Kavita Daswani - Everything Happens for a Reason

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.’

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.