Chapter 17

Group chat—Louise Beaumont, Akila Osei, Khajee Suwan, Aadhya Banerjee, 11:43 PM

Louise: Aadhya. hi. I’m Louise. Roman gave us your number and asked us not to tell Kaalia she gave us your number. I interned at Bloom two years ago and Roman never once said my name in four months but apparently she remembered it well enough to give it to you, which tells you exactly what kind of situation we’re dealing with here.

Aadhya: I love her and she is absolutely like that yes. hello! I’ve been waiting for you to reach out. when do you arrive?

Akila: Fifteen days

Aadhya: FIFTEEN DAYS

Aadhya: do you have somewhere to stay? you should stay with me

Akila: We have an AirBNB booked…But if you’re offering…I’m sure we could get a refund

Aadhya: perfect! you’re staying with me.

Khajee: Kaalia knows we’re coming by the way. I told her on the phone. Louise and Akila are still upset about this.

Louise: we’re not upset we’re just noting that the element of surprise is now partially compromised

Akila: We’re a little upset

Aadhya: does she know Roman helped plan it

Louise: no

Aadhya: does she know I’m involved

Khajee: No

Aadhya: perfect. okay. I have guest rooms, I have a plan, and I have a spreadsheet

Akila: What spreadsheet? 

Aadhya: I’ll explain when you arrive. more importantly: things are happening here.

Louise: what kind of things

Aadhya: the kind where I have been sitting in the hallway outside a door at four in the morning with a blanket.

Akila: AADHYA.

Khajee: WHAT DOOR

Louise: I interned under Roman Alvarez for four months. I have been waiting for this woman to fall in love since 2022. YOU CANNOT JUST

Aadhya: okay okay. it started with a rainstorm. they were standing in the garden in the dark and my grandmother was yelling lunatics at them from the porch and they genuinely could not hear her.

Louise: couldn’t hear her or didn’t care

Aadhya: both I think

Khajee: I’m going to need you to start from the beginning

Akila: Same

Louise: same. I have tea.

Aadhya: it gets worse

Aadhya: I mean better

Aadhya: I mean both

***

Aadhya knocked on my door the next morning, waking me up from the blissful nothingness that sleep had become since Roman had told me, “We just can’t.” Through the wall, her cheerful voice grated me to consciousness. 

“Good morning, Kaalia!”

I rolled over, checked my phone, and groaned into my pillow. “Aadhya? Did Roman send you to wake me up?” 

“No. But I miss you, pyaari,” she sang.

“It’s only seven! Roman’s Google calendar plans don’t start till nine. Let me sleep.” 

Aadhya knocked again, persistently cheerful. “Rise and shine, beautiful Kaalia! Did you know in Sanskrit, Kaalia means rosebud? Or arts? You are the rosebud of my heart.”

“What does that even mean?” 

“It means your door doesn’t have a lock so I will be coming in. Are you decent?” 

“No,” I lied. “I’m stark naked.” 

The door opened a sliver, a stripe of golden morning light impaling the darkness of my bedroom. Aadhya came to sit down on the edge of my bed. 

“Are you sick?” she said, touching my forehead. “Why are you sleeping in today?” 

“Seven in the morning is not sleeping in.” I nestled deeper into my blankets and covered my face. “Haven’t you heard of boundaries and personal space? What if I actually had been naked?” 

“That’s an American thing. I much prefer having no shame and multitudes of nosiness.” 

“Sometimes shame is good,” I grumbled. “If you touch me again, I’m going to bite you.”

“Go ahead and bite.” A slight peek through my closed eyes revealed she had offered her arm up to me as sustenance. “As long as you tell me why you are in bed.” 

“I’m tired, okay?” 

“You don’t seem tired. You seem sad.” 

“And you could tell that through the wall, how?” 

“Maybe the gods tell me things they don’t tell you. Did you know your name also sometimes refers to Kali, goddess of death and destruction?”

“Okay, well, in that case, my namesake goddess just told me I should wreak death and destruction upon you in two minutes if you don’t let me sleep.” 

“I could fight you with one hand and both eyes closed.” She poked my arm. “No muscle.”

“Did you do this to Roman, too?” 

“Roman is already awake. Besides, she does have muscle. I don’t want to fight her.“

“I’m going to start lifting weights with Roman. Will that keep you from bothering me?” 

