Chapter Thirty-Four
KIRAN
When Kiran was a teenager and the United States was a dream away, an article had come out in the paper about a girl from a nearby village. The newspaper dubbed her Roshni. Her name, the equivalent of the word glow, was meant to disguise her now-darkened life…one she would never get back. Aunties whispered in somber tones about Roshni’s fate, and fathers insisted their daughters be escorted anywhere they went as terror and sadness spread through the small locale.
Roshni had been accused of being in a relationship with a boy from a rival caste. Kiran had no idea whether it was true. In fact, she wasn’t sure anyone did. But the power of the societal hierarchy put the blame on her, a high-caste girl, for falling for a lower-caste boy. They “dated,” according to one newspaper. They had an “affair,” according to another. Words like clandestine, forbidden, and steamy were thrown around as though the two people involved with the story weren’t people at all—just zoo animals meant to serve a morbid interest.
The tale itself wasn’t about the relationship. It was the insinuation that they had sex or participated in something that no parent would want their child to undergo. And dating became the face of a tragedy that superseded the violence itself.
On her way home from school, Roshni had been attacked with acid by a same-caste member of her village for bringing shame on her family and the caste itself. The perpetrator wasn’t even related to her. He had only heard of the gossip and decided she should pay. Her face, burned away by a simmering bottle of poison, was scarred forever. No one wanted her after that. She would be mocked incessantly as a mutant. In an accompanying photo of her story, she wore a scarf over her face, one eye drooping farther than the other from the damage caused by the incident. She had lost her vision, her looks, and the life she had seen for herself.
Kiran was never sure what had prompted an acid attack on one girl and disowning another. Kirti’s punishment, in relative terms, seemed less severe. Perhaps she had even escaped a terrible fate by being banished.
“Ma…could someone do that to me?” Kiran had asked her mother.
“We would never, beta, but you should always follow the rules, so no one has reason to do something like this to you.” The reply served as a warning from an equally shaken Ma.
“What are the rules?”
“Listen to your parents and Bhagwan. You will never go wrong. Let’s go to the mandir.”
Listen to your parents because she didn’t—and Roshni deserved it. No matter how well meaning Ma had tried to be, the sympathy came with a dire consequence and an equally strong warning: Breakers of rules would be punished. Follow the path laid out, and you would be safe.
In the years following, Kiran often wondered what Ma prayed for in the mandir that day. Ma stood in her red salwar kurta, her dupatta dutifully pulled over her head as married women did, and her eyes were closed in feverish concentration. Even her breathing slowed, the twinkle in her necklace no longer catching the sun from movement. Kiran wondered if she asked for peace. If she asked for dutiful daughters. If she asked for solace for Roshni and her family, who would never find peace again.
Perhaps she asked God not to allow her daughters to fall from grace and earn that punishment.
Kiran never asked. Maybe she was too scared to.
But a stab of righteous indignation and cowardly fear still blew over her every time she thought of the article and what could happen to a young woman for doing anything that could impugn her family’s reputation…how an action—whatever that may be, like having feelings for someone, dating someone, sleeping with someone, or having her own mind—could lead to catastrophic consequences for the rest of her life from strangers with a sense of ownership over her choices. Maybe her family would have accepted it down the road, but their choice for their daughter, and her hopes and dreams, were taken away by a society so bent on keeping collective control over their image that they took the situation into their own hands.
Her family would always be branded as the parents whose daughter fell in love out of caste.
Kiran: My mom said I broke them. She also said I was a whore.
Payal: WHAT?
Akash: Are you okay?
Sonam: Why is that always the first attack…ffs. I love your mom but the foodgasm she gives me isn’t enough to keep me from calling out how wrong she is here.
Payal: Sonam, they don’t know much better than to attack.
Kiran: You think people will hold it against my parents if their second daughter does what the first did?
Sonam: If they do…are you able to cope with that?
Kiran: Honestly? I don’t know. I feel responsibility toward the place I grew up in. Geography doesn’t change history. And ours is full of pain.
Akash: Whatever you decide, we’re here for you.
