When Anjali was gone with her grandmother, Farah tried her best to be pleasing. She would wake up every morning and put tea on to boil, even though she preferred orange juice to scented hot water. She would do the dishes from the previous day as quietly as possible, and set them all on the rack to dry. She’d sit in the kitchen, undressed, unprepared, sleepy-eyed until Gautam staggered down for breakfast.
“Today’s going to be a good day,” she’d say to him. She would push up a smile. She would brush her hair behind her ear even though her finger caught in the tangles. She would push a hip out so that she stood off balance, hoping he’d catch the curve of her body beneath her nightgown and just the possibility would make him content.
“How do you feel today?” she’d ask. Each answer ran through her head: Furious. Bitter. Wrathful.
A few days after Deepti had left, Gautam had taken Farah into his arms and said,
“Do you remember the night we first moved here, I pulled you out of bed and bundled you into a taxi? You fell asleep in the back on the way, but I woke you up to tell you that we had reached the land of gold, like we’d dreamed? And the sun was just coming up, so it hit hundreds of crisp kernels of gold on the corn stalks in the field at dusk. You told me you were tired, so I said you could go back to sleep if you wanted, and you did, still in my arms. Do you remember that?”
Farah nodded.
“Farah, we were born to grow together. We were like two seeds planted feet from each other, but we’ve reached out and entangled, and how can you leave that?”
“How could you do that to my mother?”
“If you heard the things she said to me.”
“You’ve told me everything she’s ever said, and still.”
“I didn’t mean to let myself go.”
“Did you see the bruises?”
“You wouldn’t let me out of my room. Listen, Farah, we need to work together as a team.” In his voice, somewhere, there were barbs emerging. She felt the edge in his words and backed off.
“We need to work together from every morning until every night to find out what went wrong and how to fix it,” Gautam said. He brushed a thatch of hair out of his eyes. He hadn’t had a hair cut in weeks, and the black mess was mixing with the bushes of his eyebrows.
Farah nodded. “Fine,” she said.
“We’ll get Anjali back,” he said. But he lied. For months, Farah and Gautam lived in the same house, but passed by each other. Farah looked up at Gautam just as he looked back at the floor.
One afternoon, Farah drove herself to the adoption agency and signed the papers that gave Deepti custody of Anjali. She didn’t expect anyone to understand. She hardly understood herself. She could not be in the same room with Gautam without imagining his hands digging into the wrinkled skin beneath her mother’s chin, or of the vastness of the white around Anjali’s small dark pupils when she came into Farah’s room still whimpering, “Daddy, daddy, daddy...”
When she got home, she slipped into Gautam’s arms and let his fingers dance across the lines of her forehead, around her eyes.
“See how happy we are when we’re just happy together? We can be this way,” Gautam said. But he had said it so many times it felt like a curse. When his hands ran over her neck, she could not stop herself from shivering.
Another day, Farah picked up the newspaper from the front steps and read it while she stood there, not ready to go back inside to watch Gautam drink his tea. She read about The Line, and about a woman who had seen so many orphans there that she had to go home to get away from the hopelessness. Farah felt as though she were trapped in the moment between pulling on the thread and when the thread finally unraveled. She got in her car and drove to see Anjali, still in her housecoat and nightgown, bare feet on the gas pedal.
“Mom, I have to go to school,” Anjali said, pushing past Farah to get to the sidewalk.
“You don’t want to come home?”
“I have school.” The doors of the school bus closed behind her with a hiss.
When Farah returned home, she collapsed onto the couch and said,
“My daughter doesn’t love me anymore.”
A month later, in Spring when Deepti died in her sleep, her will sent Anjali to Calcutta. Farah hit her fists over and over again on the dashboard of his car in the parking lot after finding out her daughter had already boarded a plan. Then Farah would take three hours every day to wake up enough to go to work. She would sometimes forget to brush her hair, and Gautam would stop her at the front door to run her brush through the strands for her.
“Darling,” said Gautam.
“Why should I try?”
“Darling, don’t say those things. There’s always hope. You and I are still together. You still have me.” He smoothed down the rat’s nest in Farah’s hair. “I’m right here,” he said.
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