He looked at me. “You wish your life to be different?”
In a rare moment of truth, I nodded. “All the time. I wish I could just be happy with things as they are, but I always think about what didn’t go as planned, or how to change the future so it does go as planned.”
“That must be very tiring, no?”
I kicked some stray rocks in my path. It was. The restlessness was exhausting. He had no idea how much so. I hadn’t even realized how much so until these recent weeks in India, when I wasn’t thinking about the future. It was hard not to think about the past with the pain of Alex having moved on still fresh and at the forefront of my mind when I found myself alone in bed at night, trying to fall asleep. But as devastating as that had felt in the moment, the rough edge was starting to dull, much faster than it had when we had originally separated. There was something about being in India that forced me to be more present.
“Yes,” I finally said. “But I guess I’ve always taken for granted that I get to make choices about the future.”
I watched Tushar as he continued down the road. Tushar’s view on life was simple: work hard, provide for your family, and then you would be happy. He had never mapped out his future, in part because the big decisions had already been etched out for him. Like so many people who were raised in India, he had followed in his parents’ footsteps. He would run the family business, so there was no soul-searching needed to discover the career that fueled his passions. He knew that he would one day marry a nice girl who met the requirements of the holy trinity—Hindu, Gujarati, and vegetarian—and she would bear him a son who also would grow up to run the family business. He knew that, as a man, he would be responsible for maintaining the household finances, and in exchange he would never clean a toilet, do his laundry, or prepare his meals. His path was in some ways quite like Hari’s and Bharat’s, and Virag Mama’s before them. Different castes dictated different professions and neighborhoods, but beyond that, the paths were the same.
I could see that there would be some comfort in knowing your entire life was planned before you were even born. What if I didn’t occupy so much of my time with my anxiety about finding my identity, purpose, and everlasting love? I could not even imagine the other thoughts that would fill that vast space. As much as I loved the thought of less anxiety, I still couldn’t fully wrap my head around that life. The life I was born into and would have had but for my parents moving me halfway around the world. Now I was a product of the West, and a life without those big choices didn’t seem satisfying.
I jogged to catch up to Tushar. I didn’t see the sharp rock poking through the dirt on the road and stumbled as my toe clipped the edge of it. The weight of my purse and camera knocked me off balance, and I crashed to the ground.
“Ow!” I muttered as pebbles and grit pressed into my palms. There was a stinging sensation coming from my leg. I moved to a sitting position and pulled my leg toward my chest, holding my shin with both hands, applying pressure.
“I am so sorry! Are you okay?” Tushar called as he sprinted back to where I sat. He gathered my camera bag and purse and held them close, his eyes darting back and forth while he searched for looters who might have tried to take advantage of my vulnerable state.
“What are you sorry for? I’m the idiot that tripped,” I said.
“You have a small cut,” he said, reaching out his finger and gently touching the skin near the scrape on my leg.
My eyes followed his finger. He then lifted his gaze until it met mine, and I felt something familiar stirring within me, something I hadn’t felt since those first few dates with Alex.
The moment was brief because his jaw began to drop in horror when he realized that we were in public, sharing a rather intimate moment by Indian standards. He jerked his hand away from my leg as if my skin were crawling with fire ants.
“I am so sorry,” he said, stumbling backward.
“It’s okay,” I said, disappointed he had jumped back. “I’m fine.” I stood and brushed off the dirt from my clothes.
Once he saw I was fine, he offered to carry my camera bag the rest of the way, maintaining a safe distance between us while we walked. It was as if he had heard one of my junior high teachers at our school dances telling us to always “leave room for the Holy Ghost.”
As the day continued, I shifted my focus from taking photographs of people to capturing the animals roaming the city. On the surface, Tushar and I interacted the same way we always had, but there had been a shift—toward what, I did not know, but it was undeniable that a shift had occurred. Tushar represented everything I had staunchly avoided until now. On the surface, he was what my parents would have wanted for me. The holy trinity: Hindu, Gujarati, and vegetarian. Simple. Except it wasn’t. It ignored a critical, unspoken element—caste.