Everything Happens for a Reason

Everything Happens for a Reason

KAVITA DASWANI

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Kavita Daswani 2004

Kavita Daswani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007160631

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007387892

Version: 2016-07-21

DEDICATION

To the family I was blessed to be born into,

and the family I was privileged to marry.

EPIGRAPH

All my gratitude to my agent, Jodie Rhodes, who gave me something every novelist needs: a gem of an idea. And to my editor, Susan Watt, and all the wonderful people at HarperCollins, for their enduring faith in me. Every author should be this lucky.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

1

No woman in my family has ever had a job.

No other female in my entire extended clan, as far back as I know, has ever leafed through ‘wanted’ ads and shuffled nervously in a seat while a stranger asked her about ‘job history’. What would she say? That her primary profession was to serve her father and brothers in early life, and her husband and sons later?

So I was completely taken aback when my mother-in-law prodded my stomach with a wooden spoon, complained that I was yet to make her a grandmother, and then insisted that I may as well be of some use and join the workforce.

‘America is expensive,’ she said, poking the utensil with such vigour that it was a rather good thing there wasn’t a baby in there. ‘This is not India. In this country everybody works.’

It didn’t matter that I was a newlywed, in the first flush of marriage, still unpacking the silk saris and silver goblets that had been part of my small but respectable trousseau. It didn’t matter that I was still getting acclimatized – not just to living in a strange country, with a man I didn’t really know, but also with his parents and his younger sister. And nor did it matter that, as far as I saw it, my most important role in this family was as housekeeper, cook and general errand-runner, duties that came along with my new position as wife and daughter-in-law.

All this, I had expected.

But I had never thought that somebody – least of all a ferocious guardian of tradition like my mother-in-law – would be telling me to go out and look for a job.

In generations of women in my family, I was going to be the first.

It should have made me feel like a trailblazer, a pioneer, a valiant example of a woman’s right to be independent.

Instead, the idea terrified me.

Whether by design or circumstance, my parents had never shown my sisters and me much of the world. To them, there was enough to see and do in India without us having to explore what lay beyond the borders of my homeland. It is the same limited vision, I suppose, that I soon realized many Americans have of their own country.

So getting off that plane two months ago at the Tom Bradley Terminal of Los Angeles International Airport, on a muggy day, was a shock in itself. I had stifled the instinct to wail all the way on the flight over, longing to be with my family again although I had just said goodbye to them. I had drifted in and out of restless sleep as watery images of my wedding, just days earlier, seeped through my subconscious. I was trapped in a middle seat on a packed aeroplane, my husband using my armrest on one side, and a large, be-turbaned Sikh doing the same on the other. I hadn’t even landed, yet already felt overwhelmed, squashed and small.

When we finally made it out to the airport, I was astonished by not just the huge numbers of people, but their different types. Television in India doesn’t show you the variety of humanity, their complexions and clothes and cultures so removed from my own: the black woman with her tight trousers and inch-long purple nails, checking my immigration papers; the waiflike Chinese man with the small, serious spectacles, waiting for his grey-haired mother to make her way through customs; the fat white fellow bellowing at his children to get out of the way so he could heave his luggage onto a wayward trolley.

The airport already was a world I had never seen, a microcosm of a universe that I knew I would always be apart from, never a part of.

A week after our Delhi wedding, Sanjay and I had arrived in Los Angeles, his home for the past two decades. For the following two weeks, it was going to be just him and me. My in-laws and Sanjay’s sister, Malini, had remained in India, travelling and visiting relatives, and presumably looking for a husband for my sister-in-law, who had just turned twenty.

‘Welcome.’ Sanjay shut the front door behind us. ‘This is your new home,’ he announced, like the fait accompli it was.

The house was located in a quiet street in Northridge, in an area popularly called ‘the Valley’, which sounds quaint and rural, but in fact is vast and sprawling, and stretches well across the state. Sanjay dropped the bags on the carpet, and moved towards the couch as I stood and looked around.

At least it was a nice home, and for this I could be grateful. One of my friends from Delhi had had an arranged marriage with a man in Chicago, and had arrived there with all the blushing and naïve enthusiasm of a new bride to discover that he was living in a garage.

But here there was plenty of space: a large sitting room, which looked as if it was never used, filled with bulky furniture, marble-topped tables, and a shiny crystal chandelier hanging overhead. A separate dining room boasted a long table, high-backed wooden chairs and a glass-covered cabinet holding glimmering little figurines. In India, this house would be considered a palace, and I very fortunate to live in it.

