Postscript

By KOMAL DHRUV

 

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is one of the most beloved Bollywood films of all time. The movie has been playing in theatres since its release in 1995, with Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theater giving it an uninterrupted 25 year run as of 2020. The film follows the love story of happy-go-lucky Raj and dutiful Simran, two NRI’s¹ who grew up in London with their immigrant parents. Raj and Simran meet on vacation while touring Europe, only to realize their love story must be cut short: when Simran returns home, her family plans to move back to Punjab to fulfill her arranged marriage to Ajit, the son of her father’s old friend. Raj, with the encouragement of his wealthy and supportive father, travels to India to win Simran’s family’s blessings before the wedding. After a dramatic fight at the local train station between Raj and Ajit, Simran’s father recognizes the love between Raj and Simran and releases his daughter, telling her to go conquer her own life. Simran runs across the platform in a golden dress, trying to catch Raj’s hand and make it on the train as it pulls out of the station.

While the credits roll, Raj and Simran take the train to Amritsar International Airport. No one flinches at his bloodied face–they’ve all seen stranger things on these commutes. The couple returns to London, buys a flat with their parents’ money, sets up house. Raj must find a job, and, given his qualifications, he takes one in his father’s company. Simran’s family returns too, after a few months’ vacation; enough time to allow her father to say goodbye to Punjab and to mourn the separation. Simran’s younger sister Chutki thanks God in her prayers every night.

On their first anniversary, Raj gives Simran a basil plant. It grows with almost embarrassing zeal, spilling out of its container if she doesn’t use the leaves quickly enough. On their second anniversary, Raj brings her another houseplant, a sweetheart vine. Simran hangs it in the small alcove by the kitchen sink, above the basil plant. A few years later, she will arrange the overflowing vines pouring down from the pot. Look Arjun, she will beckon, and her baby will raise his head from the wooden spoon he’s been examining. From his high-chair, he will see his mother shrouded in green, heart-shaped leaves.

***

The kitchen alcove grows more crowded as anniversaries pass and more potted plants take up residency. There should be eighteen, but plants don’t survive forever. The constructed jungle comforts as well as overwhelms Simran. Every year there’s another plant. Every year, something new to care for. The bugs seem to sense the greenery in her home as the last refuge of the city. She hates killing them, and in turn begins to hate the plants too. Her younger child, Anjali, comes home from school one day to find Simran standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding a spray bottle of lemon-scented cleaner. She tells her daughter to stand back as she aims at the alcove and fires. Something small darts across the counter, trying to escape her endless chemical spray, compelled toward survival. Anjali watches it halt, move slower, and eventually stop. Simran keeps shooting until a pile of foam hides it completely, then lowers the spray bottle. She leans weakly against the counter. Her daughter moves to hug her, and above Anjali’s head, Simran cries. Anjali feels her mother’s body shake and hopes her brother will come home soon. She shouldn’t have run ahead of him on their walk back from school. Or she should have killed the spider herself, even if she has inherited her mother’s same fear. Arjun finds them both in the kitchen. He leads his mother to the sitting room. In the kitchen, Anjali watches him methodically clean up the puddle of cleaner, dispose of the corpse buried in it, and wash his hands. He glances at her, his face looking older than it should.

“I know you’re scared of them too,” he says. “You don’t have to try and help every time. Leave it to me and I’ll kill them for you both.”

Anjali trusts her brother more than anyone else in the house. But he always talks like this, like he’s trying to protect her from something she can’t understand. She wants to help, to contribute to the pool of happiness which seems so limited in their home. In the living room, Anjali puts on a CD and tries to coax her mother into dancing. She chooses the soundtrack for Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, her own personal favorite. She’s never seen the movie but she’s heard all the songs with her parents before, when her mother sweeps the floors or when her father needs to unwind after a long day. She doesn’t know every word but she likes to dance along anyway, even if her mother doesn’t.

