you can choose me back.”

There were more great days in our household during the following months than bad, but it was the bad that stuck in our heads.

Was it because the bad brought a visceral reaction in our bodies, and we could easily recall the tight fear and gut-clenching tension? Or was it that we took the good for granted and as our due?

The bad stuff was actually an anomaly, which was why it stood out.

During one of our phone sessions, Asha Auntie asked me to plot out my life. I regularly phoned her these days and not only at Sarvar’s insistence. But I didn’t know how much it helped, talking to her or to Sarvar. On most days, I felt like a pressure cooker ready to blow.

“Imagine someone has asked you to write a memoir,” she prompted.

Immediately, I listed all of the bad that had marked my life and in detail. But the good moments—and I’d had plenty of those if I chose to gush over them—I only skimmed, as if protecting the memories.

I felt like, if I mentioned the happy moments out loud, Khodai would set his evil eye on me again. Asha Auntie had tried to repair my relationship with God once before, but I wasn’t ready to forgive Him.

Summer passed in the blink of an eye, yet time flowed with excruciating slowness.

It was hideous, waiting for my husband to die. But it was what I was doing. It was what all of us were doing really.

Some days, Nirvaan couldn’t see properly. He would see two of everything. The first time his vision had doubled, he’d been looking at me. He’d joked about his ultimate fantasy of having two of me in bed come true, but I could tell it scared him.

As his mind failed, his anger and frustration began to manifest in odd places.

We’d fought again this morning. It wouldn’t have upset me so much had his sister not witnessed our bad moment.

It wouldn’t have happened at all had she not been there
, I thought uncharitably.

Nisha and her family had come up from San Diego for a two-week visit at the end of the kids’ summer vacation. By the second day of their visit, Nirvaan and I had fought three times already.

I hadn’t discussed the failed IVF with my husband at all. I’d gone to the clinic for my blood test, and when it had come back negative, I’d told Dr. Archer and Nirvaan that I never wanted to go through it again. I didn’t have the strength. End of discussion.

I supposed it was Nikita and Armaan who’d brought children back on Nirvaan’s mind. They were sweet kids but a handful, and I was tired and petulant from constantly picking up after them. Nisha was used to an untidy, kid-friendly house. I wasn’t.

On their second afternoon in Carmel, the kids, Zayaan, and Nisha’s quiet and stalwart husband, Aarav, were off Jet Skiing, leaving the odd triangle of Nirvaan, Nisha, and me behind. I had just finished setting the living room to rights when Nisha told me I shouldn’t have bothered.

“It’s just going to get littered with toys again. You should leave the cleaning for the evening when they are tired and will fall into bed,” she said as she brewed a pot of tea for herself, trailing a different kind of mess around the stove and sink in her wake.

Of course, it aggravated me that she’d said this after she’d seen me slop it up for the past half an hour. Leaving aggravation aside, did she not see that if I didn’t bother to clean up, her brother, who couldn’t see as well anymore, might trip over the toys and land on his head on one of them? Was she stupid? I also didn’t mention the potential of spreadable infection in an unhygienic house and that we couldn’t afford even one dirty dish lying in the sink, attracting germs that might or might not attack Nirvaan’s compromised immune system. I held my tongue in all ways. She was Nirvaan’s sister and I didn’t want to fight with her.

But when Nirvaan said, “You’ll need to show Simi how to be a mother, Nish,” I just lost it.

What did he think I’d been to him for the past five years, for I sure as heck hadn’t been his wife? I realized he might have said it in jest, but I was in no mood for pokes or jokes.

“I don’t need to be shown any such thing. Picking up after you has taught me well. And, for the record, I’m never having children, Nirvaan.”
There
. It was out in the open. The peek he wanted into my heart wasn’t so pretty, was it?

“Oh? The IVF didn’t work?” asked Nisha, as if she hadn’t known, as if she couldn’t see that I wasn’t pregnant. Why did she hate me so much?

