Chapter Forty
KIRAN
As she approached her office door after an early-morning meeting, the receptionist for the floor—“Farrah with the fab hair,” Kiran used to remember her by—called out to her.
“Kiran, your cell phone has been on your desk, and I can hear it from here! It’s been buzzing nonstop.”
“I’m sorry, Farrah,” Kiran answered, puzzled. “I’ll check that now.”
She took quick steps to her desk and didn’t bother sitting down. Reaching over a neatly stacked pile of books and her laptop, she grabbed the buzzing cell.
Twelve missed calls from Ma.
Three from Sonam.
Two from Payal.
Five from Akash.
Twelve voicemails.
She didn’t want to hear whatever bad news was coming from a voicemail, and she ignored them as she called Ma back. The phone rang once, that awkward ring that only international calls made, before Ma’s hysterical voice cried through the line in Hindi so fast, even Kiran couldn’t keep up.
“Kiran, tumhari baba…Baba. Baba.”
Kiran’s stomach dropped every story in the building each time her mother repeated Baba’s name.
“Ma.” Her voice cracked. “What happened to Baba?”
She tried to steel herself for the worst news she could. Her knuckles turned white, gripping the desk with her eyes clenched shut against the blow. She stopped breathing, as though her heart wouldn’t beat or react if that vital component of life was missing.
“Baba had a heart attack. He is in… He’s… ICU.” Ma’s tears spilled through the speaker.
“Tell him to hang on. I’ll be on the next flight.”
While all other threads seemed frayed at the moment, this was a promise she intended to keep.
The following hours were a blur.
She vaguely remembered telling her superiors that she had to go back to India for her father’s hospitalization. They had agreed wholeheartedly and offered their best wishes. She’d only taken a sick day when she had pneumonia. In her peripheral conscience, she registered their sad and reassuring smiles. She’d thanked them, flat-toned…thanked them for best wishes that her father wouldn’t die, as though she were acknowledging something as mundane as the fact that it was a Tuesday or that the sky was blue. It was so strange how crises propelled calm, that the eye of a hurricane could even exist amid a storm.
Then she’d called Sonam, Akash, and Payal, who had received hysterical phone calls of their own from Ma, as they were the closest people to Kiran that Ma knew and had contact information for.
“Do you need me to come with you?” Sonam had asked.
“You’re a doctor, Sonam. You and I both well know you don’t get time off.” Kiran stared at her closet. All the dress shirts, dresses, blazers, and T-shirts overwhelmed her. Who even needs this many clothes? she thought to herself in passing as she selected some cotton T-shirts that would allow her to beat the heat. You grew up with four outfits.
“I’ll find a way. I can take time off for a family emergency or figure out a way—”
“I love you, but we both know it’s not going to happen,” Kiran responded, loosely hanging on to a tunic in her hands. “And I need to do this on my own.”
Payal’s sentiments were similar.
“Are you sure you don’t need me to come with you?”
“Payal, you wouldn’t survive, and you’d have no idea what to do. You haven’t been to India in your life. But the thought is so appreciated, and I love you for it.”
Akash’s too.
“You’re like my sister. I can come. I insist.”
“Akash, it’ll be okay. I have to see them on my own. You don’t want to be a part of the mushroom cloud that is about to explode. Please.”
“Okay,” he said soothingly. “But text me once you land.”
Kiran smiled—one of her only expressions in the last few hours. She tossed the final pairs of underwear and bras in her suitcase.
She hardly remembered the drive to JFK airport. She wasn’t sure if she thanked the Uber driver as she hauled her carry-on out of the trunk and beelined for the ticket counter. Even her check-in and security were forgettable, unusual since she was brown and foreign, a source of stress for her when she flew.
It wasn’t until she was gripping the armrests of her seat as the plane taxied down the runway that she recognized what she was doing. Suddenly, the bag at her feet felt like it was growing—the passport with the emblazoned gold Lion Capital of Ashoka pushed against her calf, burning hotter against her skin as if to remind her where she was going and where she came from.
The plane rose above the clouds, flying north to Canada before making its sweep across the Atlantic. Kiran hated flying, but she loved this part when she got to look down below. She was lucky she had a window seat.
Lucky.
How could she even use that word right now? She was on her way home after finding out her father had almost died. He was so close to the brink of death that she didn’t know what news would greet her when she landed…whether she still had a father or whether she would have to watch a male cousin perform his final rites.
No, she told herself. Don’t think like that. You’re not lucky, but you’re going to count the good things.
And so, she began the fourteen-hour flight, counting all the good things that had happened that day.
She had managed to get on a flight. She got a window seat. The security line wasn’t terrible. The TSA agent was friendly. Every member of the CMC offered to come to India with her.
But she didn’t have Nash.
Though she had the support of her office mates. She was allowed to leave immediately. They wished her the best.
She managed to get an Uber with a two-minute wait time. The driver played music from an app that had no commercials. She didn’t smell the sewage on the tiny strip near the airport that always reeked of waste.
Every time the solitary little voice shouted in the back of her mind that it was a crisis situation, that Baba could die, or that she had no one, she grasped on to a thin string of hope and the seemingly stupidest optimistic piece of her day she could find. When she ran out of positive things for today, she went back to yesterday.
As the cabin grew dim and her positivity exercise exhausted her mind, she fell into a shaky sleep.
When she woke, she didn’t know where she was. The hum of the flight and the snoring of the passenger next to her disoriented her. Planes always smelled a particular way to her, the same way hospitals did.
Hospitals.
It was that word that caused her stomach to lurch and forced up, like bile, the reason she was on a plane.
She bent forward, resting her hands on the seat in front of her and steadying her breathing.
Baba could die. And his last words to you were that you were dead to him.
Kiran choked back a dry sob. Think about something happy, she pleaded with herself, but the one thing that planes didn’t carry was the ability to stop thinking—and nighttime was always the worst for that, despite where she was. Even when she was thirty thousand feet above the ground, it didn’t matter. Darkness surrounded the plane and pervaded her thoughts like smoke.
Baba had fought tooth and nail to provide a home to his family. She could remember the way his reputation for honesty preceded him the second she mentioned her name to anyone in town.
Despite the rumors and gossip that had spread through the village upon Kirti’s wedding, Baba was somehow spared the criticism. Ma had borne the brunt of it. Probably because she was female and home with the children, Kiran realized now, but she couldn’t help but think Baba’s character was a talisman. They viewed him with pity rather than judgment.
And now, if he died with two dishonorable daughters, his entire legacy wouldn’t matter. His goodness wouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t matter because he would have seen himself as a failure.
The sting of tears threatened her eyes, but she wasn’t going to cry. She had to face this bravely. As far as she knew, he hadn’t left the earth yet, and until that moment came, she would fight like hell to bring her family back together. She wouldn’t be the one to destroy it.
Instead, Kiran joined her hands in prayer and rested her forehead on her thumbs, silently begging the gods that she was flying nearer to now. Perhaps the geography would make them hear her louder.
If you let Baba survive, I will bring our family together again. Please. Don’t take him away from us.
She inhaled, fervently holding her wish inside before blowing it out. Going back to the beginning of the year and ticking off all the good things that happened to her, she glanced at her watch. She had five hours left.