The Magnificent Ruins

by Nayantara Roy

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

When Lila returns to India from the United States after inheriting an ancestral home, she must confront a culture that has always been a part of her, her mother from whom she has been estranged for a decade, and her family (grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins) who all still live in the house. These family members resent her sudden inheritance of this humongous home, a stunning display of the status and culture of the zamindars, India's ruling class that was so firmly shaped by British colonial rule.

Beyond that, her first love, the now-married Adil, seeks her out when she arrives back in Calcutta, and Seth, her star author and sometimes lover, decides to surprise her by showing up in India as well. As Lila navigates both affairs and her family’s deep mistrust, a legacy of violence in the family can no longer be ignored. In the aftermath of her cousin Biddy's wedding, an uncle is dead, and her grandmother unwillingly reveals her own secrets. With a lawsuit against Lila gathering steam and a police investigation triggered, Lila must finally reckon with her inherited custom of sweeping everything under the rug to preserve appearances.

With an unforgettable house at its heart, a violent past erupting into the present, a problematic romance, and a compelling and conflicted heroine, this novel is an utterly addictive read.

Release date: November 12, 2024

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 450

Sample

IN THE MIDDLE of that summer, I inherited my grandfather’s house in India. There were five sprawling floors of it, home to my mother, my grandmother, and their extended family, eight thousand miles away from my apartment in Brooklyn. The first time that my mother called that day was at 7:15 a.m. I let the phone ring through, because we had not spoken in fourteen months, and I was steaming my skirt, and I did not know yet that my grandfather was dead. It was my birthday, and I assumed that despite the countless others she had missed, this year she had decided that she would like to talk to me. It would not occur to her that I might be late for work if I stopped to take a call from a mother who had remained silent for fourteen months.

It was my mother’s way to remain silent. We might have argued about a minor difference (I did not like stew, thereby her stew) or a crevasse of a grievance (at sixteen, I had allowed my stepmother to formally adopt me, to be able to live with my father and her in Connecticut. Indian law did not allow a man to take his child out of the country unless he had a wife, i.e., a caregiver, nurture considered the prime function of femininity). After that, my mother had said, “My doors are closed to you forever” (a favorite phrase, which had meant six and a half weeks at the time).

The pattern, like the infinite loops of a familiar blanket, was always the same: no words exchanged until she had forgotten her wound. This worked, in part: The long spells of quiet (whether weeks or months or, once, almost two years) served to charge the relationship, as a drained iPhone might gather battery from a socket. And then the phone would ring again. With the familiarity of old scars, we would slip back into Saturday evenings when my phone would light up, euphoric and neon: Hi???!!

The first conversation would be stilted on my end, exuberant on hers. I would revel in a universe where my mother wanted me. Over time, she would begin calling regularly again. Those weeks would inevitably lull me, slightly tipsy from the largesse of her motherhood, into a maternal buzz. And then I would say something that would hurt her feelings, which always meant the punishment of disappearance.

In this manner, we had passed almost three decades. My mother was not an old lady. She was beautiful and fragile and cruel in the way children can be, and she frightened me.

THAT AUGUST WAS the hottest that Brooklyn could be, sudden warm showers permeating the mugginess. There was more steam than air in the subway, bodies stacked alongside, the whole thing reeking of damp rage and hot dogs. I was the first stop on the L train after spending an hour on the 1, inching back from Manhattan. Williamsburg was filled with photogenic parents with bamboo strollers everywhere. I was finally earning enough to occupy their neighborhood, an aberration in a railroad apartment, the kind with a unifying corridor trailing from kitchen to bedroom to living room; you had to walk through every room to get to my couch and TV—the first-class compartment, I liked to say. It was around the corner from Williamsburg Cinemas, and I had made it look like a real place—with rugs and books and plants. I was twenty-nine, and there had been enough cities and apartments—I knew how to make a cup of instant home.

A few blocks from the water, there was an Indo-Chinese restaurant serving hot green chili sauce mixed up with glistening soy Hakka noodles, vinegary chicken on top, exactly the kind I had grown up eating. The owners were descendants of Chinese migrants in India—Hakkas—who had settled in Kolkata over a century ago, adopting the goddess Kali as their own, intermingling woks and scallions with Indian spices and heat, creating the Gobi-Manchurian marriage of my dreams. I had not lived in Kolkata since I was sixteen, and having the restaurant nearby was a whiff of jumbled, salty memory that I would breathe in as I passed by.