Anjali watches the music calm her mother down as she sits on the sofa. She doesn’t know that her mother used to spin Chutki Mausi and her grandmother around the sitting room, when it was just the girls in the house, and they all knew how to keep a secret. Anjali has never known the fear of shutting the record player off the moment she hears her father’s keys in the door, switching the soundtrack to a bhajan.² Anjali holds her mother’s hands and swings them as she stands in front of her. She studies her mother’s eyes, a quiet green shade that turns young again in her own face. She’s not crying anymore, Anjali notes, too young to know that this hyperawareness is its own kind of inheritance—different from the record player, but passed down the generations just as freely.

Nobody speaks about the spider at dinner. Raj asks the children, as usual, how school was and what they learned. He asks Simran if she had a good day, and she nods and serves him another roti. The room is like the bottom of a swimming pool, blue and muted as they move slowly through dinner, looking away from one another.

When it’s time for bed, Raj and Simran ask Arjun to tuck his sister in, as if this is an unusual task for him. He leaves them in the sitting room, watching the end of a cricket game on TV, his father distractedly matching socks while his mother folds the rest of the laundry. He sits on the side of Anjali’s bed and tells her that if she turns over he will pat her back the way she likes. She shakes her head. They’re quiet for a moment, as Anjali studies him, his figure just a silhouette in the glow of her nightlight. Arjun picks at a purple and white thread from her bedspread.

Then Anjali says, “I don’t like seeing Mama cry.”

“I don’t either,” Arjun says, then adds, “It wasn’t always like that.”

“Will I be like Mama one day?”

There is a tension that clusters and dissipates before it can be named. Then Arjun says, “No. When we grow up, we’ll be happier.”

Anjali holds out her hand, a small fist with the pinky extended. “Promise?” she asks, and Arjun hooks his own pinky with hers, giving their interlocked hands a singular, definitive shake.

***

Back in Mumbai, Raj would sometimes go to feed the birds. He’d visit the temple, then walk out to the plaza and review facts and formulas in his head as he tossed bits of bread out to the pigeons and crows. He visited the temple other times as well, but feeding the birds was his ritual for exam season. Now, in London, he misses home every time he walks through the square on his way to work. Birds mill about, the fountain spews on endlessly, and nobody really notices any of it.

Arjun hadn’t started school yet the first time Raj and Simran took him to the Hindu temple. Raj had lifted Arjun onto his shoulders to ring the bell hanging at the entrance and announce their presence to God. Arjun laughed at the sound and reached to tap it again. Watching his son often made Raj feel like they were both seeing the world for the first time alongside each other. After their visit, they went to a park and ate some of the fruit they had been given as prasad.³ They took turns teaching Arjun both the Hindi and English words for banana.

It was one of those cheap dates that still felt strange. It was strange to be in a couple, to romance one another. It was strange to share a child. It was strange to fall into it so easily that he couldn’t imagine returning to any kind of previous life.

That day, Simran had put on a pink salwar-kameez, the white flowers embroidered on it like those from their first date. Raj watched her open a new bottle of expensive perfume, a small indulgence at the time, and spritz some on her wrist. She held her hand up to his nose and smiled, making his face grow warm despite the tameness of the gesture.

“It smells like gajra,⁴ no?” she asked, so sweetly that it made him marvel at how her Hindi could brighten the entire city. He touched his nose to her wrist again, just for the contact. He agreed, it did smell just like those flowers.

He began humming a familiar song, the lilting opening line: tujhe dekha to…but she cut him off, saying this was no time for Bollywood. She had to feed Arjun before they went to temple or else he would fuss the whole time. The song remained stuck in his head long after she left the room.

***

Simran knows she loves Raj because she never throws the plants out. Two days after her children find her in the kitchen with the spray bottle, Raj notices one of the plants has died, collateral damage from the chemical spray. He asks Simran about it, hurt to see one of his gifts turned yellow, the leaves brittle and curled in on themselves. Fights usually begin like this: not with anger, but with dukh. In Hindi, sadness is the same word as pain. Simran reminds Raj how much she hates the bugs the plants invite into the flat, a circular conversation they have trapped themselves in. Raj begins his regular reassurance: she has nothing to worry about because she has him. He doesn’t register all the time he’s away, quiet hours she spends tending a home she stays in by herself. When the children are at school and he’s at work, what do they all think happens to her? Or worse—do they think of her at all? By this point, the plants are long forgotten, and it’s not about the price of owning a little greenery in a gray city anymore. It’s about everything else inside their marriage, and who is lonelier in their efforts to build something that can last.

