Excerpt from "The Retreat" - The Forge Literary Magazine

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I had never eaten lobster or octopus before, nor had I ever been to a retreat. Yet, there I was, on the last day of a four-day women’s retreat in Costa Rica, barefoot on polished teak, staring at a plate arranged like an exhibit, a curled tentacle draped over a claw as if posing for a portrait. I wondered if anyone else at the table could tell that I didn’t belong here, not really, but I picked up my fork anyway.

My daughter had gifted me this retreat. She had booked it, paid for it, sent me the details with the kind of certainty only the young possess.

Four days of rest, Ma. No emails, no stress. You deserve this.

I had said no at first. It seemed too expensive, too indulgent. What would I even do at a retreat? She had asked me to reconsider, and in that moment, I thought of my mother, and of my grandmother before her. My grandmother had worked harder than my mother, and my mother had worked harder than I had. Each generation carried the next on their backs, always moving forward, never stepping off the path of relentless hard work. As for me, I had spent the last thirty years in the same job as a manager at a mid-sized software firm, never taking promotions, never working late, never climbing because I was a single mother and the cost of ambition was too high. The late nights had belonged to my daughter, as had the mornings.

And now, she had grown, and here I was.

The retreat was hosted by a woman who had once lived in San Francisco, then Bali, then Tulum, before settling in Costa Rica. She told us the chef had a Michelin star in Milan. “Then one day, he lost the star. Nearly broke him. He left it all behind to cook here, in paradise.”

“Bravo,” someone murmured. There was a light scattering of applause.

I lifted my wine glass but didn’t drink.

The hostess lifted hers. “This place feels sacred, so so sacred,” she said, as if she had been the first to uncover the truth of it. “It has a goddess-energy that I haven’t felt anywhere else, not even in India.”

Then she turned to me, pressing her fingers lightly into my arm. She liked to acknowledge my Indianness, as if my ancestry granted her access to whatever it was she thought she had found here. If I had been younger, I might have tilted my head and asked her why. At fifty, I knew it was better to let people reveal themselves.

A woman at the table leaned in. “Your daughter is a doctor, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s training to be a cardiologist.”

A flicker of envy crossed the woman’s face, or perhaps a shadow of it, barely there but unmistakable.

“So, what brings you here, all the way from India?”

She had said little to me over the past four days, and her sudden curiosity struck me as both unexpected and faintly amusing.

“I live in Austin,” I said. “With my daughter. She studied in Texas, married a Texan.”

A nod, a practiced smile, that American way of acknowledging something without engaging with it. I sighed, relieved that the retreat would soon be over.

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