Eventually, I spotted Virag Uncle, or Virag Mama, as my mother used to correct me whenever I slipped into the English word uncle. He looked just as he did fifteen years ago: tall, lean, oversize glasses covering most of his gaunt face, and unruly hair tamed by almond oil.
All around me, people murmured their namastes and bent to touch the feet of their friends and families. It was the respectful way to greet an older family member, and I leaned forward to touch Virag Mama’s toes with my fingertips. It felt odd, performing this ritual after so many years, but I could tell he was pleased I had remembered the convention.
“So little luggage?” he asked in Gujarati while taking my bag.
It took me a second to process my first language, the one I had once known better than English. I was not feeling confident enough to string Gujarati words together. “I had very little time,” I responded in English, grateful that my relatives in India were fluent in my second language.
He handed the bag to his driver, a young man with an emaciated build who could not have been more than twenty years old. The driver placed the luggage in the passenger seat while Virag Mama and I climbed into the back. His car, like most in India, didn’t have a trunk. People around us were squatting on hoods, tying suitcases to the tops of the cars with thick yellow rope, but we could fortunately forgo that ritual and not waste more time at the airport.
Ahmedabad was familiarly foreign. While I had heard my parents speak of the country’s progress during the last decade, as we maneuvered through streets packed with people using nearly every mode of transportation that had existed over the past century, that progress wasn’t obvious to me. Camels and oxen pulled squeaky lorries piled high with perishables and clay pottery. Wheeled transportation of all forms was present and accounted for: cars, buses, motorcycles, rickshas, bicycles, and scooters, all tooting their high-pitched horns. Cows wove through the traffic with careless abandon, almost as if they knew they were sacred. The animals, people, and vehicles on the roads moved in whichever direction they chose. Traffic signals and lane markers were suggestions rather than law. In comparison, LA traffic was a perfectly orchestrated symphony.
My stomach churned at the thought of Neel and Dipti in a car accident in this chaos.
“How is she?” I forced the words out of my mouth, knowing that anything could have changed during my lengthy flight across the globe.
Virag Mama patted my knee and said, “Don’t worry, beta. Everything will be fine.”
I could tell from his tone that he still saw me as the little girl who had run around the house chasing after Neel.
“I’m old enough to know the truth.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Old habits are hard to break. You’re like my daughter too.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes before placing them back on his nose.
A ricksha whizzed past us carrying a dozen children in school uniforms: boys in light-blue short-sleeved button-down shirts and brown shorts, girls in white cap-sleeved button-down shirts beneath blue dresses. Neel and I had worn similar uniforms before our family moved to America. The older kids stood in the openings and clung to nothing more than the roof of the open buggy. Other vehicles drove mere inches away from them. The children laughed and called out to each other, oblivious to the dangers of the way in which they were traveling. Neel and I had done the same thing when we used to live here, carefree and impervious to risk, but I now clutched the door handle and wished for seat belts and traffic laws.
“How is she?” I repeated.
“She’s been in a coma for many hours straight now. We’ll know more when we go to the hospital.”
A weight settled on my chest. I began to feel hot and rolled down the window.
As visually frenetic as the city was, it had always been the smells that struck me most. When I was a kid, I had cracked the same bad joke every time we stepped off the plane: “Smells like we’re in India!” The odors were unique—the aroma of poverty mixed with the smell of progress. The cleansing scents of citrus fruits, jasmine, and sandalwood coexisted with the stench of garbage, body odor, and pollution. A smell many people might find offensive but for me was oddly comforting.
A tired smile crept onto my face when we pulled into the driveway of my mama’s house. Lakshmi. Naming a house was as important as naming a child. Lakshmi was the goddess of prosperity, wisdom, and light. It was the house my mother had grown up in. And the one my family had lived in until we’d left for America. It was customary for married couples to live with the husband’s family, but my father’s parents had passed away during his college years, so my parents had lived in Lakshmi.