Lovetorn (16 page)

I hated what had become of my sane, planned, prepared life.

On Friday afternoon a week after the concert, my father called on his way home from work.

“I have a flat tire,” he said. “I need to wait for AAA to put on the spare. We must get the tire fixed tomorrow. Maybe before we go grocery shopping.” I told my father yes, no problem; after all these months here, he still relied on Sangita and me to help with the weekly food purchases. On his own, he would walk into a supermarket and not know where to even begin. It had been my mother’s role, and now my younger sister and I had assumed it.

The next morning we went to our local dealership to get the spare replaced. After we dropped off the car we walked across the street to the Apple store in the mall, where my father wanted to go and look at the iPad. He was talking to a sales associate while Sangita and I went to play with the multicolored iPods, the ones that so many of our schoolmates had.

“They’re neat, huh?” I heard someone behind me say. I whipped around. It couldn’t be. But there he was, in front of me. Toby. It was the first time I’d seen him outside of school, so it took my brain a second to recognize him.

“Oh, hi,” I said, stunned. “My dad had a flat tire. Our tire is being repaired, across the street.” I was rambling. He hadn’t asked me a single thing; and here I was, giving him a blow-by-blow account of my morning activities.

“Okay then,” he said, smiling impishly. He smelled delicious, and a tiny tuft of hair was stuck to his cheek. His top button was only halfway through its hole.

“What about you?” I asked, trying to sound relaxed. “What brings you to these parts?” God, that sounded awful. I wanted to smack my forehead.

“It’s the Apple store,” he drawled. “My favorite hangout. My dad’s too, although he’d never admit it.”

“Cool,” I said. I cringed. It was not an expression that exactly rolled off my tongue.

Sangita, who had been standing quietly next to me, spoke up.

“Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Sangita. Shalini’s younger sister. Who are you?”

“My name’s Toby. Your sister and I met during the concert, you know, the charity thing. She helped organize it.”

“Oh yes,” Sangita said now, peering at him. “I remember you. On the flute.” I looked over at her, puzzled that she would have noticed.

“It was a
long
concert,” she said, rolling her eyes. “When you’re staring at a group of people for that long, you’ll remember them.”

Toby and I both laughed. Sangita went back to checking out iPods.

“So, you got any other fund-raisers coming up?” he asked me.

“No,” I replied. “That was our biggest one. Thought we’d end the year on a good note.

“How long have you been playing?” I said. It was something I’d always wanted to know but never had the chance to ask. Up until now our interactions had been all business, very short and to the point. Now here we were, at an Apple store, a place that I wouldn’t have ordinarily come to. It was like destiny had intervened to puncture my father’s tire. I was sure Toby had things to do, gadgets to play with. But for these few minutes, I had his attention.

“My dad bought me a little flute when I was four. We were walking past a music store, and I pointed at it in the window and said, ‘I want that.’ He didn’t buy it for me right away ’cuz if every parent got every four-year-old everything they asked for, the world would be a pretty crazy place. But eventually he gave in. I started lessons when I was five. My parents tell me I even slept with my flute back then. They say it was my best friend.” People milled around us, but I didn’t care. I was completely focused on Toby.

“Krishna plays it,” I said.

“Who?” he asked.

“Krishna. He’s a Hindu god. He has blue skin. It’s his magical instrument. All the maidens of the village come running when they hear him.”

“Lucky dude,” said Toby.

His father approached us, said a polite hello, held up his purchase.

“Got what I needed,” he said to his son. “Let’s head out.”

Toby said a quick good-bye and left with his father. Sangita and I stared after him. “
Didi
, he’s
so
cute,” she said.

“Shhh,”
I whispered. Then she and I collapsed in a fit of giggles.

On Monday, at the end of the school day, I was waiting for Sangita so we could walk home together. I saw Toby in the parking lot throwing his stuff into the backseat of his gray Prius and getting into the driver’s seat. He looked up and saw me standing on the steps, and came running back toward the school until he was within shouting distance.

“Need a ride somewhere?” he yelled out.