“Absolutely,” Aadhya crowed. She stood on the bed, ripped the blankets off me, and stared at me from above like a sleep paralysis demon. For a moment, she looked just like Malini, who had terrorized me like this for years. Was this some kind of unspoken older sister ritual? “In fact, it might solve two of my problems. The second being that something is going on between you two but neither of you wants to do anything about it.” 

“That’s not true! She was the one who pulled away!” 

Aadhya started dancing in circles on the bed. “So you do want her.” 

I sat up and curled my knees into my chest. “Yes, I want her. The question is if she wants me.” 

“Of course she does.” 

“Well, she’s not acting like it.” 

“Don’t worry.” Aadhya put her hands on my shoulders. “Neither of you is leaving Kerala until you’re in love with each other. No, I don’t want to hear a word out of your mouth. It’s going to happen. I want the best for you and I think that’s Roman. Simple math.” 

“Why do you want the best for me? We just met like two days ago.”

Aadhya grinned and leaned her forehead on mine. Unlike yesterday with Roman, the touch felt warm and familial. Like a sister. Like Malini. “You Americans are all so individualistic. I don’t know. Because desi girls should look out for each other. Because you remind me of myself. You don’t talk to your parents very much either, do you?” 

“I haven’t spoken to them in almost ten years. How did you—” 

“The way you looked at me when I said I don’t speak to mine. I’m not a fool, Kaalia. There’s a look about people like you and me. It’s . . . I can’t describe it. Just a way of self-assurance, maybe.” She grinned. “Or maybe my gods whispered in my ear and told me it was so.” 

“Enough with your divine resources,” I said. “Or, better yet, tell them to start whispering in Roman’s ear.”

Her eyes gleamed mysteriously. She would make for a very wise, proverb-spewing old woman. I had no doubt.

But, softening, she said, “The real reason I live with my grandmother is that my mother doesn’t like me. Sounds stupid, no? But it’s true. Once, when she caught a sickness and thought she would die, she told me she had never loved me. Not the way she knew she was supposed to. I was the youngest child and she didn’t have the energy. Her supply of love had just . . . run out.” 

All I could think to say was the obvious: “Love isn’t finite.”

“No. It’s not. Her symptoms sounded like severe postpartum depression. But, even knowing that, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive her. I’d always sensed it, you know—that she didn’t like me the way she liked my siblings. She didn’t ask about my day or care who I dated or get mad at me when I slacked off on studying. She just . . .” A shrug. “Didn’t care. But you know who did?”

“Priya?”

“Priya. Where my mother had a deficit of love, Priya had more than enough. She is my best friend as much as she is my grandmother. She means everything to me.” 

“What does this have to do with me and Roman?” 

“Everything.” Aadhya’s eyes were bright. “Absolutely everything. You will see when you read her poetry. There is a lover in there, someone who I am certain is not my grandfather. The memory of that lover haunts even her most recent poetry.” 

“But what—” 

“After talking to her last night, when she told me you two could stay, I think I figured something out. I think—I think she sees herself in you and Roman. I think you remind her of what she lost. So I root for you not only because I think you two would make a lovely couple, and you are now family to me, but for Priya’s sake.” 

“We’re not—I can’t—that’s too much pressure.” 

Aadhya shook her head, once more channelling an ominous, all-knowing seer. “I don’t need my grandmother or even my gods to tell me that what you have with Roman is real. The rest is just a bonus.”

I FaceTimed my Sri Lankan grandparents. After a few rings, an extremely zoomed-in view of Dadi peering over her glasses appeared. “Kaalia, is that you?” she asked in Tamil. “Kaalia? I can’t see you.” 

“Hold your phone away from your face, Dadi. Where’s Dada?” 

“I’m right here.” Dada grabbed the phone. “We missed you, kanna. You haven’t called us in so long. Do we mean nothing to you? What if you had died? Who would tell us?” 

This startled a laugh out of me. “Easy on the guilt tripping. I called you two days ago at the airport. The entire time customs were clearing me. With my boss next to me.” 

“When are you coming to visit? You are right next door. This is the perfect opportunity.” 

The idea had already occurred to me. But I didn’t want to ask for time off work only two months after I had started—what if it jeopardized my job? “This isn’t a vacation, Dada. It’s a work trip. I can’t just up and abandon my boss. But it won’t be long before I can save up and come visit.”

“What about right when the trip is done? Will you have saved enough then?” 

