“Home. India home, I mean,” I said.
“You went back there? Holy crap! What’s that like?!”
I told her what had happened the night before, and she let out a low, disapproving sigh.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew they would act like heathens. They don’t deserve you.”
“Please don’t speak about them that way,” I said quietly. “They are my family. They told me what would happen if I disobeyed them, and I went ahead and did it anyway. I deserve what has happened to me.”
“Wow, they’ve really done a number on you, haven’t they?” I heard Shazia turn down the volume on her television, the laughing and applause in the background slowly fading. “If there is one thing I’ve learnt since I left home, left the culture I grew up with, is that our parents don’t have the right to tell us how to be. They should simply be grateful that we’ve turned out OK, with no drug addictions or criminal records or illegitimate children running around. Here, in America, a man wouldn’t think of disowning his granddaughter because she wanted to pursue a modeling career. Hell, I don’t think he’d care. He may even be proud of her, would boast to all his friends on the block. There’s one thing you need to get through your head, Tanaya. You shouldn’t be groveling for their forgiveness. They should be groveling for yours.”
I heard a knock on the door. Breakfast had arrived, and I used that as an excuse to hurriedly hang up.
The clerk at reception who had checked me in the night before had recognized me. He had done a double take, looking up again from his computer screen, a grimace of satisfaction spreading across his face when I told him my name.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, as I was stepping out of the hotel at one thirty in the afternoon, several photographers were lined up outside the building, cameras in hand aimed at me like weapons. A young woman probably my age, standing on the sidelines, a multicolored cloth bag slung over her shoulders, came racing toward me as soon as I emerged, a small tape recorder tucked into her hand.
“Miss Shah! Miss Shah!” she yelled out, trying to catch me as a I hailed a cab. “I’m with the Times of India, lifestyle section. Miss, what brings you back home after all this time? Are you working on any deals with local companies? And why are you staying here instead of at your family home?”
I had one leg in the taxi, but stopped. I remembered Felicia’s advice about always being pleasant to the press, whether I was in a rush, or in a bad mood, or even distrustful of them. “The least you can do is smile and wave,” she had said. “But never be rude, and never walk away without giving them something.”
“I’m here for a family visit, that’s all,” I said, forcing a smile. I waved at the rest of the cameras, smiled again, thanked them for their interest, and folded the rest of myself into the small black taxi.
In the bright light of day, Ram Mahal looked imposing. Now, under the glare of the sun, I could see its former glory hidden beneath layers of dirty rain stains and pigeon droppings.
I was standing on the other side of the building, scared to be directly in front of the balcony, certain that my mother would emerge there at some point that early afternoon, to dry her hair on one of the rough pink towels that she always used.
Lurking in the back, shuffling from one foot to the other, I felt like a criminal. I hadn’t really planned what I was going to do or say, only that I would try and get in again, past the fury of my mother, relying on the assistance of the cook.
Just then, I heard a car honk behind me. I turned around and saw a taxi pull up right next to me. The door opened, and out stepped my aunt Gaura, suitcase in her hand.
“Tanaya, you’re here!” she said, her face beaming, her arms wrapping themselves around me before I had a chance to move. I sunk into her embrace, our two silver-streaked heads bowed together.
“When did you arrive?” she asked, releasing me. “Why are you standing here? I’ve come to see Nana; he’s very sick, you know.”
“I know.” I began crying again. “I tried to see him yesterday, right after I flew in, but Mummy wouldn’t even let me through the door. They really hate me. So I went to a hotel.”
“What nonsense!” she said, now frowning. “I never understood why they treated you so badly. You are one of our own. They might not have agreed with your choices, but you are a grown woman now.”
I stepped back and looked at my aunt with gratitude and surprise. I realized then that I had never really known her, despite our closeness when I was an infant. I had never taken the trouble to visit her in Pakistan or even to reply to the letters she would write to me, when she would always enclose a leaflet of shiny stickers or a dried flower she had made in an arts and crafts class. I had set her correspondence aside, reading and then ignoring it, seeing it as nothing more than a formality between an aunt and her niece.
“You have always been like a daughter to me, Tanaya,” she said then, smoothing down my hair. “I should have called you, and I am so sorry I did not. I think I knew that you would always come home and make things right. In the meantime, Nana and your mother refused to even let your name come up. It was very sad,” she said, shaking her head. “But, my girl, you are home now. We will do what we can to bring us all together again.”
She didn’t bother knocking on the blue painted door. It was ajar, as it always was this time of day, so the cook would hear the cries of the vegetable seller as he made his way down the corridor, a large circular basket of tomatoes and parsley and okra atop his head. Aunt Gaura simply pushed the door open, announced her presence, clutched my hand, and walked in.
“What is she doing here?” my mother asked, emerging from the bedroom we once shared, her black hair wet and stringy against the polyester gown she always wore at home, a sprinkling of fragrant white talcum powder visible around her neck. The cook emerged from the kitchen, smiling at me.
“She was waiting outside, bechari,” Aunt Gaura said, referring to me as the “poor girl” that I felt like I was. “How are you treating her like this? Has she harmed anyone? Yet even so, she has come to ask for forgiveness.”
“Ma, I just want to see Nana,” I said, my voice cracking, looking toward his closed bedroom door.
“He doesn’t want to see you,” she spat out. “He’s in poor shape. Seeing you will kill him.”
“That’s not true,” Aunt Gaura said. “He’s been asking for her, and you know it. Don’t lie. Come,” she said to me, taking me by the hand again like I was a child and this was my first day of kindergarten. “Let’s go see your nana.” She set down her suitcase, walked toward his room, and pushed the door open.
Had I not known he was still alive, I would have thought I was looking at a corpse. He was half his weight, shrunken and bony beneath a white cotton sheet. His eyes were closed, his skin pale, a gray stubble roughening his cheeks and chin. His silvery hair, lighter and thinner than I remembered it, stood straight up on his head, disheveled and uncombed. Lying there, he reminded me of a broken fluorescent tube light, all brittle and skinny and shades of gray, the monochrome broken up only by a black thread worn as a necklace, a small silver talisman hanging off it. On the table next to the bed was a copy of the Koran and his reading glasses, dusty with nonuse. Bottles of pills and syrups cluttered another table, a large glass jug of water next to them. The room smelled of urine and antiseptic, like the hospital where my grandmother had died years earlier.
I stood there as if glued to the floor.
“He’s sleeping,” Aunt Gaura whispered to me. “He needs his rest. At least you have seen him. Come, let’s have some tea and return later.”