I understood after our conversation that this was probably going to be the last lunch we would ever have — together as husband and wife. She corrected me yesterday when I had said that she was still “my wife”. She said, “I am neither yours, nor a wife”. That will stay with me awhile.
I decided we would make a meal of this. After all, I was always one for histrionics. I figured the best way to say goodbye to a beautiful relationship like this was to order some of our favorite food from one of our favorite places.
Scallion Pancakes
We always had loved scallion pancakes from the early days of the relationship. We had decided to move in together very early on in our relationship. I was doing it for a couple of reasons — she and I had spent a couple of months together in each other’s company exclusively and enjoyed it. I was missing the feeling of home, and the familiarity she brought me was a whiff of home. We did love each other, in our own ways. But also honestly, I was doing it because I wanted to save on the rent because she was literally living with me 5 days a week rent-free. The optimizer in me figured she might as well pay rent here instead of to her roommates. There was nothing nefarious about it, it was purely an economies-of-scale decision that was built on pragmatism, I told friends that wondered aloud why I was moving in so quickly with someone. In a hastily sprung up plan, we moved to an apartment we found on Craigslist for a sublet in the Lower East Side.
We had quickly agreed to move in after having literally no other options as we need the end of my current lease. The rent was exactly what I paid for my first New York apartment, a studio which was converted into a 1-bedroom smack bang at the north end of Times Square. I had wanted to live in the hustle of New York since I was coming to a foreign country, alone, and lonely. The noise kept me company and I wanted to be a tourist because I didn’t know how long I would stay in New York.
We had moved in on a weekend with me driving a rented U-Haul, picking her and her stuff up from her apartment on 76th St in Forest Hills. I had made many a trip to drop her, pick her up, celebrate a birthday, not thinking twice about the long drive across the Queensboro bridge and then the painfully slow Queens Ave with uncoordinated traffic signals every few paces. I had driven over one night all the way to get her ice cream at a shady Ozone park casino, somewhere in an unknown part of Queens, just because Google maps had shown it open. We had sat there by the curb, two kids in their 20s, staring at the stars, with love and ice cream.
Her roommates were disgruntled at her moving out, I figured, jealous that Pinks was the first one who was no longer effectively in the singles market like they were. They had sat on their couch without lifting a finger as we had hauled the bed and all her belongings. We didn’t care, because we were embarking on our own journey now. None of what the world thought mattered anymore. We had stopped on the way to buy someone’s Ikea pullout sofa-bed from somewhere nondescript in Queens and other random furniture like a coffee table, all from Craigslist. Jack had been there, as he had been almost all the way during this relationship. And Gurbir had put in a cameo, like he usually did. Atreya had pulled the typical entitled “I would never do this without movers” and escaped from this. The moving had bruised my back so badly that I cried while speaking to my parents the next day, and I remember her feeling bad that I hadn’t expressed it to her. She cared about me, felt my pain, and had wanted to protect me.
The “Chinatown apartment” itself was huge for a 1 bedroom. It was almost 800 square feet, with a balcony included. It was overlooking the projects, which was not ideal, but it was close to FDR, which was convenient for me since I drove to work. She would wake up early, make me breakfast and then leave home. This was the apartment I was to spend my 30th birthday in. She had planned 30 gifts, giving me a gift each day as my birthday drew closer. It was something I had never expected and wonder to this day if I deserved. We invited lots of people over, and slowly built our home. I picked up a wooden book shelf from some Walmart location in upstate New York and took ages to assemble it. That book shelf, she would start to loathe so much later on, that she would dispose when I wasn’t around. We got a beautiful TV cabinet from Jersey City, a clothes rack from Union City, since I had a car.
Even though we both had long commutes, we came back from work enthusiastic to spend time with one another and explore the city. We went out almost every single day in summer, exploring eclectic beer gardens in Brooklyn and museums uptown.