I barely had time to roll my eyes.

“We are getting old, you know,” Dadi said, snatching the phone back. “It’s been years. I talked to Jacinta this morning. She said you haven’t called her in three days. Tell me the truth. Do you not love your grandparents anymore?” 

Jacinta, my Puerto Rican grandmother, was almost as good at guilt-tripping. But nobody quite matched up to Kannagi Vellalar. She came from a proud line of Punjabis who had migrated to Sri Lanka during the British Colonial Era. She’d refused to marry until thirty, when she met my grandfather at the dance studio she owned. He came in to pick up his older sister’s daughter from bhangra class. And forgot about her completely as he laid eyes on my grandmother.

“She was dancing,” Dada loved to tell me. “Her hair was down to her waist, all curly. Her face was so concentrated but her body moved like she commanded the air. She defied gravity. And my heart. I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t marry until I finished school. That was the only promise I’ve broken in my life. And I couldn’t be happier I did.” 

“Oh, shut up, you old sap,” Dadi said. Later, she told me that if she had never met him, she would have lived the rest of her life unmarried and child-free. “He was worth it. I knew I loved him not from a moment, but from all the times he showed up for me. He came to every last one of my dances and brought me flowers every single time. Still does.” She shook her head. “I have to keep him in line, though. Can’t let a man get too full of himself.” 

“You know I love my grandparents more than anything,” I told them. It was true. They had been there for me when my own parents hadn’t. Held me while I sobbed, screamed, gutturally, more viscerally than I ever had in my life, in the weeks after Malini’s death.

“Good,” Dadi said. “Well, tell me. What’s going on? How is the food? Surely it’s not better than Sri Lankan food.” 

“The food is good. Everything is good. It’s just . . . there’s a woman.” 

“A woman? Not like the last one, I hope.” 

I thought about my ex and winced. “No. Nothing like her. This one is . . . she’s perfect. But I can’t have her. It would never work.” 

“Why on earth not? Who is she?” 

I had made a mistake. I couldn’t tell them the woman in question was my boss. “Nobody. Never mind. It’s not important.” 

Dadi gasped. “Did you meet her in Kerala? I always told you those white women were not good for you. Bring a nice Indian woman home. Finally. Omal!” It seemed Dada had wandered off somewhere. “Omal, get back here! Kaalia is going to bring home a nice Indian woman! Did you hear? You haven’t had an Indian girlfriend since—when was that—has it been six years?” 

“No, I didn’t hear.” It sounded like Dada was eating something. “Since when? Who is she? What’s her name? I’ll do research.” 

“Dada, you don’t even know how to use the internet.”

“The internet! I don’t need that. I’ll talk to people. Someone will know someone who knows her. Tell me her name.” 

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not telling you her name. It’s not like that. We’re not together.” 

“Well, get together!” Dadi interjected. “Didn’t you hear me say we are getting old? I want grandchildren.” 

The fact that I was a lesbian didn’t seem to have any effect on their desire for grandchildren. They didn’t care how it happened—adoption or IVF or stork with a swaddled baby between its feet. They seemed to assume that if I got married, the grandchildren would naturally follow. 

In shock, after hearing me on the phone with them, Louise once asked me how my grandparents felt about my queerness. “Aren’t they homophobic? I thought they might be strict or religious. Old people usually are.”

I shrugged. “Old people have critical thinking skills. My grandparents certainly do, at least.” 

Excuses like “They’re too old to change their ways” or “That’s just how it was in their time” always fell flat to me.

I never told my family I was queer. I hadn’t felt the need to. I’d merely told them about my girlfriends over the years. If they ever had been homophobic, their love for me had done the work. They welcomed me and anyone I had ever dated with open arms. I once brought a girlfriend to Puerto Rico with me for Christmas. Maybe some of my aunts and uncles and cousins had been distant and narrow-eyed, but not my grandparents. Never them. 

Though I’d never brought anyone home to Sri Lanka—I hadn’t visited since high school, almost ten years ago—Dadi and Dada were just as supportive. I ranted to them about girl troubles and they took me seriously. Perhaps far too seriously (“I’m going to swim the Indian Ocean and strangle that cheating bitch”—Dadi was deathly terrified of water and had never learned to swim). 

