Everything Happens for a Reason
KAVITA DASWANI

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Kavita Daswani 2004

Kavita Daswani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007160631

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007387892

Version: 2016-07-21

DEDICATION

To the family I was blessed to be born into,

and the family I was privileged to marry.

EPIGRAPH

All my gratitude to my agent, Jodie Rhodes, who gave me something every novelist needs: a gem of an idea. And to my editor, Susan Watt, and all the wonderful people at HarperCollins, for their enduring faith in me. Every author should be this lucky.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

1

No woman in my family has ever had a job.

No other female in my entire extended clan, as far back as I know, has ever leafed through ‘wanted’ ads and shuffled nervously in a seat while a stranger asked her about ‘job history’. What would she say? That her primary profession was to serve her father and brothers in early life, and her husband and sons later?

So I was completely taken aback when my mother-in-law prodded my stomach with a wooden spoon, complained that I was yet to make her a grandmother, and then insisted that I may as well be of some use and join the workforce.

‘America is expensive,’ she said, poking the utensil with such vigour that it was a rather good thing there wasn’t a baby in there. ‘This is not India. In this country everybody works.’

It didn’t matter that I was a newlywed, in the first flush of marriage, still unpacking the silk saris and silver goblets that had been part of my small but respectable trousseau. It didn’t matter that I was still getting acclimatized – not just to living in a strange country, with a man I didn’t really know, but also with his parents and his younger sister. And nor did it matter that, as far as I saw it, my most important role in this family was as housekeeper, cook and general errand-runner, duties that came along with my new position as wife and daughter-in-law.

All this, I had expected.

But I had never thought that somebody – least of all a ferocious guardian of tradition like my mother-in-law – would be telling me to go out and look for a job.

In generations of women in my family, I was going to be the first.

It should have made me feel like a trailblazer, a pioneer, a valiant example of a woman’s right to be independent.

Instead, the idea terrified me.

Whether by design or circumstance, my parents had never shown my sisters and me much of the world. To them, there was enough to see and do in India without us having to explore what lay beyond the borders of my homeland. It is the same limited vision, I suppose, that I soon realized many Americans have of their own country.

So getting off that plane two months ago at the Tom Bradley Terminal of Los Angeles International Airport, on a muggy day, was a shock in itself. I had stifled the instinct to wail all the way on the flight over, longing to be with my family again although I had just said goodbye to them. I had drifted in and out of restless sleep as watery images of my wedding, just days earlier, seeped through my subconscious. I was trapped in a middle seat on a packed aeroplane, my husband using my armrest on one side, and a large, be-turbaned Sikh doing the same on the other. I hadn’t even landed, yet already felt overwhelmed, squashed and small.

When we finally made it out to the airport, I was astonished by not just the huge numbers of people, but their different types. Television in India doesn’t show you the variety of humanity, their complexions and clothes and cultures so removed from my own: the black woman with her tight trousers and inch-long purple nails, checking my immigration papers; the waiflike Chinese man with the small, serious spectacles, waiting for his grey-haired mother to make her way through customs; the fat white fellow bellowing at his children to get out of the way so he could heave his luggage onto a wayward trolley.

The airport already was a world I had never seen, a microcosm of a universe that I knew I would always be apart from, never a part of.

A week after our Delhi wedding, Sanjay and I had arrived in Los Angeles, his home for the past two decades. For the following two weeks, it was going to be just him and me. My in-laws and Sanjay’s sister, Malini, had remained in India, travelling and visiting relatives, and presumably looking for a husband for my sister-in-law, who had just turned twenty.

‘Welcome.’ Sanjay shut the front door behind us. ‘This is your new home,’ he announced, like the fait accompli it was.

The house was located in a quiet street in Northridge, in an area popularly called ‘the Valley’, which sounds quaint and rural, but in fact is vast and sprawling, and stretches well across the state. Sanjay dropped the bags on the carpet, and moved towards the couch as I stood and looked around.

At least it was a nice home, and for this I could be grateful. One of my friends from Delhi had had an arranged marriage with a man in Chicago, and had arrived there with all the blushing and naïve enthusiasm of a new bride to discover that he was living in a garage.

But here there was plenty of space: a large sitting room, which looked as if it was never used, filled with bulky furniture, marble-topped tables, and a shiny crystal chandelier hanging overhead. A separate dining room boasted a long table, high-backed wooden chairs and a glass-covered cabinet holding glimmering little figurines. In India, this house would be considered a palace, and I very fortunate to live in it.

‘Come, I’ll show you my bedroom – oh, er, sorry, our bedroom,’ Sanjay offered, leading me in by the hand.

It was the room of a young man who had yet to completely shed the remnants of his boyhood: a mess of clothes and newspapers lay strewn across the floor, a big-screen television sat in one corner and remote controls for various other pieces of entertainment equipment were scattered on the bedside table.

‘Great, isn’t it?’ Sanjay grinned.

‘It’s quite messy,’ I said to him, looking around.

‘Hah, why would I clean up after myself when my wife, my new biwi, will be here to do it for me?’ he said, smiling.

‘I am not your maid!’ I shouted, realizing as I was doing so that I had never raised my voice at him before. I knew I should revert to the meek and mild Hindu wife that I had been for the past week, but I was exhausted. ‘Don’t think that I am some kind of a village bride because I am from India and you are living in America,’ I said testily.

Sanjay jumped back, startled, fear in his face.

‘I was just joking,’ he said. ‘Why so mad?’

I walked into the den and pushed a stack of newspapers off the couch so they tumbled to the floor. Sitting down, I began to weep. My ears were still sealed from our descent, my lips chapped from the cold aeroplane air. I was wondering what my family was doing that very second back home: if my father had yet had his morning chai, if my mother was scolding the dhobi for ruining yet another of her outfits, if Radha was combing her long hair, and Roma tending to the household, and Ria reclining against her bed, her face in a book. I knew that, barring any unforeseen calamity or cause for celebration, I could anticipate only an annual return to India. Other people live forty minutes or three hours away from their parents. Mine were a whole year away.

Sanjay approached me cautiously, and sat on the couch.

‘Why are you crying, Priya? I was just joking.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘These tears aren’t for that. I miss my family. I’m supposed to see your parents as mine, but I don’t. This doesn’t feel like my home. What if this is a mistake, and we can’t get out of it? Then what?’ I turned my back to him, and continued to cry.

I felt a murmur of a hand on my back, a gentle stroking of my hair. I could hear him breathing, steadily, tentatively, as if he were not sure if or where to touch me next.

‘Roh-na,’ he said gently, asking me again not to cry. ‘We are both new to this. We will make it.’

Looking back, I believe that that was the precise second that my married life began.

Until the start of my new life in America, I had never experienced jet lag. It was, to me, a concept as foreign as seasickness and being hung over, all of which only sophisticated people ever talked about. My first collision with jet lag made me believe that there is something to be said for being confined to the same time zone for all one’s life. I couldn’t wait for evening to come so I could finally sleep, but what seemed like an eternal night ended abruptly, hours before dawn. It was when I felt most vulnerable, most alone, still subtly shocked at the sudden transformation of my life.

But when Sanjay and I were awake and alert, he said that showing me around helped him to see old things as new again, that he loved the look on my face as I marvelled at the cut-price offers on batteries and baby lotion at the 99-Cents shop, and the warehouse stores – which were the size of Bihar, I thought – where people bought twelve-packs of pizza. American supermarkets were the stuff of legend in India, sightseeing venues in themselves. To me, it was like wandering through a giant lit-up refrigerator. Apple sauce, which doesn’t even exist in Delhi, here took up an entire lane. Even half these bottles wouldn’t fit into Jagdish’s, the dried goods store near my old home where the servants buy sacks of rice and dals and packets of stiff Indian-made chewing gum.

On my first visit to our neighbourhood supermarket, the day after we arrived in America, I shuffled down the aisle, pulling my sweater tightly around me as I approached the frozen foods section, with its big, frosty bins in the centre. I reached in and pulled out boxes of ice cream and pies, chicken and gravy, peas and potatoes and corn, incredulous that all that food could come out of a small square of cardboard and that there was no chopping or dicing involved.

‘Discounts, special offers, extra savings,’ said the cashier as I paid. ‘Just fill in this form, and join our club.’ I smiled with pride as I signed the application, impatient to call my parents and tell them that I was, so soon into my life here, a member of something.

At home that evening, Sanjay showed me how to make tofu burgers and fruit smoothies. He spent three hours filling my head with so many DVD-CD-TV-VCR-laptop-desktop instructions that, by the end, I was dizzy. He showed me where all the light switches were and how to open the garage door and what to do if the alarm system went off. He demonstrated the function of the waste-disposal system, and seemed baffled that I had never seen one before.