We proceeded to explore the famous cuisine that was on offer nearby. The one we loved best was called Prosperity Dumpling, a literal hole-in-the-wall, about a 15 minute walk from ours, which had seating space for none but some counters where you could place your food and eat. It was always crowded, and while named for their pork and chive dumplings, the scallion pancakes were the clear highlight. They had varieties of Chicken and Beef that I remember and we took almost everyone we knew to the place over the next year. That was the start of the love affair with scallion pancakes. That place closed down a short while after, but I know somewhere in our hearts that we both longed for those scallion pancakes, and perhaps more for that time in our lives when things were so simple.
Dan Dan Noodles
We also ordered the dan dan noodles, which was a staple from Han. We had first been to Han Dynasty in the East Village one Christmas morning during our second year together, thinking this was perfect timing to skirt the notorious 3 hour wait that it normally came with.
Other New Yorkers, it seemed, also had the same idea. Apparently, the city was full of people who didn’t have anywhere to be on Christmas morning, and we joined them in putting our names down at the restaurant. The line did clear up relatively quickly, though, in an hour or so, and I remember we loved the food. I don’t remember what we ordered other than the fact that we first tried Dan Dan Noodles there.
The Lower East Side apartment, which is where we spent the best time of our early relationship, soon ended up springing a surprise. The sublet was not going to be renewed 6 months in. The subletter, who was an Indian guy, had decided he didn’t want to take a risk, even after I gave him a patriotic spiel. The building wanted us out because they had a long list of people waiting for subsidized housing. We would much later still proclaim that our heart was in the Lower East Side, if we could pick any neighborhood in the city.
We were forced to start looking again, within 6 months of the last time we did. I was in a difficult place at work, struggling to fit into a sales job that was thrust on me during a re-org. I had the choice of going back to India but with the life I was building here, I had decided against going back to the un-glamorous life back there.
Pinks had done the heavy lifting looking for an apartment. We had decided we would take our budget up by $400, split equally. She had chanced upon a gem of a building, the Andover, in a beautifully managed Glenwood property. It was a building that had a round rotunda, landscaping up front and a host of staff and doormen. The unit was not as large as our last apartment, but we had a nice bedroom with closets, a nice living room and a separate kitchen as well. She had repurposed the coffee table we had into a diwan with some cushions, which now sat by the window, creating additional seating for us when there were guests around. We had a chalk board with to-dos listed in our kitchen, a pantry full of Indian groceries and snacks we would pick up on weekend grocery runs to Patel’s at Edison, and making the stop at Saravana Bhavan after to get her favorite Mini Idlies and my favorite Mysore Masala Dosa.
That was also the time my parents had visited me for the first time — the first trip they had taken after my mom’s retirement. It was an interesting time for Pinks, who had also decided to take her first solo trip to Peru, which I coaxed her into. I was always nudging her to be more confident, explore more and the love for travel was one of those things I wanted to instill in her. I remember sitting at the diwan for hours on end, creating the video that I had made for her 30th birthday, cobbling together a bunch of clips from many of her friends and family to stitch it into an amateur movie of sorts. I had even asked my parents if they would be okay going to DC during Pinks’ birthday so that I could get some time alone with her — after all, it was not going to be fun for her to spend her 30th with her boyfriend’s parents. They had agreed, somewhat aghast at my request, which was exacerbated even more when they landed in DC by Megabus and it turned out to be -13 degrees Celsius that day.
The Glenwood apartment had been a whirlwind one for us. We had moved in to it happy, but as parents and other guests trickled in one after another without a break, we had found no time to prioritize for ourselves. We had let the distance grow even as we lived with one another. She had found a set of friends she had started to hang out with, and I had found comfort in the long distance emotional support of a past lover. There was a wake-up call one day when she had gone to stay with her old roommates back in Forest Hills. I had had a bit of a panic attack thinking she was with someone else and that I was losing her. I had driven all the way to Queens and proceeded to serenade her with flowers in dramatic fashion and brought her back home.
Mapo Tofu
The entrée, which was left to me, had to be Mapo Tofu, I reckoned. I had always mispronounced it as Mapa tofu, getting chided jokingly from her every time. We had our favorite Mapo Tofu place called Ajio Szechuan which we discovered in our 3rd year. A small corner restaurant close to our 3rd apartment together.
