The Evening News
by E. Deshpande
Vatsu does not mind when everyone is told to stay inside. Others do: she sees them scream and carry on to reporters on the seven-o’clock news. They brandish signs about freedom and society and haircuts, demanding that the world open up for them.
Vatsu has cut and dyed her own hair since she was a teenager. She has months’ worth of black hair dye stocked in the downstairs bathroom. She is not worried.
She has no need for society. She retreated from it last year when Nikhil died, though if you asked her she would say that society retreated from her. First the acquaintances, the nosy women and that horrible young priest, demanding that she bleach herself into their version of a widow. They complained about her behind her back, then to her face. When neither tactic worked, they ignored her altogether. She prefers it this way. Now that the world has shut down, she does not even have to see them at temple.
Her family hung on a little longer. They felt sorry for her, all alone in Amrika. But she did not feel sorry enough for herself: she refused to come home when they offered, and their pride would never allow them to offer twice. She has not heard from them since all this began. She is waiting for them to call first—she has her pride, too.
Her children would say that they are the only ones who have stayed. They call her at regular intervals, to check in. Hi mom, they say in broad American accents that she still cannot quite believe belong to her children, Just checking in to see how you are.
They used to call once, maybe twice a month, but now that everyone is stuck at home with nothing better to do, they call twice a week. Two calls a week from her three children. Sometimes Vatsu feels as though she spends her entire life on the phone with them, which would not be a bad thing if the calls ever varied. They all list the same updates: work, the food they ate this week, the shows they watched on television. Often they make a remark about the weather on the west coast. Then they ask her what she has done. When they say goodbye, they are all, always, a little too audibly relieved to be done with that day’s filial duty.
Vatsu sees young people visiting their elderly relatives in the lighthearted segment that follows the evening news: from outside their grandparents’ windows, students report their accomplishments and new parents show off infants. Vatsu does not have any grandchildren. All her children are unmarried—her oldest daughter is nearing thirty-five with no sign of settling down. Her sons, both with girlfriends, offer more hope. They always have.
Grandchildren or not, her children make no effort to present themselves at her window. It’s still not safe to fly, they say. And the drive would take days. Besides, where would we stay?
This is the latest in years of excuses. The weather is bad and a friend is getting married and the holidays are coming up so they’ll visit soon, anyway. It’s Nikhil’s fault, even though he’s gone. He drove them away. He drove everyone away, which is why Vatsu is already used to being alone, why she does not mind this state-enforced isolation.
Her children, influenced by their therapeutic Western educations, use words like alcoholic and addiction. In the months after Nikhil passed, they wanted her to get help. Grief counselling, they said. Antidepressants. Support groups.
Vatsu ignored them. Nikhil’s problem was that he got sloppy: he would spill, knock things over, let the car drift up onto the curb.
She stopped letting him drive years ago. She kept the keys hidden in a zippered pocket of her purse where she thought they were safe from his careless eyes. But she underestimated him, because the night it happened, he went through her things and found the keys. She fell asleep in the sitting room to a television program on chocolate factories. A moment of weakness. She woke up as the credits rolled and shuffled sleepily out to an entryway in chaos: coats on the floor, her purse upturned, wallet open on the carpet. Nikhil, gone.
She told the police that she didn’t know why Nikhil went out so late that night, but she did know. They had run dry. Usually restricted to foot travel, he relied on the cheap liquor at the shop a few blocks from their house. He took the car to treat himself to something nice.
Alcohol. The great equalizer. She and Nikhil downed bottle after bottle and pretended they were not spit on, yelled at, accused of invading and stealing jobs. They drank beer from Boston and wine from Napa Valley and finally felt like Americans. American alcohol embraced them the way it embraced everyone else. It did not mind that they were brown immigrants, that their passports weren’t navy blue stamped with a proud golden eagle.
Their children have the passports. They have the accents, which Vatsu and Nikhil could never master no matter how hard they tried. They only had to say hello to receive the fatal question: Where are you from?
Her family never left India. They have no idea what it’s like to live here, in a country that professes to be perfect while it breaks you again and again.
The priest, the women from temple—they could never reconcile their image of her boisterous, warm husband with the headline: Drunk driver dead in car crash. She doesn’t blame them. It was hard for her to reconcile the two versions of Nikhil, and of herself.
But she was always stronger than he was: better at holding in her sadness and her alcohol. She will survive this as she has survived everything else.
The seven-o’clock news is starting soon. Vatsu sits back on the couch, turns up the volume, and pours herself another glass.
Emma Deshpande writes short fiction and is currently at work on two novels. Her work has recently appeared in Passengers Journal and the 2020 anthology More Time. She was shortlisted for the 53rd Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest and won the University College London Publisher's Prize in 2018. She lived in London for four years and now lives in New York City. Her work has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Aspen Words, A Public Space, One Story, and Tin House. You can find her on Instagram @deshpande_writes.