Ranjit keeps his gaze on his laptop. “What are you talking about?”
Nandini points to her cell phone. “Why does she have to know about what happened with Meghna Ben? It’s bad enough as it is without her being involved.”
“I thought she could help. Maybe she could have suggested something we hadn’t thought of, since clearly these people are difficult to plan a wedding with,” Ranjit says. “Besides, what’s wrong with Charu knowing?”
Mothers lie. For her whole life, Nandini thought pushing Simran to do well, work hard, and have high expectations would guide her in the right direction. Instead, she was preparing her to be exhausted, overwhelmed, and confused. All she could hope for was a partner who understood her, and once she found that, it was important for her to not taint that, out of youthful recklessness or the inability to realize what mattered for the long-term.
“Well, if you think she’s so helpful, you’ll like to know that she judges everything that happens between us and our kids. I don’t understand what type of joy she could possibly get from all this meddling. We need to keep things that concern our family between us. Nobody else needs to know. Nobody.”
Ranjit stands up and kicks the recliner’s foot stand. “I know. I know. It’s always my family’s fault. They’re the bad ones.”
“I’ve never said that.”
“You don’t have to. It’s written all over your face. You’re in the worst mood whenever they leave our house, call us, talk to us.”
She takes a deep breath. “You can’t deny that your family’s . . . needs . . . have interfered with my own.”
Marriage etched away at the person you once were, forced you to grope for whatever remnants you could get of your old self: a conversation with a childhood friend, yellowing photographs, compliments. Nandini felt herself becoming tinier, almost nonexistent, with each polite nod or stifled complaint or ambivalent surrender.
“This again?” Ranjit asks. “Yes, Nandini, I know you wanted to start your own practice, but we couldn’t afford for you to take out the time or money.”
“Because you expected me to take care of everyone,” she says. “Literally. They’re all somehow my patients. Even when they’re not! When I’ve said I shouldn’t see family members and help refer them to someone else, it’s expected that I oversee their medications, give them opinions on their labs, or see their friends that they bring to my office without any advance notice. I’m literally their doctor on demand no matter how hard I’ve tried not to be. How could I ever expect to advance if there were continuous demands placed on me outside of work?”
Nandini thought a career in medicine would be about building long-term relationships with patients and teaching training doctors and adding to the field in creative, stimulating ways, not watching the clock and documenting visits so that her numbers could be compared to the other doctors’. Competition was fierce in their family medicine clinic, and if the staff thought she wasn’t contributing her portion, she would lose her job. It had already happened to two other women, even after they discovered they were paid less than their male counterparts. Forget that they never asked for maternity leave or flexibility with child care. Even with the sacrifices the female physicians made, it was never enough. There was no way for Nandini to spend extra time with Mr. K after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis or celebrate Mrs. L’s first pregnancy. Instead, she was another cog in the wheel, a white coat with legs. On her days off, she woke up wondering if she had prescribed Ms. B the right dose of blood pressure medication or if she had read Mr. M’s lab results properly.
Ranjit slams his laptop shut. Nandini looks down at the red hand-embroidered rug they got from Delhi. It was the only trip they ever took as a couple, the first time they saw northern India. For five days, they posed for photographs, filled themselves up on street food, and shopped for new clothes. In the evenings, they slipped under crisp hotel sheets and reflected on their day.
On their last train ride, she thought, This is how light we can be, without having to schedule anything around others. They had two identities: the vacation Ranjit and Nandini, novel and daring, and the day-to-day Ranjit and Nandini, who walked side by side, guided by habit more than anything else. Over time, she told herself they would be able to make the most of the delicate contradictions embedded in their marriage.
Ranjit scoffs. “It’s easy for you to make everyone I’m related to the culprits. As if your own sisters don’t do the same things to you.”
“You’re right,” she says now. “I allow everyone to do this to me at my expense.”
“Okay, go ahead and have your pity party. Just don’t go pointing fingers at my family and me for why things didn’t work out.”
“You’ll never understand.” She snaps her head up. “You got to have your practice. Hire your own staff. Work in the way you want, when you want. And then even become the president of the Indian American Association! It must be nice knowing you could make mistakes—big mistakes—and still have everyone’s support. Even after your family found out what you did, they still paraded you as the most eligible bachelor around.”
She shouldn’t blame him. It was the culture’s fault. Women were supposed to be accustomed to nursing guilt and blame. They had to keep their husbands sane. Teach children manners. Make the perfect daal. In some parts of India, mothers were still faulted for giving birth to daughters instead of sons, even though Nandini learned in high school that it was the male who determined the sex of a baby.
“They’re my family,” Ranjit says. “They’ll always support me and vice versa. And I’m allowed to make mistakes. We all are.”
Nandini tries to ignore the resentment building up inside her, a resentment she’s tried to let go of for decades.
“Mistakes?” she asks. “Our kids have a half-sister.”
She watches her husband’s expression shift from anger to surprise as the words come out of her. They rarely bring this up. For a while, she even thought she might have gotten over it. But she realizes that a lot of her life has been about ignoring rage and hoping it disappears, then learning it never does.
Rage lives in the body, Mami used to tell her. You just learn to deal with it differently as you get older. But it doesn’t really go away.
And the rage of double standards was even tougher for her. Why did her husband—men—get away with everything? Why was she always apologizing and making amends for her past while theirs got to disappear?
“Had . . . had a half-sister.” Ranjit’s voice is soft, as though he’s worried someone could hear them.
“Oh, right, of course. Had,” Nandini says, recalling the way she had found out about her husband’s other child.