Down the hall, when it grows quiet, Anjali imagines them moving around the coffee table, no longer on opposite ends of it, hugging each other instead. She knows this is a fantasy, because the sound of her mother’s choked sob interrupts the image, but still she persists. She’s in her brother’s room, routine for when her parents argue. She lies on the carpet, ear to the ground and her arm hooked around the teddy bear she brought with her. She waits. Arjun sits in front of his computer, and she can hear the faint crash of imitation violence coming through his headset. In the quiet, Anjali imagines her father comforting her mother the way Simran does when Anjali comes home from school with a scratched knee. She imagines her father holding her mother close, softly telling her not to cry and asking if she would like him to make her something good to eat. Love is that simple: someone with a soft shirt to soak up your tears. Further complications must be adult mistakes. Anjali hopes, unlike everything else, she will not understand this better when she’s older.

Arjun throws a pillow at her.

“Are you asleep?” he asks.

She turns to face him and starts to get up.

“No.”

“Don’t go bother Mama,” he says, “just go to bed. They always do this, you know, and it’ll be fine in the morning.”

Anjali nods, unconvinced. He’s paused his game.

“You alright?” He raises his eyebrows at her.

She shrugs noncommittally.

“You want me to tuck you in?”

She shakes her head no.

Anjali goes down the hall. There is no one in the living room. She goes to get a glass of water and finds her mother perched on one of the barstools by the counter. Anjali sits next to her. Her father stands by the counter, scooping rice out of a canvas bag and pouring it into a pot. The girls watch as he adds water directly from the tap and rinses it a few times. Once satisfied, he carries the pot to the stove and sets it down.

Picking up the pressure cooker from the back burner, he asks, “How many whistles does it take to make rice? I put it on low heat, right?”

“If you were going to ask so many questions, why did you say you would make something for me?” Simran says. Though Anjali doesn’t understand Hindi, she can hear the irritation creeping into her mother’s voice.

“Come on, I can do it. Just help a little.”

Simran slides off the barstool and moves to her husband’s side. She takes the pressure cooker from his hands and shoos him out of the way, telling him to go sit down. He protests again, but she waves him off and deftly moves around the kitchen, claiming it would be easier for her to do it herself. She walks on the cold tile in her brightly patterned nightgown, making the dahi-chaaval that was meant to be Raj’s apology to her. She looks over at them, her husband and daughter now playing a made-up game together under the kitchen fluorescents, their faces already contorted into silly, meaningless expressions. There is a pang of tenderness, as sharp as resentment. Simran feels her familiar exhaustion, knowing she will never learn the rules of these games; that she will never have the opportunity to play them.

***

Truthfully, there is no Simran. There is no Raj. There are only two kids meeting at the pani-puri cart by their university. The sky turns gray and they go catch a movie to avoid the Mumbai rain. They will project themselves onto Raj and Simran, the characters whose lives unfold on the screen that afternoon. The movie becomes a dream that is perhaps already too far out of their reach. They have grown up in India, and it is their children who will have the privilege of growing up in Europe, who will be able to take trips to Paris and Berlin in their twenties instead of sniffling their way through winters they are unaccustomed to, saving every cent for an abstract future. They don’t yet have intentions of disobeying their parents, of emigrating, of letting the movie become anything more than light on a screen. Adopting the characters’ names, Raj and Simran, is just a lovers’ joke, so common among all young couples that year. When the credits roll, they leave the theater and walk shyly down the soaked streets. They turn down an alley lined with small stores and various carts, expertly weaving through the constant crowd without breaking their conversation. Raj, who is not Raj, stops at a cart to buy gajra. Simran, who is not Simran, blushes as she turns away from him and gathers her softly wavy hair into a low bun. The rush of old Bollywood intimacy makes it difficult for him to keep his hands from shaking as he ties the gajra in her hair. As the pair continue down the street, Raj watches the small wreath bob up and down with each of her steps; the white flowers make her easier to find in the crowd. They smell so sweet, even in the polluted air of the city. And he can’t help but think, with their tiny round petals, they look like they’re still waiting to bloom.

