“I did not leave my husband, Mummy. He left me. Did you want me to chain him to my bedpost?”
Her mother gasped.
Aly almost gasped too, with the force of letting out the words that had been trapped inside her for so long. A fierceness beat in her heart. She felt like she’d thrown herself from a high-rise without hitting concrete, and the force of it almost lifted her off her seat.
“Don’t be crude, child. Worse, don’t use your crudeness to hide from the truth.” Her mother yanked her back to reality. “You refused to move to India with him. So technically you are the one who left him.” For someone who barely altered her tone no matter how brutally she wielded it, Mummy stressed the words you and him with the force of a bad actor.
After being in India for five years, Mummy was losing her American deadpanness. Americans tended to believe themselves loud. But they mistook their confidence and entitlement for actual largeness of mannerisms. You had to watch a Bollywood film once or attend one Indian party to know how wrong they were.
Aly could have told her mother that Ashish had known she would never move to India, which amounted to him choosing to leave her. She could also get into how he’d used returning to India as the final battle for power in their marriage, and she’d failed the test. But Karen was not the kind of person who allowed her opinions to be changeable. It would count as a moral failing.
“In either case, he’s only here for a short while. He’ll be back in India soon, I’m sure. So please don’t expect anything to change.”
“I don’t expect, I pray. His will be done.” With that Mummy went on her merry way, the crash of the waves on Varca Beach the last sound Aly heard before the phone went silent.
“I love you too, Mummy,” Aly whispered—fine, hissed—at the phone before tossing it onto the passenger seat.
The phone was about as moved by Aly’s declaration as her mother was by Aly’s feelings.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BINDU
Poornima turned out to be everything I’d ever dreamed it would be. But it destroyed something more beautiful than anything I could ever have dreamed of.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
I have an appointment, so you’ll have to eat by yourself,” Bindu said to her son as she poured water into the flour and started kneading the dough for rotis.
She couldn’t get herself to say the words I have a date to him.
What made it worse was that this wasn’t even one of her living-her-life dates. It was one of Cullie’s research dates from Twinge.
It had been a couple of days since Alisha had smashed a bottle of wine to celebrate Ashish’s return （and they called Bindu dramatic） and then allowed Cullie to create a dating profile for her （with a big fake smile plastered across her face）。 Ashish had pretended not to watch, his lips pursed in that way he’d always pursed them when he didn’t get his way, ever since he was a boy.
Well, good for Alisha for squeezing every passive-aggressive drop of mileage out of the situation.
Bindu wasn’t going to complain, because talking about the app had been a good way to avoid a conversation about Richard’s death. Turns out Cullie had told Ashish about it. Which is why he was here. Bindu wanted to be angry at Cullie, but how could she not have told her father? Ashish might have failed at being a husband, but he’d always been a good father. After the divorce, Cullie was the one person he’d constantly been in touch with.
That didn’t mean Bindu was going to fill Ashish in on the details. Neither about Richard nor about having coffee with a man they’d found on Twinge who made music videos in Bollywood and Hollywood. Like every other remotely successful person, he was now retired in Florida. It was a surprisingly good match, so maybe this app-shap business wasn’t as random as it sounded.
“You don’t have to make me rotis, Ma,” Ashish said in the voice that all his life had meant the exact opposite of the words he was saying.
She knew she had spoiled him. But wasn’t that the job of mothers?
Throughout his marriage, Bindu had watched as he helped Alisha around the house. Her mother’s heart had been so proud of every diaper changed, every dish rinsed, every plant watered. In retrospect, she was ashamed of her pride. Alisha had done all those things too, ten times over. And all she’d heard was people praising Ashish for what a good husband he was.
Dusting the flour off her hands before she started kneading the dough in earnest, Bindu gave the pot of fish curry a gentle stir before covering it and leaving it to simmer.
Her mind strayed to Alisha. Bindu was hungry for an update on how her date had gone the previous night. Before Ashish had shown up, Bindu had sensed the tiniest spark of excitement in Alisha about this dating thing. That poor woman really needed something nice to happen to her.
Bindu threw a look at her son. He’d made his declaration about her not needing to make rotis for him and then gone back to his phone. She tried not to let the prickle of annoyance grow. He was her only child, and of course she was happy to see him. It had been two years since he’d abandoned his family. So it had been two years since she’d seen him. They talked every few weeks, but it was the longest in her life that she’d gone without seeing him.
Contrary to popular belief, Bindu had tried to stop him. Karen Menezes had called her incessantly after he left, telling Bindu to be a good mother and appeal to her son to forgive Alisha for whatever she’d done.
Karen was exactly the kind of woman Bindu had spent her life avoiding. One of those women who believed themselves too genteel, too pious, too virtuous （yuck, that word）， too everything for lesser mortals. She had sided squarely with her son-in-law in the divorce, making it even more impossible for Bindu to not side with Alisha.
Bindu had tried to get her son to see that all marriages had their ups and downs. Staying when the going got tough was the only secret there was to a long marriage. What she’d really wanted to do was scream at him that he was a lucky bastard to have Alisha and Cullie, and he was being an idiot. But somehow, with Ashish she couldn’t stop being the compliant Bindu she’d been with Rajendra. The mother who’d had to be sensitive enough for both parents. The mother who was always compensating.
I deserve to be happy too, Ma, he’d said. Why does only Aly get to chase her dream? What about my dreams?
Maybe past generations were wise to decree that the dreams of two people could never both be important in a marriage. They were opposing forces, and opposing forces always tore things in half.
You were lucky to never want anything more than a family and a home, he had said to Bindu as he filed for divorce. And look at how well you did it.
It had been one of those moments that had hammered Bindu like nails in a coffin, slamming into focus all the things she’d allowed to die. All the things she’d had to hide from him. For him. As always, she’d buried the hurt where she couldn’t feel it.
The day Alisha signed the divorce papers, Bindu had sat next to her daughter-in-law filled with an indescribable rage and told her that she wasn’t going back to India with her son.
Please don’t leave me, Alisha had said with the exact kind of vulnerable hope with which Cullie used to ask if she could sleep in Bindu’s bed when she had nightmares. Just until all of this makes sense.