Chapter 22: Four Walls Closing In

The Patel house felt like a pressure cooker at 7 PM on Thursday. Meera stood in the kitchen staring at ingredients for dinner she couldn’t bring herself to cook. Rajesh sat at the dining table with medical journals spread around him, but his hands shook too badly to turn the pages. Upstairs, Arjun’s room was silent—no laptop clicking, no law review articles printing, just the unnatural quiet of a life grinding to a halt.

And somewhere in Providence, Priya wasn’t answering her phone.

Meera had called her daughter six times since noon. Six times straight to voicemail, each message more desperate than the last. The daughter who used to check in constantly, who shared every drama and triumph, had gone completely silent since her father’s hands started shaking.

“She knows,” Meera said to the unused vegetables.

“Knows what?” Rajesh didn’t look up from the journal he wasn’t reading.

“That we’re falling apart. That everything we built is…” She gestured helplessly at their perfect kitchen, their successful life, their American dream made manifest in granite countertops and college acceptance letters.

“We’re not falling apart.” But Rajesh’s voice cracked on the words. “I’m just having some difficulties at work. Temporary. Stress-related.”

Meera laughed, and it came out harsh. “Temporary? Raj, you can’t hold a scalpel. Arjun hasn’t left his room in three days. Priya won’t talk to us. When exactly does this become not temporary?”

“When we get help. When we figure out what’s causing the symptoms. When—”

“When what? When we fix ourselves back into the people we were pretending to be?”

The words hung in the air between them. Twenty-five years of marriage, and she’d finally said what they both knew. They’d been pretending. Performing success, performing happiness, performing the perfect immigrant family who’d made it in America.

Footsteps on the stairs. They both looked up hopefully, but it was Dada descending slowly, his cane tapping against each step. At seventy-eight, he was the most stable thing in the house right now.

“Dinner?” he asked, looking at the chaos of unmade food.

“I can’t,” Meera said. “I keep starting to cook and then… I can’t remember why. Like my hands know it’s pointless.”

Dada nodded as if this made perfect sense. “The pretending is hard work. Takes energy. When it stops working, you feel how tired you are.”

“We’re not pretending, Dada,” Rajesh said automatically.

“No?” Dada pulled out a chair, sat down with careful dignity. “You pretend your hands are steady. Meera pretends she likes being the perfect doctor’s wife. Arjun pretends Harvard Law makes him happy. Priya pretends she needs our approval.”

He looked around their perfect dining room—the table that hosted dinner parties to network with other successful families, the china cabinet displaying wedding gifts never used, the framed photos of achievement ceremonies and graduation days.

“What happens when everyone stops pretending at the same time?”

As if summoned by his words, Arjun’s door opened upstairs. Footsteps in the hallway, then he appeared at the top of the stairs. Three days of stubble, wearing the same Harvard Law sweatshirt, eyes red from either crying or staring at screens too long.

“I dropped out,” he said.

The words fell like stones into still water. Ripples of shock spreading through the careful structure of their family identity.

“What do you mean dropped out?” Rajesh was on his feet, journals scattering.

“I mean I called the registrar and withdrew from all my classes. I mean I’m not going to be a lawyer. I mean the last four years of law school were the biggest mistake of my life.”

Meera gripped the counter. “Arjun, beta, you can’t just—”

“Can’t what? Can’t choose my own life? Can’t stop living the dreams you needed me to have?” He came down the rest of the stairs, and Meera saw that her son looked lighter somehow, like he’d been carrying invisible weight that had suddenly lifted.

“We sacrificed everything for your education,” Rajesh said, his voice shaking with more than just the tremor in his hands.

“I know. And I’m sorry. But I can’t sacrifice my life to justify your sacrifices.”

The kitchen fell silent except for the hum of appliances, the tick of the wall clock, the sound of a family’s carefully constructed identity crumbling in real time.

Dada spoke into the silence. “In Gujarat, before I came here, my father wanted me to be a banker. Steady job, good money, respect in the community.”

They all turned to look at him.

“I wanted to be a musician. Played tabla, sang devotional songs. But musicians were poor, unreliable, not serious people.” He smiled sadly. “So I became a textile merchant. Made good money, supported the family, came to America, gave my son opportunities I never had.”

His eyes found Rajesh. “And you became a doctor. Very successful. Very respected. And your son was going to become a lawyer. Even more successful. Even more respected.”

“There’s nothing wrong with success,” Rajesh said defensively.

“No. But there is something wrong with success that costs you your soul.”

The front door opened, and Priya walked in. Paint in her hair, clothes rumpled, eyes bright with the particular exhaustion that comes from creating something real.

“Oh good,” she said, taking in the family tableau—Dada at the table, Arjun on the stairs, parents standing in the kitchen like they’d forgotten how to move. “Are we finally having the breakdown? I was wondering when this would happen.”

“Priya—” Meera started.

“No, it’s good. It’s about time.” Priya dropped her bag and pulled out her phone, scrolling to her latest painting. “Look, I painted us this morning.”

She held up the screen. The image showed a house with four people inside, but the walls were dissolving, crumbling away to reveal light pouring in from outside. The people looked terrified and relieved at the same time.

“I called it ‘Liberation,’” she said.

“We’re not being liberated,” Rajesh said. “We’re falling apart.”

“Same thing, sometimes.” Priya looked around at her family—her father with his shaking hands, her mother clinging to the counter, her brother who’d finally stopped pretending to want what they wanted for him, her grandfather who’d been waiting sixty years for this moment.

“The walls were always going to come down,” she said gently. “The question is whether we let them fall or whether we tear them down ourselves.”

Outside, the humming grew stronger, filling the spaces between their words, calling them toward something they couldn’t name but could no longer ignore.

“What do we do now?” Meera whispered.

Dada smiled. “Now we find out who we really are.”