The dinner buffet opened. Tara and Vijay got into the long line and filled their plates up with spicy fried black pomfret, fragrant mutton biryani, chicken in golden gravy, soft akki rotti, and an assortment of vegetables. They found seats by the potted marigolds, away from the crowd. After tucking into a whole fish fried in coconut oil and glugging half a bottle of Kingfisher beer, his eyes a bit glazed, Vijay told Tara about his broken heart.
Uma, his live-in girlfriend of six months, had broken up with him two days prior to Tara’s last call inviting him to her wedding. They had met at a bar. She was a human rights lawyer by profession and a strong-willed nonconformist. He was planning to propose to her when he had learned, through common friends, of her affair with his friend Jay. He had confronted her. She had called him a closed-minded, chauvinistic jerk, which was why she was drawn to his liberal friend. She had ended it with Vijay, leaving him to wonder why he had insisted on a quality certificate for the twenty-two-carat solitaire engagement ring he had picked up at an Indian jewelry store in Artesia.
“I was hurting and angry when you called.” He cupped a hand to his mouth to calm a burp. “So, I reacted like the closed-minded, chauvinistic bugger that I was.”
She told him it was all right. What was important was that he had changed. She felt special for being trusted with news that could never reach her parents’ ears. A live-in girlfriend was taboo. She was surprised that he had fallen in love with a nontraditional woman, that he had broken the rules too.
“I hope you are over her?” she asked.
Vijay’s nod was feeble.
“You deserve better, Vijay. She ought to have ended it with you first.”
Her reaction was from the heart, from the ache she felt knowing that her brother was still hurting. She understood that it was the same for him, for Daddy, and for Amma. The need to defend her was a force of love that had finally won over their belief systems.
It was a long evening. Around ten o’clock, she rubbed the dry henna off her hands, knowing that the longer she kept her hands unwashed, the more intense the stain; the more intense the stain, the stronger her husband’s love for her. That was the belief. But she couldn’t risk missing Cyrus’s call. She eagerly pulled Nina’s cell phone from her potli purse and held it in her hand. She waited for the inanimate object to come to life. It did not.
Her earlier enthusiasm of the evening left her. She felt drained and sleepy. She walked into the living room, where Aunty Nanda’s father-in-law had dozed off on the chair beside the side table where the landline sat, beside a bronze statue of the laughing Buddha. She woke him up with a gentle tap to his forearm.
“Grandfather.”
He opened his eyes and smiled a benign smile, making smacking noises with his lips.
“Did you take any calls tonight?”
“The Christian chap called several times, but not tonight.”
“My husband called? When?”
“When you were hiding in your grandfather’s house.”
“Are you sure he did not call tonight?”
“The phone did not ring at all. I’ve been here all evening. Nobody cares for an old man.”
Tara turned to leave, disappointment rising from her chest.
“I told him the last time he called,” the elderly man’s voice carried clearly across the room. “It was a brilliant move, marrying a Hindu girl to increase his tribe.”
Indignation welled inside her, but she let it out with a long, cleansing breath and turned around to face him.
“Have you had dinner, grandfather? Can I get you something? Or would you like to sit outside for a while?”
“Laddoos. Get me some laddoos,” he said with a smile.
Chapter 30
She dozed off on the sofa from the exhaustion of the evening, and from trying Cyrus’s number every thirty minutes. Each time, it was his crisp recorded voice after just a ring, telling her to leave a message. It was likely that Cyrus had turned his phone off. But why? She had tried Alyona’s number and got her voicemail too. Ruth had picked up, but told her that she and Dottie were in Savannah with the church group. They would check on Cyrus when they returned the next day.
When she woke up with a start, the sun was only just rising, and in the blue-gray darkness of dawn, the living room looked like it was littered with bodies. Then she heard the peaceful snoring of the sleeping guests. They were lying on thin mattresses and covered in thin handloom blankets, the men on one side, the women adjacent to them.
She tiptoed out of the living room and locked herself in the bathroom on the main floor. She was awake enough to feel restless. She had time to think as she finished her business, as she brushed her teeth by smearing toothpaste on her finger and washed her face with bar soap and water. She was still dressed in her fancy velvet lehenga, which was better than heading across the city in pajamas. She slithered back into the kitchen, looked for the ceramic jar where Amma kept small cash to pay the vegetable and fish vendors. There was no ceramic jar; but she got lucky. The cash was hidden in a black cast-iron kettle that did not belong on the top shelf. She took out a fistful of rupees, enough to engage a rickshaw to Dadda’s house.
The rickshaw puttered down the lane, the driver not fully awake. The four Saldanha homes stretched down on one side like a string of pearls, the other side just a high wall of laterite bricks and cement. The homes were all architecturally similar: large traditional Mangalorean homes with red tiled roofs and sprawling green yards from which mushroomed tall, swaying coconut palms. They had all survived the building frenzy in the town.
Tara shivered in her heavy velvet ensemble, even though it was a barely cool morning. How strange, she thought, that she had not once been to her husband’s home, had never seen the room where he grew up, the bed he slept in. The vortex in her chest expanded as the rickshaw stopped at the high double iron gates of Dadda’s pristine white villa.
Dadda met Tara warmly in the portico. He was an early riser, he told her. Cyrus had told him she was here for a cousin’s wedding when he had called a few days ago, but he had not expected to see her in wedding clothes at six in the morning.
He seated her in the inner sitting room. The shock came to her in waves, the historic nature of the moment. She had not expected to be here without Cyrus. The room appeared untouched by modernity. Grand arched wooden windows draped in lace curtains stood majestically against ochre walls. German tiles covered the floor; the low wooden beams of the ceiling reflected preserved heritage. A grand piano sat in a corner, its top covered in lace, surrounded with polished teakwood furniture topped with dark red upholstery. Tara ran her fingers over the soft fabric of the settee. She imagined a little boy with twinkling honey eyes weaving through the furniture in the room. She pictured him running out into the passageway that led to rooms beyond, into the mystery.
“How did the fundraiser go?” Dadda asked.
She bowed her head, guilt warming her cheeks.
“I’ve been trying to reach Cyrus. I was hoping you had heard from him about the fundraiser.” Her words were a rush of anxiety and guilt. Dadda’s eyebrows furrowed behind his steel-rimmed glasses. She immediately regretted passing on her unease to him. He reached over to the black antique landline phone that rested on a polished teakwood side table. She knew from his expression that he had reached the voicemail, even before he spoke to the recorder.