Chapter Two

Naina Kohli didn’t like too many people. Liking people and being liked in return was a childish and shortsighted endeavor. It worked for those interested in transient happiness induced by dopamine hits and instant gratification. It had little to do with real life, which was a long, weary road.

Her parents, for instance, pretty much loathed each other.

Her father’s loathing was more obvious, of course, because the patriarchy was a many-splendored thing. Men got to be honest. With their loathing for inferior spouses, with their disdain for their inferiorly gendered offspring. Men didn’t have to fear loss, especially not the men who carefully constructed and inculcated dependency on them in their loathed ones.

“Naina beta!” Naina’s mother threw a look over her shoulder, undoubtedly to make sure her husband wasn’t watching, before rushing over to her only child across the throng of guests celebrating Yash’s win on the Raje estate.

Naina and her father, the illustrious Dr. Kohli, were no longer on speaking terms after she’d told her parents that Yash was not interested in marrying her and that he was in love with someone else, who was not her.

So a yoga instructor with unknown parentage could trap himin a few months but you couldn’t keep him after having ten years to do it?

Yes, Dr. Kohli was a delight. Not having to deal with him any longer was the most fortuitous thing that had ever happened to Naina.

The sheer enormity of the relief Naina felt at the fact that Vansh had gone off to mingle and she was blessedly alone when her mother found her should have been embarrassing, but Naina no longer let embarrassment and her mother mix in her mind.

Despite Naina’s best efforts, her mother’s presence, her smell, her voice—it all fell like precision cuts on the ice that usually covered her like impenetrable armor.

“You good, Mummy?” she said with a casualness that made her mother’s hand tremble at her throat, where her string of solitaires caught every one of the million decorative lights brightening the Raje estate.

Naina had no doubt her father had ordered her mother to don the bling. Wear your biggest diamonds . . . That thing you had made in India to replicate Tiffany.

High-priced gems set to knock off even higher-priced gems was apparently the perfect way of announcing to the world that the Rajes had lost a precious alliance, while also making sure everyone knew that the Kohlis were just as good as the Rajes.

They weren’t.

But Dr. Kohli would never know why.

He was a medical inventor, and each of his inventions might have changed millions of lives, but he had never felt the need to change the regressive ideology that had been grown inside his head in the sprawling, entitlement-filled kothi in the village in India he’d grown up in.

“I’m all fine,” her mother said, eyes still darting around and taking note of who was watching her talking to her daughter while also making sure Dr. Kohli didn’t show up and catch her in the act of consorting with the enemy. “I was not expecting to find you here.”

If her mother had taught Naina anything, she’d taught her how to show up in uncomfortable situations. Every day.

“Whyever not?” The easy tone emerged from Naina’s lips with barely any effort. “Yash is still my friend.” He’d been her only friend, and if her being here months after her very public dumping made things easier for him by making him look a little less like a cheating jerk, then here she’d be.

“I don’t understand you children,” her mother said about her thirty-eight-year-old daughter who had never had a chance to be a child, and had spent her entire adult life trying to change the lives of women in the remotest, most neglected parts of the world.

“I know.” Those words landed on her mother like a blow and Naina kicked herself. Casual indifference was the only way to not end up saying something hurtful to her mother. Hurting her mother was like kicking a puppy. For all her reputation for hardness, Naina would never kick a puppy.

Ask me about my foundation,Naina wanted to say. Her foundation had just received a multimillion-dollar endowment from Jignesh Mehta, the sixth-richest entrepreneur in the world. They were going to be able to bring sustainable economic independence to millions of women.

“That jacket looks so much pretty on you,” her mother said instead, then, as though she couldn’t help herself, she cupped Naina’s cheek. The look she threw over her shoulder helped Naina keep the rush of warmth from sweeping her away. “You were always such beautiful girl,” she added with exactly the same expression she wore while trying to resolve an irreconcilable loss on her household expenses spreadsheet.