‘Come, I’ll show you my bedroom – oh, er, sorry, our bedroom,’ Sanjay offered, leading me in by the hand.

It was the room of a young man who had yet to completely shed the remnants of his boyhood: a mess of clothes and newspapers lay strewn across the floor, a big-screen television sat in one corner and remote controls for various other pieces of entertainment equipment were scattered on the bedside table.

‘Great, isn’t it?’ Sanjay grinned.

‘It’s quite messy,’ I said to him, looking around.

‘Hah, why would I clean up after myself when my wife, my new biwi, will be here to do it for me?’ he said, smiling.

‘I am not your maid!’ I shouted, realizing as I was doing so that I had never raised my voice at him before. I knew I should revert to the meek and mild Hindu wife that I had been for the past week, but I was exhausted. ‘Don’t think that I am some kind of a village bride because I am from India and you are living in America,’ I said testily.

Sanjay jumped back, startled, fear in his face.

‘I was just joking,’ he said. ‘Why so mad?’

I walked into the den and pushed a stack of newspapers off the couch so they tumbled to the floor. Sitting down, I began to weep. My ears were still sealed from our descent, my lips chapped from the cold aeroplane air. I was wondering what my family was doing that very second back home: if my father had yet had his morning chai, if my mother was scolding the dhobi for ruining yet another of her outfits, if Radha was combing her long hair, and Roma tending to the household, and Ria reclining against her bed, her face in a book. I knew that, barring any unforeseen calamity or cause for celebration, I could anticipate only an annual return to India. Other people live forty minutes or three hours away from their parents. Mine were a whole year away.

Sanjay approached me cautiously, and sat on the couch.

‘Why are you crying, Priya? I was just joking.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘These tears aren’t for that. I miss my family. I’m supposed to see your parents as mine, but I don’t. This doesn’t feel like my home. What if this is a mistake, and we can’t get out of it? Then what?’ I turned my back to him, and continued to cry.

I felt a murmur of a hand on my back, a gentle stroking of my hair. I could hear him breathing, steadily, tentatively, as if he were not sure if or where to touch me next.

‘Roh-na,’ he said gently, asking me again not to cry. ‘We are both new to this. We will make it.’

Looking back, I believe that that was the precise second that my married life began.

Until the start of my new life in America, I had never experienced jet lag. It was, to me, a concept as foreign as seasickness and being hung over, all of which only sophisticated people ever talked about. My first collision with jet lag made me believe that there is something to be said for being confined to the same time zone for all one’s life. I couldn’t wait for evening to come so I could finally sleep, but what seemed like an eternal night ended abruptly, hours before dawn. It was when I felt most vulnerable, most alone, still subtly shocked at the sudden transformation of my life.

But when Sanjay and I were awake and alert, he said that showing me around helped him to see old things as new again, that he loved the look on my face as I marvelled at the cut-price offers on batteries and baby lotion at the 99-Cents shop, and the warehouse stores – which were the size of Bihar, I thought – where people bought twelve-packs of pizza. American supermarkets were the stuff of legend in India, sightseeing venues in themselves. To me, it was like wandering through a giant lit-up refrigerator. Apple sauce, which doesn’t even exist in Delhi, here took up an entire lane. Even half these bottles wouldn’t fit into Jagdish’s, the dried goods store near my old home where the servants buy sacks of rice and dals and packets of stiff Indian-made chewing gum.

On my first visit to our neighbourhood supermarket, the day after we arrived in America, I shuffled down the aisle, pulling my sweater tightly around me as I approached the frozen foods section, with its big, frosty bins in the centre. I reached in and pulled out boxes of ice cream and pies, chicken and gravy, peas and potatoes and corn, incredulous that all that food could come out of a small square of cardboard and that there was no chopping or dicing involved.

‘Discounts, special offers, extra savings,’ said the cashier as I paid. ‘Just fill in this form, and join our club.’ I smiled with pride as I signed the application, impatient to call my parents and tell them that I was, so soon into my life here, a member of something.

At home that evening, Sanjay showed me how to make tofu burgers and fruit smoothies. He spent three hours filling my head with so many DVD-CD-TV-VCR-laptop-desktop instructions that, by the end, I was dizzy. He showed me where all the light switches were and how to open the garage door and what to do if the alarm system went off. He demonstrated the function of the waste-disposal system, and seemed baffled that I had never seen one before.

