"Are you?" she persisted.
There was a pause. She heard the flicking of a lighter, the first pent-up exhale of a cigarette. "I don't want to be doing this."
"What do you want to do?" she asked, not bothering to conceal her exasperation.
"I'm writing a play."
She was surprised by this information and found it promising that he was actually doing something. He had always been a good writer; once, when he was in high school, he'd written a response to one of the take-home essay questions she had on a philosophy exam at Penn, a question about Plato's Euthyphro that her professor had approved of with a lengthy comment.
She put an olive in her mouth, extracted the thin purple pit, and placed it on a painted dish she and Roger had bought together in Seville. "That's great, Rahul. But you have to study, too." "I want to drop out." "Ma and Baba aren't going to go for that. Finish college and then you can do whatever you want." "I'm sick of wasting time. And I want my car back. I hate not driving. I feel trapped." She controlled herself, not telling him that it was ludicrous to expect their parents to trust him on the road again. "It's just two more years of your life, Rahul. Try to stick it out. Otherwise you'll end up hating yourself." "Jesus, you sound just like them," he said and hung up on her.
She returned to Boston in April, during the break after the Lent term, a diamond ring from Roger concealed on a chain beneath her sweater, and this made her feel dipped in a protective coating from her family. After January her parents had not bothered her again about Rahul, telling her, the one time she asked, that he'd gone back to school. She felt guilty for distancing herself but not enough to counsel her parents, not enough to speak to Rahul. She had a ten-thousand-word dissertation to write on deregulation for her degree, and she had Roger, had moved in with him by then. She was surprised to see Rahul standing at the airport with her parents. All three of them looked sad, preoccupied, her parents perking up only when they caught sight of her behind her trolley piled with bags.
"Hey," she said, walking up to him, hugging him, though initially his long arms remained at his side. "It's good to see you."
"Welcome home," he said, and when he stepped back, she saw that he was not smiling.
"Is your semester finished already?"
He shook his head, still refusing to meet her gaze, and then a small, odd-sounding laugh escaped from him. "I live here now."
She had come home to tell her family about Roger, to tell them she planned to move permanently to London and marry him, but it was Rahul they had to talk about first. During the ride home from the airport she pieced together what had happened. It was her mother who did the talking; her father drove, muttering to himself now and then about the condition of the traffic, and Rahul spent most of the time staring out the window, as if he occupied the back of a cab. Though he returned to Ithaca after Christmas break, he'd stopped going to classes, and two weeks ago, after being formally dismissed from the university, he moved back to Wayland.
From what Sudha could tell, he was living in the house as if it were simply another vacation. He stayed in his room or watched television during the day. Their parents had sold his car, and so he never went out. Previously when he'd avoided them, there was something bristling in him, something about to explode. That energy was missing now. He no longer seemed upset with them, or with the fact that he was at home. For a while her parents told their friends that he was taking a leave of absence and then that he was in the process of transfer ring to BU. "Rahul needs a city in order to thrive," they said; but he never applied to other schools. They told people Rahul was looking for a job, and then the lie became more elaborate, and Rahul had a job, a consulting job from home, when in fact he stayed home all day doing nothing. Their mother, who had always hoped her children would live under her roof, was now ashamed that this was the case.
Eventually he got a job managing a Laundromat in Wayland three days a week. Her parents bought a cheap used car so that Rahul could drive into town. Sudha knew that the job embarrassed her parents. They had not minded him washing dishes in the past, but now they lived in fear of the day someone they knew would see their son weighing sacks of dirty clothes on a scale. Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times.
Sudha was among those successful children now, her collection of higher degrees framed and filling up her parents' upstairs hall. She was working as a project manager for an organization in London that promoted micro loans in poor countries. And she was spoken for. In the summer, she and Roger flew to Massachusetts so that he could meet Sudha's family and ask formally for her hand. At Roger's request they stayed not in Wayland but in a hotel in Boston; by now she knew him well enough to accept that he would maintain a limited exposure to her family, just as he guarded his body, on the beach, from the rays of the sun. "Better to be up front about these things at the start," Roger had told Sudha in his kind but firm way, and she took this as another sign of his responsible nature, his vigilance toward their life together. The hotel arrangement was accepted by her parents without protest; Rahul had stripped them of their capacity to fight back. They accepted that she and Roger planned to have a registry wedding in London, that they were willing to have only a reception in Massachusetts, that Roger had been previously married, that he and Sudha had a fourteen-year gap. They approved of his academic qualifications, his ability, thanks to his wisely invested inheritance, to buy a house for himself and Sudha in Kilburn. It helped that he'd been born in India, that he was English and not American, drinking tea, not coffee, and saying "zed" not "zee," superficial things that allowed her parents to relate to him. Sudha felt that they were not so much making room for Roger in the family as allowing him to take her away. But Rahul had not loosened his grip; he asked Roger questions, combing through the current issue of Roger's art magazine that her parents had admired and set aside, doing his part to inspect his sister's future husband for flaws.