Suddenly she took Naina’s arm, and with another furtive glance combing the crowd, she dragged Naina to one of the powder rooms in the Raje mansion. Once they were inside, she locked them in. Despite all this caution, when she spoke her voice was a whisper, just in case someone had their ear pressed to the bathroom door in the middle of a party.

“It’s not too late, beta. If you make marriage before Yash does, everyone will forget how sad they feel for you. Your Navdeep Mamu in Cincinnati called me yesterday. Our family is being so much supportive. They’re all coming together with rishtas. Now that we’re in forties with age criteria, mostly it’s divorcés and widowers. But I put foot down. No men with children.” Naina’s mother never paused when she talked. It was as though she had to quickly deliver her speeches before she was interrupted and dismissed.

So, Naina had developed a mechanism for putting pauses in for her and tuning out the parts of the monologue that weren’t relevant. Her mother said a few more entirely ridiculous things about marriage criteria.

The only marriage criterion I have is to never be in one, Mummy. Thanks for helping me keep it simple.

“. . . Navdeep Mamu said there is surgeon who just joined his practice. Newly widowed. Very handsome. No children. Most dedicated to medicine and only medicine. No interest in politics and news and all those type things. Your mamu showed him your picture and he’s very much flipped for you.”

Oh, how Naina wished her mother had developed some skill for knowing what someone flipping for you actually involved. Then again, love was a figment of poets’ imaginations that they subjected the world to because they couldn’t stop dwelling in pain without making everyone else just as miserable as them.

An unwelcome montage of the Raje siblings climbing all over their significant others against a pool house wall did a dramatic dance in her head.

Well, no one said the Rajes weren’t burdened with enough glorious luck to make everyone else look like the losers they were. The Rajes weren’t the norm and Naina wasn’t stupid enough to believe that good fortune, or joy, rubbed off through contact. Spending a lifetime being friends with Yash had at least taught her that much.

“Remember how I always said I would only ever marry Yash? Just because he’s in love with someone else doesn’t mean I’ll suddenly settle for someone else too.” She squeezed her mother’s shoulder, because Mummy looked like she needed something to keep her from collapsing under the weight of this revelation, which Naina had made at least fifty times since Yash’s grand declaration of love for India Dashwood on national television. “I really appreciate how hard Navdeep Mamu and you have worked for me. I mean, a widowed doctor—with no children! How did your brother even find him?”

Her mother scowled. “Do you think I don’t have enough people in my life treating me like stupid? Do you think I need my own child to do it too?”

“I’m sorry.” She was. She was so deeply, deeply sorry for having hurt this woman. In ways that reached far beyond this conversation. “But I think that poor general surgeon deserves someone who knows how to do this.” How to be you. “I know only one way to be happy, and that is by being alone and focusing on my work. I will never ever get married. Not if every surgeon in the world is widowed without children and not one of them will move on unless I agree to marry him.” She met the abject disappointment in her mother’s beautiful, tired eyes. “Never, Mummy, ever.”

A sob escaped her mother, because sobs lived at her command. “What if Yash sees error of ways and takes you back?”

Naina had to laugh at that. Suddenly she saw how her mother had stayed with her father for forty years. It was this hope. This insatiable, entirely delusional ability to cheat herself into believing that the impossible could happen. That people could change how they saw things. That tomorrow was another day and all that crap.

She tried to enunciate the words without being rude, because Mummy had to understand this. “Yash is not going to do that. We never loved each other that way. We lied because my father wouldn’t let me go to Nepal unless I got married. And pretending to be with Yash was the only way to change his mind. Yash was just helping me get around Dr. Kohli’s ridiculous objections.”

This wasn’t the first time Naina was saying these words to her mother. She’d lost track of how many times she’d repeated them. Over and over and over. But there was that horrid hope that cut off her mother’s hearing, willfully, stubbornly. Hope that had made her mother unable to hear Naina or to see Naina her entire life.

Which is why Naina couldn’t say the other part. If you had ever stood up for me, I wouldn’t have had to turn to Yash.

The parts Naina could say, she would say a hundred times if she had to. “I don’t want to get married. To anyone. Not even if your Shivji himself came down from Mount Kailash. I am not made for marriage. I’m just not.” And she wasn’t going to apologize for it ever again.

