Mohan swiveled on the couch so that he faced her. “But what about you? Who do you have to tell your story to? Who takes care of you?”
Mummy used to express a similar sentiment. She’d visit Smita in her austere apartment in New York, take in the black-and-white photographs on the gray walls, the sparsely furnished living room—and a look of worry would cross her face. “Let’s go buy some real furniture, beta,” she would say. “A nice, bright couch, maybe? All you have is this cold, hard furniture.” It took Smita a few years to figure out that Mummy wasn’t really critiquing her taste in decorating. She was concerned about her daughter’s solitary, nomadic existence. The minimalist apartment was simply a metaphor for a minimalist life, one shorn of any long-term obligations or relationships.
“I look after myself,” she said. She was aiming for nonchalance, but the words fell flat.
“You don’t have to be brave with me, Smita,” Mohan said. “What you’ve endured is shocking. That man destroyed your whole life, yaar.”
Smita shook her head. “No, Mohan. He didn’t destroy my life. I didn’t let him. Because if I had, he would’ve won.”
“You’re right,” he said immediately. “You’re absolutely right.”
“You know,” Mohan said after a while, “until I met you, until I met Meena, I really believed India was the greatest country in the world. I mean, I knew there were problems, of course. But after hearing your story? I . . . I just . . . I feel like I’ve been asleep my whole life. The fact that nobody came to your rescue? I just can’t believe it.”
“I remember this one woman who lived in the neighborhood,” Smita said. “I went to school with her daughter, but we weren’t friends. One time she ran into me and Mummy, about a year later. And she apologized to us for what had happened. She was only a distant acquaintance, but she had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s not right what happened to you,’ she said. ‘I am so ashamed. We should have spoken up.’ It meant so much to us, Mohan, the fact that she acknowledged it. Mummy remembered her kindness for years.”
“Well, I’m ashamed, too. Ashamed of my country.”
She knew that Mohan was trying to express his solidarity, that his words were meant to console. But they made her feel awful. “You don’t have to dislike India for my sake, Mohan,” she said. “Really. I mean, I don’t. Not anymore.”
“How can you possibly say that? After what you’ve shared with me?”
Smita was flooded by memories: The horns of the bull plowing a field, decorated with marigolds. The strange democracy of children and dogs and chickens and goats coexisting in the villages they had passed. The line of women walking down the side of the road with clay pots on their heads, carrying water back to their villages. The older women at the park in Breach Candy jogging in their saris and tennis shoes. The waiter at the Taj who had given her a single white rose. Nandini’s fierce, protective love for Shannon. Meena’s rootlike hand stroking Abru’s back. Ramdas’s pride in a home that didn’t belong to him. Each one of those tender things was India, too.
And this man sitting next to her, his eyes wet, torn between his need to console and his desire to be forgiven. How to make him understand that the very casualness of him, his unthinking acts of kindness and generosity—allowing the doorman at the Taj to carry her suitcase to the car, hoisting large bags of rice and dal into Ammi’s shack, his playful manner with Abru and Meena, his impressions of his coworkers that kept her entertained, all of it, all of him, had become India, too? That having spoken out loud the secret that had dirtied her for two decades—and seeing his fine, clean anger and outrage—had set free some part of her that had remained calcified for much too long?
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t say. But it’s true.”
“And you’re glad you told me? Even though I badgered the truth out of you?”
“I am.”
After some time, Smita rose from the couch, walked toward the kitchen and then looked back. “Can I ask you for a favor?”
“I will.”
“You will what?”
“I’ll keep helping Meena and her daughter. In fact, I’ll send them a monthly check. And I’ll stop by every time I come to Surat. I promise. Although, I cannot imagine going there without you, yaar.”
She made a rueful face. “I know. But we will remain friends.”