Neel stood next to the bed, rummaging through his suitcase. Ever since Dipti had gone to stay with her relatives, Neel had been distraught. He was going to see her again and hopefully get her to talk to him.
“Your driver’s here,” I said, plopping onto the bed.
Startled, he looked up at me. His eyes were blank. “Sorry, didn’t hear the door.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
He shook his head. “She’s so delicate these days. I don’t want her to feel ganged up on. I’m hoping to use Christmas as an excuse. Would be pretty Grinchy to kick me out on Christmas Day,” he said with a rueful smile.
I nodded. “She’s going to come around. She just needs some time. I can’t imagine how hard this is for her.”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I can. We should be going through it together.”
“People heal in different ways. But the important thing is that they do heal. You guys will too. I’m going to be hoping for a Christmas miracle!”
23
After Neel left, I called Carrie to wish her an early Merry Christmas, given that it was still Christmas Eve in LA.
“I was getting worried about you,” she said. “It’s been a few days since I’ve gotten a text or anything.”
“Sorry,” I said. “With me being at the photography studio during the day, and then the time difference, it was hard to find a good time. It’s been nice to distract myself with something that feels productive, so I’ve let myself enjoy that a little.”
“How long are you staying?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet. It depends on Neel and Dipti. Honestly, it hasn’t been as bad being here as I thought it would be. I’d forgotten so much about Ahmedabad and India, and it’s nice to reconnect with my old life a bit.”
“One of my cases is on the verge of settling,” she said. “If that happens, then maybe I will come see you. If you don’t mind the company, that is.”
I nearly dropped the phone. Carrie’s idea of roughing it was going to Kauai instead of Maui, so I suspected she was really coming to see if I had lost my mind since I still couldn’t tell her when I was returning. Either way, I was excited at the thought of seeing my best friend in a part of the world that I could never have pictured her in.
“I’d love that!” I squealed.
She laughed at my reaction. “Let’s cross our fingers that the settlement doesn’t blow up on us, but we are trying to get it resolved before the end of the year.”
After hanging up with her, I jumped into the back of a ricksha and recited the directions to Happy Snaps in Gujarati, a task far more complicated than it might seem. Ahmedabad had the same population as Los Angeles but had all those people crammed into a much smaller area. There was no use for GPS because without street names or numbers, the device would be nonsensical. The translation of the “address” for Happy Snaps was “the Jodhpur intersection, across the street from the fruit vendor.”
Everyone traveled through the city with these types of directions, and I was amazed that the ricksha driver knew exactly where to go based on my description. The three-wheeled buggy sputtered down the road and into the traffic. The streets were filled with a cacophony of animals calling, horns honking, and people yelling. I covered my nose and mouth to minimize breathing in the harsh pollution from the exhaust.
Pulling up in front of Happy Snaps gave me a sense of accomplishment. It was my first time taking a ricksha across the city by myself. I felt like a local.
That is, until I walked up to Happy Snaps and found the metal grille covering the door and windows. Closed. The other shops all looked the same way. Then I remembered the Indian workday started after ten. Sometimes closer to eleven when you factored in “Indian Standard Time.” It was 9:10. I was acting the same way I had when it came to my lawyer job—get into the office as early as possible. A local would have known better.
There was no point in fighting traffic back and forth, and I was too laden down with my heavy camera and assortment of lenses to walk around, so I sat on the stoop outside Happy Snaps and waited for Tushar to come and open the store.
People who passed by made a point of staring at me. I realized that in my jeans and T-shirt I stood out among the other women, who were dressed in saris and panjabis. My time in India reinforced that no matter where in the world I went, I’d be considered a foreigner.
Monkeys leaped across the rooftops of the buildings. Some crawled down and sat atop the cars parked along the side of the street. The American notion of parking lots did not exist here. Bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, rickshas, and cars parked on the dirt alongside the road without any semblance of order. When a scooter had blocked in a woman’s Maruti hatchback, she sat in her car honking her horn until the owner of the offending scooter came out. Though they yelled at each other, their exchange seemed routine, and neither party seemed fazed as they drove off in separate directions muttering to themselves.