fortune. Janya had drawn her sitting cross-legged in the cupped petals of a lotus, four arms extended, a peaceful expression on her lovely face. Or as lovely as a stick in golden sand could make her.
Exactly what would she ask Lakshmi for if she could?
She stood back and looked at the image, surprised she had created it. Drawing was part of her former life. She’d had no desire to release the images in her head since coming to Florida. Yet doing so now had seemed natural and effortless. Of course, this was only sand, and the tide would soon swallow all signs of it.
If she’d had the time, she would have waited to watch. Instead, she turned back toward her cottage. Rishi was already gone, anxious to start his day. His enthusiasm for software design mystified her, as did his decision to turn down substantial offers from two large corporations to work on their design teams. Instead, he had taken the money he’d earned as a computer consultant during his years of graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, invested it in marketing a suite of programs he’d designed to help small businesses, then used the profit from that to rent a former seafood processing warehouse on Palmetto Beach and set up his own software firm. The warehouse still smelled like fish, the office was furnished with secondhand castoffs from more prosperous businesses, and he worked with a skeleton staff. But Rishi had faith that these lean, hungry years would pay off. He said he was poised to fly.
For a moment Janya wondered where she would fly if she could. Back to India, but only if she could also fly back in time. If not? No place came to mind, because anywhere else, she would be a stranger again.
She removed her sandals at the door and brushed the sand off her feet. Then she went inside and set water on the stove for tea. Only when it was brewed, and she had taken time to breathe deeply and visualize herself in a calmer place, did she pick up the telephone. It would be five in the afternoon at home, and her mother would probably have finished her tea, a custom their family always observed with a masala-spiced mixture like Janya was drinking now, and samosas or other savory delicacies. Even if her mother had shopped late, she would still be home, making certain dinner preparations were under way, that the house had been swept and cleaned to her standards, that Janya’s brother, Yash, was studying.
Janya’s parents had hoped Yash might attend one of the colleges of Oxford, but her brother, though bright, was not a conscientious mathematics student. Instead, now he struggled in a local program to become a chartered accountant like their father. Janya knew that, secretly, Yash wanted to teach, that history was the subject he really wanted to pursue, and that the dream of joining the family business belonged to his parents. But Yash had yet to tell them. She wondered if he was afraid that when he did, his parents would turn their backs on him, as they had turned their backs on her.
Finally, as serene as she would ever be, she dialed the long series of numbers that would bring her voice home to India.
The woman who answered the telephone was not familiar, but Janya remembered that her mother had mentioned in one of their infrequent conversations that she had hired a new maid to help with cooking and cleaning. Janya identified herself to the young woman, but a long hesitation ensued, as if the maid were trying to place her. The muscles in Janya’s throat grew tight as the maid finally agreed to bring her mother to the phone.
“Aii,” she said in Marathi when her mother greeted her. “It is so good to hear your voice.”
“Yes, Janya. How are things in the United States?” No matter the occasion, Inika Desai always sounded exactly the same, as if life was a business to be conducted with economy, each conversation a job to perform with haste. She was efficient and self-contained, and if she felt strong emotions, she had learned to disguise them. Janya couldn’t remember her mother ever saying that she loved her, although open affection was less a part of the culture Janya had grown up in than the one that surrounded her now. Instead, Inika had demonstrated her love by giving her daughter a proper start in life.
A start she clearly thought Janya had squandered.
The