Growing up, I had always longed to go to the Hotel Sun ’n’ Sand. Even the name mesmerized me. It made me think of tall frosted glasses of fresh coconut juice, tiny pieces of pulp floating inside the otherwise clear liquid, served by uniformed waiters to long-legged foreigners who sat by the pool. I would imagine platters of bhel puri-tiny twigs made from chickpea flour tossed with spiced rice crispies, boiled potatoes, and coriander and heaped with a dollop of tart tamarind sauce-that would lie untouched on buffet tables as rich people perused the other offerings. I used to close my eyes as we drove by in the back of an auto-rickshaw, my nana and I, on our way to somewhere far less grand and much more mundane, and I would wish to simply sit in the air-conditioned lobby for a minute or so, to stare at the wealthy locals who came there to dine and drink and dance. At its prime, on the sun-swept shores of Juhu, there was nothing else like it.
With the palm trees outside my balcony, now encased in the pale darkness of early night, I could have been anywhere in the world. It felt odd to be at home, in my birth-place, and not be in Ram Mahal. There was something illicit about it. As much as I had longed to be here all those times I had driven by with Nana as a little girl, it saddened me tremendously to have to be here now.
But I slowly unpacked, ordered up some room service, said my prayers, and waited for the sun to rise.
With all the traveling and time-zone hopping I had done in the past year, I still wasn’t used to jet lag. When I finally awoke, it was past eleven, and my head still felt heavy. For a second, I couldn’t remember where I was, nestled under this strange comforter and atop the starched white sheets, searching for the pillow that had gotten dislodged during the night and was now by my feet. I sat up, looked around, felt the silence of the room, and started to cry.
According to my rough calculations, it was late in Los Angeles. But I knew that Shazia would be up. She had told me that she rarely went to bed before one a.m., sitting up to watch TiVo’d episodes of The Ellen Show and Jon Stew-art before finally falling asleep.
She answered immediately.
“I saw this weird number on my caller ID,” she said, her voice excited. “Where you calling from?”
“Home. India home, I mean,” I said.
“You went back there? Holy crap! What’s that like?!”
I told her what had happened the night before, and she let out a low, disapproving sigh.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew they would act like heathens. They don’t deserve you.”
“Please don’t speak about them that way,” I said quietly. “They are my family. They told me what would happen if I disobeyed them, and I went ahead and did it anyway. I deserve what has happened to me.”
“Wow, they’ve really done a number on you, haven’t they?” I heard Shazia turn down the volume on her television, the laughing and applause in the background slowly fading. “If there is one thing I’ve learnt since I left home, left the culture I grew up with, is that our parents don’t have the right to tell us how to be. They should simply be grateful that we’ve turned out OK, with no drug addictions or criminal records or illegitimate children running around. Here, in America, a man wouldn’t think of disowning his granddaughter because she wanted to pursue a modeling career. Hell, I don’t think he’d care. He may even be proud of her, would boast to all his friends on the block. There’s one thing you need to get through your head, Tanaya. You shouldn’t be groveling for their forgiveness. They should be groveling for yours.”
I heard a knock on the door. Breakfast had arrived, and I used that as an excuse to hurriedly hang up.
The clerk at reception who had checked me in the night before had recognized me. He had done a double take, looking up again from his computer screen, a grimace of satisfaction spreading across his face when I told him my name.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, as I was stepping out of the hotel at one thirty in the afternoon, several photographers were lined up outside the building, cameras in hand aimed at me like weapons. A young woman probably my age, standing on the sidelines, a multicolored cloth bag slung over her shoulders, came racing toward me as soon as I emerged, a small tape recorder tucked into her hand.
“Miss Shah! Miss Shah!” she yelled out, trying to catch me as a I hailed a cab. “I’m with the Times of India, lifestyle section. Miss, what brings you back home after all this time? Are you working on any deals with local companies? And why are you staying here instead of at your family home?”
I had one leg in the taxi, but stopped. I remembered Felicia’s advice about always being pleasant to the press, whether I was in a rush, or in a bad mood, or even distrustful of them. “The least you can do is smile and wave,” she had said. “But never be rude, and never walk away without giving them something.”
