heard her father’s hello. “Daddy, Devi,” she said.
“What’s going on, beta?” Avi asked in a groggy voice, like he’d just woken up, which he probably had since it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, too early for any of his children to call, definitely too early for party-all-night Devi to call.
“Just wanted to say hello,” Devi said, tears brimming in her eyes. She desperately wanted him to say that everything would be okay, that the world would not collapse around her, but that meant asking him for help, and the way things were she was too ashamed to hold out her hand.
This was her life, she was responsible for it, and the mess she had made of it was not something he could clean up for her. As much as she wanted to be held in the secure circle of Daddy’s arms, she knew that would just underscore her failure. At least in this, she wanted to succeed, not back out like a wimp who could neither live nor die.
“How’s work?” her father asked next.
“Great,” she lied instead of telling him that the company had closed its doors. She was out of a job again and this time there was no way around the facts. She was a loser. Had always been, especially compared to the successes in her family. Her father, Avi Veturi, had started a successful technology company with a friend and now was semi-retired, enjoying a privileged life in Silicon Valley. Her older sister, Shobha, was Vice President of engineering for a software company. Her grandmother, Vasu, had been a doctor in the Indian Army, and retired as a Brigadier. Talk about overachievers; her family was loaded with them.
Even her mother, who’d spent her entire life in the house, was still in some ways better off than her. But Saroj had no solid successes to her credit and maybe that was why Devi could compare herself only to her. That was a scary thought. Saroj never held a job, spent all her time in the kitchen cooking and pretending to take care of her family. She was a fairly good cook and a lousy mother. Her relationship with her husband seemed extra strained since he’d semi-retired a few years ago. Marriage to Avi had been Saroj’s biggest accomplishment and now that marriage was also fading away, rotting in apathy and some disdain. If they were not Indian, Devi was sure they’d be divorced.
“G’ma,” she told her grandmother, who lived in India, on the telephone just a few years ago, “they sleep in separate beds and now Daddy is talking about moving into the guest room, to avoid all the Hindi movies Mama watches at night.”
Her grandmother had been honest as she always was and told Devi that some marriages simply don’t work and they should be ended, but not too many people had the courage to do so. G’ma was not one of those cowards. She divorced her crazy husband when divorce was unheard of in India. She took that chance and so many others. She lived her life on her own terms and no one could ever call Vasu a loser.
Tears filled Devi’s eyes again and regret flooded inside her. She wanted to be like her grandmother: strong, independent, and smart. Instead she was more like her mother: a complete failure at everything she ever attempted—life, love, children, job, relationships, finances, everything.
“Is G’ma up?” Devi asked her father. Vasu was visiting as she always did during the summer to get some relief from the scorching Indian heat.
“I don’t know, beta. Probably not, we were up until three in the morning playing chess. But I can . . .”
“Who’s on the phone, Avi?” Devi heard her mother call out.
“Do you want to talk to your mother?” Avi asked and Devi whispered an unsteady “no” and hung up quickly. She didn’t want to talk to her mother, and on second thought she didn’t even want to talk to Vasu. She felt she had said her good-byes the week before when the entire family met for dinner at her parents’ house.
Girish, Shobha’s husband, was unable to make it because of some “thing” at the university, but no one believed those stories anymore. Ever since they’d found out that Shobha couldn’t get pregnant it had become more evident than ever that their marriage was not working, at any level.
For a very long time Devi had been jealous of Shobha; part of her still was. Shobha had it all. A