Tulip Season (5 page)

Oh, no, it was Adi, dressed in a worn polo shirt, and looking slightly upset. He wasn't resting at home, after all. Accompanying him was a blonde who wore rather festive, crystal-accented chandelier earrings.

Should Mitra approach Adi, point out his lying?

It might have to do with the bleeding strawberries on their plates, but she felt sick in her stomach, nausea and a rumbling. She had no choice but to dash out.

On the way to the door, she knocked over a chair, which she put back in its place, so embarrassed to make a racket that her hands shook. Then she almost collided head-on with an Indian man who had just entered the shop. Young, dark, and devastatingly handsome, he had all the bones stacked just right, as Mitra's mother would put it. Clad smartly in a silver woolen vest, this prince headed straight for the take-out counter. His impressive carriage and smoldering eyes caused a stir among women patrons seated nearby. A college student-type tried to catch his glance. He touched the jute bag, an Indian-style
jhola
, dangling from his shoulder, in a practiced gesture.

Mitra slipped out the door, too drained to absorb anything further. After taking a deep breath, she hopped into her car, and peeled out onto the road.
Please, Goddess Durga, get me home in one piece.

It drizzled but mercifully traffic was light. Within minutes, she pulled into her garage. As she stepped out of her Honda, her mind flashed on the enchanting prince from the café.

Hadn't Veen mentioned that Kareena was last sighted with a handsome
jhola-
carrier at that very spot?

Adrenaline shot through Mitra's body. Why couldn't she have been more alert? Stuck around longer to scrutinize Kareena's mysterious companion?

Should she drive back? Her watch said 9 P.M. Soirée had just closed.

Filled with nervous excitement, she entered her house. Neither the hot shower she took, nor the mug of holy basil tea she drank, tempered the anxious thoughts racing through her head. What really had happened to Kareena?

* * *

The next morning, Mitra stepped outside to get the newspaper. It hadn't arrived yet. The morning light shone on her front flower bed. An errant branch of camellia needed to be pruned. Its shadow stole sunlight from her plants. A stray buttercup had established itself at the base of a velvety coleus. She pulled the buttercup and threw it onto an impromptu compost heap, she'd just started. Next, she noticed the prolific clovers, threatening to overtake part of the space occupied by the tulips. Suddenly angry, she bent over and grasped a handful of the clover blossoms by their throats. Her muscles tensing, the blossoms practically bleeding on her fingers from the tight grip, she pulled and pulled them and tossed them into the compost pile. How dare they invade Kareena's tulips? Mitra wouldn't allow it. She refused to let them win.

With the weeds gone and blank spots in the soil staring up at her, she inspected her beloved tulips closer, an ache in her belly. All their buds were shriveled and brown, as though singed by blight, the dried stalks drooping over to return to brown earth.

Why were they dying on her so soon?

She fell to her knees and caressed the plants, lifting a wilted leaf to examine it, and squeezing its brittle stalk. She rolled each wizened bud between her fingers, but failed to find a single one with any hope.

With a pebble in her throat, she brooded about the broken promise of these tulips and reflected on Kareena, so vibrant, so full of life.

EIGHT

THE NEXT MORNING,
Mitra sat down to a breakfast of steaming whole grain cereal, soy milk, and maple syrup. The kernels were soft and puffy, promising a satisfying fullness in her belly. Ulrich's dense face and wary green gaze floated in her mind. She finished only half of the bowl, losing her hunger thinking about him, and dumped the rest into the kitchen compost bucket.

On the evening she'd first met him at a fancy modern ice cream parlor, the place was packed, so packed that she had decided to head for the exit. She heard someone at a table calling her name. Carrie, a former neighbor, sat at a crammed communal table for eight. “Come sit with us. There's an extra chair.”

She introduced Mitra to her friend, Ulrich, first names only. Mitra got her parfait and joined them.

On her own, she might not have noticed this brooding man, with a round face and a neat haircut. His eyes were a tame tortured green. He seemed quiet and content, aloof from the clamor of the scene and blending into the bone-white walls. Fit enough to suggest narrow hips, he was dressed in a wool-knit sports jacket. Speaking above the cello music that poured from the sound system, he informed her in his slightly accented English that he'd only recently moved here from Hamburg.

