“We aren’t like your family with aunties and uncles all over the place. It’s a luxury. The only family we have here is each other. We have to stick together.” Sticking together has always been a necessity, and now more than ever, it was a matter of survival.

“Your parents have each other.”

“No, they don’t.” At least not in any romantic sense that might sustain a couple during hard times, the way fat reserves kick in during lean periods. No, their marriage, if you could call it that, was less than skin and bones. Until she started school, Kavita thought that all married people met the way her parents had, all marriages were arranged. Just like until her first sleepover, she thought that all married people slept in separate bedrooms. It was an awful burden to grow up knowing that the origin of one’s birth was obligation, not love.

“The other day I went for a walk,” she continues. “When I came back, I found them fighting in the living room. You know what Mom said? That she never loved Dad. You should’ve seen the look in her eyes, Nirav. I don’t know what might’ve happened if I hadn’t come home when I did. Don’t you see? I’m here to keep them in their separate corners. To keep them civil. Just like Sunil and I always have.”

“That’s not your responsibility.”

“But it is.”

“Why?”

She shuts off the lamp on the nightstand. She has never learned how to talk about such things in the light.

“Because we’re the reason they stayed together. We’re the reason they’re so miserable.” It was an awful burden to grow up knowing that one’s existence was the cause of so much unhappiness. “They’ve never asked me to touch their feet, but this is my way of doing it. This is how I repay them.”

Sometimes she wonders if her parents’ marriage would have worked out had they stayed in India. Maybe the success of arrangements like theirs was contingent on having ample buffers around, people to give advice, check behaviour, remind them that they were part of an ecosystem, that the integrity of the family web depended on cohesion.

“You need to live your own life.”

“My family is my life, Nirav. Their pain is my pain. As long as we stay together, we’ll survive this. I have to cling to that. It’s the only thing keeping me sane.”

He sighs. Pauses for a few moments. Then asks, “How are you managing?” with a strained voice, as if frightened by his own question, as if already frightened by the answer, which is perhaps why he so rarely asks.

Silently, Kavita considers the excrescences of her new inner world.