Read on for a taste of Amulya Malladi’s new novel

Serving Crazy with Curry

available now as a Ballantine Reader’s Circle selection
from Ballantine Books.

The Beginning or The End

The DOW was down almost 600 points the week Devi decided to commit suicide. The NASDAQ also crashed as two big tech companies warned Wall Street of their dismal next quarter estimates. But the only reason Devi was half-heartedly listening to some perky CNN Sunday news anchor prattle on about the lousy week on the stock exchange was habit. A long time ago she’d kept track, listened eagerly, checked the stock of her company online on Yahoo!, but that was when she had stock options that could have been worth something. The last two start ups she hooked up with hadn’t even made it as far as the IPO.

After Devi was laid off (yet again) a week ago, it started to dawn on her that she was not going to be able to change her life. Everything she ever wanted had become elusive and the decision to end her life, she realized, was not only a good decision, but her only option.

As a good tactician, her mind laid down two categories on a spreadsheet: the reasons to die and the reasons not to die. After filling the columns she very practically went through all the reasons, struck out those that didn’t make sense, kept those that did.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter what the entries on the spreadsheet of her unbalanced mind were, because the decision was already made. She already knew that the losses she incurred had eaten away everything joyous within her. In the past six months she went from being just slightly depressed to so sad and fragile that the passing of every day seemed like a wasted opportunity; an opportunity to not live through the day.

Devi’s fingers moved over the remote control of the television and flipped through images, faces and vacuum cleaners.

Wanting to delay her impending decision of death, she picked up the telephone and sat down on her sand-colored sofa (the one she couldn’t afford), her white silk robe tightly secured at her waist. She’d been tightening her robe ever since she put it on at seven that morning, hoping it would settle her down, secure her mind and the uneasiness roiling inside her stomach. All night she had tossed and turned, going over the decision one way and then another. When finally sleep claimed her it was five in the morning and then sleep abandoned her again after just two hours.

Suicide was stressful business.

First, there was the question of how, which she’d pretty much decided on, but there were lingering doubts. Second, there was the question of when. Last night she thought she’d do it at night, in the quiet, but doubts kept her awake, alive. Now it was morning and even though there had been several such mornings in the past months that followed empty, contemplative nights, this morning was different. This morning nothing had changed with the break of dawn as it usually did. This morning her heart was as heavy as it was last night when she started to think seriously, once again, about death. And that’s why she could feel that this was the day it would happen, the day she would make it happen.

Devi stared at the telephone and her fingers automatically tapped the numbers that would conjure up someone on the other end of the line at her parents’ home.

She turned the television off as soon as she heard her father’s hello. “Daddy, Devi,” she said.

“What’s going on, beta?” Avi asked in a groggy voice, like he’d just woken up, which he probably had since it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, too early for any of his children to call, definitely too early for party-all-night Devi to call.

“Just wanted to say hello,” Devi said, tears brimming in her eyes. She desperately wanted him to say that everything would be okay, that the world would not collapse around her, but that meant asking him for help, and the way things were she was too ashamed to hold out her hand.

This was her life, she was responsible for it, and the mess she had made of it was not something he could clean up for her. As much as she wanted to be held in the secure circle of Daddy’s arms, she knew that would just underscore her failure. At least in this, she wanted to succeed, not back out like a wimp who could neither live nor die.

“How’s work?” her father asked next.

“Great,” she lied instead of telling him that the company had closed its doors. She was out of a job again and this time there was no way around the facts. She was a loser. Had always been, especially compared to the successes in her family. Her father, Avi Veturi, had started a successful technology company with a friend and now was semi-retired, enjoying a privileged life in Silicon Valley. Her older sister, Shobha, was Vice President of engineering for a software company. Her grandmother, Vasu, had been a doctor in the Indian Army, and retired as a Brigadier. Talk about overachievers; her family was loaded with them.

Even her mother, who’d spent her entire life in the house, was still in some ways better off than her. But Saroj had no solid successes to her credit and maybe that was why Devi could compare herself only to her. That was a scary thought. Saroj never held a job, spent all her time in the kitchen cooking and pretending to take care of her family. She was a fairly good cook and a lousy mother. Her relationship with her husband seemed extra strained since he’d semi-retired a few years ago. Marriage to Avi had been Saroj’s biggest accomplishment and now that marriage was also fading away, rotting in apathy and some disdain. If they were not Indian, Devi was sure they’d be divorced.

“G’ma,” she told her grandmother, who lived in India, on the telephone just a few years ago, “they sleep in separate beds and now Daddy is talking about moving into the guest room, to avoid all the Hindi movies Mama watches at night.”

