Page 140 of Debugging Love

“Bring me a dust rag,” she demands.

When I don’t budge, Mom prods me with her foot. “Get her a dust rag and then tell us why you don’t have a dog.”

I slap my hands against my knees and push myself up. I don’t have a dust rag but I have baby wipes. I hand a few to Dadi and she looks at me cautiously.

“Why does a bachelor have baby wipes?” she says.

“For cleaning.”

Instead of asking more questions, she gets to work, furiously cleaning the detailed carvings on my mandir. “I’m disappointed that you don’t have a dog. I wanted to pet the dog,” she says while forcefully flossing a crevice with a baby wipe.

“Who was snoring, then?” Mom says.

“Was it that girl in the tank top?” Dadi asks.

I jump to Danni’s defense. “No.”

“Who was it then?” Dadi asks, still flossing. “Some other girl?”

“Yeah. Savannah.”

Mom and Dadi gasp. Dadi stops dusting long enough to look at me disapprovingly, then she flosses harder.

I return to the couch and collapse again. This conversation is more exhausting than pushing a boulder up Mount Everest. “Savannah was just a date gone wrong. She had too much to drink at the restaurant and wasn’t sober enough to tell me where she lived.”

Mom sits next to me. Her vegan-fed body is long and slender, her hands no exception. She folds them and twists her wedding ring round and round. “Is that true?”

Irritation pokes at me. I’m twenty-five years old, living on my own in another country. Why do I have to explain myself? “Why would I lie?”

“You lied about the dog,” Dadi says. She’s still hunched over, wiping down the murtis now.

“Because I knew you wouldn’t understand. It was just a date, that’s all. And it ended poorly.”

“But you wanted her to be safe,” Mom says.

“Of course.”

“Was this before you had a girlfriend or after?” Dadi asks.

“Dadi,” I warn.

“I’m just asking. I don’t know how you do things over here.”

“I wouldn’t date two women at once.”

Dadi has a fistful of dirty baby wipes. I stand to throw them away, but she waves me off and heads into the kitchen without me. She starts opening and closing cabinet doors. “What do youeat?”

“Food.”

She reappears in the doorway. “We need to get you a proper meal.”

“So who’s the girl?” Mom asks.

“Danni. She’s a woman.”

“Are you two serious?”

I rest my ankle on my knee and pick at my big toe. “Pretty serious.” I am, at least. That counts for something.

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