She sighed, a hundred memories flitting through her head like macabre slides on an old View-Master. War. Genocide. Rape. And that was not counting the everyday outrages like domestic violence, the battles over transgender rights, or the abortion wars. Or stories like Meena’s, caused by twisted, patriarchal notions of family honor.
Smita hesitated, not wanting to confess this other thing to Mohan: As horrific as Meena’s injuries were, they were not the worst she’d seen. Not even close. And yet, Meena’s isolation—her complete dependence on a mother-in-law who hated her and blamed her for her son’s death—had triggered a corresponding loneliness in Smita. Perhaps it was as simple as this: She could cover heartbreaking events in Lebanon and South Africa and Nigeria and not feel complicit in those because they had not happened in her own country. But despite her American passport, despite the many miles between her American life and her Indian childhood, there was no denying it—sitting with Meena on that cot, she had felt complicit in what had happened to her. Listening to Meena’s slightly slurred speech, Smita had felt a mix of emotions, felt both American and Indian, a victim herself, but also someone who had escaped in a way that Meena never would. There was no way, however, to unspool this for Mohan without slitting open the yellowing envelope of her past.
“Smita . . .” Mohan said. “Actually, forget it. You know, we don’t have to talk about sad things, yaar. Let’s change the subject.”
She looked at him with gratitude. Every time she’d been with a nonjourno, she’d seen the curiosity in their faces, the voyeuristic curiosity as they probed her for the most sensationalistic aspects of her job. She could see them filing away the anecdotes she shared, adding to their cache of can-you-believe-this-shit stories, fodder for conversation at their next party. None of them had had the grace to restrain their prurient interest, despite her obvious reluctance. “Thanks,” she said to Mohan. “But tell me about your job. What exactly do you do?”
He spoke in his usual steady way, offering up droll, precise imitations of his colleagues, piquing her interest when he described the artificial intelligence project he was currently working on.
But after a while, she stopped listening. More than anything, she wanted to be engulfed in silence, and India was not a silent place. Smita felt suddenly, acutely homesick for New York. She longed to be flung back into the anonymity of Manhattan, to walk its crowded streets experiencing that thrilling dilution of her individual self. And New York on a crisp fall evening! The weak autumnal sun bouncing off the brownstones, the slow, drunken fall of the orange and gold leaves near the lagoon in Central Park, her face flushed and cold as she walked. She had first seen New York in autumn, when she had started grad school at Columbia, and maybe that was why it was the season she most associated with the city. These days, Smita spent so much time in places where famine or civil war had ravaged the countryside—where floods and hurricanes had uprooted hundred-year-old trees, where loggers or poachers had destroyed old-growth forests—that she felt intense gratitude for the neighborhood parks of Brooklyn and the vastness of Central Park each time she returned home. In the suburban Ohio community where they’d landed after Papa had secured a job at a small liberal arts college, she had felt like an alien, a guest in someone else’s country. It wasn’t until she arrived in New York that she experienced the sense of homecoming she hadn’t known she was missing. The first time she saw the city, it was as if something exploded in her chest—it was that visceral, that immediate a falling in love. New York didn’t feel like a city to her; it felt like a country. The nation-state of New York, where the world’s restless and ambitious gathered, where the misfits and the misunderstood arrived—and the city didn’t so much welcome them as shift just a tiny bit to accommodate them, to test them, to see if they had the right stuff. And if you passed the test, then all of it was there for the taking—the joyful riot of color and smells of Jackson Heights, the eclectic streets of Greenwich Village, the elusive tranquility of Prospect Park, the benches at the Battery, where one could sit undisturbed and stare at the “lady of the harbor.” Smita remembered what Shannon had once said: “This city is like some giant social experiment conducted every single day. This place should be a fucking powder keg—but somehow, it’s not.”
As they got closer to Vithalgaon, Mohan, too, fell silent. Smita looked out of the window at a grove of trees as Mohan slowed down to let a youth on a wobbly bicycle cross the road. She watched a farmer walking behind two skeletal oxen pulling a primitive-looking plough across a field and felt as if she were watching a scene from two hundred years ago. She noticed the garland of yellow marigolds coiled around the beasts’ horns, and for some reason, the tenderness of the gesture broke her heart. This, too, was her country, this inheritance, her birthright. Except that it wasn’t. She had been deprived of it, much as Meena had been. Of course there was no comparison between what she had suffered and what was done to Meena—Smita’s hand flew involuntarily to her unblemished face. But despite her privilege, her heart ached, and she felt a different kind of homesickness than what she’d felt for New York—the loss of something that had never fully belonged to her.
And yet, none of this—this bifurcated sense of self, this rending—was extraordinary. If her years as a reporter had taught her anything, it was these two things: One, the world was filled with people who were adrift, rudderless, and untethered. And two, the innocent always paid for the sins of the guilty.
A memory floated into her head, distant but breathtakingly sharp. Smita—at age eight or nine?—being pulled into Pushpa Auntie’s lap, snuggling into the warmth of the older woman’s flabby body, Pushpa’s upper arms flapping as she hugged Smita. “See?” Pushpa was saying to her son. “See how she sits in my lap? All cuddly-cuddly. Not like you. Mr. Stuck-up.”
“She’s a girl,” Chiku said contemptuously. “And she’s a year younger than me.”
What was she remembering? And why was Chiku scowling and rubbing the back of his head?
After lunch at Chiku’s flat, the three of them—Rohit, Chiku, and herself—lounged on the sectional. Smita and her brother each read an Enid Blyton novel from their father’s prized first-edition collection while Chiku flipped through the pages of Filmfare. From where they sat, they could hear Pushpa Auntie yelling at the servant in the kitchen. During one particularly fervent string of insults flung by Pushpa Auntie, Rohit looked up from his book and winked at his sister. Smita winked back. They both loved Pushpa Auntie and knew that the woman’s bark was worse than her bite.
“God,” Chiku spat out suddenly, “I hate her.”
“Who?” they asked in unison.
“Who? My mother, who else? She drives me mad.”
Rohit and Smita exchanged a shocked look. They couldn’t imagine talking about their mummy in such a manner. As if he’d read their mind, Chiku said, “I wish your parents would adopt me.”
“But your mummy’s nice,” Smita said.
Chiku shook his head. “I can’t stand her.”
Pushpa came into the living room, her cheeks flushed. Smita felt a pang of sympathy. She had always thought of Pushpa Auntie as being as robust and resilient as a battleship. But seeing her through Chiku’s hostile eyes, she felt a strange sympathy for her mother’s best friend. She wondered if Chiku’s mother knew how he felt about her, and her heart ached at the thought. She shut her novel as she got to her feet. “Shall I get you a glass of water, Auntie?” she said. “It’s a hot day.”