The Sari Shop Widow Read online

  Nilesh was both her brother and her baby in so many ways. She’d babysat him, changed his diapers, held him when he’d been sick, and bottle-fed him. And yet she and Nilesh argued and snarled and threw barbs at each other like any other siblings. She loved him to pieces. She’d never had children of her own, so he was still her baby. Of course, there’d been no opportunity for Anjali to think about having babies, not when Vik had died of a brain aneurysm within two years of their marriage.

  “Anju.” Usha’s voice forced her thoughts back to the cold reality of their present situation. “Could you come here and finish this display for me? I have to get busy cleaning up the house.” She threw her husband a meaningful look. “Since Jeevan-bhai is arriving in five…no…four and a half days,” she said with a glance at her wristwatch, “I have to clean, shop, cook, and launder…and iron.”

  Anjali noticed her father’s harried expression. Poor Dad.

  Usha strode away in a huff to the back of the store, then returned a minute later with her pocketbook on her arm and the car keys jangling in her hand. Putting on her driving glasses, she swept out the front door. Anjali and her father watched her disappear into the parking lot, then exchanged a troubled glance.

  In about two hours her mother would have shopped for the essentials, stored them away in the kitchen, cleaned and vacuumed the house, and aired the guest room mattress. Usha Kapadia was like a tornado when she was on a mission, especially when she was upset or angry. And Jeevan’s visit definitely qualified as both upsetting and annoying. Besides, Anjali knew exactly how her mother felt; she felt the same way herself. The last time Jeevan had visited some five years ago, her mother, just recovering from a hysterectomy, had nearly suffered a mental breakdown.

  After a four-week visit, it had been the most blessed relief to put the chubby Jeevan and his wife on a jet bound for India.

  Anjali observed her father pull up a stool and sit down with his elbows parked on the counter. “So, Dad, what exactly is Jeevan-kaka coming all the way to the U.S. to do?” she asked.

  Mohan’s expression was one of tired resignation. His messy hair tugged gently at Anjali’s heart. “He’s going to take a look at the boutique, then decide what we should do. He promised he’ll help us financially, too.”

  “His fortune’s in rupees, so how’s he going to help in dollars?”

  “Rupees can easily be converted to any foreign currency these days.”

  Anjali’s chin instinctively snapped up. “We’re not going to accept his charity, I hope?”

  Mohan gave a wry laugh. “Jeevan-bhai believes in loans, not charitable contributions. He’s a businessman, Anju, not a philanthropist.”

  “So do you think we might be able to save the store?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I really hope so. This store is all I have. All we have.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. Until last year, things had looked pretty good. Our profit margin wasn’t great, but it wasn’t critical.”

  Rising from his stool, Mohan went to the open display case where his wife had been working and started emptying out the small jewelry boxes onto the counter. “Too much competition in the immediate area. Other stores have started to copy our boutique concept and exclusive designs. The trouble is they get both their materials and manufacturing much cheaper from India.”

  “I know.” Anjali and her parents got their goods from Bangkok, the U.S., and Hong Kong. It made a huge difference in pricing. “But their quality and style are nowhere near ours, Dad. Their stores are merely gaudy imitations. It’s like comparing a diamond to rhinestones.”

  “Even then—”

  “Wasn’t it just the other day that a customer was complaining that something she bought from one of our competitors lost its color and most of its beads after a single cleaning?”

  “But most customers go for surface looks. When they can pay $500 instead of $1,500 for an outfit, the last thing they think of is color loss or the beads falling off. How many times do people take such fancy garments to the cleaners anyway?” He positioned the last diamond ring in between a necklace and its matching bracelet, then shut the glass door and locked it.

  Her father was right. Even before he’d explained it, she knew what the problem was. She just didn’t want to admit it. They’d overextended themselves with the present year’s inventory, too. The store was packed with beautiful things, but not enough customers to buy them. Most of it was her fault. On seeing the striking new silks in Thailand, she’d gone a bit overboard with her orders for chania-choli outfits. Long flowing skirts with matching blouses. Then she’d requested her uncles in India to craft jewelry to match those ensembles.