Every morning, I left the house at eight fifteen, to get to work before Gil did. Gilead Edelman had hired me not long after I’d graduated from Columbia, where he had adjunct-taught undergraduates for two years before leaving for a publishing job, and where I had spent four years planning the novels I was going to write after a bachelor’s degree. Instead, I found myself reading the manuscripts that my classmates wrote, making notes on their revisions.

Columbia had been filled with ideals and libraries and anger, and we were all trying to have some sex. In the stacks of Butler Library, I felt at home. Toward the end of senior year, I found myself a boyfriend from the graduate physics department and a job as a waitress at the café below his building. That first year after I graduated, I tried to write after my shifts—a few sentences here, a page there, of what I assumed my first novel would be. It was a lot of trying to guess at what first novels might be.

When Gil was promoted to editorial director at Wyndham, he asked if I wanted to be his editorial assistant. I gratefully shut down my many trails of Word documents and accepted the job. Seven years later, I was a fiction editor with an instinct for other people’s work. My own stories were abandoned ghost ships. But when I read a sentence, I could see past its bad-shit swag, into its spine. It felt like luck that I had found a career that included me in the world of writers yet gave me my own place, my little throne on the margins of their manuscripts. The writers, unlike my mother, kept in touch. Constantly.

MY MOTHER CALLED again in the early afternoon. Lunch had blitzed past after a series of meetings, and the phone glowered again, with the word Ma vibrating up at me as I bent over the manuscripts on my desk. There were so many sentences to read to uncover one that might offer up the promise of plot, one that might deliver a few crumbs of riches. Since Wyndham had been acquired by the e-commerce company Phenom a year ago, the authors I had to placate had multiplied, alongside the number of meetings. Still, I loved the job and sought validation constantly, because the publishing world doled it out so teasingly; despite prestige, my salary had struggled for years to meet expenses. But it was hard to complain aloud about income when the plethora of barely paid interns only increased every year, each the cream of their Ivy League crop.

To my father and stepmother in Connecticut, rarefied literary circles meant as little as the long sentences we put in our books. They were attorneys, with a shared love for paperbacks. In the evenings, they drank rum or whiskey, ate kebabs or a casserole, and put their feet up in front of Criminal Minds. Still, they extended many a loan and shoulder, turning up for book launches, drinking wine in corners, bewildered and loving.

WHEN MY MOTHER called the third time, it was the middle of the night in India. It felt unbelievable that the idea of my birth, of my body aging until it began to resemble hers, was the reason she was impatient to reach me, but if it was, I was in no hurry to let her in. It was her way, after all. Just as my mother pursued her silences, she was relentless in her need. A thought might take form, and in seconds she would be possessed by it, caught within the wheel of her imagination, spinning in unending narratives. Everything was enlarged in these moments.

The phone lit up again. I answered. “Hi, Seth.”

I had met Seth three years ago, on a dating app. With the same impromptu vision with which she transformed Wyndham’s children’s literature from preachy to astonishing, my friend and colleague Molly had signed me up for the app. I was single at twenty-six after a long relationship, and I had taken like a fish to the waters of solitude, but Molly insisted that I had gone long enough without any action. It wasn’t healthy, she said, as if prescribing me an omega-rich diet of salmon and men. Besides, what if I forgot what sex felt like? And so Seth was the second man from the app whom I had gone out with. We had had dinner at a bar in Brooklyn, followed by good sex—which I had not forgotten how to have. I was confused by how handsome he was and by his interest in me. Seth was charming, if in a constant state of despair. In the weeks and months that followed, we continued to spend time together that held no promises. The closest we came to sweetness came months later, deciding that we would have unprotected sex only with each other. This was practical, and Seth looked relieved when I suggested it, since it provided our relationship with a clear outline.

One night, after dinner, I settled into his bed as he was brushing his teeth, and looked at his bookshelf, a precarious, teetering stack, perched on a single slab of wood in the wall, which threatened to bury us as we slept. I reached toward the Mavis Gallant, to the white stack below it, which I knew was his new manuscript. Seth, I knew, was embarrassed to solicit me for both sex and a sale, and so had never asked his agent to send it to me. This suited me, but when I looked at the manuscript’s first few pages that night, I was unable to stop reading, long after an apprehensive Seth had fallen asleep next to me. The next day, sleepless, I went into the office very early and had an awkward conversation with Gil, outlining the “circumstances.” Gil had read half his manuscript by that afternoon, and that was how I became Seth Schwartz’s editor.