"Roger's a good guy," Rahul told her when the two of them were alone in the kitchen clearing plates. "Congratulations."
"Thanks. Thanks for being here," she said. She meant it; she'd never brought a man to the house, hadn't realized how nervous she'd be.
"Got nowhere else to go."
"So, how are things?" she asked. "It's not driving you crazy, living at home this way?"
"It's not so bad."
She was grateful that he was talking to her, afraid to pressure him. She was aware of a horrible imbalance between them. She felt accused, simply because her life wasn't broken in the same way.
"How's the Laundromat?"
He shrugged.
"Are you still writing your play?"
"It was stupid."
Not knowing what else to do she stepped forward to hug him, and it was then that she smelled the liquor, sweet, strong, unmistakable. During lunch he'd gotten up from the table once; now she realized he'd gone wherever the bottle was hidden. He was not drunk, there was nothing about his behavior to indicate that he'd had more than a single drink. But the fact that he'd consumed the alcohol in stealth, that he could not endure her family's company without it, made her realize that Rahul was not simply fond of drinking, or a social drinker, or a binge drinker, which were all the ways she'd rationalized it until now.
"You're welcome to visit us in London any time," she offered, saddened by the fact that she did not mean it.
"I don't have any money."
"I'm sure Baba would buy you a ticket."
"I don't want his money," Rahul said.
You live in his house, she wanted to point out. You eat the food Ma puts on the table. You let them put gas in your car. But she said none of this, knowing that if she did, the door he tentatively held open for her benefit would slam once more in her face.
In the months before Sudha's wedding reception, planned for the fall, Rahul began dating a woman named Elena. Elena was an aspiring actress, and she was a waitress at a diner in Waltham. He had conveyed these facts to Sudha when she came back to Wayland ten days before the reception, without Roger, who would be flying in for the party alone. "I've never felt this way before, Didi," he told her. A few days before the reception he brought Elena home. Sudha was a married woman now, but being without Roger made her anxious, that protective coating he provided suddenly thinning. Elena was thirty, eight years older than Rahul. But she could have passed for a high school student, wearing tight jeans and a tank top, her long brown hair fastened at one side with a barrette, dark liner rimming her eyes. She was quiet, speaking only when spoken to, not working to charm Sudha's parents as Roger had. She told them she'd grown up in Mattapoisett and had gone to Emerson. She did not eat the rice Sudha's mother served with lunch, saying it caused her bloating. Rahul kept his arm around her thin shoulders, kissing her dreamily in front of everyone. He spoke on Elena's behalf, saying she had once made a commercial for an allergy medicine. He kept mentioning someone named Crystal; it turned out that Crystal was Elena's daughter from a previous boyfriend.
Sudha's parents said nothing as this information was divulged. They had welcomed Elena, filled their table in her honor as they had done for Roger, making chitchat about the Big Dig and the menu for Sudha and Roger's reception. But then, as Sudha and her mother were bringing out tea and a bowl of pantuas in their syrupy bath, Rahul announced that he and Elena were engaged.
Sudha froze behind a chair, gripping the spoons she was in the process of distributing. The room seemed to tilt; she pressed down on the tablecloth as if a forceful wind were about to come and blow everything away. She looked down at the diamond on her finger, imagining the same thing on Elena's hand, wondering where in the world her brother would get the money to buy a ring. The Darjeeling brought out for special occasions grew too strong in the pot, the reddish-brown pantuas still crowded together in their serving bowl.
"That's not possible," their father said finally, breaking the silence that he had been maintaining, it seemed to Sudha, for over a year.
