The Direction of the Wind: A Novel
Mansi Shah
1
SOPHIE
2019
Sophie Shah presses her slim body against the cold wall that separates her bedroom from her papa’s. What used to be Papa’s, she reminds herself, but can’t dwell on that thought for too long. If she does, tears will flow, and it is senseless to let that happen again. A strand of her long, thick black hair loosens from her braid and falls across her forehead, irritating her eye. She does not dare tuck it behind her ear, fearful that if she moves even a centimeter, her fois will hear the thin gold bangles on her arms jingle and stop their conversation. She blinks hard, forcing her eyes to obey and not tear up again, and she concentrates on the exchange in the next room.
Sharmila Foi and Vaishali Foi, Papa’s older sisters, are packing his clothing and personal effects. As a dutiful adult daughter, Sophie should have handled that task. But she couldn’t. The clothes still smell of him—of the almond oil he used each morning on his unruly black hair and the talcum powder that kept his skin dry during the blistering summer heat in Ahmedabad. She cannot bear to see the dress shirts neatly pressed, folded, and stacked according to their muted tones inside the wardrobe, knowing Papa would never wear them again. Knowing that when he placed them inside, he did not know it would be the last time he would do that. His death was sudden. Heart attack. He’d been at his office, and an employee had found him on the cold white marble floor. Sophie often wonders what his last moments were like. Could he feel the life drifting out of him? Was he in pain? Has he moved to his next life already? Will his soul find Sophie again as she continues through this one? Will she feel his presence against her skin like a gentle breeze on a warm night?
Vaishali Foi has a ring of keys on a clasp tucked into the top of her sari slip, just below the exposed, doughy belly rolls that separate the top of the slip and her blouse. The keys clink against each other as she moves through the room. Sophie has grown up in this house and knows every corner of it, including the perfect place to cup her ear against the wall to listen to what is going on in the bedroom next door. She’d learned that spot as a little girl, when she used to hear her parents speaking in hushed tones.
“This will be better for her,” Vaishali Foi says to her sister in Gujarati, their native language.
Sharmila Foi clucks her tongue. “Hah, it is the only way.”
“Who knows how it will end up if we wait much longer, yaar. An unmarried girl her age living by herself would be unthinkable.”
Sophie cringes. Papa passed away nine days ago, and these two women are the only family she has left. She has no siblings, and her mummy died when she was six years old. It has been her and Papa alone in this house for the twenty-two years since. She would give anything to stay in her home, but it is not proper for a twenty-eight-year-old woman to be living alone. Her fois made that very clear. And even if they hadn’t, Sophie knows living in the house is no longer possible. Customs are not up for debate, and she has always abided by them. Well, almost always.
By this point, she should have been married and living with her husband’s family. Her friends had all married years ago, like they were supposed to. Sophie has always been an avid rules follower, and not being married yet is the only custom she has broken, but she could not leave Papa. And now, after such a quick and unexpected end, it is she who is suddenly left behind. So, when her fois approached her not even three days after Papa’s death to tell her that they had found a suitor available for her marriage, she agreed. What other option did she have? She had managed to avoid her arranged marriage for longer than most. People would raise their eyebrows after she passed the age of twenty-five and had yet to marry, but they assumed she was the devoted daughter looking after her widowed papa. And they hadn’t been wrong. After her mummy died, she knew she had to take care of him. But now there were no more excuses.
“She’s a good girl,” Sharmila Foi, the younger and softer of the two, says. “She knows she cannot live in this house by herself. I just wish we had more time to give her.”
“Time is not up to us,” Vaishali Foi says. “The auspicious dates are running out, and then we would have to wait for the next propitious period. We are lucky the Patels are willing to take her at this point. Who knows if they will find someone more suitable if we wait? Young men these days are so fickle. It’s not like it was when we were young. Now, they want too many choices and don’t know how to work for the marriage, hah?”
“The Patels are a good family,” Sharmila Foi says. “Local. Good biodata. Kiran has good height-body. Rajiv would have approved of this match.”
Vaishali Foi clucks her tongue. “Whether he approves or not, it must be done. Sophie is smart with her numbers, but she knows nothing of the ways of the world. Rajiv made sure of that. She needs someone to take care of her properly.”
“It is true,” Sharmila Foi says. “We will not be here forever . . . someone must protect her when all the blood relatives are gone.”
“That is the husband’s duty,” Vaishali Foi says.
Sophie hears their bangles clinking as her fois move about the room.
“It’s good that it only took us two days to teach her to make a proper Gujarati meal,” Vaishali Foi continues. “It would be such an embarrassment if after all of this, she cannot perform the basic duties of a wife. Rajiv let this go on too long, not teaching her the proper roles she must serve.”
Sophie flinches, feeling the sting of their words. Her fois have served as her surrogate mummies since hers passed away, but she knows they have never understood why Papa didn’t arrange her marriage earlier, when Sophie would have had her pick of the suitors. Their children had followed conventions when it came to beginning the marriage phase, and for the past three years they had begged Rajiv to make this a priority for Sophie so she didn’t end up with a half-wit, or, worse still, alone. Rajiv made the occasional inquiry, but ultimately no one seemed worthy enough for his only daughter, and he could not bear to part with her. After he passed, her fois made it their top priority to find someone to take care of her when all of them were gone.
But their task was not easy because Sophie is damaged goods in the Indian marriage market. A now orphaned spinster whose papa allowed her to focus on her education, obtain an accounting degree, and pursue a career rather than forcing her to learn the ways of the kitchen and management of servants. Her fois were relieved to have found a man from a good family willing to marry her despite her untraditional lifestyle. Sophie knows marriage is for the best, but as she thinks about her future surrounded by strangers and the fact that she will never see her papa again, the cloak of loneliness wraps more tightly around her.
“Maybe if Nita had been around, Sophie would have been raised to do the right things at the right times,” Sharmila Foi says.
Vaishali Foi scoffs, the keys at her waist jingling as she walks. “Like that woman could have taught anyone right. Look what she did with her life.”
Sophie pushes her ear closer to the wall. Nita was her mummy, but Sophie recalls so little about her now. Just a few distant memories: the heady smell of paint while she worked on canvases near the dining room window, the round red chandlo between her brows signifying she was a married woman, the way she would stare at the sky when she sat with Sophie on the family’s hichko in the front yard, that she brushed her hair with 101 strokes every morning and every night and did the same to Sophie, counting each one aloud. The main thing Sophie recalls about her mummy is that although she had never set foot in the country, she loved France.