Reboot Pt. 01

You have at least three of those things going for you. Asian, check. Female, check. Way smarter than Dave, also likely a check. At least three...

And why had Sarah sent her Jenna's email address? Wondering kept her mind busy for the rest of the afternoon.

Sumita had leftover aloo gobi for dinner at home that night, alone. She fired up her laptop to read tech news while she ate, and she saw Sarah's email at the top of her inbox. The only content of the message was an email address, twenty three characters underlined in blue. All she had to do was click. She nudged her finger up the trackpad until the mouse cursor was hovering over the link.

She slammed her laptop shut, wondering what had gotten into her. Sarah was absolutely right - she had recently lost her husband, and she had no earthly reason to email this Jenna person, as nice as the night before had been.

~~~

Sumita's house was a box, solid beige clapboard on three sides, broken up only by the front door and two very small windows. From the outside, it was about the most boring structure in the world. It wasn't until you got inside that you saw the real point. The fourth wall was all glass, looking out over Lake Sammamish. It was right on the eastern shore, with a small, unused boat jetty, and the view was beautiful during the day and spectacular at sunset. Sumita never tired of it.

Sangita wandered into the living room a little after noon on Sunday, still drowsy. Noon was early for her. Sumita was sitting on the couch, fussing about whether to email Jenna for the third time that morning.

"Hey, Gita," Sumita said to her daughter, peeking over the lid of her laptop. "What are you up to today?"

"Don't really know," Sangita replied. "Dina is in California with her parents for the week, I'm not really speaking to Alan, and all my other friends are generally unavailable. I guess I'm spending the afternoon with you."

"A whole afternoon with your aged, decrepit mother," Sumita said. "However will you cope?"

"With great difficulty," Sangita replied, digging through the fridge in the kitchen for a yogurt. "Do you think you could drag your aged, decrepit body up Cougar Mountain? It's great hiking weather."

"I think so," Sumita said, and closed the lid on her laptop. "It's been a long time, but I can probably manage."

Sangita wandered back into the living room with a spoonful of yogurt in her mouth. Her mother was in better shape than most of her eighteen-year-old friends. Of course she could manage.

"I was thinking of making sambar tonight," Sumita said. "The Brussels sprouts looked really nice at the Trader Joe's."

Sangita flounced into a chair next to the couch with her yogurt in her hand and nodded her assent. Sambar was her favorite.

"And some rice pudding for dessert?" Sangita asked, giving her mother the look.

"Sure," Sumita replied, laughing, and Sangita gave her a big smile.

"We could put a movie on after dinner..." Sumita suggested. Sangita rolled her eyes. She had not inherited her parents' fondness for Bollywood spectacle.

"... you can pick," Sumita continued, and Sangita brightened.

"Sounds great," Sangita said.

"Just please don't make me watch Fast Cars 8 or Big Explosions 11, okay?" Sumita added.

Sangita giggled. "Don't worry, Mom," she said. "I'll find something good."

An hour and a half later, they were at the trailhead, ready to go. Sangita was encased in spandex, slim and athletic. Sumita wore a loose tee shirt over her heavy-duty sports bra and baggy sweats. Her full, curvy figure was not conducive to spandex.

Sumita had to suppress a smile at the memory Rajeev's reaction the first time he saw his daughter in her hiking outfit. He was intensely proud of the mature young woman Sangita had become, but some parts of daughters growing up are harder for fathers to accept than others. The black cloud surrounding Sangita's memories of her husband was still there, but it was farther off, less threatening. Maybe it would rain on somebody else's house for a change.

Sangita set a fast pace up the trail, so that the only people passing them were the guys crazy enough to run. Sumita was pleased that she could keep up, but there wasn't a lot of breath left over for conversation.

At the peak, they stood together silently for a while, catching their breath and stretching. On another day, they would have been tempted to sit, rest, talk, and enjoy the view. That day, the peak was as crowded with hikers as they had ever seen it, and a funky brown haze had settled in the air, the kind you don't notice until you climb up above it. They ate their energy bars, drank some water, and hiked back down.

"Not bad, Mom," Sangita said when they got back to the car. "Not bad at all."

"Thanks, Gita," Sumita replied. "That was fun."

Sangita laughed as she climbed into the passenger's seat. Cougar Mountain isn't Mount Rainier or anything, but 'fun' isn't the first word most people come up with to describe it.

