27. Maybe You’re Going to Dubai? - Lords of Serendipity

Devi folded the final draft of her letter to the vice chancellor of Arcadia and slipped it into the back pocket of her blue jeans. She pulled down her black blouse so no one could see the paper. She checked her phone. She walked to the front of the house and waited. Now that Ammi was working at the hotel with Devi’s brothers, it was just her and Thathi and Achchi at home at night—until, in whatever order it happened, Thathi passed out, Devi went out, and Achchi fell asleep.

Devi!

Yes, Thathi?

Where are you just now?

Here, Thathi.

He leaned and looked.

Standing near the front door, she could see his head but not the rest of him. She didn’t need to. She knew he was sitting at the table in the kitchen with his bottle and glass, surrounded by his papers—piles and piles held together by the dirty rubber bands he took from the newspaper bundles thrown in front of the main-road lottery stall, at least on the days he was still awake in the bruised blue light before morning. Always drinking and planning his next moves, these days. He’d sometimes still be awake when Ammi and Devi’s brothers returned from the city to wash and go to sleep, Ammi getting up soon after to prepare breakfast and begin the day’s cleaning—of everything except the kitchen, which Thathi was presently treating as his operational command and deliberative chambers. At present, he was preparing to sue the United States of America for wrongful dismissal from his hotel job. He was also considering offers from three employment agents who wanted to interview Devi for vague but paying positions in Dubai.

Where are you going, Devi?

To the library, Thathi.

The village library—a corrugated-steel bunker that housed wooden crates of cracked paperback novels and stained children’s books brought over by a village boy who had worked at a nearby beachside hotel—had closed during the pandemic and never reopened. Her father had no idea. Or, Devi had come to understand, any good ideas at all.

Where is your ammi?

Working, Thathi.

My wife, working? Why? Where?

Achchi dashed out from her bedroom.

You drunk devil! You bloody know where my poor daughter is working and why! Why? Because of you! You think I raised her to clean yaka American toilets?

Devi! Take your mother’s mother away from my hearing before I get up from my chair and do it myself.

No, please no, Thathi, she said. I beg you, please, let me help.

She pleaded in a flat, dead voice, a practiced voice her father was too drunk to notice and her grandmother, too angry.

On cue, Thathi got up from the table and swayed in the threshold, nodding and cursing while Devi walked back through the house and put her arms around her grandmother’s chicken-joint shoulders. She led her behind the thin curtain separating their shared hallway bedroom from the rest of the house. Devi eased her onto the cot, found one of Achchi’s royals magazines and placed it on her lap, and took down a small burlap bag of sweets hanging from the ceiling. She looked inside. Mostly wrappers, chewed foil, and droppings. Because of Thathi’s taking it over, the family had been eating meals away from the dirty kitchen, and the mice had followed. How long, Devi wondered, before Achchi discovered the mice were getting into her chocolate, the thin squares meant for pillow tops that Ammi brought home now and then from the hotel. Did Thathi ever get such chocolates before he was fired? Why didn’t he bring them home? He must have eaten them himself, every time.

Devi knew that when Achchi figured out that mice were eating her chocolate, despite her keeping it in a burlap sack hanging from the rafter, she would goad Old Mr. Garandiya from his coconut-shell lair beside the kitchen, into the house. The rat snake would hunt and feast. And her father, who had been openly warring with his mother-in-law for as long as Ammi had been working at the hotel, would assume the snake was coming for him, and then Thathi would finally become truly dangerous to others, not just to Devi.

But hopefully she would already be in America by then, drinking boba tea on Arcadia’s famous beach, which she had learned about on a Reddit.

She checked her phone. She didn’t want to be late for her secret appointment. She found an unbitten half of a chocolate square and gave it to Achchi.

Achchi took her by the wrist.

Child, I don’t care if you go to dollar job in Dubai or go to university of Oxen or Cane Britch, just marry a good man, will you? Not like your mother! She married a bad man. A bad man! Can you hear me? Bad man!

No! I can’t hear you! Because I have your stupid luckless wedding cakes stuffed in my ears! Which did nothing! They all said no to her!

I wish my daughter had said no to you!

Go to bloody hell and say hello to your own mother when you get there!

Making her voice tremble, Devi told them she would leave the house right away if they didn’t stop.

They stopped.

Devi, darling, please, said Achchi. Will you please do this for your Achchi: marry a good man so that I can die in sadness only about my daughter, not about my granddaughter also?

Devi nodded and smiled and closed the curtain to the room while her grandmother kept muttering and cursing and nibbling chocolate, studying pictures of the royal family walking to church. Achchi tapped Prince William’s face with a crooked finger and wiped her watery eyes.

Devi went to the kitchen. The sink was full of dishes. There were oily food containers and crushed newspapers on the floor beside the cracked garbage box and broken rice cooker. A curled ribbon of fly tape hung in the center of the room, beside the naked lightbulb. The gray-green tape swinging slowly above Thathi was studded with black flies, most of them dead. He was sitting at the table, turning and turning a glass of arak in place beside a near-empty bottle, his forearms pressing against bundles of paper. To his side were a hotel pen and notepad covered in words, figures, and diagrams of bathrooms.

A few days after Thathi and Devi went to the British high commissioner’s office in vain, he began his nightly drinking. Not that he hadn’t always enjoyed a good drink, but this was different. After Devi was rejected by all the Ochpys schools, he began drinking at morning and at a night, at home and at the hotel. He lost his job after he showed up to clean a guest’s toilet and threw up all over the bathroom floor. And then used the guest’s bath towels to clean himself. And then waited for his tip. Ammi had been hired under a different surname, but the hiring manager knew who she was because it was Devi’s brothers who had first asked him to consider her. He was taking a healthy cut of her pay. The family wasn’t being called for funeral work as much, either. Of late they were crying too much.

Devi had to get out of this.

I’ll go and come to the library just now, okay?

Where are you going?

I just said, Thathi, that I’m going—

Maybe you’re going to Dubai?

I don’t want to go to Dubai, Thathi.

One of these days I’m going to select an agent.

Okay, Thathi.

Her father was never going to select an agent. Because then what would he do between all the sips and curses of his new life?

And where are you going, now? he asked her.

She waited, eyes closed, for him to answer his own question.

Where are you going? Because I know where you’re not going, Devi. Here are all the places Devi is not going, after I gave everything I had to help her!

She left the house to his ragged screaming.

Devi is not going to Oxford! Cambridge! Harvard! Princeton! Yale! Samford! Ochpys! Ochpys!

She closed the front gate behind her. The long-shuttered library was down the village lane to the right.

Dry-eyed, Devi went down the village lane to the left. The sinister side. Thank you, Oxford English Dictionary. Menaka Aunty’s house.