The woman nodded. “Of course.”
When she returned, the woman’s daughter had knocked over Smita’s suitcase and was sitting on top of it. “Sorry, sorry,” the woman said. “These children . . .”
Smita smiled. “It’s perfectly fine.” If you knew everywhere this suitcase has been, she thought, you’d know that this is the least of its maltreatment.
Smita sat down, sipping her Nescafé. She’d had a cup at lunch, Mohan sitting across from her—the two of them barely speaking. She had sensed him pulling away from her, transferring his affection to Abru. Even though she was hurt, she had envied Mohan his ability to love so effortlessly. Mohan, Abdul, Meena. They belonged to a different tribe, men and women who were willing to risk everything for love. Perhaps she would have joined their ranks, too, if Sushil had not scarred her at age twelve. Sushil’s menacing face, possessive and haranguing, rose in front of her, and she closed her eyes to escape the image.
Something hot and wet touched her thigh, and she yelped in pain. Smita saw the coffee stain spread on her pants and looked up to see the little girl giggling and running away. She pulled the linen away from her skin as the mother rose and grabbed her daughter. Heads turned as the child screamed bloody murder, a sound that immediately transported Smita back to that awful night when they had fled Birwad and Abru had screamed. Smita forced herself to focus on the present. The child before her was in full meltdown, and the father, who was at the far end of the lounge, was hurrying back angrily.
Frightened by the look on his face, Smita rose and blocked his path. “Please,” she said to him. “It’s nothing. Just a little coffee. A little accident, is all.”
The man gave her a puzzled look before turning to his wife for an explanation. The woman, still holding the screaming child, spoke to him urgently in a language Smita didn’t understand.
“Sorry, ji,” the man said to Smita.
“It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine,” she said, and then smiled broadly to accentuate her words. She decided against heading into the restroom to wash out the coffee stain, not wanting to do anything to add to the parents’ embarrassment.
The man nodded and sat down across from Smita. He turned to his daughter, who was still fighting her mother. “Meena,” he said, “stop this nonsense immediately.”
Smita’s breath caught. “Her name is Meena?” she asked.
“Hah, ji.”
It’s a common name, Smita told herself. It’s like meeting someone named Mary in Ohio, for crying out loud. Probably half the women at this airport have that name. But then she looked down at the coffee stain on her pants. She had been burned. A girl named Meena had knocked hot coffee on her pants and burned her.
Smita stood up abruptly. Then, she slowly sat back down. This is ridiculous, she thought. You’re acting like one of those superstitious idiots that Papa loves to mock. The ones who see an image of Christ in a grilled cheese sandwich. You call this little spill a burn? After what you’ve seen? Shame on you for dishonoring Meena’s suffering. Now, get a grip. Pull the paperback out of your suitcase and distract yourself. All you have to do is sit still until you’re on that plane. Because—and you know this because you’ve done it a hundred times before—the cool, disinfected atmosphere of a plane is designed to make you forget whatever hot, humid, smelly city you are escaping from. It is designed to anesthetize you against remembering home.
Home? Had she just thought of Mumbai as home? The city that she had resented and feared for most of her life? A city filled with evil men like Sushil. But then, she argued with herself, hadn’t the same city also coughed up a Mohan? Hell, hadn’t it birthed and shaped the bones of a good and honorable man like Papa? How could she have let a man like Sushil blind her to this essential truth?
Out of the blue, Smita heard the laughter: Rohit and herself. Chiku and Anand, the boy who had lived one building over. And Anand’s little sister. What was her name? Tinka, that was it. Other children from the neighborhood, too, Christians and Parsis and Hindus, all gathered in the compound of the Harbor Breeze apartments, their heads tilted upward as they watched the rockets and comets explode in the night sky. As always, Papa had spent hundreds of rupees to treat the local kids to the fireworks display during the Hindu festival of Diwali. That was India, too—that nonchalance, that secularism, nobody blinking twice at that easy melding of different traditions and faiths.
The memories came faster, like coins falling into a slot machine: Mumbai flooding during the monsoons and strangers helping one another—men giving away their umbrellas to women, commuters rescuing those stranded in buses and trains, housewives serving hot tea and chapatis to the homeless families huddled on their street, teenagers wading through waist-deep waters to run errands for their elderly neighbors. Even as a child, Smita used to thrill to the camaraderie that infected the whole metropolis then.