‘Don’t you have garbage disposals in India?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s called the street.’

But I remained perplexed, scared to touch anything for fear that it would cause the house to collapse or the kitchen to explode. I asked Sanjay where the torches were, and he had no idea what I was talking about until I described them.

‘In America, they are called flashlights,’ he said. ‘What do you need one for?’

‘For the blackouts.’

‘That’s what happens when you have too much to drink. Here, we call them power outages. And they almost never happen. You keep forgetting, you are not in India any more,’ he said to me gently, laughing.

When Sanjay went off to work the following day, I began my role as wife in earnest. I started to unpack my personal belongings, all the accumulations and acquisitions of almost a quarter-century of living, pared down to two suitcases. Sanjay had cleared out a small section of his wardrobe, which was barely enough for the contents of my trousseau. It had stretched my parents, but they had given me six each of evening ensembles, saris, and daytime outfits – the wealthiest Delhi brides got upwards of twenty each, while the poor were lucky if they received two. I somehow had to find space for all this in a sliver of cupboard no wider than my own person. When Sanjay had showed me proudly how much room he had made for me, I had asked him meekly if perhaps he could afford a little more, but he showed me his dozens of knitted sweaters and suits and bulky winter jackets, and told me that, for now, I would have to make do.

By the time my in-laws returned, it was up to me to see to it that the house sparkled like marble in the moonlight. As is the custom for a bride, my trousseau consisted almost entirely of new clothes, but I had thankfully thought to pack two old outfits for days such as these, ‘heavy cleaning days’. I shrugged into a pale green salwar kameez, a traditional tunic top and flared trousers, which was flecked with old corn oil and turmeric stains that the dhobi wasn’t able to remove.

Comfortably clad, I moved sofas and cleaned underneath. I placed a ladder in front of the wall unit, and wiped on top. I scrubbed toilets and vacuumed carpets and threw out old newspapers. I even mopped down the dusty floors in the garage, astonished all the while that with two women living here, the house had been allowed to get this dirty. It was almost as if they were waiting for me to arrive.

The last room left to clean was that of my sister-in-law, Malini. At the sagri ceremony before the wedding, when the family of the groom celebrates and welcomes the arrival of a bride, she had garlanded me and placed a kiss on my cheek, and seemed almost to mean it. I remembered looking down and catching a glint of something on her stomach. For a moment, I thought that perhaps a chunk of glitter had fallen from my hair onto her belly, but upon closer inspection saw that Malini had a ring pierced through her navel. As she caught me staring, my eyes agog, she covered herself with her sari, and quickly moved away.

So I was sure that Malini would hate knowing that I had been in her room, and I had to confess that it was more my curiosity than any slovenliness on her part that drove me in here. I looked around and wondered what it must have been like to have grown up here, in America. The room was dark, with thick yellow curtains blocking out the sunlight. A slim bed rested against a wall, with a matching dressing table and bedside cabinet next to it. Furry teddy bears and monkeys spilled over the light orange flowered eiderdown, and a stack of Teen People magazines lay neatly on a side table. On the dressing table were photos in frames – Malini with Sanjay or with her parents, another as a lone Indian girl in a group of Americans. I didn’t remember her being this pretty. Her hair was cut short and smooth in a modern style, her teeth white and shiny, no doubt using one of the three thousand types of toothpaste you can find in America. In all the pictures, she was wearing jeans and a short shirt – pink in one, white in another, floral in one after that. I knew I shouldn’t, but I felt compelled to open her wardrobe and look through it: there were jeans and cute tops and small jackets, the kind of smart clothes that I had seen people in the supermarket and on the streets wear.

Later in the week, as I took out another load of trash, the postman was stuffing mail into the box outside. I had seen him from the window, but this was the first time I was standing so close to him.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he asked. ‘How many days a week do you work here?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I didn’t know that the Sohnis had hired a maid. Good idea – they seem so busy. How often do you come?’

‘I’m not the maid,’ I replied quietly. ‘I’m the wife.’

2

Within days of arriving here, I knew what Sanjay meant when he talked about America and its ‘bumper-sticker mentality’.

‘See,’ he said, pointing out certain vehicles on the streets as we made our way to the DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I could apply for a driver’s licence. ‘Here, everybody wants to tell everyone everything. Even the cars have something to say.’ In twenty minutes, I counted fifteen such displays of personal information brandished on the back bumpers of vehicles – someone boasting of a child’s academic achievements at school, their pride at being an American, or, alternatively, exhorting everyone to ‘Give Peace a Chance’. People lumbered by alone in huge cars that blocked roads and took up one-and-a-half parking spaces. They ate and drank and watched TV and talked on tiny phones as they drove what looked like streamlined tanks, their interiors larger than a family of four in India would live in.

People in this country were not shy, and did not expect others to mind their own business. I would queue at the past office, clutching close to my chest envelopes and packets addressed to my family in Delhi, and by the time I was at the counter, I could have penned a thesis on the person in front of me. A typical ‘Hey, how are you?’ thrown my way would launch a mostly one-sided conversation revealing their last divorce and an argument with their doctor about how to treat a hernia, all while I stood and nodded politely.

At the gym, which Sanjay insisted I join, telling me that everyone in America exercised, modesty was a non-issue. In the changing room, as I slipped into my workout clothes behind the safety of a toilet cubicle, women stood naked as they slathered their legs with moisturizer, or combed the wetness out of their hair, talking with each other about cardio, carbs and calories. They had no body hair except where they should have it, unlike myself and all the other women I grew up with, who went to salons where ‘full body waxing’ was a standard request. At my jazzercise class, they wore skin-tight shorts and bra tops, while I huffed and puffed in track pants and a thigh-length T-shirt, hiding in the back next to the dark blue mats. Afterwards, I refused even to take a shower there, noticing that the curtain barely covered the width of the shower stand

After Sanjay left for the office every day, to the bag importing business he ran with his father, and once the day’s housework was done, I had made a habit of enjoying the solitude of my life. Television became my best friend, as I marvelled at the cleverness of Claire Huxtable and the frothy antics of Lucy Ricardo and the dry sophistication of those Designing Women. This was, I was sure, how the real America lived, with charming coincidences and laughs every second, fascinating people and clever situations round every corner.

Unlike everyone on television, I wasn’t ecstatically happy as a newlywed. There was no giggling, romantic haze. But I had never expected that, so my state of modest contentment and growing adjustment seemed perfectly acceptable. My grandmother used to tell my sisters and me that constant, uninterrupted joy was a myth, and fundamentally bad luck.

‘The more you laugh, the more you will eventually cry,’ she used to say. ‘Tragedy always visits people who are too happy.’

It was better, she taught us, that dull, fractious, and even miserable moments are folded into a life of moderate satisfaction.

My grandmother was never wrong.

The rain pelted down thick and hard from the skies like silvery shards of glass. Sanjay had phoned to say he would be working late with a customer, leaving me alone with tea and magazines. On the cover of one was a picture of Jennifer Aniston – I already knew the names of everyone who appeared on those glossy television shows. The actress was staring sexily into the camera, a tiny pair of jeans encasing her slender hips. I knew that she was married to Brad Pitt, who is famous even in India.

I should have been at the gym, but, today anyway, was tired of obeying the fitness instructors as they shouted their orders: ‘Activate those inner thighs! Contract those abs! Tighten! Tighten! Recover!’ I didn’t want to work my ‘obliques’, whose location in my body escaped me, despite two years of human biology class in school.

Instead, I chose to spend my afternoon reclining on the moss-green leather sofa in the den. Having finished the last of my chai, I helped myself to yet another oatmeal raisin cookie from the platter on the low glass table.

There was only the sound of the shower outside, splashing fiercely on the pavement, its defiance keeping me company. Soon, I would have to get dinner started, even if consuming all that sugar had sapped me of energy. Perhaps I would just reheat last night’s leftover grilled aubergine, and throw in some boiled potatoes and cumin to lend a different flavour. A tired Hindu bride was nothing if not inventive.

This would be my last day of indulgence. Tomorrow, my in-laws would be coming home, and their demands, I knew, would easily supersede my own. No leftovers would sully my father-in-law’s table, and my mother-in-law would not allow me to put my feet up for a second. Malini, I was sure, would have something to say about everything.

So today, I could take my final afternoon nap.

