by Sonya Lalli
“I never said that. I was always there—”
“You didn’t even try to understand what I was going through. You lectured. You sat up on your high horse telling me what to do, telling me to move on, telling me I could fix it all by screwing other guys—”
“How long was I supposed to let you sulk? Look at you—how long has it been—and you’re still not over that jerk—”
“He’s not a jerk—”
“Your nani flew all the way to London, and he wouldn’t even meet her.”
“It wasn’t like that. He was called to Zurich, and then he—”
“You’re still defending him. Why? You need to delete that picture in your head. That guy who rolls in cash and runs the world, because guess what”—she poked me—“you already dated him. And he never had time for you. He didn’t even—”
“You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You with your perfect family and job, perfect fiancé—you growing up with Auntie Sarla’s silver spoon stuffed down your throat.”
“Right, because only your mother was the fuckup. No one else gets to screw up their child.” Shay had tears in her eyes, and she took a step backward.
“So I’m screwed up,” I said softly. I was crying, too. “I’m pathetic, and screwed up, and gay—”
“You’re not gay!”
“Maybe I am, maybe I—”
“You won’t even tell me what’s going on.”
“And why do you think that is, huh?” I walked toward the bedroom door and slammed it behind me, screamed, “Because you’re so fucking understanding.”
MAY 20, 2005
The girls are spread out around the room; groups of three and four on each couch, some flopped down or cross-legged on the shag carpet, others with their knees up, their backs against the sprightly papered wall. They take turns switching their favorite CDs into Raina’s portable player—Macy Gray and Destiny’s Child, Missy Elliott and Creed. The coffee table is full of kettle corn and fuzzy peach candies, ketchup and salt and vinegar chips. Birthday cake. Sprite—although some of the girls have brought cans of beer, water bottles full of vodka and lemonade mix, and they drink this instead.
It’s Raina’s birthday and, decidedly, a girls’ night. Who decided it, Raina cannot remember, but nonetheless, Nani’s entertaining room is now full of them. Girls from the team. Girls with bad haircuts who play the clarinet or the trumpet. Ones who run track, or met Shay in Chemistry Club. They are all shuffled in together at random, high on sugar, on one another, and they are giggling about boys.
Boys—thinks Raina, listening to them—the only thing of any concern on a girls’ night.
Shay stands on the couch cushion, and everyone watches her body wriggle as she talks about Theo. He is a senior, and after class, Shay recounts, he drove her home in his dad’s Mercedes, first parking the car behind the hockey rink. Raina is anxious to hear more when she hears the door open. Shay slinks down, slides her can of beer beneath the seat, and a moment later, Nani shuffles into the room. She sets down a tray of pakoras and samosas, tamarind and mint chutney in adjacent clay bowls, and smiles to the girls. Everyone murmurs their thanks, and Nani hovers expectantly as they examine the food.
All the girls in the room except for Shay are white, and they follow her lead, carefully selecting one of the flaky fried chunks like a chimp with a new toy, biting off tiny pieces. Selecting the smallest of morsels to place on their tongues. It is a success. Their eyes pop, and their expressions brighten in thanks. Raina suspects most have never tried Indian food before, and they lick their fingers clean.
“Thanks, Mrs. Anand!” they cry, as Nani turns to leave.
“Please,” she replies, heading back up the stairs, “call me Nani.”
Shay waits until the door clicks shut, and then turns back to the group. She is smiling from ear to ear and, Raina knows, waiting for someone to prompt her.
“So,” says the girl beside her. “What happened with Theo? Did you . . .”
Shay smiles coyly. “Did I what?”
“Just tell us!”
“Come on, Shaylee,” says another.
“What happened?”
Shay squeals and topples off the couch, rolls back and forth on the floor. After a moment, she sits up, arcing one arm high in the air. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.” She is breathless. “We didn’t do it . . . but he—” She smiles and, after a moment, points between her legs, and there is a chorus of gasps around the room.