***

The other boys on the bench are raucous with newfound energy from their school lunches. They joke and shove each other around, red ruddy faces and skin that smells like marinara sauce or ham. Arjun, on his end of the bench, holds an apple in one hand and a book in the other. He’s not sure when the shift happened, but a chasm slowly opened between him and most of the boys he’s been friends with all these years. They used to have fun, but now they mostly just try to show off for each other. His lunch is only half-finished when Marlon gets shoved into Arjun’s side, pushing him off the edge of the bench. He flails but ends up on the floor, the toppled carton of chocolate milk sloshed on his head. It runs through his hair and down his nose. The bitten apple rolls off and Arjun’s eyes follow it to a table a few paces away. He looks up and sees the new girl sitting alone, watching him with her dark, discerning eyes.

In the bathroom, Arjun wets a paper towel and tries to clean himself up. He’d said very little in the cafeteria, except to Marlon who apologized sincerely and tried to help him clean up. Without looking at the others, he told Marlon it was alright and shrugged it off before rushing out. He had known it was coming. These altercations always seemed to involve them, he thought, boys like him or Marlon. He was beginning to understand something he didn’t have words for. Marlon’s family was from Jamaica, and the other boys sometimes liked to put on the accent they assumed his parents possessed. They did this to Arjun too. Both boys laughed along uncomfortably, never showing anger, never fighting back. Their fathers’ voices ringing in their ears not to get in trouble as though it was a matter of survival. They never talked about it, the uncomfortable jokes or the other places they could sit at lunch. Nothing stopped either of them from leaving the group, but they didn’t. Marlon tried, distantly, to accommodate the other boys at the table, and Arjun clung to his small section of the bench. What had the girl seen in the cafeteria earlier? The way she met his gaze lingers in him; how she looked at him, and didn’t look away.

Now, with nowhere to go and his hair still a little wet, he walks to the library. He passes a dark wood trophy case and pauses. Some are decades old, but others are from only a few years ago. He hears his father’s voice: Indians add to the society wherever we go. We boost their economies. The whole world wants us for our brains. Arjun wonders what happens with the rest of his body. He wonders too, if his father is right, where his reward is. He has seen his culture hung up on the walls of the British Museum during a school trip. There was no celebration, no prize.

In the library, he finds a secluded corner, way in the back by the arched windows, and settles into a worn beanbag.

He’s immersed in his book when a voice interrupts him, asking “What are you reading?”

Arjun looks up to see Emma, the girl from before, standing in front of him. His answer is more tepid than he wants it to be, but he says “Bleach? It’s a manga.”

Emma shrinks to eye-level with him, squatting like a frog. “I just started that one. I like it so far. You?”

“I like it.”

Arjun stops reading. Emma’s questions pour out rapidly, unflinching. By the end of the week, he’s sitting at her table in the cafeteria. Her mother includes little notes in her lunchbox written in Mandarin, which Emma reads with distaste.

“The notes say nice things but she’s only doing it as a reminder that I need to practice my Chinese more,” Emma rolls her eyes. “We speak it all the time at home, though. My Mandarin is fine. It’s not going anywhere.”

Arjun scans her face for signs she might be upset, but he can’t read her as easily as his mom or his sister.  Even if he could tell the level of her discontent, he wouldn’t know how to soothe her. Emma asks why he’s making that face and he says it’s because he wants to help but he doesn’t know how.

“Some situations can’t be helped,” she says.

***

For the past six months Anjali has been obsessed with a new princess movie, an animated happy-ending twist on Swan Lake. Instead of Odette being doomed to be a swan forever at her lover’s betrayal, she shows up to the ball herself to disrupt the spell placed on him. The princess and the fraud spin around each other, whirling the prince into their dance and asking him to choose which one is his true love. When he picks Odette, the curse lifts. Odette asks how the prince knew it was her and he tells her, in less sophisticated terms, that it was inevitable that he would recognize her. 

