“Yes. Were you here at the time?”
“Yes, madam. God was with me that day. I’d just gone up to the mezzanine floor. Two of my coworkers were not so lucky. Nor were many of our customers.”
She’d heard variations of this recap so many times, ordinary humans trying to solve an enduring mystery: Why had they lived while others had died in the tragedy? No matter what calamity they’d survived—plane crashes or earthquakes or mass shootings—survivors felt compelled to assign some reason, discern some pattern as to why they’d been spared. Smita saw no pattern to such events: she believed that life was a series of random events, a zigzag of coincidences that led to either survival or death.
The waiter draped a dish towel over his right shoulder. “The bastards didn’t even come in,” he said. “Just stood at the entrance and sprayed bullets as casually as you and I would hand out sweets on Diwali.” His eyelids fluttered briefly as he remembered. “There was blood everywhere, people screaming, ducking under tables. And then they threw in a grenade. Imagine that, madam. A grenade into a restaurant. What kind of person does that?”
All kinds of people, Smita wanted to say. Seemingly ordinary people who rise each morning, eat breakfast, smile at their neighbors, and kiss their children goodbye. People who look and act just like you and me. Until they’re gripped by an ideological conviction, or a disruption occurs in their lives that makes them want to rearrange the world or burn everything down.
The waiter must have seen something on her face—a combination of revulsion and fatalism—because he said, softly: “Same evil happened in your country, isn’t it? On 9/11?”
“How’d you know I’m from America?” Smita asked.
He smiled broadly, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I’ve worked here for thirty years, madam. Many of our customers are foreigners. Bas, you opened your mouth, and I could tell you’re America.”
“You’re America,” the waiter said. Not You’re American. Smita felt that he was right. At that moment, she felt as if she were all of America, as if the red earth of Georgia had hardened her bones and the blue waters of the Pacific flowed in her bloodstream. She was America, all of it—Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, the snowcapped Rockies and the Mississippi Delta, Old Faithful in Yellowstone. In that moment, she felt so estranged from the city of her birth that she would have paid a million bucks to be transported back to her silent, monastic apartment in Brooklyn.
“So, what brings you to our Mumbai?” the waiter asked, his chattiness making Smita uneasy. “Holiday or business?”
“Business,” she said shortly.
He must have sensed her reluctance and began to move away, his old formality returning. “Enjoy your stay,” he said.
She sat at the Leopold even after she’d paid the bill, replaying the conversation with Pushpa Auntie in her head. She was the journalist, and yet it was Pushpa who had seized the narrative. She remembered what Molly, who worked for NBC, had once told her: The most basic rule of broadcast journalism was that you never, ever relinquished the microphone, never handed it over to your subject. Well, old Pushpa Patel—who, as far as she knew, had never held a job, much less interviewed despots and leaders around the world—had successfully wrested the microphone from her. Tomorrow, the woman would gleefully recount the story to all their former neighbors—how this Smita, this mere slip of a girl, had dared to come into her house and insulted her. And how she’d put her in her place.
It was true what they said. You really couldn’t go home again. Mumbai had spat her out once, and it had just done so again. How was it that Shannon, who had been based in India for three years, had found people like Mohan and Nandini who clearly cared about her? In Smita’s case, there wasn’t a soul in this city of twenty million whom she could call. Once she’d escaped India, Smita had lost all connection with her school friends. In recent years, as many of her former classmates had found one another through social media, several had tried contacting her, but she had not replied. How could she have borne their curiosity and their questions? Her parents, too, had not stayed in touch with the handful of relatives they had in Mumbai. No, she may as well have been in Nairobi or Jakarta, for all the difference it made.
She left the restaurant and walked back toward her hotel, the frenzied cries of the vendors reminding her of the squawking of birds at sundown. Sarongs and kurtas. Leather handbags and perfume. They wanted her to buy it all. She ignored their pleas, careful not to make eye contact with any of them.