The World We Found Read online

  “So was my puppy. But we trained her.”

  Girish went pale. “I—beg pardon? You . . . ?”

  “I’m sorry,” Laleh began. “I didn’t mean to—”

  Adish stepped in. “Lal is so crazy about that puppy,” he said smoothly. “I swear, I’ve heard her compare our children to that dog. ”

  “We have a puppy,” Bindu said. Her voice was squeaky, childlike. “A Portuguese water dog. Just like the Obamas. Once they got one, bas, I had to have one also.” She smiled. “My father-in-law had one sent to us from America.”

  A tiny pulse beat in Laleh’s forehead. “You had a dog imported from America?”

  Adish’s head jerked up, alerted by a peculiar note in Laleh’s voice, but before he could speak, Girish did. “Papa is crazy about Bindu. I’m always telling him, Papaji, don’t spoil my wife so much.” His entourage murmured approvingly. He looked at Laleh. “My father is Motilal Chandani, you know.”

  “Yes, I know your father.”

  Girish grinned. “Everybody knows my dad.”

  Adish felt Laleh shift next to him and his heart sank. Surely Laleh wouldn’t. Girish was a new client. Surely Laleh knew better. He tried to catch her eye but she was staring directly at Girish.

  “We used to picket outside his textile mills,” he heard Laleh say. Her dark eyes searched Girish’s face. “Your father refused his workers a twelve-paisa-an-hour raise. Can you imagine?”

  Girish blanched. Then he laughed nervously. Bindu, who had gone back to talking to her friends, turned around to look at them curiously. “Your wife is a funny lady,” Girish said to Adish.

  “She is,” Adish said grimly. He touched Laleh’s elbow in warning, but she shook him away.

  “In any case, my dad is now retired,” Girish said. His voice was cheery, as if that fact explained away all past misdeeds.

  “I know,” Laleh said. “He made even more money developing the land the mills sat on than if he’d kept running the factories. That’s where your high-rises are now being built.”

  “It was the bloody labor unions,” Girish said. “Made it impossible for a businessman to earn a decent living.”

  Laleh let out a short laugh. “Oh, come on. Your dad did all right for himself,” she said. “It’s the workers who lost their jobs when your father closed the mills that we should worry about, no?”

  Bindu spoke. “Hey, what are you?” she giggled. “A terrorist or something?”

  There was a short silence. Then Girish said, “A Communist. Bindu means, ‘Are you a Communist or something?’ ” He laughed, his eyes imploring his entourage to follow. They snickered dutifully.

  Adish heard Laleh make a low growling sound and hastily put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed a warning. “I’m sorry. I apologize. My wife . . .” Girish was looking at him curiously. “We have to go. . . . She’s not well. Had some dental work done today. Sorry. I’ll phone you tomorrow, Girish. Okay?”

  He hurried a protesting Laleh out of the roof-top apartment and into the elevator. He waited grim-faced until the doors shut behind them. Then he turned toward her. “What the hell was that performance about? What on earth is the matter with you?”

  She was silent.

  “Laleh. I want an answer. How dare you insult my client in this manner? What bhoot has gotten into you this evening?”

  She looked up, her eyes flashing and dangerous. “I’ve told you a million times not to drag me to your work parties. You know how I get around these people.”

  “These people?” he snapped. “These people?” He grabbed her by her shoulder and spun her around so that they both faced the mirror in the back panel of the elevator. “Take a good look at yourself, Laleh. You—we—are these people. You have a maid and a chauffeur, you live in a huge flat at Cuffe Parade, you spend money as your heart desires. Who the hell do you think you are? The proletariat? You’re no longer twenty years old, Laleh. You’re no longer a rebel giving your old man conniptions. So give it up. Just give it up.”

  “It’s not what you own, Adish. It’s who you are. What values you have.”

  Adish banged his fist against the steel of the elevator. “Dammit, Laleh. Do you know how holier-than-thou you sound? What are you saying? That we’re better people than the Chandanis? How dare you?”

