Lovetorn Read Online Free PDF Page B

one of the new hip-hop–inspired Hindi tunes that were all the rage in India. But now, with these soulful songs playing in the background, I was overcome by homesickness, something that took me a few minutes to define because I had never felt it before. In the still quiet of the night, with only the occasional sound of a car whooshing by outside, I longed profoundly to be back at a house where two sleepy old men stood guard outside beneath a dusky sky, chewing betel leaves wrapped around areca nuts and gossiping about the neighbors.
    My father hadn’t had much of a chance to talk about his new job before this. Everything had happened so fast: the offer, the plans, the departure. He had flown to Los Angeles, gotten everything set up, flown back to bring us. In all the chaos of the transition, we hadn’t had a chance to hear anything about this man who had changed our lives, who had taken me away from a boy who had loved me since I was an infant. Jeremy Tucker helped big companies plan technology, had needed someone skilled in Core Java and J2EE middleware. And in hiring my father, he had wrested me away from the life I had known. My father was the only one of six brothers not to be in my grandfather’s textile business. The only way Dada and my father had come to any sort of peace over the departure was because my father had promised to return to India when this was all over in a couple of years.
    “Was it a good day for you, Papa?” I asked now, resting my head on my shoulder. “Do you like it there?”
    “Yes,” he said, his eyes shining. “I will be working with a new client, an important insurance company. I am confident things will go well. Really, I am very lucky to be here.”
    My mother let out a little grunt and went back to her newspaper.
    Apart from the music, it was quiet for a moment. It was morning in India. Vikram would soon be on his way home from his grandfather’s. He’d be calling me in the morning. I could predict his actions like clockwork.
    “Papa, tell me again,” I said, breaking the silence.
    “Tell you what, beta ?” he asked.
    “About the day that everything happened. With Vikram. My third birthday.”
    My father sighed deeply. I’d heard the story a hundred times but never tired of it. And I needed to hear it right now, like a newborn needs to nurse at a second’s notice. I needed the comfort, the distraction. The details were etched in my mind: how my father had been best friends with Vikram’s father, Uncle Bhushan, for thirty years—from boyhood. They’d met when they were ten, two scrawny and bespectacled boys sitting on top of the brick wall that stood between their homes tossing tiny pebbles into the street. That wall was the only thing that stood between them. They had crammed for exams together; and when my father had his first college crush, Bhushan had been the only person he had told. During religious festivals, my father would finish family prayers at home and then climb over the wall to Bhushan’s house. They had gotten married within eleven days of each other. Uncle Bhushan and his wife, Aunty Bharati, had their first child—my Vikram—within a year. I had come along three years later. At my Namkaran—naming ceremony—when the priest whispered Shalini in my ear, thus giving me my name, Vikram had held my tiny fingers in his pudgy hand. Forty days after I was born, when there was the customary ceremony before my mother was allowed to take me out of the house for the first time, we had gone to visit Uncle Bhushan and Aunty Bharati. They had moved an hour away by then; but my father likes to tell me that, after crying in the car the entire trip, once I’d heard Vikram’s voice, I had been instantly soothed.
    “That was something, the day of your third birthday,” my father said now, a look of nostalgia crossing his face. I pulled the blanket tighter around me. “Fifty children playing inside the house. It was crazy. I went outside to the garden for some