Though Diya’s mother remained ever-present, taking up permanent residence in the back of her mind, her grandmother quickly absorbed the shock of the physical departure, provided a soft landing in many conspicuous ways. Hers was a terrifying type of devotion: one you could spend your entire life on, twice, even as the person you loved never really came into focus, not within the parameters you’d set. Her grandmother bought a secondhand set of Good Housekeeping cookbooks and several pairs of loose-fitting blouses and slacks. She began making mac and cheese, tuna casseroles, and brownies that melted in the mouth, keeping solely to the ingredients and method listed, never deviating to make any dish more palatable in the ways Diya sensed she knew how. They play-acted her grandmother’s imagined version of normalcy, the childhood and then teenhood her grandmother gathered from TV and movies that Diya’s peers were getting. Soccer leagues, piano lessons, Christmas trees and Halloween costumes, barbecues, school dances and sleepovers, the whole deal. Being abandoned by a parent was difference enough, Diya suspected; her grandmother didn’t know or dare to test how much farther their local community’s tolerance extended.
And yet, in a corner of the pantry, her grandmother kept an altar where Diya would find her in the mornings, palms clasped, summoning her gods. The incense smoke would waft out, leaving apparitions to dissipate in the kitchen. While grabbing her box of cereal, Diya would study the gods’ and goddesses’ faces, trying to stir a dormant sensation, the legacies embedded within her that had been pulled just out of her grasp. The faces were haughty and unreachable, an expression Diya always imagined her mother wearing though it wasn’t an image from memory.
There were other times, too, that her grandmother’s facade dropped, just as it did when she was praying, when an old and deeply-rooted superstition would creep into a situation unbidden, the pull to appease the fear of misfortune so strong that her grandmother could not help but command, sit down and wait, you just sneezed, or no no no, don’t pass the salt into my hand. And Diya would walk back from the door she was just about to walk out of, or set the salt back on the table, or throw it over her left shoulder after spilling it, thinking, here we are still feeding all these ghosts.
*
Before Diya walked back to the main road to meet the car the photojournalist was sending for her, she turned around and looked again at the woman’s house. I’m leaving now, thank you, she called out, but the woman didn’t reappear. The empty water bottle and plate of crumbs and phone remained on the porch, and Diya could make out the tread of her own sneakers tracing a path to the house and away from it. She got out her camera and took a picture.
Back at her hotel, she found herself in an overtired state that left her pacing the short distance from her bed to the balcony, pausing every so often to gaze out the open doors onto the glittering buildings below. Around 4 am she fell asleep for a short while, fitfully, waking not soon after with the rising sun. On opening her eyes she was still half in the dream she’d been having, coming into wakefulness but trying to dwell in the space her subconscious had constructed.
What her brain had erected was an exact facsimile of the house of the woman who’d helped her. But the dream crept farther than reality had allowed: Diya had entered the home and found a vast courtyard, far larger than the house’s exterior suggested. The courtyard was lined by a riot of greenery, short palms, date and banana trees laden with fruit, bougainvillea and jasmine rising up the house’s pillars, marigolds, roses, and hibiscus so bright they seemed to imprint on the backs of her eyelids. Beyond the foliage were a number of people which the dream told her were the woman’s family members, all of whom were joyful: radiant in the abundance, picking fruits or flowers, reading dog-eared books, eating biscuits on faded blankets, or engaging in spirited conversation with one another. The woman left Diya’s side to blend seamlessly into this tableau, back in place with her large, happy, extended family, while Diya edged closer, waiting for a stray smile to be thrown her way, a beckoning hand to wave her over.