I’d forgotten I was still wearing the baggy jeans and wrinkled sweatshirt I’d worn on the plane. “I came straight here.”
“I can see that.”
She’d come over with my family for Hari’s wedding, and I knew that as a de facto member of our family, she wouldn’t be far from the hospital during this time. She had always been there for me, helping me cope with everything from a scraped knee to fights with my parents to my breakup with Alex. Seeing her was enough to calm some of the anxiety.
“Have you seen your mother?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
She looked at me sternly. “This is not the time for any unnecessary drama.”
I met her eyes. “I know.”
She scanned the hallway behind me. “Oh, have you met your friend yet?”
“Which friend?”
“You know, Biren.”
I creased my forehead, trying to place the name.
She slapped me on the back. “Come now. His father is the president of the electric company in Ahmedabad. You remember. They do lots of charity work. Anandbhai has a foundation and helps women and children in India get out of abusive living conditions by finding families in the West to look after them.”
Nothing registered, and the charity work sounded like something I would have remembered had I known it.
“Oy, you! You have a memory like a goldfish!” She flicked her hand. “You used to play together as children when you lived here. My God, trying to separate you two was like trying to part the sea! I saw his mother here earlier. Maybe they went home.”
The more I thought about it, I did have vague memories of a tall, scrawny boy I used to play cricket with on our lawn outside Lakshmi. I hadn’t seen him during our last few visits to India. I recalled my mother telling me his family had moved to Mumbai.
10
That night Neel stayed behind at the hospital, and I went back to Lakshmi with Virag Mama and my parents. I was too emotionally and physically drained to have a substantive conversation with my parents. Other than the short exchanges in the waiting room, we had all been relying on our old family standby: avoidance. While we had dinner with Virag Mama and his family, we avoided talking about my parents walking out on me when they found out I was shacking up with a dhoriya. As we unpacked my luggage, we avoided the fact that he and I had broken up. Then when we discussed sleeping arrangements, we avoided the fight with my mother last month.
I was thankful that Indira Mami suggested I sleep in the small room they used as an office but could pull a cot into. It allowed my parents and me to have separate spaces and continue to practice the avoidance we had adopted as a religion—the one aspect of Indian culture we could all agree upon.
As I sat on the bed my cousins Hari and Bharat had prepared for me, I thanked them. On previous trips, the firmness of the mattress and pillows had jolted me, but this time I didn’t care. I was grateful for the chance to lie down, undisturbed, for the first time in two days.
“Sorry this happened before your wedding,” I said when Hari handed me a clean towel. His hair was styled the same way as his father’s, the unruly, thick waves tamed with almond oil.
“It cannot be helped. We very much hope everything will be fine.” Despite spending a year in America while earning his master’s degree, Hari still had a strong Indian accent. But his skinny frame had filled out and become more muscular while he had been abroad, and our relatives joked that the added weight was evidence that America had been very “prosperous.”
“Hopefully.”
“I am sorry that it is under these circumstances, but we are very glad you were able to come,” Bharat said, pushing his thick, black-rimmed glasses back into place.
Hari nodded. “Laila is very excited to meet her didi.”
I opened my mouth to ask who Laila was and then snapped it shut. How could I have forgotten the name of his fiancée, my soon-to-be cousin? Their elaborate wedding invitation had sat on my front table for months, and I hadn’t bothered to learn a key piece of information from it? I had no doubt memorized the holdings of several useless cases during that amount of time.
“When is the wedding?” I asked.
“In twelve days’ time for the wedding itself, but the events start in just one week,” Hari responded. “But of course, we will change if it is necessary.”
“Whatever happens with my family shouldn’t affect your wedding.” I smiled at them. “I can’t believe how grown up you both are. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”