Late Bloomers: A Novel

by Deepa Varadarajan, Deepa Samuel, Shahjehan Khan, Mehr Dudeja

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

An Indian American family is turned upside down when the parents split up thirty-six years into their arranged marriage​ in this witty, big-hearted debut.

“Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, Late Bloomers is a charming story about starting over, stumbling, and finding yourself at any age.”—Jennifer Close, author of Marrying the Ketchups

"I have a soft spot for underdogs. And late bloomers. You’ve told me a lot of things about yourself, so let me tell you something about me."

After thirty-six years of a dutiful but unhappy arranged marriage, recently divorced Suresh and Lata Raman find themselves starting new paths in life. Suresh is trying to navigate the world of online dating on a website that caters to Indians and is striking out at every turn—until he meets a mysterious, devastatingly attractive younger woman who seems to be smitten with him. Lata is enjoying her newfound independence, but she's caught off guard when a professor in his early sixties starts to flirt with her.  

Meanwhile, Suresh and Lata's daughter, Priya, thinks her father's online pursuits are distasteful even as she embarks upon a clandestine affair of her own. And their son, Nikesh, pretends at a seemingly perfect marriage with his law-firm colleague and their young son, but hides the truth of what his relationship really entails. Over the course of three weeks in August, the whole family will uncover one another's secrets, confront the limits of love and loyalty, and explore life's second chances. 

Charming, funny, and moving, Late Bloomers introduces a delightful new voice in fiction with the story of four individuals trying to understand how to be happy in their own lives—and as a family.

 

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Release date: May 2, 2023

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 353

Sample

1

Suresh

 

All these internet women lie, I tell you. All of them. Funny that the anonymity draws everyone in. But it’s also what keeps you

from trusting a word.

Sometimes the lies are about the fundamentals: previous marriages, whether they have kids, what line of work they’re in. Oh, and age. Age is a big one. The last date I went on was with a woman whose profile said forty-one. Impossible! There wasn’t a chance that Ms. Mittal (formerly Mrs. Mittal) was a day under fifty.

My son, Nikesh, laughed at me when I told him about that one. “But, Dad,” he said, “you are fifty-nine.” Well that may be, but I didn’t go around grossly exaggerating for sport. I was more reasonable about it all. On my profile, I described myself as “Suresh Raman, a healthy and active, five-foot-ten, fifty-five-year-old divorced man of Indian origin.”

All right, so fifty-five was four years ago, the height was a rough estimate, and “active” was only an accurate description if it included toenail-clipping while watching CNN in my carpeted den. But these were reasonable deviations from the truth. RDTs, I called them. So long as you kept it reasonable, where was the harm, really?

It was early evening now. I parked my SUV in front of a small, white brick house. I had to quash my misgivings—for the next few hours, at least. I reminded myself: This was a first date, a new woman, a clean slate.

I sniffed under my arms. Good, still powdery fresh. I’d left my house in Clayborn, Texas, two hours ago, but I blasted the AC the entire drive to Austin. Whatever my doubts about lying internet women, I’d never want a date to see unsightly wet patches blooming across my shirt.

I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. Even at this hour, the late-August sun beamed harsh and unforgiving. My eyebrows looked like two furry worms wriggling around a pockmarked forehead. I licked my forefinger and tried pasting down the errant hairs. But it was useless. Hairs kept popping up in every direction. Oh well. Perhaps the restaurant would be dim and Mallika wouldn’t notice the unruly duo dancing above my eyelids.

Mallika. We’d been emailing each other for two weeks. Now, this one did not seem like a liar. I couldn’t be sure, of course, as I’d yet to see her in the flesh. At the moment, she was still three parts fantasy to one part reality—a concoction of my hazy, lonely brain. Though given the mendacious tendencies of these internet women, it was hard to maintain any fantasy for long.

Mind you, this wasn’t just abstract cynicism talking. It came from months of experience. And in my months of experience, I’d learned that even when these internet women weren’t lying about important things, like age, then they were lying about ridiculous things—things I wouldn’t have even cared about had they told me the truth. But when I discovered they’d lied about it, I had to assume it meant something.

Last month, for example, I went out with this divorced real estate agent from Baton Rouge named Usha. She lied about all kinds of trivialities. Favorite Food: Italian.

Trusting this preference in her profile, I suggested going to the Olive Garden on our first date. It had been a tiring six-hour drive from Clayborn to Baton Rouge, but I wanted to show her that I was sensitive to this detail about her—that I cared enough to remember. Upon hearing my suggestion, she shrugged and explained that Italian wasn’t really her favorite. She wanted a steak. Feeling rebuked, I asked her why she didn’t just say “steak” on her profile. She replied that she was afraid of scaring the divorced and widowed Hindu vegetarian men from answering.