  “I should’ve known better than to expect you to understand.” She was quiet for a second, and when she spoke again her voice was placating. “In any case, I was being semifacetious, when I compared his wife to our nonexistent dog.”

  He was about to say, That’s redundant. Either you are facetious or you’re not, but he stopped himself. He did not want to engage in his usual banter with Laleh tonight. He knew where it would lead—Laleh would say something impossibly witty and he would laugh, and his anger would fade. But she had crossed a line tonight and he wouldn’t let her off the hook that easily. “You know what, Laleh?” he said. “You’ve done enough damage for one evening. So just shut up, okay?”

  His anger thinned into melancholy as he drove home. It perplexed him, how Laleh could go from seeming like a soul mate to a stranger in the course of a single day. Several times he opened his mouth to speak but changed his mind, not wanting to disturb the silence. He pulled the car into their building’s underground garage and then turned toward his wife. “Let me tell you something, Laleh,” he began. “I know you’re embarrassed by the life we live. I know you’re even embarrassed by me—”

  “That’s not true,” she interrupted.

  “Don’t lie. You are. But I want to say this—I’m not. I don’t apologize for what I have, Lal. You would’ve been happy marrying some milquetoast social worker with ice water in his veins and TB in his lungs. Well, that’s not me. I’m proud to provide my family with a good life. And we can do more to help others now than we ever could if we were piss-poor ourselves.”

  “You sound more and more like my father as you get older. This is exactly what he would’ve said.”

  “So? Your dad was a great man.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You don’t even know what you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying that I’m not willing to throw in the towel, okay? I refuse to believe that what we once stood for was just wishful thinking, and that people like Girish were the smart ones all along.”

  Adish made an exasperated sound. “Why do you have to be so damn dramatic, Laleh? Why can’t it be what it was—a moment in history? And then history changed and the moment passed.” Absently, he flicked a piece of lint off his jacket. “Do you remember the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan?” he asked abruptly.

  “Of course I do. We were sitting in Kavita’s living room when the news came over the radio.”

  “And do you remember what we all said? That the days of the American Empire were over, that the Soviet Union was the new imperial power.” Adish’s lips twisted into a smile. “Do you realize how wrong we all were? A few years later, the Soviet Union breaks into a thousand pieces, disappears like a child’s dream. Just like that.”

  “So we were wrong. What does that prove?”

  “You’re right. In itself, it proves nothing. But, Lal, we also thought that liberalizing the economy would destroy India. Instead, look at what has happened. The economy is booming. Shit, there’s so much construction going on in Bombay itself, my firm can’t keep up with it.”

  “And in the meantime, farmers are killing themselves in record numbers,” she snapped. “And there are food riots breaking out in the countryside.”

  “Laleh. It’s a huge country. It will take time. But in the meantime, look at our own Farhad. Look at the pride he feels in his country. I asked him just last week if he wanted to go abroad to study. He said, ‘Papa, why should I when I have so many opportunities here?’ Now, isn’t that a huge difference?”

  “So what’s the big deal? We could’ve all gone. We chose not to.”

  “True. But, Lal, we didn’t go because of some twisted, misguided sense of loya
lty to India. That’s not why Farhad doesn’t want to leave. He wants to stay—for his own sake. We stayed—for the sake of India. There’s a difference.”

  It’s no use, Adish now thought, flicking the strands of his kusti with more vigor than usual. She will never change. Laleh was the most exasperating, infuriating woman he knew. But she was also the most loyal, passionate, and fair. And he could not imagine his life without her. There you had it—a conundrum. When she smiled at him in that coy, flirty way of hers, his heart still flipped like a trained whale. After all these years.

  He moved to the section with the burning oil lamps and decided to light one for Armaiti. She had always been kind to him in college, sticking up for him, protecting him from the lash of Laleh’s sarcasm and advising him on how to win her affection. “Listen,” she’d once told him. “I’ve known Laleh since the fourth standard. You know the best way to get her to pay attention to you? Ignore her.”