Now, Seth was one of our banner writers, nearly done with his second book—a luminous rumination on a futuristic, sinking Venice struggling under a dystopian government.

He was rarely joyful on the phone, but tonight was an exception.

“I’ve been thinking about Amy,” he said. “When she realizes the prime minister’s program she’s been peddling doesn’t allow single mothers like herself to fall in love, her image of herself as a good person cracks. By the time she meets Marcus, she uses that rule as a guardrail against him—but really, she’s just self-sabotaging.”

It was a good idea. Seth had been writing a character that could not have fallen as headlong in love as he had written her.

“That’s great,” I said. “Think of her as suffocating every feeling that comes up, in that paragraph where she realizes that she wants him to make her breakfast.”

“I’ve also been thinking that act two should be in Amy’s voice,” said Seth. “If we just switch that section entirely to her POV, we’ll see Marcus through her lens as he rises to mayor and marries his first wife.”

This was not a good idea. At least he had had one of each.

It was his fourth attempt this month to douse a raging writer’s block. Seth was in his early thirties and had written a first novel titled Reminders, which was, as every editor had told his agent, too close to the plot of a popular thriller. The slew of rejections had sliced him open. Sinking was his second novel, told through the eyes of a young Italian boy, the son of a villainous prime minister. In the book, after watching a friend drown while ice-skating, the boy becomes obsessed with the idea of sinking objects. In adulthood, he goes on to become the mayor of Venice, on a crusade to save his city from climate change and corruption, only to morph into his father and the bureaucracy he had spent his life fighting.

Seth was Jewish, from the Upper West Side, and spoke only broken Italian, but the manuscript saw through his issues with his own father, and so he wrote with fluency. So much so that Gil and I had asked if we might take a look at Reminders. And then Wyndham had published Reminders, after all, and Seth Schwartz was called a writer now, and it had brought the color back into his cheeks.

IN MY OPINION, Seth took too many pills. In my Indian family, pills had been considered a last resort, when the human body and mind had failed. We did not approve of much failure, so we did not invest in much medication. Seth’s bottles of Ritalin and Lexapro made me nervous. But through Seth, I had learned that, like a migraine or a cold, when depression descends, you treat it as any recurring condition, with prescription and baths and compassion. It was the opposite of all that my own kin believed in.

When I was nineteen, my father and I had taken a trip back to India, the last of two visits I had made since becoming “an American,” as my mother liked to put it. Lying next to my mother’s mother, Geeta, on her four-poster bed, the fan overhead a steady hum, I had asked if she had ever considered taking my mother to a therapist. My grandmother had blinked for a moment, a flicker of doubt passing through, and then rebounded, on the offense.

“So everyone in America runs to a therapist for every little thing?” she had whispered in Bengali, frowning even as she looked away. We both knew that my mother’s problems were no little thing, but it was only years later, faced with the open, shame-free medicine cabinets of my friends at Columbia, faced with Seth’s Monday-to-Sunday pillbox, that I relaxed righteous judgment toward prescribed pain relief. Years later, I understood that my mother had remained undiagnosed her entire life, untreated and alone, swinging between extremes.

“MARCUS IS YOUR guy. Sinking is his story. If the middle section doesn’t get into his head, is it still his story?” I asked Seth as my assistant poked her head into my office, signaling that I had another call. I wondered if it could be my mother, but I had never given her my work number. I signaled to Harriet to take a message.

Seth did not answer. I could hear the hum of a jazz playlist, soft chatter, a barista calling out a name, from the abyss inside the phone. Small things could spiral Seth into a bleak vacuum, from which he would then struggle to swim out of and stay afloat. What I had not learned about him as his sporadic lover, I knew intimately as his editor. In our professional relationship, his writerly anxieties meandered easily to the surface, past his sheen. He had been born into wealth and bred in Manhattan; at his book launch, his friends were familiar faces—occupants of the middle ranks of the Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and my bookshelf. It was territory I knew how to navigate, and I prided myself on having reached the same literary circles without pedigree or trust fund or whiteness.

“Maybe I can just stay with him for now and see where it goes,” said Seth, a grudge in his voice.

