The Copenhagen Affair Read online

  PRAISE FOR AMULYA MALLADI

  “Malladi examines India’s surrogacy industry with honesty and grace. This slice of life will touch all women who have struggled with conception and/or poverty. [A] thought-provoking novel [that] will be a sure hit with book groups.”

  —Booklist (Starred Review) on A House for Happy Mothers

  “Malladi writes a poignant novel from two difficult perspectives that spans several complex and often controversial topics. This title would make a great book club selection.”

  —Library Journal on A House for Happy Mothers

  “The story provides an intriguing glimpse into the surrogate industry and casts light on the emotional toil those involved face.”

  —The Associated Press on A House for Happy Mothers

  “A feel-good story that warms the heart.”

  —Redbook on A House for Happy Mothers

  “Amulya Malladi brings Denmark’s capitol into brilliant color in this intriguing novel about a marriage on the brink, a wife’s precarious emotional stability, and the international business deal that could either save or ruin everything. The Copenhagen Affair reminds us that we must each decide what we are willing to risk to build our fortunes and find our true happiness.”

  —Julie Lawson Timmer, author of Five Days Left, Untethered, and Mrs. Saint and the Defectives on The Copenhagen Affair

  “Amulya Malladi’s The Copenhagen Affair is an entertaining romp of a read! As we travel with Sanya on her search for happiness, love, balance, and the meaning of life, we end up, as she does, completely captivated by a swirl of infidelity, corporate intrigue, and the very particular habits of Copenhagen’s café class. Along with surprises, twists, and humor, Malladi gives us an intimate look at a city she clearly loves and knows well. I was captivated to the end.”

  —Nancy Star, bestselling author of Sisters One, Two, Three on The Copenhagen Affair

  “Compulsively readable, The Copenhagen Affair had me turning pages well into the wee hours. The story of Sanya’s unraveling is familiar to anyone who has ever felt the overbearing weight of depression, but how she heals from her downward spiral is anything but ordinary. From gossipy coffee shops to gritty blues clubs to the dining rooms of the Danish elite, Sanya’s impulsive, exciting, [and] often humorous journey through the colorful streets of Copenhagen is full of surprises. I could not put the book down!”

  —Loretta Nyhan, author of All the Good Parts on The Copenhagen Affair

  ALSO BY AMULYA MALLADI

  A House for Happy Mothers

  The Sound of Language

  Song of the Cuckoo Bird

  Serving Crazy with Curry

  The Mango Season

  A Breath of Fresh Air

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Amulya Malladi

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503940314

  ISBN-10: 1503940314

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Copenhagen, jeg savner dig

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 The Implosion

  Chapter 2 Exiled

  Chapter 3 Sanya and Harry, a Happy Couple?

  Chapter 4 The Emmerys on Strandvejen

  Chapter 5 Dinner at the Ambassador’s Residence

  Chapter 6 A Few Good Days in May

  Chapter 7 They Leave Their Babies Outside

  Chapter 8 Penny and Mark Make the Papers

  Chapter 9 Penny Hits on Harry

  Chapter 10 A Most Casual Barbecue

  Chapter 11 The Swedish Summer House Plan

  Chapter 12 Ravn’s Ballerinas

  Chapter 13 Penny and Mandy Take Sanya Around the World

  Chapter 14 Can the Blind Lead the Blind?

  Chapter 15 Imperfections Make Life Interesting

  Chapter 16 Dinner at the Almanak

  Chapter 17 Improper Fantasies, Sexual and Otherwise

  Chapter 18 The Love Doctor

  Chapter 19 Percy Shelley Strikes at Kiin Kiin

  Chapter 20 The Swedish Summer House

  Chapter 21 Bad Penny

  Chapter 22 Sanya Can’t Handle the Truth

  Chapter 23 Chaos Theory

  Chapter 24 Rainy Day Woman

  Chapter 25 Good Mandy

  Chapter 26 Harry Wants to Be Married

  Chapter 27 Omelets at L’Education Nationale

  Chapter 28 A Lucky Break

  Chapter 29 A Mannish Boy at Mojo

  Chapter 30 Sinner Woman

  Chapter 31 The Lightness of Being

  Chapter 32 Harry Goes Right

  Chapter 33 And Then She Falls Off the Mountain

  Chapter 34 A Penny for Your Thoughts

  Chapter 35 Penny Deals In

  Chapter 36 Kidnapped

  Chapter 37 Off the Mark

  Chapter 38 Harry Meets an Angel

  Chapter 39 Mythical Indian Villains and Heroes

  Chapter 40 Helen of Troy Maybe Had a Similar Problem

  AUTHOR’S NOTE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR Q&A

  READER’S GUIDE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  The Implosion

  It’s a common mistake to assume that emotional baggage will disappear if one changes geographies. There are many who think that a change in weather is all that is needed to set everything that is wrong with a person right.

  Harry, Sanya’s husband of two decades, was under the very same misconception. He came upon the idea after a joint therapy session with Sanya’s shrink, whom she started to see after her dramatic nervous breakdown three months earlier.

