I never found her pretty, even if I wished to have her clear skin and her willowy body that was as tall as mine, but surprisingly looked so much taller. I miss her laughter though, blunt and fearless, so charming, always charming. My son still talks about her. ‘Where is Dina aunty?’ He asks, with a temerity that makes me want to smack him hard on his dome shaped head.
My son and I were both smitten by Dina when we first met her. Her wholesomeness in this new city, new country, alleviated the profound emptiness we both had begun to experience. It was probably the way she stared when she spoke to me and pulled my son into her arms, like she could see something tender in us that we were not aware of ourselves. I was won over, and my son seemed to have fallen in love. And when I invited her to our home in the dreary Jersey City apartment, I meant it, I really did.
She arrived with my husband, who had picked her up from Bridgewater where she lived with a distant uncle. I asked my husband to do this. To welcome Dina, I pulled out my knee length dress, the one I had picked up from Kohls because it seemed so pretty and so unlike anything I had ever wore worn. I could never bring myself to wear this dress before though, because my feet seemed too stout hanging under it, or my traditionally Indian face just seemed odd hanging over it. I was afraid to wear it anywhere else, afraid of being judged or worse still, ridiculed. But with Dina I could never be afraid. Dina's eyes had lit up when she saw me, and I could see she had taken in the whole of my appearance. ‘So classy.’ I remember the words. Classy! No one had called me that before.
Dina spent the whole day with us, helping me with the chores, playing intelligent games with my son, and accompanying my husband when he offered to buy us all coffee and donuts. She seemed to spread out into our otherwise firm familial existence. I stayed smitten and my son happily offered to accompany her to her home when it was time for her to return. ‘You stay the weekend with us next time,’ I told her. And she said she would, and she did.
The next weekend Dina brought discounted passes to Six Flags for all of us. And my husband readily booked a car to drive us there. I woke up early in the morning and, not wanting to feed myself overpriced pretzels, steamed a fresh batch of idlis and then packed them with a generous quantity of podi I had picked up from the Indian grocery store. Dina surprised me with her resourcefulness here too. She had brought neatly cut cheese sandwiches for us, a snack my son loved more than my husband did.
And when it was time to head off on the drive, Dina walked to the passenger side of the car's front, and then realising what she was doing, turned to look at me, a sheepish smile on her face, like she wanted to say something more, but could not. I gestured to her, even as words escaped me. I was frantically moving my arm to tell her that she could sit in the passenger seat and I was perfectly happy with that. We were making her a part of our family and families did not bother about who sat where in the car, did they?
My idlis stayed untouched and later had to be cleared into the bin, because we stopped at a fancy looking diner for a 'brunch' as Dina called it, even if I knew it wasn't late enough to be called that. But I loved how the eggs were cooked there and the hash browns and the beans that I cleaned off my son's plate. He ended up eating most of the other dishes that I had put on his plate, only because Dina coaxed him into eating them using a combination of charm and cunning. I was impressed, because I had never thought of these wiles, and I was the one with the child.
Two bathroom breaks and one deli break to pick up a bag of Cheetos – because Dina and my son wanted them – we finally got to Six Flags well into the noon hour. I was tired and slightly nauseated. It had to be the eggs that now seemed to have left a permanent taste of butter and pepper mixed with milk right down to my intestines, or it probably was the coffee, more bitter than the bitterest coffee I had ever consumed.
Dina and my husband had already decided which rides we would sit on. My son was too young to be on any of them. So, we decided we would take turns to babysit him as the other two went on the rides. But when I neared the very first ride, called Batwing Coaster as it had something to do with the Batman, I could feel the undigested coffee and egg yolk rise right through the insides of my mouth. I would soil myself. I would soil others around me. My son would cry. My husband would be embarrassed. Suddenly I was very relieved. I did not even like these adventure rides. I had no point to prove to anyone. My husband laughed at me, his laughter filled with more ridicule than anything else. I was used to it. My potbellied and big mouthed husband, always ridiculing me, for reasons neither of us cared to understand, though I attributed it to his H1B visa and to his other foreign trips to London, Sydney and Singapore, and me, only having travelled to suburban America, with him, because of him.
