That was why Sophie ended up with her French name. Nita had shunned the cultural norms that mandated that Rajiv’s mummy select Sophie’s name based on the location of the stars, and so Sophie has spent her entire life explaining to everyone in India why she doesn’t have a normal name like Swapna, Reena, Ketan, or Atul, like her cousins do. As a child, she often wished that Papa had been less progressive and lenient with Nita and had forced the traditional naming conventions upon her so that Sophie could blend in. She had hated saying her name aloud in school or at work and having people stare at her. She took after Papa and did not crave the attention of others, and living in Ahmedabad with a name like Sophie meant she went noticed more often than she cared to be.
After Nita died, Papa and their family barely spoke of her. With the passage of time, Sophie’s memories of her mummy started to fade, and with no one willing to speak about her, there was no way to revive them. Yet even though she remembers very little, Sophie still feels the urge to defend her mummy from her fois’ words. After all, who else is left to do it?
Sophie begins to move from the wall when she hears Sharmila Foi say, “I wonder how Sophie would have turned out if she hadn’t left.”
Vaishali Foi murmurs something Sophie cannot hear, and then, in a louder tone, says, “She would have filled Sophie’s head with all those crazy dreams of hers. She would have turned her into the same rebellious spirit who doesn’t know her place. The best thing for this family was when she ran away. With her gone, Rajiv at least could teach Sophie duty without disruption.”
Ran away?! Sophie’s mind reels. Her mummy died.
As Sophie mulls over her fois’ words, she scans her memories of the events surrounding Nita’s death twenty-two years earlier. She recalls that she had been too young to attend the funeral. But she remembers her fois coming home from it and putting a garland of vibrant orange marigolds around the framed photo of Nita that had been added to the puja room. Sophie presses her ear even closer to the wall, sure she has misheard her fois because she would have known if the story of her mummy was something different. In Ahmedabad, the streets have eyes and the wind has ears, so secrets like this would have been impossible to keep from her for all these years.
Sophie wants to burst into the room and ask them what they are talking about, but she knows better. She would only be chastised for eavesdropping. A good Indian girl should never speak out of turn is what they would say while looking at her disappointedly. And she has been that—a good Indian girl—for as long as she can remember.
If only Papa were still here, she thinks to herself as tears continue to prick her eyes, then I could ask him what they were talking about.
The burden of truly being alone in the world sits heavy on her heart. Because it had been just Papa and her in this big house for most of her life, they had developed a tight bond—closer than the average parent-child relationship she saw with her friends and cousins. He would never lie to her, and she never lied to him. It is what made her such an obedient daughter. She never wanted to disappoint him, so she’d never snuck out of the house with friends or tried alcohol that someone in university had gotten from a foreigner with a liquor license. Instead, she always behaved as was expected. And she will honor him by continuing to do that even though she desperately wants to tell her fois not to speak poorly about her parents when her memories are all she has left of them.
Sophie had convinced her fois to let her stay alone in the bungalow for one final night before moving into Vaishali Foi’s home until her wedding the week after, and then into her husband’s family home, where she will spend the rest of her life among the strangers who will become her new family. She has never been alone in the bungalow she grew up in. There were always servants or Papa or another relative, but now the servants have been dismissed, and her fois are in their own homes tending to their own children and grandchildren after having spent the majority of the last week and a half dealing with Rajiv’s passing.
The night is eerie as Sophie moves through the bungalow. The windows are open, and Sophie inhales the smells that waft in, letting them linger around her. Jasmine that blooms just outside the living room and releases the sweetest scent at night, the smell of fire and charcoal from the street vendor who roasts cashews with black pepper at his tiny cart, and lemon from the water the servants use to mop the floors. She will never smell this combination again. She will never smell home again.
Sophie hears a pack of dogs nearby, rickshas and scooters tooting their horns as they swerve through the streets, and firecrackers off in the distance. There must be a wedding somewhere, she thinks, knowing that October is the start of the wedding season in Ahmedabad. Her heart feels so broken and empty that she cannot contemplate celebrating anything. She cannot fathom that in a week she will be part of a wedding herself and embark on the most unknown chapter of her life. Who will greet her on the mandap? One of her fuas?
She glides across the cool marble floor and brushes her fingers along the ornately carved wooden dining room chairs. Last month, she and Papa were sitting in those chairs, going over the wedding schedule for this year. With so many weddings, each spanning a week or more, they strategized about which events to attend for which couple. They considered which families would have the best food and planned to go during mealtimes for those. They talked through which ones were all the way across town, requiring them to navigate hours of Ahmedabadi traffic, and came up with polite excuses. Of the nineteen weddings on the calendar between late October and the middle of December, before the auspicious period ended, none of those weddings were meant to be Sophie’s. Until now. Papa’s passing had made her Wedding Number Twenty for this season among their family and social circle.
She slowly climbs the marble staircase and pauses outside of Papa’s bedroom. Her fois had left the door open, his bed littered with piles of clothing, evidence of their efforts to pack his belongings. Having spent today removing all the valuables and transporting them to the safes in their homes, tomorrow they will ask the servants to finish what remains.
She moves into the closet room and tugs on a door, wanting to smell Papa’s shirts one last time. Memorize the scent. So she never forgets, the way she forgot the smell of her mummy. She knew it as a child, but it faded so many years ago despite how much she tried to conjure it, and she doesn’t want that to happen again. She has a set of house keys fastened to the waistband of her panjabi, and she finds the right one and begins to unlock the wardrobe doors, opening them all. She touches Papa’s button-down shirts and slacks, some still folded and wrapped in thick brown paper bundled together with twine from the cleaners. The paper crinkles as she unties the twine and exposes the shirts. She buries her face in the starched cotton and inhales deeply, knowing that unmistakable smell of Papa that lingers even after the clothes are washed. His shoes are lined up along the bottom. Everything in its place. Just as he had taught her. She smiles as she pulls open the drawers. His watches and rings are now gone, tucked away in his sisters’ safes; only the red velvet lining remains, and she imagines the items that used to be there.
In the very back of one drawer, she sees a box covered with dust. Her fois must have forgotten to look that far back. Wanting to make sure all Papa’s treasured possessions are preserved, she removes it. It is the size of a shoebox but is ornately decorated, like her fancy jewelry boxes that are wrapped in cloth and adorned with colorful stones.