Karma Gone Bad Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Jenny Feldon

  Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  Cover image © Ismael M. Verdú/istock images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of her experiences over a period of years. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  INDIAN SUMMER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  MONSOON SEASON

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  MANGO SEASON

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  for Jay

  Author’s Note

  Karma Gone Bad is a true story. Most names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals who shared this journey with me. For the sake of storytelling, the timeline has been altered in places and a few characters have been combined.

  Prologue

  “I just need another minute.”

  The cab driver grunted and spit out the window. I stood on Ninth Avenue in the pouring rain, huddled over the taxi’s trunk. Inside was a mountain of rainbow-colored fabric, designer dresses I’d spent years coveting, collecting, and paying off on my MasterCard. Once, they’d hung proudly in the closet of our Upper West Side one bedroom. Now they were crushed in a sad, wrinkled heap next to an ancient bottle of window washer fluid, a case of Yoo-hoo, and half a dozen water-logged emergency flares. And they, like me, were about to be shipped off to the third world.

  Double parked next to us, unfazed by the angry slur of horns whizzing by, was another cab. My husband Jay sat in the back, his foot propping the door open just enough to communicate but not enough to let the rain soak his Armani suit. He was on his way to work. I was on my way to brunch at Pastis. We’d met halfway so he could confiscate my entire dress collection, which I’d planned to pack in my carry-on luggage.

  “Pick ONE,” Jay said, gritting his teeth. “One for the party. That’s it.”

  “But…”

  “It’ll be fine, Jen. I promise. You’ll have them back in a couple of days.” He picked up his BlackBerry and scrolled through his messages, the technological equivalent of an exasperated eye roll.

  In forty-eight hours, we were moving to India.

  India, the country.

  Jay had decided, at half-past the eleventh hour, that we were bringing too much stuff on the airplane. By “we,” of course, he meant me. Our apartment was already packed into a shipping container the size of an eighteen-wheeler. The apartment looked desolate and empty now, inexplicably smaller without our four-year collection of belongings cluttering its hardwood floors.

  The Moving Guide for Expatriates Jay’s company sent in the mail recommended taking our essentials as carry-on luggage to safeguard against accidental losses. He and I had different definitions for “essentials.” For Jay, that meant his laptop, his BlackBerry, and his red fleece sleeping hat. For me, that meant four pairs of designer shoes, two hundred manuscript pages of my novel-in-progress, the dog’s teddy bear, and an assortment of cocktail dresses. Plus the dog himself, a small white Maltese named Tucker.

  Preparing for Tucker’s move had been even more complicated than preparing for ours. First, there was the stockpiling. Two years’ worth of training pads, dehydrated chicken breasts, and chew toys. A velvety blanket for inside his carrier so he wouldn’t get cold or insecure on the plane. A travel-sized stuffed animal, because his favorite was too big to fit in my carry-on bag. His favorite stuffed animal was a brown Gund teddy bear named Bear. I’d never seen Tucker look as sad as he did the day Bear got wrapped in plastic and tossed into a cardboard box, sentenced to a journey by sea. I took one last look at the dresses in my arms and understood exactly how he’d felt.

  I rescued a white strapless Diane von Furstenberg as Jay leapt from his cab and snatched the rest away.

  “See you tonight,” Jay called as he dove back into his cab and slammed the door. The cab darted back into traffic. Through the rear window, I watched him brush off his lapels, the rest of his body swallowed by a mass of chiffon and lace-edged satin. The gold-embroidered hem of the Cynthia Steffe I’d worn to our rehearsal dinner was trapped in the door jam, trailing in the muddy street. I shouted after him, but the rain was too loud and by the time I got the words out, he was already gone.

  “Come on, lady,” my cab driver bellowed, his “meter’s-running” complacency abruptly disappearing into the mid-city fog. “Get in or walk. It’s like a monsoon out here. I can’t wait all day.”

  We sloshed downtown. Traffic, as always, was oppressive. The day stretched before me, my swan song in the big city. First there were farewell burgers and mimosas at Pastis with my best friend Kate. Then a visit to the salon for blow-outs and manicures, and then the going-away party Kate and her husband were throwing for us tonight. I’d wear the white strapless DVF with gold stiletto sandals and drink too much champagne. Laugh at our friends’ jokes about curry and call centers and holy cows. Make a speech about big dreams and big adventures, not making eye contact with anyone so the tears would stay put. Wear waterproof mascara, just in case.

  “Seventeen-twenty, lady,” the cab driver barked. I handed him a twenty and climbed out into the rain, the yellow warmth behind Pastis’s windows beckoning like a lighthouse. Before I could even close the door properly, he made a U-turn and screeched off, spraying my legs with gray water that lurched up from the overflowing gutter.

