Tulip Season Read online

  “You're not disturbing anything, Grandmother,” she said.

  She questioned whether Glow could really fill her need for a grandmother, but as it would turn out over the next several months, she did. They had fun hanging out together, generation gap be damned. And Mitra loved her explanation of why she'd changed her name from Gloria to Glow. She was no longer the “caged-bird wife,” “Sichuan carry-out mom,” “buttoned-down nonprofit administrator,” or “silly greetings card saleswoman.” She was free to glow.

  Thinking warmly about Glow, Mitra now drove to her house in Fremont and reached it in a few minutes. She buzzed the bell and instantly the door opened. There stood Grandmother, her plump, self-described “Cabbage-Patch doll” body dressed in a color-splashed caftan. Her cat Tampopo, with her glossy fur and large alert eyes, stood next to her, purring.

  Grandmother hugged Mitra and asked her to follow her to the kitchen. She poured a glass of mango lemonade for Mitra and a Scotch from a tall sturdy bottle for herself. She swirled the pale yellow liquor in her glass, backed into the counter. What's with the drink? Mitra wondered. Grandmother's doctor had advised her to avoid alcohol.

  “Has Henry called back?” Mitra asked, a quaver in her throat.

  “Yes, just before you came,” Grandmother said.

  “And?”

  “I don't want you to panic. He said that the body of a 32-year-old woman was found in Lake Stevens at about 5 P.M. yesterday. She might have fallen off a boat. Henry wants you to call the Medical Examiner's office.”

  Mitra's cheeks went cold. She set the juice glass on the counter and, with a numb hand, dug her cellphone out of the pocket of her jumper. She got hold of the Medical Examiner's office. The person who would have the answer was out to lunch. Mitra's shoulders sagged.

  At Grandmother's suggestion, they carried their beverages to the living room and sat on the couches. Tampopo stalked in and jumped on Mitra's lap.

  Perhaps to lighten the moment, Grandmother touched the top of her hair. It was tinted red, but the result looked nearly natural, save for the extra sheen. “I need a new hairstyle,” she said. “It's the same modified Mitzi Gaynor cut I've been wearing for decades. She was a movie star eons ago.”

  Mitra nodded, her mind occupied with the telephone call. Tampopo leaped out toward an invisible insect. The conversation went back to Kareena.

  “She's always there when someone needs her,” Mitra said, her voice thickened. “I remember when Veen's sister had emergency surgery in Dallas and she couldn't get there on time because she had pneumonia, Kareena offered to go in her place. Her boss wouldn't give her the time off, but she flew there anyway and risked the consequences because there was no one else to go. That's just the way she is.”

  “Who's Veen?”

  “Veen Ganguly is a mutual friend of ours. Anyway, Kareena had no place to stay in Dallas. I guess she camped out in the hospital's waiting room. That selfless act ended up costing her greatly. Adi gave her a hard time for going against his wishes, her supervisor docked her pay, and she had to cancel plans for a holiday weekend getaway.”

  “You spend way too much time with her. I know you both like to go out to restaurants and enjoy yourselves, but I get the impression she uses you. Didn't you say you do the flower arrangements for her parties? I bet you do it for free.”

  From a neighboring house, there rose the metronomic clanging of a hammer. You're right about the flower part, but wrong about Kareena, Mitra was about to say when her cellphone beeped.

  Her pulse racing, she held the phone to her ears. It was the Medical Examiner's office. The dead woman had turned out to be a tourist, not Kareena. Mitra breathed a sigh of relief. Despite the scare, Mitra felt glad that Grandmother was keeping an eye on things for her.

  Grandmother glanced down at the empty glass on her hand and shook her head. “It's been quite a day. I got a letter in the mail from my fourth husband. He signed it ‘Sincerely, Georgio.’ Can you believe it?” Grandmother laughed, perhaps to massage away the day's wear-and-tear and callousness of those once close to her. “I didn't mean to get your spirits down by talking against Kareena. On my way home, I had a clear view of the Cascades, so tall, so glorious, so other-worldly, no matter how many times I've seen it. I parked my car to have a better view. No matter what, we have these high peaks to look up to.”

