Pushpa’s face darkened. “Have you come back after all this time to create problems?” she hissed. “What is the meaning of all this drama, this tamasha? You show up to my door after all these years to insult me? Is this how you Americans treat your elders?”
Smita leaned in. “No,” she said slowly, her eyes fixed on the older woman’s face. “But is this how you Indians treat your children?”
She heard Pushpa gasp before the older woman stood up. “Get out. Leave. Get out of my house now.”
Smita stared at Pushpa, aghast at how quickly the conversation had gotten derailed. “Auntie, we got off on the wrong foot,” she said. “Listen, I came here to gain some insight. I would like us to talk . . . Please.”
“Jaiprakash!” Pushpa yelled. “Where are you?” And when a dark-skinned elderly man rushed into the living room, she turned to her cook and said, “Show memsahib the door.”
The man looked from his employer to the well-dressed younger woman in confusion. Smita put up her hands and rose. “It’s okay,” she said to him. “I’ll go.”
Smita dragged her feet as she walked back toward the Causeway, angry at herself for this impulsive visit, mortified by how easily Mrs. Patel had turned the tables on her. What had she hoped to gain from this fool’s errand anyway? She had hoped to embarrass the woman, to squeeze out an apology that she could carry back to Papa, to remind Mrs. Patel that the past never died. Instead, she had been banished from Mrs. Patel’s life for a second time.
Why on earth am I surprised? Smita asked herself as she crossed the street. She had been a journalist for too many years to not know how easily people made excuses for their past misdeeds. Nobody was the villain in his or her own life story. Shame on her for expecting Pushpa Auntie to have lost any sleep over ancient history. Why would she fret over the past when every day a new Mumbai was being built atop the debris of the old city? “Look to the future, child,” her father used to say. “This is why our feet point forward, not back.”
As soon as she got to the shopping district, Smita stopped at a clothing store to buy appropriate outfits for her trip to Birwad, but the salesman who greeted her in the first store was so oily and effusive, she walked right out. She was spent; she would have to shop the next day, in between breaks from caring for Shannon. Surely, there will be stores near the hospital? she thought. Meanwhile, she wanted only to get a bite to eat and then collapse on her bed. But the thought of eating alone in the opulent splendor of the Taj was a lonely one, and so she continued walking, looking for a restaurant that catered to the many Western tourists in the neighborhood. She stopped at the Leopold Cafe and sat at one of the tables overlooking the Causeway.
As she sipped a beer, after ordering a sandwich from the elderly waiter, Smita saw what looked like bullet holes in the Leopold’s walls. She blinked, remembering. Of course. The restaurant had been one of the targets of the terrorist attacks that had brought this metropolis to its knees for three horrific days in November 2008. What the Leopold had done—refused to paper over its history and instead keep the bullet holes as a permanent marker of those harrowing days—was unusual. Most of the time, the world chose to move on with nary a look back. She saw this in the US after every school shooting: a flurry of news stories, the sanctimonious tweets about thoughts and prayers, the predictable calls for gun control reform and then—silence. Parents and other survivors were left to their private lifelong grief, permanently out of step with a world that had moved on. Bloodstains were scrubbed from school walls before the students returned.
Smita had been visiting her parents and brother in Ohio that November, the four of them glued to CNN as it reported on the young men from Pakistan shooting up the city and setting fire to the Taj. Rohit had looked up from the television set and said, with spite in his voice that made Smita and their parents pay attention: “Serves them right. I hope they burn that whole miserable city down.”
“Beta,” Papa had said reflexively, “to wish ill on millions of innocent people is a sin.”
Rohit had shaken his head and left the room.
She’d tried broaching the subject with Rohit later that evening, the two of them perched in front of the TV again after their parents had gone to bed. But he had gestured toward The Daily Show. “I’m watching this,” he said curtly, and Smita had acquiesced with silence.
The old waiter returned to her table with her sandwich. “First time here?” he asked, nodding toward the wall with the bullet holes.