Mitra liked the foreignness about him, a closed window she'd like to open. “I've visited only one town in Germany for any length—Heidelberg,” she said. “I went there for a week when I was on summer vacation from college.” She recounted for him how she got caught up in the drama of the sky and mountains and loveliness of the university campus, the thrills experienced when trains pulled into the station on time—the way you wish your prayers were responded to, as one fellow American traveler put it. “My grammar wasn't perfect—I'd often forget to put the verb at the end of the sentence—I had had only one semester of German. But no one laughed and most of the time they understood me.”

He leaned closer. “Why did you study German?”

“To satisfy the foreign language requirement, but mostly because I loved the long syllables. To call a grocery store
Lebensmittelgeschäft
is to give it heft.”

Silence for a moment. She listened to the cello. “Do you like the music?” he asked, eyes sparkling.

She was glad he asked. Quite likely, they had a common taste. “Is that David Geringer? I seem to recognize the fingering.”

“Yes.” He lowered his gaze to her hands. “Are you a musician?”

“No, I'm a landscape designer.”

“I appreciate the earth sciences. Tell me more about what you do.”

Thank God Shiva, she didn't disappoint him. Sitting up straight, she described her typical day—visualizing, sketching, digging, transplanting, and appreciating the nature. But then did she really have to talk about the sheer delight of composting? She knew she was talking too much, but he stared at her with fascination, affecting her the way early spring lighting did. She shed her usual bashfulness, handed him her business card, and asked him how he liked the rainy city.

“I've found a good barber,” he said, “as well as a European deli and German beer at Trader Joe's, and I don't mind the rain, but I can't find my way around here. Yesterday, it took me an hour to locate the house of an older German couple. I didn't think I'd be making friends with retired Germans here, but that's the way it has turned out to be.”

She almost liked it that he didn't have many friends yet. She heard him saying, “But you have a circle of friends here, correct? From the way you carry yourself, you seem like what we call
gemütlich
, cozy.”

“Well, my first three months in Seattle weren't
gemütlich
. I'd just moved from Alaska.” She related to him the joy of strolling through one landscaped Seattle neighborhood after another in a state of touristy euphoria. Premature calendula blossoms lent a yellow-orange cast to the atmosphere—in February, no less. Compare that with Alaskan roads, as solidly frozen as a reign on death. But, as she'd soon discover, Seattle had a wintry side. If the weather was easy here, forging a network wasn't. In cafés she connected with
bright, interesting minds. They discussed monorail as mass transit, the Koolhaas-original library, and the farmers' markets. But it wouldn't go further than that; she'd go home and curl up on her couch with a blanket and a book. She concluded by saying, “I did volunteer work at the Arboretum and met people on a casual basis, but didn't become intimate with anyone.”

“You had—what do they call it here—trust issues?”

She nodded slightly. He fixed her with a gaze that said she was the only woman in the universe, at least in that room. She didn't know why but a slight discomfort rose in her, a feeling she pushed down.

He moved to other topics. Between chilled sweet bites, she disagreed with him in a pleasant manner when he suggested that the universe could be reduced to a giant computer program. She argued in a happy voice that billions of lines of codes wouldn't be enough to explain the life-force that transformed a tiny seed into a colossal pine tree, the determination in the heart that inspired a human of average strength to conquer Mount Rainier, or even what made each person's iris individually unique. If a computer program could decipher the mysteries of life, then they ought to destroy those lines of code. Some things were best left unexplained.

He didn't offer a differing opinion, just smiled. There was enough in that smile to distract her. She didn't even notice when Carrie and the others left.

By the time they had gotten up to leave, Mitra's head spun with abstract ideas, whereas her insides quivered with a delicious anticipation. She didn't head home alone that night.

Closing the compost bucket and heading toward the sink to wash the breakfast bowl, Mitra thought of the Deutscher, the green of his eyes, his caress. She couldn't wait to hear his sleepy sexy mumble. Why hadn't he called? They had so much in common: both came from far-away places; both spoke a foreign tongue; both were cello aficionados. In the past few days, she'd imagined seeing Ulrich everywhere; as she fidgeted in the grocery store check-out line, mended a garden hose, waited her turn at the ATM machine, or fed the parking meter.