  Despite her training, she’d made the grave mistake of neglecting the financial end of the business and left it entirely to her father. He was a smart businessman but she still should have kept her eye on the bottom line.

  Unfortunately, her heart was in creating pretty things and not in finances. But no matter what her reasons, it was still partly her fault. It wasn’t fair to let her father take the blame.

  Mohan returned to his bookkeeping chores, so Anjali moved to the sari section and started to unpack the new boxes of Benaresi silk saris that had arrived that morning. Even before she could slit the carton with a box-cutter, she knew the goods would be beautiful. She’d hand-picked every one of them during her recent trip to India and supervised the packaging herself.

  Reverently she unwrapped each exquisite sari from its tissue paper and placed it inside the glass cabinet. This place used to be just a sari shop at one time—boring, bland, dimly lit—one of countless such shops that lined Oak Tree Road. Her parents had sold Japanese-made synthetic saris wound in bolts and crammed onto shelves alongside the most uninspiring mass-produced clothes.

  Back in the 1970s, as a child, Anjali had enjoyed going to her parents’ old Jackson Heights store in New York City. Every afternoon, after school, she’d done her homework in the crowded back room. That cramped space had also served as her parents’ office. A desk and chair, a file cabinet, and a portable electric stove for warming up lunch and making chai had left room for little else. She’d loved wandering around the shop, touching the fabrics and draping them over herself, slipping into the high-heeled and jeweled sandals on display, pretending she was a fashion model.

  Then her parents had relocated to Edison in the 1980s because it was a brand-new Indian enclave with more promise and less competition. However, even after the move, the store’s name and general appearance had remained the same. Her parents were bright people, but creativity was not their strong point. She was a teenager by then and had come to view the business more objectively. It needed to be much more than Kapadia’s Sari Emporium.

  Somewhere between the ninth and tenth grades, she’d decided to try her hand at dress designing. Helping her parents at the shop combined with her eye for color and shapes had naturally progressed into a degree in apparel design and merchandising, and further into plans for joining her parents’ business someday.

  But fate had taken her on a slight detour. Soon after graduate school she’d met Vikram Gandhi, fallen for his boyish good looks and sunny nature, and then married him. His career was in New York, so instead of working for her parents she’d found a job at an advertising agency in the city.

  She’d been happy, though, content with her condo in Queens, her marriage to Vik, and life in general. Back then she’d had big dreams of owning several elegant boutiques all over the country—maybe in other countries, too. With typical youthful enthusiasm she’d had it all figured out.

  Although Vik was an electronics engineer by profession, he had encouraged her retail dreams, even shared in them. And just when they thought they’d saved enough money to start working on bringing those dreams to reality, Vik had collapsed at his office, and died soon after. His only symptom had been waking up with a severe headache that morning.

  They’d had no idea that a silent killer had been stalking Vik for many years. He had swallowed
a couple of aspirin and gone to work despite the acute headache. By the time the ambulance had arrived, he’d hemorrhaged to death. All her dreams had died with him. So much for drawing up a neat blueprint of her life. The only solace was that he hadn’t suffered too long.

  Seeing her drowning in grief, her parents had encouraged her to quit her job in New York, sell her condo, live with them, and help them with the store, which was best suited for her training and disposition anyway. Even Vik’s parents had seen the logic in that and supported her decision. Little by little she’d overcome her sorrow and made her parents’ business a success.

  Unfortunately, along the way, she’d drifted away from Vik’s parents and his married sister. Anyhow, Florida was too far to visit often.

  Eventually she’d sunk all of her and Vik’s joint savings into upgrading and glamorizing the store, and making it a showpiece—Silk & Sapphires. The grand opening was written about in all the local newspapers. Magazines had run articles about the new ethnic dream store in the heart of Little India. With all that helpful buzz customers had crowded in, and the business had done extremely well.