It was a version of “Pussy Cat Dues,” from Mingus Ah Um, that was playing in the café he was at, I realized.

“God, Lila, I hate this chapter. This book, this guy. I have no idea what’s true about him. Remind me again when you go on your big vacation?”

A little wave of pleasure coursed through me at the mild panic in Seth’s voice.

“Next week,” I said. “I’ll be back in two weeks.”

“You’re deserting me. In my hour of need.”

I laughed. “I haven’t had a holiday in three years. You’d think it would be my hour of need. Besides, I’ve paid for it already, so there’s no going back.” I closed my eyes in pleasure at the thought. It had taken me almost a year’s savings to be able to afford a week at a cliffside retreat in Maine. I envisioned myself walking along the ocean, my laptop floating away from me, tossed to the waves.

“Maine, right? Do you want company? My dad’s cottage is probably not too far from wherever you’ll be doing yoga under the stars.” I heard a glint in Seth’s voice, the unmistakable note of a suggestion. His easy switch back and forth between our identities as professionals and lovers flustered me.

“Don’t you have a book to write?”

“Yes, well, that’s all going to the dogs.”

I laughed again. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“See you tonight?” he asked.

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. You busy?” There was a faint note of concern in his voice.

“For… work?”

“No,” he laughed. “Not for work.”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay. Tonight is cool.”

Seth must have heard the heat in my cheeks, because he laughed again.

“Cool,” he said gently as he disappeared into the ether.

It was all cool. I was as cool as ice, still figuring out the ways of Brooklyn. I pressed line two and immediately panicked that it might be my mother. There was no one on the other end.

HARRIET WAS EATING pistachios at her desk, bright as I approached.

“Hiya, Lila.”

I frowned at her. “What was so important?”

There was a 1960s romance novel flipped over, steamy cover side up, on her desk. Harriet’s gaze slid to it at the same time mine did.

“Oh. Molly was looking for you,” she said.

“Harriet, Seth’s got a couple of months left until the deadline. There’s a small chance it makes Wyndham as much money as Reminders did. Which would make Gil very happy. Which may even get you a raise. So, please, allow me to make that happen.”

Harriet looked chastened.

“Time for coffee,” I sighed.

“I’ll get it,” said Harriet, standing up so fast that her chair spun back.

I raised my eyebrows. Harriet Chen was not known to volunteer for nonliterary tasks.

“Just, y’know, to make up for the Seth Schwartz call. Sorry ’bout that.” She grinned at me. “And because you look so tired.”

“Why, thank you.”

A murmur of anxiety whispered through my veins. It was almost sunset, and the Brooklyn skyline was bathed in pink and orange, a zigzag of Midtown towers spread out in the distance across the water, my precarious reflection a blur of shadows in their center.

Suddenly, Molly’s arms folded around me, squeezing the breath out of me. Others sang “Happy Birthday” around her. Harriet, all-knowing, carried in a cake. I blew out the candles, and Harriet set to slicing wedges onto too-thin paper plates. The cake was a mixture of whimsy and richness, bits of grapefruit punctuating sharp cream cheese, a two-tiered monster, sweet and bitter, typical Molly. I could see some people recoil from its extremes as they ate, but I adored it, and her.

Eleven years ago, Molly and I had shared a dorm room at Columbia, teenagers jostling past harried New Yorkers to get to the green campus, a respite from the city. With her family in Queens and mine in Connecticut, we had alternated our combined laundry between either home on long weekends. In those days, we had had no need for separation, and when the opportunity to work for the same publishing house had presented itself, it had felt only natural. In the absence of any real sense of belonging, it felt like Molly was family I had found.

Now, as the office party wound down, she insisted we go downstairs to the bar, school night be damned. I was agreeable because it meant that I could not be expected to answer a phone at my own birthday celebration.

I LOOKED AROUND the corners of the crowded bar. Molly had invited all of our friends, our colleagues at Wyndham, and anyone else she thought would wish me well on my birthday. Seth was chatting with Penelope, the new wellness editor who sparkled as she placed a hand on his shoulder.

Molly’s arms encircled my shoulders. “Are you having fun?”

I nodded, happy.

We squeezed onto barstools as Chris, the bartender, brought us a martini and a spritz.

“There’s a line of people who want to buy you drinks,” he said. “This one’s on Gil.”

Molly looked radiant. Bringing a community together, watching them create new threads and channels, was her superpower. I looked around the room and felt a warm buzz.

