The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple. As she enters the temple and slips off her shoes, she finds it amusing that she has made this trip wearing a sari. Such courage! Back then in ‘89, in Alabama and fresh from India, how terrified she was of appearing ‘foreign’ in public. She spent so much time observing women in the streets, at least the more modestly dressed ones, and making mental shopping lists. But where she is now, were she to be confronted by one of those gun-toting skinheads she used to be terrified of encountering, she would only feel gratitude for him if he were to relieve her of her existence. Just pull the trigger, dude. Hey, didn’t you hear me? Blow my fucking brains out. Please!
She redirects her consciousness to her breathing to help make peace with the present and to prepare herself for the friends she has come to meet. She pats her hair to ascertain its perfect order, smooths all imaginary wrinkles from her immaculately draped sari, and enters the inner sanctum of the temple. It’s a spacious furniture-less hall with a gleaming wood floor, illuminated by a grand chandelier. To the beats of a two-man ensemble of kartals and mridang, dancing in religious delirium, or at least trying to attain that, are four women of her ‘divorcee gang.’ They don’t call themselves by that name, of course, but isn’t that who they were, five lonely Indian women approaching fifty, living on the wrong side of short, bad marriages? Like Charu, they too had failed miserably at second chances, but unlike her, not for the lack of trying. And now, realizing where they had all arrived, they had resigned themselves to seeking Krishna and each other, having found a tiny place in the world where they could feign happiness.
“Gopi-jana-vallabha ..” a devotee sings. Krishna, the beloved of the cowherd girls. Charu knows how He could consummate relationships with all the cowherd girls in the village of Vrindavan in a single night, once they left their husbands and danced into the gloaming to merge with Him. What would He do with us – bitter, wasted shells of women? What fools are we to come to Him every Friday, to sway and whirl, round and round in big arthritic zeroes?
Stay calm. Charu watches the altar, whence Krishna and his consort, gorgeously covered in silk and gold, smile back at her. The love is real. A small tingle of bliss goes down her spine; the chant and beats make her spirit soar. She tucks the end of her sari, raises her arms, and starts swaying.
“Charu?”
Charu turns around. Holding her arms out for a big hug is Kavya. She sports a simple polyester kurti over an old pair of jeans. Her husband Vasu is standing behind her, chatting quietly with another devotee.
“Charu, look at you! Never seen you in a sari before. You are gorgeous,” she says.
“Oh, I thought I’d, you know, for a change,” Charu replies, flustered, but beaming. “How are you? You’re looking good. It’s been ages since I saw you.”
“Yeah! You should come visit us sometime.”
Should she? Only, she hasn’t been invited to do so for the last six years. Not after the incident where her son, Anup, then thirteen, sneaked out with Kavya’s little boy, grabbed Vasu’s reciprocating saw from the garage and cut down the elegant little Japanese maple gracing the front porch, and ran victory laps around it, hooting and screaming.
She exhales these thoughts away. She should be, actually is, grateful to Kavya for being a solid support over the years, off and on, albeit exclusively via WhatsApp.
“I will, most certainly!” she mutters, completing the awkward hug.
“You made it! Did you really walk all the way?”
“I did!”
“That was terrible what happened to you. I hope the police return your car, uh, truck soon.”
“They said it might be under impoundment for a month. Oh, Kavya, you don’t know how much my life sucks right now.”
“I know! But hey, try to look at the bright side. You would never have thought about the joy of having this thirty-minute walk on a nice summer evening if your truck hadn’t been impounded. I think Krishna is sending you a message. Sometimes He takes away one thing dear to you for a little while so you can see new paths which you otherwise wouldn’t have.”
Charu laughs. “That’s a good thought. But I’d rather have my truck back.”
She gestures to her gang, asking them to continue dancing without her. She walks over to a quiet corner of the hall with Kavya and they sit down cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the wall.
“What a surprise,” Charu says. “I thought you only came on Sundays, for the kirtan and feast.”
“Me too, you know, for a change,” Kavya chuckles. “Actually, after we chatted, I thought I should come and meet you. So, tell me, how’s Anup after this latest drama?”
