The second was of Ashish as a baby in faded sepia tones, toothless and abundantly joyful, with the thick head of hair. Her ex-husband’s crowning glory was something he’d been blessed with in the womb.
How Aly had yearned to have hair like that. Silky, bountifully thick, with just enough of a wave to make it look like he had used product on it even though he just used body wash. Too lazy to even open the bottle of shampoo sitting right there in their shower. Or just too complacent in the blessing that was his hair.
He’d taken it for granted, just as he’d taken all his other physical attributes for granted. The lean body, the flat belly, the unfairly white teeth, the glowing skin. Never carried them like the advantage they were.
When Aly had first met Ashish in her freshman biology class at the University of Florida, he’d been fresh off the boat and entirely unaware of it. She had noticed, with a shock of awareness, almost immediately after first meeting him, that something about him had felt inexplicably familiar to her. Before she knew it, being in his presence had become wrapped up in this sense of having found something she’d been searching for. A bright light amid the dreariness outside her. A leak in the pressure inside her.
His grungy rock-concert T-shirts; his overgrown hair and careless stubble; the nerdy glasses: she’d never met anyone so comfortable in their skin. More significantly, she’d never met anyone so oblivious of her own frizzy curls, her rounded body, or the undulating scars on her cheeks from teenage cystic acne.
Four years into their relationship, they’d been sitting under an oak tree on campus, his head in her lap, her back against the craggy trunk, her fingers playing in his hair, when he’d told her she was his deep shade in the beating sun that was life, singing it to her in his golden voice.
One look at you
and a thought brushed my mind
Life is the desert sun
and you the deep shade of woods
An ageless Urdu ghazal, a ballad from a Bollywood film they both loved about a young couple who wanted to live life counter to the world’s expectations.
It was the moment that had cemented who Aly was in her own mind, made her fall into herself. She’d loved being that: soothing shade in the brutal sun. An Oasis.
It was the moment she’d realized that Ash didn’t just not see her physical flaws, but his mind processed them as beautiful. Back then, before she knew that his most ruthless criticisms would cut at something much more deeply buried than physical beauty, he’d lit her up. Exactly the way the rays of sunshine had found their way through the thick oak canopy above them that day.
Ashish had turned his head in her lap and looked up at her, his hazel eyes soft and burning at the same time, slightly unfocused because he had taken off his glasses. “You know what? We should marry each other. Nothing else is ever going to feel this right.”
That was Ashish. That proposal. Him in a nutshell. An edge of insult threaded through with the purest emotion. It wasn’t until much later that Aly figured out how he used those two things to balance himself out. The dismissive cynicism that kept him from getting too invested in anything that might take away his control, and the purity of unfiltered, uncomplicated feelings. He constantly juggled those two things in order to survive without ever having to face any uncomfortable parts of himself.
When Aly had met his mother, she’d known exactly where the happy, loving parts of him had come from. But it was also where his belief that no woman could be enough had come from. He barely ever mentioned his father, but the dynamic of his parents’ marriage had taught him that a woman’s job was to constantly prove her worth.
The kicker was that Bindu didn’t even know how much she constantly worked at proving herself. She thought she was so different from Aly. But Aly just didn’t know how to hide it.
After grad school, Aly hadn’t been able to pursue a job in TV because the hours and the intern’s pay hadn’t fit with their goals. She’d put her dream on hold until the time was right. But as soon as her dream had taken form and become attached to her individual goals, it had stuck in Ashish’s eyes like a dislodged lash he couldn’t extract. Aly’s parents’ reaction had been much the same as Ashish’s, but Bindu had found a vicarious joy in Aly’s getting the reporter job at SFLN. At her living on her own terms.
It was her mother-in-law’s favorite phrase. Whatever that even meant.
Well, in this moment it meant that a man had died “following the act of coitus,” as the doctor had declared when informing them of the death.
Bindu had blinked up at the doctor, who looked far too young to be declaring deaths, as he walked away, and then turned to Aly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve found a man dead, you know. I was the one who found Rajendra. I didn’t need a resident to tell me what I already knew.”
Saying the words had turned Bindu’s skin paper pale, leaving behind a constellation of freckles across her cheeks. Since then, Bindu had barely said a single word.
Aly stuffed Ashish’s pictures back in the drawer and ignored the inexplicable anger that burned inside her. The reason those stupid pictures were in that drawer was that Bindu thought they would hurt Aly’s feelings if they were on a wall. Aly hated when Bindu coddled her.
Why do you need to be coddled so much? Ashish had always said to her. You women want to play the feminism card, call it equality, but all you want is to be coddled.
Slamming the drawer shut with more force than she usually allowed herself, she set the cups of tea on a tray and took it to the bedroom, where the barest amount of light filtered through the blinds.
No, she would not let her ex-husband’s voice tell her that letting Bindu stay in bed so long was coddling her. A man had died in her arms. Well, not in her arms, exactly.
Embarrassment heated Aly’s face at the inappropriate urge to laugh. Cullie and Bindu were rubbing off on her.
Except that Bindu was nowhere to be found this morning. Her irreverent—“extra,” as Cullie called her—mother-in-law seemed utterly snuffed out as she pretended to be asleep while Aly stood there, studying her over a steaming tea tray.
“Morning, Ma,” Aly said. “Chai’s ready!”
Bindu sniffled and kept her eyes closed. She hadn’t cried, but her perfect button nose was bright red with holding in tears.
“I used a lot of lemongrass and ginger. I bet you won’t be able to complain about there not being enough,” Aly said, placing the tray on the nightstand.
When Bindu continued to pretend to be asleep, Aly put a hand on her shoulder. “Ma, it’s noon. If you don’t get some chai in your system, you’re going to get a headache.”
“Too late for that.” Finally a response.
“Do you want acetaminophen?”
Bindu pushed off the pillow she was hugging and sat up. Her eyes were puffy, and her hair was pressed up on one side. The batik kaftan nightie she was wearing seemed oddly droopy around her. As though she had shrunk overnight.
Her phone buzzed next to her, and she stiffened, a tremble going through her at the sound.
“Is it the coven again?” Aly picked up Bindu’s phone.
The fact that Bindu just sat there and didn’t grab the phone away said a million words.
“Those bitches,” Cullie said from under the block-printed Jaipur quilt. “That phone has been buzzing nonstop.”