She came to sit on the sofa, sipping her tea, while Nirvaan and I faced each other down across the coffee table.

I was on my knees, checking under the sofa for wayward toys. Nirvaan was sprawled on the sofa opposite me. I waited for Nisha to bring up the trust fund that had been set aside for the child and me—
child
being the operative word. I hadn’t asked Nirvaan if he’d sold Bapuji’s land. I didn’t want to know. I planned to refuse any and all financial help from his family once he…when Nirvaan was no more.

Nisha didn’t bring it up. Instead, she said, “I think you need to try two or three times before an IVF works.”

Nirvaan pounced on that immediately. “Exactly. They said the same thing at the clinic. We should try again.”

“No, we shouldn’t,” I said firmly. “You said it was up to me. And I’ve made up my mind.”

Needless to say, Nirvaan didn’t appreciate my honesty so much. And he flayed me with his meanness. “It’s probably your negative attitude that made you miscarry. You never wanted our baby.”

“It’s not called a miscarriage if the zygote didn’t attach to my uterus at all!” I shouted, outraged that he’d say such a vile thing to me.

I would’ve stopped there, but Nirvaan made an exceedingly distasteful comment next.

“Oh, baby, baby. Why yo womb reject my love, baby?” he rapped like a punk, hiding an accusation behind a joke. Everything was reduced to a joke or an order with him.

His words made my heart bleed, and I wanted to hurt him back.

“Maybe it was your deficient genes that made an imperfect, chromosomally abnormal zygote. Maybe it’s your sperm that can’t do its job properly, so stop making me the villain when it’s your own inadequacies that have failed you.”
Oh God, I hurt him.

An hour later, when the jet riders came back home, we were still fighting. The general consensus was that I needed a break. I’d wound myself too tight. Nisha suggested I go visit my brother while she was in Carmel.

“I’ll hold the fort down here, so don’t worry,” she offered generously.

I dug my heels in. I would not be separated from Nirvaan. What if something happened to him while I was gone? What if I never got to fight with him again?

I refused to go until Nirvaan made me.

“We both need a break, Simi. It’ll do us good,” he said, making me bleed even more. He was giving up on me. He couldn’t stand me anymore.

“Fine, I’ll go. But a day is plenty to clear our heads,” I said.

The next morning, I gave my husband a Mean Girl wave before driving up to San Jose. I was adamant to be back by nightfall the next day.

Let me be the first to admit that the break had been a great idea. I’d wound myself too tight in the last few months.

Sarvar’s townhouse was as spotless as mine, so I had no need to run about, brandishing a vacuum hose. I didn’t need to cook as we ate out mostly. And it was the weekend, so Sarvar devoted all his time into knocking sense into me.

“I was relieved when the IVF failed,” I confessed to my brother. “I don’t want a child, so why do I feel so upset?”

We were having dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, which always struck me as incongruous. If you thought about it for a minute, a country known for poverty and mass deaths of its citizens by starvation had its own food culture. I guessed it was a God-has-a-dark-sense-of-humor type of thing.

“I like this restaurant. Ethiopians might starve, but their cuisine flourishes on other continents,” I said, pushing the platter of food toward Sarvar.

Ethiopians shared their meals. They dug their fingers into a common platter and ate it together, like certain sects of Muslims. Like Zayaan’s family had done on special occasions. I’d shared the
thaal
, the common platter, with them once. I’d loved the intimacy of the act, the laughter that had ensued when hands bumped into each other as you accidentally reached for the same food.

“I feel awful about the failed in vitro. That
I’ve
failed Nirvaan, failed to accomplish the one thing he asked of me.” I was grieving for a baby I hadn’t wanted. I took a deep breath, counted to ten. I was grieving for a life that was no longer mine. “I don’t want to want Zayaan. I don’t want him. I
can’t
have him. So, why can’t I stop thinking about him? Stop wanting him?”

It didn’t matter that Nirvaan had given his blessing. It was wrong to want Zayaan. It felt wrong.