CHAPTER ONE
BINDU
The way a woman wears the color red tells you everything you need to know about how she sees herself. The first time I saw Bhanu, she was wearing a red bikini.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
It wasn’t every day that someone left you a million dollars, without so much as a warning and no way to give it back, no matter how badly you wanted to. For years Bindu Desai had believed that life was a series of accidents waiting to happen, fragile beads strung together on threads of varying strengths. The only way to keep them from shattering was to stand utterly still and hold them as carefully as she possibly could. Then, twenty-six years ago, her husband had died, two days after Bindu’s thirty-ninth birthday, and she swore to take them off and Move! Dance! She didn’t care if the beads shattered. She was going to live.
But everyone in her neighborhood in Mumbai knew her. Mrs. Bindu Desai, wife of Dr. Rajendra Desai, mother of Ashish Desai, who was studying engineering somewhere in America.
Sure, her choice to keep wearing bright colors as a new widow was met with tolerant smiles, but when she’d worn her Western blouses and pants outside the house instead of her usual salwar kameez, the women in her building had started to avoid her. Especially if she dropped in on them after the husbands got home from work.
Turned out Moving! Dancing! wasn’t quite so simple, because all her friends were still wearing their fragile beads.
Then her son announced that he was getting married to a woman he’d met at the University of Florida. They’d been in love for three years. Ashish had told Bindu about Alisha in confidence because his father would never be okay with his son marrying a Catholic girl. Even if she was Indian. Well, Indian American.
Alisha’s parents were from Goa, but she had grown up in America. Being from Goa herself, Bindu felt like she’d won some special intraparental prize when Ashish had chosen a wife from her hometown. Too bad Rajendra would never know that she had won that marital contest.
He’d also never know that because he’d died and left Bindu alone, she’d been free to move to America and move in with Ashish and Alisha when they had Cullie while still in grad school and needed help raising her. Some accidents were actually beautiful.
Her daughter-in-law was one of Bindu’s favorite people on earth. Sure, she was a bit—how could Bindu put this delicately—uptight? One of those people who always had to do the right thing. But Bindu didn’t mind. She liked when people felt free to be who they were.
After Ashish and Alisha had gotten divorced two years ago, after twenty-three years of marriage, Bindu had chosen to go on living with her daughter-in-law. For one, Alisha had asked her to. For another, Bindu now moved and danced to her own tune. At least as best she could, which at sixty-five was not unworthy of pride.
That didn’t mean, every once in a while, she wasn’t livid enough at her daughter-in-law to want to drown her in the neighborhood pool. This morning they’d had one of those fights, triggered by something so insignificant that halfway through you forgot what started it.
Well, an empty chai cup started it. Bindu had left the blameless thing on the coffee table, preoccupied as she was with the unexpected million dollars. Why on earth would anyone leave such an obscene sum to a woman whose life he’d almost destroyed? What had he possibly hoped to gain, other than digging up old pain and secrets? Ever since the money had shown up, Bindu had felt like she’d been hit by a truck, one filled with every shameful mistake of her youth.
Alisha had snapped at Bindu, in her passive-aggressive way, about not using a coaster, probably preoccupied with some new stunt her bully of a boss had pulled.
“It’s a table, Alisha! It doesn’t have feelings. And it’s ugly anyway,” Bindu snapped back.
The coffee table was a gift from Alisha’s mother. Which explained why it was ugly and why it needed so very much care. If Bindu had her way, she’d only ever buy furniture she could dance on, with heels!
Nonetheless, she shouldn’t have said it, and from that moment on things had snowballed out of control. Hurtful words were tossed about, fragile beads shattering one by one, until Bindu declared that she was going to the open house at the retirement community that Debbie Romano had been pestering Bindu to accompany her to.
Debbie lived a few houses down from the house Bindu shared with Alisha in Naples, Florida. For years Debbie had been Bindu’s walking buddy. They walked five miles daily, each committed to never missing a day.
Over the past year, Debbie, who was ten years older than Bindu, had turned repetitive in her conversation. Bindu responded by learning how to block out the parts she’d heard before. When you spent hours walking with someone, it might seem easy to confuse company with friendship, but Bindu didn’t have that problem. Defining relationships and responding to them with exactly what they needed was one of her greatest skills.
“Maybe it’s time for me to move out,” Bindu had said in the final throes of their nonsensical fight.
Alisha had made one of her laugh-groan-scoff sounds.
If not for that stupid sound, Bindu wouldn’t have said yes to Debbie, and Bindu wouldn’t be standing here in a red summer dress she’d bought online, with nowhere to wear it to.
Elegant brass letters on a gray stone wall proclaimed that they were at the clubhouse. Shady Palms—Luxury Living for Your Vibrant Years.
If you were going to put a bunch of old—sorry, she was supposed to say “older” now, even though that made no sense—people in one place, why would you call that place something as fake sunny as Shady Palms? Palms should never be anyone’s choice when seeking shade, especially if other options were available.
