Two months after Raj and I started dating, although I’d heard a lot about you already from Raj, I met you for the first time when we picked you up to go out to dinner together. In the car, Raj introduced you, the brilliant founder of a Bangalore startup and his “chaddi buddy” (diaper buddy), who’d rescued Raj from a gambling habit, bringing his life and career back on track. At the restaurant, I listened mesmerized while Raj looked on with pride, as you recounted your own hard-won rise from oppressive beginnings. We toasted to friendship, love, and dreams, optimistic about possibilities stretching in front of us like an unblocked road. Later, teetering on my toes to reach up and hug you goodbye, I was a little tipsy when I said, “Thanks for your part in making Raj the man I love today,” but I meant every word of it.
It would’ve been impossible for Raj and me to tie the knot without your help. Your efforts at convincing Raj’s casteist father to accept Raj and my relationship were nothing short of heroic. His father was more than a little swayed to give in, considering that like me, he too, was grateful for your friendship with Raj. When my family, insulted by his family’s prejudices against them, blamed me for causing them distress, I requested you to vouch for Raj. You stepped into the shoes of an older brother and smoothed things over with your mellow voice and confidence. “This was harder than dealing with my startup clients,” you told Raj and me with a wink when family members from both sides dropped their raised hackles low enough to provide reluctant blessings for our marriage.
Soon after our wedding, Raj’s employer offered him a transfer to Seattle, providing us an escape from family tensions even though I had to resign from my IT job. Driving us to the airport, you were your usual jokey self, but when I caught sight of your eyes reflected in the rearview mirror, the sadness in them punched a hole in my gut. At the airport, my heart trembled at the way the tearful hug between you and Raj stretched on. “I’m going to miss you, too,” I whispered.
In the USA, a few minutes into our weekly video call with you, I’d leave the room — a third wheel purposefully rolling away — to let you both talk, mostly about your business and Raj’s work, with some sports and political news thrown in. “Typical male friendship talk,” I’d snicker to myself if I happened to overhear snippets of your conversations, knowing that although I wasn’t completely right, I wasn’t fully wrong either.
When my job search felt hopeless, you and Raj pointed out your resilience to setbacks until your venture took off. After every rejection, I’d turn to Raj and you to wring out my despair before starting a new application. When a small tech company finally hired me, after Raj, you were the one I called. “I recognize a fellow fighter. You won’t rest until you get what you want,” you said with a thrill in your voice that made my heart dance.
On our first visit back to India two years later, although Raj stood by me, my father-in-law’s continued antagonism, and my family’s finger-wagging “we told you so” wore me down. In the evenings, I sought respite from the stifling days at home in the long drives you took us on to hole-in-the-wall eateries where you’d make me laugh with silly puns. I’d return home to bed alone but in better spirits. Raj would follow much later at two in the early morning, hungry for me, pumped up on drinks and conversations with you on career aspirations and your business journey, all of which I’d much later realize shaped how things turned out.
At the airport, you turned to us abruptly. “Don’t leave,” you said with a grim face but then broke into a forced laugh. Through my tear-filled vision, your lanky figure waved from afar, or was it a gesture of trying to reel us back in?
A year later, both Raj and I got promoted at work, and we bought a small house in Seattle. We couldn’t have been happier to host you as the first guest in our home when you traveled from India for a technical conference. We showed you around, and as you sank into the living room sofa cushions, you looked up at us, beaming. “I sense a lot of love in this place.” Raj squeezed my hand and flashed me a smile that took me straight to the early days of our courtship. In my mind, I prayed that you’d find someone special too.
That week, we accompanied you on an unforgettable road trip to San Francisco for your conference. At the hotels we stopped at on the way and back, Raj stayed up with you at night, helping with your prototypes and business plans. On those sunlit mornings, I drove us down scenic freeways, smiling at how both of you slumbered like babies despite the music in the car, wishing we could keep going on together like this forever.
Soon, it was time for you to leave for India, but the gloom surrounding your departure held a kernel of joy. “I’ll be back for a client meeting in three months. We’re going to have an epic time again,” you said, parting with a promise of a new outing, another road to travel down together.
A few weeks before you arrived on your next visit, Raj and I had news for you. On the video call, your wide eyes and dropped jaw followed by a whoop made us laugh harder than when we’d found out we were expecting.
After you arrived and wrapped up your work with the business client, we took a trip to the Grand Canyon and posed for what would be our final photo together from the trip — you, towering in the middle with your arms around our shoulders, while behind us, sunset light spilled into the jagged chasm with its snaking river carving a watery road between it.
That night, you shocked me with plans to have Raj lead a crucial team in your company and move back to India. It would be either now or never — timing was everything. Raj was torn, but you shot down all my reasons for opposition: we wouldn’t be able to manage the demands of a startup and a baby, we’d have to face family troubles there, I loved my job here, and I sure as heck wasn’t ready to give up our American Dream.
“Stop being selfish,” we screamed at each other while Raj pleaded with us to discuss everything calmly after our trip until he lost it, too, and we all went to bed angry.
The drive back to the airport from the Grand Canyon the next day, lacking sleep, conversation, or music, seemed to go on forever until we stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere in the prickly desert heat. Raj went to the restroom, and you filled up gas, while I slumped in the backseat, my aching head leaning against the car door, one hand on the bulge of my stomach. In the side-view mirror reflecting a washed-out sky above an empty highway behind us, your tired eyes met my own, and we both looked away. Perhaps you were as afraid as I was, of finding within our gazes the answer to the question that was surely eating away at everyone’s mind: “Would we ever travel down the same road together again?”
*****
Deepti Nalavade Mahule is a writer of color living with her husband and children in California, where she develops software at her day job, feeds books to her two young children at home and writes short fiction. Her website, which has links to her selected published work, is: ‘https://deeptiwriting.wordpress.com‘. A piece in *82 Review was nominated for Best of the Net 2024 and another was shortlisted in Flash Fiction Magazine’s contest in July 2022.