So soundly did I sleep, that I didn’t even hear Sanjay come in. When I opened my eyes, groggily and unsure, a trace of saliva had dribbled out of my mouth and onto the arm-roll of the couch, where I had been resting my head. I was still embarrassed for Sanjay to see me like this; I locked the bathroom door whenever I was inside, baffled by the practice I’d seen on those cable television shows of so many couples who did everything in front of one another.

‘Oh, you’re home,’ I announced, looking up at him sheepishly. ‘I’m so sorry. I must have been really tired. What time is it? I’ll get up now, get dinner ready.’ My head still spinning and heavy with sleep, I swung my legs off the couch and started to make for the kitchen.

‘Don’t worry,’ Sanjay said, grabbing my arm. ‘Forget that. Come, I want to take you out for dinner.’

‘But why? It’s nobody’s birthday.’

‘Never mind,’ Sanjay replied. ‘We’ll go out and enjoy ourselves. They’re all coming back tomorrow. It’s our last evening together like this.’

It was my first look at an American buffet. Before I was married, when friends and relatives had returned from trips to the US, they would almost invariably talk about the food. ‘Big big plates,’ they would say, recalling the highlights of their trip. ‘Big big portions. So much to eat. So easy to become fat.’

Here, on counters that lined the length of the restaurant, moist yellow kernels of corn sat next to glistening green peas. Slices of blood-red beet were arranged near broccoli shaped like miniature trees. And all those beans – kidney and black-eyed, chickpea and lima.

‘And see, this is only one section,’ Sanjay said. Holding plastic trays, we walked to an area where large stainless steel vats steamed with soup – minestrone and split pea, clam chowder and chicken noodle. Further down, there were trays of cheese-laden breads and garlic rolls, pizza slices and spongy muffins filled with fruit. Jellies wobbled and white cream on cakes twirled and swirled. After all those cookies at home, I wasn’t even hungry, but this seemed too good to pass up.

‘So, what did you do today?’ Sanjay asked, when we’d sat down and he was slicing into a stack of tomatoes. ‘Are you finding that you are getting more settled in?’

I wished, at that moment, that I could have been like the smart lady with the perfect English accent on Cheers, who always had something funny to say, or the cheerful red-haired mother on Happy Days. Instead, I told Sanjay about someone calling to offer me a credit card, which had been the highlight of my day, but that the offer was revoked when I told her I’d never had one before.

‘Actually, I think I’m a little nervous,’ I said, revealing something to Sanjay that I had just begun to know myself. ‘I’m worried about your family coming tomorrow – if we all will, you know, get along.’

‘I understand,’ said Sanjay, nodding. ‘You’ll do fine. They’ll grow to love you,’ he reassured, squeezing some mustard out of a packet onto a portion of French fries. He raised his earnest face and looked straight into mine. ‘You just have to obey them, keep quiet, smile, and everything will be great,’ he said.

The spoon of split pea soup I was holding close to my mouth suddenly stopped moving, lingering on the edge of my lips. I had known in principle that this was how good daughters-in-law behaved, but had never thought my husband would be actually giving me instructions.

‘What if they tell me to do something and I can’t obey them?’ I asked him, fearful. ‘What if, no matter what I do, they are still never happy with me?’

‘My parents are reasonable people,’ Sanjay said. ‘As long as you don’t argue with them, everything will be fine. And there is no need for you to argue with them because, as I say, they are reasonable people. I told you, just stay quiet, and obey. Come, are you finished? Let’s go home.’

The next day at the airport I dutifully bowed my head to greet my husband’s parents, something I knew they would expect me to do first thing in the morning and last thing at night for at least the first year of married life.

My father-in-law had been trundled over in a wheelchair; usually, he was quite happy with a cane, which he felt he needed after a fall in a slippery bathtub a few years ago (after which, this being America, he sued the builder of the house). But he was never one to reject a free ride, so when it was offered to him by way of a wheelchair, he wasn’t about to decline. Malini and I hugged awkwardly, she staring at my daffodil-yellow sari and me at her slim-fitting velvet tracksuit.

We made our way to the car park opposite the terminal, and began unloading the mounds of luggage. Inside those suitcases were dozens of packets of masala and chevda, the foods that no bonafide Indian home should be without, and all the silks and brocades that my in-laws had accumulated in Delhi, as part of my dowry and on their own.

I helped my father-in-law into the front passenger seat, and my mother-in-law into the back. Malini got in on the other side. Sanjay was revving up the engine as I squeezed the last little sack into the boot, and slammed the lid down. As soon as I did so, Sanjay, thinking everyone was in, drove off, leaving me standing there. He was the only one who realized I was missing, just as he was turning the corner, and came back to fetch me.

‘Sorry, my mistake,’ he said, as I opened the door and got in, my mother-in-law looking displeased as she made room for me.

At home, I carted the luggage off into the bedrooms, rubbed my mother-in-law’s feet, and began reheating dinner – which had been ready since eight this morning.

‘You know, Ma, Priya has been working very hard for your arrival,’ Sanjay said, as she enjoyed a cup of tea. ‘She’s been really great. The house is spotless, no? And she’s learned to do all the grocery shopping and everything. She knows to buy only generic brands, and she uses coupons and all.’

I smiled, touched by his observation.

‘Hah, hah, very good,’ my mother-in-law responded. ‘What’s for dinner?’

I had prepared South Indian cuisine in honour of their arrival. I lay the platters of steamed idli and spicy sambar on the table, which I had covered with white paper doilies. The bright overhead light shone on the condiments and cutlery, making the table setting look like something that might be photographed in a magazine.

Dinner was over quickly, with none of those lingering conversations I had seen on those daytime movies, the ones where brandies were poured and dainty chocolates devoured. My dreaded first night at home with the in-laws seemed to have gone off OK.

Now, I just had the rest of my life to worry about.

3

It’s true when people say marriage is ‘hard work’. There are floors to scrub and shelves to dust and mirrors to wipe. There are onions to chop and spices to sizzle and pots of tea to brew. There are a hundred things to do every day, none of which, I soon realized, had anything to do with the actual marriage itself.

At least that was what my marriage was like.

I knew, in marrying Sanjay, that I was going to be part of a traditional joint Hindu family, two generations under one roof. My own parents had done it that way back in Delhi, as had everyone I knew. In many Hindu families, for a son to have his own home is somewhere between a scandal and a tragedy. Male children are born to care for their parents, and then they marry and bring a wife into the house. She is expected to be ‘homely’. In America, that means ‘not good-looking’. In India, it means ‘taking care of the home and being there all the time’ – with the exception of dashing off to buy peas.

So it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been prepared for any of this. In India, where labour is cheap, we could say things like: ‘I’ll send my man to pick you up.’ There, you can live well as a member of the middle class. In America, everything always seems to be a struggle, what with terrifying taxes that you can’t corrupt your way out of, and car registrations, and electricity bills.

Thankfully, my mother had groomed my sisters and me for what she called a ‘domestic life’.

‘Darlings, you have to learn how to take the entire skin off an apple before it turns brown!’ she used to say to us, as we endured potato-peeling and parsley-chopping rituals.

All of which, I have to say, has now come in very handy.

But nobody ever tells you what really happens when a marriage begins; when the wedding reception is over and the gifts are cleared and a girl moves in with a boy – and, in my case, his entire family. Nobody prepares you for that. Like a Hollywood ending, you never know what happens after the credits have rolled and it’s the morning after the couple have walked off into the sunset.

Like all other girls of my age and background, my view of marriage was shaped by commercials and Indian soap operas, where men never saw their wives looking anything other than flawless. There were no acne breakouts, no runny noses, no belching or burping in marriage. I imagined that my future husband would always be clean, sweet and smiling. I would always have waxed legs and a pristine complexion. We would never have a moment’s silence between us. He would garland me with gold chains and I, petite in his oversized pyjama shirt, would kiss his stubbly cheek every morning.

But my marriage, as tender as it could occasionally be, was nothing like that.

It was, in the end, a guy in a vest, scratching himself, and a girl wondering what to make for dinner. For us, there were no trips to Ethan Allen for mahogany bookcases, no putting up pictures together and standing back, arms around one another, looking at the straight and perfect job we had just done. There were no nose-nuzzling nights with a bottle of wine in front of the fire. It was about me being absorbed into the life of Sanjay and his family, without leaving much of myself behind.

Sanjay had promised me that when his family returned from India, they would throw a grand reception to introduce me to all their friends. I had already selected the sari I would wear to the party, a cream chiffon one that had been a gift from my meddlesome Aunt Vimla, and the one thing about her I actually liked. I would wear it with the gold I had been given on my wedding day, and I would be poised and pure and everyone in my in-law’s Northridge circle of friends would marvel at how Sanjay Sohni had found such a nice wife.