"What's not possible about it?" Rahul asked. He still had an arm around Elena, his index finger stroking the side of her neck.
"You are only a boy. You have no career, no goal, no path in life. You are in no position to be getting married. And this woman," their father said, registering Elena's presence only for an instant before turning away, "is practically old enough to be your mother."
They were even, equilibrium, if it could be called that, restored to the room. But Sudha knew that it was the furthest thing from equilibrium, that in fact it was war.
"You're a snob," Rahul said. "You're nothing but a pathetic old snob." There was no rage in his voice, none of the violence Sudha had expected. He stood up in a fluid motion, seeming to lift Elena to her feet as well, as if his arm were a magnet for her form, and then the two of them left the house. Sudha and her parents waited until they heard the sound of Elena's car backing out of the driveway, and then her mother began to pour the tea.
"I have been thinking," her father said, turning to Sudha, breaking the silence for the second time. "The restaurant where we will have the wedding reception. There is a bar?"
"All restaurants have bars, Baba."
"I am concerned about Rahul. He has no control when it comes to-" He paused, searching for the word he wished to use. "When it comes to that."
Sudha shut her eyes, thinking she might cry. All this time she had been waiting for her parents to acknowledge Rahul's drinking, but hearing her father say it now, after what had just happened, was too much.
"Maybe we should hold it somewhere else," her mother suggested. "Somewhere without drinks."
"It's too late for that. And it's not fair," Sudha said. Sudha and Roger expected to be able to drink at their own wedding reception, she maintained. Why should everyone be punished because of Rahul?
"Can't you ask him not to drink too much that day?" her mother asked.
"No," Sudha said, pushing back her chair and standing up. She had been fiddling all this time with her teaspoon, and she flung it now, ineffectually, on the carpeted floor of the dining room, where it fell without sound. "I can't talk to him anymore. I can't fix him. I can't keep fixing what's wrong with this family," she said, and like her brother only a little while earlier, she stormed out of the room.
During the reception Rahul made a toast. It was a tribute to Sudha and Roger, but Sudha held her breath as he spoke, wanting him only to sit down. He was without Elena. The day after walking out with her he'd returned abject, alone. Sudha wondered if Elena had broken up with him, but she didn't ask. She wondered if Rahul would not attend the reception, but he was at the restaurant an hour early, maintaining his rightful place in the family, greeting people as they arrived, showing them to the sign-in book. They were almost all friends of Sudha's parents, almost all Bengali. No one from Roger's side had come.
The toast went on, the words becoming slurred. Before the reception, her father had spoken with the bartender, paying him extra to monitor Rahul's drinks; Sudha did not have the heart to tell her father that Rahul was beyond such measures, that alcohol dwelled in his pockets where most men's wallets were, that the two glasses of champagne he'd had openly were just for show. Rahul began telling a story about Sudha's childhood, dredging up an anecdote about going on a vacation long ago in Bar Harbor, Sudha needing to use the bathroom and there not being a gas station for miles. Then their father got up, stood next to Rahul, and whispered something in his ear, motioning for him to sit down.
"Excuse me, I'm not finished." People laughed, not realizing Rahul had not meant to be funny, that it wasn't some sort of comic routine. The microphone made a screeching sound.
Their father took him by the elbow then, and Rahul flinched, giving a shove. "You-don't-touch me," Rahul hissed, the words amplified by the microphone.
One of Sudha's parents' friends got up to make another toast, but Sudha didn't hear it. She was aware of guests talking among themselves in front of their plates of pink tandoori and her brother heading toward the bar. When she got up to look for him, he was no longer there, his car missing from the parking lot. She alerted her parents, prepared herself for another call from the police. But no one was in the position to search for him in the middle of the reception, and without him there, perversely, her parents began to relax. Only Sudha couldn't relax. Roger, who had had a little too much champagne himself, told her not to worry. "He's been going through a rough time," he observed dispassionately as he led her on the dance floor. "He's young."
She stared at her husband, wanting to scream at him for believing in Rahul in a way she no longer could. She had never told Roger about the old game of hiding beer cans, a fact that now tortured her. But once again she chose not to tell Roger, fearing that he would blame her, that he would judge Rahul. It was like the painting they'd first looked at together in London, the small mirror at the back revealing more than the room at first appeared to contain. And what was the point of making Roger lean in close, to see what she was already forced to.