  He was smiling at the memory when he felt someone tap him on his shoulder. It was Maneck Sethna, the old man with the bad case of Parkinson’s who prayed at the well every day.

  “Sahibji, Maneckshaw,” Adish said.

  “Sukhi re, deekra, sukhi re,” Maneck replied. “Be happy.”

  “Thank you. How are you?”

  The old man’s eyes filled with tears. “Chalta hai, deekra. Life goes on.” Adish noticed how he labored to spit out those words. The Parkinson’s seemed even worse than he remembered. He shifted his attention back to Maneck’s words. “I’m worried about my son,” he was saying.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He lost his job, deekra. Was working as an accountant for Kitar Enterprises. But business is bad, so they let him go. He has a wife and three children. Can’t find a new job. I try to help, but on my pension, not much I can do.”

  Adish was relieved to be confronted by a solvable problem. Unlike the situation with Armaiti, this he could help with. “Do one thing, Maneckshaw,” he said, as he dug through his shirt pocket for a business card. “Have your son call this number on Monday and speak to Ashok, my head accountant. I’m sure we can find a position for him in my company.”

  Maneck stared at him open-mouthed. “What are you saying, deekra?”

  Adish laughed. “I’m saying that I will try to hire your son.”

  The old man gripped Adish’s hand in both of his. “This is the miracle of this holy site,” he said. “When I approached you, I had no idea. Many blessings on you, beta.”

  “Good,” Adish said lightly. “I need all the blessings I can get.” He extracted his hand from Maneck’s trembling ones. “Good day, Maneckshaw. See you soon.”

  She had not showered. It was the first thing Adish noticed as he entered the apartment and walked into the bedroom. In all the years that they had been married he had never known Lal to wait this late in the day to shower. He found her sitting in the middle of the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, rocking slightly. Her thick, dark hair had come loose, and when she looked up at Adish, her face was smudged, her eyes red and puffy.

  And just like that, the residual anger over the incident from last night disappeared. “Oh, Lal,” he breathed, making his way to her.

  He forced himself to ignore the fact that she stiffened imperceptibly when he sat on the bed and put his arm around her. For a second he wondered if Laleh was still smarting from their argument from last night. “What’s wrong, darling?” he asked.

  “Armaiti called,” she said. “It’s the middle of the night there but she couldn’t sleep.” She twisted her head to face him. “Armaiti’s dying. My oldest friend in the world is dying.”

  “I know. It’s very sad.” He bit down on the urge to point out that she and Armaiti had not been in close touch for years.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lal said, as if she was replying to his unspoken thought. “It doesn’t matter that we didn’t talk to each other a whole lot or stay in touch. Armaiti was—is—an aspect of me. The best, purest part of me.”

  Before he stubbed it out, Adish was singed by a jealousy that had its origins in an older time—the college years, when Laleh had seemed so attuned to Armaiti and so disinterested in him. “Love doesn’t die when people do, janu,” he said to her. “What you and Armaiti shared will always be alive.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. The look on Laleh’s face told him this. “Don’t try and pacify me with your spiritual mumbo-jumbo, Adish,” Lal said. “It may work for you but it doesn’t work for me. The fact is that Armaiti is dying and I’ve been a lousy friend to her. Nothing changes that.”

  He felt his face redden. “I—I was only trying to help,” he said.

  “You can’t help, Adish. No one can. We both know why Armaiti is sick.”

  He looked at her blankly. “Because she has a brain tumor?” he said at last.

  Laleh made a growling sound. “And what caused the brain tumor, stupid?” she said. “Why does a healthy woman who is not even fifty suddenly get a tumor?”

  A bell was clanging inside Adish’s head, and it was getting louder and louder. It was beginning to dawn on him what Laleh was talking about, but the thought was so preposterous, so far-fetched, that he let the clanging of the bell drown it out. He opened his mouth to speak but could only shake his head.