But my mother-in-law told me, a week after their return, that there would be no such party.

‘Enough money was spent in India at the wedding,’ she said, referring to my father’s expenses and some imaginary ones of her own. ‘No need to do anything here. Bas, you’ll slowly meet people. Our friends will have lunches and teas. Then they can see you. Anyhow, you are busy with the house. No time to socialize.’

Sanjay was one of the last in his group to get married, so we instantaneously had a young-couple clan to be a part of. Every few Saturday nights, once I had prepared dinner for my in-laws and cleaned the kitchen, Sanjay took me out with his friends. We went for dinners in loud restaurants where all the boys drank beer and paid me no heed. There was Rajesh and Naresh and Prakash, married to girls named Seema and Dina and Monu, and they looked me up and down, with no attempts made to be subtle about it, each time we met. All the wives worked, and seemed proud of it. When they weren’t talking about bad bosses and car payments, they gossiped about other girls. They wore quite smart Western clothes, and seemed to have forgotten the days when they were new to America from India, and had dressed traditionally, just like me. They were Indian girls, but American now, and I knew when I met them that they would never become my real friends, because whenever I saw them they made me long to be with my sisters again.

Whenever Sanjay wanted to see these people, I went along with him. When we returned home, I told my in-laws that we had had a nice time, and said nothing as Sanjay lied to them about how much dinner had cost. I set the alarm clock for early the next day so I could get up and make tea. Then I touched their feet, even if they had already gone to bed. Between that and picking up the trail of clothes and other items Sanjay would leave in his wake, I knew I would be spending much of my marriage at a ninety-degree angle.

I was a good Hindu wife. This is just what I did. Dutiful, devoted and ever so downtrodden, but always happy and smiling. I was to do what my in-laws said.

And now, I was to go and find a job.

4

Vivacious! was my favourite magazine in the whole world. When it arrived every month at our home in Delhi, I would tear off the Cellophane covering, sit down with a jug of nimbu pani and not get up again until I had read the issue cover to cover. There were none of those ‘Ten Wicked Ways to Please Your Lover’ columns like I was embarrassed to see that American magazines are filled with. Instead, I read features with titles like ‘Ghee – Not Just in Your Mother’s Kitchen’. There were articles about at-home pedicures (or at least how to train the maids to give them), the importance of yoga in prenatal care, and how curtains can be made from those unwanted silk saris. Delhi socialites were interviewed about their most memorable parties, and Hindi movie-stars about how grrreat their co-stars were in their latest films.

When I was still a single and carefree Delhi girl, I had been priming myself to ask my father if I could apply to Vivacious! for a job. I had realized, as I flicked through the crisp pages of the magazine, occasionally holding it up to my nose to smell the new print, that I wanted to write those stories. I had composed plenty of essays for my degree in English literature, for which I almost always got at least a B-plus, so there must have been some ability in me to put words together. My father, I knew, would probably refuse, and repeat to me that ‘no woman in this family has ever worked outside the house – and look, your sisters are all at home where they belong’, which is something he said to any of us when we brought up the subject. And I had to confess that it was not important enough to get into an argument about. Still, there had been no harm in asking again.

But then marriage happened to me. Literally. This profound life change fell upon me as suddenly and fatefully as buckets of dirty water sometimes tumble from buildings upon Delhi pedestrians, as they walk by drinking coconut juice and eating tamarind-soaked rice crispies.

So the night that my mother-in-law suggested I look for a job, my first thought was to reprise my former ambition of being a journalist. My grandmother used to say to me, ‘After marriage, do what you want. Nobody wants a working girl as a bride, but maybe later, if you are lucky, your husband will permit you to have your dreams.’

I had hoped that my in-laws would reward my proven subservience by acquiescing to a small request that I had.

‘Absolutely not!’ my father-in-law shouted when I mentioned it, reacting as if I had told him I wanted to become a stripper. ‘I’m not having a daughter-in-law do that kind of nonsense work. Reporter-beporter, hah! This is a small community, and I will not let people say they have seen the wife of my only son with different men, meeting them alone. Maybe you’ll have to do interviews in hotel rooms? Maybe they will give you alcohol? Then what will you do? If you were a doctor, something respectable, I would not have a problem. But none of this going here and there by yourself. I will not tolerate it. You must find a simple job.’

New brides were not supposed to argue with their in-laws, so I deferred to my husband, hoping he would step in. But he said nothing, keeping his eyes on his plate the entire time, playing with a paratha.

‘Fine, Mummy, Papa,’ I said quietly. ‘As you wish.’

It was disappointing, but I took comfort in my grandmother’s words as she would observe any of life’s minute dramas and greater mysteries.

‘Things come about the way they are supposed to,’ she would often repeat. ‘Everything happens for a reason.’

5

Those words wafted around in my head as I sat in my car in front of a gleaming chrome and steel building in Beverly Hills, about to go into my fifth job interview in ten days. The sun was glinting off the mirrored surface of the building with such brightness that the number on the top of the entrance was momentarily hidden, so I couldn’t be sure I was even in the right place. It looked, well, too nice. I had so far been turned down for salesgirls positions in three stores – the interviewers had each time surveyed my drab, shapeless Indian outfit and told me the position had already been filled. And the owner of the local 7–Eleven rejected my application because I had ‘no experience’, even though I reminded him that I had quite a way with a broom, and was pretty sure I could master the cash register in no time.

Apparently, in this country, having no job before the age of twenty-four isn’t the soundest recommendation, and the current flat economy didn’t help. Had I been in India, the only reason I would be out seeking work was because a search for a husband had, for whatever reason, been deferred. There, to be twenty-four and gainfully unemployed was a good thing.

I checked my watch. It was exactly nine o’clock. I was on time, and, as sophisticated as this place looked, it was the correct address. I took a deep breath, said the prayer invoking Laxmi, the Goddess of Prosperity, that I always said before one of these, and went in. Hopefully, today, She would listen to me.

‘Um, hello, I’m here to interview for the receptionist position,’ I said to the security guard in the cool marble foyer, pulling out the newspaper ad. He made a call, and then gave me a ‘Visitor’ tag, which I plastered on my tunic top. In the elevator, I checked myself in the mirror, smoothed down my waist-length hair, wiped off a bit of lip-gloss that had somehow landed on my chin, and hiked up my drawstring trousers so they no longer puddled around my ankles. The red powder that I wore in my hair parting to signify my status as a newlywed wife was still bright and intact. It always drew stares, and many times gasps of concern from strangers who thought that perhaps my scalp was bleeding. In the concentrated light of the elevator, it looked almost sinister. The pendant of the Hindu goddess Durga around my neck shone under the spotlights. The small heels of my slightly scuffed beige shoes added a bit of height to my frame, and I noticed that I still hadn’t regained the weight I’d lost since my wedding, which explained why my trousers – drawstring notwithstanding – couldn’t stay up.

When I got out, I saw the words Hollywood Insider scrawled in brilliant blue across a set of double glass doors leading to an office. Inside, two girls were sitting on a dark orange sofa in the reception area and on a corner table was a stack of job-application forms. I picked one up and started to fill it out. I had the contents of these almost memorized by now.

The girls, obviously friends, were fashionably dressed and lively, chatting to one another with confidence.

‘I’m sure one of us will slam-dunk this,’ said the first girl. ‘I have to admit, things are really looking up for me since I started on the Zoloft.’

‘Yeah,’ said the other one, chewing gum. ‘Can you imagine who we could meet? You know, Colin Farrell could come in through those doors any second.’ At that, they both giggled and pretended to swoon, while my only thought was: Colin who?

Sitting behind the reception desk was a woman who looked at least fifteen months pregnant, trying to get comfortable in her chair. I glanced around at the smooth, shiny marble floors, the glass-enclosed offices on either side of me, the huge framed magazine covers featuring famous people that lined the walls. The receptionist, who introduced herself as Dara, asked to speak to each of the other girls first, individually. They conversed quietly while I scribbled my details down on the form. Name: Priya Sohni. Age: 24. Languages: English, Hindi, Conversational French. I left blank the space next to ‘Experience’.

Before I knew it, it was my turn.

‘Hi,’ Dara said, barely able to move. ‘So, as you’ve probably guessed this is for my position, as I’ve got more pressing things to do,’ she said, pointing to her large, bulbous stomach. ‘I’ll chat with you first, and then send you off to human resources for a second interview. OK? Right, let’s have a look,’ she continued, scanning down my form.

‘You have all your papers? Legal?’ she asked, when she read that my place of birth was India.