Her grandmother had been honest as she always was and told Devi that some marriages simply don’t work and they should be ended, but not too many people had the courage to do so. G’ma was not one of those cowards. She divorced her crazy husband when divorce was unheard of in India. She took that chance and so many others. She lived her life on her own terms and no one could ever call Vasu a loser.

Tears filled Devi’s eyes again and regret flooded inside her. She wanted to be like her grandmother: strong, independent, and smart. Instead she was more like her mother: a complete failure at everything she ever attempted—life, love, children, job, relationships, finances, everything.

“Is G’ma up?” Devi asked her father. Vasu was visiting as she always did during the summer to get some relief from the scorching Indian heat.

“I don’t know, beta. Probably not, we were up until three in the morning playing chess. But I can . . .”

“Who’s on the phone, Avi?” Devi heard her mother call out.

“Do you want to talk to your mother?” Avi asked and Devi whispered an unsteady “no” and hung up quickly. She didn’t want to talk to her mother, and on second thought she didn’t even want to talk to Vasu. She felt she had said her good-byes the week before when the entire family met for dinner at her parents’ house.

Girish, Shobha’s husband, was unable to make it because of some “thing” at the university, but no one believed those stories anymore. Ever since they’d found out that Shobha couldn’t get pregnant it had become more evident than ever that their marriage was not working, at any level.

For a very long time Devi had been jealous of Shobha; part of her still was. Shobha had it all. A vice president of engineering at a software company at the young age of thirty-two was quite an achievement. Marrying a Stanford professor and excellent man, Girish, was another one. Devi was perversely (and guiltily) glad that Shobha couldn’t put down “perfect mother” on her list of achievements.

Just two years after marrying Girish, Shobha had surgery for endometriosis and was told that she could not conceive. Shobha was shocked that at the age of twenty-nine she couldn’t have children.

“They have a billion people in India and I can’t have a baby? Those crack addicts who can’t take care of themselves get knocked up, so why the hell can’t I?” Shobha demanded angrily. Even then angry. Not sad, not devastated, like the rest of the family. Shobha was angry, always angry. That was Shobha’s trademark emotion, her way of dealing with the world at large. Anger, Shobha said, was not a bad thing.

“Fuck them who say . . . and yes, Mama, I can say fuck, I’m twenty-nine years old and barren, I can say fuck even if fucking doesn’t get me anywhere anymore . . . so what was I saying?”

“You were saying that anger is a good thing,” Girish filled in patiently. “Maybe you got endometriosis because you’re so angry all the time.”

Girish had been a broken man when he heard the news, and tried to convince Shobha that adoption would be the solution. She wouldn’t hear of it. “If I can’t have my own child then maybe this is nature’s way of saying that I shouldn’t have children. Not mine, not anyone else’s.” Their relationship deteriorated after that.

Devi wondered if she should call Shobha to say good-bye. They never really got along, not like sisters did in movies, in other people’s families, in books. They were distant, and Devi had a strong inkling that Shobha genuinely disliked her.

She dialed Shobha’s cell phone number, always a reliable way of getting in touch with her and the best way to avoid speaking with Girish, who could answer if she called their home phone. The fewer people she had to say good-bye to, the easier this would be. But even as Shobha’s cell phone rang, Devi knew she was procrastinating. On the sixth ring, right before Shobha’s voice mail would click in, Devi hung up, threw the phone down on the couch, and stood up. It was time, she told herself firmly. It had been time for a while now.

Devi was not the first person in her family to attempt suicide. Thirty-eight years ago Ramakant, Devi’s grandfather, hung himself from the ceiling fan in his brother’s house with one of his exwife’s silk saris. Vasu had never forgiven Ramakant for killing himself just three months after the divorce. The blame fell squarely on her, and everyone merrily overlooked the fact that Ramakant was obviously unbalanced. Adding insult to injury was the suicide note, in which Ramakant took great pains to specifically explain how his ex-wife was not the reason why he was doing himself in and that he loved and respected Vasu very much.

Devi decided in the beginning that if she ever killed herself it would be without a suicide note—no melodrama for the damned. This was a personal business, a private affair, no one needed to know why. Sure, her family may think she owed them an explanation, but that was an unreasonable expectation compounded by Devi’s perverse desire to keep them guessing. Her parents may have brought her into the world (and that, too, without her permission), but it was her choice when she left.

She wanted to leave now.

It wasn’t like she woke up one day and thought, Oh, it’s a good idea if I kill myself today. No, it took several months before she reached this point. It started like a spark of electricity, something that happens when wiring goes bad. And once the idea popped into her head, she couldn’t unpop it, no matter how hard she tried. No matter how hard she shook her head to clear it away, it stayed, and soon became a constant companion.

Everything seemed to be an omen, giving her the green go-ahead signal to die.

The computer crashed again. Damn, if only I was dead, I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.

I locked the car keys inside the car. Damn, if only I was dead, I wouldn’t have to call Triple A.

