Serving Crazy With Curry (25 page)

They drove silently for a while and then Avi stopped the car at a red light. He turned to look at Devi.

“Do you have plans for the future?” he asked.

Devi laughed. “Girish was asking me the same thing a few days ago.”

“That son of a bitch,” Avi said and then slammed his hand on the steering wheel.

“Daddy!”

“He cheats on my little girl? And then … how dare he?” Avi said angrily and slammed his foot on the accelerator as the light changed.

“You told Shobha that you supported her,” Devi reminded him.

“Of course I support her,” Avi said. “They weren't happy, I know that, but still, he cheats on her? The bastard!”

Devi turned her head to look out of the window. She leaned over and made a wet patch with her breath on it.

“He had the decency to call me and apologize. Why apologize to me? It wasn't my marriage he fucked around with,” Avi said, his language veering from the straight and narrow.

Devi made a mark on the wet patch with her forefinger.

“Has Shobha talked to you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Devi said and looked up from the wet patch. “She seems relieved about the divorce. They were so unhappy together. It wasn't meant to be, Daddy.”

“I know.” Avi sighed as he slid the Jeep into his driveway. “Still, divorce? That's a big deal for me. I wanted my children happy.”

“I'm happy,” Devi offered brightly.

Avi looked at her for a moment and then nodded. And it makes
me
very happy to hear that.”

Devi smiled and then took a deep breath before she got ready to ask her father for help.

“I need a favor, Daddy.”

Just a few months ago she'd have bitten her tongue off rather than say those words. All her life she had wanted to be a great career woman without her father's help, without anyone's help. She wanted to be at level with her father without any assistance from him. Now she knew that this was not a competition. She didn't have to one-up her daddy. She had to realize what made her happy and pursue it.

Anything,” Avi said without hesitation.

“I need you to put me through school again,” Devi said.

Avi raised both his eyebrows.

“I'm looking into going to a culinary school,” she told him, and he nodded appreciatively. “I think I should give that a shot.”

“I say go for it.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” Devi said and then threw her arms around her father over the gear shift and the controls of the Jeep.

mama's recipe
dosa
with sambhar
The day I decided my future

Mama refused to let me make the
dosas.
I suggested that it would be more fun to try making savory crepes to go with the
sambhar
and pickle but she vetoed the idea.

She took the overnight-soaked rice and
urad dal
and ground them to a paste in the food processor. Then she added some baking soda and salt

to the mixture and let it sit for a while. She took the mixture, which had now swelled a little, and stirred it thoroughly.

Taking a ladleful of the dough, she spread it rather expertly on a hot cast-iron pan and let it cook. No one, and I mean no one, can made
dosas
as paper-thin as Mama can. It's the way she does it. A ladleful goes on the pan and then she uses the round base of the ladle to spread the mixture in a circle.

For the
sambhar,
Mama cooked
thoor dal
with salt in the pressure cooker. In a separate saucepan, she fried mustard seeds along with asafetida and turmeric. She added green beans, pearl onions, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes to the oil and fried them for a while. She then poured in a mixture of tamarind water with
sambhar
powder (which Mama obviously made at home by frying a lot of whole spices together and then grinding them). Afler that she added the cooked
dal
plus some water and let it all simmer for a while.

My memories of Sunday mornings of eating hot
dosas
with
sambhar
and pickle are vivid. I'm glad that I'm living here again so that I can learn to appreciate the one thing that I never did learn to do before: Mama's impeccable south Indian cooking.

For Once, Then, Something

Shobha woke up early. A little too early. But once she was awake she couldn't go back to sleep. She watched the alarm clock in her old childhood room change from two
AM
to three
AM
and then to four
AM.
Tired of watching the flicker of the red LCDs, she decided to give up on trying to sleep and got out of bed. Her room, she thought as she turned the bedside lamp on.

This was where she'd grown up. They had moved to the house when Shobha was eight years old. Saroj didn't want to give the girls separate rooms; she worried that they'd get scared at night. Devi said she wouldn't mind sharing a room but Shobha was eight, belligerent, and wanted her own room. And she got it two years later, after long fights, arguments, and tantrums. Even after Shobha left for college, Saroj didn't change the room, not really. She'd added a few things here and there but the room was the same, the single bed was still uncomfortable and her black-and-white posters of Humphrey Bogart (a crush in her teens) and Lauren Bacall were still where she'd left them.