‘Yes, miss, absolutely,’ I replied, nervously winding a handkerchief in and out of my fingers.

‘I love your accent,’ she said smiling. ‘Sounds real nice. So, are you familiar with computers?’ she asked, casting a curious glance towards the slim red streak down my hair parting.

‘I’m proficient with word processing,’ I said.

‘Good English, huh?’

‘Bachelor’s in literature.’

‘When do you think you can you start?’

‘Um, right away, if you would like,’ I replied hopefully.

‘That’s good to hear,’ she said, grimacing and looking down. ‘I think my water just broke.’

Five minutes later, as Dara called her husband to come to fetch her, yelling out to me, ‘Good luck with the rest of the interview!’, I was carted along to the head of human resources, an efficient-looking woman named Hilda. She had short black hair, was dressed in a business suit that seemed a bit heavy for this climate, and asked me to take a seat in her office. I tried not to get my hopes up, but this was the furthest I had ever been.

‘You know what the job is, yes?’ she asked. ‘We’re a celebrity magazine. There’s lots of answering of phones, taking deliveries, greeting visitors.’ As I nodded, she looked at my application from again.

‘It says here you’re from India. What brought you to America?’

‘Marriage. My husband emigrated from India many years ago with his family,’ I replied.

She looked up, and put down her pen.

‘Was it, an, um, what-do-you-call-them, arranged marriage?’ she asked, suddenly interested. ‘And a joint family? Like on the Discovery channel? Do you all live together?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact we do,’ I said, my accent suddenly sounding thick and clumsy in this light-filled room with the modern art on its walls. ‘It’s quite traditional, how it all happened.’ I was conscious of my English, remembering Mrs Pereira from school, who would thwack my palm with a chipped wooden ruler if I slurred words together or dropped letters from their place. Even if I was living in America now, there would never be any ‘gonna’ or ‘wanna’ or ‘gotta’.

‘Yeah, I read something in Marie-Claire about brides moving in with their in-laws,’ Hilda continued. ‘Hafta say, don’t know how you folks do it. It’s hard enough living with just my husband, forget his parents.

‘I think you’ve forgotten to fill this in,’ she then said, suddenly changing the subject and pointing to the ‘Experience’ section. My heart sank. This was the part where I was always shown the door.

‘I didn’t forget,’ I said quietly. ‘I have not had a job before. This would be my first.’

Hilda looked stunned.

‘Not even while you were in college? Not even part time or summers? Well, that’s disappointing because the ad did say we needed someone with experience. I’m sorry, I know you came all the way in, but –’

‘Please, Miss Hilda,’ I stammered, trying not to cry, I couldn’t take another rejection, another day of going home empty-handed, and then having to start the search all over again. Already, my in-laws were complaining about how much petrol I was wasting on what they called ‘coming up and down’, as if it were my fault that nobody wanted to hire me.

‘I know I can do the job,’ I pleaded to Hilda. ‘I learn very quickly and am willing to work hard. Please, just give me a chance.’

Hilda leaned back in her chair. ‘You don’t want to become an actress, do you?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes.

‘Oh my, no!’ I replied, surprised at the question.

‘Then that’s about the only thing you have going for you. Everybody else who comes in here thinks that this will be their first step into the industry, as if they’ll be discovered by some super-agent as they’re sitting behind reception. Like the two girls who were in here before you. I knew they weren’t serious. It’s infuriating. We fill the position so often that it’s become a joke. Dara is the only one we’ve had that had a legitimate reason for leaving,’ Hilda said, shaking her head.

She looked me up and down, clearly not enamoured of my outfit and puzzled by what to her must have looked like a razor slit above my cranium. And I knew when I left the house that the waist pouch was a bad idea.

‘You’re very nice-looking, but you might want to invest in a few new clothes,’ she said. ‘You’re the first person anyone sees when they walk through those doors.’

I nodded eagerly, but was wondering how I was going to get around that one. My in-laws frowned on what they called ‘very bad and sexy American-style clothes for cheap girls’ – which to them was anything but a baggy sweat-suit. If it were up to them, I would be cruising through Los Angeles in a burkha.

‘You’re lucky that we need someone to start immediately, and that I can’t be bothered to interview any more this morning. So I hope I don’t regret this, but I’m going to give you a shot,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the Hollywood Insider.’

Within minutes, I was signing contracts and having my social security card photocopied and being shown around a glossy set of offices by a man called Lou, Hilda’s assistant.

‘This is where the Hollywood Insider is put together. That’s just one division of the company, the one you’ll be involved with. The rest of the building is ours as well,’ Lou said, as if he’d recited the same speech a million times before.

I couldn’t help hearing snippets of conversation coming through the glass-enclosed booths, the tops of the cluttered desks filled with flat-screen computers, brightly coloured in-trays, stacks of pens and mobile phones charging. Everywhere there were photographs of movie stars – a big black-and-white shot of Jackie Chan lay on the floor, a signed picture of Julia Roberts was pinned to a corkboard. People were chatting on their phones, scribbling notes, yelling over their desks things like, ‘Harrison Ford’s guy is on line two.’ I was in the same room as people who knew people who knew Harrison Ford, who, like Brad Pitt, was famous even in India.

From what I’d seen in the movies, I had thought I would be sitting in front of a large wall repeating ‘Hold, please’ every five seconds, switching little wires in and out of sockets. Isn’t that what a receptionist did?

Instead, I was installed behind a large circular desk that had a counter above it, making me feel even smaller and more hidden. Jerry, a young man from the IT department, had come along to ask me if I had any questions about how the phone system worked.

‘Everyone here has direct lines, so most of their calls come through on those,’ he instructed. ‘But sometimes people call the main line – that’s you – and you’ll need to direct them. So here’s a list of everyone’s names, what their job titles are, and their extensions. And this row of buttons – that’s for you if you need to buzz anyone in-house, like my department, or accounting, or security. Especially security,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you think you got that?’

As soon as Jerry had gone I called Sanjay to tell him that I had got the job, was starting right away, and wouldn’t be home until evening.

‘Congrats, honey!’ he said. He had started calling me ‘honey’ recently, leading me to believe that he had been watching too much Days of Our Lives on the television in his office. ‘I’ve been a bit worried, didn’t hear from you all morning,’ he said. ‘I left a couple of messages on your mobile. As long as everything is OK …’

‘Yes, fine. Better go now,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want them to think I’m not doing anything on my first day. I’ll speak to you later, hah?’

Hollywood Insider, as I read from a company brochure I found in my desk, was a newcomer to the world of entertainment publishing. Its purpose was to ‘provide accurate, entertaining, informative and illuminating news and features on movie stars, their films, and the world they inhabit’. The parent company, Galaxy Holdings, also published a tabloid, called Weekly Buzz, which was located two floors down. Stardom, the cable television channel Galaxy owned, was an even more recent arrival on the scene.

In between taking and rerouteing calls, I leafed through a few recent issues of the magazine. There were long interviews with major movie stars, short items about production deals gone sour and a page devoted to who was wearing what at last week’s premieres. Everyone around me was beautiful and busy, and I gazed at them from behind my desk, where I was barely visible unless I stood up. They were the kind of people that my father, in his infinite cleverness, would describe as ‘the impression-making sort’.

In the middle of the morning, a smiling redhead came up to me with a trolley.

‘Hi, I’m Deanna from the mail room,’ she said. ‘You’re new here, right? Every few weeks, there seems like there’s someone new here. Not that it’s a bad job – in fact I think it’s a great job, but people don’t seem to stick around that long. What’s your name?’ she asked, finally stopping for breath.

‘Priya,’ I said, standing up. ‘Very nice to meet you.’

‘Anything to send out?’ she asked, scanning the top of the counter above my desk. ‘I’ll be coming by a few times a day, but this is the first call.’

‘Um, nothing yet. Is there anything else I should know?’ I asked.

‘Well, let’s see. For the most part, everyone is supernice. But,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘there’s a couple of people down there,’ and she motioned with her thumb to the corridor where all the writers sat, ‘that can be really mean. Just, what’s that word, terrestrial?’

‘I think you mean territorial,’ I said.

‘Yeah, that, whatever,’ she continued, flicking my words away with her hand. ‘Some of them down there get really snippety about newcomers, think that everyone is after their jobs. I mean, so paranoid!’ she said, rolling her eyes, and fingering one of the six silver rings that lined her left ear.

‘So where you from, anyway?’ she asked, cupping her chin in her hand and leaning against the counter on an elbow. ‘You got a real unusual accent. What is it, like, Toledo?’

‘Um, India, actually,’ I said. ‘Not Toledo. Delhi.