Now, I wasn’t an unsympathetic man. Or a vegetarian. And while I questioned the sanity of anyone who enjoyed masticating thick slabs of beef

, I understood that a forty-two-year-old divorcée with two teenage kids needed to expand her pool of possibilities in any way she could. Only that wasn’t all.

Over the course of that evening, which began and ended at Matthew’s Steakhouse, I discovered that in the dozen emails and phone conversations leading up to our fateful meeting, she’d lied about her car (a Honda not a Volvo), her glasses prescription for nearsightedness (minus four, not minus two), her tennis elbow (she didn’t even own a racket), and her subscription to National Geographic (ha!). None of those things in isolation would have caused me to do more than raise a puzzled eyebrow. But read together, the insignificance of those lies added up to one significant thing: She was a liar.

There had been countless such evenings. During the long (and sometimes multistate) drives back home, when disappointment sat in the back of my throat like undigested food, I’d say to myself: “Enough, old man, enough of this silly business.” But at such moments, I too was a liar. For within minutes of pulling into my garage, I’d head straight for the buzzing glow of my computer. I’d check for new responses, answer the promising ones, and update my profile—the three-step ritual that had become second nature to me, like the windshield-to-rearview-mirror-to-speedometer visual reflex of driving.

Nikesh called me “hooked.” I’d describe my dating mishaps to him, and he’d say, “If they’re so bad, then stop; or just stay local, at least.”

Local? What was the point of trying to meet an Indian woman in Clayborn? They were all friends with my ex-wife, Lata, who’d left me, and would therefore be biased against me. And a non-Indian woman? That was too foreign to contemplate. But I didn’t say any of this to my son. Instead, I’d meekly reply, “You’re right—this is the last one. No more.” But he wouldn’t believe me. He’d chuckle and chide, “You’re hooked, Dad.”

He was right. I had yet to go on a good date, but I wasn’t ready to stop.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a curtain flutter in the front window of Mallika’s house, a ripple of black hair against the glass. Was Mallika peeking out? Was she wondering why I hadn’t gotten out of the car yet, hadn’t crossed the dried expanse of lawn to her front door?

I thumbed my brows one last time. I ran my palms over my grayed—but mostly full—head of hair. I unbuckled my seatbelt, leaned forward and then fell back again, my back hitting the leather with a loud smac

k. Why couldn’t I sit here for just a little while longer? Just a few more moments to savor the Mallika of my hopeful imaginings and delay the inevitable disappointment.

For a second, I considered pulling out my phone and dialing Nikesh. I could ask him to tell me a joke and lighten my spirits. But then, maybe I shouldn’t bother him at this hour. Six o’clock in Texas meant it was seven for Nikesh in New York. He would likely be busy—either at work late, or giving Alok a bath, or coaxing him into bed.

It startled me sometimes to think that Nikesh, my youngest, was no longer so young—no longer that spindle-legged teenager with an unruly mop of hair, but a thirty-year-old man with an eleven-month-old son of his own, working long hours at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. My grandson, Alok, was by all accounts a sweet-tempered boy like his father. Thankfully, he’d inherited none of the Nordic sternness of his mother, Denise, a woman that neither I nor Lata had even met before Nikesh married her—correction, before he eloped with her, telling us about it only after the fact. No doubt Lata was still licking her wounds from the shock of their elopement. For my part, though, I was relieved not to publicly perform the role of delighted father of the groom. At least Nikesh had spared me the indignity of reciting some fraudulent speech about the joys of marriage in a Hilton ballroom, while our friends (Lata’s friends, mostly) squirmed and Lata glowered behind me.

In truth, I couldn’t find much fault with Nikesh. Oh sure, he might tease me now and then for being hooked on internet dating. But at least he was indulgent and kind to his aging, addled, romantic-idealist father.

My eldest, Priya, on the other hand, hurled harsher words my way: post–midlife crisis; act your age; ridiculous; embarrassment.

I tried not to take it too personally. It had been almost a year since Lata moved out, but the wound was still raw for my daughter, a thirty-five-year-old history professor in Austin. Oh sure, give her macro-level changes—civil wars, fallen empires, mass famine, and pestilence—those were her bread and butter, she couldn’t get enough. But throw some micro-level change her way, and she turned on you.

