The World We Found (4 page)

N
ow, as she entered the kitchen, Armaiti was thankful for Diane’s insistence. Laleh had immediately said yes. Kavita had phoned her two hours later. And the possibility of a visit had lightened the mood in the house. Not that Diane was any closer to accepting her decision to forgo treatment. She was still stomping around the house, making snide remarks, and generally making her opposition known. Let her, Armaiti thought. Let her hold on to her anger. It will get her through these next few months.

Diane was pouring boiled potatoes into a colander when she walked in. “Can I help?” Armaiti asked and Diane handed her the masher. “Can you mash? And don’t skimp on the butter, either.” She eyed her mother critically. “You’re looking kinda skinny. Gotta fatten you up.”

Armaiti smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”

They decided to eat dinner on the screened-in porch. As they sat down, Armaiti removed her cell phone from her pocket and placed it on the table. Richard covered her hand with his. “It’s not time yet,” he said. “It’s just mid-morning in Bombay, remember?”

She smiled. “I know. I’m just so nervous they won’t find Nishta’s parents.”

“If it’s meant to be, they will. Now, relax.” He clicked his wineglass to her water glass. “Bon appétit.”

Armaiti watched with something akin to awe as Diane wolfed down the grilled salmon dinner that Richard had cooked. Had she ever had an appetite like that? she wondered. She doubted it. No woman ate that heartily in the India she’d grown up in. And definitely not in her family. When Armaiti was a child, her mother’s favorite word had been “ladylike.” “That’s not ladylike, deekra,” she’d say if Armaiti asked for a second helping of cake at a birthday party, or, “That’s not dainty, dear,” if she blew her nose too vigorously. Her mother’s life was ruled by one commandment and measured by one yardstick: What Will the Neighbors Say? And Armaiti, protective of her mousy, frail, widowed mother, had for the most part gone along. That is, until her best friend, Laleh Madan, had read
What If?
by Lenin and passed it on to her. Then Armaiti’s life was guided by the opposite principle: Screw What the Neighbors Say. Damn their petit bourgeois neighbors and the hypocritical platitudes that came out of their mouths.

“So, are Auntie Laleh and Kavita coming for sure?” Diane asked with her mouth full.

“I think so,” Armaiti said, thankful that they could talk normally about this subject at least. “They’re trying to.”

“And Auntie Nishta?”

“Don’t know.” She glanced at the cell phone, willing it to ring. “We should hear from Laleh in the next hour or so.”

Chapter 3

T
hey had just called Armaiti with the good news about Mrs. Lokhanwala, and now Kavita was dropping Laleh off at the dentist’s office. Adish, true to his word, had gotten her an emergency appointment.

“You sure you don’t want me to wait with you?” Kavita asked again.

“No. Don’t worry. Either Adish will come or one of the kids will pick me up.”

“The kids. How are they?”

“Fine. Indestructible. Ferzin loves college—everything but the studying part, that is. And Farhad is . . . Farhad. Goofy, easygoing, not a care in the world. God knows what will become of him.”

“He’ll be just fine. Honestly, you don’t know how lucky you are.”

Laleh shot her a sidelong glance. “Yah, you and Farhad have always had a special bond.” There was pleasure in her voice.

“It will be nice to meet Diane,” Kavita said. “Finally.”

“Yes.”

“But can I tell you something, Laleh?”

“What?”

“I’m really upset that Armaiti won’t try radiation. I don’t blame Diane for being furious. I mean, this is madness, no? To not try and fight?”

Laleh sighed heavily. “You know what Armaiti’s like, Ka. She’s always been like this. She’s all mild-mannered and genteel, but made of steel on the inside. Stubborn as anything.”

Kavita nodded. They were both quiet for a moment, and then Laleh said, so softly that Kavita was unsure that she’d heard her correctly, “I should’ve been the one who landed in the hospital.”

Kavita took her eyes off the road for a second. “What do you mean? She’s not in the hospital. She’s home.”

“Not now. Then.”

“What?”

“Don’t you remember? After the march? She was in the hospital with a concussion.”

It took her a minute to realize what Laleh was referring to. “You mean in 1979? After the laathi charge?”

“Exactly.”