  Mitra rose. Grandmother stood up, gave her a hug, and they clung to each other for a moment.

  Mitra stepped to the porch and turned to wave. Glow stood on the doorway, fingering her bangs. How like Mitra, her adopted grandmother from another era, who had another sensibility and another hairstyle, but who navigated similar losses. She felt for her in a way she hadn't before.

  THIRTEEN

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Mitra was working in her home office when the doorbell chimed. She scrambled to her feet and flung open the door in a sudden motion, startling a tall man in his mid-thirties poised on the porch.

  “Ms. Basu?” Their gazes locked. “Nobuo Yoshihama. I'm the detective assigned to the Ms. Sinha's case. I thought I'd stop by to see you. You left a message on my cellphone. You work with Robert?”

  He even knew where she lived. Before she could size him up, he'd flipped open his wallet to flash his police badge and identification card. She barely glanced at them.

  “May I come in?”

  The air was thick, the sky the color of soot, and the silent trees bristled with an uneasy stillness. “Yes, please,” she said.

  He took a seat in a leather armchair in the living room, declined her offer of a cup of tea. His beige windbreaker seemed pale against the green glaze of her north wall.

  “The last few days must have been difficult for you.” He asked a few questions about where she'd first met Kareena, took notes in a slim notepad, and seemed satisfied with her answers. “Any information you provide is confidential. Do you have any idea where Ms. Sinha could have gone?”

  “No. Every year she travels to India for a month. She plans for it and tells me long before the trip.”

  “Did she seem depressed recently? Do you know if she has had any psychological problems in the past?”

  Was he going to psycho-analyze Kareena? “Oh, no, she's a friendly, outgoing, centered person.”

  “Any indication of trouble? Any financial concerns?”

  “No to both. She makes a decent salary. Her husband has an excellent income. They both come from money.”

  “I'm told you're someone Ms. Sinha was close to. When you last saw her, how did she seem?”

  “Yes, we were close. We were alike in so many ways. We last met at Toute La Soirée. Aside from being fatigued after a long day, she seemed happy.”

  “Toute La Soirée.” Yoshihama lifted his head from the notebook and inquired about its location, décor, clientele, and even what one ordered there.

  Mitra responded with minutiae that under more pleasant circumstances would have been fun to share. Kareena, who had no special loyalty to any one place, somehow had taken a fancy to rendezvousing there with her. Mitra concluded with: “I'm told that's where she was last seen. A young, well-dressed Indian man was with her.”

  “Do you have any idea who he might be?” Yoshihama asked.

  “No.”

  “Did Ms. Sinha ever tell you why she chose to be a DV advocate?”

  “She likes to help abused women who have no money or family support, women who don't understand the legal system.”

  “Do you know what her typical day is like?”

  Mitra peered through the window at a Fed-Ex truck speeding down the street. “No, Kareena doesn't talk a lot about her job.” Another fact percolated at the back of her mind. Kareena had a bumper sticker with the DV helpline number on it. She asked Yoshihama if someone could have traced her from that.

  Yoshihama expressed his doubt, paused, and said, “Tell me about Ms. Sinha's marriage. Does she have any marital problems that you know of?”

  To assume that Kareena had marital difficulties was mer
e speculation on Mitra's part. Still, recalling the telltale brown swelling on Kareena's upper arm, Mitra decided to be open. “I can't help but be suspicious of Adi. I've seen bruises on Kareena's arm that looked like someone grabbed her. And Adi isn't cooperating in this matter.”

  Yoshihama asked her to elaborate, leaned back, and listened as she laid out the details. He seemed cool, professional, thorough, and somewhat Zen. His quietness and deliberate manner, even after she'd spilled out her worst fears, began to get on her nerves. How did he plan to find Kareena?

  “I saw your greenhouse,” Yoshihama said. “Did Ms. Sinha have any interest in gardening?”

  “None at all, although I've tried to get her interested.”

  “You work with plants?”

  She nodded her assent and briefly described her small business.

  “I admire people who can get beauty out of the ground. What's your favorite flower?”

  How unusual for any man to ask such a question, especially a cop. “Tulips. Yellow tulips, for that matter. I grow them, although this year they're not doing so well.”