  Was I going to miss this? The rude taxi drivers, the claustrophobic subways, the grit and the rush and the perpetual sneer of the Big Apple? More than I could say. From the minute I had moved to Manhattan from the Boston suburb where I’d grown up, my soul felt at home in a way I’d never known before. I loved the lights and the skyscrapers, the crowded streets. The exhilarating feeling of hu
manity—fervent, focused—scrambling over each other with a single collective purpose: GO.

  I loved Central Park and hot dog vendors, walks along the Hudson River, and the bodega on the corner of Seventy-Second and Broadway where I bought my coffee every morning. I loved the underground vibrations of the subway, the collective pulsing energy of 1.6 million people trying to make their dreams come true.

  I thought we’d live in New York forever. I’d just finished my master’s degree in creative writing; Jay worked in computer forensics at a Big Four accounting firm. First there would be my debut novel, then his partnership, then one day a red Bugaboo stroller parked in the lobby of the Upper West Side brownstone we’d rent—a two-bedroom with a tiny sliver of park view. In the meantime, there would be art museums and yoga classes and dog parks and late-night drinks with friends. There would be vacations in the Hamptons or St. Barth’s.

  Then Jay came home one night, a night that should have been a typical Tuesday spent curled up on our worn blue couch with pad thai from Siam Inn. But instead of asking me to order extra spring rolls, Jay walked in, dropped his briefcase in the doorway, and looked around our apartment like he’d never seen it before.

  “BKC wants me to move to India,” he said. “To start up the new practice.”

  Berkeley, King & Coolidge, BKC for short, was the global accounting firm Jay worked for. Bill Gates had been the first American to stick his corporate flag in the crumbling Hyderabadi soil, instantly transforming the barely developed Indian city into the newest stomping ground for dozens of international companies. BKC was an early adopter of the overseas model, tapping into the talent of India’s rising technology stars to create a U.S.-owned, Indian-run outpost—nicknamed Region 10—that could process investigations at twice the speed and half the cost of its American counterpart. With the Region 10 office running a full nine and a half hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, BKC would be able to serve their clients’ needs twenty-four hours a day. Jay had been talking about the India project for months. Now, it seemed he’d been chosen to get the entire operation up and running.

  I stared up at him with Tucker on my lap. It was like he’d just said something in Mandarin. Or Urdu. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the words.

  “India?” I repeated. “India, like the country?”

  “For two years. They said we could think about it, but I don’t know if we really have a choice. I think we have to go.”

  ***

  It’s karma! That’s what everyone said when we broke the news. I’d been studying yoga for ages. I was the manager of a busy Upper West Side Bikram studio. What better adventure for a dedicated yogini like me than a pilgrimage to India: the birthplace of yoga, the spiritual homeland of the Far East? And for a writer, a life abroad was the holy grail. Think of Hemingway! Think of Gertrude Stein! People said these things, and I smiled and nodded and agreed. Because, just like with the move itself, I didn’t really have a choice. Fate—and a multinational corporation—had chosen this path for me.

  Sure, OK. It was a dream come true, right? I’d visit ashrams and study with real live yoga masters. My blog, Karma in the City—formerly a journal about Manhattan living—would become a travelogue, full of photographs and anecdotes about my exotic new life. My literary dreams could still come true—I’d just have to chase them from the Far East instead of the Upper West Side. Instead of living the New York writer’s life, I’d become the best Indian housewife anyone had ever seen. Jay and I would become citizens of the world. I would make an “Indian bucket list” for all the amazing things we would do, like ride elephants and visit the Taj Mahal. Maybe we’d like it so much we’d stay expats forever, roaming from one exotic country to the next. Moving to India was the opportunity of a lifetime. A gift from the universe. Karma at its very best.

  Except…not really. The truth was, I’d never had the urge to travel farther outside U.S. borders than Cabo San Lucas, where we’d gone for our honeymoon. My wanderlust was satisfied with a ride on the R train to Brooklyn. Ashrams weren’t really my style; I was perfectly happy practicing my asanas on Seventy-Second Street overlooking the M-13 bus stop. I loved our life. I loved New York. Everything we’d ever wanted or needed was right here in front of us—our family, our friends, our happily ever after.

  Jay and I were both twenty-seven years old. We’d been married less than a year. Our lives were mapped out in a way that did not include international visas or typhoid vaccinations or pamphlets on common Hindi phrases. I lived by Zagat, not Lonely Planet. Yet here I was, soaking wet in Jimmy Choo sling backs on the side of Ninth Avenue, clutching a lone cocktail dress that I’d soon realize was as useless and ill-suited to life in India as I was.

  INDIAN SUMMER

  Chapter 1

  There were no lights.