  “Copenhagen,” Harry announced with aplomb like it was a panacea. “We’ll move to Copenhagen for a year. It’ll be an adventure.”

  “I know nothing about Copenhagen,” Sanya said.

  “And therein lies the adventure,” Harry said.

  Harry explained that his company, ComIT, a Silicon Valley IT consultancy where he was a partner, was going to buy a company in Copenhagen, IT Foundry, also an IT consultancy, to get a foot in the European door.

  ComIT had already done a fair amount of due diligence, and now Harry had offered to go and finish the acquisition and run the company as interim CEO. Once he established the business and found his successor, which he believed would take a year, he and Sanya would come back home to California. This was a win-win, according to Harry. He would solidify his standing as partner with this project, and it would improve his wife’s health.

  “Look, I have to go. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Not everyone gets a chance to expand a business into new markets like this. And I’m not leaving you alone here. Can you please not be selfish about this and see the bigger picture?” Harry said.

  Sanya was baffled. Oh, Harry, really, she thought. You’ve been leaving me alone through sickness and in health for years, and now you can’t leave me alone? And I am the selfish one?

  If Sanya cared enough, she would’ve said something in protest, but she didn’t care enough, not since the incident, so she further sank into the couch, wanting nothing more than to go back to bed.

&n
bsp; “It’s the happiest place on earth,” said Sanya’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Sara, who had driven up for that weekend from UCLA, where she was a political science major.

  What Sanya found out later was that Denmark was also the country with the highest consumption of happy pills; after all, they invented the antidepressant. They had the highest rate of female suicide and the second-highest consumption of beer per capita in the world. They used to be the top beer-drinking country but lost that status when Czechoslovakia split and the title went to Slovakia.

  To move or not to move was a question that Sanya’s addled brain couldn’t compute, and she, as she had always done, let someone else make another decision to impact her life without her interference.

  Sanya’s life was, and probably would forever be, fragmented between Old Sanya and New Sanya, pre- and post-nervous breakdown. Old Sanya was happy, positive, a director of strategy at a financial consultancy, and a veritable pushover with a please everyone all the time disease who lived in a three-thousand-square-foot house in the prestigious Montclair neighborhood of Los Gatos in Northern California. New Sanya was depressed, unemployed, unresponsive, and intractable, and lived under her duvet cover regardless of geography.

  So what happened to positive, cheerful, life-loving Sanya? It was physics. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy is the quantitative measure of disorder in a system. In any closed system, the entropy of the system will either remain constant or increase. If marriage is considered a closed system, then the physics of it starts to make sense. Entropy or disorder increases in a marriage—day after week after month after year.

  And what happens when disorder completely takes over the system?

  It implodes. Boom it goes, and a new system comes into existence—not a better one, just a different one—like the one under the duvet cover where the colors were muted, the sound hollowed, the world small, keeping pace, one breath after the other, where creation exists in only that one moment of inhale and exhale, nothing before it and nothing after.

  Since it was Sanya’s first nervous breakdown, she didn’t quite know what to expect. One minute she was a whole person and the next she was a broken, scattered caricature of herself. Of course, it didn’t happen from one moment to another; it took years of buildup for that last straw to fall on her back before she broke.

  The nervous breakdown was theatrical in its execution. Hysterical, movie-style.

  It happened the morning the partners of her consultancy invited her for a meeting. They were all there, all ten of them. People she had worked with for nearly a decade and a half. She had started as a junior consultant and worked her way up to director of strategy, but the elusive partnership had never been offered to her. Brian, who was hired three years after her, was one of the ten partners. He was a star. He was fast-tracked. His type usually was.

  Sanya worked for a financial consultancy in San Francisco’s posh Embarcadero Center—they did financial process optimization. Sanya was a finance expert. She looked at the books. The money legalese. She fixed accounting procedures for many, many companies around the United States and even some in Europe.

  She was considered to be hardworking, pleasant, someone who didn’t challenge authority, went with the flow, and never negotiated a raise or a bonus. She was a workhorse. She was good at what she did. Clients specifically asked for her to be on their projects. She was considered to be a good middle manager, a good leader. People wondered why she was still just a director and not a partner. She never wondered. She knew why. Every day Sanya went to work she waited to be found out. Every day she thought, Today will be the day when they will know that I’m not as good as they think I am. When one lives with that kind of low self-esteem, they expect the worst, and when it is handed to them, they feel relieved not to wait for it anymore.

  So after being passed over, ignored, and generally underappreciated, when Sanya was offered partnership for being a financial consultant who had been bringing in a lot of business to the company based on her reputation and skill, instead of saying “Thank you, this is great,” she burst into tears and didn’t stop crying until they knocked her out with a benzodiazepine in the emergency room. There had been plenty of drama in the meeting room that morning. One partner asked to call security, no one knew why. One called 911. Another asked Sanya to get a grip. Through it all Sanya just sat there and cried hysterically like a Victorian ingenue from a period film, wiping snot off her face with the sleeve of her charcoal-gray Hugo Boss suit.

