Omkar wasn’t always an only child. He used to have two older siblings. His parents had not been planning to have another child and so Omkar had been totally unexpected. They had a son, Ajit, who was 20, and a daughter, Shashi, who was 16. Ajit had recently moved from where they lived in Chandigarh to Bhuj in the state of Gujarat to work for a textile export company. As fate would have it, Shashi had gone to visit Ajit, accompanied by her aunt, for Republic Day. But that day, an earthquake hit that turned out to be one of the deadliest earthquakes in the history of India. The earthquake destroyed 400,000 homes. Twenty thousand people died that day. Omkar’s brother, sister and aunt were among them.
Having only just been born when it happened, Omkar didn’t remember his parents’ reaction when they heard the news. He had no memory of his sister or brother. But the tragedy was like a thundercloud always hanging over the family. His mother kept their pictures on the wall. She clutched Omkar tighter because of the loss of them. She clutched him so tight, he could barely breathe. It was as if his parents had placed all of themselves in him and in his life’s trajectory, which they tried to control every part of.
After the tragedy happened, they spent five more years in Chandigarh before deciding that they couldn’t take the pain of trying to feel like a family again in the same house that Ajit and Shashi had been raised in. They considered moving to a different house in the same city. But it would have been the same way of life. They wanted a new life altogether. So, when Omkar was seven, they decided to move to America. They chose to move to Los Angeles because of the weather and the dreams they imagined they could make a reality there. Although he had been a market research analyst in India, the only job that Omkar’s father could get in America was in a little convenience store called the Sun Market. He worked hard and saved money until he offered to buy the place from its owner, who wanted to retire. He renamed the place the Super Sun Market. The family had been both working and living there above the store ever since.
Omkar wanted to be a civil engineer in order to design and construct buildings that could withstand any earthquake. This goal was the North Star of his life. The Gujarat earthquake lasted just over two minutes. In those two minutes, the entire course of his family’s lives was changed. It was tainted forever. Three members of his family had been lost. And some people had an even worse fate. Some that were there, who did not die themselves, lost everything and everyone. Omkar couldn’t live with the idea that in a matter of minutes, something like this could happen. He had so many reasons for having this goal, but deep down, part of him felt like if he just figured out how to resolve the issue that had killed them in the first place, the dark cloud over the family might lift.
When he was done with the assignment, Omkar got up from his place at the table in the great hall. He tried to make as little noise as possible collecting his things. Before driving home, he bought a burrito, which he ate in a solitary corner of the cafeteria, watching other students contemplate their purchases. Despite coming to America, Omkar’s family only ever made Indian food. He knew that his mother would have some waiting for him when he got home. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her cooking; he loved it. It was that eating American food sometimes made him feel less foreign. And today was one of those days where he wanted to feel less foreign. Despite having been in America for almost 12 years now, he hadn’t managed to lose his accent, and as a result, he felt like people couldn’t see him at all. All they saw was the stereotype of an Indian exchange student. Omkar hated that people couldn’t see through that stereotype almost as much as he hated how unfortunate it was that he fit that stereotype so closely.
And he wanted time to think. Omkar was haunted by his encounter with Aria. The day she’d come into the store, he had raced downstairs expecting to find one or two of his parents’ friends standing there, waiting to scold him for his poor service and irresponsibility. He had thought her to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He had found it hard to hide the shyness he felt in her presence with the usual “greet-the-customer routine” that his parents expected him to execute perfectly. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
He’d allowed her to swim around in his head, letting the idea of her distract him from the boredom of the store. He extended the meeting in his own mind. He imagined her life in the suburbs of LA. He imagined her mom and dad and sister and brother. He imagined her at college and wondered what she was studying there. He had no idea how wrong about her he really was. But there was something about her loneliness that mirrored his loneliness and promised that they might find what they both lacked together.
He would most likely never see her again. But the fact she existed made him feel like maybe a woman existed out there in the world who could tame his loneliness. And he let the promise of it comfort him.
The unpredictable chords of the overly dramatic soundtrack from a Bollywood soap opera dominated the room. Omkar’s mother, Jarminder, was glued to the screen as usual, fully immersed in the storyline. Her figure was the very epitome of an Indian