“Down there?”
Shay nods, and another girl chants, “Shaylee, no way!”
“Did it feel good?”
She squishes her nose like she’s about to sneeze. “I think so.”
“You think so?”
She nods again. “He says he knew what he was doing.”
“Of course Theo knew what he was doing,” says one of the girls from track. “He always knows what he’s doing.” Two other girls laugh.
“Shay,” says Raina. “You never told me that.” And after Shay turns to her and shrugs, Raina asks, “Is he your boyfriend?”
Shay glares at her, as if she is irritated. “I don’t care about things like that.”
“Do you think you’ll have sex with him?”
But Shay has already turned away, turned her attention to another girl, another question, and they launch into a discussion about things Raina has never done—things she can barely fathom. Shay reaches into her backpack and pulls out a Cosmopolitan magazine—bright yellow and pink, Sarah Michelle Gellar posed on the front cover. Everyone leans in, and as they paw over the glossy pages, shrieking, Raina slips out of the room unnoticed.
Upstairs, Nani is splayed out on the couch, her calloused feet resting on Nana’s lap. And although he appears to be asleep sitting up, eyes closed, his fleshy chin pillowed onto his neck, his hands are in motion. Softly stroking Nani’s feet.
“What are you doing?” asks Raina, watching them from the hallway.
Nani looks over, and Nana snorts himself awake. “Raina.” His yawn lands in a wide smile. “How is the party?”
“Good.” Raina walks over to them as Nani slides her feet off the couch, and Raina wedges herself between them. She sinks into the cushion. “What are you watching?”
“Mohabbatein,” says Nana, wrapping his arm around her shoulder.
“Again?”
He nods toward the TV. “Your nani loves this one.”
“Should we start it again?” asks Nani. “Your friends want to watch?”
Raina shakes her head and stares at the screen. The actors are in a market throwing colored powder into the air, dancing beneath the festive debris. It seems like the DVD has been on a loop ever since Nana brought home a pirated copy from the restaurant, and from time to time, Raina has watched it with them. The characters have just started college and are falling in love for the first time, and as Raina watches them, her stomach drops. Their lives, their experiences—it all seems like an eternity away. But Raina is now sixteen, and college is not so far off in the future.
Raina cannot imagine having to decide what to do with her life. What—or whose—path she should follow. Shay already knows she will be a doctor, but Raina is not strong like her, and she cannot see herself in a hospital, in the witness-box of death and decay. Kris studies engineering—but Raina does not know what that means. She likes math, physics—even wants to understand his job, but these days Kris rarely sleeps at home. Nani despised his Sri Lankan girlfriend, a nutritionist with buckteeth and giant breasts, but she convinced him to propose, and now talks excitedly about the wedding even though a date has yet to be set.
Her nana tells her that she would make a good lawyer, but Raina has never met one before, and other than episodes of Law & Order, she has no idea what lawyers actually do. Often, she wonders if she should go to university at all. Nani didn’t, and neither did Mana
vi. The last time her mother lived at home, instead of a degree postered above her desk, she had a map. Tea-stained and pricked with a slew of red and blue pins. All the places that Manavi had been—or wanted to go. Places that Raina knows nothing about.
“Are you okay, my sweet?” Nani brushes Raina’s cheeks with both hands. “Are you having fun?”
Raina nods. “Yes, thank you. Everyone loves the food.”
Nani wiggles her eyebrows. “Don’t worry. I saved spicy ones for you.” She grabs a plate of pakoras from the end table and hands them to Raina, and Raina pops two in her mouth at once. She smiles, crunches the spicy warmth between her molars.
“Now,” says Nani, setting the plate back down. “Go have fun.”
Raina stands to leave, but lingers by the doorway. “Hey, guys?”
They both look at her.
“Manavi had just turned sixteen.” Raina looks at her socks, toes the lines in the hardwood. “She was sixteen when I was born.” Her lips quiver, and inexplicably, she wants to cry.
