Stop dwelling, Simran.
She lowers the blinds in her bedroom and living room. She needs darkness. She stumbles into the kitchen and plugs in the coffeepot. It starts to gurgle.
“Nani, I’m still not clear about why you can’t come to the party. What exactly did the doctor say was wrong?”
“I haven’t been feeling well for the past week. Nothing serious. He just wants me to be cautious. All that time in the air can be dangerous for someone my age, flying alone, trapped with everyone’s germs.”
“But you’ve done that plenty of times. Why is this any different?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. You never tell us if anything is going on with you.”
“Because I don’t want you to be concerned about me.” Simran hears Nani turning down the volume of a Fair and Lovely commercial, the kind that used to convince she and her friends that they could be hot if their complexions were ten shades lighter. She wonders how much money and time Indian women have spent in pursuit of fairness.
“You have your own life,” Nani says. “Your brother’s new marriage. Your wedding. Your parents. And I’m fine. More than fine. I couldn’t ask for anything else. Everything’s perfect.”
“But it won’t be the same without you,” Simran says.
Simran takes out a Styrofoam bowl and plastic spoon for cereal. Anything to do fewer dishes. Her future mother-in-law would be so proud.
“I know. I wish I could be there. And no, not just because I wanted to dance to rap songs that I can’t listen to here,” she says, referring to her newfound love for American hip-hop or, specifically, to “that talented artist named Cardi B.”
Simran writes a mental note to herself: Look forward to becoming an old lady so I can say whatever I want and it can’t be held against me.
“But you’re okay? In general? How is everything going with the girls at school?”
Nani goes to the all-girls school near her house every afternoon to read stories to the students about the Indian goddesses. Some of the teachers at the school found her ideas too “progressive” and stopped her from coming during recess, so now she goes after the last class.
“Yes,” she says. “Just, you know, the same nonsense from the principal but the girls themselves are doing well. I think they’re learning a lot. I never feel as though there’s enough time with them, but everything has limits. It’s more than I could do when I was married, so I can’t complain.”
She chuckles, and her voice seems lighter than usual. Simran thinks back to what both she and her mother have noticed over the past month with Nani. Unanswered phone calls. Her being out of the house more. The lightened mood.
“Oh my god,” Simran says, her voice lowering to a whisper. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“What?!”
“Sorry, you just sound so zen.” She actually wants to tell Nani that she sounds high. “And you’ve been distracted. Tough to reach. Something’s going on.”
“And you think it has to do with a man? Please, Simi. You know I loved your nana very much, but men can’t take care of themselves. They need someone picking up after them, cooking for them, everything. They’re babies. I paid my respects as a widow in the way I was supposed to. What’s the phrase? Been there, done that.”
“Okay, I was wrong. Sorry,” Simran says.
“It’s fine. Just fine,” she says, in a way that’s not fine at all. “Anyway, enough about me. How is Kunal?”
“Okay.” Simran leans against the kitchen counter and splays her toes on the cool, smooth tile. “I think we should take a break from wedding planning.”
“What?” Simran can see Nani sitting up, placing a wrinkled palm over her mouth. “What break? What does that even mean?”
“It means that I wanted us to get through this smoothly, and I know he did, too. But things aren’t going the way I thought they would. And we need to change the way we’re thinking; otherwise, this process is going to ruin us. So maybe taking a step back from wedding planning would be helpful. I mean, we still have about a year until our actual wedding date, so there’s time. . . .”
She doesn’t tell Nani the rest of what she’s thinking. Maybe taking a break from them would be helpful. She can’t let herself complete that thought even in her own mind.
But Nani reads through Simran’s words. “Simi, running away isn’t the answer. Nobody said this would be easy. And you’ve been . . . friends for so many years.” (Nani still can’t say the words “boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” or “dating.”)
“That’s the thing, though. We’ve been with each other for such a long time, and practically grew up together. And through each new phase, we just kept going and going and going. It’s as though I’ve dated five different guys along the way because of how much we’ve both been through. But now, with the wedding, all these things are coming out from both of us that we didn’t expect. And everything is a mess. Things just don’t feel . . . right.”
“So? You think the answer is to just walk away? When your wedding is in almost one year?” Nani asks.
“It’s not walking away at all. It’s just taking a second to think. He and I really need to talk. We have so many things to discuss, really discuss. There are things that we need to establish. And things we both have to work on. I don’t want to be quiet or passive about what doesn’t feel right in my life. And if putting off our wedding date for sometime, for a while, will be better for us in the long run, then we should do it.”
Simran opens a bottle of Aleve and shuffles the tiny blue pills among her fingers. She imagines herself going to Kunal’s StuyTown apartment right now, walking up the five flights of narrow stairs, and telling him about what happened with Neil.
“Putting off your wedding date? Please tell me your mom doesn’t know about this,” Nani says.
“No. There’s no way I’d tell her right now. She’s been so stressed lately, even more than usual.”
“She’s dealing with a lot. You all are. I know there were some things she wanted to talk to you about soon.”
“Well, she isn’t telling me anything.”
“Do you think she’s happy? She constantly seems distracted. Maybe she’s always been that way and I never noticed.”
When Simran thinks of her mother, she has a vision of her cooking rotlis at four a.m. for her dad’s family. Every day the same combination of rushing, folding, tucking, pleasing emerging from the pliable contours of her memory.