Navini had expected the visit to involve some kind of conflict or tension, which was what usually happened when they spent time together after a long separation, but the novelty of her mother’s presence in New York⁠—the sheer strangeness of seeing her there in the apartment⁠—seemed to bring about a suspension of their usual patterns, and their first few days together were pleasantly uneventful, peaceful even. They managed to leave the apartment by ten o’clock most mornings, and knowing that her mother would feel cheated if they didn’t visit the city’s more iconic landmarks, Navini took her to Times Square and Central Park on their first full day, to the Empire State Building the day after, and the World Trade Center memorial the day after that. It required considerable effort to conceal her contempt for all the loud, bored, oblivious tourists they encountered, for the roving packs of policemen, outfitted as if for a war zone, the gaudy kiosks selling I Heart NY shirts and key chains, but summoning all her resources Navini did her best to smile and project fresh enthusiasm on each excursion, telling her mother she’d avoided sightseeing in the city all this time only so they’d be able to do it together. Her mother, for her part, showed little interest in the places she was taken, insisting Navini take selfies of the two of them at every site to send to relatives later but otherwise paying little attention to the landmarks themselves, which she conceptualized only in terms of the streets, paths, staircases, and elevators required to get through or around them. It clearly gave her satisfaction to pretend she had no personal investment in these excursions, that it was only for her daughter’s sake that she was agreeing to come along, and though Navini was well aware that her mother would have felt wounded had she not bothered making plans, or had she shown any sign of boredom or restlessness, she resigned herself to playing along. It was sad and a little hurtful, these pretenses of investment and indifference that she and her mother both felt obliged to put on, these carefully calculated, heavily charged exchanges of interest and aloofness, but extended time together was probably not possible without these postures, she told herself, and ultimately they were a small price to pay for harmony. 

Their differences of framing aside, the truth was that after some initial adjustment Navini found it surprisingly enjoyable to spend time wandering through the city in her mother’s company. The extended, uninterrupted time together meant they were free to discuss more than the fixed range of topics they were limited to on phone calls⁠—more than the latest incident with Navini’s brother Niven, or what they’d been cooking that week, or which of their relatives was going into open-heart surgery next⁠—and it meant, too, that they could choose also not to speak, to lapse into the long silences that were a precondition of actually having things to say. Being in physical proximity meant they were free to speak only when they felt called to speak, and having a new environment to respond to gave them novel material for conversation as well, allowed them to comment on strange dogs and their owners, the ridiculous outfits of people on the train, the striking amount of homelessness in New York compared to Toronto, to construct out of these shared observations a kind of solidarity against the massive, impersonal city they were moving through. Occasionally, when they passed stylish or sophisticated-looking people her own age on the street, Navini found herself becoming quieter and more self-conscious, embarrassed by her mother’s odd appearance, her mismatched top and bottom, her cheap shoes and oversize parka, but she ignored these people as best she could, dismissing them because they were white, or bourgeois, or people who didn’t know anything about the real world, and she managed after just a couple of days to feel shielded inside the increasingly impermeable unit she formed with her mother. Holding her soft, slightly clammy hand when she noticed her getting overwhelmed at crowded intersections, swiping her MetroCard for her when she had trouble passing through subway turnstiles, Navini took pleasure in the new authority she was being granted, her mother’s new deference and physical docility, as well as in her own new position of guide and caretaker, responsible adult daughter. Her mother still exerted her customary powers wherever she could, especially in the apartment, and especially in the kitchen, but it seemed at times like something unexpected was opening up between them, a way of being whose possibility she’d never really glimpsed back home. It was as though the tension she usually felt in her mother’s presence came not from some fundamental incompatibility in their natures or characters, as she’d long assumed, but rather from the specific dynamic that was imposed upon them in Toronto, maybe by Niven and the convoluted triangle they always became part of in his presence, maybe by the instinctive conservatism that came from living in a city populated by so many Tamils. 