  Yoshihama's brown eyes roamed the room. He nodded. Maybe he viewed Mitra's décor the same way she did, as Asian-style austerity. Her rooms were minimally furnished. She considered blank space to be restful and harmonious, and it freed your mind to create beauty, not to mention that it was easier to keep tidy. Kareena had once said just the opposite. She'd suggested that Mitra needed heavier furniture “to graft personality, to inject chi, and achieve a fuller, more built-out appearance” that she believed this Craftsman bungalow called for. Of course she'd think that. She and Adi had a large bank account, which Mitra didn't. And yet she didn't resent her friend for spending freely or giving her a tip or two on interior decorating.

  “I like this room,” Yoshihama said. “It's peaceful.” He gazed down at his notebook.

  “What's being done to find Kareena?”

  “We have questioned six or so persons—none has panned out. We're auditing Ms. Sinha's credit card usage and waiting for the cellphone company to release her records. As I promised Mr. Guha, I'll do my best to help him. But I let him know we field more than two thousand disappearance cases every year.” Yoshihama shut his notebook, rose, drew a business card from his breast pocket, and offered it to Mitra, brushing against her hand. “Please call me right away if Ms. Sinha gets in touch with you.”

  He gave her a warm handshake. At the door, with a strong motion of his wrist, he twisted the slightly loose knob. Before she could help him, he yanked the door open, again caressing her hand. Usually, her visitors had problems with this door. Not him.

  Their gazes, two appraising pairs, met. With a nod of assurance, he turned and descended the front steps, pausing a moment to examine the pink flowering cherry tree on her parking strip. He touched a branch—leafy, dark brown and reaching up to meet the sunlight—and his expression turned tender. Did he have a cherry tree of his own? He walked a few steps, glanced back at her, waved, ducked into his black SUV, and drove off.

  Mitra sighed. Although she could see that the police were doing what they could, in her heart she felt as though their attitude was rather casual. She didn't, however, write Yoshihama off completely. They'd made a connection of sorts and that might help speed things up.

  She wandered into the kitchen, opened and closed the cupboard, rearranged items in the refrigerator, and filled the tea kettle with water. With a cup of black tea and a slice of toast, she sat at the table. Bananas protruded from a sunny ceramic bowl within arm's reach. She fiddled with her iPod.

  As she grappled with various possibilities in her mind, the tea tempered to lukewarm, toast became dense, and bananas remained untouched. She stared at the large “Trees are not trivial” poster on the sea blue wall. Mitra's mother had sent that poster from Kolkata on her last birthday. In it, a sari-clad Indian woman lowered her head in respect before a gigantic leafy tree.

  And that made her recall an incident involving Kareena's mother. Mitra and Kareena had been hanging out on her back deck one weekend, when Kareena's cellphone sang out. It was impolite to eavesdrop and so Mitra walked over to the evergreen kalmia shrub and pretended to ignore the conversation.

  “Stop yelling,” she heard Kareena imploring. “Stop it, Ma.”

  Kareena hung up, visibly shaken, her mouth slack and the sparkle in her eyes reduced to a dull sheen. Mitra walked back to join her.

  In a small raspy voice, Kareena said, “That was my mother.”

  “Is everything okay?” Mitra asked.

  “Oh, she's being the usual drama queen. She still thinks her life is like one of those Bollywood movies she acted in a zillion years ago.”

  Taking a sip of her lukewarm tea, Mitra wondered if that long-ago afternoon could shed new light about her sister and whether she should have remembered to mention it to Yoshihama.

  Mitra had seen how a catchy song from a movie, a dance scene, a dream sequence, but most of all a dashing actor would keep Kareena's heart and mind soaring. Had she gotten that passion for Bollywood films from her mother? Mitra remembered a particular incident that took place about two-and-a-half years ago. On that day, she'd come down with a cold and stayed in bed.

  As the evening fell, Kareena turned up at Mitra's doorstep, a soup tureen on her hand. They slurped the rasam, what Kareena called, “the Mumbai version of mother's chicken soup,” and munched on boat-shaped chamcham sweets, which she'd toted back from a recent trip to India. Afterwards, they'd pored over the garishly colored pages of an issue of Film Dunya, a fantasy rag from Mumbai.