~~~

Both showered and changed when they got home, and Sangita holed herself up in her room with her laptop while Sumita sat in the living room and read a book. Sangita emerged a few hours later, just as Sumita was pouring out a bowl of chapatti flour to start dinner.

They were a practiced team in the kitchen. Sangita had started cooking with her mother when she was six, and there were times during the awkward teenage years when the only happy words they exchanged all day were over a frying pan.

Sangita set a pot of lentils to simmering while her mother made the chapatti dough. When the dough was kneaded and resting, Sumita pulled out her immersion blender to puree the cooked lentils. Sangita measured out the spices for both dishes, ducking under her mother's arms to stir the rice.

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting at the kitchen counter watching the two pots simmering on the stove. The room smelled of cinnamon and cardamom, and both women felt their stomachs grumble in anticipation.

"So," Sumita said. "How's work going? It seems like we've barely seen each other since you started."

"It's good," Sangita replied. "I wasn't sure about the night shift at first, but I love it. Everything is so peaceful. Frank - he's the supervisor - anyway, he lets me do all the standard blood chemistry tests myself, and those are like ninety percent of our work on the late shift. It keeps me pretty busy. The machines do most of the work, so it's not super interesting, but it's good experience."

"It was really nice of Doctor Srinivasan to recommend me for the job," Sangita added after getting up to give the rice pudding a stir. "They don't hire too many students just for the summer."

"Vivek was happy to help," Sumita replied. "Neither of his boys went to medical school, so he's really excited that you want to follow in your father's footsteps."

"Yeah, I get that," Sangita replied, laughing. "And I do appreciate the encouragement. There's no way I'm going to be a dermatologist, though. I don't know exactly what I want to specialize in, but I know it's not that."

"Well, your father would be proud of you whatever you do," Sumita said, and it felt good to say it. Even through the fog of her grief, Sumita could feel Rajeev's love for his daughter.

"I know, Mom," Sangita said. "Thank you."

When the rice pudding was done, Sangita put the pot in the fridge to chill, grabbed the mixing bowl with the chapatti dough, and started pinching off chunks and rolling them into little balls. Sumita joined her.

"So," Sangita said to her mother while rolling a ball of dough out into a flat round. "How's your work, Mom? I heard all about your first week, and you haven't told me anything about it since."

"Well," Sumita replied, rolling out her own round, "there was a training class one week in the afternoons about a lot of the tools and processes. That was kind of helpful, I guess. Mostly I've just been fixing bugs."

"You're just fixing other people's bugs?" Sangita asked. "Doesn't sound very exciting."

"No," Sumita replied. "I suppose not. They kind of piled up, so last month was bug jail month for the whole team. It's actually been a good way to get back into coding. Anyway, this month Bhavesh has a project for me. He's been trying to get somebody to do it for a couple years now, and it always gets pushed back because it's too scary."

"Sounds interesting," Sangita said. "What is it?"

They'd finished rolling out half a dozen balls of chapatti dough into flat rounds, though none of them were more than approximations of a circle. Sumita's sister, mother, and mother-in-law all had the technique down, rolling out chapattis as round as a compass on paper every time, but Sumita had never quite gotten it. They tasted exactly the same, but every misshapen chapatti felt like a tiny failure as a wife and mother. Sumita tried to put it out of her mind. Her husband and daughter had never minded.

Sumita laid three chapattis on the griddle. "You know how web pages often have tables of stuff on them?" she asked. "Like airline ticket prices or weather forecasts or whatever?"

"Yeah," Sangita replied.

"Somebody has to write code to turn that data into formatted HTML that the browser can display," Sumita said.

"Okay," Sangita said. "Makes sense."

"So we have this feature in the web editing tools that will write the code for you," Sumita said, minding the quickly-cooking flatbread. "You do whatever you want to the sample data in the WYSIWYG editor, and we generate the script to apply your formatting to the live data on the web server. You don't have to know anything about JavaScript; it just works."

"Sounds really cool," Sangita said. "What are you doing with it?"

"It is cool," Sumita replied, flipping the chapattis over, "but it only works for really simple tables. Bhavesh wants me to make it work for the kind of tables people actually use. Those are much more complicated."

"I'll bet that's hard," Sangita said, "but I'm sure you'll figure it out."

"I'm not so sure, Gita," Sumita said. "If nobody else on the team has even been willing to try, I really doubt I'll be able to do anything special."