With a shudder, her mother recoiled from her. “That is unnatural, beta. How you can say something so against nature, and society, and God? Your father is right. You are not normal.” She looked like the very sight of Naina made her queasy with the enormity of her own failings. “What did I do to deserve child so abnormal?”

With not a word more, she unlocked the door and left, but not before she had peeked out to make sure she wasn’t being watched.

Of all the questions her mother had asked today, Naina knew the answer to only that last one. She knew exactly what her mother had done to deserve a child so abnormal. She had created her, moment by moment, action by action, day by long day. It was a wonder that the question even needed to be asked.

Naina’s mother had been the captain of her college basketball team. A woman close to six feet tall is good for little else but sinking balls into baskets while barely seven people watch from the audience. Naina had heard this a thousand times from her grandmother. Words Naina’s father had repeated at least as many times over the years in one brilliant instance of gaslighting after another.

Needless to say, basketball was not something at the top of Dr. Kohli’s list of things that made this daughter more acceptable.

Naina had been one of the taller girls in sixth grade. After that she had mostly stopped growing and ended up favoring her father’s more average height genes. But until middle school she’d been tall enough that the basketball coach had asked her to come to tryouts.

She’d made the team with relative ease. But when she’d asked her father for the fifty dollars for team fees, he’d thrown one of his patented looks of utter disgust at her mother. The kind of look that had been responsible for teaching Naina the meaning of the word fear early in life. The kind of look that made her mother sob silently as she rolled rotis in the kitchen. The kind of look that had taught Naina exactly how useless tears were.

It was the look that had taught her she was not like the Raje children or like any of the other families in her parents’ friend group. It was the look that made it seem like the floors of their home were lined with eggshells, and they were laid out with such skill that those who didn’t live in their house never saw them.

Sometimes Naina saw the aunties study her for signs of something. Bruises? But her bruises were like the eggshells, invisible. Sometimes Naina thought people did see. But vision was like every other power: of no consequence unless you chose to use it.

When Naina had gone to her father with her request for the basketball fees, he’d asked her how her grades were. They’d been all As. She’d always been too afraid to let her grades slip.

“You have one job,” her father had once said to her mother. “To make sure your daughter does not end up stupid and uneducated like you. Luckily for you she has my genes.” Dr. Kohli always directed his disappointment in his daughter at his wife, almost as though he knew that hurting her mother was far more potent than directly hurting Naina.

Many years later, when Naina had told him she was not taking the MCATs or going to medical school, the expression on his face had brought her the kind of indescribable satisfaction she’d never until that day experienced. The man who had toyed with her helplessness for sport her whole life had looked entirely helpless. It had been a day she’d been waiting for since what she had labeled the Basketball Incident.

The night her father had refused to pay the team fees, her mother had found Naina sobbing silently in bed.

“Maybe it’s time for mother-daughter secret,” Mummy had said, and slipped an envelope into her backpack.

Never before had Naina ever felt hope like that. Searing and sharp enough to hurt.

“Really?” Her excitement had made her voice burst from her far too loudly.

“Shh!” Her mother’s smile had made her look like other mothers. “When you’re being brave you have to be very very afraid that no one find out.”

Naina had gone to bed smiling.

At her first practice, Mummy had shown up in a baby-pink tracksuit. One that made her look like one of the cool moms. Instead of the long braid hanging down her back, she had pinned her hair into a bun at her nape. When Naina had missed her shot, she’d come down from the bleachers and shown her how to make the perfect shot. Then she’d shown the other girls. She’d been firm and gentle, and magnificent. The girls on the team had followed her instructions like smitten fans. It was like having a whole different life.

After practice the coach had asked Mummy to be the team parent. Fear had flashed in Mummy’s eyes, turning her back into the mother Naina had grown up with. In that moment, Naina had realized that she would never be able to bear having her old mother back. Never.

