Serving Crazy With Curry (24 page)

“You're counting on me feeling guilty forever?”

“Oh yes.”

“What if I don't?” Devi demanded.

“Oh, I'll make sure you do,” Shobha said and then smiled, her first real smile in a long time, a smile that came out of feeling some happiness. “I'm glad you're talking, tyke.”

Devi nodded. “I guess now I have to go inside and talk to the others as well, huh?”

“You don't have to tell them about Girish,” Shobha said softly. “I won't, if you don't want me to, either. This could be our secret.”

“Just like we never told Mama who broke her pink glass vase?” Devi asked, remembering the incident that was almost two decades old. Even then Shobha hadn't told on her. She never was a tattletale.

“How come we have secrets like the broken glass vase but we could never get close?” Shobha wondered aloud.

Devi nodded. “I've thought about it myself.”

They both fell silent for a while and then Shobha turned to face Devi.

“And now that you're talking, what's with all that damn cooking?” Shobha asked seriously.

Devi lifted her shoulders slowly her hands in the air. “Who knows?” she said with a smile.

“It wasn't meant to happen,” Devi told Dr. Berkley the next week during her session. “Usually, we try not to sleep with our sister's husbands, you know?”

Dr. Berkley nodded with a smile. Devi could see she was relieved her patient was finally talking.

Everyone was relieved that she was finally talking. Saroj asked so many questions. Devi answered a handful. Avi kept saying he was so thrilled and Vasu, she just held on to Devi, big unshed tears in her eyes.

Devi hadn't told them about the baby, the father of the baby, or any part ofthat sordid tale. It was not easy to tell them even though she was talking again.

The first few times she had resented coming to see Dr. Berkley, but this time she had so much to talk about that she'd hardly been able to wait.

She and Avi came half an hour early and wore down the soft beige rug in the lounge pacing. Dr. Berkley's assistant kept looking at her cautiously and at the glass wall behind her, as if worried Devi would jump through the glass of the fourth-story office.

Now that she was talking, Devi wondered how long she'd need to come to Dr. Berkley. There was comfort in seeing a shrink because you attempted suicide. It made you believe that something was wrong in the upper story and the doctor was fixing it. But if everything was all right and she was talking again, then Devi knew she had to get back to life and living. She wasn't ready.

Her mother was nudging her, asking her what she planned to do next. Her father hadn't said anything but he kept talking about the
job market and how the economy looked like it was going to get better. Shobha hadn't said anything and Devi thought it was because she herself was spending her afternoons watching Oprah with Saroj when she should be looking for a new job. Vasu kept saying that Devi should take her time and find out what was in her heart before rushing into anything.

Even Girish had tried to drag her out of her silence and push her into a new life when they had been alone in her parents’ house watching, or rather pretending to watch, some Spanish movie on the IFC.

“He's gone,” Devi said sadly. “He was supposed to go to Oxford this fall for a new job. He already left. He told Shobha it was to find a place to live and get settled.”

“Did you want him to speak with you before he left?” Dr. Berkley asked.

Devi nodded. “He just told Shobha to tell me that he was leaving and that's it.” She smiled with tears in her eyes. “Of all the men in the world I could fall in love with and there are a lot of men in the world, why the hell did it have to be Shobha's husband?”

Dr. Berkley nodded sympathetically.

“I feel like Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca.
You know? Of all the bars and et cetera, et cetera in the world, she walks into mine? I had so many choices, so many other assholes to sleep with, and …” Devi was once again at a loss of words.

“Would you want to pursue a relationship with him?”

Devi groaned. “I can't even think about that. I'm so nervous about telling my parents, my grandmother about this. Though I have to say, Shobha took it… well, she didn't react the way I'd thought she would.”

“But you still told her,” Dr. Berkley pointed out.

“I had to,” Devi said. “I had no choice.”

“Why?”

“I didn't want her not to know,” Devi said, trying to explain. “I couldn't let her get divorced without at least knowing who Girish cheated on her with. I thought she'd go berserk, instead she said she knew. She knew all along. I wish she'd gone berserk. She said she
didn't know how she felt about this. I'm scared that when she does know how she feels, she's going to hate me.”

Guilt was a constant companion. There was a lot of guilt, as if purchased in wholesale to save money. There was guilt for having not spoken for days, for having slept with Girish, for having gotten pregnant, for having lost the baby, for not having told anyone about the baby or losing it, for … it was like a huge mountain, resting on her head.

“I thought that once I started talking everything would become easy and it would all be clear,” Devi told Dr. Berkley.

“And it isn't like that?” Dr. Berkley asked.

Devi shook her head. “No, it's all the same, now I can just tell everyone how much it is the same.”

Vasu figured it out. It wasn't very hard if you'd been watching carefully. Saroj hadn't and Vasu decided to leave the woman in her delusional world as they both chopped tomatoes for the tomato pickle, one of Avi's favorites. Vasu was comforted that Saroj and Avi had talked about their problems and were trying to solve them.

“I can't believe Girish had an affair,” Saroj announced, unable, obviously, to comprehend what had taken place right under her nose.

“Some things just happen,” Vasu said carefully. Knowing the truth was a burden. She had to now be extra careful to ensure that Saroj didn't trip on it as she had.

Saroj made a clicking sound with her tongue and sat down on one of the dining chairs. She was uneasy, her impatience obvious. It was difficult to see her daughters’ lives fall apart. Vasu knew because it was just as difficult to see her granddaughters’ lives fall apart. Technically both Shobha and Devi were in a better place, but at their age one expected them to be settled with lives of their own, not coming home to Mama and Daddy after they either try to kill themselves and/or lose their jobs and leave their adulterous husbands.

Devi was with her doctor. Avi had taken her, as Vasu was feeling
“uneasy.” Saroj immediately pounced on that word and demanded that Vasu see a doctor. But at her age, what choice did she have but to feel uneasy? She was over seventy. She had a fragile heart. She had lost the man she loved, and her favorite granddaughter had attempted suicide. Vasu would've wondered what was wrong with her if she weren't feeling uneasy. At this point, when life was behind her, she knew what lay ahead: more uneasiness.

“And Shobha is going to be a divorcee. Your influence, Mummy,” Saroj declared as she ran her sharp knife through the ripe and lush tomato.

Vasu smiled. “Your father was nothing like Girish. He was not very well balanced. Sweet one minute, a monster the next.”

“I don't remember him being like that,” Saroj said, as always leaping to her forgotten father's defense.

“You don't remember anything,” Vasu said teasingly. “That doesn't mean none of it is true.”

“I was five years old, Mummy, not an infant,” Saroj told her.

Vasu wiped her hand, which had become wet from the tomatoes, on her light gray cotton sari's
pallu.
“Do you remember the night we spent in Captain Faizal's house?”

“They had a yellow cat,” Saroj said, remembering. “And a cuckoo clock.”

She remembers the cuckoo clock but doesn't remember why we had to spend the night there,
Vasu thought in amusement. The human brain was an amazing sieve. Certain memories stayed, others evaporated.

“And they had no children,” Saroj said, piling all the tomatoes into the blender.

“Yes,” Vasu said. “Do you remember why we stayed the night there?”

Saroj added chili powder to the tomatoes in the blender, along with a big spoon of pureed tamarind. She whizzed the blender as she thought about it, her forehead creased. She stopped the blender and shook her head.

“No. Why did we stay there that night?” Saroj asked.

Vasu opened her mouth to tell her but decided against it. What would the point be? Saroj wouldn't believe and even if she did, what
would it achieve? If she had good memories of her father, then so be it. All her life Vasu struggled with anger, even jealousy that Saroj should think nicely of Ramakant. Why? The man was a bad husband, a terrible father, didn't earn a proper living, slapped her around, yet her own daughter claimed she loved him, remembered him fondly.