“What can I say? It gets darker every day, Kavya. You know that. As I stood at the platform a little while back, waiting for the train, I kept staring at the gleaming tracks, and the electric third rail, waiting for the two headlights to emerge from the tunnel, and thinking …”
Enveloped by surging beats of castanets, the ecstatic chants of rapturous devotees, the wafting notes of incense and jasmine, and the warm embrace of a dear friend, she sobs quietly with abandon.
The table with the prasadam in the dining hall is being cleared, the last of the devotees are depositing their paper plates and napkins in the trash, the altar doors are shut, and the temple is quiet except for a few soft departing footsteps on the parquet floor.
“Hope the weather hasn’t cooled down,” Charu tells Kavya, glancing at a weak reflection of hers in the glass of a display case of scriptural books, to make sure all her mascara mess has been cleaned up, and her bindi is still centered on her forehead. “It’s a bit of a walk to the BART station.”
“No, don’t worry about that. Vineet can give you a ride back home. He lives in San Rafael. Richmond will be on his way.”
Only then does Charu observe the person who has been hanging around with Vasu. A dark-skinned man, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, sparse, but tidy hair, wearing a somewhat formal navy blazer, unbuttoned, over a light blue dress shirt barely outlining a not-too-bad-for-his-age small paunch. He has the most placid eyes, almost like sad puppy ones. He smiles delicately, nodding gently in assent.
“Oh, no, I will be fine. You don’t have to take the trouble,” Charu says, too startled to blush.
“No trouble at all,” Vineet says.
“Vineet, this is Charu. We go way back,” Kavya says. Turning to Kavya, she says, “Vineet works at CalTrans. My company contracts with them, so I know him through work. Brilliant engineer, great guy! As I said, your house will be on his way.”
Charu is touched, but annoyed at Kavya’s persistence.
In the periphery, Kavya’s voice is buzzing with restrained effervescence, “Vineet usually goes to the Vedanta center, and I said, you should also check out the Krishna temple. It is more down to earth, less intellectual, more joyous, …”
Oh, so Kavya didn’t just come to meet her? She had this plan, too?
In the long chat session with Kavya last night, Charu had lamented at length about the latest ‘incident.’ Anup had sneaked off with her Ford F-150 Raptor, the one true love in her life, the truck she had spent a year’s worth of paychecks on, the one entity in this world she trusted. Wretched Anup, his license still under suspension, had got the Raptor and himself involved in a highway cop chase, live on evening news, and she had to take a payday loan to bail him out. The last thing she could afford now was a lawyer for the fourth frigging time this year, and it sucked to take BART to work. And to meet up with the ‘divorcee gang,’ she had to BART to the temple as well, and so yeah, Kavya knows all this and her coming to the temple on Friday was by plan, and Vineet being ‘introduced to the temple’ was most definitely no frigging accident.
What the hell is Kavya thinking? An introduction at this time of her life?
“… and do you see these frescoes? The devotees themselves painted them when the temple was built in the seventies. Really skilled craftsmen, they were.” Kavya is still gushing. Vineet is standing tall, his back ramrod straight, listening attentively, but impassive.
Turning to Charu, Kavya asks, “Let’s go?” She holds Vasu’s hand as if to lead him away from the scene. Vineet nods his head by a smidgen.
As they shuffle out of the temple, Charu scans the courtyard. Her gang has left. They must have said their goodbyes at some point; she doesn’t remember. She examines Vineet again. He is slipping into his patent-leather shoes and he seems harmless. It is nice to see that he cares about his appearance, unlike most Indian men of his age whom she knows.
She’s tempted. She’ll take the ride, why not? Anyway, her feet hurt after all that dancing and the prospect of a thirty-minute walk doesn’t sound too great now. Maybe she doesn’t need those skinheads. This old balding man in a blazer could be the one to do the job right and end it all for her. With engineering precision, perhaps? Laid down in small uniform pieces under a remote California Highway, unnoticed by the world while she carries its ever shifting burden, would be nice. Unlike her brother, whose body was torn to pieces as he flung himself before a speeding train in front of throngs of onlookers in a Delhi train station, the word ‘useless’ written in marker all over his naked body, the name her father mostly used to address his two children by …
Vineet has been quiet for the whole ten minutes of the ride so far. His Prius is as neat and bare as a car freshly picked up at an airport Rent-a-Car, but it has 180,000 miles on the odometer. They have merged onto I-80 now and to their left, tendrils of fog are sneaking in from the Golden Gate under vermilion skies. The Bay has the dull sheen of anodized aluminum. Vineet clears his throat.