Anjali insists on watching it at every opportunity, and when she isn’t watching it, she plays with the Princess Odette doll her parents bought her. Sometimes she imagines herself in the body of this beautiful blonde doll, someone who might be chosen by a prince. She has paired the plastic Odette with her favorite teddy bear, and they encompass the future Anjali dreams of. The toy couple holds hands while strolling through imaginary gardens and has long important conversations while eating imaginary dinners. Whatever Odette says in these talks is treated with importance. You’re so lucky, Anjali tells the doll.

She never plays Swan Lake in her brother’s room. Arjun misses her. They still do homework together in his room, but she finishes before him and doesn’t stay like she used to, making up games for herself while waiting for him to finish studying and play with her. But then, when she sneaks into his room early on Sunday mornings to wake him up to play, Arjun forgets how nice her presence is. Grumpy and half-asleep, he tells her to go watch her stupid movie one more time. She slinks out of the room, moping, and he sulks too as soon as she’s gone.

Because Anjali has watched the movie about 100 times, so has Simran. She’s intrigued by her daughter’s taste, this children’s story where marriage seems to solve all problems. When Simran told her parents she was going to marry Raj, despite their wishes, her father blockaded her with silence and her mother wept until she ran out of tears. Every silence asked how she could leave them, since marrying Raj meant following his dream of living overseas. In the quiet that followed her decision, Simran tiptoed to the kitchen one night to find her mother sitting at the table. She had a small white mug in front of her with pink flowers on it, half full of warm milk with a little honey, turmeric, and other spices. Simran asked shyly, in Hindi as usual, if there was more of the drink. Her mother gestured vaguely toward a pot on the stove. Simran found a matching mug and sat across from her mother. She looked at the dark circles under her eyes, the delicate wrinkles beginning to surface on her skin. She wondered if she had ever really looked at her mother’s face, since she had never before noticed the faint sunspots on her cheeks. For the first time, Simran decided to expose the truth, something so soft she had been afraid to leave it unprotected by saying it out loud. I know I’ve hurt you and Baba, which is something that will always haunt me. But when I’m with him, I want it to continue at any cost; I don’t want to return to who I was before we met. Can’t I become someone new and still belong to you? Can’t I still be your daughter? Her mother looked up at her and smiled sympathetically, tragically, shaking her head a little.

“No one can change what is written in your naseeb,” she said, pointing to her forehead and moving her finger across it in a straight line. Fate is written on our faces from the moment we meet the external light of the world.

Her mother’s response was a kind of left-handed forgiveness, disappointment and love at the same time. Naseeb, luck, or destiny; Simran thought of her own parents’ arranged marriage and wondered if that was also naseeb. If it was an inevitability that she would hurt people she loved and be hurt by them in return. They sat together for a long time after that. Mumbai was never quiet, but night was the only time they kept the windows closed so the city noises sounded distant. Simran was grateful for how that unusual quiet held the two of them. The muffled noises of trucks and rickshaws left to other people, living other lives. Slowly, Simran and her mother each emptied their mugs, speaking softly, like people who had never made each other cry.

***

Simran wakes up early and bathes. No one else is awake when she lights incense by the small kitchen altar for the family Gods, murtis⁵ she had once wrapped in cloth and tucked in her suitcase to bring to her marital home. After finishing her prayers, she begins to make chai for her family. Simran holds her hands over the pot as she heats the water, trying to reawaken her cold fingers. She remembers a day before Anjali began school and left her alone in the flat. Raj had taken the last cup of chai that morning, which Anjali insisted was unfair. She wanted to make a new pot, just the two girls together. So Simran sat Anjali on the kitchen counter and let her watch as she boiled the spices and tea once more. She was putting the tea leaves away in the cabinet when Anjali burned herself. This was the most unforgivable part to Simran: that she didn’t see it happen. Anjali barely made a noise, but when Simran turned around, thick tears ran down her daughter’s face. She gathered her up quickly and sat her by the edge of the sink, plunging Anjali’s small hand under a rush of cool water.

“Don’t cry, beti,” she comforted, wiping her face. Anjali looked at her red hand, the leftover welt taking the irregular shape of a country. She started to breathe more slowly.