  But now it looked like all that hype and hard work were for naught. Anjali and her parents were in danger of losing their boutique. Her dad had estimated that if they didn’t start turning a profit within the next six to nine months, they might have to sell, or worse, declare bankruptcy.

  They’d never been exactly rich, but they’d been comfortable. Her education had been entirely paid for by her parents, and at this late age they were paying Nilesh’s college bills.

  They still lived in a decent home and drove late-model cars. Going from relative middle-class comfort to possible bankruptcy was inconceivable to Anjali. What in heaven’s name were they going to do if things got really bad?

  She closed her eyes and tried to dispel the dark image of potential poverty. No. Please, God, no.

  Despite all her initial ranting at the idea of having the autocratic Jeevan come down to stick his large nose into their private affairs, when faced with the frightening prospect of bankruptcy, Anjali was beginning to have second thoughts. She’d also had a little while to simmer down.

  Maybe the old curmudgeon would be of some use after all. Her dad was right. There was never any doubt that Jeevan had a gift for business. He had the uncanny combined instincts of a lion, a bloodhound, and a fox.

  Placing the last sari in the cabinet, Anjali looked at her wristwatch. It was nearly closing time. She needed to get her mind off work and business—and her uncle’s impending visit. Maybe she’d call Kip and meet him later over a drink. He’d help her relax.

  For lack of a better term, she thought of Kip as her boyfriend. He was her friend for sure, a patient pal, her lover, and a comfort to have at times. But he wasn’t a boyfriend in the true sense of the word. Their relationship was neither sweet nor romantic. It didn’t involve whispered sweet nothings, flowers or chocolates, holding hands, or walks in the moonlight. It was just a friendship with some free drinks and sex thrown in when it was mutually convenient.

  She’d been seeing Kip Rowling secretly for nearly two years, mainly because widowhood was lonely and frustrating. All her Indian girlfriends were married and enjoying husbands, homes, and children. They were involved in a variety of careers, too. As a single woman who worked seven days a week, Anjali didn’t fit into their social circle anymore. She was the odd one out, the one to be pitied and condescended, and occasionally the one to be eyed with suspicion as a potential husband snatcher.

  She had some non-Indian girlfriends—women she’d gone to college with. They were single like her, but they’d never been married. She got together with them for drinks or dinner once in a while. But she didn’t have any close friends. Her work was her life.

  Although she was a mature woman, in charge of her own life, if her parents ever found out about Kip, a white Protestant guy who owned a bar and lounge in the heart of New Brunswick, had little formal education, and wore an earring in one ear, she’d be in deep trouble. Respectable Gujarati women with solid family values, especially thirty-seven-year-old Hindu widows, weren’t expected to fraternize with barkeepers.

  She was lucky to be born and raised in the U.S. If this was India, she’d probably have to live the semi-reclusive life of a widow. Widows were supposed to keep their inauspicious shadow from falling over the rest of society and bringing a similar curse upon it. Indian society had evolved considerably in the past decade or so, but widows still had a rough life over there.

  All the Indian guys her parents and relatives tried to fix her up with wanted marriage, but she was afraid of marriage after what had happened to Vik. A few of those men were widowed, or even divorced, but almost all of them had kids, and she didn’t want to play mom to anyone’s children, not when her life was consumed by business.

  It wasn’t that she disliked children. She’d hoped to have her own when she was married to Vik, but that dream, too, had become a blur and then vanished.

  Besides, so far, every Gujarati man she’d been introduced to had turned out as interesting as plain boiled potatoes. They all lacked sophistication. Desis—countrymen—as Indians in America affectionately referred to themselves, were a homogenous bunch of people—essentially decent, honest, hardworking, and obsessively goal-oriented, but the one thing about them that bored Anjali to tears was their lack of humor. They laughed at others and felt no guilt at ridiculing the guy next door, but they could never poke fun at themselves.

