Chapter Four
KIRAN
He could be a serial killer, Kiran thought as Nash followed her up a flight of stairs to her apartment on the left-hand side. Oddly, the voice in her head sounded like Sonam’s.
She’d never been the type to invite random strangers over for chai—her special treat, no less!—but the earnestness and overwhelmed look on Nash’s face, and Kiran’s own memory of being new to a place, had prompted her to extend the invitation.
Or maybe it was her bout of loneliness.
After an evening of chai with her friends and a chat with her parents while grocery shopping, Kiran sensed a piece of her was missing. It was always that way, wasn’t it? People always fell into routines and, slowly but surely, emptied their tanks as they lived through redundancy. Time spent with loved ones always filled those tanks back up to the brim…and one always longed for that feeling to last longer than it ever did.
Kiran unlocked her door and held it open behind her for Nash.
He stepped inside, his eyes taking in his surroundings. “Well…your apartment is a lot nicer than mine.”
“Why, thank you.”
“My style is ‘bachelor pad bare,’ whereas yours is…”
“I think Americans describe it as ‘hoarding,’ no?” Kiran smiled and closed the door behind them.
“I think I’d describe it as colorful. This is a happy place to come home to.”
“Thank you! I think colors can change people’s moods so quickly.”
“I’d have to agree. Waking up in this place must automatically give you some good energy.”
Kiran’s large studio was split into a living space and a sleeping space, with three windows looking over the street. Decorating each sill sat three little plants in small rounded pots, equally spaced apart and in the same colored order of metallic gold, yellow, and red. A bright-red love seat faced the brick wall, and a TV hung on the wall across from it. A fluffy blue armchair allowed a third person to be seated comfortably. A carpet with giant yellow sunflowers set against a blue background decorated the middle of the room. Blue saris with a gold design along the border, an impulse buy on her last visit to India, draped from an ornate gold rod hanging from wall to wall in the back of the rectangular space and created makeshift curtains to separate her sleeping space. Photos, all mounted in the same golden frame, took up much of the spare spaces on the walls and were lined up so cleanly that Kiran was sure her hours of effort with a ruler showed.
The entire space seemed to be blasted with color.
The kitchen was crammed full of pots, pans, and odds and ends—and a faint smell of spices lingered in the air.
Kiran slipped off her shoes at the entrance, neatly placing them on a shoe rack by the door.
Nash paused for a moment at the door. “Do you want me to take my shoes off?”
“Would you mind? It’s kind of an Indian thing.”
“Like, you don’t want to ruin all the colors and pretty things in here?”
“Something like that.”
He smiled and used the toe of one foot to pull the shoe on the other off. He carefully put them by the door and shuffled a few feet into the room, hesitating.
“Make yourself comfortable!” Kiran chirped as she placed her groceries on the counter and swiftly began to put them in their places. “I’ll make the chai in a moment. Also, that blue chair is super comfortable.”
Nash listened to her advice and sank into the armchair. “Have you lived in this place long?”
“About two years. I was in an apartment with my best friends when I first moved to the city.”
“When was that?”
“Six years ago,” Kiran remembered fondly. “I got a job in the city as a biomedical engineer right after graduation.” She filled a small pot with milk and set it to boil on the stove.
“Ah, so you’re a scientist.”
“What do you do? Or, given you moved here five minutes ago, what will you be doing?”
“I’m going to be a child and adolescent psychologist at NewYork-Presbyterian.”
“How exciting!”
Kiran chopped some ginger and sprinkled it into the milk and water, followed by cardamom, sugar, a drop of vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and anise.
The loose tea leaves were the last thing she added to the flavorful mix. As the concoction simmered, the aroma of spicy sweetness began to permeate the air, making the apartment a cozy, warm space that belonged in the middle of winter rather than the middle of July.
Kiran stirred as the milk turned frothy and then switched off the gas on the stove. She held a strainer and expertly filtered the liquid through it, filling each cup with steaming chai in no time.
She noticed Nash had turned his attention from a science magazine on a side table to the direction of the kitchen where the smell was the most intoxicating.
“You know, I’m simultaneously excited and nervous,” Nash admitted as he watched her step carefully toward him with teacups in hand.
“About the tea?”
“About the job.”
Something about the way his eyebrows rose as he said it made Kiran think he hadn’t confessed this to anyone before.
“Why are you nervous?”
“You remember what it was like when you graduated from high school?”
“I knew I was moving to a different country. It was terrifying.”
“Exactly. I’ve been in Nashville all of this time. Though it was a new phase of life, there was something familiar about the environment that didn’t change. Now, it’s all new.”
She handed him a cup and sat on the love seat across from him, folding her feet beneath her.
“I don’t have any doubt you’ll thrive.” Kiran smiled.
“This smells amazing, by the way. And once again, I will never call it ‘chai tea.’ Ever.”
“The Indian in me thanks you profusely.”
“Moment of truth…” Nash grinned, raising his cup to her.
He took a sip.
Kiran bounced her toes against the sofa as she waited, her own teacup steaming underneath her nose.
Nash stared inside his cup. “This might be the best drink I’ve ever had.”
“Liar.” But she was elated.
“For real. You’ve ruined coffee for me forever.”
“We used to drink this every morning and every evening back in India.”
“So that’s where you learned how to make this nectar from heaven?”