“No thank you,” I shouted back. “I’m waiting for my sister.”

I had a huge smile on my face all the way home.

I was still in a good mood when Vikram called that evening. He had been prepping for exams and helping his parents take care of a sick relative, so had been preoccupied lately.

“We haven’t talked in almost a week,” he said to me. It could have been longer. I felt so distant from him. “How are you?”

“Very good. So busy. Amina wants to start talking about fund-raisers for the fall. And remember that girl who used to be horrible to me? Sasha? She asked me to look over her English paper. So weird. It’s like after all this time of being invisible, people finally see me.”

“You sound happy, Shalu,” he said. “It’s nice.”

I sighed deeply. He was such a tremendously kind boy, and I loved that so much about him.

“I am happy, I guess,” I said. I fingered my ruby ring. “You were right. You told me it would just take a little time to settle in. But now that I have a few friends and a routine, my life here is not so bad.”

“Well, don’t forget about me,” Vikram said, laughing.

“Never,” I said. But when I hung up, I couldn’t shake the discomfort that had descended on me.

Two days later Charlie asked me if I would meet him in the library for a refresher session, just to nail some algebra problems before finals. After Charlie left I was packing my things to leave. Toby walked in, a backpack slung over his shoulder. I was thrilled to see him but didn’t show it.

He sidled up to me.

“Hey,” he whispered. “What’s going on?” I pointed to the door, indicating I was about to leave.

“I’m just getting started,” he whispered. “But I’ll walk you out.” He dropped his backpack on the table and followed me.

Once we were outside he said, “I Googled Krishna.”

I laughed. “I didn’t realize that Krishna could be Googled,” I said.

“Oh yeah. There were twelve-and-a-half million pages on him. Some nice pictures too. His flute is sweet.”

“Yours is sweet too,” I said, realizing that the words sounded awkward.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Home,” I said. “I live a few blocks away.”

He paused for a second, looking at me, a thin frown on his forehead.

“You know, I think I need to stretch my legs before I hit the books,” he said. “I’ll walk you.”

Chapter Twenty-one

EVEN THOUGH I WAS ENGAGED,
I’d never been out alone with my fiancé. Vikram and I had yet to go to dinner or to the movies by ourselves, where, if we had been of a different culture and from different families, we might have held hands in the back row.

I reckon that even if I wasn’t engaged, I still wouldn’t be allowed to date. At my school in India, it wasn’t something that was done, not like here, where I’d hear a girl sobbing in the bathroom, confiding to a friend about a guy she’d made out with who no longer looked at her. Sometimes I’d see kids walk out of the school holding hands, kissing as they parted at the curb. In the smallest way, I envied the freedom in which they lived.

So to me, this walk home with Toby was momentous and profoundly romantic. It was a huge leap forward, a step that showed I was more immersed in this culture today than I was yesterday, more grown-up, more American. A boy—a particularly good-looking, popular, well-known boy who also happened to be a senior—had stopped what he was doing to take a short walk with me around the block . . . me, a girl who had never seen herself as either good-looking, popular, or well-known.

Strangely though, as significant as this afternoon was turning out to be, I was not in the least bit nervous. There was something about Toby, something calming and confident about how he carried himself, that was rubbing off on me.

He started telling me about his parents, his home life.

“My dad is the son of German immigrants, but my mother is from Tehran,” he said. I nodded. That would explain those exotic good looks: the dark hair and fair skin.

“My parents want me and my sister to have the best of both cultures,” he said. “So I speak three languages, but my Farsi kind of sucks.”

I laughed. My feet kept in time with his as we walked, my head tilting down, my eyes glancing sideways at him to show him that I had been listening, had heard every word.

“Tell me about you,” he said.

“I arrived from Bangalore last September,” I said. “I had never left India before. I lived there with thirty-seven relatives in a big house, parts of which I am quite sure were built illegally. I missed the noise of my old home. It has been difficult for me. But it is better now. Now I like it here.”

