Cullie’s brain was still stuck on the fact that he’d just insulted not only her but every human being who’d ever struggled with any kind of illness, mental or otherwise. Fortunately, her brain worked faster than his ever would.
She pressed a hand to her head, the Bollywood pose for regret. “Did she tell you she told me?” Cullie had never spoken to his ex-not-ex-had-she-ever-been-an-ex? wife.
Just like that, it was clear in his face.
What. An. Idiot. She’d. Been.
“Did you never file for divorce in the first place, or did you file for it and then change your mind?”
He stood there, mouth open, trying to figure out if she’d just figured it out or if his wife had called her. Finally he settled on a face that said the answer to her question wasn’t relevant. But it was the most relevant damned thing.
“It’s the first, isn’t it? You told me you were divorced when you hadn’t even filed for one.”
“I meant to. I contacted a lawyer. But you know how it was between us at the beginning. It was impossible to wait. You didn’t want to wait any more than I did.”
All the lies he’d told her splashed like acid inside her head. One corrosive drop after another. “If that’s true, if you really believed I was too into you to wait for you to leave your wife, why did you lie about the divorce?”
His gaze dropped to the floor, the first sign of shame.
But he didn’t know what shame was. Shame was being taken for a fool when you prided yourself on being the smartest person you knew. Shame was trusting a liar when you prided yourself on trusting no one.
“The point is, it was never about Shloka,” he said, smug again.
“Oh, it was always about Shloka.” The time he’d waited was the time it had taken them to take Shloka to market. He’d made sure she’d trusted him completely and handed him the app before he made his move. “Start looking for another job. Because I plan to make NewReal billions, and you won’t see a cent of it.” With that she walked away.
CHAPTER NINE
ALY
I’d spent so much time agonizing over how to ask her to do Poornima. But all I had to do was narrate the script and she was as lost in it as I was, the two of us equally helpless in our passion.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Sunshine flooded into Bindu’s kitchen, making the quartz countertops shimmer as Aly poured the lemongrass and ginger chai into three cups. It was past noon, but both Cullie and Bindu were still asleep in Bindu’s bedroom. More accurately, Cullie was passed out and Bindu was pretending to sleep.
Aly was supposed to have taken the couch, but she hadn’t been able to. So she’d put a comforter on the living room rug and slept there. She’d expected to be plagued by dreams of dead bodies. Instead she’d dreamed of Joyce and her mother fighting over her while Bindu laughed.
The sleep aid the doctor had given Bindu had turned her limp and restless at the same time. By the time it had finally knocked her out, it was well past midnight. Just a few hours after that, Cullie had arrived on the red eye and fallen asleep next to her drugged-out grandmother.
Aly had taken the day off today—even though it was the most awful timing, and Joyce had made sure Aly knew that—but she’d gotten a few hours of work in before she’d heard Bindu getting up to use the bathroom and then promptly returning to bed. As un-Bindu an act as anyone could imagine. When Bindu had responded to Aly’s “Morning, Ma!” with pretending to be asleep, Aly had turned to Bindu’s own fix for all things: chai.
The invigorating smell of it filled the condo, and Aly hoped it would be enough to infuse life back into her usually overenergetic mother-in-law.
Unlike Aly’s own kitchen, Bindu’s bordered on messy. Bindu described it as “artfully disarrayed.” Not to be confused with Aly’s artless perfection. To her credit Bindu never said that last part, but she did laugh when Aly added it as a joke.
That morning Aly had cleaned up out of habit. Then she’d felt bad, because Bindu had always made the effort to keep their kitchen—when they’d shared one—as perfect as Aly liked it. So Aly moved some things back to their disorderly places. The sugar pot on the island, the spice grinder on the counter, the kitchen towel not perfectly aligned on the oven handle.
Truth was, she’d never seen Bindu like this. Bindu tended to smile at the height of the flu; she made jokes at funerals. The blankness in her eyes since the previous night—a Bindu knocked off her game—had scared Aly. The ways in which Bindu was different from Aly had always been a comfort to her. Bindu worked harder than anyone to color outside the lines as much as she could. The irony made Aly smile. Her mother-in-law was super wound up about never appearing wound up.
All through their marriage Ashish had thought it “adorable” how tightly wound Aly was. Maybe that’s why she had married him. Her need to be good, to be correct: it was who she was. And when a man like Ashish Desai had loved her for it, she’d had not one single complaint.
Aly used her discretion, and common sense, to define what was right, instead of her mother’s way, which involved letting community and religion dictate it.
Karen put her role as a devout Goan Catholic mother above everything else. Heavy on the discipline, light on the fun. She did nothing without the permission of her priest, talked incessantly about Goa and how everything there was perfect, and believed with all her heart that the only way for life to end up okay was to thank God for it, preemptively and constantly. An oversize blanket to cover all her bases and keep any of her blessings from slipping away. For Aly it had always caused a perpetual sense of holding her breath.
Now she let it out, long and cleansing.
As Aly poured heated milk through a strainer into the teacups—because Cullie would gag if even a bit of milk skin escaped into the chai—it struck her out of nowhere that Bindu’s new home was scattered with pictures, framed prints sitting on tables and shelves and hanging from walls in artistic clusters. Most of them were of Cullie. A few of Aly. There were even some of Bindu in her youth. Pictures one might mistake for Gina Lollobrigida. Seriously, the women could be twins.
The bouffant hair, the winged eyeliner, the lush, darkly painted mouth, the regal high cheekbones. The chiffon sari with its psychedelic geometric print was where the similarities diverged.
How had Aly never noticed that there were no pictures of Ashish in the condo? Putting the milk pot down, she started opening drawers. Encountering everything from absurdly large stashes of nail files and lip balms to . . . oh . . . lube.
She noticed that the tube of lube was open, as though someone had hurriedly thrown it into the drawer. Aly snapped it shut and wiped up the little that had leaked out and forced herself not to have any feelings about that. Not a single one. She continued snooping through the drawers. Well, it wasn’t snooping. Bindu had said repeatedly that her home was Aly’s home.
And there it was, tucked way at the back of the bottom drawer, under a stack of notepads. Two metallic picture frames with Ashish’s smiling face. One was Aly and Ashish’s engagement picture. When they’d been at their happiest, knocked sideways by the serendipity of finding each other, sitting under a tree with their arms and legs intertwined.