Chapter 24
Tara quit her QA job to make time for writing. Her short stories and essays appeared in online journals, local magazines, even the London Review. The New Yorker proved elusive, but she’d keep trying.
Cyrus registered the Georgia branch of the Annette Saldanha Foundation, a charity he had hitherto run from San Jose. The foundation raised and dispersed funds to run the Annette Saldanha Home for Children in Mangalore. Cyrus’s dadda managed the home in India, identifying needs, allocating funds, supervising the staff. Dadda had sold Saldanha Motors—a fleet of buses that plied between Mangalore and nearby towns like Udupi, Karkala, and Kasaragod—to his competitor’s son, devoting all his energies to the family charity.
Annette Saldanha hadn’t been forgotten. Cyrus had made sure of that. It was her name on the charitable endeavor he and Dadda ran. In death, Annette had achieved a larger-than-life status, a saint-like aura. She was the dispenser of love, kindness, and hope. She gave new life to withered, fractured, abandoned little lives.
Annette had never been the love of his life, but she was the family Cyrus never had. He had admitted this to Tara once, a few months into their marriage, when they lay next to each other on the red mattress in their tree house. A part of him had died with the passing of Annette and her mother, Aunty Mariette. Growing up, they had been his anchors, their villa his home.
“I don’t ever remember spending an afternoon in my own house,” he had said, staring up at the wooden beams of the ceiling reflectively. “Every day, James and I were picked up from school by Uncle Lobo, who dropped us off at the villa. We three kids, we did everything together. I only returned home late every evening after Dadda got home, and even then, I wanted to escape, run back to be with my buddies, play some more, talk some more, argue some more.”
“What if Annette were still alive? I suppose you and I would never have reconnected.” Tara had turned to face him.
“I would have still searched high and low for you,” he had said without hesitation. “Annette and I should never have married. We both knew that going into it. We didn’t have a choice. She was pregnant.”
“If you both knew it was a mistake to marry, why did you even have sex, get pregnant?”
A long silence ensured. “He wasn’t mine,” he had said at the end of it. “My son, I mean. Biologically, he wasn’t mine.”
Stunned, she had searched his face for an explanation.
“Annette was a stubborn girl. She didn’t want to make the problem go away.”
“But whose baby was it?”
“Some fool from college who didn’t want to own up responsibility and face the wrath of his family.”
“So, you took responsibility?”
“Yes, what other solution was there? Mangalore is not exactly America. An unmarried mother would be ostracized there even today.”
“Does the family know?”
“No one else knows. Only Annette and I, and now you.”
“You are a good man, Cyrus Saldanha,” she had said, rolling into his arms, kissing the hollow of his throat. “And all this time I assumed it was raging adolescent hormones.”
“My hormones are raging now.” He had tightened his grip around her; nuzzled her neck. “It’s time that we tried for little stars of our own, no?”
She had grown stiff in his arms, mumbled something about needing a little bit more time to prepare herself mentally to be a parent. She was surprised with her reaction, because theoretically, she wanted children. Was she stalling because she wanted Cyrus all to herself for a while? Or was it the fear of failing as a parent?
His disappointment had cloaked her with guilt, but he had never brought up the topic again. Six months later, she told him she was ready.
He enveloped her in his arms, held her tight when she told him she had missed her period by a week. When her physician confirmed the news, he dazzled the dull room with his smile. Their joy lasted two weeks, until she noticed spotting following severe stomach cramps. A visit to the Emory emergency room made their fear of a miscarriage real. He cradled her in his arms that night, kissing her forehead, sounding chirpy.
It was all right, he said. Miscarriages were common. They would try again in a few months, whenever she felt ready.
When the second miscarriage happened seven months after the first, eight weeks into her pregnancy, she was afraid she had run out of time. But he assured her it was okay. They’d take their time before trying again. They had fifty-three kids in Mangalore who called them Amma and Dadda.
Cyrus was going to Mangalore to be part of the tenth anniversary celebration of the home. Tara helped him pick gifts for the children—pencils, fancy erasers, candy, T-shirts. He had wanted her to join him, but her last conversation with Amma had come crowding back into her head. She didn’t feel ready to brave the hostility she would face in her community. She had been humiliated as an abandoned wife. She could only imagine the viciousness that would be flung at her, now that she had dared to divorce her first husband and taken a second, outside the community.
After Cyrus left, her social ostracism felt real.
“I may never be able to visit Mangalore again,” she told Ruth as they baked caramel cake for the church sale one evening, but all Tara craved was a slice of Amma’s pound cake.
“It is your family’s loss that they choose to stay away from your happiness,” Ruth assured her. “This is your home, and we are your family.”
“Your family don’t care for your happiness. Why you should care what they think?” Alyona fumed over a plateful of massaman curry and steaming hot rice at their favorite Buford Highway Malaysian–Thai place the following Saturday.
It wasn’t as simple as that, Tara knew. It wasn’t just her versus her family. It was also her parents versus the rest of the community. Perhaps Vijay was right. She had thrown her parents to the wolves and left them to defend their family honor while she stayed in the safety of Cyrus’s arms.
He had called or emailed her every day, and sent her photos of the tenth anniversary celebration of the Annette Saldanha Home. The best one was of Cyrus with a group of kids standing outside their home, his arms spread across them, complementing their toothy smiles with deep dents on his cheeks. How the sun radiated on their faces. How happy he looked with them. They all belonged to him, and he to them. Seeing the photo, she had felt a twinge of regret for not going, for leaving herself out of Cyrus’s big family affair.
But there were unexpected gifts to gladden her heart when Cyrus returned home. He spread them out on the bed as he unpacked. A clay peacock with its feathers spread out, a pink paper fan, a white handkerchief with embroidered red roses in the corners—all artistic creations of the kids. There was even a card addressed to Amma that was signed by all fifty-three children. On the front of the card was a watercolor scene of the sun rising between two mountains and crowned with blue cottony clouds. A stick figure stood on the green grass at the foot of the mountains with an upward curve of a smile. An arrow pointing in the direction of the figure, had “Amma” written on its tail end. Tara laughed at the shaggy long hair that fell to her stick waist; at the way her arms stuck out at rigid angles. She would treasure this Mona Lisa all her life. With so much love from the children, Cyrus could never miss having one of his own. Neither would she.