The Box, Chapter 10

The Box is a short story I wrote in 2020. It inspired my second novel, Can You Be.

This is Chapter 10.

E Battery Street, Charleston, SC

Read below or watch/listen to the video at the bottom of the page:

Holy Man popped up regularly, always wearing the same white linen suit and sock-free brown loafers. It solidified in Naina the feeling he was in a commercial made exclusively for her—like her personal Gecko or Flo. Naina wondered if he was the angel sent to her through the angelite. He waved from the window when Raiya and Naina were at the bar at Felix and winked as he walked by when they sipped coffee at Bakehouse. He jogged past them when they stared out at Charleston Harbor from the Battery.

Naina also spent time in Raiya’s apartment. She relished the smell of spices that wafted throughout his apartment. He wasn’t a good cook. In fact, he didn’t cook at all. The smell came from incense and decorative jars filled with raw spices. The only thing he knew how to make well was a good cup of masala chai. Like most of his family, he had the habit of drinking chai twice a day. He drank a cup first thing in the morning before he walked over to Naina’s to get his coffee. And then he drank a cup in the middle of the afternoon, around 5:30 pm. He told Naina that his two cups bookended his workday.

She got into the habit of stopping in Raiya’s apartment after work and sharing his evening chai. She loved the biting taste of ginger and the subtle hint of cardamom, clove, and cinnamon. Naina remembered more of her mother’s cooking, but the sensations were fleeting. Vague glimpses of the food flashed in her head like a slideshow, but she wasn’t familiar with the names. Those memories were stored in her memory bank, but Raiya seemed to be drilling holes into the vault and pulling out threads of long-lost treasures.

She remembered eating a roti rolled up with ghee and sugar that she ate greedily as her mother ate her roti filled with mango achar. Her mother poured her a glass of bright red Rooh Afza. The memory came back to her so clearly that she could still taste the sickly sweet rose essence on her red-stained tongue.

Naina wished she had grown up with her mother, as Raiya had done with his. He called his mother once a day, every day. Naina was with him once when he FaceTimed his mother. Naina waved at her and Raiya’s mother called her beta, like Naina’s mother had once done. Ever since then, Raiya’s mother sent blessings to Naina.

Raiya treated Naina as his life-long confidant. He told her of his last boyfriend’s affair, swearing him off relationships, at least for the time being. He talked about his happy childhood in Mumbai, an only child, yet ever surrounded by a cacophony of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived together as an extended family. He was two years older than Naina yet had lived a richer life than she would have thought imaginable.

For the first time in her life, Naina found herself telling another being about how her parents immigrated to the Bay Area from India in 1971. Naina shared with Raiya that she was born 9 years into the marriage and by then her mother had rejected her new country so fiercely she barely left the house.

When she did, she averted her eyes at people stripped down to shorts and tank tops and threw her dupatta over bikini-clad women at the beach. She screamed besharam at couples kissing. Eventually, she found the liberal nature of the country so unbearable that she couldn’t stand living in it.

Naina’s father had scattered her ashes into the Bay–in the same waters where she had ended her life. But Naina only heard that from her stepmother, years later.

“I have never belonged to anyone,” Naina said. She held the crystal in her palm, petting it like a pet.

“You belong to me.” Raiya wrapped his arm around Naina’s shoulders. She eased into his embrace, feeling safe in his cocoon.

Watch or listen along below: