Chapter 11
On Sunday morning, Alyona’s day off, Tara knocked on her door with a request and a computer printout of a map. She had hated that she had to log on to the computer using LizSan to get the directions. Now that she knew of Sanjay’s Romeo to Liz’s Juliet, it didn’t require a great mind to deduce what LizSan stood for. He hadn’t even bothered to change the login name when she moved to Atlanta.
“Alyona, will you take me to the Hindu temple in South Atlanta?” she asked. Alyona, agreed without hesitation. “Let’s drop Viktor off at Derek’s first,” she suggested. “I’ve never been to Indian temple. This will be so much fun!”
Alyona drove twenty miles down interstates I-85 and I-75 with her usual spirit of adventure.
The temple loomed into view, sparkling and pristine, after Alyona made a sharp right turn off the highway, through the open gates, and into the almost empty parking lot. The white rajagopuram, the steeple of the temple, built in Chola architectural style, towered in its magnificent splendor in front of them. The forty-foot-tall rajagopuram rose up five tiers, each tier rich in exquisite detail. Tara noticed a sculpture of Lord Narasimha on the top tier, and Maha Vishnu in various poses at the lower levels.
The girls walked up the steps to the shoe room where they left their footwear, and made their way into the main shrine of Lord Balaji. Tara was thankful there weren’t many people yet at the shrine. Even the priest was missing. She rang the bell outside the sanctum sanctorum, felt it reverberate in the chambers of her heart. She paid obeisance to the main deity of Lord Balaji inside the inner chamber before settling down on the red-and-gold-carpeted floor of the hall, folding her legs in lotus position. Alyona followed suit. Tara kept her eyes closed, while Alyona looked around mesmerized.
The temple was serene and smelled of camphor and sandalwood incense. Save for a couple who circumambulated around the navagraha, the nine planets, the main hall was empty. Tara had not been to a temple in years. She had no idea why she was here or what she was seeking, but for a while, she had left the turbulence of her life outside the temple door. She didn’t ask; she didn’t pray. She sat in the stillness, in the present, her thoughts at bay, and that seemed like a blessing. Her breath flowed easy, unhindered by the powerful emotions that had become the mainstay of her life in recent days. When they pulled away from the parking lot of the temple, a seed was sown, a purpose was born, a determination grew to make a new life.
Tara was thankful to the universe for putting Alyona in her corner. She often wondered where she would have been if she didn’t have her pushy, opinionated, but big-hearted friend by her side. In the next few days, Alyona helped Tara in a multitude of ways—a shopping expedition to buy a thin foam mattress, a single duvet, and sheets; a visit to Brad’s Driving School; and a stopover at AT&T for a new cell phone connection.
Since the night of Sanjay’s disclosure, Tara had been sleeping on the sofa. She didn’t belong with Sanjay; she couldn’t bear to be near him. With the new foam mattress, the study became her bedroom. She pushed the computer desk and swivel chair to one end of the room and made space to lay out her bedding at night. During the day, she rolled the mattress over, bound it with a plastic rope and stuffed it in her closet. Sanjay had said nothing about her moving out. Tara had not once looked in his direction; not a word or gesture or sign had passed between them. And yet she wondered if it pleased him that she had moved out of his way.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish, Mr. Sanjay Kumar,” she muttered indignantly, as she lay in her new bed, under the cheerful yellow floral duvet, near the computer desk which creaked occasionally. She couldn’t think of one logical reason why the desk should creak. It was not broken or unhinged—like her. Someday, when her heart wasn’t as burdened as it was now, she would get to the bottom of the mystery. Her thoughts took off at a tangent. She wondered how Amma might react to Sanjay’s brazen infidelity.
“We had a fight, and I am upset,” was all she had revealed to Amma. Her pain was hers to bear, the challenges hers to overcome. She couldn’t let her parents see how utterly unworthy Sanjay thought she was.
“Try to win him back, Tara. Try your best, darling.” That is what Amma would have said, if she had known. As if Tara even stood a chance against the enchantress of DCS Tech, with whom her husband had proudly proclaimed to be “madly, utterly, helplessly in love.” Amma didn’t know what it felt like to be rejected, to be called a mistake, to be made to feel small, ugly, and unwanted.
Invariably, Tara’s thoughts returned to Sanjay, who was probably sleeping on his back, his hands resting peacefully over the gentle heave of his chest. Were his last thoughts before going to sleep about Liz? “Madly, utterly, helplessly in love,” Tara repeated softly. Was he a different man with her? Was he soft, gentle, caring? Did he cup her face and whisper sweet nothings into her ear? Did he kiss her; hold her tenderly even when they weren’t having sex? Tara rolled over to her side, because the weight on her chest was making it hard to breathe. If wishes were horses. If turnips were bayonets. If Liz would drop dead. If Liz would drop dead.
She pressed her cheek to her folded arm and willed her mind to change thoughts. She had to focus on bettering herself. Learning to drive was the first step, even if it meant using up all the money she’d earned. She was glad she had enrolled at Brad’s Driving School that morning, but the lesson had been terrifying. Her instructor Brad had taken her to I-285 and her heart had been in her mouth all the way.
“Stay in your lane, speed up, speed up! You are going too slow!” Brad’s constant bellowing jangled her nerves. The large trucks and trailers on I-285 were Godzillas. She had come close to veering out of her lane and almost hit an SUV, but Brad had swerved the wheel in the nick of time, leaving her in a cold sweat. Her sixty-minute lesson was a trial that had pushed all other worries off her mind. She hoped it wouldn’t be as scary tomorrow. But if it was, what choice did she have but to face her fear?
Driving was just the first in a series of enormous challenges Tara had laid before herself. Once she had a driver’s license, she would look for a cheap used car. Then she would start a job search.
It took all of seven attempts for Tara to pass her driving test and get a license. Each time she failed, she had to pay Brad $75, her weekly earnings, for the trouble of taking her to the DMV. The first time, when the examiner asked her to step on the brake lights, she froze in the driver’s seat. She had no idea what brake lights meant. The other times, the examiner asked her to take a left or right turn at the next crossroad, and Tara kept going, as if her test were one straight path. Either her mind refused to cooperate or her jelly hands rejected her mind’s command to make a turn. The last two times, she had failed the zigzag and parallel parking tests, bumping into the orange cones until they dropped over. Each time she failed, she wept into her pillow, her tears draining her resilience.
“You need practice,” Alyona said, with the authority of a seasoned driver. She allowed Tara practice sessions in her Mini Cooper, supervised trips in the by-lanes of their neighborhood, gave her directions in a series of sharply barked orders. “Speed up, slow down, turn left, turn right.” She set up make believe cones at intervals—a wicker basket, a stool, a few bricks—and had Tara weave through them, or bring the car to a stop in a space between them, until she had perfected the techniques of zig-zag driving and parallel parking.