He hoped that Gital Didi had already taken her leave for the night. And she had. Perhaps it was the relief of her absence that propelled him forward, that made him drop to his knees in front of his mother and begin sobbing, the sounds caught in his throat, as if a creature were trapped there.
“Ma, I have made a real friend. A real Indian friend. And it is a woman. And she is not like anyone I’ve ever met. She … listens to me and respects me and wants to make others listen to me and respect me. And just being around her—it makes me wish that we still spoke to each other. That I could tell you everything that I want to tell you.”
He paused for a moment to let the creature in his throat struggle a bit more, and then he let several strong breaths in and out, trying hard to calm himself down as much as he could. Then the words poured out of him, as he began to tell her about how, exactly, he had met Ranjana, about the party she gave, about her kindness to him. He wasn’t sure why he was speaking or why he was telling her all this. He felt the recklessness of it all, how it would only injure his mother further, to know that he had found some kind of version of—no, replacement for—Swati. But he could not have foreseen what happened next.
His mother moved, decisively. She pulled off her purple sunglasses, and she stood. Not the stark position in which he had found her earlier, right before Gital Didi had come in and interrupted, but a position of resolve, of meaningfulness.
“Harit, beta,” she said, her voice tough and smooth, like a healed wound. “You’ve finally saved us.”
*
She spoke to the point of being long-winded: she told him that she had been waiting for him to finish his mourning and find his own way before engaging with him. She explained to him that she could see, that Gital Didi had taken her to the doctor, that her cataracts were manageable—and that, because of this, she knew full well that he had been dressing up. Harit froze at this, this information almost too much for him, but she touched his face, ran a finger over his mustache, then pulled him close, and they wept against each other. There was something about the way that she both received his weight and pushed against it that acknowledged that Swati’s passing was not his fault. Even given the pleasure of having a conversation with his mother after all this time, Harit saw this physical language as perhaps the most wonderful revelation of all.
Then Harit told his mother the kinds of thoughts that he never believed that he’d be able to tell anyone, let alone her. How, in India, it had been very easy for him to plan his future: his family would find him a girl when he was the right age—midtwenties, perhaps—and there would be a lovely but brief ceremony, an exchange of gifts, and he would continue living his life, giving his wife a child or two and feeling terror over being a father. In the end, bolstered by his wife’s responsibility and goodwill, he would settle into the role and assert his fatherhood by way of routine tirades. This is what he saw other men doing, so he assumed it was what he would be expected to do. Knowing his own shyness, he feared this entire process, but at least he knew what the process would be.
All of this was the plan until his father clutched his chest, until the sweat collected in the grooves above his collarbone and his eyes became protrusions in his head, the whites expanding, and Harit knew, even as he saw the violent knocking of that body on the kitchen floor, that everything he had assumed about his life was going to change. The family flew across the world, as far away as his mother could get from the tragedy, not knowing that she would trade tragedies just as she would hemispheres. As Harit watched the world unspooling under the plane, he couldn’t tell what was stronger—his terror at having to decipher America or his relief at having dodged married life, at least for the time being. He had been in India just long enough to see his marriage prospects pale in comparison to other men’s, to see how undesirable he was. As the world changed, as American culture inserted itself into Indian life more than he could have predicted, women were starting to introduce rules and standards where few had been before. It was possible now for the girl down the street, so convinced until recently that she deserved nothing more extravagant than a market owner, to expect an attractive husband where an industrious one may once have sufficed. The same woman would make it understood that Harit was not handsome, that his hair and his rumpled clothing and his rumble of a voice were not so valuable, after all, not when the Internet was making layers of romance more visible than ever. There were no longer categories as simple as “handsome” or “ugly”; there were subcategories of “marriageably handsome” or “unmarriageably ugly.” As Harit explained all this, standing in his living room, his mother wiped more tears from her eyes, then hugged him once more, her physical gesture telling him that he was being too harsh on himself.
Ironically, he told her, he had always had Swati to protect him from women. Dazzling—so dazzling, in fact, that she dazzled herself out of the marriage game—she had been such a large part of his life that he had no reason to seek the charms of women outside his home. Sex was something discussed in vulgar terms by other boys in passing, and Harit, so accustomed to turning away from the other daunting things in life, turned away from it, too. He turned to Swati, to the only embrace that truly mattered. And how he missed Swati! How he knew his mother missed Swati! Swati—a word that they now passed back and forth like a prayer.
“Swati taught you more than I could,” his mother said. Harit shook his head no, but she stopped him. “I have been wrong about many things. Swati was the better teacher. But what I did get right was hope itself. I hoped that you would come to discuss these things with me, in all the ways that I have not been able to discuss them with you. I’ve failed—but my hope did not.”
This admission, that hope had never left them, allowed Harit to consider a question, a question that was in itself an answer, yet he had to ask it instead of state it, so afraid was he of telling her too much before he even understood it himself:
“What if who I want—in that way—is not a woman at all?”
At that, Harit’s mother told him one last story: the truth about her and Gital Didi.
Harit fainted.