“Let’s go to the bathroom. Some Vaseline will help too,” Simran said.

Anjali trailed after her mother in small footsteps, all the way to the bathroom, where she was lifted from the ground and placed on the counter again.

“Why didn’t you call for me?” Simran asked. “You were so quiet. Where did you learn that?”

Nowhere, Anjali thought, it was a natural response. She looked to her side, where she could see them both in the mirror. Simran looked in the mirror too, at their twin faces next to each other. Her daughter’s, still a bit red and raw, and her own with a heavy grayness settled into its shadows. She couldn’t remember where that had come from. But she could see her image in her daughter already, or maybe it was her daughter’s image in her own. It was inescapable.

Raj finds her in the kitchen, crying softly over the pot she’s brewing tea in. He comes up behind her and turns the stove off, hugs her and asks what’s wrong. She shakes her head because she doesn’t know. Raj steers her toward the table and sits her down. He pulls out two mugs and strains tea into them, then adds sugar and milk. They drink their chai together quietly in the pastel light of the morning, and Raj wonders how often she cries when he’s not home. She wonders how he learned the place of everything in the kitchen cabinets.

***

It probably shocks both of them when Emma invites Arjun to her house for dinner. It’s Friday night, and he spends a long time getting ready. She suggested it so casually, he feels silly for not knowing what to wear. His mother sends him over with a box of sweets, refusing to let him show up empty-handed and have this lack of manners reflect back on the family. Dinner is uneventful, tidy, quiet. Emma’s father is white, and he speaks to Arjun with calculated politeness, asking about school and listening attentively. Then he asks Emma about school. When she says she’s going to switch music class for visual arts next term, both her parents dismiss the idea. It seems like an old conversation, worn out. Arjun has seen Emma’s sketchbook, pages thick with ink, but by the end of the conversation Emma has grown quiet, succumbing to her parents’ insistence on the cello. Arjun feels lost next to this new, quiet girl.

After dinner, Arjun follows Emma to the sitting room and joins her on the floor in front of the sofa. He looks over his shoulder, toward the kitchen where her parents stand side by side at the sink, doing dishes together. It’s a romantic and unfamiliar sort of domesticity. The sitting room is dark, lit only by the TV light and the leftover glow from the kitchen.

Without moving her eyes from the TV, Emma says quietly, “My parents don’t know anything about what I read. I should have told you earlier, but don’t mention it in front of them, okay?”

“Okay. I won’t say anything.”

Emma watches the movie for a while and Arjun watches her, cautious and apologetic. He knows it’s just books, just one class, but these little mountains make up everything when your life still feels so small. Emma folds her legs up and hugs them to her chest.

Finally, she says, “I just don’t want them to take it away.”

Arjun stares at her profile, bathed in blue and white flickers from the TV.

“My parents only want the best for me. They worry about everything I do. They wouldn’t want me reading anything as violent as the manga we like. It’s just one thing I get to keep for myself. I just want something to be mine.”

“Sure, of course. Of course you do,” he says.

It is this moment which makes it impossible for him to return to his old lunch group. Sometimes Arjun felt Marlon look over at him sitting at his new table with Emma. He sensed a kind of longing in his gaze the first time it happened, and when he went home that evening he invited Marlon to game online together. They walked through a post-apocalyptic wasteland together, shooting in the direction of any sudden movement to gain a sense of catharsis. Sometimes they still did homework together in the library after school, or kicked a football around on the weekends, talking around their old friend group instead of about it. Marlon still sits on the same bench at lunch, less at risk of falling off now that Arjun no longer takes up a seat, but more uncomfortable, too.

When he gets back home from Emma’s house after dinner, his mother is waiting for him on the sofa. She puts down her book and asks how it went. He tells her it went fine, and he doesn’t stay long enough to offer more details. Instead, he goes down the hall and finds Anjali sitting on the floor of his room.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“Shh,” she says, “Mama doesn’t know I’m here.”

He sits on the floor with her. “How was dinner?”

“Boring because you weren’t here,” she scolds. “Everything was good and then Mama said something in Hindi and I couldn’t understand and they both got really quiet.”

