Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

perpetuate the lie you and Grandfather concocted? You want me, too, to deny my father?”
    Korobi rushes from the room as though she can’t bear to be near Sarojini. Almost as though she wants to tumble down those same stairs to join her mother, Sarojini thinks, holding her breath until she hears her granddaughter pick up the phone and say hello.

    By the river in the yellow light of the deserted streetlamp, Rajat holds his sobbing fiancée and tries to comfort her. But he can’t find the right words—he’s too shocked by the astounding news she’s just told him. He starts to say that he can imagine what she must be going through, being lied to like this, but then he stutters to a stop. The truth is, he can’t imagine it at all. It chagrins him, this failure of empathy. Perhaps it’s because the news ambushed him so unexpectedly. He’d called the Roy home to tell Korobi that he wouldn’t be able to see her tonight. He needed to spend some time with his family, whom he’d been neglecting shamefully since Bimal Roy’s death. Even at the height of his infatuation with Sonia he had managed to carve out more time for them. His mother hadn’t complained—that was not her way. But last night he got home to find Pia lying on the sofa, where she had fallen asleep waiting for him to return. Awakened, she had rubbed at her eyes plaintively and said she never got to see him these days. Struck by compunction, he promised her that he would have dinner at home tonight, maybe even play a game of Scrabble afterward. He was surprised by how happy it made him to plan a relaxed evening with his family. But when he’d talked to Korobi, the feverish intensity of her voice had worried him. He had come—as she requested—as soon as he could.
    “I’m very sorry. . . .”
    Even to his ears, the words sound inadequate, equivocal. What exactly is he sorry for? Sorry that her grandfather had betrayed her, that he might have contributed to her mother’s death? That she’d been lied to about her father for all these years? Yes, of course. But isn’t he also sorry that she has now found out about her father? Certainly it would have been simpler had Rajat not been handed this strange, sudden father-in-law, a foreigner shrouded in a conspiracy of silence. He can’t help wondering what reason Bimal Roy, a canny man if ever there was one, might have had for cutting Rob out of Korobi’s life so completely.
    “It’s hard for me to believe that Grandfather was so harsh to my mother. If only he’d accepted my father—or at least not pressured her to remain in India—she would still be alive. And I’d have grown up with both my parents.”
    Rajat makes a sympathetic sound. If only is a dangerous path to travel. But it’s no use trying to tell Korobi that right now.
    “What hurts even more is knowing that my grandparents—whom I loved more than anybody—would deceive me like this! It hurts so much.”
    Something twists inside Rajat. He thinks, unwillingly, of Sonia. How well he knows, from his own life, what Korobi is describing, that feeling as though the solid earth has turned to shifting sands beneath his feet.
    “Plus I feel stupid for being so gullible.”
    He takes a deep breath. His job right now is to comfort Korobi. She is his heart, his breath, the way out of his own abyss. “You can’t blame yourself for believing them. You had no reason to think it could be a lie. I would have done the same.”
    “Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’m never going to trust anyone so blindly.”
    The weary bitterness in her voice troubles him. “Cara, surely you can trust me.”
    She raises a mutinous chin, her body hard, her eyes narrow and so angry he hardly recognizes them. It strikes him that he doesn’t know her as well as he’d thought. But then she gives a giant sigh and crumples against him.
    “You’re right. You’re the only one I can count on. That’s why I had to tell you. Grandma said I shouldn’t, that it might