“I’m here for a family visit, that’s all,” I said, forcing a smile. I waved at the rest of the cameras, smiled again, thanked them for their interest, and folded the rest of myself into the small black taxi.
In the bright light of day, Ram Mahal looked imposing. Now, under the glare of the sun, I could see its former glory hidden beneath layers of dirty rain stains and pigeon droppings.
I was standing on the other side of the building, scared to be directly in front of the balcony, certain that my mother would emerge there at some point that early afternoon, to dry her hair on one of the rough pink towels that she always used.
Lurking in the back, shuffling from one foot to the other, I felt like a criminal. I hadn’t really planned what I was going to do or say, only that I would try and get in again, past the fury of my mother, relying on the assistance of the cook.
Just then, I heard a car honk behind me. I turned around and saw a taxi pull up right next to me. The door opened, and out stepped my aunt Gaura, suitcase in her hand.
“Tanaya, you’re here!” she said, her face beaming, her arms wrapping themselves around me before I had a chance to move. I sunk into her embrace, our two silver-streaked heads bowed together.
“When did you arrive?” she asked, releasing me. “Why are you standing here? I’ve come to see Nana; he’s very sick, you know.”
“I know.” I began crying again. “I tried to see him yesterday, right after I flew in, but Mummy wouldn’t even let me through the door. They really hate me. So I went to a hotel.”
“What nonsense!” she said, now frowning. “I never understood why they treated you so badly. You are one of our own. They might not have agreed with your choices, but you are a grown woman now.”
I stepped back and looked at my aunt with gratitude and surprise. I realized then that I had never really known her, despite our closeness when I was an infant. I had never taken the trouble to visit her in Pakistan or even to reply to the letters she would write to me, when she would always enclose a leaflet of shiny stickers or a dried flower she had made in an arts and crafts class. I had set her correspondence aside, reading and then ignoring it, seeing it as nothing more than a formality between an aunt and her niece.
“You have always been like a daughter to me, Tanaya,” she said then, smoothing down my hair. “I should have called you, and I am so sorry I did not. I think I knew that you would always come home and make things right. In the meantime, Nana and your mother refused to even let your name come up. It was very sad,” she said, shaking her head. “But, my girl, you are home now. We will do what we can to bring us all together again.”
She didn’t bother knocking on the blue painted door. It was ajar, as it always was this time of day, so the cook would hear the cries of the vegetable seller as he made his way down the corridor, a large circular basket of tomatoes and parsley and okra atop his head. Aunt Gaura simply pushed the door open, announced her presence, clutched my hand, and walked in.
“What is she doing here?” my mother asked, emerging from the bedroom we once shared, her black hair wet and stringy against the polyester gown she always wore at home, a sprinkling of fragrant white talcum powder visible around her neck. The cook emerged from the kitchen, smiling at me.
“She was waiting outside, bechari,” Aunt Gaura said, referring to me as the “poor girl” that I felt like I was. “How are you treating her like this? Has she harmed anyone? Yet even so, she has come to ask for forgiveness.”
“Ma, I just want to see Nana,” I said, my voice cracking, looking toward his closed bedroom door.
“He doesn’t want to see you,” she spat out. “He’s in poor shape. Seeing you will kill him.”
“That’s not true,” Aunt Gaura said. “He’s been asking for her, and you know it. Don’t lie. Come,” she said to me, taking me by the hand again like I was a child and this was my first day of kindergarten. “Let’s go see your nana.” She set down her suitcase, walked toward his room, and pushed the door open.
Had I not known he was still alive, I would have thought I was looking at a corpse. He was half his weight, shrunken and bony beneath a white cotton sheet. His eyes were closed, his skin pale, a gray stubble roughening his cheeks and chin. His silvery hair, lighter and thinner than I remembered it, stood straight up on his head, disheveled and uncombed. Lying there, he reminded me of a broken fluorescent tube light, all brittle and skinny and shades of gray, the monochrome broken up only by a black thread worn as a necklace, a small silver talisman hanging off it. On the table next to the bed was a copy of the Koran and his reading glasses, dusty with nonuse. Bottles of pills and syrups cluttered another table, a large glass jug of water next to them. The room smelled of urine and antiseptic, like the hospital where my grandmother had died years earlier.