‘Are we allowed to be talking like this?’ I asked, looking around nervously. ‘I don’t want to get caught.’

Deanna looked at me disbelievingly and giggled.

‘Where do you think you are – boarding school? It’s just an office, for God’s sake. Sure we’re allowed to talk. It’s not like we’re in some lock-up, although I guess sometimes it might feel that way!’

Lou came by, and I shuffled some papers, lowered my eyes, and said goodbye to Deanna, who shook her head, rolled her eyes and walked away.

‘You can take an hour off for lunch, between one and two,’ Lou said. ‘Just don’t forget to turn the system to voicemail, and check any messages when you get back.’

I was suddenly hungry – I hadn’t had any breakfast this morning, convinced I’d be back home in no time – so at exactly one, I made my way back down in the lift, which stopped on each floor until it was filled. I kept my eyes lowered as I heard these people in their relaxed, slurry accents talking about what had happened this morning or debating between Chinese and a sandwich. I was the last to emerge when we reached the lobby, stepped out through the big glass doors, and wasn’t sure where to go next. Everyone else had gone off in pairs and groups, leaving me standing there alone. The sun was beating down strong and hard, causing me to squint to find my bearings. Cars whizzed back and forth as I stood in the parking lot, looking out across the wide, busy boulevard. There were dozens of places to eat, and I just had to choose somewhere to go. In a way, it felt lovely to be this free; that the next hour was mine to do with exactly as I wanted, instead of having to cut short my shower, which I often had to do at home, because the aubergine might be burning.

I opened my wallet and found that I still had the twenty dollars that was left over from last week’s housekeeping money, which would buy me just about anything, food-wise. A bright yellow awning down the block beckoned me, and I found that it was a little Italian café. I went in, said the radical words ‘for one’, and was escorted to a small table against a wall. A slim novel was tucked into my handbag – one of my sisters had taught me never to leave home without one – and I ordered a dish of vegetable pasta and some water. I was the only person in the restaurant dining alone, and while I recognized some of the other people there from the office, I know that they didn’t recognize me. I kept my eyes on my book the whole time, as if raising them and looking around would mean that I was opening myself up to the humiliation, surely, that women feel eating by themselves. And when these people around me laughed, as they did often while in conversation, I was certain that they were laughing at me.

As awkward as I felt, however, this was so much better than standing in the kitchen with my mother-in-law, grinding cumin seeds.

Even if I would still have to do that later.

6

Finally, I knew what people meant when they talked about being in ‘commuter hell’. I had been told that once anyone drives in India, getting behind the wheel anywhere else in the world is a dream; Los Angeles, especially, with its infamous freeways, which were never particularly free. There were rules in this country. In Delhi, people parked sideways along narrow streets or in front of entrances or on top of the pavement, safe in the knowledge that it would take two days for a tow truck to get there. Speeding tickets would be torn up with an offer of a few hundred rupees, and it didn’t matter if you didn’t have your licence on you – or if you didn’t have one at all, for that matter. But here, in this land of rules and regulations, I knew that I couldn’t just slide by. It had taken me three attempts to get my licence; I kept knocking down those orange cones during the test. And when I was finally a fully qualified member of the driving community, I refused to use those freeways.

‘I’m scared to merge,’ I said, crying to Sanjay. ‘So many cars coming, one after the other, nobody letting me go. I want to stay in one lane only.’

‘If you do, you’ll end up in Santa Barbara,’ he said. ‘If you want to live here, you have no choice.’ This was why I knew I would never fit in. Other drivers slid in in front of me, whether I was prepared for them or not, and barrelled through lanes as if they owned the roads. I always gave them priority, convinced they had more right to be there than I did. I would rather end up in Santa Barbara than fight for the right exit.

Tonight, after shifting and merging alongside the rest of the cars on the 101 freeway, filled with their stressed-out lone occupants, it wasn’t till seven thirty that I finally pulled into the drive of our house.

Our home was distinguished from all the others on the street only by the bunch of dried chilies suspended above the front door, and the small plastic mural of Laxmi embedded into the stucco wall on the right of the entrance.

I opened the door, and saw my family seated around the dining table, about to tuck in.

‘Priya, glad you made it home in time. We weren’t sure when you would be back. Terrible traffic, right?’ said Sanjay, rising from his chair.

My in-laws looked up, while my sister-in-law, Malini waved casually across the room.

‘Hiya, bhabi,’ she said, referring to me in the way that all good girls are meant to call the wives of their elder brothers – although I knew, based on the contents of her closet and the secrets that I sensed lingered in the walls of her bedroom, that Malini wasn’t really a good girl.

‘We ordered Domino’s pizza and garlic bread,’ my mother-in-law said, huffily. ‘It became late; nothing was ready.’

‘Sorry, Ma,’ I replied. ‘Rush-hour traffic. I think it’s going to be like this everyday. I don’t know what else to do.’

‘Hah, never mind, we’ll work something out,’ she said, surprisingly sympathetically, cutting stretchy string cheese that connected a slice of pizza to the plate. ‘Maybe you just do all the chopping and cutting in the morning before you go, and then Malini and I can fry everything later.’

My sister-in-law, nibbling on a piece of bread, did not look amused.

‘You have to learn eventually, beti,’ my mother-in-law said, addressing her. ‘You are twenty now. Soon, we will have to find a boy for you and then what will you do?

‘And then,’ she continued, turning back to me ‘on weekends, we can do everything else – cleaning, dusting, sweeping properly. We will have to make new arrangements because of your job.’

That seemed a pretty equitable arrangement. Besides, didn’t everybody in America live this way? Work at work and then come home and work still?

‘Anyway, how did everything go?’ my father-in-law asked, his bald spot shining beneath the light, his thick and unruly eyebrows reminding me of a picture I had once seen of the jungles of Borneo. I was surprised by his interest; he usually only interacted with me to tell me that the cauliflower could be crispier.

‘Everything went well, Papa,’ I replied. ‘I think I will like it there.’

‘What is your salary?’

I told them, and my in-laws promptly proceeded to work it out in rupees, causing them to ooh and ahh with delight. It then fell upon Sanjay to remind them that while two hundred thousand rupees was, indeed, a fortune in India, forty thousand American dollars was just forty thousand American dollars, a lot less after tax.

‘Better you open a bank account,’ my father-in-law advised. ‘We will see how much goes towards your own savings, and how much we can use for the house expenses. Also, we have to remember that you won’t be working for long. Soon, God willing, baby will come, yes?’

I looked over at my mother-in-law, thankful that she wasn’t wielding her wooden spoon just now, although she was waving a spatula around somewhat menacingly.

‘So, tell me about the job,’ Sanjay said to me later, as we lay on our bed, watching television. ‘Are you enjoying it so far? You know, if you don’t we can find you something else.’

‘No, no, I really like it. The people seem nice – at least the four that I’ve met so far. And it’s such a great place. They run all these different magazines, and even some TV thing, and I work on the floor of a magazine called Hollywood Insider, which reports on celebrities and movies.’

‘Wow! Do you think you’ll ever get to meet anyone famous?’ Sanjay asked.

‘I doubt it. I’m just a girl answering the phones in reception. But I really am enjoying it,’ I said, snuggling up to him and enjoying the privacy of our bedroom. I knew it would be short-lived; in an hour, as was his habit every night, my father-in-law would summon me downstairs to make hot pista milk for him. And once I was in the kitchen, my mother-in-law always found something else for me to do.

‘Hey, I have a great idea!’ Sanjay exclaimed. ‘I’ve always wanted to get one of those deals where we make bags for when a movie comes out – you know, with cartoon characters and stuff. Now that you know these people at the studios, maybe you can help me do that, introduce me to the right people. Shall I give you some samples to take into the office tomorrow?’

‘Sanjay, I don’t know if that’s appropriate,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know these people. I’m just a receptionist there. How can I carry a load of bags in tomorrow as if I’m selling something. It looks a bit tacky, no?’

Sanjay thought about it for a minute. ‘Hah, maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s too soon. Let’s wait a few months. I hope you’ll still be there by then.’

‘I hope so also,’ I said. ‘But you know, there is one thing. I know it’s my first day and all, but I think I’ll be needing some new clothes. The people who work there are very fashionable. Not that I have to be very fancy-fancy or anything, but just something that looks a little more decent than what I have now. Do you think that would be OK?’

‘I think so,’ Sanjay said, wrapping his arm around me. ‘We’ll talk to Mummy and Papa about it and get their permission. You know how they feel about Western clothes. But maybe they’ll agree. Then this weekend, if we have time, we’ll go shopping.’