Her mother had seen those thoughts in Naina’s eyes, because she’d agreed to become the team mom. Then she’d shown up for practice every day in her pink tracksuit with silver side stripes, and she’d worked the girls hard and made them laugh. The girls hadn’t noticed her thick accent or cared that she pinched their cheeks when they did well. The girls just looked at Naina like she was the luckiest girl in the world. She’d even stitched them matching scrunchies from the fabric she always brought home from India. Team colors of green and yellow.

On the eighth day of practice, Naina and her mother came home to find her father waiting.

“How was basketball practice, Knightlina?” There was not a trace of emotion in his voice.

“Go to your room, beta,” her mother said, a sob tearing her voice. “Now.” That last word was in her coach’s voice, and Naina knew that she would never hear that tone from her mother ever again.

The next morning, Naina came down to an empty kitchen and found a note on the island in her father’s doctor’s scrawl. “Disobedient girls go to school without breakfast.”

Naina didn’t care about breakfast. All she cared about was having her mother show up at practice. But, of course, she didn’t. Instead Naina was met by the coach’s sad eyes.

“Your mother was in an accident, Naina. You can be excused from practice today to go home early.”

J-Auntie, Yash’s housekeeper, had driven her home with Yash. Mina Auntie, Yash’s mom, always stepped in to help when Mummy felt badly. Yash had held her hand through the entire twenty-minute drive as tears streamed from Naina’s eyes. He’d known without her telling him that if he asked any questions she would die of shame.

“Do you think you can come help me with my chemistry project later?” he’d asked, his eyes so kind she’d felt like there was more to the world than what waited for her inside her house. “Ma will speak to your dad and J-Auntie will come get you.”

Naina had nodded yes and walked inside by herself. She had no idea what she expected but it hadn’t been her mother with her arm in a cast on a sling. One side of her face was swollen, and the skin squeezing her eye shut was dark purple.

Before that day Naina had been infuriated by her mother’s cowering, by her pandering, by her jumping to do his bidding even before her father spoke. Now she felt shame. Her mother had known something she hadn’t. Her mother had known and she’d made sure Naina never got to see this. Then Naina had put her in a position where the choice had been between something she wanted to show Naina and something she didn’t want her to see.

Naina, even at twelve, had known without a doubt that there was no right choice for her mother to make. That’s just what life was: a string of bad options to choose from.

God knew Naina had made her fair share of them. Sucking her best friend into a ten-year-long fake relationship was a pretty stellar example. Needing to give her father the finger at every available opportunity had been an irresistible and delicious motivator. She didn’t need a therapist to tell her that.

Now, here she was, sitting on a five-thousand-dollar Japanese commode that knew how to keep her butt warm even when she was using it as a chair with the top down. In a house her father had spent most of Naina’s life dreaming of her moving into as a daughter-in-law, because in his head that was how the world still worked. Your success lay in how well you married off your daughter. The fact that he’d never have that satisfaction made Naina positively light-headed.

At the ripe age of thirty-eight, Naina’s revenge was complete. After stringing her father along with the dream of a son-in-law who was going to be the governor of California, getting to yank that dream right from beneath his feet had been vastly more satisfying than Yash’s betrayal had been painful.

If the satisfaction of breaking her father’s heart was the full-bodied jolt of a lightning strike, the pain of Yash’s choosing someone else over her was a pinprick. One was the ocean, the other a raindrop.

So how could she be angry with Yash? And that girlfriend of his was just so hard to hate. Trying to hate India Dashwood was almost like peeing on a live wire. You’d burn yourself to a crisp and the darned thing wouldn’t even get wet.

Standing up from the warm Raje throne, Naina washed her hands and touched up her lipstick. Kissed by Frost. She’d bought the shade for the name alone. It could easily be the title of her memoir.

Truth was, being back in California, all grown up and flush with redemption, wasn’t a bad deal. The fact that her foundation had a gigantic endowment from a billionaire she had eating out of her hands wasn’t a bad deal at all.

As for Mummy and the Rajes, Naina knew exactly how to keep them all where they belonged, at a nice safe distance where they couldn’t hurt her.

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