We were on 96th between 2nd and 3rd. A very short walk down to 95th and 2nd got us to this hardly ever crowded restaurant where they had the best Mapo Tofu.
This apartment had not seen the end of our problems that carried on from the earlier one. We had just recognized it, but had failed to address it fully. This resulted in me a few months later deciding to move out on my own to this smaller apartment. We had mended our relationship at the very last minute, after even creating a notepad list of what I would take and what I would leave for her. She had relented to this, and since I had finalized this apartment on 96th St myself, she had agreed to come with me there without even seeing the apartment once — a big deal for someone as OCD about home things as she was. The apartment was less than ideal — it was small, barely 500 square feet with a bathroom that could only be accessed from inside the bedroom, which tormented us immensely when my parents visited that summer. All that struggle was to save some money to buy an apartment, I had told myself.
This was the apartment that also saw the most amount of stress we had collectively gone through.
We had decided to get married while in this apartment. After the month I had spent alone in 2015 while she was in India for her brother’s wedding, she had come back with an ultimatum that she wanted to get married in the next year. I had spent the time apart also thinking I was missing her a lot and had spent the time planning on what was next. I did my research about the 4Cs, choosing a beautiful princess cut ring which was a stretch for my budget, but I was going to do it regardless, because it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I had rented out a private rooftop gazebo at the Knickerbocker hotel, a place that had a sweeping view to Times Square, a place I chose because New York defined us and our relationship. It was also an ode to her love for the city, and this evening had to be about her. I had found a reason to get here there, with minimal hints, but as most girls did, she had picked up on it and worn a beautiful green dress to get there, even while on the first day of her period. And Jack had been around, clicking away photos, perched on a ledge atop the building.
I had mounted a GoPro to one of the pillars as well and had a long-winded speech ready. Pinks, in typical fashion, didn’t want any of the speech and was freezing in the especially windy night. I had gone down on one knee and asked this lady to marry me. That was all I had wanted, and the hotel had graciously served us champagne, which somehow they never charged me for!
We had gone through the pain of Pinks breaking her hand during a trip to Acadia National Park with my parents. She was relishing the bicycle ride when she went downhill a tad too fast, clutched at the front brakes and toppled over, and wanting to avoid landing on her face, broken the fall with her palm, which twisted and broke into multiple pieces. The surgery had taken a few hours as I had wandered around the hospital with my mom, sitting at the Lexington Pizza Place, to get a coffee. We finally took her back that night, and she was very groggy with the anasthecia. She had thrown up all night into a plastic tub we had kept beside me, and I had woken up every half an hour, cleaning her up, being forced to feed her another painkiller because her pain was so high. She had always had a low pain tolerance, and needed the doctor the next day to tell me to get her off the pain medication, else she would continue to suffer. She finally relented after hearing from the doctor, the same thing she had heard from me and my parents.
I had never taken care of another person in my life. I had no sense of responsibility, living a nonchalant life thus far. I had shirked all responsibility, especially when it came to care giving, and run away to be with friends and girlfriends when my mom and sister had minor procedures done during years past. Taking care of Pinks made me realize she was mine to take care of. There was no other people to worry about, this was my world and she was mine to protect. She had become my wife even before we signed our papers in City Hall a month or so after, and even before we took our feras around the fire a few months down that same year.
We had spent a lot of time searching for, then going through the process of finalizing and acquiring the apartment we had fallen in love with. I had been the driver, and she the follower, in our apartment search. I was disciplined as ever, making calls, spending every weekend for 3 months visiting apartments across the city and crunching numbers. After almost 100 apartments searched online and speaking to numerous brokers, maybe 40 viewings in person, we both knew this was the one as soon as we came in for a viewing. And then we did our best to get it, and after one failed attempt that left us bruised, we had upped our offer and landed it.