‘Don’t you have garbage disposals in India?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s called the street.’

But I remained perplexed, scared to touch anything for fear that it would cause the house to collapse or the kitchen to explode. I asked Sanjay where the torches were, and he had no idea what I was talking about until I described them.

‘In America, they are called flashlights,’ he said. ‘What do you need one for?’

‘For the blackouts.’

‘That’s what happens when you have too much to drink. Here, we call them power outages. And they almost never happen. You keep forgetting, you are not in India any more,’ he said to me gently, laughing.

When Sanjay went off to work the following day, I began my role as wife in earnest. I started to unpack my personal belongings, all the accumulations and acquisitions of almost a quarter-century of living, pared down to two suitcases. Sanjay had cleared out a small section of his wardrobe, which was barely enough for the contents of my trousseau. It had stretched my parents, but they had given me six each of evening ensembles, saris, and daytime outfits – the wealthiest Delhi brides got upwards of twenty each, while the poor were lucky if they received two. I somehow had to find space for all this in a sliver of cupboard no wider than my own person. When Sanjay had showed me proudly how much room he had made for me, I had asked him meekly if perhaps he could afford a little more, but he showed me his dozens of knitted sweaters and suits and bulky winter jackets, and told me that, for now, I would have to make do.

By the time my in-laws returned, it was up to me to see to it that the house sparkled like marble in the moonlight. As is the custom for a bride, my trousseau consisted almost entirely of new clothes, but I had thankfully thought to pack two old outfits for days such as these, ‘heavy cleaning days’. I shrugged into a pale green salwar kameez, a traditional tunic top and flared trousers, which was flecked with old corn oil and turmeric stains that the dhobi wasn’t able to remove.

Comfortably clad, I moved sofas and cleaned underneath. I placed a ladder in front of the wall unit, and wiped on top. I scrubbed toilets and vacuumed carpets and threw out old newspapers. I even mopped down the dusty floors in the garage, astonished all the while that with two women living here, the house had been allowed to get this dirty. It was almost as if they were waiting for me to arrive.

The last room left to clean was that of my sister-in-law, Malini. At the sagri ceremony before the wedding, when the family of the groom celebrates and welcomes the arrival of a bride, she had garlanded me and placed a kiss on my cheek, and seemed almost to mean it. I remembered looking down and catching a glint of something on her stomach. For a moment, I thought that perhaps a chunk of glitter had fallen from my hair onto her belly, but upon closer inspection saw that Malini had a ring pierced through her navel. As she caught me staring, my eyes agog, she covered herself with her sari, and quickly moved away.

So I was sure that Malini would hate knowing that I had been in her room, and I had to confess that it was more my curiosity than any slovenliness on her part that drove me in here. I looked around and wondered what it must have been like to have grown up here, in America. The room was dark, with thick yellow curtains blocking out the sunlight. A slim bed rested against a wall, with a matching dressing table and bedside cabinet next to it. Furry teddy bears and monkeys spilled over the light orange flowered eiderdown, and a stack of Teen People magazines lay neatly on a side table. On the dressing table were photos in frames – Malini with Sanjay or with her parents, another as a lone Indian girl in a group of Americans. I didn’t remember her being this pretty. Her hair was cut short and smooth in a modern style, her teeth white and shiny, no doubt using one of the three thousand types of toothpaste you can find in America. In all the pictures, she was wearing jeans and a short shirt – pink in one, white in another, floral in one after that. I knew I shouldn’t, but I felt compelled to open her wardrobe and look through it: there were jeans and cute tops and small jackets, the kind of smart clothes that I had seen people in the supermarket and on the streets wear.

Later in the week, as I took out another load of trash, the postman was stuffing mail into the box outside. I had seen him from the window, but this was the first time I was standing so close to him.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he asked. ‘How many days a week do you work here?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I didn’t know that the Sohnis had hired a maid. Good idea – they seem so busy. How often do you come?’

‘I’m not the maid,’ I replied quietly. ‘I’m the wife.’

2

Within days of arriving here, I knew what Sanjay meant when he talked about America and its ‘bumper-sticker mentality’.