It turned out Rahul hadn't gone far, only back to their parents' house, where they found him, at the end of the night, in his bedroom asleep. The following morning Roger and Sudha flew off for their honeymoon. She felt neutralized in the air, sealed off in the cabin, the unnaturally strong sunlight bleaching out the events of the night before, but as soon as they touched down in St. Thomas she felt tainted all over again, hearing Rahul hissing into the microphone, insulting her father and pushing him in front of all their friends. Life went on. Sudha and Roger returned to London, settling into their new house, writing cards to thank their guests for helping to make it such a special day. But Sudha could not forgive Rahul for what had happened, those dreadful minutes he stood at the microphone the only thing she remembered when she looked at the photographs of her reception, all the posed portraits on the grass in which they were smiling, leading up to that.
And then he disappeared for good. There was no note, no explanation. He simply left one night, her parents said, and had not returned. By then his comings and goings were so erratic that their parents had not fully absorbed the fact of his absence until a few days had passed. Then they realized that his toothbrush was not in the bathroom, and that one of the big suitcases normally used for trips to India was not in the basement. He must have decided to visit a friend, her parents said, but they knew none of Rahul's new friends and were unable to make calls. They reported that the car was missing, and it was located the next day, abandoned at the bus station in Framingham. Roger, trying to be helpful, suggested they contact Elena, but they had never known Elena's last name.
After a week a letter came, with a postmark from Columbus, Ohio. It was not addressed to anyone; he had not even put their family surname on the envelope. "Don't bother looking for me here," he'd written, "I'm only spending the night. I don't want to hear from any of you. Please leave me alone." They wondered how he got to Ohio, since he had no money, wondered if he'd hitched rides. A week passed before her mother noticed that the small zippered pouches she kept hidden at the backs of her drawers, behind her jumble of British brassieres, containing all the gold jewels she'd acquired over her lifetime, all the pieces representative of her husband's success in America, much of which was intended to go to whatever woman Rahul eventually married, were missing.
He had been gone two months when Sudha discovered that she was pregnant; one night during her miserable honeymoon, her body had begun to make a life. Suddenly alongside the terrible there was now the wonderful, the good news reviving her parents. Sudha thought of Rahul often during her pregnancy, invaded by memories and dreams of their childhood, recalling the existence that had produced them both, an experience that was both within her and behind her and that Roger would never understand. In her first trimester her emotions dipped and soared without warning. On good days she believed that Rahul needed to get away in order to put his life back together. On bad days she feared that the police would call her parents saying his body had been found in a ditch. He was absent the following Christmas, which Sudha and Roger spent in Wayland, absent at the hospital in London the night she gave birth to Neel. And she got used to it, used to having a brother she never saw.
Wrapped up with Neel, her parents got used to it, too, coming to London now at every opportunity, their tiny grandson plugging up the monstrous hole Rahul left in his wake. For hours they stared into the bassinet, at the stern downy creature with Roger's pale skin and Sudha's dark hair and a destiny all his own. After a few months Sudha returned to work, first three days a week, then five, leaving the house at eight thirty and returning at six, taking Neel from the nanny and spending just two hours with him, first in the bath and then nursing him to sleep in the rocker. She felt awful, always, that it was for such a brief piece of her day that she actually cared for Neel, but she reminded herself that he was too young to resent her for it, his face lighting up at the sight of her, leaping into her arms as if she were the most wonderful being on earth.
It was then, at a time when her life was at its most demanding and also gratifying, that she returned home one cold Saturday from grocery shopping and found, on the other side of the door slot, an envelope from America addressed in Rahul's hand.
She stood in the entryway of the house, with the brownand- gold wallpaper she and Roger kept meaning to tear down, staring at that simple but certain proof of Rahul's existence. She wondered how he'd gotten her new address, but then she remembered, when she was home for her wedding reception, writing it on a piece of paper and taping it to her parents' refrigerator. Neel napped in his stroller, not knowing the existence of his uncle, not knowing the shock that filled his mother's eyes with tears. There was a faded postmark from New York, and on the back of the envelope, a post office box somewhere upstate. Before opening the envelope she pulled out an atlas. The town was north of Ithaca. She was stunned- she had assumed he'd gone as far as possible, to Oregon or California. She never thought he'd want to return anywhere near the place where he'd so spectacularly failed. Inside was a single sheet of paper that he'd stuck into a typewriter.