“Thanks, love,” I said to Molly.

She looked pleased, lifting her glass. “To Lila, the best editor and friend,” she said.

Gil and Seth planted kisses on my cheeks and made toasts, raising their glasses. “To Lila.” Clink. It felt like a trickle of sunlight that could suffuse your body on a winter’s day, enough to brave the rest of the season.

Gil looked like he had had a long day. Going from editorial director at Wyndham to being owned by Phenom was like managing a bodega one day and Whole Foods the next. Everything was amplified—resources and problems—and a team that wanted our books on every shelf in America was asking him too many questions. Gil knew exactly how to run our office when it had twenty-five people in it. He knew how to curate literature, patterns forming a quilt, arriving at a rarefied “Wyndham sensibility” over the years. But now we had entered the lion’s arena, needing beach reads and social presence around magnum opuses. In 1976, Edgar Morgenthau and Kathleen Walker had started publishing poetry chapbooks with three-hundred-copy print runs, and Wyndham had been born in their garage. Kathleen had died three years ago, and Edgar had moved back to their family home in Vermont. He had taken the check from Phenom and gone, leaving Gil stranded in board meetings all day, navigating moguls and marketing people and excessive print runs for books that inevitably became warehouse stacks and held the promise of near death to literary careers, and so we were now the most frightened that we had ever been.

“Gil,” urged Molly. “Tell us what Aetos is like.”

Gil, conspiratorial, leaned forward. “I think he’s made of silicon.”

We roared, firmly on Gil’s side.

Molly interrogated Gil. “Does he talk about family? What does he order at lunch? Does he want an office in the building?”

Molly wanted to understand Malcolm Aetos, the billionaire businessman who had founded Phenom, so that when the time came, she would be able to connect with him in a specific way that only Molly knew to establish. Gil sighed. Chris, the bartender, put a Smiths record on for us.

“The man doesn’t sleep,” said Gil. “He drinks only green juice and gin, eats almond butter by the spoonful, and does seven things at the same time. He’s making a decision, texting with a CEO somewhere, dictating a memo, and coming up with an idea, all in ten minutes. And they’re all good ideas,” said Gil, forlorn, running his hand through thinning hair.

“I can barely come up with the one idea I’m supposed to have,” said Seth, melancholy.

Gil and Seth admired moguls instinctively—a taste for soldiers and superheroes.

Gil had been a ladies’ man through the 1990s and early 2000s, to the point where his former employers had gently tapped him on the wrist for dating several of their female authors. But he cut a dazzling New York social figure, throwing Wyndham parties that were legendary for their debauchery as much as for literary glamour.

I loved Gil. He had brought me into his world, and he had turned around a small press enough to self-sustain it and attract the eye of Aetos. Learning from Gil his consumption and understanding of the world and, thereby, fiction, had made me a better editor and a freer person.

“Let’s dance,” said Seth, scooping me by the waist.

“Girlfriend in a coma, I know. I know, it’s serious,” sang Seth, along with Morrissey, into my ear. He was fluid with his body when dancing, completely unlike his usual, anxious self. The heat enveloped us, coming in through the open windows, but we didn’t care anymore.

Molly put on Tito Puente, her Afro a perfect halo around her face, her nipples jutting through her thin vest, effortless in the center of the room. My hair formed sweaty clumps of tendrils around my temples as Seth and I twirled around, knocking into Ingrid from nonfiction and Gil as they cha-cha-ed their way around the tables.

At two in the morning, I pulled out my phone to look at the time. My mother had called three more times. I stood on the sidewalk a few minutes later, waiting for an Uber. Seth appeared, grabbing my hand, just as the car rolled up.

“Going home already?” he asked, wistful, his dark hair fanning over his sweaty forehead as I opened the car door.

“I’m tired. No good for anything else.”

I let my fingers link through his. The minute we were out of the bar, out of work, out of sight, we took on the shape of lovers.

“Okay, okay. Did you have a good surprise? I helped, you know.”

“I know.”

“Lila Day?” asked the driver.

“Absolutely not,” said Seth to the man.

“That’s me,” I said to the driver, smiling at Seth as something electric and familiar passed between us.

I wondered if it wasn’t too late to take him home, after all.

Penelope appeared at the entrance of the bar and lit a cigarette. Spotting Seth, she lifted her hand in a half wave to us. I unlinked our secret fingers gently.