‘See,’ he said, pointing out certain vehicles on the streets as we made our way to the DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I could apply for a driver’s licence. ‘Here, everybody wants to tell everyone everything. Even the cars have something to say.’ In twenty minutes, I counted fifteen such displays of personal information brandished on the back bumpers of vehicles – someone boasting of a child’s academic achievements at school, their pride at being an American, or, alternatively, exhorting everyone to ‘Give Peace a Chance’. People lumbered by alone in huge cars that blocked roads and took up one-and-a-half parking spaces. They ate and drank and watched TV and talked on tiny phones as they drove what looked like streamlined tanks, their interiors larger than a family of four in India would live in.

People in this country were not shy, and did not expect others to mind their own business. I would queue at the past office, clutching close to my chest envelopes and packets addressed to my family in Delhi, and by the time I was at the counter, I could have penned a thesis on the person in front of me. A typical ‘Hey, how are you?’ thrown my way would launch a mostly one-sided conversation revealing their last divorce and an argument with their doctor about how to treat a hernia, all while I stood and nodded politely.

At the gym, which Sanjay insisted I join, telling me that everyone in America exercised, modesty was a non-issue. In the changing room, as I slipped into my workout clothes behind the safety of a toilet cubicle, women stood naked as they slathered their legs with moisturizer, or combed the wetness out of their hair, talking with each other about cardio, carbs and calories. They had no body hair except where they should have it, unlike myself and all the other women I grew up with, who went to salons where ‘full body waxing’ was a standard request. At my jazzercise class, they wore skin-tight shorts and bra tops, while I huffed and puffed in track pants and a thigh-length T-shirt, hiding in the back next to the dark blue mats. Afterwards, I refused even to take a shower there, noticing that the curtain barely covered the width of the shower stand

After Sanjay left for the office every day, to the bag importing business he ran with his father, and once the day’s housework was done, I had made a habit of enjoying the solitude of my life. Television became my best friend, as I marvelled at the cleverness of Claire Huxtable and the frothy antics of Lucy Ricardo and the dry sophistication of those Designing Women. This was, I was sure, how the real America lived, with charming coincidences and laughs every second, fascinating people and clever situations round every corner.

Unlike everyone on television, I wasn’t ecstatically happy as a newlywed. There was no giggling, romantic haze. But I had never expected that, so my state of modest contentment and growing adjustment seemed perfectly acceptable. My grandmother used to tell my sisters and me that constant, uninterrupted joy was a myth, and fundamentally bad luck.

‘The more you laugh, the more you will eventually cry,’ she used to say. ‘Tragedy always visits people who are too happy.’

It was better, she taught us, that dull, fractious, and even miserable moments are folded into a life of moderate satisfaction.

My grandmother was never wrong.

The rain pelted down thick and hard from the skies like silvery shards of glass. Sanjay had phoned to say he would be working late with a customer, leaving me alone with tea and magazines. On the cover of one was a picture of Jennifer Aniston – I already knew the names of everyone who appeared on those glossy television shows. The actress was staring sexily into the camera, a tiny pair of jeans encasing her slender hips. I knew that she was married to Brad Pitt, who is famous even in India.

I should have been at the gym, but, today anyway, was tired of obeying the fitness instructors as they shouted their orders: ‘Activate those inner thighs! Contract those abs! Tighten! Tighten! Recover!’ I didn’t want to work my ‘obliques’, whose location in my body escaped me, despite two years of human biology class in school.

Instead, I chose to spend my afternoon reclining on the moss-green leather sofa in the den. Having finished the last of my chai, I helped myself to yet another oatmeal raisin cookie from the platter on the low glass table.

There was only the sound of the shower outside, splashing fiercely on the pavement, its defiance keeping me company. Soon, I would have to get dinner started, even if consuming all that sugar had sapped me of energy. Perhaps I would just reheat last night’s leftover grilled aubergine, and throw in some boiled potatoes and cumin to lend a different flavour. A tired Hindu bride was nothing if not inventive.

This would be my last day of indulgence. Tomorrow, my in-laws would be coming home, and their demands, I knew, would easily supersede my own. No leftovers would sully my father-in-law’s table, and my mother-in-law would not allow me to put my feet up for a second. Malini, I was sure, would have something to say about everything.

So today, I could take my final afternoon nap.

So soundly did I sleep, that I didn’t even hear Sanjay come in. When I opened my eyes, groggily and unsure, a trace of saliva had dribbled out of my mouth and onto the arm-roll of the couch, where I had been resting my head. I was still embarrassed for Sanjay to see me like this; I locked the bathroom door whenever I was inside, baffled by the practice I’d seen on those cable television shows of so many couples who did everything in front of one another.