I stood there as if glued to the floor.
“He’s sleeping,” Aunt Gaura whispered to me. “He needs his rest. At least you have seen him. Come, let’s have some tea and return later.”
When I was a child, my most profound fear was losing my grandfather.
Every time a plane crashed somewhere in the world-even if it was a charter jet in the interiors of Russia, something I rationally knew my nana would have nothing to do with and was nowhere near-I couldn’t sleep until he returned safely to our home, his peaked cap nestled on his bedside table. Each time I put on the television and the news came on, I was anxious until the sari-clad newsreader, her bindi as big and bright as the moon in the center of her forehead, moved on to sports, knowing then that there had been no plane crashes in the world that day.
And even after Nana had retired and he was always there, in the next room, the pages of his newspaper rustling in the mid-afternoon breeze, I don’t think I ever stopped worrying about him. Every time his temperature went up a few degrees, or he complained of a headache, or perhaps was afflicted by a bout of indigestion after a particularly rich meal, my thoughts would always run to the extreme: It was cancer, a brain tumor, he was about to have a stroke.
It only occurred to me much later, that the dread with which I held my nana when I thought I was about to lose him was the same dread with which I encased him when he was well and sound and happy. I feared him; I feared for him. There was, I realized, nothing about our relationship that wasn’t based on fear.
“You have to know how much he loves you,” Aunt Gaura said. We had returned to my hotel, and were seated at the coffeeshop, cups of masala chai in front of us. “You have to know that no matter what you did, there wasn’t a day when he didn’t think of you. At the same time as he was cursing you, he prayed for you.” She sighed and readjusted her headscarf. “I will never understand that man. I will go to my grave, and he to his, without ever truly knowing him.”
She paused for a moment and glanced around the coffeeshop, her eyes falling on the smartly dressed people at adjacent tables. Even in her simple light orange cotton salwar kameez she was a stunning woman, heads turning toward us when we walked in, us looking more like sisters than aunt and niece.
“You have done well,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “When I was your age, I was married with a child on the way. I would never have been able to afford even a cup of tea here, much less to stay here on my own. You have broken every rule of our family. But somehow I cannot judge you. I cannot be like the others. I fed you from my own breast when you were just days old, and I cannot kill you off in my mind like the rest have done.”
I started to cry softly, deeply moved by my aunt. She reached over and put her hand on my head, atop the Shah streak, and smiled at me softly.
“If I really think about it, I guess I can understand why Nana is the way he is,” I said. “He is from another generation, after all. He is an old-timer in every sense,” I said, now laughing. “But to see the fury on my mother’s face-it shocked me. I had never seen such a thing. I had never seen much of anything on her face.” I stirred my tea, watching as the swirls of milk dissolved into the caramel-colored liquid.
“It pained me to see how she was with you,” my aunt said, her expression now sad. “I couldn’t understand how a mother couldn’t love her child.”
I thought back, for a second, to Zoe, my first roommate in Paris, the short-haired American girl who had given birth to a daughter that she had never wanted either. Perhaps it wasn’t so uncommon after all.
“When your mother saw how beautiful you were becoming, she almost turned against you,” my aunt continued. “She wanted you to be like her. She began to see you as a stranger. And when she realized how much your grandfather loved you, and how close you were to him, she put herself in the background of your life, concerning herself with whether the vegetable basket was full and that your school fees were paid on time. But she never knew how to really be a mother to you, did she?” my aunt asked, looking at me with such tenderness that I wanted to cry.
Aunt Gaura’s words were shocking to me, even though she was telling me something I think I always knew. I pushed my chair back as if I needed to stand up and go somewhere, when I really had nowhere else to go.
“Maasi, tell me something,” I asked. “My friend Nilu told me that Nana had the accident on his way to the post office, that he was going to mail something to me. What was it? Do you know?”
Aunt Gaura scooped another spoonful of sugar into her tea. She then lifted up her head and stared straight at me.
“It was a letter from your father.”