“Take care of my girl. I’ll come get you if you don’t,” she said to Sanjay on her way out, a plastic pink smile on her lips.
“Of course,” he promised, with a hollow laugh.
He was quick to shut the front door behind Ruth, as if to put a lid on an embarrassing drama. Tara shuddered, as if she were a rat caught in a trap. She had expected to feel righteous, for the balance of power to have shifted. Yet, when Sanjay towered over her, she couldn’t help but sink into a corner of the sofa to stop the trembling of her legs.
He took the loveseat. She could see him struggle to get the appropriate words out. “You must be hungry,” he said at last. “Let’s grab some Indian food. I hear that a new desi restaurant has opened in Decatur. Their tandoori chicken is supposed to be the bomb.”
She nodded. Sanjay didn’t like Indian food. This was his way of making up. But it was so inadequate, so ineffectual. She escaped into the bathroom, where she stayed for a long time, giving in to all that emanated from her chest. On the other side of the door was her reality. Her return was as much a compromise for Sanjay as it was for her. Nothing had changed between them.
Sanjay kept his promise to Daddy and Amma. In the spring of the following year, they moved into a house in a neat subdivision called Stone Crest in Dunwoody, a different part of town, away from her friends. The house was bright and warm, especially in the summer when the sun toasted its red brick front and made the grass in the little front yard seem greener, the roses redder. Two of the three bedrooms had plenty of sunshine, and the third Sanjay used as his study. They bought a new sofa set for the formal living room. Alyona helped Tara pick the sheer curtains and tan faux silk valances for the windows, a fact that Tara did not care to tell Sanjay.
A month after they moved, Tara found a job as a tester—through her QA training institute—at Alpha Tech, a software company in Suwanee. She didn’t enjoy bug testing, but it was better than the alternative: to stay in an empty home. Besides, at $25 an hour, the money was good. Over the weekends, she still made plans to hang out with Alyona or with her friends from QVision Tech. She still accompanied Ruth and Dottie on their church projects.
Sanjay ate at home every weeknight. She wished he didn’t. Cooking every night was a tedious chore, especially after an entire day spent finding bugs in software, and then driving home from Suwanee. She had five standard Italian and Mexican recipes, which she rotated with little enthusiasm, one for each day of the workweek. On weekends, they either ate out or resorted to takeout dinners.
At the kitchen table, they sat shielding their thoughts with small talk. Often, they gave in to silence, after struggling to find common ground. He had not once mentioned Liz in the time since she had returned home, but it was evident Sanjay still missed her—in the fine lines on his forehead, in the forlorn, faraway look that haunted his eyes as they watched TV or when he drove them around town. Three times a week, he worked out at the neighborhood LA Fitness. But exercise did nothing to change the brooding, solemn expression that had become his permanent feature, as if he had resigned himself to a loveless life with a woman who had dared take him to court.
Sanjay had stopped using condoms, although starting a family was never discussed. Tara would have liked that too, starting a family, if only because that would give her some purpose in life. But she froze each time Sanjay kissed her, worked on her body. She still had trouble getting LizSan out of her head; when she managed that, Sanjay’s insult poured ice over her body: Hijra. That’s the first word that came to my mind when I saw you at Hartsfield–Jackson.
As the year went on, they stopped having sex. Behind the shallow small talk, a dull silence hung over them like a shroud.
“You have a beautiful home, a green card, a full-time job, and a husband who earns well. All you need is a baby to complete your life,” Amma reminded her happily from time to time. If only Tara could feel some of that charm; if only the dream-like quality of her life would percolate into her heart.
Amma and Daddy came to visit when the white hydrangeas were in full bloom in the front yard. Initially, most evenings, Sanjay and Daddy sat watching TV, sipping their glasses of Glenlivet or Black Label, a bowl of nuts and minced goat meat kababs or chicken 65 on the coffee table, making small talk, which often centered around politics and corruption in India or the complexities of its rambunctious democracy, while Tara and Amma busied themselves cooking dinner. Tara cooked a dish that Sanjay would eat, because he now joined them at the dinner table; Amma cooked for the rest of them.
Amma had fallen in love with the large kitchen, with its granite countertops, chocolate-glazed maple wood cabinets, the island that held a cooktop, the trendy stainless steel appliances, and she made the best use of them, cooking up a storm three times a day. Once a week, Tara drove her parents to the farmers’ market, where Amma, her face fuller but striking, the middle-aged spread more obvious in her faded denim pants and knit top, went berserk selecting vegetables and exotic fruit on sale. She was equally excited at the Indian grocery store in Decatur, looking for spices and condiments and frozen seafood to make Tara’s favorite dishes. Often, Tara came home from work to the robust aroma of rohu fish marinated in turmeric and fried in mustard oil for macher jhol, a recipe Amma had learned from their Bengali neighbor before they had moved to Shanti Nilaya. Amma would always remember to set some misthi doi, sweet curd, in a clay pot for Tara to relish after dinner every night.
When they first arrived, Tara’s parents had been severely jet-lagged. Daddy was also bored. He had nothing to do all day and could not venture out on his own. By the end of the second week, however, he had acquired a new hobby and established a routine. He picked up a few books on gardening at the library and everything else that he needed from Pike Nurseries. He set about creating a little vegetable patch in the backyard, where he planted tomatoes, eggplant, green peppers, and squash in neat rows. Every morning, after a late, leisurely breakfast of omelet, buttered toast, and hot tea, he spent time nursing his babies, while Amma cut store-bought vegetables or marinated fish and set the pressure cooker with rice and dal on the stove for lunch. When he wasn’t gardening, he read the day’s copy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution from cover to cover. When Tara got home from work, the three of them went for a walk through the subdivision. Sometimes, if the weather was right, they ventured out of the subdivision to Morris Road and strolled up to the library a mile and a half down the road. They sauntered through the library, flipped through the magazines—it was a welcome, cool break before their return journey home.
Tara’s parents had no trouble stopping to talk to the neighbors at Stone Crest, Amma more so than Daddy. Within weeks of their arrival, they had made friends with doctoral candidate Valentina Bernacki and their next-door neighbor, Susan Myers. Tara had never even seen her neighbors before her parents’ arrival. Valentina, who was from Colombia, lived in a larger house by the entrance. She was married to the head of the physics department at Emory University. Susan lived right next door to them, a stay-at-home mom to three little kids, the youngest one, a six-month-old baby girl named Samantha whom Amma carried and bounced and cooed to in Kannada.
It rained sparsely during Amma and Daddy’s three-month-long stay. But every evening, the atmosphere thickened a little when Sanjay got home. Tara watched like an outsider as Daddy’s demeanor got stiffer, politer; as Amma hushed and relegated herself to the kitchen. In the morning, when Sanjay left for work, they shed the restraints, and Amma rushed to draw the curtains open to let the sun in.