I was up at six the next morning, making the tea, which I stored in a Thermos, pending the awakening of the rest of the household, and left slices of bouncy white bread ready to be toasted in the miniature oven. Then I got going on dinner, which wasn’t to be served for another fourteen hours, but at least prepared all the vegetables and left them covered in the refrigerator so my mother-in-law could cook them later. I unloaded the dishwasher from the night before, put everything away, cleaned the counters and was running upstairs to take a shower when Malini emerged from her room.

She was in a pair of white pyjamas with little red lips printed all over them, the top held up with two small straps, her nipples showing through underneath. I knew she was only wearing them because her parents were still asleep. As soon as they awoke, she would run into her room and throw on a dressing gown. Now, she yawned and stretched, revealing the tiny silver ring clipped through her belly button. I looked down at my high-collared floral nightgown and felt like an overstuffed chintz sofa.

‘Have a great day at work, bhabi,’ she said. I had always thought that she looked, dressed and sounded like one of those girls on Beverly Hills 90210. I couldn’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, when nobody was looking, she acted like one of them too.

‘Thank you, Malini,’ I said, as I sprinted back into our bedroom. ‘You have a nice day too.’

I found a place to park in the shade right beneath the building, and noted that it was exactly nine seventeen. I pulled out a Wet Wipe from the glove compartment, and ran it down my hair, removing the sindoor I had just applied before leaving the house. I had a small silver container of it in my bag, and would replace it later before I went home.

Office hours were nine thirty to five thirty, so I was early. I even had time to do what all the other early arrivals around me were doing – buying coffee and a pastry from a stall on wheels outside the entrance to the building.

Settling in behind my desk, I sat and waited for the phones to start ringing, for people to start coming through, for deliveries to pile up. At nine thirty on the dot, it seemed as if the whole place jolted awake and came to life. I could hear phones jingling all over the office, and the little system on my desk was flashing and beeping too. The doors swung open every minute or so, the reporters and researchers and photographers filing in, carrying computer bags and trendy totes and chatting with each other, occasionally and unthinkingly throwing a smile my way. I sat behind my desk and wanted to greet them all individually, making eye contact and nodding my head eagerly.

‘Good morning,’ I said, as they whisked by me, on their way to their offices. The only people who stopped to chat were Lou and Jerry, both asking me how I was settling in or if I needed anything.

‘I’m doing fine, sir,’ I said to Lou, who had already asked me four times not to call him that.

It wasn’t too hard to feel invisible; all day long, people stood around me and chatted as if I wasn’t there.

‘So, did you get your period yet?’ one girl in a short white skirt and black boots asked another. ‘You must be freaking out! Does Simon know? Are you gonna tell him, or wait until you know for sure? I mean, you don’t want him to marry you only because you might be pregnant, right?’

I cowered beneath the counter, answering phones, but couldn’t help overhearing every word.

‘He’ll probably dump me,’ the other girl replied. ‘Don’t think he’s ready for any big commitment, you know? I’m screwed,’ she said, turning paler than she already was and shaking her head. ‘Anyway, forget all that. How are you and Patrick doing?’

‘Yeah, great. He wants to go on holiday, asked me to pick where. There’s a place I keep hearing about, but don’t know too much about it. The West Bank?’

Later, in the elevator, I saw the same two women, still talking. When I got in with them, they stopped for a second, looked me up and down, and proceeded on their conversation, evidently deciding that I was too simpleminded to pay any heed. I stood in one corner, staring down at the light blue-with-black-trim salwar kameez, which was one of the nicest outfits from my trousseau. I thought I looked smart, and was hoping that the girls might comment on the exotica of my dress sense, but they said nothing, instead carrying on with their chat about missed menstruations and sun-tanning on the Gaza Strip.

Deanna was my only real link between the desk that I sat behind, and the far more vivid world that seemed to exist beyond it. During her four-a-day visits, she would tell me stories about people I hadn’t spoken to, and give me glimmers of insight into the lives of colleagues that I would probably never meet.

‘And that girl, Aimee, you know, the one who covers the nightclub scene, tall, skinny, blonde, beautiful, makes you sick just to look at her? You know? Anyway, she snuck her boyfriend in here, and was caught making out with him on the desk of the photo editor, who now wants to move out of his office because he says he can’t imagine using that desk again! Can you believe it? Hysterical!’ she said, as I stared at her, baffled at the things that went on in corporate America.

‘And,’ she continued, pausing for emphasis, ‘that overweight movie reviewer – you know the one, really serious, thinks he knows everything, total snob – he’s about to get fired because they found out he was taking money from a studio to write good reviews. Isn’t that outrageous?’ she screamed, giggling.

‘Not really,’ I replied, whispering. ‘In India, everyone does that.’

7

If everything were exactly according to the order of Hindu cultural law, I shouldn’t really be living in America.

I shouldn’t really even be married.

I am the youngest of four girls – which some would say is a disaster in itself. But, until a couple of months ago, I was also the youngest of four unmarried girls, which is something that parents with a weaker spiritual constitution than mine might forever be on Prozac for.

Where I come from, these things happen chronologically. Sisters get married in succession. The youngest waits her turn.

But by the time I was twenty-four, and my sisters still weren’t married, my parents just didn’t see how they could turn the offer down.

My mother never listened when she was told she had been cursed. Multiple girls, no sons, everyone kept saying, as if she needed reminding. But she simply shrugged, smiled, shook her head and patted ours. She called us her ‘little Laxmis’.

‘Just you see,’ she said to all those who tut-tutted at her perceived misfortune. ‘My girls will bring us great luck and joy. Just you see.’

She was right, and she was wrong. The luck came as my father’s small construction business grew at a steady pace, and he was able to provide somewhat comfortably for us. But the joy faded as we grew older and our hands remained, mostly, unasked for, our hearts unattached, our dowries ready-in-waiting for years upon years.

We are all exactly two years apart in age, all of us born in the same last week of December, which made birthday parties convenient, if rather chaotic.

According to my grandmother, at the naming ceremonies for each, our family priest had cautioned my parents against giving any of us names that began with an R.

‘It doesn’t match your own initials,’ he’d said, consulting his almanac. ‘It will surely spell disaster on some level.’ But my mother, who pooh-poohed anything to do with the occult, stood her ground. She adored the idea of having a gorgeous, voluptuous ‘Rrrrrr’ trip off her tongue each time she might call her girls to her.

But by the time I came along, my mother relented and listened to the priest. ‘P,’ he said to her, calmly. ‘Pooja, Payal, Pinky, anything like that will do.’

‘Priyanka,’ my mother announced. She had decided to name me after the only daughter of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, the beloved assassinated prime minister and his white-skinned wife. But growing up, it was clear that nobody could see any resemblance between me and the charming, strong-willed scion of a legendary political family, so it didn’t surprise me that, eventually, ‘Priyanka’ became simply ‘Priya’ – smaller, softer, far less regal-sounding.

I am convinced that the reason I am married today, and my sisters are not, is because of the name I was given at birth.

The letter had arrived at our home from a family friend in Bombay, telling us about a particular family in Los Angeles with a son about my age, who happened to have matrimony on his mind.

‘I don’t know, Chandru,’ my mother had said to my father. ‘Priya is our baby. She’s our youngest.’

But my grandmother, whom everyone lovingly called Kaki (her given name was actually Kiku, but it required quite a deft use of the tongue to refer to her as Kaki Kiku) immediately demurred.

‘Saras, our Priya is twenty-four already. She is hardly a baby. I hear this family that is asking for her, they are quite good people. They have their own business. I think you should definitely consider it.’

Later that day, I heard my grandmother on the phone with the go-between in Bombay, as if she needed to convince him further of my virtues. I watched her small, grey-haired head bobbing in enthusiasm, her slim spectacles sliding down a perfect and pointed nose.

As far as Kaki saw it, I had inherited a little bit of everyone’s best. Radha was born beautiful, Roma was blessed with what is often described as ‘a good nature’, and Ria had copious quantities of spirit. Kaki always told me that these characteristics seemed to have been distilled and diluted and poured into me.

‘Oh, and our Priya is quite pretty,’ I heard her say, ‘and really rather positive in terms of outlook, always smiling and that. And a straightforward sort of girl, no nonsense and hanky-panky. Quiet, but outspoken if she has to be, which is rarely. Touch wood, touch wood, she is a lovely girl.’ Kaki reached over and laid her hand on the teak coffee table. She did so frequently, at every opportune and necessary moment, like when letting people know that my father had secured another construction project – ‘God has been good to him, touch wood.’ She knew, and had taught us all, that trumpeting our accomplishments and singing our own praises without then fingering something derived from a tree to ward off the evil eye would no doubt result in calamity and downfall.