Navini had planned to have Kathir over for dinner on Tuesday evening, the fourth day of the visit, and her mother insisted on undertaking all the preparations herself, her usual anxiety around hosting amplified no doubt by the fact that she was entertaining one of her daughter’s friends from New York. She decided to cook four separate curries and a sambal, despite Navini’s insistence that the dinner was meant to be casual, and she rushed Navini down to the deli last minute to get a large bottle of Fanta when she realized with panic that there weren’t any soft drinks to serve their guest. Her mother had seldom shown interest in her friends when she was younger, had often been suspicious of their closeness to her, warning her to be careful what she told them, as if they presented some kind of threat to the family system, and it moved Navini to see her putting so much effort into welcoming one of her friends now, another sign, surely, that something between them was changing. Kathir dressed down a little for the dinner, his nose piercing the only detail that might have hinted at his sexuality, and upon entering the apartment he went straight to her mother and kissed her on both cheeks, told her how much he’d heard about her and how happy he was to finally meet her. He asked about her flight, about Niven, about their ancestral village in Jaffna and her routine at home, his unexpected attention clearly flattering to her mother, who complimented him on how well he spoke Tamil, looking at Navini as if to ask why she hadn’t been told more about this impressive young man. She responded to his questions generously, opening up more than she usually did, though her answers, as was usually the case when she talked to people outside the immediate family, were comically embellished, giving the impression that their life in Scarborough had been wonderful and that she and her two children lived in peaceful, flourishing coexistence. Her mother asked questions too, which she did not often do, and when she asked him what he did for work Kathir began telling her about his dissertation project, explaining his thoughts about genocide, displacement, and the diaspora without resorting to English and without oversimplifying, insisting on all the nuances and qualifications he would have made to a college-educated person their own age. She listened carefully, nodding in agreement as he spoke, making the occasional comment, asking the occasional clarifying question, and when Kathir was done she clasped his arm and said she was proud to see that young people still cared about the cause, which was, Navini felt sure, intended at least partly as a slight against her and her brother. Watching Kathir and her mother talk she was surprised and a little jealous, surprised because she’d always assumed that her mother had no interest in intellectual or political discussions, because whenever she and Niven had brought up such topics in the past her mother had always ignored them or tried to change the subject, jealous because her mother rarely ever asked about her work, rarely ever asked her anything except what she’d been cooking and eating. She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her hands on. Maybe, it struck her, the issue all these years had been purely linguistic, maybe her mother had shut down her attempts at conversation only because they were expressed in a language that she could, at best, speak haltingly, a language in which she inevitably appeared less intelligent than she really was. 

The rest of the evening went well, with none of the long, awkward silences Navini had feared. Conversation slowed only when it came time to eat, her mother waiting till Kathir needed a second helping before letting herself begin, stopping to heap new servings onto his plate each time he seemed close to finishing. Navini was grateful to her for making him feel so welcome, for taking such trouble with the food, for talking so openly and being so curious, but something continued to bother her about the tone of intimacy, almost confidentiality, that seemed to have developed between her mother and friend. Maybe she was just envious of Kathir’s Tamil, the easy communication it allowed them and the slightly excessive way her mother praised his speech, praise she herself had never received despite trying so hard to improve her own Tamil over the past couple of years, or maybe what bothered her was the way her mother described their family, the superficial images of domestic happiness and harmony she was continually constructing for their guest, the way Kathir, in turn, despite knowing better, seemed to accept and encourage these constructions without scruple. The annoyance persisted, and when, later that night, as they tidied up together in the kitchen after Kathir had left, her mother made a comment about what a nice boy he was, how thoughtful and intelligent, Navini made a point of not replying. The silence felt charged, and after hesitating a moment her mother remarked that she was surprised she hadn’t been told more about Kathir earlier. How had Navini met him, she asked, how long had they known each other? She’d gotten the sense that he liked her, did she like him as well? Her mother’s voice was soft and earnest, her lips bent upward in a small, contrite smile. It was a smile intended, Navini knew, to acknowledge the long-standing pact of silence that her mother was now breaking, the agreement Navini had forcefully initiated two or three years earlier when, on a visit home, after days of being chided about how she was getting older, how she needed to find a man before it was too late, she’d thrown the TV remote against the wall in anger and told her mother that she wasn’t interested in finding a man, that her mother of all people should have known that a man didn’t solve anyone’s problems, that if the subject came up again she would stop spending her vacation time in Toronto. The small gesture of violence had seemed to bring the matter to a swift resolution, her mother falling into line with surprising obedience and tact, but it was obvious now, as she should have known, that her mother’s obsessions, rather than being stamped out, had simply moved underground. Navini began to understand why her mother had been so generous with Kathir that evening, why she’d spoken so much over dinner and shared so much of herself, and turning slowly from the sink to study the hopeful, uncertain expectation on her mother’s face, taking distinct pleasure in the effect she knew her words would have, she replied that no, she didn’t like Kathir that way, wouldn’t have introduced him to her mother if she had, and anyway her friend was gay, he only had sex with men, hadn’t she been able to tell? 