  Once she stopped crying, she also stopped speaking. It went on for nearly a week. When she finally was able to talk, slow and stilted and with effort, a psychiatrist wanted to know if she was suicidal. Ten days after the incident in the meeting room, once the mental ward people were sure Sanya was not a danger to herself or the people around her, they released her into the general public—and that’s when she took residence under the covers, alone, cocooned and insulated inside her new closed system.

  Sanya learned about entropy and closed systems from her best friend, Alec, who was a physicist at Stanford.

  “Think of your closet,” he said. “You spend a whole weekend cleaning it up, and it’s neat and nice and looks like the inside of a Benetton store. The first week, you try to keep order. You put clothes where they belong and it works. But the folded T-shirts are getting a bit unruly, and you start mixing your pants with your skirts, and soon your blouses are everywhere, and you throw in that sweater that was lying on the bed before you went to sleep. A couple of months pass, and your closet is disorderly again. A closet is an isolated system. It’s not going to get any cleaner than it was when you started; it can only get messier.”

  Sanya felt that Alec was talking about her life, her marriage, which was a closed system where the entropy had increased exponentially with every passing day.

  “You’re right,” she told him, “my pants are mixed in with my skirts and my blouses with my jackets.”

  Among all of Sanya’s friends, Alec was the only one who didn’t like Harry. The others thought he was amazing. This good-looking man (How on earth did you land him, Sanya?), this successful man, this charming and stylish man was just what every woman Sanya knew thought she wanted. Harry believed that Alec was jealous of him. Alec was single, balding, not particularly good-looking, geeky, and ideal as a friend for a man’s wife, as Harry put it, because he was no threat at all.

  Alec, on the other hand, felt Harry didn’t consider Sanya an equal. “Of course he does,” Sanya would protest, and then Alec would remind her of the many instances where Harry treated her like his at-home secretary.

  “Can you make sure those suits are dry-cleaned? And I think I need a new suit bag. Can you pick one up for me? I need it before next Monday; I have meetings in New York,” Harry would ask on his way out the door, the same door Sanya would be out of a few minutes later to go to work, just like he did.

  Of course she would take care of the suits and the luggage. Because that’s what she did. She took care of Harry and Sara. Sanya didn’t particularly like to hear what Alec said because it made her sound like one of those pathetic wives on Oprah who wanted to find the wind beneath their wings and become her own person. The fact that she had become a doormat to her successful husband made her cringe. She wasn’t even sure when it happened.

  Alec came to see Sanya when she was catatonic in the hospital and then after, when she took up residence in her bed. He had sat stroking her hair, saying nothing. No judgment. Sanya felt that he blamed himself a little because he hadn’t seen this coming; he had thought she was tougher.

  Sanya’s parents, both of them successful doctors who had emigrated from India in the seventies, were disappointed in her as well because they also assumed that she was stronger. Earlier they used to be disappointed that she was not a doctor and that she was also not getting anywhere in her career. Her lack of ambition was just not what they expected of a Bhargav, and now they felt the size of their disappointment had increased several hu
ndredfold.

  Sanya’s mother, Naina Bhargav, an obstetrician and gynecologist, and her father, Raghuram Bhargav, an anesthesiologist, lived and worked in Boston and understood the chemistry of what had happened to Sanya’s brain, but they were horrified that their daughter was now popping antidepressants and seeing a therapist. Also, they were appalled that their happy and positive daughter was now a hostile nutcase who seemed to not care about her job, her life, her family, or her home and spent an inordinate amount of time under a duvet.

  Her younger sister, the wonderful Mira, who was married to the impeccable Vinay, was gleefully upset—a part of Mira was probably relieved that the competition was over. She had won. She was a successful pediatrician with her own practice in Boston. She had two beautiful boys. She had the handsome Indian neurosurgeon husband (Sanya was married to a corporate white man). She had full control of her mental faculties. But Mira loved her sister, so she worried and called Sanya to make her feel better in her own style—which lacked compassion, to say the least.

  Sanya had her sister on speakerphone outside the duvet while she lay inside, and when Mira started to talk about how she always knew Sanya was the flaky sort and had predicted that something like this would happen, Harry, who had been listening to their conversation, if you could call it that with Mira doing all the talking, picked up the phone and told her to not call again for a long while.

  He did that, he told Sanya, because he felt Mira was being condescending, and that she was not saying what his wife needed to hear during her difficult time. Which was nuts! Mira had always been like this—how did he miss that for two decades? Every time they had a family get-together, size-zero Mira, who still fit into her before-kids jeans, would tell Sanya just as she loaded her plate with food about a new diet she knew her sister needed to try. You know, to get rid of all that belly fat. Just two months of programmed starving and Sanya would look great in the dress she was currently wearing (which was very nice but didn’t quite flatter the middle area).

  Sanya’s mother would agree with Mira. Harry would ignore Mira and Sanya because he would be busy playing whose dick is bigger with Vinay, as they both ran marathons and liked to discuss their stats. Sanya’s father, who liked to stay away from any controversial female conversations about body image (or anything else, for that matter), would not defend potbellied Sanya.