For a moment he said nothing. He simply gazed at me, those long lashes framing his eyes. He squinted to avoid the glare of the sun. A bird twittered in an overhead branch and fluttered off. A mail truck stopped across the street. But all I heard, saw, was him.

He lightly touched my shoulder.

“Good,” he said. “You deserve to like it here.”

I was still in a daze when I stepped into our home. My mother was sitting on the couch in the den, knitting. I was so pleased to see her with her needles and a ball of yarn. She used to knit all the time in India, but I hadn’t even seen her knitting bag since we got here. It was like a tiny light had been turned on somewhere.

“How are you feeling, Ma?” I asked her. “Can I bring you anything?”

“Come,
beta
, sit,” she said, patting the space on the couch next to her.

I sat down, and she took my hand in hers. Her palms were surprisingly cold, but soft.

“What is troubling you?” she asked.

“Wh . . . what do you mean, Ma?” I stammered.

“I am not blind, my child,” she said. “You are not the same. There is something on your mind, something that is worrying you. I have not been well; but I am still your mother; and I know you like nobody else.”

I began to cry. I wanted to tell her but couldn’t because I didn’t know how to, and I didn’t know what I was feeling. I loved Vikram. But I was attracted to Toby. I missed home. I was happy here. I no longer knew what I wanted. I no longer knew who I was. I didn’t know how to say any of this to her in a way that she would understand because I didn’t understand it myself.

“It’s nothing, Ma, really,” I said. “I’m just worried about you. That’s all.”

She pulled my head to her shoulder. She didn’t say anything. The knitting needles and ball fell to the floor. That tiny light seemed to have gone off again.

“Come, Ma,” I said. “It’s time to take your medicine.”

As the school year drew to a close, there seemed to be only four things occupying the minds of the high school students: prom, finals, graduation, and summer plans—and not necessarily in that order.

I really didn’t concern myself with the first two. I was secretly relieved that there was no junior prom at my school, unlike at Renuka’s, where she was all set to go to hers with a group of friends. But I was certain that Toby would be going; no popular and well-liked boy would stay home that night. It gnawed away at me that he was, and that he would be going with some mystery girl who wasn’t me.

The whole school was prepping for finals, everyone in a flux of all-night cramming sessions and extra, last-minute tutoring. I wasn’t worried about my exams, and happily stepped in to help some of my classmates who needed it. I didn’t mind being known for being smart. But despite the stress around exams, there was a vaguely celebratory mood around school, a shared relief.

Amina, Justine, Patrick, and Catherine scheduled our last meeting of the semester. When we came back in September, we would all be one year higher, one year closer to college. Toby wouldn’t be in this school anymore, a thought that filled me with sadness.

Since our last encounter, that precious walk to my home, I hadn’t seen him around school much. He had emailed me a couple of times; but I had been one of many, just another recipient of a funny YouTube video or silly joke. He had waved to me as he was leaving the cafeteria one day just as I was entering, shouting out a “Hey!” I didn’t want him to tell me “Hey.” I wanted him to love me. I stupidly, insanely, illogically, wanted him to love me.

And Vikram, despite all this, loved me still. He wrote poetry in thick black ink on red cards. He mailed me a package of some of the latest Indian CDs, even though I’d told him that everything was available in America, mimicking what my father had said to my mother once.

And my mother. I didn’t know what to make of my mother. She dropped in and out of our lives like a transient, some moments lucid and present, others vapid and vacant. The latest round of drugs gave her constipation, and the subsequent laxatives gave her nausea, and the nausea lead to light-headedness; and there we were, spinning round and round in a cycle of my mother’s intermittent madness. In all of this, my father was the sole constant, the glue that held us all together.

Amina was spending part of the summer volunteering at an orphanage in Dhaka, close to where her father was born.

“I hope we all have a great vacation,” she said, looking at us as we sat around a teak table on the school grounds. “But I’d also like you to think a little about what we could do next year that could outdo the success of the concert. Let’s come up with something really awesome that could raise a big chunk of change. Okay?”

“What are your plans?” Amina asked later, talking to me through a mouthful of egg salad sandwich after the others went off.