I said nothing, only glared at him, like I always did. His mouth fell flat, and he looked away, then looked at our son, and asked him to take care of his mother. My son jumped at this sudden adult responsibility. ‘I will take care of Amma,’ he repeated. Dina laughed and pulled him close. ‘So chweet,’ she said and then beamed at me. That was an image of her that I will never be able to destroy.
My son can write in Telugu as well as he can write in English, now. A couple of months, and that monkey boy will turn five. In a past life, I would have given him a younger sibling for company by this milestone of a birthday. But now it is just me, and my bored parents. He does not like my parents much; I can see that. But they adore him and remain grateful for his presence. Sometimes they ask me what my plans are. I have no plans. They know that too, but they still ask, waiting to be surprised.
Rakshabandhan happened exactly two months after our Six Flags visit, inside our Piscataway apartment, on my husband's hairy right-hand wrist. There was also a long, graceful tika on his forehead, and he was fed not one but three pieces of kaju katli picked up from the Bengali Sweets on Indian Street. I had no brothers. But I was just as overcome by emotion as Dina was when she bent down to touch my husband's feet. My sister-less husband had found a sister. Dina laughed her head off when she lifted herself up. My son rushed to my husband and bent down to touch his feet too. We had a feast for lunch. And then we all went to sleep. My son and I in one bedroom. My husband on the living room couch with his legs dangling off the sofa, even if he was barely over five-and-a-half feet tall. Dina refused to sleep, saying she'd watch a downloaded version of a movie, the latest Bollywood blockbuster my husband and she wanted to watch in a theatre, but did not, because I was not interested. I watched her as she spoke about the movie now, lamenting on how ugly the hero was and how unnaturally tall the heroine was. I was mildly disturbed. Did she think of me and my husband as ugly too? And what about my son? As a three-year old, he was undoubtedly 'cute'. But the cuteness would soon be gone, I knew that. He'd probably grow much uglier than this hero Dina was talking about. I was upset. I wanted to be left alone. So I went to the bedroom and lay down beside my fast asleep, future-ugly son. But sleep eluded me. And from the neighbouring bedroom, I could hear the strains of Dina's sporadic laughter. I found the laughter strange, and then I heard it reduce, I also heard the door being pulled shut and locked, or maybe it was all in my dream, for when I next opened my eyes, my son was sitting up against the bed, picking his nose and humming a lullaby I had been teaching him lately. It was close to 6 in the evening. I had slept for three hours!
Dina and my husband were in the living room, she was squatting down on the floor, her hands brushing against my husband's thigh. They were reading something. Neither of them noticed me enter and I felt like I was an intruder in my own home. This feeling should have saddened me or angered me. Instead, I felt pitiful of my status as an H4 visa wife. Me, with my two degrees and with my once coveted job and publications. I snapped at my son. The poor boy wasn't even doing anything. I snapped at him for not waking me up earlier. I snapped at him because I needed tea and I did not want to prepare it myself like I had been doing for the last six years.
Dina and my husband noticed me somewhere through all this snapping. Dina smiled at me, a vacant smile that gave away nothing else. ‘Can you make tea for me?’ Did I say that or did Dina stand up on her own to make tea for all of us. I do not know. Dina said I ought to stop using the steel coffee glasses I had carried from India and buy newer cups from Walmart because they are always on discount and because they look lovely. I did not look at her face as she said this because I wanted nothing to do with her tea or with her or with the cups, she wanted me to buy from Walmart. ‘My aunty has the best tea sets. I will take you to their house. Really you must see the house. It is so well decorated.’ I had heard about this aunty many times before and if at one point, the idea of associating myself with another woman who was from somewhere in the 'land' that I was from and yet now belonged to a different 'land' where I was trying to settle myself in, had left me excited, it left me disgusted now. Disgusted at this woman, and the others like her, with their 'well-decorated' homes, and bought-on-sale cutlery and furnishings and their sleek-haired and American accent spouting children, and their husbands who drove around in mid-sized cars or SUVs and then brought a much cheaper car for their wives. Or maybe, I wasn't disgusted at any of these people, because if anything they'd persisted and survived, made peace with their aspirations, while I coasted from one city to another, and now with a child who, if not brought up well, would possibly grow up being as confused as I was at that time. Who was I disgusted at? Myself? Or at Dina who was now carefully pouring tea into my steel glasses and then placing them on the tray one by one, simultaneously saying if it were a little earlier, she'd have fried pakodas for all of us. That liar! She would never fry pakodas, neither would she ever take me visiting to this aunty’s house. I laughed out loud. Dina stopped talking and looked at me. For a second, I saw vulnerability on that face, a vulnerability I was very eager to latch onto, but soon it disappeared. She laughed too. ‘You are quite crazy, no. I always felt that.’ My mouth and face fell back onto themselves. She may be right. I might be crazy. Maybe she was right, maybe I was crazy.
