The World We Found (2 page)

And now, the past loomed again, in the form of Nishta’s old apartment building. A thousand memories flooded Laleh’s mind as Kavita searched for a parking space on the tree-lined street. And although she had felt a great urgency to locate Nishta’s parents ever since Armaiti had called with the news, Laleh now felt herself moving slowly, as they exited the car and walked toward the building. When they reached the entrance, she and Kavita stood wordlessly for a second. Then Kavita exhaled loudly and they entered the familiar lobby. Their eyes scanned the large wooden board for the Lokhanwalas’ flat number. “Look,” Laleh said. “They’re still here. Thank God.”

“The lobby still smells the same,” Kavita said, and Laleh nodded as they approached the elevator. “Yup. Like sandalwood.”

They rang the doorbell twice before the servant girl answered. “Hello. Is memsahib home?” Kavita asked.

“Who is calling?”

Kavita hesitated. “Just tell her . . . it’s some old friends.”

The girl threw them a skeptical look before putting on the door chain.

“Yes?” A wizened face peered out at them a few seconds later from the slight opening in the door. “How can I help?”

“Auntie, it’s us—Kavita and Laleh. Nishta’s college friends. You remember us?”

There was a puzzled silence and then the old woman cried out softly. There was a rustling of the chain before she threw the door open. “Kavita. Laleh. I cannot believe. What brings you here? Come in, come in.”

A minute later they were sitting across from Mrs. Lokhanwala in her large, airy living room, the three of them staring at each other, all of them too polite to comment on the changes time had wrought. “What will you take?” the old lady said at last. “Coffee? Tea?” And before they could answer she was calling out, “Deepa. Bring three cups of coffee. And some snacks.”

“Auntie, please. Don’t go to any trouble,” Laleh said. Her mind was whirling, trying to reconcile the fact that the stylish, trim Mrs. Lokhanwala—had they ever known her first name?—was now an old lady. The living room itself looked frozen in time—the same cream-colored walls, the gray floor tile, the beautiful teak rocking chair.

“My God, you two look just the same,” Mrs. Lokhanwala said. “I would’ve recognized you anywhere.”

They smiled shyly. “You, too,” Kavita lied. “And what news of Nishta?”

At the mention of her daughter’s name, a curtain fell over the old woman’s face. The smile vanished. Her eyes turned cloudy. “You don’t know?” she whispered.

Laleh leaned forward. “Know what?” she said.

“We don’t have any contact with her. My husband—he forbade any relations. She married a Muslim boy, you know.”

Laleh realized that she’d been holding her breath. “Yes, we know,” she said. “Iqbal was a friend of ours.” She forced herself to keep her tone neutral. “We had hoped that after all this time, you know, that there might have been a reconciliation.”

Despite her tact, the older woman recoiled, as if she’d been slapped. She stared out at the balcony for a minute before turning to face them again. “What brings you here today?” And before they could answer, “And whatever happened to that other Parsi girl—the fourth one? What was her name?”

“Armaiti,” Kavita said.

“Ah, yes. So much I’ve thought about all of you over the years.” Mrs. Lokhanwala smiled. “So lively our house used to be, with all of you here.” Her face fell. “Now it’s just me and my husband, you know. Our son—you remember Arun?—is settled in Australia. Anyway, how is Armaiti? You see her often?”

“Fine,” Laleh said automatically and then she caught herself. “Actually, auntie, she’s not fine. She lives in America, you know. And”—it was still hard to say the words, but she forced herself—“we just found out that she has a serious illness—a brain tumor.”

“Arre, Ram—” Mrs. Lokhanwala’s hand flew to her mouth. “How could that be? That sweet little girl?”

For a moment Laleh saw Armaiti as Mrs. Lokhanwala did—a teenager forever. She swallowed. “Yes, well . . . And that’s why we’re trying to find Nishta. Armaiti wants to reconnect with her, you see.”

The woman’s face was impassive. “I wish I could help you,” she said.

Laleh suppressed the wave of anger that rose within her. “Does Nishta never try to contact you, either?” she asked evenly.