The next morning Navini woke up to find her mother on the couch, staring at her phone, glasses on and sullenly absorbed, though she wasn’t really interacting with the screen and there was no sound to suggest she was watching anything. Her eyes looked smaller than usual, swallowed up by the puffy skin around them, and she didn’t seem to realize she was being watched until Navini, still under the covers, cleared her throat and asked what she was doing. Her mother, startled, glanced up and told her she hadn’t slept, that she’d spent most of the night awake and had decided at dawn to get out of bed and make some tea. She’d been sitting on the couch since then, playing sudoku on her phone⁠—what else was she supposed to do when Navini was still fast asleep at nine in the morning? There was an agitation in her mother’s voice, and when Navini asked why she hadn’t slept, whether the heating had been turned up too high, she shrugged and looked back down at her phone. She didn’t know, she said, staring distractedly at the screen, she’d been lying in bed, thinking about things, and had started worrying about Niven. She’d wanted to message him to ask whether he was doing okay, whether he’d been eating the food she’d left in the fridge, but thankfully she’d managed to stop herself⁠—it was her rule now to communicate with him only if he initiated. He could, of course, have taken the trouble to ask if she’d made it safely to New York, to let her know that everything was okay at home, but that wasn’t how Niven was, he didn’t care about other people’s problems, only his own. Navini, still sluggish, was quiet for a moment, then remembered the plan to take her mother out shopping that afternoon, a plan that would become far more complicated, she knew, if her mother was in a bad mood. She tried suggesting that maybe Niven was busy, or that maybe he was trying not to interrupt their time together, but her mother waved her hand dismissively. She continued looking at her phone with almost demonic expectation, as if by staring hard enough she could force the arrival of news from her son, till sensing, after a while, that Navini was still watching her, she put down her phone and looked up. Of course Niven was busy, she said, if he was too busy to say a word to her when they were both in Toronto, how was he going to find the time to send her a message while she was away? She picked up her phone again, then quickly put it back down, as if realizing suddenly how obsessive she must have looked. Maybe, she asked, looking up again, her tone becoming more conciliatory, Navini could do her a small favor? Maybe she could send Niven a quick message to check that everything was okay? He would ignore any messages she sent, would probably get angry at her for asking, but if Navini messaged he would feel compelled to respond⁠—would she mind just sending a message so she didn’t have to spend the whole day worrying? 