We had also had the pressure of planning our own wedding, while buying a home, with her broken hand and me with a painfully difficult job and boss. My mom mentioned during the wedding toast later that year that we both would sit, laptops in hand, planning our own wedding, every single weekend without a break. That was the best of us — we worked together as a team. I had the excel sheets and the templates, and she had the motivation if she put her mind to it. That was a year of stress — and that 96th St apartment saw us deal with it in search of the next chapter of our lives.
Pork Dumplings
I also ordered the pork dumplings. We had probably had pork dumplings in 30 different restaurants in the city at the very least — everything from Vanessa’s dumpling, where you ate in styrofoam plates to Hakasan, the Michelin-star restaurant, and everything in between. Our love for Asian food was so strong that it found a mention in our wedding vows as well. “I would always give you company to chow down on copious amounts of Asian food”, I had said.
We had finally moved to our 4th apartment in 5 years, and what was to be our last home together. If anything, this was our home. We had moved in to it and fixed every single nook and cranny of it ourselves. We had realized the pains of home ownership first hand, but hadn’t buckled down. We had put our love, our sweat, blood and tears into this place.
We had gotten married while here. We had been to 15+ countries from this apartment. We had a home airport. We had a name tag with our name on it, a property tax bill with our names on it, a door mat we had chosen and every single thing in this home was carefully curated by us. We got a newspaper delivered to our home each weekend. We had every single ingredient in this place to make it our home. Every single plant here had her name on it. Every single wire in the AV system and smart bulb and light had mine on it. Every purchase had been arrived at through a rigorous process of arguing, because we had such strong ideas about everything, which I lament in hindsight. I remember going to a discount furniture store in Long Island together and looking at another Indian couple at each others’ throats, looking at ourselves with pride on how we were so far from that.
It was a feeling of safety, one that I never knew I had wanted. To have a home to calls ours. To open all opens from Uber to Lyft to Postmates to see a “home” saved that you could really call home. It was the place, it was who we were, it was where we were, and how we felt about each other.
But somewhere along the line, the stresses of mortgage payments, of visas, of job transitions and rejected promotions, took a toll on us. We continued to be friends and partners, the best version of ourselves while traveling. But at home, we retreated into our own bubbles. There were visitors and more visitors. There was an entire year where we had less than 2 weeks to ourselves when someone wasn’t around in our space.
The fights grew more vicious. There was a push in the kitchen once that had happened instinctively. There were words said that couldn’t be taken back anymore, it seemed. And the weight of the tears shed here had a magnitude that was heavier than any we had encountered.
We had grown closer, yet further apart, at this place. We now knew each other better than we ever did. Every single reaction, every response was now known. But we also weaponized it. We emotionally manipulated each other and started paying scant regard to one another’s goals. After a brief hiatus, she went back to her spending ways and her promise of not using a credit card was well broken. I had my habit of fighting nasty, dragging her into the muck, condescending and patronizing.
But we continued living like roommates. The romance had been dead, for what seemed a long while. We hardly ever had sex. We changed sheets for our marital bed when there had been no action at all during that entire period. We stopped communicating about our needs. We had the affection and felt deeply protective about one another, but the amorous love was somewhere missing.
And then the distance came up — an eventuality neither of us wanted, but one we had to go through for her career. We had prioritized hers and let her change her job to get on to my visa as a dependent. As a result, she had to spend a year over the past 2 unemployed, in limbo, where that took a toll on her. I had to spend an extended period of time away. The only way I could keep my job.
We went ahead and prioritized our own needs ahead of the other, had some of the best and worst times, but independent of each other. In years past, whatever had happened, we had gone through it somewhat together. But not this time. We had no choice but to walk it alone. I had walked a path that had brought me immense joy and transformation; she had walked a path that had brought her immense pain and realization.
And here we stood, at the precipice. With our order from Han Dynasty now at the table: the scallion pancakes, the dan dan noodles, the mapo tofu and the pork dumplings were all there. But the happiness wasn’t there anymore. The food didn’t taste the same. The quantity was more than I remember it to be. The salt was less than she liked, the spice less than I did. And one thing led to another at our lunch table, with condescension and virtue-signaling taking the place of where once existed pure unbridled joy.