“Which exit should we take?”
After taking note of her answer, he follows through with simple ice-breaking questions. Where does she work? What does she do? How long has she known Kavya? Easy questions, thank goodness the traffic is moving fast, easy answers. No challenging ones like “what do you say we go for a coffee?” Questions she isn’t prepared for.
And then she hears him say, “You are quite a graceful dancer.”
A thousand bolts of lightning cruising through her veins, paralyzing her. Now they are a minute from the exit.
The last time a man said something nice to her was when … uh, no, that has never happened, really. Well, in her phone, she has secret recordings of her boss’s flirtatious overtures to her, recordings which she wants to take to HR but holding back in fear of losing her job, but they don’t count, do they? Since those endearments implied a vulgar quid pro quo, right? What do Vineet’s words imply?
“You can drop me here. Thanks.”
They are in front of the security gates of her condo complex.
“No, no, I’ll take you to your building. What’s the security code?”
She doesn’t have to reveal any codes to this stranger, not yet. Punching a few numbers on an app in her phone opens the sliding gates. She guides him to a visitor parking space next to her building.
She unfastens her seatbelt, gathers her purse, and opens the door without making eye contact with him — and she stays frozen in her seat for a long time, hand clutching the door handle. Having decided something, she pulls the door back, slamming it hard, and faces him.
“Kavya set this up, right? What did she tell you about me?”
Vineet’s grin is sheepish, but confident.
“Yes, she did. She said she wanted to introduce me to someone very nice.”
“Very Nice! Re-e-e-ally? Just that?”
“Yes. I think she’s been thinking about matching me up with someone ever since my wife passed away three years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Charu says, staring at the patterns of shadows cast by the Prius’s headlights on the jumbled mess scattered around the dumpsters in front of her.
“What for? Anyway, you were visibly upset today, so I guess the introduction was not executed as she might have planned. Hope you are feeling better now.”
Feeling better? Didn’t Kavya tell him anything?
“You mean Kavya didn’t tell you what a fucked up mess I am? She didn’t tell you I am a single mom who lives with an adult son with severe mental health and substance abuse issues, and now he is in trouble with the law? Have I said enough? You should flee the scene, right now. Don’t get involved with this stinking dumpster fire.”
Vineet is quiet for a bit. Then he says, “She may have hinted you are going through a difficult phase.”
“A difficult phase?” Charu is confused. She buries her head in her hands, stifles a giggle. Then she looks at him, eyes twinkling with amusement, and bursts out with a hearty laugh.
“Would you call the full forty-nine years of a person’s life a phase?” she asks, a hand over her mouth, rubbing her chin.
“Sorry,” Vineet says, powering off his car into silence. “I did not know.”
The night passes quietly for a few minutes. It is eerie quiet in the condo complex parking lot. Brilliant colors modulate in distant windows from the TVs behind them.
“Is your son getting the help he needs?” Vineet finally asks.
“Listen, Anup has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. When he takes his meds, he is manageable. Somewhat. When he does not, he is a terror. Hears voices; easily triggered by noise. Just the other day, he got into a big fight with a crew that was doing roof maintenance. The roofing company made a big deal out of it, and the HOA wants to kick us out of this place. I really gotta move to a single family home, with no HOA headaches. The market being what it is, I might have to liquidate my 401K to buy a house.”
She notices Vineet listening intently, absorbing every word, and that flusters her. She says, “Oh, why am I bitching about my life to you? I am pretty sure this is not what Kavya had in mind when she stuck us together.”
“Don’t worry about what she had in her mind. You have a lot in yours, and you should let it out.”
“We are all fucking nuts. It runs in the family.”
Vineet gently touches her shoulder.
The universe instantly dissolves into inky blackness except for the very visible hand on her shoulder, like a lone glowing scarab in a pitch-dark rainforest. She glares at it with contempt.
Since the deliverance, through marriage, from the clutches of her father’s violence, the only man who had ever touched her was the miserable alcoholic she was married off to, and he too had touched her a mere handful of times, and wasn’t she still paying the bills for that mishap? With no date specified for the last installment? Who is this guy in front of her and how did he dare?
She sees Vineet’s panicky recoil and forces a smile.
“Thanks,” she says.