“Huh.” Kavita waited, wondering why Laleh was bringing up ancient history. When she realized that Laleh was not going to amplify, she asked, “What’s making you think of this now?”

Laleh looked at her, a furtive expression on her face. “I’m just wondering if the tumor happened because . . . she had that awful concussion, remember? And the amnesia?”

As pragmatic as she is, Laleh can be so damn dramatic at times, Kavita thought. Thank God she married someone as even-tempered and easygoing as Adish. “That’s crazy talk, Lal,” she said.

“Is it?” Laleh said noncommittally. “In any case, if I’d been there that day, I could’ve protected her.”

“Protected her? From those police goons? The bastards went crazy that day. Believe me, I know. I was there.” An image of the dank jail cell and the humiliation that followed rose in Kavita’s mind, but she pushed it away. She had spent a lifetime running away from the room of laughing men and she wasn’t about to reenter it now.

“And I wasn’t,” Laleh was saying. “That’s just it.”

Why were they talking about an incident from thirty years ago? Now, when they had more urgent things to talk about? “Laleh, this is silly . . .” she began.

“I know. I know.” Laleh shook her head. “Just forget it.”

Kavita looked at her for a moment, puzzled. It’s the shock about Armaiti, she told herself. She’s not thinking straight. She cleared her throat. “Anyway. When do you want to go see Nishta?”

“As soon as possible.”

“It’s too bad they’re not listed in the phone book,” Kavita said. “This address sounds like it’s out in the boonies. It will be maddening to go all the way there if she’s not home.”

“I know. But it can’t be helped. I promised Armaiti we would try.” Laleh stared out of the window for a moment. “I still can’t believe we’ve lost touch with Nishta and Iqbal so completely. I didn’t even know they’d moved from Mazgaon.”

“Now, don’t go blaming yourself for yet another thing.” Kavita’s tone was teasing but firm. “
They
pulled away from us. Remember how weird Iqbal acted at your house-warming party?” She entered the gates of the medical building, parked the car, and leaned over to give Laleh a kiss. “Today was a lucky day,” she said. “We’re going to see Nishta soon. Focus on that.”

“You’re right. Listen, how about if I call you tonight and we figure out a time to go see Nishta this week? I can go any day except Thursday—that’s my day at the women’s shelter.”

“Righto. Call me before ten, okay?”

Laleh frowned. “Oh, wait. I just remembered, I have a stupid party to go to tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow. First thing.”

“Okay,” Kavita nodded. “See you.” She was anxious to get away now, to be alone in the car, to savor the memory of the brief phone call to Armaiti earlier today. How happy Armaiti had been at the news of Mrs. Lokhanwala’s unexpected help. “Oh, thank you, Ka,” she’d said, and Kavita had shivered, remembering in a flash the first time Armaiti had shortened her name and how it had felt like a feather brushed across her face. The four of them had gone to Juhu Beach for the day and she and Armaiti had lain on the hot sand, their hands occasionally touching each other’s, staring up at the newly scrubbed sky. Kavita had felt languid, lulled into sleep by the heavy, salty sea air, and then singed into wakefulness every time Armaiti’s hand brushed against hers. It was the most delicious combination of aliveness and dreaminess she had ever experienced. And just then, in response to something she’d said, Armaiti had rolled over on her side and propped her head on her elbow to look down at Kavita’s face, inches from her own. “What you don’t realize, Ka,” she said, and then the rest of her sentence disappeared into the shimmering afternoon air, because the nickname had landed on her like a kiss and all she could see then was Armaiti’s hair set on fire by the sun, the flecks of light in Armaiti’s warm, brown eyes, Armaiti’s golden face against the denim-blue sky, obscuring, no, taking the place of the sun.

Kavita waited until Laleh disappeared through the front door of the dentist’s building, then pulled out of the gate and made a left turn onto the busy street.

Armaiti. Had she ever loved anyone as much? What she now had with Ingrid was so different. Kavita remembered the countless nights when she had lain alone in her single bed, pining away for Armaiti, trying to stop her hands from roaming her body, to intellectualize the slow heat climbing up her limbs, to explain away in anthropological terms the sexual desire that left her mouth dry, to not see the face that loomed before her tightly shut eyes, to not hear the name that threatened to escape from her parted lips. Armaiti. Armaiti—the steady eyes, the wry, wicked humor, the good, kind heart. And then the parts that Kavita saw in the not-seeing: the thin, sensual lips, the clear brown eyes, the pert breasts, just large enough to fill a woman’s hand, the generous hips that would fit perfectly against her own.