Navini had learned to dismiss her mother’s anxieties about Niven lightly but firmly, to chastise her for entertaining them the way a child might be chastised for eating too many sweets, and sitting up in bed she told her mother not to be silly. Niven would be fine, he was twenty-eight years old, and could handle being home alone for a few days. Hadn’t her mother claimed she was done worrying about him, hadn’t she told her a hundred times that she wasn’t going to think about him if he wasn’t going to think about her? Her mother regarded her from the couch, smiled coldly, and replied that it was her mistake to have asked. These were things only mothers could understand, it was her own stupidity for having expected Navini to help, saying which she pursed her lips and picked up her phone again, leaned back against the couch so the bright blue rectangle of her screen was reflected in duplicate on her glasses. Navini rubbed her eyes, studied her mother’s small, tense, agitated figure. It was possible, she knew, that she was misjudging the situation. Her mother had probably spent the whole night worrying about Niven, wondering whether he was okay and feeling guilty for leaving him alone at home. Unable to text him herself, unable to relax as she lay awake anxiously in bed, probably her only consolation had been the thought of asking her daughter to text him in the morning, which was probably why she was taking the rejection so badly now. In most circumstances Navini would have ignored her sarcastic reply, or given her a sarcastic response in turn, but she knew that all things considered it was probably best to placate her mother now. She told her mother that she was resisting only because she didn’t want her to go back on her own word, that she could get in touch with Niven if that was what her mother really wanted, and reaching for her phone with an exaggerated gesture she began typing out a message to her brother, trying to make it sound as though she were reaching out of her own initiative. He replied, miraculously, in less than a minute, saying that everything was great, that he was happy to finally be home alone, adding with a smiley face that they needed to make this part-time-here-part-time-there arrangement more permanent. Navini conveyed the gist to her mother, omitting the comment about making the arrangement more permanent, and after asking her to repeat exactly what the message had said, savoring it like a little morsel of her son’s existence that had suddenly entered the room, her mother smiled at her in gratitude and satisfaction. She looked around the apartment, as if remembering where she was, then stood up with surprising ease and lightness, as if she’d been pinned to that specific position on the couch all morning and had only then been released. She told Navini she was going to shower, that it was almost ten and they needed to leave soon, and watching as she closed the bathroom door behind her Navini sighed with relief and hauled herself slowly out of bed. 

The idea of taking her mother out shopping, as natural an activity as it might have seemed, had occurred to Navini only a couple of days earlier, walking through Midtown with her mother after multiple hours spent lining up to ascend the Empire State Building. They hadn’t gone shopping together in years, probably not since high school, certainly not since she’d graduated from college, and her hope had been that it would be a way for them to reconnect with the past, that maybe her mother would be touched, given all the other changes taking place between them, if she were the one who bought everything this time. Navini could remember, back in middle school, all the excursions that she, Niven, and her mother had made to Scarborough Town Centre to pick out clothes before the start of the school year, how her mother would take them to all the lower-end retail outlets she’d heard other Tamil mothers talking about, reminding them which of their clothes needed replacing as they walked through the aisles, making various suggestions but ultimately letting them pick out the items they wanted. Occasionally her mother would object to one of her choices on the grounds of price, though she always tried to make sure her selections stayed on the cheaper side, and sometimes, on special occasions, if she’d done well at school or if her birthday was coming up, they would go to one of the bigger, trendier stores, H&M or Urban Outfitters, though she would only ever be allowed to get one item and it would generally have to be on sale. Niven began finding their shopping trips increasingly tiresome as he got older, and as he entered his teenage years he would often slip away into one of the video game or electronics stores, telling them to just get him whatever they liked, a request that both Navini and her mother would agree to only after a show of protest, though in truth this was the part of these trips they both looked forward to most. His absence gave them a project to collaborate on, something they could work on together without risk of hurting each other’s feelings, and walking through the boys’ sections of various stores, sifting through the options displayed on tables, in bins, and on racks, they would discuss the positives and negatives of each item that caught their attention, what they thought Niven would like versus what they thought would suit him best, her mother trying to glean from Navini something about the styles in fashion for boys, Navini taking pleasure in the weight her mother seemed to give her opinions, the momentary sense that they were partners in something, friends almost.

