Smita dragged her feet as she walked back toward the Causeway, angry at herself for this impulsive visit, mortified by how easily Mrs. Patel had turned the tables on her. What had she hoped to gain from this fool’s errand anyway? She had hoped to embarrass the woman, to squeeze out an apology that she could carry back to Papa, to remind Mrs. Patel that the past never died. Instead, she had been banished from Mrs. Patel’s life for a second time.
Why on earth am I surprised? Smita asked herself as she crossed the street. She had been a journalist for too many years to not know how easily people made excuses for their past misdeeds. Nobody was the villain in his or her own life story. Shame on her for expecting Pushpa Auntie to have lost any sleep over ancient history. Why would she fret over the past when every day a new Mumbai was being built atop the debris of the old city? “Look to the future, child,” her father used to say. “This is why our feet point forward, not back.”
As soon as she got to the shopping district, Smita stopped at a clothing store to buy appropriate outfits for her trip to Birwad, but the salesman who greeted her in the first store was so oily and effusive, she walked right out. She was spent; she would have to shop the next day, in between breaks from caring for Shannon. Surely, there will be stores near the hospital? she thought. Meanwhile, she wanted only to get a bite to eat and then collapse on her bed. But the thought of eating alone in the opulent splendor of the Taj was a lonely one, and so she continued walking, looking for a restaurant that catered to the many Western tourists in the neighborhood. She stopped at the Leopold Cafe and sat at one of the tables overlooking the Causeway.
As she sipped a beer, after ordering a sandwich from the elderly waiter, Smita saw what looked like bullet holes in the Leopold’s walls. She blinked, remembering. Of course. The restaurant had been one of the targets of the terrorist attacks that had brought this metropolis to its knees for three horrific days in November 2008. What the Leopold had done—refused to paper over its history and instead keep the bullet holes as a permanent marker of those harrowing days—was unusual. Most of the time, the world chose to move on with nary a look back. She saw this in the US after every school shooting: a flurry of news stories, the sanctimonious tweets about thoughts and prayers, the predictable calls for gun control reform and then—silence. Parents and other survivors were left to their private lifelong grief, permanently out of step with a world that had moved on. Bloodstains were scrubbed from school walls before the students returned.
Smita had been visiting her parents and brother in Ohio that November, the four of them glued to CNN as it reported on the young men from Pakistan shooting up the city and setting fire to the Taj. Rohit had looked up from the television set and said, with spite in his voice that made Smita and their parents pay attention: “Serves them right. I hope they burn that whole miserable city down.”
“Beta,” Papa had said reflexively, “to wish ill on millions of innocent people is a sin.”
Rohit had shaken his head and left the room.
She’d tried broaching the subject with Rohit later that evening, the two of them perched in front of the TV again after their parents had gone to bed. But he had gestured toward The Daily Show. “I’m watching this,” he said curtly, and Smita had acquiesced with silence.
The old waiter returned to her table with her sandwich. “First time here?” he asked, nodding toward the wall with the bullet holes.
“Yes. Were you here at the time?”
“Yes, madam. God was with me that day. I’d just gone up to the mezzanine floor. Two of my coworkers were not so lucky. Nor were many of our customers.”
She’d heard variations of this recap so many times, ordinary humans trying to solve an enduring mystery: Why had they lived while others had died in the tragedy? No matter what calamity they’d survived—plane crashes or earthquakes or mass shootings—survivors felt compelled to assign some reason, discern some pattern as to why they’d been spared. Smita saw no pattern to such events: she believed that life was a series of random events, a zigzag of coincidences that led to either survival or death.
The waiter draped a dish towel over his right shoulder. “The bastards didn’t even come in,” he said. “Just stood at the entrance and sprayed bullets as casually as you and I would hand out sweets on Diwali.” His eyelids fluttered briefly as he remembered. “There was blood everywhere, people screaming, ducking under tables. And then they threw in a grenade. Imagine that, madam. A grenade into a restaurant. What kind of person does that?”
All kinds of people, Smita wanted to say. Seemingly ordinary people who rise each morning, eat breakfast, smile at their neighbors, and kiss their children goodbye. People who look and act just like you and me. Until they’re gripped by an ideological conviction, or a disruption occurs in their lives that makes them want to rearrange the world or burn everything down.
The waiter must have seen something on her face—a combination of revulsion and fatalism—because he said, softly: “Same evil happened in your country, isn’t it? On 9/11?”
“How’d you know I’m from America?” Smita asked.
He smiled broadly, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I’ve worked here for thirty years, madam. Many of our customers are foreigners. Bas, you opened your mouth, and I could tell you’re America.”
“You’re America,” the waiter said. Not You’re American. Smita felt that he was right. At that moment, she felt as if she were all of America, as if the red earth of Georgia had hardened her bones and the blue waters of the Pacific flowed in her bloodstream. She was America, all of it—Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, the snowcapped Rockies and the Mississippi Delta, Old Faithful in Yellowstone. In that moment, she felt so estranged from the city of her birth that she would have paid a million bucks to be transported back to her silent, monastic apartment in Brooklyn.
“So, what brings you to our Mumbai?” the waiter asked, his chattiness making Smita uneasy. “Holiday or business?”
“Business,” she said shortly.
He must have sensed her reluctance and began to move away, his old formality returning. “Enjoy your stay,” he said.
She sat at the Leopold even after she’d paid the bill, replaying the conversation with Pushpa Auntie in her head. She was the journalist, and yet it was Pushpa who had seized the narrative. She remembered what Molly, who worked for NBC, had once told her: The most basic rule of broadcast journalism was that you never, ever relinquished the microphone, never handed it over to your subject. Well, old Pushpa Patel—who, as far as she knew, had never held a job, much less interviewed despots and leaders around the world—had successfully wrested the microphone from her. Tomorrow, the woman would gleefully recount the story to all their former neighbors—how this Smita, this mere slip of a girl, had dared to come into her house and insulted her. And how she’d put her in her place.
It was true what they said. You really couldn’t go home again. Mumbai had spat her out once, and it had just done so again. How was it that Shannon, who had been based in India for three years, had found people like Mohan and Nandini who clearly cared about her? In Smita’s case, there wasn’t a soul in this city of twenty million whom she could call. Once she’d escaped India, Smita had lost all connection with her school friends. In recent years, as many of her former classmates had found one another through social media, several had tried contacting her, but she had not replied. How could she have borne their curiosity and their questions? Her parents, too, had not stayed in touch with the handful of relatives they had in Mumbai. No, she may as well have been in Nairobi or Jakarta, for all the difference it made.