Arjun frowned, trying to calculate the effect on his sister from his one night away. He generally thought of his parents as nothing more than a little mess; inconvenient to hide maybe, but never damaging.

“Did they fight?” he asks.

“No,” Anjali says, smiling. “They tucked me in and then went to read together in the living room. I saw when I snuck out of bed to come and wait for you here.”

Arjun feels his chest relax. His mother treated every moment like the world was ending, a million tiny fires to step through. He didn’t know what Simran would do if the apocalypse really found them. Her fears, contained in the corpse of a spider, but the size of an entire afternoon. At least tonight there was nothing to contain, no reason his sister might need a shield.

Anjali studies him, leaning in uncomfortably close to his face.

“So. Do you love her?”

Arjun laughs and pushes her away. “It doesn’t work like that. You read too many princess stories.”

How could Arjun explain the new feeling taking residence inside him? Earlier that night in the sitting room, Emma leaned her head on his shoulder, and he tilted his head to rest it on hers too. There was something so liberating about this. To have something meaningful happen to him and to not share it with his family, with anyone. A memory that was his and Emma’s alone. It made him feel like perhaps he did belong to himself, and wasn’t just someone else’s brother, son, or lone hero in a perpetual apocalypse. Love is such a heavy word when he ties it to his family. He doesn’t know what it would mean to love Emma, but with her there are no fires to tame. He imagines both of their gentle hands, side by side, as they slowly turn the pages of books full of monsters to be slain. Happy just to be together.

***

Raj wonders if he should try and find another job. This one is comfortable, of course, but it feels redundant. It feels far from what he imagined he would be doing at this age. He thinks of his past self, imagining his current self. They don’t seem like the same person.

Neel walks by his office and knocks on the open door.

“Wanna grab a pint after work?” he asks, and Raj agrees.

 

The pub is too loud and too dark, but it’s Neel’s favorite. After finishing his drink, Raj asks Neel if he wants to go for a smoke, motioning towards the door. He had tried a cigarette or two before coming to London, but never in the casual, adult way he smokes them now with Neel. It seemed a rite of passage when he first arrived, something that makes perfect sense at one age in your life and never again. Simran doesn’t say much when he smokes, because he doesn’t do it often, but she won’t let him come near her when the scent is still stuck in his clothes. Neel is divorced, and his terrible lungs are one of the few things he still has in common with his ex-wife. The two friends take their time with this little indulgence, even though the air outside is cold. They blow soft smog into the gray city and feel the warm hug of nicotine spread through them. Neel laments, as usual, that the only reason he started smoking was because there are no chaiwallas in London. This is the perfect weather, he begins in his New-Delhi Hindi, before clicking his tongue in disappointment. They both know it’s always the perfect weather for a roadside chai, but they live here now. If they want chai they must make it themselves. When he finishes crushing the cigarette butt with his toe, Neel asks Raj to walk him home. Raj knows this is just an excuse for prolonged company.

When they arrive at the block of flats, Raj watches his friend shuffle in the dark toward the door; watches as a skinny gray cat intercepts him and as Neel crouches down to pet it. It doesn’t seem like a stray, because it lets Neel scoop it into his arms and stand up. Raj can hear his friend muttering something soft and incomprehensible to the little creature. Neel looks over his shoulder and smiles, lifting the cat slightly as if to show it off.

“She checks on me every day. Probably just because I feed her, but she’s good company.”

Raj smiles too. “I’ll introduce myself next time.”

He leaves his friend standing there in the moonlight, smiling contentedly and cradling the cat to his chest. Walking alone in the cool night air, still buzzing with the dregs of a nice evening, Raj knows he loves Simran because his thoughts immediately turn to her. Who else would he want to share this with? He starts walking a little faster, rushing home. When he gets there, he ignores Simran’s complaints and throws his arms around her, engulfing her in the cigarette smoke still caught in his jumper.

***

On the morning of their anniversary, Raj forces himself to wake up when he feels Simran move away from him under the covers. She sits on the edge of the bed, takes her mangalsutra⁶ from the nightstand and secures the clasp, then gathers her loose hair and braids it. He says good morning, then happy anniversary, and she smiles over her shoulder. When she goes to wash her face, Raj quickly changes clothes and slips her anniversary gift into the deep inner pocket of his coat. When she comes out of the bathroom she frowns at him.

