Omkar was bothered by so much about his mother. He didn’t understand why they had come to America in the first place if they planned to bring so much of India with them. His mother still wore a salwar kameez every day of the week. To be fair, the silk fabric was more beautiful than what people of the Western world wore, but it was just one more thing that made fitting in impossible for the Agarwal family. Jarminder hated speaking English. Frequently, she would speak to Omkar and her husband in Punjabi and they would respond in English at home. She was as irritated with this behavior as they were irritated by her refusal to speak the language of the country that they were still trying to make into a home. It made her feel like she was losing herself.
Omkar’s father, Neeraj, also bothered him. Though he had demanded that they all learn perfect English, he too had defiantly brought his customs with him. Every day he would wake up and tediously wrap the navy blue fabric of his traditional Sikh turban into an aggressive peak. This was the image of his father that Omkar would always remember. His kara, a cast iron bracelet he wore on his right wrist, would slide across the surface of his arm as he pulled and folded the fabric of his turban across his cheekbones. In traditional Sikh form, as a sign of his acceptance of God’s will, he did not cut the hair from any part of his body. The bottom half of his face was claimed by wild black facial hair, which had long since been transforming into gray.
Omkar stood in the kitchen looking down over the street. He filled up a water glass, failing to turn off the faucet before it began to overflow onto his hands. “Dhi’āna rakhō,” his father said in their native tongue. It was a warning to be careful. Neeraj had taken it upon himself to bring Omkar’s feet onto solid ground. His son’s dreamy nature didn’t make him feel confident about his capacity to work hard enough to carve out a life for himself. The sound of Neeraj’s voice was deep and authoritative. Sometimes his father reminded Omkar of a warrior who had retired into the retail business. After all, the Sikhs had been warriors.
Omkar stared at the glorified painting of Guru Nanak on the wall. The look on his face and the way he had his hand lifted in the painting always made Omkar feel like he was messing up. Neeraj had aspired to fashion himself after Nanak’s virtue. As a result, Nanak always reminded Omkar less of a guru and more of his own father.
Though Omkar wore a thin version of the traditional kara bracelet, he had chosen when he was very young to shave, cut his hair and abandon the traditional Sikh costume. Sometimes, this made him feel guilty. Neeraj and Jarminder still felt invalidated in their lives and beliefs by his decision. They wanted Omkar to be proud of his faith and most of all proud of the culture that had forged the marrow in his bones. But they also knew that faith could not be forced upon their son. They knew that the tighter they held him, the more he would rebel, and they were afraid that rebellion might just lead him to reject their culture entirely. And so, there was a tension in the house that was never directly addressed. You could only feel it sometimes in sideways comments and in the emotional distance between them.
Neeraj sat down on the couch beside Jarminder. The companionship of his wife could only be accessed at times like this by joining her in her fixation on the screen. He asked her for an update on the plot line. Irritated at the possibility of missing something, she caught him up in a fast and exasperated tone before settling into the pleasure of having someone to experience the rollercoaster of intrigue with her.
Omkar, who had only come upstairs for a drink during his shift watching over the family shop, sidled back down the stairs. The store seemed emptier than ever. He stood behind the checkout counter staring at the products, whose packaging advertised only to the emptiness in the room. It felt like a waste of life doing what every good Indian boy should do with the family business. “How much more of a cliché could I be?” he wondered. But he didn’t want to hurt his parents any more than they had been hurt already. Omkar hadn’t yet carved out his own life because of the fact that he would have to leave his parents’ lives to do it. He couldn’t face the severity of the shame inherent in doing so. He couldn’t choose to betray them by becoming one more thing that they had put all their energy into, only to lose.
With no customers to serve, he pulled out his laptop computer and went back to his schoolwork until out of the corner of his eye he caught the silhouette of someone about to come through the door. Omkar felt an alarm go off inside himself, the ecstatic shock of seeing her again. It was the girl who had come into the store a week or two ago. Despite his shyness, he stood up and immediately welcomed her back.
Aria was almost upset to discover that the strange feelings she had felt for the man who stood before her were back. She afforded him a bashful smile and began looking through the aisles. It felt wrong to have come back there, but once again, Aria was desperate. Her period, being predictably
