“By the way, I got you something.” Jane slipped a brown paper package out of her gym bag and handed it to Bindu.
Bindu had to laugh. “You didn’t!” she said without having to open it.
Jane, Connie, and Bindu met for dinner and wine every Wednesday, and Jane and Connie had spent their last gathering dissecting, in thorough detail, the pros and cons of various lubes. It was a subject Bindu had no experience with, which the two women found hilarious. Bindu hadn’t shared with them that a man hadn’t been involved in her physical pleasures since her husband. There were plenty of ways to skin that particular horny cat on one’s own. But everyone didn’t need to know everything.
Her new friends, it would seem, had done quite a bit of indulging in the very eager pool of lustfulness that was Shady Palms.
“It might be time to put Richard out of his misery. The man has been following you around like a puppy dog the entire time you’ve been here.”
“Maybe,” Bindu said as they came to Jane’s building and parted ways. But not before Jane wiggled her brows and declared that cute clothes weren’t the only way for a woman to celebrate herself.
Bindu knew that. She also knew that she was listening to all the voices inside her—her mother, Rajendra, every person who’d ever looked at her and seen a slut unless she shrank herself into a tight little ball. But living life on her own terms meant she had to be intentional about it. She refused to let her choices be mere acts of rebellion. Freedom meant she’d do things for the right reasons, when she was good and ready for them. Because now she could.
Which didn’t mean she didn’t utterly revel in Richard’s pursuit. After a long hot shower in her jewel-toned bathroom, she made herself a cup of chai in her quartz and glass kitchen and took it to her lanai. The roar of the ocean mixed with the melodic notes of old Bollywood ballads playing on the Bluetooth speaker Cullie had given her as sunshine poured life into her skin. She sank into her papasan chair and opened her email, anticipation making her heart race in the most exhilarating way.
As the sixty-five-year-old grandmother of a coding genius, Bindu was proud to admit how very much she loved technology. Who would have believed human beings could do this? Communicate across distance in real time, all the time? It was the kind of magic that had colored her grandmother’s stories.
As a little girl, growing up in Goa, Bindu had wanted nothing more than to burrow into her grandmother’s soft cotton sari and fall into her stories. She’d dreamed them into existence every night with herself as the hero, those worlds alive inside her in Technicolor like the movies her grandmother sneaked her into.
The princess trapped in a cave, plotting ways to escape as the prince fought seven-headed monsters and fanged serpents to rescue her.
The princess in disguise, strolling through bazaars, naively stealing food and being chased down for her crime, only to be rescued by a handsome rogue.
The princess throwing herself in front of the sword meant to pierce her warrior husband.
How naive it had been to believe herself the hero simply because she was part of the action. How she’d romanticized it all. She’d bought into her role as the one in trouble, the one making trouble, the one deserving of its consequences. Maybe she’d bought into it even more than everyone around her had. Because Bindu had never been able to control the even-more-ness inside her. Not once had it struck her as odd that every one of those stories had centered on men.
It’s the way of the world. Another of her mother’s aphorisms that made it possible to keep going no matter what you lost. A blessing. On the surface.
What would her grandmother have thought about email? A note composed in one corner of the world that miraculously and instantaneously appeared in any other corner of the world so long as you had a magic screen.
But like all magic, some witches would find a way to misuse this.
Seventeen emails from the HOA.
Really?
One would think drying bras on a clothesline in your own home was akin to streaking naked across a crowded bazaar in broad daylight. Or getting naked in front of a camera. But no, she wasn’t going to think about that.
This was low even for them.
Then again. Undergarments dried just as well in your bathroom. But there was just such inexplicable joy in annoying pretentious people, Bindu couldn’t help herself.
I don’t want it to be the way of the world, Aie!
She’d been slapped across her face for saying that. The sting of her mother’s palm across her cheek anytime Bindu “showed her true colors” had been just another way of the world.
The important thing was that Bindu had not turned into her mother. She was living her true colors now, and it didn’t matter how long it had taken her to get here.
She skimmed her email. Richard （was there a more regal name?） was an author of some repute. Fine, the National Book Award was more than just some repute. The man sent the most beautiful emails. His words were caresses.
Those emails were the reason he had scored a third date. How many men described the bow of your lips as plump doves in flight? Your eyes as the harbingers of a storm?
Nope, nothing from Richard yet. To be fair, he’d written to her just half an hour ago, telling her that the eroticism of his anticipation for her company harkened his lost youth. That had sounded an awful lot like a euphemism for sex. Who used the word eroticism without expecting dinner to move their incipient connection from the ethereal to the tangible?
She shivered. Yup, she loved words. Possibly even more than she loved orgasms. The man was probably resting up for the night.
With a click that she told herself was more hopeful than desperate, she refreshed her inbox. It took a while to reload, as though it knew her impatience as she waited for it to scour cyberspace for love notes. Then: nothing.
Except, of course, the seventeen emails complaining about her red push-up bra. One of the best parts of moving to America was the beautiful undergarments.
“Rule about Unmentionables.” Yes, that was the subject line. Stacked upon which were sixteen rows of “Re: Rule about Unmentionables” cc’d to twelve email addresses, each of them belonging to another pearl clutcher.
If they’d been cold at the open house, they had turned downright hostile after she’d moved to Shady Palms, this group of women who ruled the HOA.
Why oh why had she decided to take them on again?
Because if not now, then when?
The betrayal that flashed in Alisha’s eyes whenever the topic of Bindu’s moving out came up hurt. Bindu wished she could explain what had come over her that day at the open house. Even if she understood it herself, it would mean sharing things she could never explain. The things she’d done. The person she’d been before she was a wife and a mother and a grandmother. She’d worked too hard to put it all behind her, in the vault of the past, to survive.
Bindu had considered herself happy, living with her daughter-in-law in the house she had shared with Bindu’s son. It wasn’t as strange as it sounded. Bindu could hardly abandon the girl after her son had done it.
Ashish letting someone like Alisha go was something Bindu still couldn’t wrap her head around. If anything, she’d worried about Alisha leaving her son, but never the other way around.