“You stood up to your entire family. That’s not easy. Your mother and I couldn’t do it. And even now, do you know how many people just take the life that’s handed to them, and then regret it when it’s too late?”
Simran shakes her head.
“Nobody can do the work you’ll have to do in order to grow and accept yourself. Only you can take that journey. But you’re not going to get anywhere by moping and feeling sorry for yourself.” Nani lowers her voice. “Now, come, let’s get ready to go to the school. I have your clothes in the bedroom.”
They stop at the garden, which is now occupied with its standard afternoon members: black sparrows that flock from one clothesline to the next, gray monkeys with tails that curl like question marks, and Kavita squatting to wash the dishes and arrange them in the sun to dry. Many people around Baroda will stretch out for their afternoon naps.
Nani guides Simran into her drafty bedroom. It’s dark and warm, with low ceilings.
Specks of dust float in the sunlight. There are two short beds with stiff mattresses and folded cotton and polyester blankets. The floor is cluttered with cardboard boxes.
“What’s going on here?” Simran asks.
“I’m finally trying to organize everything. You accumulate so much junk over the years. Those”—Nani points to boxes labeled Simi—“have some things you can take back home.”
Simran nods, and Nani says, “And I have your salwar kameezes in the bottom drawer of the kabaat.”
Simran wears cotton salwar kameezes whenever she comes to India, partially because they’re comfortable and partially because they decrease the number of stares she receives for being an obvious foreigner.
On their walk to the school, Nani waves at her neighbors and stops to talk to everyone. She introduces Simran to the tailor at the end of her street. They say hi to the owner of the local DVD store. (Nani knows about his three scandalous affairs, his mother’s irritable bowel syndrome, and where he gets his pirated DVDs, but she forgot his name.) She yells at the corner paan dealer for overcharging her yesterday. Mom told Simran that despite the expectations of widows in India, Nani only became more social after Nana passed away.
Simran’s grandmother: charismatic, cultured, and capable of beating the shit out of you if you offend her.
There’s more sweat trickling down Simran’s stomach by the time they reach the school’s playground, which is a sea of dirt patches and rusty swing sets. The girls are dressed in navy blue and white uniforms, their hair slicked back with coconut oil and tied into pigtails.
“Mimi Masi!” One of the girls runs toward Nani and gives her a hug.
“Hi, Pallavi,” Nani says. “This is my granddaughter, Simran.”
Pallavi waves and offers a shy smile.
“Pallavi is the top student in her class.”
“That’s great,” Simran says. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A doctor,” she says, pointing her nose in the air, reminding Simran of what Mom may have been like at that age. Self-assured. Unaware of limits.
“She’s learning how to read the story of Sita,” Nani tells Simran as Pallavi nods. “The right version, of course, not the one where Rama is esteemed for being perfect.”
Out of all the Hindu stories Nani’s shared with Ronak and Simran, the Ramayana is her favorite, because of how it showed a man’s devotion to his duties and a woman’s ability to sacrifice.
Rama, the king of Ayodhya, is forced to spend a period of exile in the forest. His wife, Sita, devotedly joins him but is kidnapped by Ravana, the conniving king of Lanka, and Rama’s enemy. Sita is eventually rescued, but she has to perform a series of tests that confirm her purity. She passes the trials, asserting that she didn’t have any inappropriate relations with Ravana, and Rama welcomes her back to the kingdom.
Unfortunately, the local citizens start to doubt her and, in turn, criticize Rama for keeping a wife who had lived with another man. Despite his own faith in Sita, Rama realizes that he can’t be an effective ruler when his people discredit his choices. His dharma as a king overruled his dharma as a husband, and ultimately, he drives Sita out of the kingdom. She obeys and eventually raises two boys as a single mother. Her resilience and unwavering strength became the virtues that Indian women revered over generations.
Pallavi finishes summarizing the story for Simran. When she walks away, Simran turns to Nani. “It’s amazing you’ve taught her all of that. She knows every detail.”
Nani shrugs. “I try. She’s at the top of her class, but her parents can’t pay for her English lessons, so there’s a good chance she won’t get that far in school. She had an older sister here. They took her out of school once she started her period. Now she’s married. They could barely afford her dowry. That’s my main problem with our country. The minute a girl bleeds, she no longer belongs to herself.”
Nani introduces Simran to some of the other girls. “Simran, do you want to tell them a story?”
“Sure,” Simran says, moving away from Nani.
Simran motions for the girls to come closer to her, but only two of them listen. The others rush to play hopscotch or sit on the dirt, their hands in their laps.
“So, uh, have either of you heard of Goddess Kali?”
Simran tries to remember the details Nani taught her about Kali years ago. But before she even starts, the two girls run away.
“Hey!” she yells.
Neither of them looks back toward her. Pallavi is leading her own discussion at the far end of the playground.
Nani touches her arm. “You have to get started right away or they lose interest. Sometimes, their teachers don’t show up, so they stay out here for the entire day, waiting for their parents to pick them up. They’re fed up by now. Bored out of their minds.”
“I don’t know how you do this.” Simran slumps her shoulders.
Nani throws back her head and laughs. It’s the first time Simran has heard her laugh since she got here. “Come. I’ll show you the rest of this place.”
They take a tour through the hallways, where a janitor asks Nani if Simran’s the granddaughter she’s been talking about.
“I used to bring your mom here,” Nani says. “She was the only one of my kids who cared to come with me. The other ones were always bored. But she would walk around with me. When she was eight or nine years old, I told her not to tell my in-laws about these visits. She kept that secret without asking any questions.”
“You never thought about working here after your in-laws passed away?”
She looks over the playground, considering this. “By that point, it had been so long that I don’t even think it occurred to me. You see, most people eventually make peace with their lives, but that doesn’t mean that things turned out the way they wanted. And when you’ve been living in a certain way for so many years, you lose that faith you used to have in yourself when you were younger.”