Walking over to the kitchen window, she replayed his voice in her head. She practiced pronouncing
gut
for good, bobbed her head
up and down, said
ja,
d
och
, the way he conveyed agreement. She injected a musical “z” for “th” in certain words, as if she, too, were a German struggling with English pronunciation.

Was that one night with him no more than a casual dalliance? She felt a blush of embarrassment creep into her cheeks.

Still, she couldn't help picking up the cellphone and calling her friend Carrie, who had introduced her to Ulrich, and dropping his name in the conversation. It was spring, after all, with waves of green growth just outside the window, and what else could Mitra think of?

Carrie caught on. “Oh, he's probably still around. He's finished putting new cabinets in my cousin's kitchen. I don't know what he's doing next. I'll call you back with his work number. You two seemed so cozy that night.”

Within a couple of hours, Carrie called back. “Ulrich doesn't work for that outfit anymore. But my cousin says she's seen him painting a house at the northwest corner of 42nd and Latona. You know the rambler with a holly tree shading the front? Good luck.”

Following an impulse, Mitra picked up the car keys, fired up her car, hurried to the said intersection, and parked on the curb, then looked through the car window. Sure enough, Ulrich was standing on the grass, scraping the exterior paint of a house across the street, his body snug in a gray sweatshirt, his back turned toward her. He seemed so much into the task at hand. His movements were smooth, with no wasted motion. She watched his hands going up and down, how the breeze ruffled his hair. His tall frame was a solace. She'd like to confide in him.

If only he would turn around so she could see the depth of his eyes, the determined jaw. If only he'd notice her and dash out in her direction, saying, “
Mitra!
”

He picked up a bucket and moved to another corner, no longer visible to her. Should she exit the car and approach him?

No. Mitra put her hands on the steering wheel, lurched away from the parking spot, and started toward her house. She'd seen him at least, which was satisfaction of some sort.

That afternoon, Mitra went to a private reception for Professor Devi Laal, a visiting social studies lecturer from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on domestic abuse. Even though she didn't
feel festive, Mitra had a twofold purpose in attending the reception. She wanted to meet Professor Laal—Kareena had more than once mentioned her name with respect—and she wanted to exploit this opportunity to mingle with the Indian community. Kareena remained her highest priority and the community could be of help.

In the reception hall, Mitra joined a small web of guests. Professor Laal, a stout woman in a simple white sari, spouted the creepy worldwide statistics of one in three women suffering physical abuse at home. Mitra recognized one of the people listening to Professor Laal from another community function; it was Dr. Sardar, a biotech engineer in his forties.

Dr. Sardar lifted his shoulders under his pricey sport jacket. His huge dark eyes made him appear perpetually curious or cross. “Of course, family violence happens,” he countered, “but it doesn't happen with
us
. I'm sure the police get loads of calls from Rainier Valley and Central District.”

A hush fell over the group. Mitra wanted to laugh at Dr. Sardar's denial. Blame it all on the working class and their neighborhoods.

Before Professor Laal had a chance to respond, Mitra stared Dr. Sardar in the eye and said, “Excuse me. I'm friends with a woman who's a DV counselor. Do you know where Kareena Sinha's clients come from?” She surprised herself by asserting that violence occurred as often in million dollar lakefront mansions as in apartment houses with chipped paint, shattered windows, and streaming cockroaches. Several women spoke up in agreement.

Mitra went one step farther and suggested, as Kareena would have, that it was time to educate the men. Such teaching should start at diaper age. Boys mustn't witness violence at home, or they'll carry germs of that behavior in their psyche forever.

Dr. Sardar blinked, seemingly in annoyance. “Excuse me,” he said and headed for the samosa table.

Mitra wouldn't let him off. Minutes later, she cornered him as he dug into a flaky vegetable pastry, and talked to him about her effort in finding Kareena. When she finished, she noticed his eyes softening. “If you need any help,” he said. “Call my office.”