On the plane back to the US, Gita felt inert. When a baby cried in the crib at the front of the cabin, beneath the movie, she didn’t offer to help the mother by carrying and shooshing it, as she usually did. When she had said goodbye to her family Delhi Airport, that large, airless shed with its many cracked tinted windows, gummy-wheeled carts, and floors still bleeding with a mixture of lemon cleaner and pure mud, she hadn’t cried either. She felt she was bidding her parents and brother goodbye one final time; she wanted her eyes to be dry so she could have a real look at them and store their visages in the deep freeze of her brain, to be taken out and examined in the vacuum of life in Midland—a life she needed to embrace as her own.
On the drive home from the airport, she told Sachin, “I don’t want to try anymore.”
“Did someone say something to you in India?”
“I think we were meant to be without children.”
He looked into the distance, into the shivering trees and overhead green metal traffic signs blasted by wind. He said, “If you want me to take citizenship, I can do it.”
Then, a month after Gita’s return, Sachin said, in reference to a question Gita had asked, “Not that weekend in May, that’s the weekend Laxman and Archana are coming.”
Gita thought she had misheard. “Anshuman? From New York?”
“No. No. From Delhi. Laxman. He has a business opportunity? He said he’d told you.”
In shock, she said nothing.
The monster. I only went to his sister, his promoter—and he, the bastard—he went straight to my husband.
Since returning, she had been fuming. She had finally told Sachin about Vibha’s idea—not mentioning Laxman—and he had . . . laughed! “They’re just like that, they’re all complexed, leave them behind, this is why I don’t want to move back,” he’d said, and they’d had a big fight, with Gita responding, “You always promised we’d go back,” and him saying, “You’re the one who can’t handle it, who comes back with a scowl every time,” and her shouting, “It’s because I’m coming back to you. . . .”
It didn’t matter that she’d vowed not to return herself. This talk of “going back” was really a talk of something else—restoring an Edenic past.
When they’d finally made up, Sachin had said, “I’ll speak to Vibha Bua,” and she’d mumbled, “No need,” and the topic had been put aside. Why was he so defensive about his family? Gita wondered. Was it just because, after his father suddenly died, Laxman and Vibha had helped gather funds for his master’s in the US?
Now Sachin noted her reaction, furrowed his eyebrows, and went on, “They’re going want the whole works. Apparently, Laxman has business in Detroit or something. Where he found a partner, God only knows—”
Gita said, “He never told me they were coming,” though she now recalled a mention of an Indian in Detroit.
“Anyway, what’s done is done. Then a few weeks later we have Suresh Mama arriving, so this way the whole summer will pass—”
Sachin paused.
“You know, I don’t love him either,” Sachin conceded. “But I don’t have a choice.”
On a weekday, Gita drove to the lapidary lake around which she often took walks—one of the hundreds of smaller unsung lakes in lakey Michigan.
At the edge of the placid, taut, wobbly acre of water, with its evidence of beaver infrastructure projects, she stood barefoot on harsh pebbles, looking in and through the water to the rocks, their green astroturfing of algae, the zebra mussels that had once pricked her cold feet.
She had been born in another country. What would it mean to die here?
This was the fear that united all their immigrant friends.
Sachin’s Pilani classmates were always talking returning to India, though they had never made a move in that direction. Their lives were good in the US. But they were afraid to die here. Everyone had an intuition that, one’s waning days, the mind would helplessly plummet homeward.
Her mind had always been turned to the past—to India.
“People don’t realize,” friend Anamika had told her in India, in the early days of Gita’s infertility, when Gita’s friends thought they needed to convince their willful friend to join them in motherhood, “but the reason we all need to have children is so that we stop obsessing about the past, about our parents. When you have kids, your love flows downward.”
These thoughts glimmered incoherently in her brain as she looked at the swaying water. Startled by an explosion—a twig or a stone falling into the water—Gita stepped away from the shore.
