Chapter Thirty-Three
KIRAN
Kiran spent the night and most of the next day at Payal’s apartment, where her best friend had woken with a hangover of legendary proportions. Kiran had used the night to ensure Payal wasn’t throwing up and most of the day handing glasses of seltzer and painkillers to her. Exhausted from the night—and making comments every hour about how they couldn’t handle partying the way they did at twenty—they’d lounged around the sofas and ordered takeout.
By the time night fell and she’d texted Nash to check in, she was ready for her own bed and fell into it.
At 2:00 a.m., the phone rang and jolted Kiran awake. Her heart raced.
A middle-of-the-night call was never good.
“Ma,” she answered.
“Kaise ho?”
“Is everything okay? It’s two in the morning here. Are you okay?”
“I forgot about the time difference.”
Relief flooded through her, and Kiran dropped her head back into her pillow. The fear turned to elation. They wanted to talk to me!
“How are you and Baba?”
“We’re good. I wanted to see how you are doing.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you eating?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? You sound angry. Are you angry? Are you sure you ate? Eat some daal—it will make you feel better—”
“Hai Bhagwan, Ma, I told you I’m fine!” She laughed.
“Okay, beta, if you’re going to say you’re fine, then you’re fine.”
Kiran rolled her eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Being yelled at by my daughter for caring about her welfare.”
“I’m not yelling. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Your baba doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Oh…” Kiran’s heart fell. Leave it to Ma to tell it like it is.
“He thinks you’ve betrayed us.”
“Ma, please don’t tell me this.”
“We expected that you’d listen to us.”
“I have listened to you.”
“You’re so far away, and we miss you. You can’t blame us for taking care of you or trying to monitor how you are. You’re our daughter. Beta, you saw how terribly our family treated us when…well, when this happened before. You’re the only person who we can look out for who watches us too.”
You would have had two if it weren’t for this entire load of garbage we’ve all gone through.
Kiran wasn’t a rage machine. She bowed her head when Baba shouted and did her best not to raise her voice back at her mother, even though she knew most Indian moms and daughters had the type of relationship where all could be forgiven after a tiff.
But fury coursed through her. They hadn’t spoken to her. They’d said she was dead to them. And Kirti hadn’t been spoken to in years… Was it so easy to cut daughters off and bring them back into the fold? Was their love contingent upon her obeying them for the rest of her life? Did Ma or Baba have the right to complain about having only one person to take care of them when they had forced their own hand and made that choice?
“Whose fault is that?” Kiran fired back. “Whose fault is it that I’m the only one to take care of you?”
Forget digging her heels in and remaining calm. Her mouth decided to take a running start to a free fall off the ledge. A beast had awoken within her, roaring at anyone who came near her wounded heart, whether they were friend or foe.
“Yeh kya bakwaas hai, Kiran?”
What kind of craziness is this? The kind of lunacy that resulted from losing a sister because of archaic rules and pressures that tore apart a family. How could any of this possibly make sense?
“Ma, I am in love with Nash!” she snapped.
It was true that sometimes the truth slipped out in unexpected moments.
She was in love with Nash. And the realization knocked the wind out of her as her mother gasped on the line.
“Love? You don’t know love if you can’t love your family and honor it.”
Kiran tried to compose herself, to speak from a place of logic and reason.
“You and Baba don’t understand. Every time I see him—”
“You saw that boy again? We told you that you were forbidden from seeing him.”
“You’re focusing on the fact that I didn’t obey you, not what this is going to do to me or us!”
“This is why we can’t trust you anymore. You deliberately choose to disobey us.”
“When have I ever disobeyed you? You have to trust me!”
“We did trust you.” Ma changed tack, trying to be gentle again. “Kiran, this isn’t about freedom or control. We happily sent you to boarding school. We didn’t want to marry you off too early because we knew you deserved better and wanted more. We sent you to America to study and make a successful life for yourself. You can’t tell us you want to be a member of this family, after all we’ve gone through together, and then go see him—”
“I love him!”
“You have to make a choice at some point.”
“You made Kirti choose too, and she chose him! Why are you making this so difficult?”
“Fine, then choose him!” Ma snapped back.
“I don’t want to choose anyone! I want us to be happy.”
“If you are with him, we will never be happy. That should make you upset.”
“Ma, you already lost a daughter, and now you’re making the other one pay for it!” Kiran snapped.
“You never argued like this until he came along! Until you went to America and got these fancy ideas in your head about what a girl should do, instead of understanding our fears and soothing them. Are you sleeping around now? Are you being a whore?”
The insult was as if Ma had hit her with an open palm, leaving a reddened sting on her cheeks in front of a gawking crowd. This was the second time Ma had come at her with the lowest of insults, the one that all women were called for having ownership over their lives.
“I am not a whore. How dare you!” Kiran’s fists clenched, her heart racing.
“How dare you. Log kya kahenga? They will all say we raised two daughters who couldn’t keep their lust in check. Two! I don’t know what we did to fail as parents, but every day, I ask God the same question.”
Kiran ignored the stab of guilt she felt. She could picture Ma at the mandir, head bowed, hands together in humility in front of the priests who would ring bells, circumvent fire around an idol as a representation of God, and handle all the masses who would come to ask for a million different things.
The old Kiran, untainted by love and unbroken, would have caved immediately. The mere image of Ma and Baba’s sacrifices would have been enough to whip her back into line, outmarching everyone else in the ranks. But she was so off-kilter, so shaky, she couldn’t find her center to handle Ma’s guilt trips with any grace or amusement.
But lust and love weren’t cause and effect. Lust wasn’t the reason Kirti and Kiran turned to people around them. It was just love. There was no mark on their character.
Mustering up what little dignity she could feel within herself, she braced and answered Ma. “I’m sorry you got hurt. I never intended for that. I love you and I’m doing my best. I don’t know what else you can ask for.”
“I can ask you to listen to us! You haven’t seen your baba. Since you dropped this news on us, he’s been depressed and down. He yells. He’s damaged, and it’s because of your decisions. Whether you’re with this boy or not, you’ve broken us, Kiran. You broke us.”
“Then I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.”
This time, Kiran was the one who hung up without another word.