“Indeed. Though my father’s is better. It’s the only thing he can make in the kitchen.”
“Well, why learn anything else, right? If your sole expertise is this good. Can you cook too?”
“Are you hoping for dinner tonight?”
Nash shook his head, looking bashful. “You’ve been too kind. I would never ask.”
“I was only kidding. But I can cook. I can also eat.”
“Always a notable talent. Any favorites?”
“I am a world-class macaroni and cheese connoisseur.”
“Wait, really? Mac ’n cheese?”
“Food of the gods.”
“You live in the largest food capital in the world, and you’re choosing toddler food.”
“Yes. I stand by this choice.”
“I am from the South, you know, so I make a mean mac,” Nash said, taking a sip of his chai. “You’ll want to stuff your face with it.”
“That’s what she said,” she replied without missing a beat. Then burning heat rose into her cheeks.
Nash burst out laughing.
“I’m so sorry. My best friend, Payal, is a terrible influence, and sometimes I can’t stop myself from saying things out loud that she would.”
“You know, those jokes are a dime a dozen, but I sure as hell didn’t expect it to come from you.” He chuckled again.
“Is it that obvious that all my good jokes come from my best friends?”
“You just didn’t strike me as a dirty joke kind of girl. I know that sounds weird… You seem innocent somehow.”
“Ah, well, Mr. Hawthorne, I pride myself on being a woman of mystery.”
“Unpredictability… I can roll with that.”
“Actually, I am pretty predictable,” Kiran confessed. “But it is way cooler to sound like an enigma.”
Nash laughed. “Well, I think you’re plenty cool, so don’t you worry about that.”
“Why, thank you.”
They drank in silence for a moment.
“I never had it growing up,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Macaroni and cheese. Cheese wasn’t really a thing, outside of paneer. Or maybe it was but we couldn’t afford it.”
“Paneer?”
“It’s like…” Kiran scrunched her nose as she tried to come up with the English equivalent for the buttery goodness that was well-made paneer. “It’s like tightly packed ricotta.”
“I’m not sure that sounds appetizing.”
“Oh, but it is!” she cried out. “With tomatoes and onions, set up on a tandoor, spiced and sizzling.”
The mental recollection of Ma’s cooking was enough to make her mouth water.
“Okay, maybe that does sound great,” he said. “And you miss it.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell. The way your voice changes. The way your face gets animated. Do you get to go back often?”
Her demeanor shifted like the breeze, a sudden gust before the calm. She inhaled, smelling the polluted and still, sweet air as if she’d stepped off a plane into the blast of boiling atmosphere.
“No,” she murmured quietly. “I should. I’ve gone back once and invited my parents once.”
“What did they think?”
Oddly, she appreciated the way he asked the question. There was no automatic assumption that her village-bred parents were in awe of the massive buildings and clean-kept parks.
“Like anyone, they were overwhelmed by all the different faces and languages. But in terms of chaos, New York is no change from India.” She shrugged. “When you grow up around a billion people, you get used to having no personal space.” Not that we would have had it anyway in our home…and we like it that way.
“Hey, if your parents came from a different country and enjoyed it, hats off to them. I’ve lived in the United States my entire life, and even I was scared shitless moving here.”
His candor surprised her. His accent was the only indicator that he wasn’t a native New Yorker…that, and his immediate warmth with strangers.
“That’s surprising to me.”
“Why’s that?”
“You seem so sure of yourself.” If she was honest, she was a little jealous. If Nash had a list, he’d probably have finished it by now…or so it seemed.
“I think you have to approach life with a little confidence. It works out in the end, and you have to stay in the moment and handle it as it comes.”
“You mean like when you lock yourself out of your apartment and need to hang out with a neighbor you don’t know?” It was her turn to tease him.
“Something like that, yeah!” He grinned and she smiled too. “So you said you brought your parents…no siblings?”
The abrupt pause in the conversation brought a twinge of awkwardness to what had become a comfortable afternoon tea for Kiran. Nash waited patiently, seemingly unaware that he had set off an internal bomb inside her. She chewed her cheek for an excessive amount of time, until she felt like the giant elephant in the room was shoving her.
“I have a sister.”
“Are you guys close?”
This time, she was ready. “No, not really.”
“Older? Younger?”
“She’s older,” Kiran said. “Fifteen years. She’s in her forties now.”
“Wow, big age gap.”
What Nash didn’t see was Kiran calculating whether Kirti would actually be forty-two or forty-three. Her birthday was on August 15, Indian Independence Day. It was only July now, so Kiran was a few months ahead on her estimation.
“Indeed. Any siblings for you?”
There was a strange impulse to poke at her own sore spots when finding out information. It was as if every time she asked friends about their brothers and sisters, she would push on her own throbbing bruise, hoping that with enough onslaughts, the ache would fade. Kiran wanted to find out about another sibling relationship and close the gap she felt every rare time she mentioned Kirti’s name. She wanted her tough skin to become even more callused, to layer over all the years of protection she’d built over her heart in her sister’s absence.
In the years following Kirti’s departure from their family, Kiran had transformed into an only child. She learned not to mention her big sister’s name and instead to focus on her own success so she never had to view her parents’ disappointed faces. Even Kirti’s face was fading.
But the ache never quite disappeared completely. And she couldn’t place whether the hollowness in her heart was named after abandonment or sadness.