"Geez, Mom," Sangita said. "You're like the smartest person I know. Have some faith in yourself."

Sumita laughed, tousled her daughter's hair, pulled the chapattis off the griddle, and then cooked the other three. Sangita spooned out two bowls of sambar and carried them to the dining room table, along with the steaming bread basket. Sumita stopped at the fridge to pull out a pitcher of iced tea, poured out two glasses, and followed Sangita into the dining room. They sat down together to eat.

Sangita grabbed a chapatti, dipped it into the thick, silky lentil stew, and took a bite. She swooned. "Soooo good," she said.

"Glad you like it," Sumita replied, smiling. Sumita couldn't imagine a better compliment than that.

"I've been thinking," Sangita said after she'd eaten a few more bites. "Maybe it's time to break up with Alan."

Sumita sat up straight in her chair. "Oh," she said, trying very hard to sound casual. "What happened?" Sangita had started dating Alan just after Rajeev died, and Sumita had never liked him.

"Nothing really," Sangita replied. "I just don't see it going anywhere. He's kind of a slacker, and he gets all pissy at me when I have to work, like my job isn't important."

"Whatever you think is best, Gita," Sumita said.

"Yeah, right, Mom," Sangita said with a laugh. "I know you don't like him, and I understand why. He was fun for a while, though, and I needed some distraction."

"You're right," Sumita said. "I didn't like him at all, but I didn't want to pry. I just want you to be happy, Gita."

"Thanks for not pushing," Sangita said. "Anyway, I'm not the only one who needs some distraction. You need more friends in your life, especially since Aunt Julie moved away. I hope you're meeting people at work that you can do stuff with."

"Most of my coworkers are closer to your age than mine," Sumita replied, and Sangita gave her mother that you fuss too much about everything look that she had been using since she was a teenager.

"Sarah and Meaghan are really nice, though," Sumita said. "I have dinner with them on Wednesday nights sometimes, and I went with them to an art gallery thing on Cap Hill last week. I actually bought a painting - it should come next week sometime."

"Wow," Sangita said. "Cool. Can't wait to see it. I'm really glad you have some new friends."

"Yeah," Sumita replied. "Me too."

"You know," Sangita said. "I wouldn't mind at all if you met someone. Like, met someone..."

Sumita turned bright red. Talking about her love life with her eighteen-year-old daughter was the last thing in the world she expected to do when she got up that morning.

"It's been almost a year since Dad died," Sangita continued. "I still expect him to come home at night sometimes, before I remember. But I know he's not going to, and you shouldn't keep waiting for him. You deserve another chance at happiness. I just want you to know that I'm okay with it."

"Sangita, I . . ." Sumita replied, at a loss for anything else to say.

Sangita gulped down the last of her iced tea and then set the glass down on her placemat. She leaned forward against the table, looking at her mother with a bland little smile, as if she'd just suggested taking up knitting.

Sumita tried again. "I really don't think I'm ready, Gita," she said, very slowly. "I was married to your father for a long time, and the idea of being with anybody else, even just going out for dinner or something is . . . I don't know. It's going to take some getting used to."

"I know, Mom, and that's fine," Sangita said. "I'm not trying to push or anything. I just want you to know that it's okay, when you think you're ready."

Sumita noticed that her heart was beating a little faster than normal, and she wondered why. Then she knew. "Um," she said, "I think I might, maybe, have already met somebody. It's probably nothing."

"That's great!" Sangita said, bursting into a huge smile. "What's her name?"

"Sangita!" Sumita cried. What had possessed her daughter to ask such a thing? And how did she know?

"Oh, come on, Mom," Sangita said, cutting off any further protest. She was still smiling, but her voice was filled with exasperation at maternal cluelessness. "It's, like, totally obvious. It's actually kind of cute the way you sometimes get nervous and fidgety around Dina's mom, but then you don't even notice Erik's dad. Who is totally hot, by the way."

Sumita gave her daughter a sharp, motherly look at that last comment, but Sangita didn't flinch. "Just 'cause he's way too old for me, doesn't mean he doesn't look like Brad Pitt," she said. "Just sayin'."

Sumita laughed out loud. She hadn't really thought about it, but she supposed Mr. Nielsen was in very good shape, and much better looking than most of the men in her age bracket. Not that she was interested.