Sometimes her mother would buy her things on her own private trips to the mall too, not at Scarborough Town Centre, where she hardly ever went by herself, but at one of the smaller Tamil strip malls that were filled with Tamil stores and businesses, with sari stores, travel agencies, law firms, tailors, jewelers, CD and VCD stores, anything a Tamil person might need. Her mother would buy her cheap imitation-leather handbags, silver- and gold-plated earrings and bangles, gifts that were meant to be a kind of acknowledgment that she was getting older, though Navini rarely liked what she was given, and over time, as her mother began to understand how far their tastes had diverged, this practice too came to an end. The obvious issues with her outfits started coming up, that her bra straps were visible beneath the straps of her tank top, that the pants she wore when going out were too low-rise, but what bothered her mother often had less to do with how revealing her clothes were than with the strange ideas of style they seemed to involve, for example the ripped, intentionally distressed jeans she’d begun wearing, which her mother found especially offensive. Her mother would claim the jeans made her look poor, like she didn’t have anyone to take care of her, and her insistence that what her mother found ugly or ridiculous was in fact stylish only seemed to confirm her sense that her daughter was drifting away from her, falling under the sway of powerful, obscure, occult influences in the outside world. The only clothing her mother was still buying for her by the time she graduated from college was underwear⁠—maybe she assumed there was no such thing as style when it came to underwear⁠—and even after Navini had started working full-time her mother would furtively inspect her bras and panties whenever she did the laundry, taking note of all the fraying pairs she saw and then going out later to buy replacements, leaving them for Navini to find on her bed or dresser. Navini had found the heart to halt this practice only after the end of her first year in New York, confessing finally that she hardly wore the underwear her mother got her, that it wasn’t the kind of thing she or her friends wore these days. Her mother took the rejection in stride, but in retrospect the disclosure had come to seem needlessly cruel, and maybe it was for this reason, seeing all the tourists with their shopping bags in Midtown a couple of days earlier, that she’d decided to take her mother shopping during her visit, not just because it would be a way to spend time indoors, away from the cold, but also because it felt like a way of making amends, especially if it was her money they spent this time. She would help her pick out a few nice, stylish, more expensive items, some trousers and sweaters, an elegant coat to replace the ugly parka with the Scotiabank logo she’d gotten for free years before, things she could take back to Scarborough and wear proudly around the neighborhood, telling people they were gifts from her daughter in New York. It was true that her mother had never liked receiving gifts from her children, that she considered them a waste of money, but the more Navini considered it, the more drawn she was to playing the role of the hardworking, magnanimous daughter, the grown-up child who bought her working-class mother things she’d never been able to afford. She’d shared the idea hesitantly and her mother had, after some resistance, seemed genuinely moved, taking her by the hand and telling her she’d accept the gift proudly, that she’d be so happy to wear something that her daughter had bought her with her own hard-earned money. 

The day, it soon became clear, would not go according to plan. Navini had decided she would take her mother to Macy’s, which she’d never been to herself but knew was the kind of New York institution that would be familiar even to people in Scarborough. Macy’s consisted of nine vast levels spread out across an entire block, the street level lined with veined marble floors, and walking uncertainly through the stately entrance into the large, warm, brightly lit lobby, their faces fractured and multiplied by all the pristine glass and mirror, Navini immediately began to wonder whether it had been a mistake to come. They both stood there for a moment, slightly disoriented, surveying the display stalls arrayed with cosmetics, jewelry, and high-end perfumes, the backlit images of waifish European models with their mouths held open like goldfish, and only when Navini caught sight of the escalators did she try to guide her mother forward with an air of confidence, both of them drawn, as they walked, to the delicate scents of perfume and the momentary glints of precious metal, both of them keeping their heads trained in front of them so as not to be caught looking too longingly at something by one of the impeccably suited store assistants. The Macy’s-brand women’s clothing was on the third floor, and when they arrived her mother got her bearings quickly, heading straight for the aisles marked for discount at the far end of the floor, going methodically through the racks and paying special attention to what seemed like the ugliest items available, particularly the stiff fabrics and floral designs that already comprised most of her wardrobe. Navini tried to suggest that maybe she should look for something different from what she usually wore, bolder colors, fabrics that