Fiction: How will Kaya hold on to love as she fights institutionalised hate in volatile times?

I must admit that I’ve fallen in love a lot. Some might say it’s not really love if you keep going from one person to the next. But I like to think of it as the constant evolution of love.

Sometimes, the passage of time allows me to see myself better.

When I was twenty-three I fell in love with a man from Eritrea. He had lived the first six years of his life there. The rest was mostly in a small town in Utah where his parents ran a real-estate business. I met him two years before I moved back to India. At the time, my mother was having a cancer scare. Or rather a cancer reality; thankfully one of the kinder varieties that went into remission quickly and was never heard from again, even to today. Every morning, during the cancer-scare months, I would throw on an old, brown pullover and jeans, put my hair half-up, and make the twenty-minute trek to the Starbucks that was next to a King Soupers. Every day he’d be there in the same spot with a small laptop and a grande iced coffee, talking in a language I had never heard before. I would later learn that these were phone calls with his mother and that the language was Tigrinya. For the longest time our relationship’s heart was based on basking in finding our cultures “the same” but “so different”. I had begun adding a smear of lipstick to my ensemble after I noticed Yonas. I liked to watch the tiny bubbles of water form over his cup; I would measure his drinking speed by the lifeless melting ice floating on the surface of his coffee. It was inevitable that he would eventually catch me staring. One day, he looked directly at me, indicated his coffee with his large right hand, smiled and raised his eyebrows at me. He was saying something, but I couldn’t really make out what. I raised my eyebrows back at him.

“You want my coffee or something? The way you been staring at it . . .”

I covered my hot face with my hands, looked up and saw he was laughing. I went over to his table and saw that he had glowing, perfect skin. I looked him in the eye and told him I had noticed him every day and that it was enough for me to imagine his life. I don’t know where I found the confidence to do that. He was easy to talk to. Too easy.

Yonas was the first person I felt at home with. Many people say things like this when they fall in love. When I say it, I mean that I wanted to always be around him. Whether he was folding his laundry or reading a book. His chattering with his mother was my lullaby. I’d take afternoon naps in his bed as he turned shirtless, back to me, his phone balanced against his ears with no hands. His ignorance and potential for fascination with my world of Bollywood allowed me to share with him my deepest exoticized tropes and hopes for love. I’d play Maar Dala on YouTube and watch his reaction. He responded coolly as if it was an expected Britney Spears song being played at a club. He tapped his feet and then looked at the video, the parrot-green-decked Madhuri Dixit. “That’s dope,” he’d say. And I went on and on with my playlists. Dil toh pagal hai, Tujhe dekha toh ye jaana sanam.

We talked about immigration. He didn’t remember much but his parents had seen much of the war before Eritrea’s independence in 1991. Some of his extended family had gone to Sudan, but his family had managed to make it to Utah. They didn’t know a scratch of English, but they learnt and they thrived. He asked me how my parents spoke English so well. At the time, I switched to the old American Indian “tch-tch, how little of the world you know” syndrome. I explained that Indians not knowing English was a myth and that we spoke several languages and one of them was certainly not “Hindu”, which was in fact a religion.

“Remember we were colonised by the British?”

In any case, at twenty-two, I had still not understood how caste had colonised my country before the British. That, yes, a large number of people in India certainly spoke English, but statistically, it was only 15 per cent. And the percentage of those who could use English to pass as educated, cool and savvy enough was even less. However, it was still a large number. But that number mostly represented upper-caste people, aware of their heritage, but not aware that it was their systematic benefit to access better education, acquire wealth, feel entitled to the American Dream and then pretend that caste didn’t exist.

What I should have told Yonas was: “It’s like White privilege. Most Indians who do well in the US came from better networks, access to better education, network in India, not all but most.”

That’s only in the daydream of who I am now and what I might say to Yonas. Even in the daydream I am slightly annoyed with how pedantic I sound. How much like Millie I sound. Even now I still think of reaching out to Yonas and telling him I was wrong. And that his question was legitimate and that I had learnt a lot more over the years.

Yonas could make a neat meat stew and excellent pancakes from scratch. I could make dal and spicy Indian salad with red onions, lime juice, green chilli, tomatoes and chopped cucumber. One day, we had a meal that comprised of all these dishes and although it was an unpalatable mess, we were fooled by the excess romanticism of cross-cultural love.

Because I was in love and because my mother was healthy enough throughout her treatment, I felt a palpable need to tell my parents I was in love after only two months of dating Yonas. Some might call it a self-destructive move. Others might call it both natural and inevitable. Yonas had mentioned me in passing to his mother, or so he claimed.

She had said “Indian girl? That’s nice.” Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t think she bothered with these things as long as her incessant phone conversations with her son were not interrupted. I, however, became irrationally obsessed with her lack of interest.

This is why it might be better to call my need to tell my parents about Yonas a self-destructive move. It was proxy validation. If Yonas’s mother would not be compelled by me, then Yonas, at least, would be compelled by my parents. It would provide an unpredictable beat to the soft, gentle sweetness that had saturated my existence with Yonas.

Excerpted with permission from The Girl Who Kept Falling In Love, Rheea Mukherjee, Penguin Random House India.