Chapter 3: Rina's Table

Rina Rana's apartment above the old shop smelled the way it had always smelled — turmeric and machine oil, an odd but permanent combination from decades of cooking dinner two rooms away from bolts of silk and a sewing machine that never quite stopped running. The shop below had been dark for five years, but Rina still kept a single sewing machine upstairs, still took in alterations for half the town under the table because pride wouldn't let her stop working with her hands even after the business itself had died. Kabir stood in the doorway of the apartment for a long moment before he made himself walk in, the dhol case bumping against the frame, and felt something in his chest crack open at the sight of his mother standing at the stove in the same worn blue apron she'd worn his entire childhood, stirring dal like the last five years hadn't happened, like he hadn't been gone at all. "You're taller," Rina said, without turning around, which was such a profoundly her thing to say that Kabir nearly laughed despite the tightness in his throat. "I'm the same height I was at twenty-four, Ma." "You're taller in the doorway. Sit." She finally turned, and he watched her face do the thing he'd been dreading the whole drive — crumple for one unguarded second before she caught it, pressed her lips together, and pulled herself back into the brisk, unsentimental woman who'd raised him alone for the last five years while he sent money from tour stops and called on holidays and told himself that was enough. "You look thin. Are you eating on these tours or just playing drums for strangers and living on gas station food?" "I'm eating fine." "You're thin." She set a bowl in front of him before he'd even sat down properly, dal and rice and a wedge of roti, and the domestic ordinariness of it, after five years of hotel breakfasts and green room catering, nearly undid him. "Eat. Then we'll talk about why it took your grandmother's health scare and a favor for me to get you back in this town, when I raised you better than that." "That's not fair." "I didn't say it was fair. I said it was true." Rina sat across from him, folding her hands on the table, her wedding ring — she still wore it, five years after his father died, and Kabir had never once asked her why, some part of him afraid of the answer — catching the kitchen light. "I asked you for nine nights, Kabir. Not forever. I know you have your life on the road, your — whatever you call it, your career of disappearing." A flicker of something dry and knowing crossed her face. "I asked because the Hall needed a dhol player and because I am sixty-one years old and I wanted my son in the same town as me for nine days before I forget what your face looks like when it isn't on a phone screen." Kabir looked down at the dal, throat tight. "I saw Meera." Something shifted in his mother's expression — not surprise, which meant she'd been expecting it, or maybe hoping for it, in the particular way mothers hoped for things they never said out loud. "And?" "And nothing. We talked for two minutes on the sidewalk. Rehearsal's at six tomorrow." He pushed rice around the bowl without eating it. "Ma, why didn't you tell me it was her Hall I'd be playing for? You told me it was a festival gig. You didn't say Kamla Desai's granddaughter would be running the whole thing." "Because you would have said no." Rina said it simply, without apology, the way she said most true things. "And I needed you to come home, Kabir. Not because of the drum. Because it has been five years, and your father is gone, and you have not been back to this town once, not for a holiday, not for his death anniversary, not for anything, and I am tired of grieving alone in a town that still asks me every week how my talented son is doing on the road, as if I have an answer that doesn't hurt to give." The silence that followed sat heavy in the small kitchen. Kabir stared at his hands, calloused from five years of drumming, and thought about all the ways he'd told himself this absence was reasonable — that touring was the job, that Ashford Grove held nothing for him but a shuttered shop and a debt he'd never fully understood, that staying away was easier for everyone, including his mother, who he'd convinced himself was better off without the reminder he'd become. "I didn't know how to come back," he said finally, quiet. "Every time I thought about it, I thought about the shop. About Baba standing in that window for thirty years, and then just — gone. Padlock on the door within a month. Nobody in this town ever explained to me what actually happened, Ma. You never told me the whole story either." Rina's jaw tightened, and for a moment Kabir thought she might finally, after five years, say the thing he'd been half-afraid and half-desperate to hear. Instead she stood, collected his empty bowl though he'd barely touched the food, and said, in a voice that closed the subject more firmly than any argument could have, "Some things are easier left in the past, beta. Your father wouldn't want you carrying it. He wanted you to play music and be happy, not haunt this town looking for someone to blame." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one I'm giving you tonight." She softened, briefly, resting a hand on his shoulder as she passed behind his chair. "You're here for nine nights. Play the drum. Let your grandmother-that-isn't figure out her festival's problems, because Kamla Desai has never once in forty-two years needed anyone's help solving a problem she didn't ask for help with. And maybe," she added, with a knowing lift of her eyebrow that made him deeply suspicious, "spend some of those nine nights being kind to Meera. That girl has been holding up that entire Hall on her own shoulders since Devraj died, and she was kind to you once, a long time ago, when you needed it." Kabir didn't answer that, because he didn't trust himself to say the true thing, which was that some nights, on tour, in strange cities, he still thought about seventeen-year-old Meera Desai finding him behind the Hall the week his father's shop closed, sitting with him in silence for two hours because he hadn't had words yet, not asking him to perform okay-ness the way everyone else in town had. He hadn't let himself think about what it meant that she was the one person from this town who'd never once made him feel like a cautionary tale. He helped his mother wash the dishes in silence, the old apartment settling around them with its familiar creaks, and afterward, instead of retreating straight to his room, he found himself wandering to the narrow staircase at the back of the kitchen that led down to the shuttered shop below. The door at the bottom had always stuck in damp weather; it stuck now, and he had to put his shoulder into it before it gave, swinging open onto a room he hadn't stood in for five years. The shop was smaller than he remembered, the way childhood places always were, but the bones of it were exactly the same — the long wooden cutting table still bolted to the floor along the far wall, the glass display counter where his father used to lay out finished chaniya cholis for customers to admire, the three dress forms standing sentinel in the corner like patient ghosts, draped now in old sheets gone grey with dust. Bolts of fabric his mother had never been able to bring herself to sell still leaned in a rack near the window, faded by years of sunlight to pastel versions of whatever brilliant colors they'd once been. Kabir ran a hand along the cutting table's edge, feeling the familiar groove worn into the wood where his father had rested his shears a thousand times, and let himself, for the first time in years, actually stand inside the grief instead of outrunning it. He remembered being nine years old, sitting cross-legged under this exact table while his father worked above him, humming old film songs under his breath, occasionally dropping pins for Kabir to gather into a little tin can as a game. He remembered being fourteen and learning to thread the old Singer machine in the corner, his father's hands over his, patient in a way the man rarely was about anything else. He remembered, less willingly, being twenty-four and standing in the doorway while movers carried the last of the fixtures out to a truck bound for a consignment warehouse two towns over, his father refusing to watch, sitting instead in the apartment upstairs with his back to the window. He hadn't asked his father, that final week, what had actually happened. He'd been too angry, too raw, too certain that asking would only make the grief in the room worse for both of them. He'd told himself there would be time later, once things settled, once his father had found some new footing — and then eighteen months later there hadn't been time at all, just a phone call from his mother at two in the morning and a funeral three days after that, and every question Kabir had ever meant to ask had died with the answer still locked inside his father's chest. He stood in the dark shop a long while, dust motes drifting in the thin moonlight through the front window, and let himself feel the full weight of it — not the outrunning version of the grief he'd carried on tour for five years, but the real thing, heavy and specific and entirely his. Somewhere above him he could hear his mother moving around the kitchen, the pipes groaning as she ran water for tea, the small ordinary sounds of a life that had kept going despite everything it had lost. Eventually he climbed back up the narrow stairs, latched the door behind him the way he used to as a kid making sure nothing got out, and made his way to his old room. His dhol poster was still taped crooked to the wall, a relic his mother had apparently never had the heart to take down, and he lay on the narrow bed staring at the ceiling, doing math of his own. Nine nights. One drum. One shuttered shop full of unanswered questions two floors below him. One woman he'd spent five years trying very hard not to think about, and had failed, spectacularly, for exactly as long as it had taken to cross a single street. Outside, faint through the old window, he could hear the Hall's sound system testing again, someone running the opening aarti track on a loop, the same low, steady dhol beat that had underscored every important moment of his childhood. He closed his eyes and let it carry him toward sleep, and did not let himself examine too closely why the sound felt, after five years away, less like a memory and more like coming home.

Before you start reading

You must be 18 or older

Comments (0)