‘Everybody knows, darling,’ she used to say to me, ‘that for good fortune to remain, humility must always be present. No matter what wonder life brings you, do not ever be boastful.’

Now, as Kaki made her grandmotherly efforts to sell me over the phone, my mother and I took a jug of lime water and went out into the small garden behind our house, where yesterday’s washing still flapped in the breeze. My mother ran her hand through her long, full hair and turned to look at me as I swung lazily in the old rusty swing.

My mother was, in many ways, quite modern. She resisted the stereotype of Indian motherhood, shunning saris in favour of trousers and long tops when she was at home, and lassis for gin and tonic when no one was looking. But when it came to us girls, she tacitly agreed with my father about the most appropriate way to bring us up, the concealing clothes we should wear and the restrictions we were to put on our own minds. She nodded when my father said that the only way for us girls to remain ‘unspoiled’ was to be sheltered from anything that lay beyond our house in Delhi’s Defence Colony, where we knew all the neighbours’ names. The city had its society girls, the ones with the halter-tops, who went disco dancing. They lived on the leafy streets of Nizamuddin East and inside the grand houses of Jangpura Extension, with their sprawling lawns. They sat in imported cars, windows slightly lowered, atop which peeked cigarettes suspended between manicured fingers. They were Indian girls like us, yet as foreign as anything.

Despite all the protection and purity, however – or perhaps as a result of it – we had remained single. My parents had been keen to keep us close by, so initially had sought out boys only from Delhi. They had envisioned a life for us where we would be able to stop by at our natal home, our babies in our arms, and have clattering Sunday family lunches, a mélange of sons-in-law and grandchildren. But then Kaki insisted that the radius be extended to the rest of India, and then, a couple of years later, pulled out even further to other parts of Asia – Bangkok or Hong Kong maybe, some place just a few hours by plane away, with little jet lag involved.

But when the letter came from my father’s friend in Bombay, speaking of a boy in America, of all places, my father’s first instinct was to ignore it, before Kaki changed his mind.

‘Houses are big there,’ she said. ‘And everything is available. And no blackouts and rations like we still have here. It is far, but it could be a good life for our Priya. At least let the boy and girl exchange photos.’

When his arrived, I thought Sanjay looked like the kind of boy who might still be living on our street, the boy-next-door type I might have fallen in love with. He had a sweet smile, beautiful features, hair that fell into his eyes with an endearing innocence. I remember nodding in agreement, which is why he called me one day, at a prearranged time. I blushed as I heard his voice echoing down the static-filled telephone line, my sisters and parents gathered all around me. Sanjay told me a little of his life in California, and it seemed respectable and appealing. He had been there since he was five, so was more American than Indian.

Afterwards, I wasn’t sure what to think or how to respond. I was a twenty-four-year-old jobless virgin, who had hardly been trained to make decisions and have ideas and know truth from fantasy. But everyone around me was so excited – sisters talking about buying new saris, mother planning on sending out baskets of sweets in celebration, grandmother doing prayers of gratitude in the temple – that I got swept along with it. Without ever really planning it, I found myself engaged.

Sanjay and I met for the first time a week before our wedding, at the engagement ceremony. He came straight from the airport, a baseball cap on his head and bright red socks on his feet. He looked happy and excited, as if this was going to be like a day at Disneyland. He reached out his hand for mine and shook it, eagerly looking at my face.

‘You are very pretty,’ he said, looking relieved. ‘Even prettier than your photo.’ I smiled, taking in his handsome features and easy smile. We exchanged garlands in front of a large marble statue of Lord Shiva and his consort, Parvati, and I thought that, like the heavenly beings, we made quite a match. We may have only just met, but I was quite sure that I would love him in no time.

The six days between our meeting and the wedding were mostly happy. We shyly avoided kisses, but occasionally allowed our fingers to touch as we stood behind the pillars in my home, while my relatives golden-fried sugary jalebis and florists fussed around the rooms. The neighbourhood children would show up at our door for the chocolates and foil-wrapped hard-boiled sweets that were generously distributed at wedding times. They would gather around and gleefully sing the childish tunes that they always brought out for these occasions: ‘Sanjay and Priya sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a golden carriage!’ before scampering off, their pockets bulging with sweets. Their mischievous exhortations aside, Sanjay and I observed cultural norms and restrained ourselves from overt shows of affection. Even so, everyone told us we looked as happy as two toddlers playing in a park on a summer’s afternoon.

My delight notwithstanding, the presence of Sanjay’s mother always weighed me down. I appeared to have been the last one to find out about her bitter nature. ‘Oh, she’s marrying Nita’s son, is she?’ people would ask my parents, trying to hide the astonishment in their eyes. ‘The boy is very handsome, yes, yes. And the family is quite well off, we believe. But that mother …’ I overheard one of my many interfering, melodramatic aunts warning my father that eventually Nita’s miserable temperament would manifest in her children.

‘The milk that flowed through her breasts must surely have been sour, smelling like lime,’ said the aunt. ‘How do we know that Sanjay did not receive this bad milk, which must have fizzled in his stomach like bad curd? How do we know he will not grow up to be like his mother? Our Priya will have to work extra hard to keep him sweet.’

To me, my mother-in-law was often mean and critical, condemning me a few days before our wedding because my outfit was ‘too revealing’ and my collarbone was showing.

‘My parents are very conservative,’ Sanjay had said to me. ‘They want you to dress only in Indian clothes. You understand, no?’

Two days prior to wedding, when we were out being showered with good wishes by friends, dining and dancing and drinking (Sanjay had beer, I stuck to Shirley Temples), Sanjay announced that he had to get home early because he had promised his mother. And that whole week long, she would call and demand extra additions to the dowry, the supplying of which had taxed my parents enough.

I should have taken that as my cue to end things.

But I couldn’t.

My family had already been through enough with so many unmarried daughters, and I was not about to bring more shame on their heads.

Plus, the neighbourhood children were right. I felt as if I loved Sanjay. And following love must come marriage.

And as my Aunt Vimla would insist: ‘All Indian families are the same. Mothers want the best for their sons. Be obedient and homely, and everything will be fine. Things always get better after marriage.’

At the wedding, I was surprised that they didn’t make me change my name. Hindu brides don’t simply take on their husband’s surname, but a new first and middle appellation as well. I was to go from Priyanka Chandru Mehta to something else entirely. My original middle name was my father’s name, now to be replaced by my husband’s name, for as Kaki had explained to me, this was a significant indicator that Hindu girls are ‘to go from their father’s house to their husband’s house, and nowhere in between’. And the point of changing my first name was simply to show that my identity – or what little of it I had – would be shed alongside my virginity. With a slim gold band on my finger, and the black-beaded mangal sutra necklace that all Hindu brides are given, I was to become a brand-new person. As Sanjay and I sat in front of the fire, its grey smoke twirling overhead, I waited for the priest to whisper my new name into my ear. But he did not. As it turned out, Priya was the perfect fit, as far as names go, for Sanjay. I would be Priya Sanjay Sohni. One out of three wasn’t bad.

Right after the wedding, the dholi was waiting for me outside the temple where the nuptials had taken place. I used to dream about being carried off in this palanquin, excitedly anticipating my life ahead with a new husband; only, I had always thought that I would have watched all my sisters make the journey before me. Instead, now, they each hugged me in turn, their cheeks wet with tears against my own. Aunt Vimla, who was a distant cousin to my mother but seemed to have turned herself into the family know-it-all, elbowed her way towards me and whispered in my ear: ‘Something will happen to you when you are alone together. Don’t cry, even if there is pain. We have all done it. And remember, you have married not just Sanjay but his entire family. You must do everything to please them. Only then will you have blessings on your head.’

My mother, however, had pushed Vimla aside, and clasped her strong arms around my neck. ‘My darling daughter, you are my first child to be married, but, please God, may you not be the last. May you stay happy. And if ever you are not, remember you always have a home with us.’ But then my mother paused, cupped the back of my head with her hand, stared straight into my eyes, and said: ‘But, Priya, darling, do try and be happy.’

Inside the dholi, I hugged my knees towards me, and fingered the coarse, wiry golden threads of my sari. I pulled aside the strings of jasmine that quivered in the warm evening breeze, and waited quietly as everyone paid their respects to a young, departing bride. Vimla and her entourage were meant to cry at the sight of me leaving, but instead they were rejoicing. They were waving and cheering, as if suddenly relieved of some monumental burden. I could swear that I even heard one of them yell out: ‘See ya!’

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