Baba had lovingly caressed her forehead with damp washcloths when Kiran had gone down with typhoid during her seventh-grade final exams—tests that the government didn’t allow students to make up without repeating a year, and the state had forced her to take them anyway. Ma had sold a set of her gold wedding bangles to pay for Kiran’s schoolbooks.
Nash had been around for months…and in comparison, while his emotional weight held strong on the scale Kiran measured him on, the time she had with Ma and Baba always weighed in their favor. The things they had given Kirti and Kiran—educations despite the small towns they’d grown in, textbooks despite their income limitations, love despite being girls in a society that valued boys—those counted for more than few months of butterflies, right?
Her body squirmed underneath the sheets that night, suddenly hot and cold at the same time. Her body reacted to the decision she made with violent chills. The creaking floorboards from the apartment above her screeched in the quiet.
That night, her dreams were full of smoking flesh and screams of agony.
I’m coming over. She texted Nash in the evening, after she had spent hours trying to talk herself out of what she was about to do.
She buzzed up to his apartment, feeling a rock settle in her belly.
“Hey, I was hoping to see you. I wanted to talk to you about something,” Nash said as she entered the living room.
The apartment was clean, as though Nash had spent the entire night scrubbing everything in his sight. An open letter was the only thing askance on the coffee table. But right now, Kiran had to speak.
“Can I go first?”
Nash’s face wasn’t helping. He was so hopeful and delighted that she’d come over, and she couldn’t stand the way his blue eyes widened like a child’s.
“Nash, my parents are really upset. They aren’t supportive of this at all. My mom called me a whore.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know about this anymore. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to settle down.”
“We can face this together,” he said. “Anger always comes first, but it has to fade at some point and leave room for conversation, right?”
He leaned down to kiss her, but she turned her head, resulting in a misplaced peck on the cheek.
“No…I don’t think we can face this at all.”
“Kiran, I know it’s weighing you, and I’m sorry for that. But we can make it. I promise you we’ll survive. You just have to keep working at it with them.”
“For how long? My sister fought it for months. They were forced to let her go for that decision. And they never forgave her for it either.”
“This isn’t like that.”
“How? It’s exactly like that. Potentially worse. Because you’re—”
“Because I’m what? White?”
Nash’s words were true—and Kiran’s blood boiled at it. She wouldn’t give him the benefit of answering that accusation, knowing how bad it made her and her family sound to someone who didn’t understand the nuance of a foreign culture…and also because it made her question it too.
He glowered at her now, his characteristic patience and understanding evaporating in front of her eyes.
“I don’t get it. You stay with me, and they’ll eventually come around. That’s the only way they’ll get used to the idea, isn’t it?”
“Can you please stop assuming you know how to fix it? It’s not going to work.”
“You keep acting like I’m the one who’s been holding this over your head and telling you that it’s me or them.”
“Aren’t conversations like this exactly that?” Kiran snapped. She couldn’t handle that he was right, that she was doing this to herself.
“Of course not. You brought up why you were upset, and I was offering a suggestion. You’re writing me out of this narrative completely. I have zero say. You’ve decided. You want to go.”
“It’s not like that…” She struggled to explain. “I can’t choose you over my family! After all they’ve gone through, I can’t do that to them.”
“I never asked you to!”
“Don’t you get it? The mere idea of us—you and me together—is already making me choose.”
“My God, Kiran, all I’ve wanted for my entire life is a solid home. A place where I can rest my head and know that in the morning, there will be stability, love, and a reason to look forward to every day. I thought I found that with you, yes, but I wouldn’t ask you to give up your family—the same people who have given you that very thing—just to fulfill my wish. Who the hell do you think I am?”
“Then what do you want?”
“Anything but this!”
The words hung between them, like dangling stalactites in a cave, threatening those who dared to walk underneath.
“Then why don’t you look for anything but this?” Kiran hissed.
Her last baiting idea was to toss the idea of a more suitable partner, an American woman, at him and hope he’d get fed up with her. How else would she get him to see that it would be easier with someone else? It would be so much easier if he saw that he was worth more than this and if he called her on her shit and left.