“That jumper still smells like cigarettes. I couldn’t get it out,” she informs him, saying the words jumper and cigarettes in English, a stark contrast to the Hindi.

“Oh that’s alright, I’ll just wear it again the next time I feel like having a smoke,” he jokes.

“There shouldn’t be a next time.”

“Don’t be so sour. You know what day it is — we should go share a cigarette right now, just to celebrate.” He grins at her.

Simran looks at him with horror. She’s only smoked once before in her life and it was back in Mumbai. Before they had ever discussed marriage, Raj and Simran and a few of their friends had all met for a picnic on the chhat.⁷ It was early evening when they started, to avoid the daytime heat. They ate under pink clouds, then played cards for a while. When that got boring, one of Raj’s friends took two stolen cigarettes out of his pocket. They all took turns dragging timid puffs out and blowing them into the dusky blue and purple sky. Simran felt like she was entering new terrain in her life, but she was afraid she would wake up from the burn in her lungs and discover she wasn’t a new person after all. Now, all she thinks is that the sky is never as beautiful in London, as saturated, as it is in Mumbai.

Simran returns to her husband before her, in their gray-city flat.

“We’re parents. We shouldn’t smoke when we know it’s bad for us,” she tells him, “And we can’t leave the kids alone anyway.”

“Come on,” Raj urges her. “Ten minutes. They’re still asleep and we’ll be right here, no farther than a ride in the lift.”

Simran hesitates.

“We can even write a note for Arjun to come get us if he wakes up sooner. He’s looked after Anjali before,” Raj says.

So she goes down with him. Into the lift in her slippered feet, wearing his coat at his insistence. It feels heavier than it should. They go to the side of the building, and Raj lights a cigarette for them to share. He grins like he’s twenty years younger, like they’re on the chhat  again and he’s a Bollywood hero riding out the movie’s crescendo. Simran looks at her now-ruined pink slippers. She thinks she can’t wear them around the house anymore, now that they’ve been outside. She thinks this is a sign she’s growing old. Then Raj passes her the cigarette with the joy of a teenager and she starts laughing. She can’t stop, even when he asks for an explanation. There’s nothing more to say about this buoyant hollowness. Finally, she takes a long drag and holds it. It hurts her lungs like she knows it should but she lets it settle before she blows it out. Only Raj could find a way to make her feel so young.

He tells her to reach inside his coat pocket and she hands him the cigarette. Her hand curls around a small box, white, with simple pink trim on the edge of the lid. Simran smiles when she opens the present, nostalgic before she can even pull the bottle from its mold. It’s the same perfume from years ago. A different bottle but the same scent. The smell of gajra mixes with the smoke and makes her tear up, a reflex, though she doesn’t feel like crying. It’s only perfume, but Simran thinks of a small bug skittering across the kitchen counter, trying to survive, and how lonely that expanse must feel when you can’t see the end of it. She looks at Raj, who watches her with a face so innocent it breaks her heart.

“For me—?” Simran says.

It’s not articulate and it’s not enough, but her words hold the weight of decades. The sky cracks apart with a loud thunderclap then, just like in the movies. Out of the clouds, a profound elemental tension snaps and releases the rain.

 

Notes

1. Non-resident Indians

2. Dharmic devotional song with religious or spiritual content

3. Blessed food distributed in temples of Dharmic faiths, often fruits, nuts and sweets

4. Small flower garlands, typically very fragrant, worn in women’s hair in India. The garlands can be bought on the street. In Mumbai, the most common one is made of Indian jasmine.

5. Sculptures of Hindu Gods used for worship

6. Necklace indicating married status for Hindu women; similar to a wedding band in Western contexts

7. Terrace. In India, a terrace typically refers to the flat open roof of a building, easily accessible to people for a variety of uses.

 

 

Komal Dhruv (she/her) is an Indian-American writer and social worker. She enjoys spending time at her local library, sipping on a good cup of tea, and writing about tenderness and Asian-diasporic identity. This is her first published work.