that each time they were reborn, they be rewarded with the same husbands. June was not far away, but this was a ritual in which Janya would certainly not participate. Not now or ever.
The banyan had been planted in Florida almost a century ago by the inventor Thomas Edison. Rishi had told Janya this just yesterday, on a sightseeing trip to Fort Myers that had been calculated to make her fall in love with her new country. Her husband was fond of the oddest details, of facts and bits of information he could categorize and store in his computerlike brain. His enthusiasm for the trivial made her head ache.
She told herself not to think about Rishi and their marriage. She wanted to savor these brief moments of independence. At the very least, she wanted to pretend she was like everybody else, only mildly unhappy with her lot.
The bus arrived on time, and as always, this seemed almost miraculous. She climbed aboard quickly, afraid it might leave while she was shaking her head in wonder.
The ride was short. Palmetto Grove was a peaceful city, small and emerald-green, with bursts of tropical color. Cars rarely honked their horns, and pedestrians were perfectly safe as they strolled across the streets. A small city center just blocks from the gulf held shops for renting videos, restaurants with pleasant outdoor seating, and stores that sold hardware, auto parts and wedding cakes. Sidewalks gleamed in the sunshine, and women of all ages, in shorts or sundresses, walked arm in arm with men sporting tans and sunglasses.
Coming to town always made Janya feel so homesick she could hardly bear it. Not because Palmetto Grove was anything like Mulund, the suburb of Mumbai where she had been raised. Because it wasn’t. Things were so easy here, so sensible, so polite, so utterly different. She had never wanted to leave India. Unlike so many of the educated upper class who had seen their future in other places, she had always seen hers where she was born. Now she wondered if she would ever go home again.
Last night, to keep homesickness at bay, she had made a list of what she would do today when she got off the bus. Take documentation of her address to the small downtown library so she could get books. Visit the specialty grocery store that sold a variety of lentils and spices, along with hummus and fresh pita bread for the town’s transplanted Mideasterners, jerk seasoning for the Jamaicans, and plantain chips and Sunchy tropical juices for the Cubans. Check out the recreation center.
As part of his campaign to make her happy, Rishi had told her about the center. There were classes, he said, for anybody who lived in Palmetto Grove. The fees were small, and she would meet others like herself, young women with more time than money. He had insisted it would be good to leave the house and get to know Americans. Someday she would be one, too.
This was an event she did not look forward to. To Janya, all Americans seemed lonely. So much space around them. So little family. Old people like Herbert Krause and Alice Brooks lived alone and took care of their own needs. Where were the children, the grandchildren, the nieces and nephews, to feed and clothe them?
Of course, sometimes family was worse than nothing. She knew this, too.
An hour later Janya had a library card and two books, red and yellow lentils, asafoetida and fenugreek, and six cans of Cuban fruit nectar. After debating whether it was time to head home, she started toward the recreation center for the last stop of the morning.
The Henrietta Claiborne Recreation Center was a gift to the town of Palmetto Grove from an eccentric hamburger heiress whose car had broken down outside of town four years ago, while she was crisscrossing the state, alone and incognito, from her Palm Beach mansion to its twin in Newport, Rhode Island. While she waited in a local café for somebody to drive to Tampa and retrieve a part for her Jaguar—she wasn’t that incognito—Henrietta had overhead a conversation about how badly the town needed a recreational center so the people who lived there year-round would have a place to socialize, and the town’s children and teenagers would have a place for their activities.
Henrietta was so impressed by the courtesy and helpfulness of Palmetto Grove’s citizenry that she wrote a check on the spot, and presented it to the mayor just minutes before