“What are you reading?”
He held it up so that I could see the cover: The Eyewitness Travel Guide for Australia.
“Planning a trip?” I raised an eyebrow, excitement creeping into my voice, especially at the thought of someone traveling to the part of the world I had enjoyed so much. “You would love it there. There’s so much great scenery to capture.”
“No, just learning. Appreciating the natural beauty captured in the photos.” Tushar held up the book and showed me a picture of Uluru, the vermilion-red sandstone structure standing out against the barren backdrop.
I smiled. “Do you ever wish you could see these places with your own eyes?”
He shrugged. “Not really. There is no point in thinking about such things.”
His answer was so simple and yet so complex. During my childhood years in America, I had constantly heard that there was nothing in this world I could not accomplish. I was told that if I worked hard, then jobs and places and people would not be cut off to me. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized this wasn’t true. My life would have been so different had my family stayed in India. I would have learned the same rules as Tushar, and my life would have been predetermined for me the same way Tushar’s had been for him. The caste system would have put me in a different lane from Tushar, and my life would have been planned alongside Hari’s and Bharat’s. And the interesting thing was that I probably wouldn’t have longed for the passions I now had, like photography, because I’d never have known it could have been a profession for me. I wouldn’t have longed for the Western notion of romantic love because people here didn’t seek or desire it in the same way.
“What do you dream about in life?” I asked, a question posed to nearly every child in America, but a rather foreign concept in India.
He stopped flipping through the book as he thought about the question. “Maybe buying a bigger house for my family if this shop can make more money,” he said.
Had I been asked that question, I could have rattled off a list of a dozen things ranging from tangible to intangible. My dreams were limitless. I appreciated the selflessness and simplicity in his answer. While I saw an upside to the Indian way of life in which people didn’t spend most of it wishing for things they did not have, my problem was that I had grown up around American values, had desperately tried to emulate them without question, and now I didn’t know how to unring that bell. I had become a dreamer, and the Indian way of life was acceptance over passion and pursuit. While I appreciated that type of existence, I wasn’t quite sure if I could live it.
Maybe my mother felt that same way too. Maybe that’s why she wanted to be in America. But if that was the case, I’d never seen her pursue anything in America that she could not have sought in India. The more time I spent in India, the more I wondered what had led my parents to leave in the first place.
25
Later that afternoon, I emerged from the darkroom to find Tushar slumped over the counter, his nose in yet another book.
I dried my hands on an ink-stained towel. “What are you reading now?”
He held up a book with a vivid picture of penguins in Antarctica on the cover.
“I’d love to see those in real life,” I said.
“Finally, we have found a place where you have not been,” he joked, still not fully understanding my desire to travel to countries in which I had no family or connection.
I moved toward him to get a better look. My arm rested next to his on the counter. I could feel his arm hairs brushing against my skin. “There are lots of places I haven’t—”
The bell chimed above the doorway. We bolted upright and apart as though we had been caught breaking some rule.
But it was too late. From the look on her face, I could tell she had seen enough to have her answer.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, feigning nonchalance.
She bit her lip in that characteristic way that made clear she was holding something back. Tushar scurried around the counter to greet her.
“Welcome, madam. Namaste.” He bent at the waist to greet her. “Some chai?”
Mom held up a hand and shook her head. “I only wanted to see how Preeti’s photo project from the wedding is coming along. She has spent so much time here this week that I thought I better see what she is doing.”
Tushar had clasped his hands behind his back and was swaying back and forth as if he didn’t know what else to do with himself. Eager to keep things from getting more awkward, I motioned for my mother to join me on the other side of the counter.