Though in all fairness, I couldn’t entirely blame Priya for being skeptical. If someone had asked me a year ago, I would have said the very concept of internet dating was ridiculous. Just a fast-food model of human connection. If nothing else, it was a sport left to the young. I couldn’t say for sure when my scorn started to subside. But if I had to place a date on it, I’d say it was about a month after the divorce papers were finalized—maybe the thirtieth evening in a row that I found myself glued to the evening news, a Crate & Barrel plate (chipped in the corner, so Lata left it behind when she moved to her own apartment) balanced on my lap, dragging a butter knife across the unyielding skin of a microwavable bean-and

-cheese burrito. (It was a bitter month for my digestive system; even now, my gastroenterologist refers to it as “that unfortunate burrito period.”)

That particular night, after loading the dishwasher with the handful of kitchen items Lata left behind—the aforementioned chipped plate, a mug that came free with a purchase of gas at the neighborhood Exxon station, a fork, an oversized spoon useful for scooping out generous amounts of salsa and sour cream—I readied myself for bed. I climbed onto the mattress, pulled the comforter to my chin and switched on the bedroom television, hoping to catch the Leno monologue before falling asleep. But just as the comedian began his routine, the oddest thing happened: I started to weep.

It was the first time I’d cried like that since Lata left me. But for some reason, at that particular moment, it struck me how much I missed her. Even during the worst phases of our thirty-six years of married life, when silences were thicker than the cement foundation underlying the two-story house we’d designed together, when our hands had long forgotten what the touch of a bare stomach or the soft inside of a thigh felt like, we could still take solace in one consistent form of togetherness. Late at night, every night, before nodding off on opposite sides of a king-sized bed, we’d watch the Leno monologue together. (Leno by default, because Lata could never stand Letterman’s self-congratulatory laughter while delivering a joke.) And for those precious few minutes, we could be co

nsoled by the intermingling sounds of our laughter. By the feeling that we weren’t completely alone, together. It might not seem like a romantic or even an interesting marital ritual. But it was ours. Now, it too was gone.

The following day, I found myself typing three unlikely words into Google: “Indian internet dating.” What I discovered was a cornucopia of sites promising romantic fulfillment: Shaadi.com; DesiDating.com; IndianSingles.com. The sites seemed endless. Was there one for every flavor of desolation? Lonely-Middle-Aged-Ukrainian.com? Aching-for-Contact-Papua-New-Guinean.com?

In the end, though, some combination of loneliness and curiosity got the better of me. And late one night, unable to sleep, I logged on to a site. Within days, I’d read dozens of profiles, completed one of my very own, and made a discovery I hardly dared hope for: women wanted me. And not just one or two, but scores of them. Shalinis. Malinis. Sri Devis. Purvis. Forty- and fifty-somethings from all over the country responding to my ad. Good-looking too, some of them, in their pictures (though, of course, this was all before I became aware of the lying phenomenon). My initial reaction was to assume something was wrong with them. What else would propel them to go to such lengths—to meet me of all people? Not that I was a particularly insecure man. I knew I was okay—maybe not a prize bull but not a smelly boar either. But their responses—so obsequious, so eager to make contact. You sound like a fascinating man. Your profile really caught my attention. Your answers were so funny, so clever.

A few weeks of covetous attention and, as my children would say, it started going to my head. I began seeing myself less and less as a portly, indecisive man, who rarely knew the right things to say, who bungled his first marriage, who loved his children but felt his absentmindedness often bordered on neglect.

Instead, I’d entered a new world—one that enabled me to have what, left alone with dust and memories in a four-bedroom house, I secretly desired most: an escape from myself.

---

—

“Mallika?”

A petite woman, seemingly younger than the forty-three she claimed to be, answered the door. She had honey-colored skin, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a slender, curvaceous figure encased in a form-fitting orange dress with embroidery on the bodice.

“Suresh?” Her voice was soft, with the lilting undercurrent of an accent.

For the next few seconds, we stared confusedly at each other. Her confusion was easily explained. It was likely due to the fact that I’d become a stuttering fool, incapable of forming a single declarative sentence: Mallika? Yes, uh…I’m Suresh? Who could blame her for looking so uncertain in front of a strange man who seemed painfully unaware of his own name. But the excuse for my befuddled state was even easier to explain: She was stunning.

In all my months as an internet dater, I’d grown accustomed to a certain disillusioning phenomenon: the face-to-face letdown. Weeks of buildup over phone and email culminating in disappointment at first sight. But standing on Mallika’s doorstep, I felt none of that customary dissatisfaction, that feeling of air seeping out of my stomach like a needle-pricked balloon. I watched the dusky sunlight bounce against her silky hair, and a dizzying fume of elation wafted over me, almost as sweet as her rose-scented perfume.