“I think Penny’s looking for you,” I said.

He turned around.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, we were just… y’know. We might hang out later, yeah.” He grinned at me, his hand sweeping his hair away from his face. “That is, unless you’ve changed your mind?”

I liked looking at Seth Schwartz—he was like a painting in a museum that had no place in my apartment.

“Good night, Seth.” I smiled up at him.

He kissed my cheek, shutting the car door behind me. “Happy birthday, Li.”

Penelope waved at me, and I waved back. The car sped through the empty streets, past a few bars with dim lights still on, the last revelers emerging into the night. I rolled down the window, drying my sweaty hair, grateful for the brief gust of coolness from the August breeze.

WHEN THE UBER stopped in front of my apartment building, three men were stretched out, sleeping, on the street, each perpendicular to the other, arms splayed against the heat. As I got out of the car, I realized one of them was a woman, her dark hair fanned out, a book spread open on her chest as if she had fallen asleep, reading, as I did so often. Williamsburg by night was at its most truthful, revealing the spaces that people occupied in sleep—insiders versus outsiders.

As I made my way up the stairs, I could hear what sounded like an action movie, coming from my Pakistani landlady Saba’s apartment on the ground floor—muffled gunshots and sirens. Locking the door of my apartment behind me, I slipped out of my blouse and skirt, eager to hide in the safety of my bed, eager to leave birthdays and my mother behind.

In the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, looking at my phone, I saw that a distant cousin in Singapore had posted a photo of my maternal grandfather. He was laughing that deep belly laugh of his, and even before I finished reading the caption, I knew that he was dead. The post was long, and I had to click on it to be able to read the whole thing. In it, my cousin grieved the loss of a good man. My grandfather had been in bed, chained by his kidneys failing him, for over two years. All I remembered was the bear of a man whom I had had secrets with. A man with a giant stomach that vibrated with laughter like a shaking hill when I had climbed it as a child. I felt a seizure of grief, winded by its intensity, as I stared at the phone in my hand.

My grandfather’s death was all over Instagram and Facebook and Twitter in the matter of an hour. I looked at pictures of him, the man who had made my childhood better. I tried to imagine the world without him but found it impossible, even though I had not seen him in person in ten years. I willed myself to cry and release the thudding in my chest, the despair that choked my throat.

My phone buzzed again and again, the metal slippery with sweat, as if screaming at me from between my clutching fingers, but since I did not want to hear it from her, I did not answer my mother’s call.

It felt like my grandfather’s death might melt me down, throw me back into the waters that threatened to dissolve the life I had built in New York. We would share a date now, he and I—my birthday, the day he had died. It felt like another of our secrets, like the hard-boiled sweets I would sneak into his big, dry palm when my grandmother would leave the room. Pythagoras, the Ionian Greek philosopher, had believed that when a human died, the soul would leave its body and search for a new home. Pythagoras had said that home could be the first plant or animal or living creature that the soul took a fancy to. But what if home was Williamsburg, Brooklyn, across an ocean? My brain was warm with gin from the party, and standing in my bedroom, I imagined my grandfather’s soul possessing me, his laugh radiating through my own body.

Something in me wanted to pretend to my mother that I did not know that he was dead. What would make her comfort me? Or me her? Fourteen months ago, I had broken an elbow, a week before we last spoke. I wondered if she would ask me about it if I were to call. We were perennially at the precipice of holding each other to bitter trial.

I picked up the phone and held it against my ear. It was cold, and then quickly, hot, the metal warming like fire as it began to ring. There were things my mother had done to earn my rage—for instance, to throw away flowers sent to my grandmother or let them die unseen. Forgotten to invite me to a family wedding. Stopped speaking to me for imagined slights. I had never understood, but I was ready for battle, scimitar raised. She picked up on the third ring.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Ma.”

“Lila. How are you?” She was polite, even concerned.

“I’m okay, Ma. How are you?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I have to be okay, for the kids.”

My mother was a professor. The kids she referred to were her students. Not the daughter she was speaking to.

“Dadu died last night, Lila,” she said. Her voice had turned gentle, a rarity, and my eyes burned for the first time as I imagined my grandfather, never again in a room with me, never again delighted to see me.

“He died in his sleep,” my mother said. “It wasn’t too bad.”

She said this as an act of kindness, I would learn later.

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