“Raina.” Nana’s voice is strong and sweet. Raina feels him, both of them, as they draw near her and stand on either side of her. Nani takes Raina’s hand into hers.
“Listen to me.” Nani squeezes her hand. “You are such a capable girl.”
“A good girl,” adds Nana. “With such bright future ahead.”
A tear drops, and Nani wipes it away. “You are nothing like your mother.”
“Do you understand?”
Raina nods. Forces out a smile, and a moment later, she says, “I understand.”
Raina rejoins the party. Her seat has been taken, and so she curls up on the floor by the coffee table. The girls have moved on from the magazine. They are sillier now, passing cans and bottles around to one another, giggling, already thinking they are drunk. A bottle of beer reaches Raina. It has gone warm, and her hand sticks to the green glass. She takes a deep breath, wraps her mouth around the lip of the bottle, and throws back her head. As she drinks, Raina cannot stop thinking about what if Nani is wrong. What if she actually is like her mother? What if Raina, too, is a disappointment?
SEVENTEEN
For the first time ever, I was grateful for the long hours and sleepless nights at the office, the distraction of the cutting-edge, thankless world of banking. Winter churned on outside my window, and I sat in my twelve-foot-square cell poring over financial statements and market data, working and reworking a balance sheet. Dissecting a cash flow problem, an economic implication. I worked without really working; I spat out what I was supposed to, and as I sat there on the phone with a client discussing pharmaceutical investments and market shares, made notes on a risk analysis, I was thankful. For the diversion. The disturbance. Thankful that I didn’t really have to think. I tore through reports faster than they were assigned, and Bill warmed up to me again, happy to see that I was “back to my old self.” Ironically—although, predictably so—I felt further away from myself than I’d ever been.
January and then February dragged on, and still the winds sliced brisk and sharp, the sleet and snow creeping in through the revolving doors, at the edges of frosted windowpanes. It seemed like spring would never rear its willowy horns, fill the city with light and sun. It seemed that Dev would never show up, either. He’d been temporarily assigned to a project in Jakarta now—something about an emerging market, heading up a risk analysis. These days he called often, and his texts and e-mails were flowered with darling and missing you, constant reassurances that he’d be back in a jiff. But even when—even if—he came back, I wasn’t sure what I’d do or say, or how he’d fit in to the spectacular mess I’d created and, with each passing day, obstinately ignored.
I mean, it wasn’t every day that someone managed to single-handedly divide a community.
After New York, I’d gone straight home and asked Nani what had happened, and she’d simply apologized and collapsed soundlessly onto the couch. I prodded, but she couldn’t remember all that much about Auntie Sarla’s New Year’s Eve party, except that she’d reacted when Auntie Sarla made a derogatory remark about two men kissing on television. And then, partway through the argument, Nani had told Auntie Sarla—told everyone—what she thought to be the truth.
Nani outed me to a room full of people born in a country where homosexuality was still a crime, to a room full of people who quickly took sides. Overnight, everyone knew, half of them disgusted with Auntie Sarla, the other half disgusted by me. And in the months that followed, Nani had cut ties with at least half of her friends, despite my urgings that it wasn’t necessary. She’d disinvited herself to dinner parties and to the movie club, to any social gathering organized by someone on “Team Sarla.” Anyone who believed homosexuality was wrong.
“You should have seen her reaction, Raina. Terrible!” Nani had sobbed, clutching me in her arms. “But if you saw—you would have done the same. In front of everyone, she screamed at me, asking me how I could allow this”—Nani panted, exhausted from the dramatization, and then continued—“and I reply, ‘What is there to allow?’ Then, that voman, she told me to leave the party. Told me of course I would make all my girls turn strange.”