“Shall we have Thai food for dinner?” I asked as soon as the fuzziness left my head.

“My favorite—you remembered. There’s a place called Bangkok Garden close by.”

Relief flooded through me. So far, so good: no sign of mendacity.

Holding the passenger door open for her, I noticed the smoothness of her right leg, the glistening sheen of her peach toenails, the peek of cleavage as she climbed into the car. I shut the door and walked briskly to the other side. Gulping discreetly, I scolded myself for behaving like a skin-starved schoolboy and started the car.

Soon enough, we were nestled in a corner booth at Bangkok Garden. A young waitress placed two sweating bottles of Singha and several steaming plates between us. I sipped my beer with relief, hoping it would loosen my tongue and counteract the near-paralyzing effect of her beauty. Perhaps sensing my nervousness, Mallika began to talk. She spoke exuberantly and at length: about her fondness for snow, her inexplicable fear of rabbits, her embarrassing habits like watching Ron Popeil infomercials late into the night and listening to country music stations while mopping her kitchen floor. She described her job, working as an administrative assistant for an elderly ophthalmologist who was going blind himself. She asked me about my job, and feeling more relaxed now, I told her how I’d worked as a systems analyst at Central Texas State University for almost thirty years, before taking an early retirement last year.

“You must have liked it—to have stayed there for so long?” She spooned pad thai onto my plate first and then onto her own—a gesture of generosity that touched me.

I chewed a forkful of noodles and considered her question, deciding to answer it honestly. “Well, it was a good job. Reliable, paid decently, and I rarely had to work weekends. But I can’t say I liked it. It was inertia that kept me there, really. And a lack of imagination about what else to do. And, of course, I had a wife and two children to provide for. My wife, Lata—I mean, ex-wife—didn’t work. She works now—part-time at a library or some such thing. But she didn’t work back then, so I was the sole breadwinner.”

Mallika nodded, forking a broccoli floret. “I can’t say that I much like working for an octogenarian ophthalmologist either. But it does pay the bills, which is important, now that I’m…you know, on my own.”

I spooned two mounds of rice and green curry onto my plate, and then silently scolded myself for not offering some to Mallika first. Maybe she didn’t notice. “So how long have you and your husband been divorced?” I asked, trying to distract her from my selfish food-serving practices.

“No, we didn’t…I mean, I’m not divorced. I’m a…a widow.”

I paused, spoon hovering in midair. Widowed? This young? In our emails, this had not

come up. I’d assumed she was divorced, like me. Mallika’s cheeks flushed, and I struggled to mask my surprise.

“I-I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. “How did your husband, I mean, your ex-husband—wait, are they still called husbands, if they die? Forgive me—that was insensitive. I don’t know the proper terminology. But how did he…die?” I whispered the word “die,” and then felt ridiculous for whispering.

Mallika picked at her Singha label. “Well, he died a few years ago. His name was Ajay. I’m sorry, but do you mind if we talk about something else?” She stared at her shiny nails scratching bits of paper off the glass. When she finally looked up, her expression was hard to decipher. I saw pain in her eyes, but was there something else in there too? Guilt or shame, maybe? Her face flushed again and she looked away.

I shook my head, trying to free it from irrational thoughts. I was being ridiculous. She didn’t want to talk about her dead husband on a first date. It made perfect sense. There was nothing fishy about it. Those other internet women were just making me paranoid.

“No, of course we don’t have to talk about it. I’m sorry.” I busied myself by scooping rice onto my plate.

“Don’t be. It’s just that tonight has been really nice. Let’s not spoil it with unhappy history. There will be time for that later.” She smiled at me during the last sentence, and I tried not to gawk at her face—those radiant pink cheeks, those curling lashes, the delicate curvature of her cheekbones.

Later. There would be a later.

My stomach began to churn. For years, I suffered from too much acidity in my stomach. I lived with a near-constant, low-level discomfort in my gut, easily exacerbated by spicy pickles, public speaking, employment evaluations, fights with Lata, and too much Taco Bell. But this—this was an entirely different topsy-turvy feeling in my abdomen.

Was it hope? Hope that there was actually someone out there in the world capable of making me feel joy, maybe even love? That such a person existed? Or was this feeling in my gut anxiety? Anxiety that, even if the chance of finding such happiness was possible, even if it was right in front of my face, I’d manage to bungle it somehow.