She'd dreamed of MIT and Harvard and big business schools in this room. But she'd ended up at Cal getting an engineering degree and when it came time to go to business school, she went back to Cal. It was in the Bay Area and convenient. Even now she regretted
not getting into MIT for her undergrad. It had been a slam to the ego, such a failure, but she'd covered it up by convincing herself that she'd always wanted to go to Cal anyway. It was closer to home, it was in a familiar area, and it was a very good school.

It was a warm night, even though it was almost August. Fall had threatened to come but now didn't seem imminent; still, in California one didn't have to worry or wait for the seasons. Maybe she needed to move, she wondered seriously. She lived too close to her parents, her childhood. Maybe she needed to move to someplace where the seasons changed, the weather altered. Spring and summer were looked forward to after the chill of winter and the quiet cool of the fall was welcomed after the heat of the summer. Even as she thought it, she knew she couldn't leave. She was a Californian, she couldn't live anywhere else. She could probably go on vacation, on a project, but she would always live here. And there were advantages to living near her parents’ home. Whenever she got fired and divorced again she knew she'd have a place to crash.

When Shobha came to the living room, her hair mussed, her eyes a little sleepy, she found Avi sitting on the sofa watching television. The sound was muted and a black-and-white movie was unfolding.

“So you figured out how to whistle yet?” Shobha asked as she slid onto the sofa next to her father.

“Yep, you put your lips together and blow,” Avi said, trying to imitate Lauren Bacall.

“You can't watch Humphrey Bogart with the sound turned off,” Shobha admonished him. “Can you imagine just reading
here's looking at you, kid
from the closed captioning and not hearing Bogie actually say it?”

Avi shrugged. “I didn't want to wake up Vasu just because I couldn't sleep,” he said, inclining his head toward the adjoining guest room.

“G'ma sleeps like a log,” Shobha said. “Once I tried to wake her up because I had a bad dream and wanted to sleep with her. I shook her and called out to her, nothing, she was dead to the world.”

“When was this?”

“Ah … we were visiting her in Hyderabad. You and Mummy had gone for some wedding. The
muhurat
was at some ungodly hour, two in the morning I think,” Shobha said, remembering. “I think it was Prabhat Uncle's wedding.”

“Vasu's grown old now, she doesn't sleep that well anymore,” Avi said. And Prabhat didn't get married in India. He got married in New York. Remember that horrible trip? We missed the connecting flight in Chicago—”

“—and had to spend the night at the airport.” Shobha nodded. “Mama was not a happy camper.”

“And then the bastard got divorced seven years later,” Avi said and then made a sound. “I'm sorry.”

“What? Now you can't say the words
suicide
and
divorce
in front of your daughters?” Shobha demanded sarcastically.

Avi laughed self-consciously. “I hurt for you.”

“Don't,” Shobha told him. “I'm happy that we're apart. It's better this way. I can start living my own life, alone, and he can start living his. We were never meant to be married. We never got along, always argued. We got married but never became a couple.”

“Still, I feel responsible,” Avi said. “I should've fought harder with your mother and you. After living all your life here in America you're simply not suited for arranged marriage and neither was he.”

Shobha shook her head. “Prabhat Uncle had a love marriage and he got divorced, but you and Mama are still married. Vikram Uncle and Megha Auntie had an arranged marriage and they're still married, happily for the most part, right? It's a luck of the draw, whether you fall in love or walk into it the arranged way.”

“You have a point,” Avi conceded. “But I can't help blaming myself.”

“It's done with,” Shobha said sharply. “I'm happy. Isn't she gorgeous?” she asked suddenly, looking at the woman on television.

Avi nodded.

“I think women in these old black-and-white movies simply looked better because we couldn't see them in full color,” Shobha said, staring at the television screen. “I've seen Lauren Bacall in
color and she doesn't look anywhere as hot as she does here. What the hell am I going to do?”

Avi didn't bat an eyelid at her change of topics.

“About what?”

“Everything,” Shobha said in frustration. “Girish just left so I have to make sure the house sells and I have to divide all our stuff pack it, and ship it.”

“But you offered to do all of this,” Avi pointed out.

Shobha grinned then and nodded. Girish had seemed in such a rush to leave the country that she didn't press for his help in getting rid of the house, making sure the packers packed everything and shipped it to the right places. This was the easiest divorce in the history of divorces. They'd lived such separate lives that now there were no intertwining material things for them to argue over.