Mrs. Lokhanwala’s eyes darted around the room. “Every year she sends me a birthday card,” she said. “But my husband doesn’t allow me to open. I just throw it away. Or return it.”

Laleh stared at a spot over the old woman’s left shoulder. She had saved every note her children had ever written her, from kindergarten on. She tried to imagine throwing away a birthday card from Ferzin or Farhad, asked herself what the children could ever do that would make her renounce them. She couldn’t come up with one plausible scenario.

The servant girl came in with a tray and set it carefully down in front of them. Laleh grabbed Kavita’s arm and pulled her to her feet as she stood up. “I’m sorry, but we have to go,” she said. She wanted to get away from Mrs. Lokhanwala’s presence before she said something that she would regret.

“At least have a cup of coffee,” Mrs. Lokhanwala protested, but her voice was drained, flat, and there was a look of understanding on her face.

“I’m sorry, auntie,” Laleh insisted. “We are already late.” She would be damned if she took a sip of anything in this household.

Kavita took a few steps to where Mrs. Lokhanwala was sitting and put her hand on her shoulder. “It was nice seeing you again,” she said softly. “Both of us have such good memories of this house.”

Laleh felt a faint flush on her cheeks, reading a rebuke of her rude behavior in Kavita’s thoughtfulness.

Mrs. Lokhanwala took Kavita’s hand in both of hers. “I know it must seem strange,” she began, but Kavita was already backing away.

They didn’t say a word to each other as they rode the elevator five floors down. The silence held as they walked out of the building gate, crossed the two-lane street, and made their way toward the car. Finally, Kavita turned to Laleh. “I wish we’d never gone there,” she said.

“I know. What kind of mother turns her back on her child?”

“I get the feeling it’s the husband who’s controlling the situation.” She mimicked Mrs. Lokhanwala. “ ‘My husband doesn’t allow me to open the card.’ ”

“Listen,” Laleh said fiercely. “If Adish told me I couldn’t talk to my children, I would pull his tongue out with pliers before I would comply.”

Kavita sighed. “She’s from a different generation, Laleh.”

“Excuse, please,” a soft voice said behind them. They turned around. It was the Lokhanwalas’ servant girl. She was holding an envelope in her hand. “Memsahib wanted me to give you.” She handed the envelope to Kavita, looked up toward the building, and then walked briskly away.

They followed the girl’s line of vision in time to see a figure leaning over the fifth-floor balcony. But a second later the person had moved indoors. It was obviously Mrs. Lokhanwala, making sure that the servant had carried out her instructions.

Kavita turned the envelope around. It was addressed to Mrs. Lokhanwala and there was a return address, which someone had circled in red, with an arrow pointing toward it. And with the same red-ink pen Mrs. Lokhanwala had written in large, shaky letters, “Do not judge me. Please.”

Kavita and Laleh looked at the piece of paper, and then each other. They glanced at the now-empty balcony, and then back at the envelope. When Laleh finally looked at Kavita again, her face was red. “I feel like a total piece of shit,” she said.

Chapter 2

A
rmaiti had been weeding for an hour, ignoring the waning light of the day, when she noticed the dead cardinals.

There were two of them and they lay facing each other, their eyes open, their beaks nearly touching, as if they had been kissing. Their bright-red feathers were bleached to a rusty brown, which told Armaiti that they had been dead for a few days.

Putting on the gardening gloves that she usually forgot to use, she lifted one of the birds gently, half-expecting it to stir and fly away. It felt impossibly light and bony, as if all that plumage was just dazzle, a sleight of hand to cover up a hollow core. The thought made her feel tenderly toward the dead bird. Turning it in her hand, she examined it for a wound, a mark where a cat or a larger bird may have attacked it, but saw nothing. She looked up at the June sky, as if expecting an answer. There was no overhead tree from which the pair could’ve fallen. Maybe the birds had simply tumbled out of the sky, she thought, the way whales sometimes beached themselves on the shore, for no apparent reason. The thought of these beautiful, red creatures falling to earth made her eyes fill with tears.

