A Short Story For You

Here's a memento left from my India-obsessed days.

Tokens of Love

She could hear the baby crying in the next room over the abandoned sports announcer. Indira rolled off the edge of the bed and slipped on her flip-flops. Motilal had already headed off to the university where he taught and researched Biology, leaving the television on, his dirtied plate on the table, and a half-empty teacup on the table by the door. His flip-flops sat on the floor beneath the teacup where he had switched into his brown lace-ups before heading to work. She noticed these things off-handedly as she went to comfort fussy Lilia, but they were only marks of his absence rather than irritants to her. In Calcutta, she would not have had to stay home alone while Motilal was at work. She would have been surrounded by her mother and sisters. But his family had dreams for him to pursue an education not available to him in Calcutta, so shortly after their marriage she had packed her one large suitcase of belongings and boarded a plane towards Boston.

That plane ride had been one of the first times Indira and Motilal had really talked and gotten to know one another. Their marriage, like all the marriages in their families, had been arranged by their parents, and they had hardly known each other before she had sat in her living room answering questions posed by his parents. They had been matched, and then wed in an extravagant ceremony with beautiful saris and ornate hair. But all of these things, traditional or not, had felt so impersonal to Indira. She enjoyed much more sitting next to him on the humming plane discussing everything from their new lives in Boston to their childhoods at home in Calcutta.

She shuffled through the living room cradling Lilia as she bent to turn off the television with the remote on the side-table. Then she took the abandoned teacup and breakfast plate to the kitchen and sat them next to the sink, promising herself to come back to them before Motilal returned home. She noticed a clean cup on the counter and the teapot still sitting on the stove. She lifted it to survey its contents. It was thoughtful moments like this that Indira knew they were beginning to fall in love. He had thought of her as he prepared for his day and left her warm tea and a cup to pour it in. The small things still stuck out to her.

She had wondered at first whether she could ever love the scruffy, bearded man who sat across from her in her parent’s living room on that day of courting. He had not been her favorite suitor, but she played very little part in the decision making. Still, she did not protest. He was very friendly to her throughout the process, and the wedding had gone smoothly. Even their first week together was not completely uncomfortable because there was something charming and understanding about him. Even when he told her of his plans to move to Boston, she thought she sensed a slight fear in his voice of displeasing her.

But after a little more than a year together, half a year in American, and even less than that with Lilia around, she felt like she was growing closer to Motilal and approaching the love that she saw in her parents, however concealed it may have been most of the time. She missed her family and Calcutta, of course, but she finally had a family of her own. And it was the small things, a token left here or there, that promised her that her new home would one day be filled with love, no matter where it was located on the map.