her own snacks at teatime, Pival’s confidence had faded and died, replaced by a reserved meekness and deep inner pain.
And then there had been Ram, who had isolated her with his judgments. No one was ever good enough to be their friend, so now she had none. Who could measure up to the Sengupta standards? It had been easier not to argue, easier to just quit. Her brother had died in an accident when he was twenty-seven, so when her parents passed away, her last ties to anyone outside of the Sengupta clan had been effectively severed. Now, she realized, she knew no one else.
Pival took another sip of her tea, trying to force that pale shadow of herself back into the past. Stop haunting my living room, she told it in her mind. Today she was alone. She no longer had to bend and mold herself into the shapes others had left for her to fill.
After Ram’s death, many of her former visitors had maintained their teatime arrivals to comfort her in her time of need. At least, that was what they said they were doing, but Pival had been aware that their real goal was to ensure that her grief followed the prescribed paths set out for her by the Senguptas. Carefully they observed her, as if she were an animal at the zoo. Even in mourning there was a host of customs for Pival to neglect and perform incorrectly. That must give them a great deal of happiness, Pival thought, finishing her tea. Pival sometimes found herself speaking to her husband in her mind in a way she never could have in life. At least I’m good for something, Ram.
A crash and then the sound of angry protests floated up to her window. She returned to the balcony and looked down below. A car had collided into a cart full of supplies to decorate the goddess, and now brightly colored paper and paints and flowers filled the narrow road. The owner of the cart screamed at the driver, demanding compensation for his damaged goods. The driver, on the other hand, was furious at the injury to the car, which seemed to have suffered no ill effects that Pival could see, other than a few splatters of paint and a shower of flower petals. Certainly his vehicle would face more such damage during the festival itself, which flooded the city with people and left cars covered in its decorations for days.
Inside the car, the passenger was rapping loudly at the window, and the screaming driver’s face shifted instantly from angry to servile. He bowed to the car’s occupant, who had rolled down the window an inch or two and was slipping a slim handful of rupees rolled into a neat cylinder into the cart owner’s hand. The man accepted the compensation happily as the driver grumbled and spat a large stream of paan right at the cart owner’s feet. The driver resumed his position within the car, and the cart owner dragged his cart, now with a cracked wheel, in the other direction. The small street was silent once more, with only the spattered remains of the decorations as evidence that anything had happened. A flicker of movement caught her eye. There was a child crouched in the gutter, begging. She hadn’t even noticed.
When she was young, Pival had loved Durga Puja, but as an adult all the joy of the holiday had died for her the day that Rahi left. Without him in the house, her celebrations felt hollow. Rahi had always loved to take his lantern and dance in front of the goddess, thanking her for her triumph over the evil demon and imploring her for her grace. Ram would watch, disapproving of his son’s dancing but unable to say anything because it was traditional. Once Rahi was gone they didn’t decorate their house or their shrine; instead they visited with others during the holiest days of the event, leaving their own house empty and allowing the servants time off.
She had thought she had nothing to thank the goddess for this year, but as she watched the empty street she realized Durga Puja was giving her the opportunity to escape. It would be like the child in the road. People would be so distracted by the festival that they would never see her slip away. She watched the child scratch at his scabs and made a mental note to send down some food from the kitchen if there was extra. The cook had yet to learn how to prepare meals for Pival alone, and they always had too much. The child would have something to eat that night, at least.
Why had Mr. Munshi not returned her calls? Was there some problem with the guide, or worse, the companion? Mr. Munshi, whom Pival would not want to insult but who sounded vaguely Bangladeshi to her, had assured her, “All is possible, probably, prepared, madam!” Now she feared that this was not the case. Her tickets had been booked. She left in a week, at the height of the festival. What would she do if there were no tour guide and companion waiting? She hated to admit it but Tanvi’s dire warning echoed in her brain.
She wished she had kept more of herself whole throughout her long marriage. She could have used her youthful boldness now, but it was gone. In its place was fear, and what could that help her now? She thought about Rahi. Why had he left her all alone? What had he found in America?
Jacob Schwartz fell in love for the first time sitting in a traffic jam on the way back from the airport and it was only because of the horrible congestion of the Los Angeles freeway that he realized it. If he had lived in another kind of place, who knows what might have been possible? But he looked over at the face next to him, the strong jaw, the straight nose, the smooth tanned skin, and the mouth stretched wide as Bhim belted out a power ballad from the early nineties, and there it was. Love. They were two miles from their exit and in the half an hour it took to travel that distance Jake had convinced Bhim to kiss him back, and by the time they reached Jake’s apartment their inhibitions were long gone, as were their shirts.
For as long as he could remember, Jake’s life had been dictated by traffic. He had grown up in Los Angeles, so commuting had been a way of life. His mother, a divorcée and part-time yoga teacher living in Venice Beach, had carted him from school to guitar lessons to soccer practice to the mall to movies and finally, three nights a week, to his father’s condo in East Hollywood for awkward meals from nearby Chinese food takeout joints. Together he and his father would eat moo shu chicken in silence, with his father’s tentative overtures met with surly rebuffs. What they talked about, because they couldn’t talk about anything else, was traffic. How to get where, what route they had taken that day, what its potential benefits and downsides were. Traffic was the language of neutrality in Los Angeles and Jake learned it young.
The early years after his parents’ separation, which occurred just after his tenth birthday, had been filled to the brim with activities, as if his life could be made too full for him to notice the difference. Jake, as he had been called by everyone in his life but Bhim, had observed his parents carefully after they split up, like a scientist monitoring a long-term experiment, noting changes and constants, variations and radical outliers. He kept a diary with carefully maintained charts, as he was, according to all his teachers, a visual learner. His ultimate conclusion, after several years, was that in fact the best situation for them all was this, for his parents to live in two separate bubbles, with Jake as the only connection between them. This hadn’t stopped Jake from craving a partner, however, though it did make him wary about finding one.
Like many children of divorce, Jake was so good at telling the story of his family that by the time he was an adult he could gauge which detail would amuse his listener the most and play to it. When he had first met Bhim through mutual friends at a bar outside of San Francisco called Bangers and Mash, which served neither, their conversation had eventually shifted from hours of discussion on the nature of monotheism, marine life, and architecture to Jake’s family. When Jake had cheerfully described the divorce, wringing it for the kind of humor he thought this quiet Indian graduate student might enjoy, Bhim had turned pale and quite seriously apologized to Jake for his “broken home.” Jake, having never heard that phrase outside of Lifetime original movies, laughed hysterically. His home was far from broken, he gently explained to Bhim. The other man looked at him with such compassion in his eyes, and Jake had to admit, he couldn’t help but lean into it, hoping it might turn into something more.
There was something about Bhim that was completely