  Vik was different. She had yet to meet another Indian man with a self-deprecating sense of humor like Vik’s. Because of his highly recognizable last name, folks had often asked him if he was related to Mahatma Gandhi or Indira Gandhi. His stock answer used to be, “I’m related to both, except no one seemed to recognize my potential for political greatness or martyrdom, so I ended up in engineering school.” With his deadpan response, he’d always ended up getting a chuckle out of people.

  And now there was Kip Rowling—a fun guy. He could make an idiot of himself and then laugh about it. She liked that about him, not to mention the fact that he was sexy as hell and made her bones melt into a puddle of warm soup with a single touch. She hadn’t experienced that kind of sexual high in years. At the moment, though, she badly needed a good belly laugh. And a roll between the sheets sounded pretty good, too.

  Noticing her father still engrossed in his receipts, she quietly pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and slinked away through the rear door out into the parking lot. And she dialed Kip’s number.

  Chapter 2

  Anjali maneuvered her compact black sedan around Oak Tree Road’s busiest intersection. Even this late on a Wednesday evening, when most of the businesses were either closed or in the process of closing, the street was thick with traffic.

  Pedestrians crossed the street at leisure and she had to keep a careful eye on them. Many of them behaved as if they were still in their native India, where traffic rules were made mostly to be disregarded. Some even appeared to derive perverse joy out of thumbing their noses at pedestrian crossing signs and honking cars. The same people who were willing to obey the laws two miles outside this neighborhood seemed to lose all sense of civic awareness when they set foot in Little India.

  By the time she got to New Brunswick, a mild headache was beginning to set in, probably because she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She’d lied to her parents that she was going to meet some friends for dinner.

  An old Beatles tune greeted her as she entered the Rowling Rok Bar & Lounge. The air inside was warm and humid. The bitter, yeasty smell of beer and a mix of perfumes hung in the air. Wednesday was “Ladies’ Night.” Women could buy drinks for half price. The place was comfortably filled with females of various ages but very few men. The hum of chatter was loud enough to muffle the music. The giant TV screen was off.

  She headed straight for the bar that Kip was tending. He grinned and waved at her, motioning to her to grab a stool at the counter. A few seconds later, he put
a tall glass of rum and cola in her hand. It was the only thing she drank and he knew it well.

  “Hi, Angelface. You look a bit peaked,” he said and pinched her cheek briefly. “Hungry?” He pushed a bowl of pretzels toward her. “Want Billy to fry you some mozzarella sticks?”

  Shaking her head, she gratefully took a thirsty gulp of her drink along with an aspirin tablet she’d dug out of her pocketbook. Mixing aspirin, cola, and alcohol wasn’t very prudent, but she was too tired to care about prudence this evening. In about twenty minutes her headache was likely to fade away.

  She observed Kip return to his task and deftly handle several orders. He was so darn good at that. She often wondered how he could remember the recipes for all those exotic cocktails and stay even-tempered on the busiest of days. He always served with a smile and a friendly word. Even the most difficult customers, including the inebriated and abusive ones, turned to putty in his large, capable hands.

  Kip had a way with people. With the number of customers in the bar tonight, it didn’t seem like he’d have much time for her. Just as well, she concluded. She wasn’t in much of a social mood. Maybe she shouldn’t have come at all. Why impose her drab sentiments on Kip?

  But when there was a slight lull at the bar, Kip returned to her. Twirling a lock of her long dark hair around his index finger, he tugged gently. “What’s the matter? Had a bad day?”

  She took a sip from her glass and stared vacantly at the crowded display of liquor bottles on the long shelf with its mirrored backsplash. She’d come here to forget her woes, but neither the prattling crowd in the bar nor the rum in her cola had helped so far.

  A drink with more punch to it would have been nice to get smashed with, but common sense told her it would solve nothing. In fact, she’d be hungover and even more miserable the next day. And facing her mom and dad’s looks of shocked disappointment at seeing her drunk would be a whole lot worse. Instead she brought her gaze back to focus on Kip. “Sorry. I’m rotten company tonight.”