The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Twenty-Two

SHIVANI

SHIVANI APERJEET STOOD IN A HOT KITCHEN GRATING CARROTS to make gajar ka halva for her oldest son’s birthday. Vijay, who would be forty-three—forty-three!—had not asked her to make halva, but she remembered how he always put his fingers in it, plucking out the cashews and all the golden raisins.
Shivani wiped her forehead with the loose end of her fuchsia sari. The young ones, the grandchildren—although none of them were Vijay’s kids, which was not right, he was forty-three!—would turn up their noses and complain that this was not “real” pudding. Whoever told them halva was pudding? Shivani kept on grating, the juicy, orange mound growing before her. She remembered who. Rita. Vijay’s wife.
Shivani snagged her knuckles on the grater. Not his wife. Not now. She couldn’t get used to saying “ex-wife.” Forty-three! He was forty-three and left a marriage just like that, the way a person might toss out rattan furniture that wasps had burrowed into.
She sucked the coin taste of her bloody knuckles and pictured Vijay scolding her for using the metal grater. “Mom,” he would say, “why don’t you use the food processor we bought you?”
Shivani picked up the last carrot and grated it down to a quarter-thin nub. She didn’t want to use a machine. She didn’t want it to be easy.
She scooped up the slick, orange gratings and plopped them into the gallon of whole milk waiting in the stockpot. She turned on the flame, lowered it to a hint of blue, then put her hands on top of the empty gallon jug. A marriage did not come with an expiration date like this gallon of milk. The idea was as foreign to her as the gas flame she could turn on twenty-four hours a day when she first came here.
The milk had already turned pale orange as Shivani wiped her forehead and under her eyes again. Now she must stir the halva for an hour or more, until the carrots drank up nearly all the milk. She remembered Rita’s wide eyes. “An hour? No wonder this is never on the menu at Indian restaurants,” she said. “It’s too labor intensive.” As if that were a bad thing. A reason not to make it. “If we turned up the heat, we could speed it up, right?”
Wrong. If you turned up the heat, you would scorch the milk on the bottom. Even if you peeled off the black strips, that ashy charred taste would remain. No. You must be patient. You must tend to the stockpot while the milk simmered and the carrots swelled over the low flame.
Shivani sighed. She’d been married by the time she was twenty. She knew her children were embarrassed to talk about their parents’ arranged marriage. Shivani had known that would not be the path for her sons or even her daughter. She’d been happy for them, with their choices.
But their freedom had not done them any good. For all their choices, for all their “practice”—Vijay and Rita had shared a home before the wedding—it had not protected or prepared them. Only Asheev was married now. Kinnari was thirty-five! She claimed there were no good men but was outraged when Shivani had offered to arrange some meetings with sons of their friends.
Shivani dropped eight cardamom pods into the orange milk. “I will marry for love,” all of her children had declared. Did they think she hadn’t? She and Lalit had love. But they loved the marriage as something far greater than just either one of them. She had not known what to say when Vijay told her of Rita, “This just isn’t working. We don’t make each other happy.”
“Well, you must begin to,” Shivani had told him, bewildered. Her son was an intelligent man!
Shivani would take more of this halva to Camden. It was she who would eat it, even cold from the refrigerator. It was she who had eaten it always, even during that nonsense in high school when she’d whittled herself down to the bones of a beggar child.
Camden Anderson without a husband. Shivani stirred and knew the wish in her heart.
Shivani and Caroline had wished for it back in the college days. Even Lalit didn’t mind the idea of their pale dark-haired children. They suited each other. And they were friends, which is what mattered beyond all else. “I will marry for love,” they’d all declared.
She snorted. Couldn’t they see the deep love, the enduring love, the real love that was already there? Ah, these movies that gave them such ridiculous notions of romance!
She stirred the thickening milk, now a rich, reddish color. Her back ached from standing, but there was still much time to go before she could melt the ghee in a skillet and brown the cashews.
Lalit came into the kitchen. She took in his white temples, the hair that grew so abundantly from his ears, the owlish look to his eyes behind such thick glasses. “Ahh, halva,” he said. He stood beside her and kneaded the small of her back, that open patch between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her petticoat, just where she ached. Shivani leaned into his touch.
“This will be good,” Lalit said, with certainty.
“It is good,” Shivani said. She turned her sweaty face up to his and kissed him.