Dina did take us to visit her uncle’s house in Bridgewater, a visit I liked more than I should have, because I don’t remember much about the few hours we had spent there now. I don’t remember the colour of the walls or if the floors were carpeted or not, or how big the portico of the house was, or what Dina's aunt sounded like, or how fair her cousin was. But I must have found something there, something that made me feel like I was a part of something else, something solid, a family with all members willing to welcome another family they had nothing to do with them. I could not do that to anyone. But here I was welcomed, and so were my husband and my child. And this was all because of Dina, who did everything to make sure I was comfortable. Only me, because my son had gone berserk exploring the open bright spaces so unlike our dull apartment. And my husband had surprisingly found some topic to talk about with the man of the house, Dina's uncle. Only I oscillated between Dina, her aunt and her two cousins.
One of Dina’s cousins got married to a tall Indian man. Dina herself got married a few months after I took up a new job as a lecturer in a Diploma college. I don’t know how long the marriage lasted and why it did for as long as it did. I hear from the wife of an old friend of my husband’s, who I occasionally talk to, that she is now in New Zealand, still like sunshine, with a few kilos packed on her, and with a flair for writing charming Instagram/Linkedin posts. I think, not of Dina as she would write those posts, but the people in her ‘Followers’ list who would read those words, and how each one of them would know Dina, ‘know’ her the way she really was. But then what was she, really?
My husband probably knew. He probably knew the lies she interspersed in her truths. He probably knew that she was nothing like me, or the other women in his life. And that’s maybe why she saw something in him that no one else did, or maybe only I never did. Because I never liked my husband; at the most I could only tolerate him, for his sake, for my sake, for the sake of our uncomfortable but convenient domesticity. Even when we lay down in bed, or let our bodies move together clumsily, we did it less out of pleasure and more out of a habit. It felt like something we needed to make happen. How then would either of us have resisted Dina and everything she made us see. My husband and I had both fallen in love with her. Only, he had the courage to act on that love. I could only pretend to be shocked at his betrayal, because secretly I was jealous that Dina had even accepted this foolish man’s love, even for an unexplained fling.
*
My husband wants to come back now. He cries every time he talks to me and my son, even to my father, though never to my mother. Even in his grief, it probably is unmanly of him to let his vulnerabilities show in front of a mother-in-law. I don’t speak much to him, nor do I miss him in my life. My son though, can do with a father, certainly. But at least for now, he is young enough for my self-indulgences. I live on the money my husband shares with me and my still unremarkable salary, though I might just do a PhD and move into a better college at a better university. My husband tells me he will atone for all his mistakes and I am not sure I understand which mistakes he is referring to. I also wonder why he hasn’t yet begun to look for a second wife, though I am sure he has attempted that. What would he look for in this second missus? Dina or me or a combination? I am amused by the thought, and I look forward to something like this happening: my husband finding his happiness, Dina finding her happiness, and who knows, me finding my happiness.
*
Prashila Naik is a writer from Goa, living in Bangalore. Her work has been published in various online literary magazines from India and elsewhere, such as Out of Print, Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, Litro UK, Muse India, Jaggery, Papercuts, Bombay Literary Magazine, and Spark, among others. She has also published in some anthologies, the most recent one being, Bangalore Writers Workshop's Anthology on Bangalore.