Dear Didi, I hope this is you. First, I want to say that I'm sorry. For everything. I know I screwed up, but things are better now. I have a job at a restaurant, as a line cook. I discovered that I really like cooking. Nothing fancy, but I've gotten really good at omelettes. Also, I'm writing another play. I showed it to someone I met here, a guy who's directed some things at Syracuse, and he said it still needs work but that I should stick with it! I'm living with Elena-remember her? We got back together and I convinced her to come up here. Crystal's in fifth grade and Elena got a job doing human resources at the university. Think what you will about Elena, but she got me to start rehab. So like I said, things are better. Anyway, I'm sorry for everything and I hope you (and Roger) can forgive me for being a jerk at your wedding. I really am happy for you guys. And I'd like to come to London and see you, if that's okay. I've saved up some money and I'll have a little time off from the restaurant this summer. I'm assuming you won't mention any of this to our parents.
Rahul She replied immediately, without rereading the letter or bothering to ask Roger if it was all right for Rahul to stay with them. She tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook they kept by the phone, for messages, and wrote: Dear Rahul, Yes, it's me. I've had a baby, a boy named Neel. He's ten months old, and I want you to meet him.
She stopped, then signed the letter. She had nothing more to say.
She had not seen Rahul since her wedding night, a fact that was incredible to her. "Hi, Didi," he said when she opened the door, still using the traditional term of respect their parents had taught him. She felt no awkwardness, the sight of him after over a year and a half standing under the portico of the house, completing a part of her that had been missing, like the clothes she could wear again now that the weight of her pregnancy was gone.
"Here he is," she said to Rahul, adjusting Neel in her arms. Neel stuck out a hand, his fingers gripping a digestive biscuit. He babbled softly, taking in the new person in front of him.
"That's right," Rahul said, stroking Neel's cheek with the back of his index finger. "It's your screwup uncle finally here to see you." He shook his head in disbelief, acquainting himself with the details of Neel's face, the nose and eyes and mouth and wisps of hair that Sudha felt she'd known all her life. It was Rahul who'd changed. He'd put on weight, enough so that his once refined features appeared common, his neck and waistline thick. He had acquired the stoop of an older, uncertain man. His hair was combed back from his head, receding above the temples, the sideburns long. His jeans had lost their stiffness, frayed at the hems. The pin-striped blazer looked like it had come from a thrift store and was a little short in the sleeves.
"I can't believe you were born and I didn't know it. You're absolutely perfect," he said to Neel. He looked at Sudha, then Neel, then back at Sudha. "He's got your face, totally."
"You think? I see Roger's."
Rahul shook his head. "No way, Didi. This boy is a Mukherjee through and through."
She gave him a tour of the house: the kitchen and a small toilet in the basement, the parlor above, two bedrooms and a bathroom above that, Roger's study under the eaves. In spite of all the stories the house was diminutive, and they were constantly going up and down the staircase, which these days Neel was also attempting to climb. The steps were too much for Sudha's father, who had recently developed bursitis in his knee, and when her parents last visited London they'd stayed with friends in the suburbs. But Roger had agreed to let Rahul sleep on the daybed normally covered with papers in the study.
"Feel free to take a nap," she told Rahul, but he declined, coaxing Neel into his arms and not letting go as Sudha peeled potatoes and prepared to roast a chicken. He took in the lowceilinged space, with its black-and-white checkerboard floor, a perpetually cluttered dining table, Spode plates and copper molds hung on yellow walls. Roger had painted the walls himself, the final layer applied with a sponge. Rahul stopped in front of some shelves where the cookbooks were, along with photographs in frames. Most of the photos were of Neel: in the hours after his birth, in the arms of Sudha's parents, sitting in his stroller outside of the house. There were no pictures of Rahul. "When was this taken?" he asked.
"Which?"
"It looks like an annaprasan."
"Oh that," she said, pricking a fork into a lemon, thinking back to the day Neel was fed his first meal a few months before, her parents flying to London for the occasion. "It was just a tiny thing at home," she told him, as if that would explain away Rahul's absence. It was the maternal uncle who traditionally fed the child. In Neel's case it had been Sudha's father.