Gita considered visiting her cousin Anju on the dates Laxman would be here. She’d tell Sachin she had mixed up the dates, present a fait accompli. But when she called Anju, Anju said she would be away, as she had the last five times Gita had tried. Only one relative on this continent, and she’s a bloody recluse, Gita thought.
Next, Gita contacted an acquaintance named Jennifer who lived down the street and had recently become an editor at a lifestyle magazine named Bay City Monthly, based out of the nearby eponymous city. Jennifer was something of an Indophile—one of the rare Midlandians who had backpacked through the subcontinent—and had asked Gita to contribute a “piece” titled “An Indian’s Journey over a Great Ocean to the Great Lakes.” Gita, working at the stonecutters’, had written and rewritten the article to death till she was in tears—and never submitted it. Now Gita, who was usually afraid to request favors, asked Jennifer if there was an opening at the magazine.
Jennifer said they were looking for a copy editor few hours a week: Would she be interested? The pay was low, but would train her.
“Jennifer Perlin’s hired me,” Gita told one evening, exaggerating the extent of her work. Then, quickly, Laxman’s coming in the morning? I won’t be able to go.”
“Did you have to start on day itself?” Sachin said, irritably.
“Don’t you want me a job?”
Where had his gone? Sachin wondered.
For the first time, he thought about what life might look like without her.
*
When Sachin had arrived in the US, in 1974, he’d been a shy, grieving young man—his father, a civil engineer at a government-run housing finance company, had died suddenly of a stroke before Sachin had left for his master’s. In this new nation, anyway, Sachin had no family to speak of. He was a man without a past. The lack of past, in America, was a kind of freedom. But it meant everything was up to you.
After his master’s, the job at Trident had not come easily. When he had applied the first time, for a summer job, he received a cyclostyled letter informing him that there were no vacant positions. He planned to stay on at Brooklyn Poly for his PhD—he had enough credits and had been granted a teaching assistantship—but then, against the wishes of his adviser, he decided to drop out: After all, he’d never even wished to be an engineer, he’d only done it to please his grandfather, the great SP Chopra, who was also dead: Why was he trying to please the dead? He drove cabs for two months in Newark, where you didn’t need a green card to become a cabbie, and, bemused and scared, ferried the human cargo of the city behind his tensed back, his eyes and ears and nose absorbing every twitch, perfume, and snore emanating from the back seat, wondering on the one hand what his family might think if they learned he had gone to America become a mere chauffeur and thinking on the other, But this is freedom! I could be killed by any of these fast-talking passengers, shot in the back, and I would vanish from the record of the universe: And yet, this is freedom! His mother would mourn his loss, it was true, but the family was big enough to absorb casualties. Being born into the Chopra clan was no different from being an immigrant here. You were a prized nobody. He had been free from the moment he’d been born. Or, more precisely, from the moment his father had died.
As he drove in the cab at night, his father’s mournful face—with the high forehead, gray skin, the large downward eyes and the signature toothbrush mustache giving him a Chaplinesque self-important dignity—this face would flare across the windshield or flash at him from underneath a golf hat as he drove by, and he would recall the last picture he had of his father, the dead man lying on his back, wrapped in white, mouth open, nose stuffed with cotton, the lines on his forehead like the score of some piece of music that gave a clue to the pattern of his father’s thoughts. . . . Even then, under that soaring cremation canopy, with his noisy family surrounding him, his engineering mind had been at work, using reality as a springboard to sail into the abstract, and the next thing he knew, his tall and smart air force flying officer brother Brij, in his white kurta, was circling a gigantic but struggling fire, the substances within all evaporating at different rates, the cotton curling and giving off bluish fumes, the skin burning clearly, like cellophane, that beautiful word cellophane, an intimation of his life in plastics ahead, and then Brij, handsome Brij, still capable of emotion, was taking a long stick and bashing the charred skull of his father, and then his father’s soul was released and loosed into the air, one last substance that burned at its own mysterious rate.