My wife—ex-wife—always said I suffocated her with my pessimism, sucked the joy out of her like a Hoover. In her characteristic myopia, she never stopped to consider that maybe she brought out the negativity in me, that my so-called pessimism was more acute in her judgmental presence. But bygones. Divorce was good for nothing if not the copious amounts of alone time. A perfect opportu

nity for self-reflection and reexamination. And it was possible, just possible, that I could be, at times, a tad disagreeable. A bit of a complains-first-thinks-later sort of person. All right, so I could be a real donkey. But that was all going to change. Mallika would only see the reformed me. The jovial me. The new and improved, happy-go-lucky Suresh Raman.

We made lighthearted conversation for the rest of dinner. A mint lemonade for me, a tea for her. A shared plate of sticky rice with mango. At the end of the night, I walked her to her front door and let my hand linger on her shoulder. She pecked me on the cheek and thanked me “for a wonderful evening.” She closed the door with a sweet little wave.

All right, so maybe the date ended more chastely than I might have wished. But wasn’t this a commendable thing too? My Mallika was a virtuous woman. A lovely, modest, old-fashioned kind of woman. The kind of woman a man could marry—would be lucky to marry. The kind of woman that some man already had the great luck to marry and the greater misfortune to lose—through death. Likely a car accident. Or a heart attack. Or cancer.

At any rate, he was gone, and I was here, standing on Mallika’s doorstep, inhaling the lingering scent of her perfume.

Blissfully, thrillingly alive.

2

LATA

hen Professor Greenberg, a History of Jazz professor at the university, handed me the slim plastic CD case across the checkout-and-return desk, I started to place it in a pile of disks for scanning and shelving. But then he stopped me.

“No, wait,” he said, “it’s not from the library. It’s for you, Lata. I burned that CD for you.”

“Burned it? For me?” I placed the CD case on the oak counter between us, and stared at it, confused.

“Remember our conversation the other day when you mentioned that you had never listened to jazz and didn’t own any jazz CDs? Well, I made you a compilation of some of my favorite vocalists singing standards I thought you’d like—just to ease you into the genre. There’s also a card—well, a folded sheet of paper—inside the case listing each song and artist.”

He spoke very fast, and when he stopped, I had no idea how to respond.

Since beginning my position as a library assistant five months ago, a position I’d seen advertised on the bulletin board of my favorite bookstore, I’d come to learn that libraries had their regulars (much like bars, I’m told). And Professor Greenberg was definitely a regular. Nearly every other day, I’d start my shift expecting to see his tall, trim frame in a listening carrel, earphones peeking through his gray curls, his head bobbing as he scribbled notes.

And it was true that a few days ago, I had said something to him in passing about not owning any jazz music. But we weren’t friends or anything. To my mind, we weren’t even casual acquaintances. Until today, our interactions had consisted of little more than the “hello, thank you, you’re welcome” formalities of checkout and return. I didn’t think he knew my name, so what could he mean by giving me this CD?

I’d been staring at his gift for several seconds without saying a word. My silence was clearly making him uncomfortable. Although he was at least sixty, he had a boyish face, and a matching inability to mask distress. A few students stood behind him in the checkout-and-return line, and they watched us with a mixture of curiosity and impatience. Both wanting and fearing further explanation from him about what prompted this gesture, I quickly thanked him for “burning me it…I mean, making me the CD,” and turned to help the spiky-haired boy next in line.

---

—

“So, Lata, what’s the deal with you and jazz-professor man?” Deanna, another library assistant, appeared next to me with a teasing smirk.

I pretended like I didn’t hear her. I tried to seem very busy piling the returned books into a neat stack. I closed my eyes for a moment and focused on the texture of book covers between my fingers, the not-unpleasant smell of yellowing, mildewed pages.

But Deanna was not a person you could easily ignore. She was a graduate student who specialized in something called ethnomusicology. From what Jared, the head librarian and our boss, had told me, Deanna was a kind of genius. Barely twenty, she was one of the youngest PhD students at the university. To look at her, though, you’d never guess that this hundred-pound girl—who had rings through her eyebrows and a tattoo of a giant lotus on the back of her neck and often wore long sweaters that she (purposely!) shredded with scissors—spent her hours applying for research grants and coauthoring papers with gray-haired professors. But sometimes I wondered if Deanna’s accelerated schooling had stunted her social development. She seemed to have a hard time getting along with others. With the library patrons, for example, it was not uncommon to see Deanna yelling at some unsusp

ecting student for returning a biography with pencil-marked pages or for using a cellphone inside the library. This tiny feather of a girl liked to fight.

But for some reason, Deanna had taken a liking to me. She listened patiently—though with an amused expression on her face—when I read from a hepatitis pamphlet I’d picked up from the doctor’s office about the dangers of tattoo needles, ...