It’s a Friday night and I have no one to go out with. If only I’d killed myself in the morning then I wouldn’t have to deal with this loneliness in the evening.

So on and so forth.

Devi had it all planned, the method (this after some serious pondering), the time of day (though this kept changing), and the place. But in all her planning, Devi didn’t account for one mistake she had made a year ago. She gave Saroj a spare set of keys to her town house in Redwood City. Saroj had virtually beaten the keys out of Devi when she’d rented the place; nagged the hell out of her until Devi relented.

“You have to give us a spare set of keys. If you lose yours you will have to pay your landlord all that money to get new keys . . . this way, everything will be nice and easy.”

It hadn’t been quite nice’n easy as the hair-coloring commercial promised. It had been a nightmare. Saroj quickly forgot her guarantee to Devi that she wouldn’t enter Devi’s house using the spare key and did exactly that. The first time was with a box of ladoos.

Devi was shocked to see her mother in the dining area putting a box of ladoos on the table while Devi struggled to cover herself with a towel and hold on to a baseball bat, convinced that someone had broken in while she was in the shower.

When asked why she didn’t just ring the doorbell, Saroj spluttered something about having done that and then, having not gotten a response and seeing the driveway empty, using her key.

Devi reminded Saroj that she had a garage and therefore didn’t park her car in the driveway. Saroj just held up the ladoos and asked peevishly, “So, you don’t want the ladoos?”

Devi sighed and said it was okay this one time, but who was she kidding, the visits soon became a habit. Sometimes Devi would come home and there would be new Indian food items in her fridge and a long message from her mother on her answering machine explaining why Saroj just had to use her set of keys to put the perishable food in the fridge.

So it would have been prudent of Devi to have set the deadbolt from the inside that morning to prevent an unwanted visitor. However, new food hadn’t appeared in her fridge for a whole month and Devi didn’t think of her mother’s trespassing ways.

Devi sat down at the edge of the claw-foot bathtub, one of the reasons why she’d wanted to rent the house despite the exorbitant price the landlord was asking. She turned the delicate, antique brass water faucet, her fingers caressing the water as the thick drops fell. After a steady stream of cold water poured into the tub, wet heat began to stroke her hand. Deciding that the temperature was right, she rose and realized how insane it was to ensure the temperature of the water was right when she was going to do what she was going to do. How did it matter?

She tightened her robe one more time as her glance fell on the beautiful ivory-handled knife she’d purchased in Chinatown several years ago. She bought it because it looked fancy and was expensive. She’d accepted her first real job offer with her first start-up and they were paying well. She wanted to buy herself something silly, something expensive, and the ivory-handled knife caught her eye for all those reasons. At the time she would’ve never thought how handy it could be, how the sharpness that surprised and annoyed her would work to her advantage.

“Am I sure?” she asked herself and waited for a resonating answer in her mind.

She stood in front of the floor-length mirror, loosened her robe, and let it fall. Naked, she saw the small bulge of her tummy, her slight breasts, a constant cause of embarrassment, her curly, dark pubic hair that grew at a rapid rate, another cause of embarrassment.

“This is me,” she said out loud and removed the elastic band that held her shoulder-length hair in place. “I’m ready,” she told herself with a small smile.

Compared to all that had slipped away like a chimera through her fingers, losing her life didn’t seem too monumental. She sucked back the tears that were ready to fall on her cheeks. She wasn’t going to cry. This was the right thing, the only thing, and she wasn’t going to let any doubt enter her through those tears.

She dropped lavender bath beads inside the tub with some self-amusement. How would it matter how the bathwater smelled when soon, it would smell and look like blood? The thought and the realization that blood would be everywhere allowed nausea to creep in. She battled against it, just as she had the tears.

She lay down in the tub and took a deep breath before dipping her head in. The water soothed her, relaxed her, and she floated for a while, her mind empty of thought, her hearty empty of emotions. She held her breath for as long as she could under the water and then, when oxygen became vital, she pulled herself out.

Slowly, she rested against the bottom of the tub and raised both her hands up. They were wet and slick. She picked up the knife from the edge of the bathtub.

She ran her left thumb over the blade and felt the instant tearing of skin, gushing of blood. Carelessly, she washed the blood away in the lavender water.

She lifted her right hand and looked at the wrist carefully. This was the last time she would see it like this, unmarked. This was the last time for everything.

With the precision she’d always been known for, Devi took the knife in her left hand and slowly made a deep vertical cut on her right wrist, tearing open the vein that would lead her to death.

Two things happened after the Devi “incident,” as everyone in the Veturi household started calling it:

1. Devi completely stopped talking.
2. Devi started cooking.

Two things she did with such intensity and consistency that it drove her already shaken family up the wall.