“Don’t you dare do that. Don’t you put words in my mouth and try to twist this so I’m the bad guy, when you’ve had the power all along. I don’t want this, this ridiculous in-between where you want to play both sides but don’t want to move forward in any direction.”
“You don’t get it! And you won’t try to.”
“I don’t get it. I’m trying, but you won’t let me in to see how I can make it better for you. You’ve already given up, and I’m the only one here fighting.”
His attempt at convincing her to stay only broke her heart into more pieces. She wanted to take back her words and go back to the blissful nights they’d spent cuddling on the couch.
Our daughter is dead to us.
“We need to break up,” she said. The monotony in her voice frightened her—a robotic tone that lacked any vitality or conviction.
Nash’s face reddened. He exhaled and turned away from her, his hands on his head. Then he whipped around.
“I expected better of you. I thought you’d fight to make this work.”
“Well, clearly that wasn’t the case, was it?” Kiran snapped. “And how could you think that, Nash? My family disowned my sister for doing the same thing. It’s always been a choice—you or them. If I choose you, I lose them because how could they forgive a child who has done this to them after seeing what they already went through. I would actively hurt them—I would make a choice to hurt my parents. And if I choose them, I lose you, because that’s the only way they stick around.”
“But I don’t understand how you could make a choice like this so easily.”
“How dare you!” she shouted back. “Do you really think this was easy?”
“Oh, stop it, Kiran. You’re in America. You have options and freedom—”
“You stop it, you arrogant jerk,” she hissed. “The world isn’t America.”
“You have the freedom to choose here.”
Kiran scoffed, and he frowned at her accompanying dubious laugh. Freedom. No one was free. Every action had a consequence.
“What, you think your country—”
“Stop. Stop it now, Nash.” Kiran put her hand up and leveled her voice, though the deadliness in it could kill the most indomitable enemy. “You’re about to insult a place you haven’t been and a culture you don’t understand. Not only is that beneath you, but I will not stand here and let you insult my family, my village, my education, and all we collectively worked for because you’re on your high horse.”
His face crumpled at being called out on the worst of him. “I didn’t mean—”
“You did. Don’t pretend.”
“I don’t understand. I get that you have commitments. I respect that. I respect what your parents been through. But I don’t understand why it’s a choice. Why is this an us or them? Why can’t it be all of us? Or how can a single decision negate all that you mentioned—your family, your village, your education, and all you worked for? Those things should hold steady regardless who you fall in love with. That’s literally the biggest decision you’ll make.”
“Nash…I love you for being so idealistic, but the world doesn’t work that way,” Kiran said sadly. “And it was always a choice. We’re toxic to each other. Look at what we’ve already done to our relationships.”
Her relationships.
Incredulity bled across his face. His fingers tightened into fists, as though he was catching his rebuttal in his knuckles instead of allowing the painful words he was fighting to tumble out of his mouth.
“That’s really how you feel?”
No, of course not, you idiot.
But anger from his impending bigotry and frustration at being unable to speak to her parents flowed through her veins like blood, feeding every cell in her body to end it now and go back to when life was simpler.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“We never stood a chance, did we…” It wasn’t a question. The bitterness seeped from his every pore as he muttered the words with disgust. “I never stood a chance. It was never about me at all.”
“Nash…” Kiran’s eyes filled with tears.
How could she explain that years of watching her parents wipe their eyes on Kirti’s birthday and pretending as though Baba’s long hours hadn’t been to pay for her schooling were just a denial of the truth: that love was never in her future on her terms and that her family had sacrificed all they had to get her where she was.
“I can’t make you understand. I’m so sorry.”
“No…you can’t. You’ll never understand that it didn’t have to be this way.”
“It was always a choice, whether you wanted it to be or not,” she tried to explain. “They already went through this once! How can I ask them to do it again?”
“Well, now I guess you don’t have to. You should leave.”
Kiran recoiled. “Nash…”
“Go.”
But she stood in place, frozen in shock at the vitriol in his voice.
“Fine. I’ll go,” Nash muttered.
He slid his feet into the running shoes by the door and slammed the door on the way out, leaving Kiran shell-shocked and forced to calm herself down alone.