sat more softly on her body, but every item she brought her mother dismissed on sight, shaking her head in the disparaging way she had of rejecting without consideration anything she didn’t like. She found issue with most of the items she’d picked off the racks herself too, she liked the design but not the fit, or the collar but not the buttons, or the price was too high for the quality of the material, so that it took almost an hour and a half of browsing before she finally gathered enough items to justify a visit to the fitting rooms, where they then had to spend another half hour, Navini waiting outside the stall while her mother tried on and then decided against most of the items. She ventured out only twice, first to show Navini a pair of beige pants that were tapered too tightly toward the ankles and made her ass look unnaturally flat, then to show her a sweater that Navini had been hopeful about but which hugged her torso too tightly, revealing the awkward shape of her upper body, her unusually high waist and small chest, the same high waist and small chest that Navini had inherited. Navini tried to maintain an earnest, studious expression throughout, but something repulsed her about the strangely altered woman standing there in front of the illuminated mirror in those stiff, odorless, disturbingly formfitting clothes, waiting expectantly for some kind of positive response, and she had to suppress the urge to shove her mother back inside before anyone else saw her. She tried to emphasize once more that maybe softer, looser fabrics would suit her better, but her mother returned abruptly to the stall while she was talking and shut the door behind her, as if having changed her mind about wanting a second opinion. She came back out in her original outfit, which suddenly didn’t seem that bad, handed the entire bundle of tried-on items to the attendant, and then waiting till they were out of earshot, her lips pursed and her eyes directed straight ahead, she told Navini that if she was going to get her clothes as a gift then she needed to understand that her mother had her own tastes⁠—a gift was supposed to make someone happy, not to try to change them. 

They found, after a while, a green woolen cardigan that they both agreed was nice, though her mother didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic, and it was hard to say whether she actually liked it or was merely settling on something so they could put an end to their excursion. Navini wanted to go home too, to be done with shepherding this cheap, impossibly picky woman through the endless aisles, but the cardigan cost only forty dollars and didn’t feel extravagant enough to count as a gift, certainly not the kind of grand symbolic gift she’d been imagining. When her mother tried to lead her back down to the ground floor Navini tugged on her hand to stop her, leaned up against her and put on the exaggerated pleading face she’d used when she was younger and had been trying to obtain permission for something. She wanted to get her something a little more expensive, she said as sweetly as she could, something for her to use on special occasions, something better than just a cardigan. She had something in mind, actually, a specific kind of item, would she please let her show her? Not waiting for a reply, Navini led her reluctant mother down the escalator and past more aisles toward the winter clothing section, where pointing to a few of the racks she explained that she’d wanted to get her a nice woolen coat, something to replace her parka, which she’d been using now for too many years. She could get any coat she liked, she said, however expensive, the money wasn’t a problem, adding this last qualification with perhaps just a little too much assurance. Her mother’s expression, already irritated, turned angry. She didn’t want a coat, she hissed, she was happy with the jacket she had, what kinds of occasions did she have to dress nicely for anyway? There was a reason she always wore the same jacket, and she wouldn’t switch to another just because her daughter didn’t know the value of money. The dismissal took Navini by surprise, sparked a sharp flash of anger inside her, but not wanting to create a scene she tried not to respond head-on, told her mother that it was just an idea. They didn’t need to get a coat, though they did have to get one other item at least, otherwise she would refuse to leave. Her mother seemed inflexible and Navini was uncertain, but she continued with her posture of partly playful, partly stubborn insistence till her mother relented, and they spent another forty-five minutes wandering around till she managed at last to persuade her mother to buy a pair of pants she’d been lingering over. Navini didn’t love them but was satisfied because they cost ninety dollars, more than her mother would usually spend on a pair of pants and expensive enough, along with the cardigan, to feel like a significant gift. They stood in line for the cashier and she paid for the items with her card, her mother patting her shoulder lightly and giving her a tired, half-hearted smile of thanks. They had a quick meal at the McDonald’s close to the station, then got on the subway back to Sunnyside, both of them trying to seem content with the results of their trip but neither making an effort to speak, their silence becoming more and more rigid as the train took them beneath the river in the direction of Queens.