How sweet the letters from Gita had been, arriving in his grad-school cubbyhole at Brooklyn Poly! They had started as missives of condolence for his father, morphed into questions about educational opportunities abroad, and bloomed into romance.
In 1976, blowing all his savings on the flight, he went to India and proposed to her.
“The problem is I don’t want to live in the US,” she had said coyly as they walked together through Delhi University’s campus, where she had studied.
“What’s the issue, then?” Sachin told Gita. “I’ll move back.”
He was still getting used to the sight of her: that delicately bulbed nose, the wide forehead, her small body, the excited eyes that looked away, especially when she was making an important point. Sachin was five feet five, pitiably short, he felt, but she was shorter still and fit in the crook of his arm.
How much of his life, his desperate desire for success, greatness, had been prompted by his shortness?
Is this why he’d gone so far?
On the jungled campus with its thelas of peanut and popcorn sellers, Sachin told Gita the story of his friend Rajesh. Rajesh, a school classmate, had come to the US for his MD-PhD, Sachin said. He had gotten his green card quickly, but then had been sent to Vietnam—to tend to wounded American soldiers near Da Nang.
Are you sure about this? Sachin had asked him before he left. You can go back to India.
Look at it this way, Rajesh said. Everyone said that it would take five years to get a green card. I got it in three months!
And that, Sachin explained, was the last Sachin had seen of Rajesh, who was killed in one of the most brutal assaults on an American base during the war, his life canceled in a weird parenthesis, a nowhere land between nations. Gita was greatly moved by the story. “That’s why I’m also not sure about residing there,” Sachin said. “I haven’t taken a green card, though they’re handing them out candy to Indians.”
“You sound so American,” she purred.
His blood jumped.
Then Gita and Sachin had considered their life here, in India, would look like. Sachin had inherited a share some joint lands, but they couldn’t be sold, and he had no money. They would have to settle in a room in the complex. “It’s a rowdy family,” said. “You only know them as a visitor. They’re well-meaning, rough. You’ll have to get used to it—for some years.”
Gita could imagine it: sharing a kitchen with six other brides, arguing over eggs and Worst of all, the great SP Chopra—who had once cast a nullifying warm shadow over such bickering—was dead.
Gita said, “Well, maybe America will be an adventure.” She brought her hand scandalously close to his on the concrete bench they had settled on. “As long as it’s only for a few years.”
How much arrogance and confidence this woman had for a girl who comes from a nothing family! he sometimes thought. So sure of what she wanted! So confident that India was the best of all worlds!
And who was to say she—or anyone else—was wrong?
Having Gita in his life in the US had extinguished his longing for family, for India. A year after their marriage, when his mother passed away—having developed an infection while undergoing a knee surgery—Gita became, in essence, his closest relative.
But for Gita, he felt, he was not enough. In those first years in Midland, she was often lonely, her mind beamed toward India, constantly shooting off letters home, still involved in the controversies of the past, keeping up with friends and family, asking: When will we move back, when we move back? She was so lonely that he and she had devised, for of occasionally calling India without paying for it—their greatest collaboration. Gita would dial the American operator and say she trying to reach a gentleman in Delhi named “Keehalji.” Then, when Gita’s parents answered, Gita would say over and over, “Keehaal hai which meant “How are you?” while her mother answered in Hindi. Gita would return to the operator and say, “Sadly, Mr. Keehalji wasn’t available,” and so the phone call would be free.
As to her questions to about when they would repatriate, he’d say, “Arre, you’ve barely to know this country!”
Or: “When saved fifteen thousand dollars.”
Or: “We have to think long-term, Gita. If our kids are born here, then they’ll have citizenship, and they can more easily go to Harvard or Yale.”
He wanted to uphold his promise, but he also enjoyed his work.
When she had turned down that trip to India, he was shocked. But he knew, even then, it wasn’t out of love for him. There was something else going on, some problem in India itself.
If India drew her back, it also repelled her.
India was her spouse. What was he?
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From The Complex by Karan Mahajan. Copyright © 2026 by Karan Mahajan. Published by Viking, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