He crossed the floor to where she stood at the butcher block and removed his wallet from his back pocket. With one hand he shook it so that it displayed a school portait of a smiling young girl with freckles and two long brown ponytails. "This is Crystal," he said proudly, explaining that he arranged to be home every day when Crystal got home from school, making her a snack and then cooking her dinner before Elena returned and he went off to his shift at the restaurant. He didn't pull out a picture of Elena but Sudha remembered her clearly from that one time she'd come to lunch. Sudha didn't ask Rahul if he and Elena had gotten married, if they were going to have a child of their own. Sudha had tried to help her brother but it was Elena who had succeeded. "She's a great kid," he said, before putting away Crystal's picture. "I thought I'd get her a little tea set, you know, something really English? She'd love that."
He lifted Neel into the air, shaking him playfully, rubbing his face against Neel's belly, Neel cackling hysterically.
"Careful," Sudha warned.
Rahul obliged, stopping the game and hugging Neel tightly, then beginning to tickle him so that the cackles started up again. "Relax, Didi. I'm a parent too, now."
Sudha and Roger had white wine with dinner, but Rahul had asked only for club soda mixed with some orange juice. They ate outside, at a small table on the garden patio, overlooking the rosebushes that thrived in spite of Sudha and Roger's neglect. She had wondered about the wine, whether or not to drink it in front of Rahul. There were a few bottles of Scotch and vodka in their kitchen cabinets left over from a housewarming party she and Roger had thrown, and she stuffed them into the back of her closet and into the sweater chest at the foot of their bed, telling herself that Roger would never notice. Neel sat in Rahul's lap, eating small dollops of mashed potato from Roger's extended finger.
"First time in London, is it?" Roger asked Rahul.
"Apart from sitting in Heathrow dozens of times on the way to Calcutta," Rahul said, and Sudha was reminded of all those trips they'd taken together in childhood to see their relatives, trips that would never take place again. They had slept beside one another on the same bed, often bathed together, taken everything in with one pair of eyes.
Rahul mentioned things he wanted to see in the course of the week-the British Museum, Freud's house, the V&A- asking if it was possible to go to Stratford-upon-Avon for the day. He seemed suddenly desperate to interact with the world, after all those years of sitting up in his room. Roger told him when the museums were open, what was currently on exhibit, and it struck Sudha how little her husband and her brother were acquainted, that they remained all but strangers. "Mainly I want to spend time with Neel," Rahul said. "I can take him out to a park or a zoo, whatever."
Sudha told Rahul to enjoy himself, that Neel spent the days with a nanny, but that in the evening his nephew would be all his.
"So, when's the next one?" Rahul asked, draping Neel over his legs, jiggling them up and down.
"Next what?" Roger asked.
"The next kid."
"Have you been talking to Ma?" Sudha said, beginning to laugh before abruptly stopping herself.
"What do you want, buddy?" Rahul asked, looking down at Neel's upturned face. "A little brother like me, or a sister?
Now that the subject of their parents had come up she decided to give Rahul their news, that their father was retiring at the end of the year and that their parents were shopping for a flat in Calcutta. "That's where they are now," she said.
"They're not in Wayland?"
"No." It was a fact that had made it easier for Sudha to honor Rahul's request and not tell her parents about his visit.
"Are they moving back for good?"
"Maybe." She told him about their father's knee trouble, that he was going to have surgery to have fluid drained. One day, she knew, it would be something more serious, and when it came, as long as Rahul stayed away, she would have to be an only child all over again.
After dinner Roger put away the leftovers while Sudha went upstairs to run Neel's bath. Rahul came with her, sitting on the toilet and blowing some bubbles he'd brought for Neel as she crouched on the floor and soaped and rinsed him. Neel was ecstatic about the bubbles, waiting wide-eyed for each to emerge from the little plastic wand, reaching out and popping them and calling out for more.
"Okay, little guy, time for bed," she said after a few minutes, lifting the rubber plug and letting the water drain out out of the claw-foot tub. She reached for Neel's towel, throwing it over her shoulder and lifting him out. She wrapped him up, scrubbing his head. "Say goodnight to Mamu," she said.
"What does he call them?" Rahul asked.
"Who?"
"Our parents."
She hesitated, though the answer was not something she had to search for. "Dadu and Dadi."
"Just like we did," he said, his voice softening. "I bet they treat you like a king," he said to Neel.