  Laleh had an expression on her face that reminded him of another day from long ago. But he couldn’t think of that now, because he was confused. And distracted. Because despite the disheveled hair, the eyes swollen with tears, the chewed-on lower lip, Laleh looked beautiful. Adish’s eyes wandered to the spot where her long, dark neck met with the collar of a white shirt, worn over the black pants that she’d bought during their last trip to Thailand. The stone in Laleh’s ring caught a flash of the sun and cast a fleeting rainbow on the wall. “Lal—” he ventured.

  “It’s happened, Adish,” she said fiercely. “It took years and years to catch up with me, but it did. You know what I’m talking about. You were there.”

  He flinched, as if she had slapped him. He stared at her, at a loss for what to say. Despite her occasional penchant for drama, Laleh was the most pragmatic person he knew. Over the years he had learned to count on the coolness of her judgment on almost everything, from choosing the color of the upholstery to helping him decide to quit his job and start his own business. She had a way of clarifying the world, of reducing problems to their most basic roots, and then solving them, that he had always envied. He suspected it was one of the reasons she had always resisted the allures of the religious faith that he had found more and more compelling as he grew older—she was afraid that it would cloud the clear-eyed way in which she saw the world.

  And now his wife was sitting on her bed telling him tearfully that she was responsible for Armaiti’s fatal illness. He saw now that what he’d thought was grief and shock at hearing the devastating news was really guilt. The past coming back to haunt them. The past, which he had believed they had beaten down, like cotton stuffed inside a mattress.

  “Laleh,” he said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  Her eyes were big and round. “It was the blow from the laathi, Adish,” she whispered. “You remember when she was in the hospital? The bastard police officer had hit her right in the head. Don’t you remember her amnesia?”

  “It was thirty years ago.” His voice was louder than he’d intended, and for a second he wondered where the children were. Then he remembered. Ferzin was at a friend’s house. Farhad was at the gym. “And it was just a concussion. The amnesia was temporary.”

  “That’s what Kavita said also. But I still remember how black-and-blue her forehead was. She probably bled internally. And there was probably scar-tissue buildup over the years. And that . . .”

  He grabbed her wrist. “Laleh. Shut up. Shut up and listen to me. You’re not making sense. You’re not a doctor. This is just a coincidence—a very sad coincidence. You have to stop torturing yourself like this.”

  She said it so softly, he almost didn’t hear he
r. “So is this how we absolve ourselves?”

  He shot up from the edge of the bed and stood, towering over her. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” And then, with a defiant look in her eyes, she repeated what she’d said, louder this time.

  Adish shook his head. “I won’t let you do this. I won’t let you drag me into whatever bullshit’s swirling around in your head.”

  “That’s up to you. You have to face your own conscience. I know that I made a Faustian bargain. And that I’m paying for it now.”

  He held back the tears that were lining his eyes. “So what are you saying? That you regret our life together?” His hand swept around the room and the life that they’d built. “That none of this matters?”

  She pulled back, as if to see him fully, and then released her words, gently, languidly, like an archer knowing he was about to score a kill. “On the contrary, dear Adish. I’m saying that it all matters. Everything matters. Our virtues and our sins.”

  He was grateful for the out that she had given him. “Sins?” he yelled. “The woman who a few minutes ago gave me shit for my religious mumbo-jumbo is now talking about sin? What the hell, Lal? Suddenly you’re a damn missionary? We were not even twenty years old, Lal. Younger than our Ferzin. There was no sin. Unless you’re going to sit there and tell me that my loving you was a sin. And if you do, I swear I’ll knock your teeth out. I’ll lose you first before I’ll have you call what I felt for you a sin.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Laleh suddenly exhaled and looked deflated, like a sack emptied of its cargo. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore,” she mumbled. “I’m—I’m tired.” She looked up. “I’m not trying to hurt you, Adish.”

  He stood looking at her, moving his weight from foot to foot, feeling the blood throbbing in his head. “Listen,” he said finally. “I—I need to go to the office for a couple of hours. Catch up on some work. Okay?”