But they were here, so Bindu held her head high and walked through the arched entrance as regally as she could. Not easy with Debbie hiding behind her. If the outside of the clubhouse was impressive—all manicured landscaping and giant fountains—the inside was a veritable ode to showy elegance: a mullioned glass ceiling, mosaic marble floors, and an absurd profusion of indoor (still not shady) palms.
Bindu sent up a prayer of gratitude for her dress with its cute cold shoulders and gently flaring sleeves. As forms of self-soothing therapy went, Bindu had always believed that clothes, jewelry, and the perfect shade of lipstick were underrated. To say nothing of all the things a good hair day could fix in your soul. Thank heavens she’d touched up her hair color just yesterday.
These people did not look like they touched up their own grays with drugstore color. They looked like they’d been airdropped here, in chartered planes, straight from Beverly Hills. Bindu dragged Debbie to the circle of women gathered under the impressive crystal chandelier. Every one of them had blown-out hair, super-moisturized faces, and gold chains so delicate they were barely visible against the freckled crepe paper skin of their necks.
Eyes in all shades of blue and green and gold flickered Bindu’s way, then flickered away without so much as a hint of acknowledgment. She might as well have been invisible.
Then their eyes landed on Debbie’s blonde head, ducking behind Bindu. Smiles warmed every face. They introduced themselves to
Debbie with enough enthusiasm that the contrast in their reactions landed on Bindu like a slap.
Maybe she was imagining it.
“Hello,” she said, trying to sound breezy, but her own accent sounded loud in her ears.
No one responded. The circle dragged Debbie in and closed up as Bindu stood outside it, taking in the wall of backs. The chill of the air-conditioning hit her exposed shoulders even as her skin turned clammy and hot. It was like menopause returning in a tidal wave. Had she used too much kohl to line her eyes? Was her lipstick too red? The sense of feeling all wrong tangled up her limbs. A girl from a lifetime ago, a girl Bindu had buried with a forgotten past, trembled back to life inside her. And her resurgence felt exactly like rage swallowed too long.
Escaping the turned backs, Bindu pushed past the oversize lead glass doors, slamming them hard enough that she heard some gasps behind her. Outside, the blast of heat and sound enveloped her but gave her no relief. A pool dropped into another pool by way of a waterfall and led up to a bar where swimsuited and sunglassed people laughed and chatted as though they had not a care in the world.
The phrase vibrant years had amused Bindu when she’d read it on the brochure, but looking at these deeply confident faces, it felt like the joke was on her. The sunshine was blinding, much like the rush of feelings she’d just experienced at the sudden reappearance of the girl she’d been. Unwanted. Unaccepted. Always on the outside.
She knew exactly why she was suddenly reacting with such ferocity to everything. It was the stupid money.
“Don’t let them get to you,” a kind voice said behind her.
She turned slowly, hand shading her eyes from the sun, not trusting the way the soft, deep tones settled the churn inside her. Her gaze landed on a pink golf shirt. She tipped her head back to look up his absurdly tall body and found hazel eyes, much like her own, studying her. Lines radiated from their edges like cobwebs pressed into skin. Lines that would never be considered this beautiful on her face.
Bindu hadn’t thought of a man as beautiful in a very long time. But there was no other word for the gentleness with which he watched her. Not the sympathetic kind that grew more and more abundant in the way people treated you as you aged, but one that seemed rooted in humanity, in humor. As though he knew he could get her to see what he found so amusing about the situation that had just churned up the worst parts of her. A gentleness of equals.
“They’re easily threatened.” His voice was low, confident that people would focus to hear him no matter how softly he spoke.
“Threatened?” She let all the smoky huskiness of her own voice play out in the word, twist it with nonchalance.
It made his smile grow. He tilted his chin with the exact same impact as raising a finger and tracing her from head to toe.
It was the strangest compliment. But deadly, because it hit her where she never let men’s compliments hit her. She’d spent a lifetime fielding men’s gazes, their admiration, their lust. In recent years most younger men had stopped having that reaction to her, but men around her age still rarely gazed upon her as anything more than an object they’d like to possess.
The way he looked at her carried the weight of all those things. It saw how she must be looked at rather than mirrored it. Which made it different. But the part that caught her like the slow hook of a deep-sea fisherman was the clear displeasure in his gaze at how those women had made her feel.
“Are you new?” He seemed like a man who’d never once felt like an outsider.
In a flash she imagined his life in Hollywood-inspired vignettes: a high school athlete who got straight As. A father who called him “buddy” and shared life lessons as he tossed him a ball. A mother who baked pie and handed out supportive advice over it. A Mercedes-Benz and golf and a wife who kept a house that belonged in Architectural Digest and invited friends over for wine and dessert under a gazebo overlooking their lush garden.
Her gaze dropped to his hand, searching for a ring. But it was tucked into his pocket.
“I’m here with a friend,” she answered.
