Come on, Shobi, how will the child feel if you’re not there?
How many times had her aunt said those words to Shobi?
Shobi not being there had been a huge relief. Now that she knew how dishonest she felt being in the same room with Rico and her family, how much like a fake, Ashna was sure that adding Shobi to the mix was something she absolutely could not handle. Some relationships were just so ugly you couldn’t share them with anyone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I think you should tell Ashna that we’re together.” It was easy for Omar to say. But Shobi had no idea where she would even start with telling her daughter all the many things she had hidden from her. How had she ended up here? With a thirty-year-old daughter who didn’t know her mother was with someone. That she had been with someone since long before Bram died.
The look Omar gave her was almost as powerful over Skype as it was in person, intense with understanding. His neatly trimmed silver goatee had grown out just a bit and his gentle eyes were dimmed with worry. Those eyes and the way they saw her might be the reason she had fallen in love with him. They were certainly what had made her determined to return to him when every force in the world had conspired to separate them.
“I don’t know how,” she said without bothering to hide her despair. “The secrets between us have grown too large to swallow.”
“Then break them into smaller pieces. Isn’t that what mothers do?” A breeze blew through Omar’s thick silver hair. He was having tea on the terrace of their Juhu flat. Shobi heard the crashing of waves from the beach behind him. It was Mumbai’s premium view. Omar had bought the flat fifteen years ago, fulfilling a promise. Albeit an unspoken one.
Shobi had never needed any of the things from Omar that her family had expected from a husband for her. When you decided on your future so young, pragmatism had no place in it. Even so, those words had been everything: Our house has been waiting for you, jaan. Only you can make it a home. Not once had he asked her to leave her marriage. Not once had he questioned her when she had decided to.
“She’s your daughter, how can she not be strong?” Omar took a sip from his stoneware cup. He refused to drink his black chai with lemon and honey out of Shobi’s hand-crafted Wedgwood china.
After getting his law degree, Omar had ended up making his fortune writing for Indian TV and film. But his heart was that of a poet, incapable of the violence of unkindness, forever searching for the truth. How had he lived with her, a liar, for so long?
“When has telling the truth ever helped me?” Shobi poured herself another glass of wine and took a slow sip. The rich, full-bodied liquid warmed her despite the chill of Bram’s kitchen.
“All your life. It has helped you all your life. Don’t you see, Shoban, you are truth. The pain in your life comes when you’re separated from your truth.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because now you have the time to hear it.”
He put down his cup and leaned in toward the computer screen. “I miss breathing the scent of your hair.” It was something he had done for as long as she could remember, press his face into her hair and fill his lungs as though she were air.
When he’d done it that first time after she found her way back to him, he hadn’t hesitated even for a moment. No one other than Shobi had believed she would be with him again. Except him.
“You are my breath,” he mumbled in Urdu. “Follow the truth, jaan. Don’t be afraid of it.”
Shobi ached to hold him, to press against the starched hand-spun cotton of his kurta draped around his spare, tall body. Like his poetry, there wasn’t an inch of excess in his form.
He held up the computer, giving her a view of her beloved ocean before letting her go with his “Khuda hafiz.”
She watched the computer blink off.
“You are the ocean,” Omar loved to say to her. She had never lived far from an ocean. Not in Jaigaon, her family’s home just south of Goa; not in Sripore, the Rajes’ royal seat just north of Goa; and not here in Palo Alto. Although she could never think of this as home.
Except that her daughter lived here. Her Ashna, who had never been hers at all; Bram had never let her be. Not that she was special; it was what the world did to all women. Decided what they could claim, and at what cost. If they wanted more, it made them fight for it. In that, Shobi had given the world what it wanted. She had fought.
Except for Ashna.
She sat up on the barstool. The sound of the ocean, still in her ears, picked up force. The ocean inside her was a tidal wave.
How had she allowed this?
All her life she had refused to rely on anyone else to save her. So how had she stood impotent in this?
He had taken her child from her. But she was the one who had let him. And she was the one who had no idea how to get her back.
Shobi hopped off the stool and started pacing Bram’s kitchen. She had no idea when Ashna would be home. It was a bit embarrassing to suddenly find herself waiting up for her daughter. It was a good twenty years too late to play the overprotective mother. She stared at the rice and dal she had cooked for when Ashna did finally get home. It was also a little late to play the nurturing mother, but she didn’t care. She was sitting right here for as long as it took.
After her disastrous trip to the restaurant, she’d needed a bottle of wine. It had been horrifying how run-down Curried Dreams looked. It had to be breaking Ashi’s heart. How did people do this? How did they handle their children’s pain? Especially when they saw how unnecessary it was, how easy to fix. Why couldn’t Ashi see what she was doing?
Shobi had found herself unable to help Mina as she directed the staff and took care of the dinner crowd. The restaurant was full. The way it used to be when Bram ran it. Ashna might be right, she might actually have a chance to turn the place around. Then again, what happened when the popularity of the show passed? Ashna had no love for feeding people. Even when she’d helped Bram, it was always in other parts of the restaurant, never the kitchen.
Not that Shobi blamed her. Bram was an exacting monster in the kitchen. Well, he was that in all things, but his obnoxiousness was considered talent when it came to food. Shobi had once seen Ashna trembling outside the kitchen when Bram was in one of his culinary rages. When Shobi tried to ask her about it, she’d been mortified and had withdrawn deep into herself. In the end Shobi had done the only thing she could think of. Told her that she didn’t have to ever go into a kitchen if she didn’t want to.
The restaurant had always made all of Shobi’s rage at Bram surface. Even today she hadn’t been able to stand being there. How did Ashna do it? How did she go in there day after day with that room in the back, Bram’s lair, where he’d trapped himself those last few years, where Shobi had finally told him she was done with their farce of a marriage, and where he had taken his own life, with no regard for the child who had found him in a pool of his own blood?
In the end, Shobi had left without helping Mina and come back to the house. The bottle of red wine she had been nursing all evening was only half-depleted. She poured herself another glass. She’d had to walk to the Whole Foods down the street to pick up the wine, because the house was entirely and completely dry. Dry enough to make Mahatma Gandhi proud.