"Plus," Sangita continued, "I know you were crazy in love with Aunt Julie. I still remember that time on the playground in Marymoor Park, when Ryan pinched his finger in the climbing mesh, and you and Julie were having some big, serious talk. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but it stuck with me somehow. Then at Julie's wedding, when you were crying, I figured it out."

Sumita sat back in her chair, took a sip of her tea, and breathed out. "Julie and I were never more than friends," Sumita said firmly, so there could be no misunderstanding. "I loved her very much - I still do - but I was never in love with her. It's not the same thing."

Sangita arched an eyebrow in disbelief.

"I wasn't," Sumita insisted, "honestly."

Sangita started at her mother, eyebrow still raised. Sumita stared back, her I'm your mother stare, but Sangita didn't blink. Sumita folded.

"I wasn't in love with Julie ..." she repeated. Her voice was quiet and controlled, but then the dam broke. "... but I so easily could have been. There was a moment right before I met your father when we got close, but we were both too confused or too scared to act on it. And then I met Rajeev and we got married, and that was that."

Sumita was surprised to feel a tear sliding down her cheek, and Sangita reached across the table and took her hand. "I'm really sorry, Mom," she said.

"It's okay, Gita," Sumita replied. "I wouldn't change a thing about my life, even if I could. And I really did love your father, even though he was a man. Besides, if things had turned out differently, you wouldn't be here."

"Fair point," Sangita said with a giggle. "But you still haven't told me her name. This mysterious person you might, maybe, possibly have met."

"Oh," Sumita replied. "Her name is Jenna. I met her at the gallery thing with Sarah and Meaghan. She's the one whose painting I bought, although she doesn't know that. We went to Molly Moon's for ice cream afterwards. Really good by the way - we'll have to go there sometime. Maybe there's one on the east side."

"Sounds nice," Sangita said. "I really am happy for you, Mom."

"Thank you, sweetie," Sumita replied, "but I don't think it was anything, really. It was just an ice cream cone. I'm not really ready for any of this anyway."

Sangita rolled her eyes. "Whatever, Mom," she said, and got up to clear the table.

They did the dishes together, Sangita washing and Sumita drying. Sumita was lost in a tangle of conflicting, confusing thoughts and feelings, not paying much attention to the task at hand. Sangita jolted her back to reality.

"I kissed Dina once," Sangita said, and then handed Sumita the last pan to dry.

"What?" Sumita asked, not quite processing what Sangita had said. When she put the words together in her head and the meaning became clear, she tensed up and nearly dropped the pan. She would love her daughter no matter what, but she didn't want her life to be any harder than it needed to be. Losing her father was bad enough. Sumita set the pan down on the counter.

"I kissed Dina," Sangita repeated. "It was after Aunt Julie married Amanda. I think maybe we both just wanted to see what it was like. I don't know."

"And what was it like?" Sumita asked.

"It was nice, I guess," Sangita replied, smiling at the memory. "She's a really good kisser. Whoever she winds up with is going to be really lucky."

"So does that mean you're . . .?" Sumita asked, not quite able to finish the question.

"Nah," Sangita replied. "At least I don't think so. I like girls, but they don't really get my heart racing, you know? I wouldn't mind at all if the perfect girl came along someday, but I don't expect that to happen. I'm pretty sure it'll be a boy, or a man, or whatever. Somebody better for me than Alan."

Sumita relaxed. A mother never stops worrying about her child, but Sumita had faith that things would turn out well for Sangita. She picked up the pan to dry. "You've got a good head on your shoulders, Gita," she said. "You'll know when you've found the right person."

"Hope so," Sangita replied, and walked out to the living room.

Sumita followed a few minutes later with two bowls of rice pudding. Sangita had already turned on the TV and queued up the movie.

"Ready?" she asked.

"I guess," Sumita replied.

"Here goes," Sangita said.

Sumita could see that it was set in India from the opening shot, and she was surprised at her daughter's choice. Sangita had never shown any interest in Indian movies. This one was from a moderately famous director, but Sumita had never even heard of it.

"It doesn't look Big Explosions 11," she said to Sangita, "even if it is called Fire."

"Just watch, Mom," Sangita replied. "I think you'll like it."

It started out as a dysfunctional family drama, something no culture lacks, even if the details differ. Radha was an unhappy woman in a loveless marriage, almost the same age as Sumita. Sita, young and beautiful, moved into the house after an arranged marriage to Radha's brother in law, who was no better a husband than Radha's own.