The Sari Shop Widow (2 page)

Having expressed her sentiments, her mother turned around to cast a quick glance in the mirrored wall and patted her hair, which was swept back into a simple but elegant chignon. Then she went back to arranging the new shipment of jewelry in the display case—earrings, bracelets, and rings made of rare yellow diamonds.

Anjali watched her mom’s dainty fingers gently lift each piece and arrange it over the sapphire blue velvet spread. Having grown up in a family of jewelers, Usha knew her gems well. And at fifty-nine she looked wonderful—much younger than her age.

“Whatever my brother’s faults, he has the knowledge and money to help us,” said Mohan, picking up his calculator and gathering up the day’s receipts. “And his advice is free.”

Anjali mulled over the issue for a minute. There had to be another, less drastic solution than the insufferable Jeevan. “Can’t you call him again and tell him you were wrong?”

“No.” Her father shook his head emphatically.

“Say you made an error in judgment and that everything’s just fine?”

Mohan gave her a bland look. “I can’t. He’s arriving here next week.”

“What?” A dull thud jolted both Anjali and her father. Usha had dropped a box on the counter and turned dark, accusing eyes on her husband. “You didn’t tell me your brother was coming
here.
”

“I thought I did.” Mohan’s tone was mildly apologetic.

“Not true, Mohan,” Usha reminded him. “This morning, when you called your brother, you said you were asking for a little advice and nothing more. You didn’t say anything about him coming to New Jersey.”

“Slipped my mind…I guess.” Ordinarily a resolute man with a good head for business, Anjali’s father seemed to turn to putty when his beloved Usha was around. Despite her sweet face, dimpled smile, and her preference for soft colors and understated accessories, she wielded the gavel like a seasoned judge. It was a good thing, too, because Anjali’s dad was too softhearted. If it were up to him, he’d give away half the store to someone he thought was needy.

She watched the angry color rise in her mother’s amazingly unlined face. “Slipped your mind? Something as important as that?”

“But…but he said he wanted to come. How could I say no?”

“Exactly when is Jeevan-bhai arriving?” Usha demanded. “Or were you planning to tell me after he arrived at Newark Airport?”

Anjali had a feeling her father had deliberately kept his brother’s visit a secret. She felt a twinge of sympathy for her dad. The poor man was caught between his loyalties to his brother on the one hand and his wife and kids on the other.

“But there’s still one more week,” he mumbled weakly. “He’s arriving next Monday.”

“Next Monday is only five days away, not one week,” reminded Usha.

Mohan ran his fingers through his hair yet again. What little hair had been lying flat now stood at attention. “Jeevan-bhai is family. Why are you getting so upset?”

Usha’s look of annoyance turned to disbelief. “Your brother is not some ordinary family member like the others; he is a god. Once he descends from his chariot he wants everything perfect, from homemade vegetarian food cooked in clarified butter and spotless white sheets to his newspaper available at a precise time every morning. And don’t forget hot
masala chai
five times a day. I’ll have to dedicate myself to serving him hand and foot.”

If there was one thing Anjali couldn’t picture her mother doing, it was waiting on someone hand and foot. Raised in indulged affluence in the city of Ahmedabad, and being the only girl in a family with four boys, she was a prima donna. Her brothers doted on her.

Though Usha was a good cook, she preferred working in the store and depended on restaurant food to feed the family most of the time. It was the simplest and most efficient thing to do, anyway, with literally dozens of Indian restaurants serving any kind of reasonably priced multiregional cuisine, literally within walking distance from their store.

Every night, after locking up, Anjali and her parents, too exhausted to worry about cooking, bought restaurant food and toted it home. After eating, they barely had energy left to get changed and head for their beds in their modest house in neighboring Iselin. Despite keeping the store closed on Mondays, the boutique was a 24/7 commitment for the three of them. It was their whole life.

Anjali couldn’t bear to think of any other way of life. She’d had her own home and a career separate from her parents many moons ago, while she’d been married to Vikram Gandhi. But after Vik’s death, heartbroken and depressed, she’d decided to pool all her savings with her parents’ and upgrade their struggling sari shop in Edison.

Now the boutique was everything to her, a place where she’d buried her grief and more or less resurrected herself. It had helped to have a challenging business to keep her mind occupied, the best kind of therapy for a grieving young widow.

Her brother, Nilesh, a sophomore at Rutgers University, had always distanced himself from the clothing business. Nearly eighteen years younger than she, and an unexpected late-life baby for her parents, he could be a joy as well as an annoyance.

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.