My stupidity and weakness had ignited a war between Auntie Sarla, a social pillar of west Toronto’s Indian community, wife of a neurosurgeon and mother to two successful children, and Suvali Anand: a blue-collar, social-climbing widow. Mother of rebels. Grandmother of, apparently, a lesbian.
Right then, I’d opened my mouth to tell her the truth: that I was straight. And this spectacular mess was actually about a man, a man I’d barely heard from over the holidays—a man who probably didn’t even deserve me. But I’d pressed my lips together, and turned away. Because I wasn’t strong like Nani, or Shay, or Zoey. Or even Mom.
I was much, much worse. I was a coward.
* * *
Now I sat in my office, my belly full of a Vietnamese noodle bowl Zoey had brought me for lunch, and I let my face fall onto my desk. My forehead stuck to the varnish as I breathed against the hard surface. I was bored and restless; it was becoming harder and harder not to think about Shay. She’d gone to India with Auntie Sarla and Julien, and had already been back for a week, Nani had told me. At yoga classes, she’d seen Auntie Sarla, who’d refused to turn around and look at her as she attempted chair pose at the front of the temple rec room.
“That woman is so inflexible—it is not stool pose,” Nani had said cattily, waiting for me to laugh.
For the millionth time, I flicked through my phone, scrolled back to my last message from Shay. It was dated from over a month before: New Year’s Eve. 11:51 P.M.
Where are you Raaaaaina?
I peeled my head off the desk and stared out the window. It was the middle of the afternoon, dark and miserable outside my office, and I missed Shay.
I missed my best friend.
I looked back at my computer screen, inundated with numbers, formulas, and I tried not to think about her. Concentrating, narrowing in on my work, there was something else I tried not to think about; someone else I hadn’t seen since New Year’s.
I’d left New York in a rush, and I was sure the rumor that I was gay had spread to Asher. No wonder he hadn’t texted or called me.
Had he chalked up our kiss to a New Year’s frivolity with a lesbian? Or did he think about it, too? A part of me wondered if I did call him, if he did know the truth, if anything would happen between us. The other part of me was sitting on my hands like an idiot. Screwing up my life—and worse, Nani’s—while I supposedly waited for a guy I wasn’t sure was coming back.
My intercom buzzed, and I hit the button. “Yes?”
“Raina, you have a—uh, visitor here.”
My stomach fluttered. “Who is it?”
“A Dep-oosh Sax-ee-na?”
“Oh.” I caught my breath. “All right, thanks, Emma. Send him up.”
I opened my
office door and waited out in the hall. A minute later, the elevator opened and Depesh appeared; fresh-faced, even taller it seemed than when I saw him the previous summer.
“How’s university?” I asked. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Haven’t heard from you, either.”
As he followed me into my office, and sat down in Zoey’s usual chair, I guiltily remembered that I’d never made an effort to see him.
“You’re right.” I sat down beside him. “I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged.
“You want some coffee?”
“Hmm?”
“Coffee.”
“Oh.” He shrugged, and then looked down at his feet. “Nah, it’s all right. I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
He went silent, and I watched him as he shook his foot wildly, refusing to meet my eye.
“Is everything okay?” I paused. “Is it Sharon Auntie?”
He shook his head. “Ma is fine.”
“And you don’t want coffee?”
He shook his head.
“Uh, tea?”
“No”—he stood up, started pacing the office—“I don’t want tea, all right?”
“Depo?”
He stood by the door, and when he put his hand on the knob, I thought he might leave. But then he closed the door and sat back down. He paused, and then said, “I heard you’re gay.”
“Oh.” I sank back onto the chair. “That.”
He glared at me. “Thanks for telling me, by the way. And what are you, like, thirty?”
I blew out air through my teeth. “Nearly.”
“Everybody knows now, do you even know that? Like, everybody is talking about it.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” I scratched my head. “I am acutely aware.”
“Why couldn’t you just keep it a secret?” He looked at me like I’d done something wrong, like I was being ridiculous.
“Excuse me?”