He touched the spot where she’d kissed him. “Bye. Be safe. Phone me when you’re at the gate. I’ll be waiting in here or outside. Just in case your flight is delayed.”
“Mohan, it’s getting late. It’s going to take you forever to get back home. You should leave now. Please.”
He frowned. “Don’t be silly, yaar. I’ll wait until your flight takes off.”
“But that makes no sense . . .”
“Smita.” He put his finger to her lips. “It’s an Indian tradition. Now, go.”
“Bye. Love you.”
“Bye.”
Smita phoned Mohan as soon as she was settled in the lounge. The phone rang and rang, but Mohan didn’t pick up. Had he changed his mind and left? She hung up, resolving to try again after she went to the restroom. She still had plenty of time before her flight. But just as she was about to place the phone in her handbag, it rang. “Sorry, yaar,” Mohan said. “They kicked me out. I’m standing outside with what seems like half of Mumbai. And it’s so bloody noisy, I couldn’t hear the phone.”
She hated the thought of Mohan standing in the thick crowd behind the barricades. “My flight doesn’t take off for another two hours. What’s the use of you waiting? Everything went smoothly.”
“Smita, in my family, we always wait until someone’s plane takes off. What if there’s a delay or something?”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay. I can tell I’m not going to win this one.”
They talked for another ten minutes, and then Smita said, “Hey, I want to go use the restroom. I’ll call you from the plane before takeoff, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Smita found a seat across from a family of four when she returned to the lounge. She smiled at the harried-looking mother, who seemed responsible for the two young children, a boy and a girl, while her husband walked around the room, stretching and yawning languidly. The woman smiled back at her self-consciously. “My first time to Am’rica,” she said in heavily accented English.
“Beautiful children,” Smita said. “How old are they?”
“He is five. She is two.”
Smita nodded, then shut her eyes, the events of the day finally catching up with her. Earlier, she and Mohan had taken Abru to Hanging Gardens, where the girl had been transfixed by the roadside antics of a dancing bear. Then, they’d returned to Zarine’s apartment to drop off the child. The older woman had made her disappointment and disapproval crystal clear, barely speaking to Smita. “Bon voyage,” she’d said stiffly when Smita and Mohan were leaving for the airport.
Smita decided to get a cup of coffee. She turned to the woman across from her and motioned to her suitcase. “Can you watch this for me?” she said. “I’m just going to go get something to drink.” Even as she asked, she was aware of how she’d never make this request of a stranger in post-9/11 America. She had a hunch that Indians had not yet embraced the culture of distrust and fear that had permeated every aspect of civil life in America.
The woman nodded. “Of course.”
When she returned, the woman’s daughter had knocked over Smita’s suitcase and was sitting on top of it. “Sorry, sorry,” the woman said. “These children . . .”
Smita smiled. “It’s perfectly fine.” If you knew everywhere this suitcase has been, she thought, you’d know that this is the least of its maltreatment.
Smita sat down, sipping her Nescafé. She’d had a cup at lunch, Mohan sitting across from her—the two of them barely speaking. She had sensed him pulling away from her, transferring his affection to Abru. Even though she was hurt, she had envied Mohan his ability to love so effortlessly. Mohan, Abdul, Meena. They belonged to a different tribe, men and women who were willing to risk everything for love. Perhaps she would have joined their ranks, too, if Sushil had not scarred her at age twelve. Sushil’s menacing face, possessive and haranguing, rose in front of her, and she closed her eyes to escape the image.
Something hot and wet touched her thigh, and she yelped in pain. Smita saw the coffee stain spread on her pants and looked up to see the little girl giggling and running away. She pulled the linen away from her skin as the mother rose and grabbed her daughter. Heads turned as the child screamed bloody murder, a sound that immediately transported Smita back to that awful night when they had fled Birwad and Abru had screamed. Smita forced herself to focus on the present. The child before her was in full meltdown, and the father, who was at the far end of the lounge, was hurrying back angrily.
Frightened by the look on his face, Smita rose and blocked his path. “Please,” she said to him. “It’s nothing. Just a little coffee. A little accident, is all.”
The man gave her a puzzled look before turning to his wife for an explanation. The woman, still holding the screaming child, spoke to him urgently in a language Smita didn’t understand.
“Sorry, ji,” the man said to Smita.
“It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine,” she said, and then smiled broadly to accentuate her words. She decided against heading into the restroom to wash out the coffee stain, not wanting to do anything to add to the parents’ embarrassment.
The man nodded and sat down across from Smita. He turned to his daughter, who was still fighting her mother. “Meena,” he said, “stop this nonsense immediately.”
Smita’s breath caught. “Her name is Meena?” she asked.
“Hah, ji.”
It’s a common name, Smita told herself. It’s like meeting someone named Mary in Ohio, for crying out loud. Probably half the women at this airport have that name. But then she looked down at the coffee stain on her pants. She had been burned. A girl named Meena had knocked hot coffee on her pants and burned her.
Smita stood up abruptly. Then, she slowly sat back down. This is ridiculous, she thought. You’re acting like one of those superstitious idiots that Papa loves to mock. The ones who see an image of Christ in a grilled cheese sandwich. You call this little spill a burn? After what you’ve seen? Shame on you for dishonoring Meena’s suffering. Now, get a grip. Pull the paperback out of your suitcase and distract yourself. All you have to do is sit still until you’re on that plane. Because—and you know this because you’ve done it a hundred times before—the cool, disinfected atmosphere of a plane is designed to make you forget whatever hot, humid, smelly city you are escaping from. It is designed to anesthetize you against remembering home.
Home? Had she just thought of Mumbai as home? The city that she had resented and feared for most of her life? A city filled with evil men like Sushil. But then, she argued with herself, hadn’t the same city also coughed up a Mohan? Hell, hadn’t it birthed and shaped the bones of a good and honorable man like Papa? How could she have let a man like Sushil blind her to this essential truth?
Out of the blue, Smita heard the laughter: Rohit and herself. Chiku and Anand, the boy who had lived one building over. And Anand’s little sister. What was her name? Tinka, that was it. Other children from the neighborhood, too, Christians and Parsis and Hindus, all gathered in the compound of the Harbor Breeze apartments, their heads tilted upward as they watched the rockets and comets explode in the night sky. As always, Papa had spent hundreds of rupees to treat the local kids to the fireworks display during the Hindu festival of Diwali. That was India, too—that nonchalance, that secularism, nobody blinking twice at that easy melding of different traditions and faiths.