Just before Simran can tell her that might be one of the most depressing things she’s ever heard, Nani says, “But I’m happy with my life now. I have regrets, yes, but who doesn’t? Don’t trust anyone who tells you they don’t have regrets.”
“You really are doing so much for these girls. Have you ever thought of doing more?”
She furrows her thin, gray eyebrows. “Oh, no.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get any more involved in the politics of teaching at this school. All that corruption and fighting and getting pushed around. The administration is already watching me.”
She shades her eyes with her hands and squints at the school’s entrance. “Let’s go before some annoying administrative person shows up to make fake small talk.”
They say goodbye to the girls and head home. Simran realizes she hasn’t thought of home or Kunal or Neil all afternoon.
At home, they slip off their chappals. Simran unlocks the wooden doors. She’s always loved the large double doors in old Indian bungalows, with their barrel-bolt locks that are on the top instead of the side, like American doors.
Nani sits on her leather recliner. “Simi, can you get me some water?”
Simran goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. The inside door has bottles of boiled water, which Nani always has ready when they visit. During their first trip to India, Ronak drank water at a neighbor’s house straight out of a pot and battled a miserable, endless cycle of diarrhea and vomiting for the rest of the trip. Since then, he and Simran never drank water that wasn’t from Nani’s fridge.
Simran pours some water into a steel glass. When she comes back in the living room, Nani is horizontal on the recliner.
“I’m going to take a nap for a little bit. You’ll be fine, right?”
“Of course,” Simran says. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, yes,” Nani says. “I didn’t sleep very well last night, so I just need a little rest.”
“Okay,” Simran says, giving her a quick kiss on her forehead.
Simran goes into her bedroom, closes the double doors, and unclasps her suitcase. In the inside pocket, she takes out an article she started last month: “Things Nobody Ever Told You About Being an Indian Adolescent Girl” by Simran Mehta.
She spent three paragraphs talking about how Indian girls have to balance academic success, abide by their parents’ strict rules, and deny any desire to want a relationship. Then, she discussed how those things change when an Indian girl enters her twenties, and all of a sudden, if she isn’t thinking about a relationship, something is wrong with her. She included lines from celebrity media interviews and novels.
Simran’s not sure if it’s being in India or time or a mixture of both, but she suddenly sees that the piece isn’t working. The message is strong, but the execution is poor. She folds it in thirds and tucks it into the bottom of her suitcase.
A puff of dust fills the air when she puts her notebook on top of the dresser, next to tubes of Tiger Balm and Pond’s talcum powder. She starts opening the boxes labeled Simi. Two are filled with antique jewelry, Bollywood cassettes, and frayed Enid Blyton books, the ones she used to read on her family’s trips to India. All of the boxes are stuffed with ghosts, items that have lost their purpose.
On the other side of the room, there’s a pile of unlabeled boxes. Two of the boxes have faded kurta tops and saris. The box underneath them has black-and-white pictures of Mom and her sisters when they were younger.
In one of the pictures, Mom is wearing a navy blue cotton frock and doing a curtsey. She’s grinning, and her baby teeth are missing. In another, she’s sticking out her tongue at the camera. Simran doesn’t remember her ever being this carefree.
She looks at the picture again. There her mother is, playful and confident at once. This little girl had no idea she would move across the world, have an arranged marriage, find herself stressed and overwhelmed as she tried to balance the needs of the world with her own.
Maybe Simran has seen glimpses of this little girl sometimes. In the car when she lets her hair down and hums to old Hindi songs or when she stretches out on the recliner and pretends not to be watching a marathon of Golden Girls.
Simran puts the picture back into the box. There are also black-and-white pictures of the extended family, where Nana and Nani sit in the middle and nobody is smiling. Underneath them is a portrait of Mom and her sisters. They’re all wearing school uniforms similar to the ones she saw today.
A few stray sheets of paper and dried fountain pens are amid the photos. Her mother’s old homework. Simran reads through her mother’s analysis of The Scarlet Letter, with her long, looped handwriting that has since flattened into exhausted doctor script.
At the bottom of the stack, there’s a photo of Mom in her wedding sari. Simran lifts it up and studies the red dupatta over her head, the gold naath on her nose. Her smile is straighter than in the earlier pictures.
Below that picture, there’s one of Mom during her wedding ceremony.
Sitting next to a man who isn’t Dad.
Simran stares at the picture again. At first, she’s confused. It can’t be real. Her mom, with her hands draped in maroon henna and the man who isn’t her dad, wearing a cream sherwani and bifocals. Bifocals. The fire between them. Nani and Nana on one side. His parents on another.
But then, as she stares at the picture again and again, the confusion lifts and is replaced with shock. The type of shock that makes it hard to think or feel or even see. The picture becomes blurry, just a constellation of shapes. But it is real. That is Mom next to another man.
Simran stares at the man. He doesn’t look familiar. Who the heck is he?
Mom’s husband, that’s who, a voice in her head says.
She feels a wave of sickness rising in her stomach. Her mother was someone else’s wife. What else has she been hiding? What if Simran doesn’t even know her? What if her life has been a lie?
Simran grips the picture and runs to the living room. “Nani!”
Nani doesn’t move. Simran nudges her shoulder.
“Nani, wake up.”
It takes Simran a few more seconds to realize that Nani isn’t breathing.
Nandini
She ran away from her first husband three times.
The first time, she went to the market to buy okra for dinner. A black rickshaw was dropping off a young mother and her son. Nandini saw their hooked pinky fingers, told the driver to wait, and then stepped in, one chappal at a time. She tucked her dupatta into her lap. She reached Mami and Papa’s house in twenty minutes. After she paid, the driver settled in front of their neighbor’s veranda to take a nap.