“And then there is the whole job situation,” Shobha said, feeling embarrassed. Her father was a successful entrepreneur, while she was currently unemployed. She'd never started her own business, had never wanted to, she'd always wanted to be CEO of someone else's company, and now she'd been fired.

“You'll find something soon. Good people always do,” Avi said carelessly.

“Do you know what the job market is like these days?” Shobha asked, incredulous that he couldn't see the perilous situation her career was in.

Avi nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know. But if you're good, you're good. I told Vikram and he already wanted me to ask you if you want to work for Sentinel.”

Sentinel was the company that Vikram Uncle and her father started all those years ago. The company was still alive, though it had merged with another company ten years ago. It was after the merger that Vikram Uncle and Avi had both started to feel the pinch of working in someone else's company, and a few years later they'd both accepted positions on the board and left the day-to-day duties to the next generation. Vikram Uncle continued to talk about a second start-up, but Avi said he was too old and too tired to start all over again.

“I don't want to work for your company,” Shobha said uneasily. “I'll manage.”

“I can make a few calls to make your life easy if you like, but I really don't think it'll be necessary,” Avi said, his demeanor indicating clearly to Shobha that he thought there would be no problem in her finding another equivalent job.

“I thought you'd be ashamed of me,” Shobha said, surprised, even a little confused. Her father was the one person she had been afraid of facing because she thought she had disappointed him the most. She couldn't imagine him feeling any pride in her after what happened.

“Why?” Avi asked, now looking confused. “You're a VP at your age. I'm incredibly proud of you.”

“I got fired. I'm not a VP anymore.”

“Bullshit,” Avi said and put an arm around Shobha. “The job business—don't take it personally. Every time the shit hits the fan someone's head rolls. This time it was yours, next time you'll be firing your scapegoat. That's business. What I feel bad about is Girish. I can't believe he cheated on you, and I don't know what to do now that I know he did.”

Shobha made a sound of disbelief. There was no way she wanted to have this discussion with her father. He had no idea how close to home this whole adultery business was and how interconnected it was with the first domino to fall: Devi.

“I thought about cheating on him,” Shobha said, not wanting to put all the blame on Girish. It wouldn't be fair. “I mean I really did.”

“But you did not cheat on him,” Avi said angrily.

“Would it be okay with you, then, if Mama fantasized about other men?” Shobha demanded.

“The idea doesn't have appeal,” Avi remarked. “But still… the son of a bitch.”

“And I thought you always liked him,” Shobha said and cuddled closer to her father.

“As a man I still like him, but as my little girl's daddy, I could break that boy's kneecaps,” Avi said. He kissed her forehead and rocked her gently. “Are you sure you're okay?” he asked.

“Yes, Daddy,” Shobha said and closed her eyes. “I think I've never been better, but you're free to follow up on the kneecaps threat, as long as I can watch of course.”

LETTER FROM AVI TO SHOBHA

Dear Shobha,

Divorce? That word has an ugly taste, doesn't it? Just a few days ago your mother threatened me with that word and scared the life out of me. I was afraid she'd pack my bags and throw them out; worse, burn them and tell me to get lost. I'm Indian enough and in love enough that divorce scares me, maybe even disgusts me a little.

So when my little girl tells me that she's divorcing her no-good husband, I want to break that boy's legs and put him on a platter and serve it to her.

But I know Girish and I know you. If I didn't know Girish, I'd happily blame him and sit back while I made sure he burned for his sins. But I know him, and knowing him I know that a man like him would never break a commitment this serious unless something drastic happened.

And I know you. I know that you would never fail at anything unless something terrible happened.

I realized just now that maybe this was for the best. I thought about what I would do if Saroj cheated on me or what Saroj would do if I cheated on her. For all her small temper tantrums, Saroj would probably very calmly get a gun and put a bullet in between my eyes. I can't say I wouldn't do the same. But you, you are so blase about this, smoking a cigarette, getting drunk on my good whiskey with Devi, acting like it is party time, that I wonder if maybe it really is party time for you. You seem to be laughing loudly enough. But I wonder.

There is a song from this old movie called
Arth
where a man asks a woman, “You are smiling so much, there must be a deep pain that you're hiding.” I wonder what your deep pains are and I wonder how I have failed you.

I have always been so proud of you. You are so easy to be proud of. When you became VP, I strutted around like a peacock telling everyone who'd listen that my daughter was a vice president at the age of thirty.