Ravi winced. Fiel. His mother had picked it up from the Dominican ladies in the bodega next door. She used it like a weapon now — la fiel de Ravi — as if Sofia's loyalty to him was a foreign disease.
"Good is not enough. A husband should be fiel — to your family, to your ways, to your blood." desi fiel
Desi fiel , Ravi thought. Not a contradiction. A new kind of promise. Ravi winced
"You come to puja this Sunday," his mother said. "You haven't come in months. People are talking." She used it like a weapon now —
Sofia would hold the phone away from her ear and look at Ravi sleeping on the couch, his dark hair falling across his forehead, the tiny gold chain she'd given him on their fifth anniversary resting against his collarbone.
"Maa, I work Sundays now. The warehouse—"
And things had cracked. Last year, Ravi's father had a stroke. The family business — the spice shop, the little apartment above it, the whole delicate tower of immigrant dreams — began to wobble. Ravi's older brother, the golden child who'd become a cardiologist in New Jersey, sent money but no time. His younger sister had married a Gujarati boy and moved to London. That left Ravi.