She was holding death in her hands. The thought unnerved her and she hastily set the bird down. But then she remembered, and she grimaced. She was holding death in more than just her hands—her entire goddamn body was playing host to it, throwing it a grand old party. To take her mind off the subject she checked her watch again. Still too early to hear from the others. The others. After all these years, that’s still how she thought of them. Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta. Would they find Nishta? Find her in time? She so badly wanted to see the three of them again. But now, only now, while her body was still hers. Still hers, most of the time. Not later, when things would get ugly, when her diseased brain would be calling the shots.

Armaiti pushed herself off the ground and for a second the earth wobbled before righting itself again. But the next instant she was distracted by a sharp stab of pain in her knee as she rose. She usually thought of all pain as something to ignore, like a person with bad table manners. Today, she noticed. For the past two weeks, ever since the biopsy report had come back positive, she had been attentive to every whisper and whimper of her body.

She went into the wooden shed behind the garage and returned with a trowel to dig a hole to bury the birds. She laid them side by side in the small grave and then covered them with dirt. Later this week, she thought, she would plant some petunias over the spot.

It was getting too dark to stay out in the yard much longer. And Richard and Diane were indoors, putting together a dinner she knew she’d be too tired to eat. Still, she would try. For their sake. She had brought enough heartbreak into their lives, for the second time in five years. First the divorce, and now this. Diane, now a junior at Harvard, had still been in high school back then.

Why had she been so resolute to divorce Richard? Armaiti wondered as she put away the gardening tools. He had begged her not to go through with it, had sworn that Blossom Greer meant nothing to him. But what had sealed their fate was that Richard had no explanation for the affair. He looked as bewildered and incredulous as she felt. And that unnerved her. If there was no reason, no discontent that explained his infidelity, then it meant that something restless and untamable lived inside of Richard. Armaiti found it unacceptable, this mysterious threat to their life together, whose very ordinariness was their greatest triumph.

“What if it happens again?” she had said to him.

“It won’t,” he’d stammered.

“How do you know?”

“I . . . I . . . just . . .”

Two days later she called their lawyer.

But although Richard had been out of the house for five years, he still was what he had always been—her closest friend in the United States. Now it seemed to her as if they’d just been play-acting—the cheating husband, the outraged, unforgiving wife. How silly, how
unnecessary
it all seemed now. As she crossed the lawn and walked toward the house, Armaiti was struck by a thought: she had been afraid of the dangerous, unpredictable thing residing in Richard’s heart, and it turned out that she had been carrying her own dangerous, unpredictable thing, nestled in her brain. As she pushed open the screen door, she marveled at the bleak irony of fate.

T
hey had broken the news to Diane five days ago, and it had not gone well. They had waited until she came home from Harvard for the summer to tell her. And as if the shock of telling your only child that you’re dying of a brain tumor—how lurid those words sounded, even now—and that you have six to eight months to live—like lines from a cheap movie—wasn’t bad enough, she also had to break the news about her decision to refuse treatment.

Diane had remained calm, had kept her emotions under control as they told her about the unexplained headaches, the MRI, the biopsy. Her demeanor reminded Armaiti of the old days, when her four-year-old daughter would put on her lipstick and wear her shoes around the house, convinced that stepping into her mother’s shoes made her a grown-up.

The trouble came a few minutes later. “When’s your next appointment?” Diane said. “I wanna go with you to discuss treatment options.”

“There isn’t going to be any treatment, honey. I decided against it.”

Diane looked puzzled. “Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning I’m not going to get better. Even with treatment. It’s a glioblastoma—a very aggressive tumor. Inoperable. Did I already tell you that?” Armaiti willed herself to go on, even though Diane looked as if with each word she was hammering a nail into her face. “I have six months or so, Diane. Maybe more. Who knows? You can’t ever pin these doctors down. Not that they would know, either. How could they?” She heard the jittery quality in her voice and forced herself to slow down. “And I don’t want to ruin that time with radiation and all that nonsense.”