“Do you remember the doll with the blue eyes that he got for me when he went to Calcutta?” Saroj said, her eyes brightening. “I called her Lathika. I wonder what happened to the doll.”

“Still in storage,” Vasu said. “When you come to India, you can look through the boxes in the spare bedroom. They are full of your … our old things.”

“I should have brought them along,” Saroj said and sighed. She turned the gas stove on and put a wok on the fire. It was an old wok, one she had brought along with her all those years ago when she'd moved from India. Even though she'd managed to bring many things along, she'd left just as many behind. “I should have given that doll to Devi and Shobha to play with when they were kids.”

“You can save it for your grandchildren,” Vasu said.

Saroj smacked her lips disapprovingly and poured peanut oil into the wok. “What grandchildren, Mummy? Shobha can't have babies and Devi… well…”

“Devi will have children and who knows, Shobha may adopt,” Vasu told her, raising her voice to be heard over the sizzle of the mustard and fenugreek seeds Saroj dropped into the hot oil.

“How can an adopted child be our own?” Saroj asked as she stirred the seeds so that they didn't burn. “Not our blood, not ours at all.”

Vasu didn't argue. Saroj was set in her ways and at fifty-three years of age, it was too late to change her.

“But if she adopts, then, a baby is a baby, right, Mummy?” Saroj said and poured the oil and fried seeds into the tomato mixture. “And we'll love the baby. Hard not to love babies.”

As Saroj prattled on about babies and booties, mixing together all the ingredients of the tomato pickle, Vasu tried to ignore the pressure building inside her. She had to talk to everyone tonight, she decided,
she had to go back to India. If the time to go had come, she wanted to go in India, not here in “the white pit” as Saroj called it.

“Was it good, Devi?” Avi asked as he drove them both back from Dr. Berkley's office. “Does it help at all?”

Devi nodded and then realized that she could speak again, so she said, “Yes.”

After having not spoken for almost four weeks, it was hard to speak, to use her voice again. It was almost tempting to go back to the days of no words.

“So, what are we having for dinner?” Avi asked, unsure of what to say to his daughter.

“Mama is on a cooking rampage.
Dosas
tonight with
sambhar
and fresh tomato pickle,” Devi told him.

“She's cooking like there is no tomorrow,” Avi agreed.

“Just like I was,” Devi said and grinned. “I miss the cooking, but Mama lets me help, so that helps.”

Avi smiled and nodded.

“I couldn't believe it. When Saroj called and told me, I couldn't believe it,” he said after a short silence.

Devi didn't feign ignorance; she knew what her father was talking about. He hadn't said anything, hadn't talked about the “incident,” until now.

“I couldn't understand why you'd want to …” His words broke away as he tried to explain his confusion. “But I understand the feeling.”

“You do?” Devi asked, surprised.

“Of course I do,” Avi said and raised his prosthetic arm. “When I woke up without the arm, I was angry, shocked, disoriented. I yelled at the doctor. I'd rather have died. My entire battalion was dead, my commanding officer was dead, my friends were dead. I was alive … with no arm.”

“You tried to kill yourself?” Devi asked, shocked.

Avi sighed and then shook his head. “Didn't have the guts. But I did try to drink myself to death. I even thought about getting a gun
from Quarter Guard and shooting myself dead. I thought about driving into a wall. I thought about jumping off a cliff. Plenty of those in the Himalayas.”

“But you didn't,” Devi pointed out, feeling small and insignificant in front of her father. He'd lost so much, an arm, all his friends, and he'd still managed to live while she'd given up when she had so much to live for.

“No, I didn't, because Saroj came inside my room and beat the bad thoughts away,” he said with a small smile. “I was lucky that she came when she did.”

“And she was lucky that she could pull you out of that room,” Devi said.

“Yeah, we both got damn lucky,” Avi said with a big grin.