Impatience

1

Anyone who leaves home wants to be asked back. Even if she never plans to return, she wants to be asked. That was what my husband told me when I left him to go live in India. He then told me that I looked especially beautiful to him because I didn’t want to be asked for anything. Riddles, I decided. The next day though, I visited my daughter’s apartment. We lunched on nutrition bars from her gym bag and cups of green tea, and as we were saying our goodbyes, my daughter told me much the same thing, and I knew I was going to be fucked.

2

I moved to my parents’ birthplace, Hyderabad, to a small one-bedroom apartment overlooking a thoroughfare with a name I never tried to pronounce. The building had a security guard out front, an old man who sat on a metal folding chair tapping a baton against his boot, and who wore the olive green colors that in America mean the army but in India mean the police, though he was neither. There was a small grim garden with coconut trees at the heart of the building; in the nighttime, monkeys came to scavenge for the food we left out, and the guard dogs chased them up the tree trunks. When I had trouble sleeping, I stepped out onto the veranda and counted the gangs of campfires in the nearby shantytowns.

In the early morning, the daylight had a ragged, astringent, sandy quality. It reminded me somehow of Jerusalem, where I’ve never been but I’m sure that I would like. It would have been nice, perhaps, to marry an Israeli, some great barrel of a man, with a beard and an accent, both as thick as a bearskin rug, someone with military service: a man with a tan who had shot a gun. We might have met in college; he would have been a graduate student, assisting one of my classes; I would visit him during office hours and unconsciously start speaking in his accent; he would think I was mocking him, and from such mirthful misunderstandings our love would begin. He would ask me to become a Jew, and I don’t know if I would, but I know that I would count that day as one of the happiest in my life. (But if a boyfriend had ever asked me to become a Christian, I would have dumped him immediately.)

When I first landed in Hyderabad, I was in a daze. Every aspect of the city was indistinct to me. I had not been here since I was a little girl and I did not believe that I had come back. It had to have taken foresight for me to make the trip—I must have decided to go, must have worried about where to go, must have arranged a visa and bought a ticket—but I could not remember any planning at all. On the flight to India, I kept thinking that each second I needed to make a choice, whether I should stay or whether I should go. It seemed to me that I could always do either, as if I were riding a subway and each second brought a new stop that I could visit or let pass. It felt that way even after landing. As we touched down and our seats shook, I still had not made up my mind where I wanted to go, and once I stepped out from the glossy airport light and found myself back in India, I was astonished, as if I had arrived not after an eighteen-hour flight but on a great cloud of impromptu.

My ex-husband would ring up to taunt me with fake headlines of Indian news—“villagers riot after seeing elephant in short skirt”; “finance minister combats inflation with hunger strike”; “yoga causes cancer.” My mother worried that, at the age of fifty-one, I had been sold into white slavery. She asked her nieces and nephews to look after me; the boys and girls she had coddled had grown into men and women...