It was India. It was the late 1970s. The West, with its women’s movement and gay liberation movement and its permissiveness and promiscuity, was at least a planet away. It was India in the late 1970s, and the country was still coming to grips with the nightmare of the Emergency years, and corruption was endemic and food prices and college tuition were rising, and public services were breaking down. How could any moral individual worry about the clamoring of her own heart? It was India in the late 1970s and how would anyone even know what name to give this strange, unseemly obsession with another woman? Occasionally Kavita’s mind would circle around the forbidden word, but then she’d remember what her older brother Rohit had once said: “Homosexuality is what men do to each other in prison.” What did anything that ugly have to do with her and this tender, protective feeling that she felt around Armaiti? She could call it love, yes, but she loved Nishta and Laleh, too, though they were not the reason she looked forward to college every day. And since there was no word, no description for what she felt, it was easy—or at least possible—to subsume that desire, to channel the basic unjustness of her situation into a desire for justice for all the world’s dispossessed. She didn’t—couldn’t—count herself as one of the dispossessed, not in the India of the late 1970s, not in a place where malnourished children and lepers with holes for noses haunted the streets, and most of her countrymen couldn’t read or write their own names.

A car cut in front of her and Kavita slammed on her brakes, setting off a protest of car horns behind her. She barely noticed. Armaiti was dying, would probably be dead before she turned fifty.

Armaiti, almost fifty. It seemed impossible. She wondered what Armaiti looked like now, added twenty kilos to the slim, lanky girl she’d known to create a matronly figure, gave the sharp-faced girl a triple chin, made the lithe, nimble, movements slower and more deliberate.

It didn’t work. She kept remembering Armaiti in the college cafeteria as the sun came in through the dirty windowpanes and lit up her face; Armaiti on piano and she on guitar as they learned the chords to a Moody Blues song; sitting beside her at Marine Drive as they watched the evening sky turn orange and gold; the two of them caught in a sudden downpour, soaking wet before they could even get their umbrella open, and laughing all the way home.

She had never told Armaiti about how she felt. Back then, they never discussed matters of the heart. The only boys they had talked about were named Lenin, Marx, and Mao. Of course, Adish and Iqbal had always buzzed around Laleh and Nishta, but the girls acted as if they barely noticed them. Nonchalance. That was their posture, their affect. How different they had been from the other teenage girls—passionate, yes, but about the political, not the personal. Broken hearts, broken fingernails, broken promises—all the things that their classmates fretted over, they dismissed. The four of them had been an odd bunch, eccentric and unconventional. They smoked, drank, swore. Claimed to believe in free love. But in many ways they were as virginal as nuns.

Why? Kavita now demanded of herself. Why were we so damn guarded? As close as we were, in some ways we were almost shy around each other. Her mind flipped back to what Laleh had said a few minutes earlier, the guilt that she felt about being absent the day of the march. Had Laleh really been carrying that burden all these years? And she? Why had she never told the others about what the police inspector had done to her in the lockup the night of the march? How his deputy had penetrated her with his fingers, how the men in the room had laughed at her humiliation? How the episode had nearly unhinged her, how it was the first step in her journey away from the political activism she’d once thought would be her life?

The memory of one humiliation yielded another. And although this one was fainter, the memory of it still made sweat form on her upper lip and Kavita lowered the car window to let in fresh air. The year after Armaiti had left for America, Kavita had mailed her a Valentine’s Day card. She had debated whether to do so for weeks and finally, unable to conceal or reveal her true feelings, she had settled on a humorous card—and then signed it,
Love you always
. It was the closest she could come to letting Armaiti know. She had waited for weeks for an acknowledgment, a reply, and when none came, hope turned into shame and self-recrimination. Stupid, stupid, she chastised herself. Finally, a powder-blue aerogram arrived in the mail—a news-filled letter from Armaiti that talked about her classes, the books she was reading, the Leonard Cohen concert she’d attended, droll commentary about life in Ronald Reagan’s America, a board game called Risk that she was addicted to, and a classmate named Richard.