Everything Happens for a Reason
KAVITA DASWANI
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollins Publishers 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
To the family I was blessed to be born into,
and the family I was privileged to marry.
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.
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
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.
Читать дальше