I knew how lucky I was. I’d heard stories of people getting thrown out of their homes. Louise’s father hadn’t spoken to her for five years. Her grandparents had practically blacklisted her. Khajee’s family pretended she had never told them she was queer and kept asking when she’d get a boyfriend, as if by asking enough times they could make it true. For me to have two sets of grandparents, equally supportive, abundantly loving, felt almost greedy at that point. But maybe the universe had decided to give more to me than it had taken away. My grandparents were still healing me from what my parents had done to my sister.

And while I didn’t think I’d ever get over her death, having my grandparents on my side, always, no matter what, made everything infinitely better. 

After sidestepping several interrogation-like questions about Roman, I told Dadi and Dada I loved them and hung up (with a promise to call them in another two days with an update). Then I called Lita and Pito and updated them, too, before they could call and complain I never told them anything anymore. They also demanded the identity of my mysterious suitor. But there was absolutely no way I could tell anyone the woman in question was Roman Alvarez, not just my boss but the CEO of Bloom Press. Who had rejected me just last night.

We just can’t. 

By the time I left my room, more than an hour had passed. I still had time before Roman’s rigorous Google calendar schedule put me to work. One of the maids pointed me outside for breakfast. 

“She’s waiting for you.”

I hoped that meant Priya or Aadhya. Anyone but Roman. I didn’t think I could face her before our work schedule. Especially in a non-professional context. 

Warm morning sun and birdsong greeted me as I stepped onto the porch. Roman sat alone, on one of two chairs with a small circular table between them. Food had been laid out, along with two cups of frothy, milky-brown liquid. One nearly empty.

“Chai?” Roman asked.

I nodded and sat down. She must have been waiting for a while—the chai was cold. We both looked towards the wet field of grass and the palm trees. The muddy, sandy rivulets of earth and the dewy orange flowers that bloomed around them. Maybe, if I focused hard enough on the one bright yellow flower in the distance, Kerala’s favoured kanikonna, I could glean the answer to coping nonchalantly with my boss’s rejection. 

“We need to talk about last night,” Roman said.

My head snapped in her direction. Was this it? Was she going to fire me? Had I gone too far? Was I too obvious? 

I braced for another rejection. For her to fire me. In a flash, I decided I’d book a flight to Sri Lanka and show up at Dadi and Dada’s door. They’d take me in. I’d give up my home in New York and live, permanently, on the edge of the sea. Maybe I’d become a fisherwoman. I’d skewer trout from a river and eat it raw. Scholarly articles and academic work would become a long-forgotten dream. I’d never read again. I’d dramatically burn all my books in a big bonfire (after printing them out, because I hadn’t brought them with me). I would take in all the stray cats who came to me. I’d speak in poetry and meows. They would label me as the village’s designated crazy lady. I could live with that.

But instead of firing me, Roman said, “I wanted to kiss you. I still want to. But I’m terrified.” 

The vision evaporated. 

“What?” 

“I’ve been trying to pretend. I thought it would go away. The attraction. But it hasn’t. Kaalia, I . . .”

My heart started pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. I leaned back and forced myself to draw long, even breaths. I could feel myself on the verge of hyperventilation. I had started hallucinating. My boss couldn’t possibly have told me she wanted to kiss me. The woman whose Wikipedia profile was bookmarked on my laptop. I still hadn’t deleted the 244 times I searched up her name (in the last two months only) from my Google history.

“But you said we couldn’t,” I shot back. “What changed since last night?” 

Roman lowered her eyes. She had already done her makeup—her long, dark lashes brushed against her smooth, dewy cheekbones. A light smattering of freckles dusted her nose bridge. I had spent months fantasizing about her. Feverishly watching YouTube clips of her interviews. Saving book-nerd-made Tiktok-thirst-trap-edits of her. The moment I saw her for the first time at the carnival, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And she wanted to kiss me back.

“I didn’t—I don’t want to ruin this,” she said. “You. Us. Our work. But I also can’t keep pretending I don’t feel like this.” 

“So don’t pretend.” I needed to shut my mouth. “We can just . . . see.” 

“See?” 

Be quiet, be quiet. My mouth kept moving against my will. I had been possessed by evil spirits. Or vengeful, impatient ghosts. “We can take it slow. And see. What happens in Kerala stays in Kerala.” 

She nodded and smiled slightly, ruefully. “What happens in Kerala stays in Kerala,” she repeated.

I clinked my mug of chai against hers, a makeshift cheers, and we drank.

***

Are you guys excited or what?

Love,
Meera