Chapter 1: Tallulah

The bus from Mumbai dropped me in Hogwada at six-seventeen AM on a Tuesday, and the first thing I noticed was that nobody had fixed the pothole outside Sharma General Store. Three years in Mumbai — three years of auditions and callbacks and the specific, relentless humiliation of being told you're almost right but not quite — and the pothole was still there. Same shape. Same depth. Same muddy water collecting in it after the rains. Hogwada did not change. That was either its charm or its curse, depending on whether you were arriving or leaving.

I was arriving. Again. With a single suitcase and a phone full of messages from my sister Kamini and a career that had peaked at a thirty-second appearance in a Vim dishwash commercial where I played a woman who was impressed by how clean her plates were. The commercial ran for two months. My mother recorded it. She played it for every guest who came to the house, pausing at the exact frame where my face was visible and saying, "That's my Tara. In Mumbai. Acting."

Acting. The word had different meanings depending on who said it. In Mumbai, acting meant craft, audition, struggle, survival. In Hogwada, acting meant my mother's eldest daughter had left a perfectly good town with a perfectly good degree in commerce and had gone to the city to pretend to be someone else and had come back pretending to be fine.

I was not fine. But Hogwada did not need to know that. Hogwada needed to know that Tara Kulkarni was back, temporarily, to help her sister run the family chai shop on Main Road, and that the temporary would become permanent the way all temporary things in Hogwada became permanent — slowly, then suddenly, then so completely that you forgot you had ever planned to leave.

The chai shop was called Kulkarni's Kadak Chai. It had been my father's before the heart attack, my mother's before the arthritis, and now it was Kamini's — Kamini who was twenty-three and who ran a chai shop with the same fierce competence with which she ran everything: school plays, college festivals, the annual Ganpati decoration committee. Kamini did not fail at things. She succeeded at them loudly and expected you to applaud.

"Tara-didi!" She was at the shop door at six-twenty, which meant she had been watching for the bus, which meant she had been awake since five, which meant she had already made the first batch of chai and swept the floor and arranged the steel tumblers and done all the things that I should have been here to help with for the past three years.

"Kamini."

She hugged me. The specific, full-body, Kulkarni-women hug that was part affection and part assessment — she was checking if I'd lost weight, gained weight, changed in ways that a hug could detect. "You're thin," she said into my shoulder. "Mumbai didn't feed you."

"Mumbai fed me. I just couldn't afford what it was serving."

"Same thing." She pulled back. Looked at me. Her eyes did the thing that Kamini's eyes always did — moved fast, taking inventory, cataloguing details the way a shopkeeper catalogues stock. "Your hair is different."

"I cut it for an audition."

"Which one?"

"The one I didn't get."

She nodded. Kamini did not waste sympathy on things that had already happened. Sympathy was for the present; the past was inventory — you counted it, shelved it, moved on. "Come inside. Chai's ready. Appa's photo needs new flowers. And we need to talk about Vikrant."

"Who's Vikrant?"

"The sub-inspector. You remember Vikrant Patil? Chikki-wala's son? The one who stole Tripathi-sir's scooter in tenth standard?"

"The delinquent?"

"He's a cop now. Sub-inspector. Posted here six months ago. He comes for chai every morning at seven-fifteen. Two cups. Extra ginger. He tips twenty rupees every time, which is either generous or suspicious and I haven't decided which."

"Why do I need to know this?"

"Because he asked about you. Twice. And because he's — different. Not tenth-standard different. Grown-up different. The kind of different that makes you want to check if you're wearing your good kurta."

"I just got off a bus, Kamini. I'm wearing the same clothes I've been wearing for fourteen hours."

"Then change. He'll be here in fifty-five minutes."

The chai shop smelled the way it had always smelled: of ginger and cardamom and the specific, deep, smoky-sweet scent of tea leaves being boiled in milk on a gas stove that had been running since four-thirty AM. The smell was home. Not the house — the house was four streets away, with Amma and the television and the framed Vim commercial screenshot. The smell of chai was the home that preceded the house, the home that existed before memory, the smell that meant Appa was alive and the shop was open and the world was functioning.

Appa's photo was on the wall behind the counter. Garlanded. The fresh marigolds that Kamini replaced every morning — orange, the petals already wilting in the heat, the flowers that Indian shopkeepers hung on the photographs of dead fathers because death did not end the partnership, it just made one partner silent. I touched the frame. The glass was warm from the stove's heat. Appa looked the way he always looked in this photograph — fifty-three, moustache, the specific, proud, serious expression of a Marathi man who owned a chai shop and who believed that chai was not a beverage but a civic duty.

"He'd be happy you're home," Kamini said.

"He'd be happy I failed and came home. He never wanted me to go."

"He wanted you to do what you wanted. He just also wanted you here. Both things were true."

"Both things are always true in this family."

"That's because this family is Maharashtrian. We contain multitudes and we don't discuss them. Now drink your chai before it gets cold."