  “Look at this lehenga,” Kareena said, pointing to a woman's red-and-purple bare-midriff costume.

  “I wouldn't wear it myself, but—”

  “Look at him. Isn't he gorgeous?”

  Different tastes for different folks. Despite the closeness she felt for Kareena, Mitra realized their tastes were galaxies apart.

  Finally, Kareena popped in a DVD in the player, a “cop romp,” as she described it. For the next three hours, they watched a shadowy gangster story, a blend of gun play, car chase, rapes, dance sequences, and sappy romantic interludes. Kareena laughed, hooted, and applauded often, whereas Mitra had a hard time coping with the fights, blood, high decibel, and fake tears.

  As the credits rolled, Kareena said in a cozy voice, “That was great. Could we watch it again? Oh, just that part where they dance on a glacier. Such a terrific background score. You don't mind, do you?”

  Mitra really didn't want to, but seeing her friend so happy and rosy, she went along with it. This was a yet another Kareena. Mitra wondered if, in her mind, Kareena tamed the beast of aggression she saw daily as an abuse counselor by making it an object of fantasy.

  “If I took your temperature now,” Mitra teased her friend at the end of the repeat viewing, “It'd break the thermometer. The diagnosis? Bollywood fever.”

  Kareena threw her head back and laughed. “It gets me going, the melodrama, the craziness, even the tacky songs. If it's fever, I want no cure for it.”

  Mitra had accepted her friend's school-girlish enthusiasm. In her gardening pursuit, she had long ago learned to love and nurture a wide assortment of plants, even those exhibiting peculiar characteristics. As with plants, so it was with people.

  * * *

  After another sleepless night thinking about Kareena and missing the warmth of their friendship, Mitra sat at her desk, pulled a sheet of featherweight lilac stationery, and held her pen poised over it. She would write a letter to her sister; otherwise, her insides would burst.

  Dearest Kareena,

  I've always loved you and cherished you as a friend, and now that Aunt Saroja has spilled a huge secret, I feel even closer to you. I can't wait for you to come back. It's still hard for me to believe it, this secret, so tender and so sacred. It keeps me up all night.

  We're half-sisters.

  Yes, the warm way we feel toward each other is just what it should be.

  This is the biggest thrill
of my life. You see, I never had a sibling and always wanted one to play with, to mess around with. To have you as a sister is the best thing in the world. I wish you'd come back soon, so I could tell you this in person and welcome you to my family.

  Mitra filled the page and spilled over to another sheet, recounting her memories of their father, Nalin. Once finished, she sealed the letter and slid it inside a matching lilac envelope.

  She had no mailing address.

  She stowed the envelope in a dresser drawer. Well, she'd hold on to this letter, until such time as they met again. She'd love to watch her sister's reactions as she read it.

  She knew what to do next. Adi hadn't kept his word about staying in touch. She'd have to visit him. She wanted answers.

  FOURTEEN

  MITRA ARRIVED AT Adi's corner office unannounced at lunchtime, knowing his watchdog assistant wouldn't be there. Standing by the window, Adi checked his iPhone. He had on a pricey well-fitted blue shirt (which Kareena had gifted him on his last birthday), casual khaki trousers, and no tie. Mitra paused at the open doorway and waited for Adi to notice her. He raised his eyes, frowned as usual, and waved for her to sit in the chair across from him.

  He wore a bewildered expression, as though someone had just awakened him from a deep sleep without telling him why. The face was fleshier, the complexion mottled, the eyes puffy as new pillows. Here perhaps was a more human Adi, more fallible, and even vulnerable.

  Putting the iPhone down on the desk, Adi clenched his hand into a fist, then asked Mitra to sit tight for two seconds so he could handle an “action item,” and walked out of the room.

  A black metal file cabinet situated next to a wall was partially open. Mitra glanced at the door and saw no one nearby. Should she open it? What might be in there? After a moment, she sidled over to the cabinet, pulled it open, and thumbed through the hanging files, reading their labels. One titled, “Kolkata Investigation,” drew her attention. Why Kolkata? She extracted the folder. It held newspaper clippings and several business letters. Voilà. She might find a clue here. She picked up a letter.