He is bewildered, and she is dawdling over relaxing the smile she is holding. Fortunately, a car alarm goes off in the parking lot and both turn to watch the blinking lights on the triggered car, with relief. Vineet turns around to look at Charu again, shrugs his shoulders, and both laugh softly. Charu freezes and screams, “No!”
Vineet sees a scrawny young man running towards the beeping car, brandishing a baseball bat. With a volley of cuss words, he slams the bat on the hood of the car. Before he could bring it down for the second strike, a six-foot-three, two-hundred-fifty pound man tackles him from behind and pins him to the ground. The young man squeals in pain, heard over the incessant wail of the car alarm, as the baseball bat rattles on the pavement.
Charu runs to the scene of the fight and starts hammering the big guy’s back with her fists. “Don’t hurt him! Please!” she cries.
By the time Vineet has regained his composure, and hurried to the scene himself, the car alarm has been turned off, Charu and the two men are all standing up, the young man squirming to get out of the big guy’s hold.
“Lemme go, you moron,” the young man yells.
“Your son should be prosecuted for vandalism, damage of private property, California Penal Code 594,” the other man tells Charu. “Let me inform you as a former officer of peace …”
Anup interrupts him. “You were kicked out of the police force, so shut the fuck up, former fucking officer of peace. Oski vs. City of Richmond, U.S. District Court, N.D. California, 2012 …”
The ex-office twists Anup’s arm further, and he screams once again.
“Anyway, ma’m, this is gonna cost ya. See these dents?” the ex-officer says.
“I am an adult,” Anup says. “She won’t owe you nothing. And you ain’t getting nothing out of me, cuz I ain’t got nothing. Sucks for you if you don’t have decent insurance.”
Charu takes the ex-offer aside, after convincing him to let go of Anup. While she is pleading with him, she remembers Vineet, turns back and waves him a quick goodbye. Go, go, go away! Don’t come back.
She sees Vineet staying put, staring at the dent on the hood of the damaged car.
To her horror, Anup snatches his bat from the ground and swings it twice. He sneers at Vineet and barks, “Who the fuck are you?”
With relief, she sees Anup lowering his bat as Vineet hastens back to his car.
Charu steps out of the shower and walks into the bedroom. The high sun is streaming through the blinds of the window. The sari she wore last night is lying in a pile in the corner. She shakes her head dreamily.
She had woken up to her phone beeping. The text messages were from Vineet. He had nice and thoughtful things to say, even though they really meant nothing. Credit to him for being brave enough to reach out to her after the previous evening’s drama. In fact, he must have contacted Kavya to get her phone number. That was something!
She stands facing a full-length mirror, naked. She sees herself like she hasn’t in years. There are stretch marks, tags, and lines on her skin that are possibly new. At least something is new.
Her phone beeps again.
Vineet texts, “Do you know about 5150? For involuntary psychiatric commitment of individuals who are dangerous to themselves or others.”
She chuckles and texts back, “They won’t 5150 him unless he is shitting in his pants or wandering around talking to himself. That’s not my Anup. My son is very smart that way. He can run circles around any shrink who tries to talk to him. Besides, who knows where they will take him if they 5150 him. I have heard horror stories.”
There is a long pause where she is lying down in the bed, feeling the breeze of the ceiling fan and the satin of her sheets on her bare skin, staring at the phone screen.
He texts, “OK. Let me know if I can help you in any way. Actually, I know an excellent lawyer. He knows the system inside out. He was very helpful when I had to 5150 my wife.”
Charu drops the phone in panic. The wretched vandal! Sometimes He takes away one thing dear to you for a little while so you can see new paths which you otherwise wouldn’t have. She sees herself walking on a sunny beach with a nice, kind man. She sees Anup in an institution, zombified by meds. Is that what it would take? She quickly wraps the comforter around her body, which is freezing in fear.
Anup bangs on the door. “What the fuck, ma?” he yells. “We are out of Froot Loops.”
Vaidhy Mahalingam came to the USA from India for graduate school, completed his PhD in Naval Architecture, and had a 29-year career in the tech industry. In retirement, he spends his time cherishing moments with his family and putting into words the stories that have lived in his thoughts for years. His short stories have been featured in Arkana, Pembroke Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, MudRoom, The Temz Review, and The Write Launch.