  The seat-belt sign was on, our carry-on luggage was stowed, and a dull ache in my ears confirmed the changing pressure of descent. But out the window, over the massive wing of the Airbus A340 that was delivering us to our new life, everything was dark. Beneath us, I could feel the grind and clank of the plane’s landing gear. I pressed my forehead against the window and rubbed at my contacts, which were shriveled in my eyes like plastic wrap from twenty-four straight hours of wear. There must be a control tower, an airport terminal, a runway down there. My worst neurotic-flier fears kicked in: the pilot made a terrible mistake, the plane ran out of fuel, our adventure was over before it even began.

  Tucker growled softly in my lap. I stroked the fur behind his ears, but he saw right through my fake reassurance to the anxiety beneath. Dogs are good like that. He growled again, deeper. I reached over and grabbed Jay’s hand. He squeezed back, still slumped in his seat, his red fleece ski hat pulled down over his ears so his head wouldn’t touch the germy back of the airplane seat. In New York, he’d brought the hat with him every time he traveled on business, too much of a germaphobe to sleep without a layer of protection between his skin and the hotel sheets. He called it his “sleeping hat.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are making our final descent into Hyderabad. Please ensure your seat belts are fastened and your seats are in the upright position. Dhanyavad, and thank you.”

  I stared out the window again, and now I could see them…faint, orange dots of dusty light that formed a narrow strip below us, an almost-invisible pathway in the vast darkness. Located in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad was supposed to be a city, an up-and-coming metropolis in the “cone” part of India’s ice-cream shape on the map. Shouldn’t there be lights? Buildings? No city I’d ever seen looked so dark from the sky. I closed my eyes. The plane bumped and jerked, touched down.

  “Welcome to India,” said the voice over the loudspeaker. “You are here.”

  This was really happening.

  I grabbed my carry-on bag, a white monogrammed Yves Saint Laurent I’d gotten for graduation. It was the first designer handbag I’d ever owned.

  “Don’t you think you should take something a little more practical?” Jay had asked, watching me arrange and rearrange its contents for the hundredth time, carefully wiping my fingerprints off the bag’s shiny leather. “Something less expensive, less…white?”

  I’d ignored him and packed the YSL with essentials: sunglasses, lip gloss, fuzzy pink socks so my feet wouldn’t get cold on the plane. A bottle of malaria pills. Dog treats for Tucker. A copy of Lonely Planet: India. I tried to read it on the plane, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was still reliving everything that had come before: before I worked my last shift at the yoga studio; before we said champagne-soaked, sentimental good-byes to our friends; before we turned in our apartment keys to Eddie, the doorman, who took off his crimson-and-gold cap and saluted like we were going off to war. I was waiting for that moment when it would all sink in, when it would become our reality instead of something we talked about in foggy hypotheticals. Like the moment in a dark theater just before the movie begins, India had been
something that was about to happen for so long I kept forgetting that, one day, it was going to be real.

  In the shuffle of passengers getting ready to disembark, I looked for Jay, expecting him to take the first step off the plane with me. It would be symbolic, like the groom carrying the bride over the threshold. Except on our wedding day, Jay had raced me to the bathroom so he could brush his teeth first, then passed out in the hotel bed before I’d finished unpinning my veil. As if to prove our new life would still have the comfortingly familiar elements of our old one, Jay had already disappeared down the Jetway, determined to be first in the customs line.

  At least I had Tucker to help me savor the moment. I patted the side of his carrier bag. He growled in reply, scratching at the zipper. “Just a few more minutes, buddy,” I whispered. I thanked the pilot and stepped off the plane with my right foot, a superstitious gesture of gratitude for a safe arrival. Then I walked straight into a wall.

  That’s what it felt like, anyway. Never before had an atmosphere felt so physical, so oppressive. I rocked back on my heels, disoriented by the onslaught of heat and smells. The air felt like it was boiling around me, damp and thick, scented with a combination of spices and mold and camphor and trash. The ceiling of the airport was low and uneven, lit with naked bulbs that threw shadows across mildew stains creeping along the walls. Beneath my feet were beautiful mosaics, works of art being trampled and forgotten as three hundred people shoved their way into the customs lines, clutching cases of—were those chocolate bars?—with determined expressions.

  “Do you have anything to declare?” asked the customs agent, his brow furrowed as he studied our packet of travel documents. “Weapons, alcohol, chocolate, meats?”

  “No, but we have a dog,” I said, pushing a pile of paperwork toward him. Tucker had needed almost as much entry paperwork as we did: an international health exam, full medical records and vaccination reports, a special visa from the embassy in New York. Even a U.S. pet passport I’d custom-ordered online, complete with a government-standard photo of his furry, bewildered face.