Fiction: Lila’s return to Kolkata brings a fraught reunion with her mother and extended family

A secret is a terrible thing. It starts as a single inhalation, a fragment of bacteria that enters your bloodstream, multiplying immediately or over centuries, a thousand neural networks of secrets emerging from the first. As a family, we were long practiced in the art of secrets, trading one deception for the other through generations, weaving an intricate silk screen that prevented the outside world from knowing who we might turn into. But that night on the terrace, confronted by the body that we had taken life from, I wondered if there would be no hiding this time.

A secret is a terrible thing. Unless there was honour in keeping it.

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 am. 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 favourite 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 neighbourhood, 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 chilli 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 GobiManchurian marriage of my dreams. I had not lived in Kolkata since I was 16, 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 8.15, 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.

Excerpted with permission from The Magnificent Ruins, Nayantara Roy, Hachette India.