“That’s too bad. You should move here.” For the first time his voice slipped from its confident pedestal. Just the slightest bit.
She threw a glance over his shoulder at the women still fawning over Debbie. “How can I resist?”
Another smile warmed his eyes. She’d been wrong about the color. They weren’t hazel, like hers. They were green, like pond moss that made you slip off rocks.
“I think someone like you is exactly what they need.” His tone was the warm water that cushioned your fall when you slipped.
Bindu didn’t like it when people assumed they knew her. But since she’d just pictured his entire life without knowing him, she waited for him to explain.
“You’re trouble.”
The words body-slammed her, as if she’d run full tilt into a wall, one she’d built around long-ago memories. Glass beads crashed everywhere. It had been forty-seven years since she’d heard those words, since she’d almost let them ruin her life.
“Exactly the kind of trouble this world needs,” he went on. “They need someone who’ll pull them out of their bubble. Wake them up, you know?”
She felt off balance. “Setting the world straight is not my job.”
Words her mother had said to her too many times. The world is what it is. Fixing it is not your job.
The resurrected girl inside her flipped her hair and flounced off like the heroine from an old Bollywood film. Bindu was about to follow her when a group of men approached him. Every one of them wore well-cut golf shirts in sunny pastels and khakis so sharply ironed they had edges. Their eyes strayed to Bindu as they greeted him.
One of them offered her a glass of wine. The pale-gold liquid sparkled in the sunlight. “Lee, who’s your friend?”
Over the man’s shoulder Bindu felt rather than saw the women who’d closed ranks on her start to stir with awareness, their attention turning in her direction, one by one.
His green eyes smirked. A challenge?
You’re trouble. Yes, those words still held the power to move her to recklessness.
It had been a lifetime since she’d picked messages from a man’s eyes, since she’d felt like this person.
Taking the glass of wine, she shook the hand one of the men held out. “Bindu.” All on their own, her lids lowered and lifted slowly. Her shoulders straightened, making her immensely grateful for the drape and cinch of her dress, for the huskiness of her voice. Things about herself she’d let rust from lack of use. “This seems like a nice place to live.”
The circle of men closed around her, laughter and questions and offerings of more wine, and cheese, and all the elaborate analysis of why a certain cheese paired with a certain wine. These were men who’d had time to explore the things they deemed fine. Men comfortable with success, but not so much that they were unconcerned with broadcasting it.
All of that set him apart from them. Lee.
When she looked back, he was gone, but the women had left the shade of the clubhouse and made their way out into the blazing sun. Bindu Desai was no longer invisible. And just like that, she knew exactly what she was going to do with the money.
Excerpted from The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev with permission from the publisher, Mindy’s Book Studio. Copyright © 2022 by Sonali Dev. All rights reserved.
“Bursting with humor, banter, and cringeworthy first dates, Sonali Dev’s The Vibrant Years is a joyful and fun read, but it’s also very much a timely tale about a group of underestimated women demanding respect and embracing their most authentic selves.” —Mindy Kaling
Living on their own terms means being there for one another.
When sixty-five-year-old Bindu Desai inherits a million dollars, she’s astounded—and horrified. The windfall threatens to expose a shameful mistake from her youth. Desperate to keep the secret, Bindu quickly spends it on something unexpected: a condo in a posh retirement community in Florida.
The impulsive decision blindsides Bindu’s daughter-in-law, Aly. At forty-seven, Aly still shares a home with Bindu even after her divorce from Bindu’s son. But maybe this change is just the push Aly needs to fight for the segment she’s been promised for years at the news station where she works.
As Bindu and Aly navigate their new dynamic, Aly’s daughter, Cullie, is faced with losing the business that made her a tech-world star. The only way to save it is to deliver a new idea to her investors—and of course they want the half-baked dating app she pitched them in a panic. Problem is, Cullie has never been on a real date. Naturally, enlisting her single mother and grandmother to help her with the research is the answer.
From USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev comes a heartfelt novel about three generations of hilarious, unconventional, ambitious women navigating bad dates, a spiteful HOA board, reemerging exes, and secrets that refuse to remain hidden. Join the Desai women on a shared journey of self-discovery as they dare to live their most vibrant lives.
Romance Comedy | Women's Fiction Contemporary [Mindy's Book Studio, On Sale: December 1, 2022, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781542036221 / ]
Sonali Dev's first literary work was a play about mistaken identities performed at her neighborhood Diwali extravaganza in Mumbai. She was eight years old. Despite this early success, Sonali spent the next few decades getting degrees in architecture and written communication, migrating across the globe, and starting a family while writing for magazines and websites. With the advent of her first gray hair her mad love for telling stories returned full force, and she now combines it with her insights into Indian culture to conjure up stories that make a mad tangle with her life as supermom, domestic goddess, and world traveler.
Sonali lives in the Chicago suburbs with her very patient and often amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, and the world's most perfect dog.
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy