by Anne Cherian
“Okay, then, good. You will come with us to Las Vegas, and we will show you a good time. Wine, women, the tables, bring it on,” Pierre rubbed his hands together, “especially the women.”
Vic enjoyed his liquor, but he had never understood the lure of the gaming tables. He only gambled when the odds were in his favor, as with the darts. He had never had the time, or interest, to study cards, and never considered risking his money on a game of chance. He also didn’t understand the need to see naked women dance, or take them back to the hotel room.
The Frenchmen weren’t the only people he knew who enjoyed the company of loose women. He had met a few Indians in recent years who talked of prostitutes, and one man was very open about his American mistress. Vic knew that those Indians viewed such behavior as a mark of their success, and the man with the mistress felt superior to his countrymen because he was sleeping with a white woman. Vic had done all that while at UCLA, but once he married Priya, he committed to being a faithful husband. The only French he knew was the term ménage à trois, which had led him to believe that they were a people who did anything and everything sex-related. This opinion had been confirmed by the Frenchmen, who claimed that relationships were like musical chairs, and they got up or sat down depending on the girl passing by. “When is the trip happening?” Vic took out his Blackberry.
“June tenth.”
“That is not a good weekend for me.”
“Why? The wife wants to do something?” Pierre jeered.
“No, nothing like that.” Vic had purposely not told them much about himself. It was the same tactic he had employed at IIT. Back then, he had feared ridicule because of his socioeconomic conditions; in America, he knew that some people thought Indian customs were strange. So he kept his house to himself and only let others know what was absolutely necessary.
“Come on, you can tell us.”
“Why don’t we just look for another time that is suitable for all of us?” Vic prevaricated.
“Now you are making us very suspicious. What is so important on June tenth that you can’t even tell us?”
Vic almost made up a story about his company. Then, at the last minute, he decided it was okay for them to know about Nikhil’s very American success.
“I am having a party for my son.”
“Change the date. You don’t have to give the party on the real birthday.”
“It’s not for his birthday. He has graduated from MIT and is returning home to join my company.”
“MIT. Wow. Congratulations. Your son must be very smart.”
Vic shrugged. He didn’t want to brag. Most of the men were construction workers. They had come to visit America and then stayed on. Pierre was the only one who worked at a desk.
“I really thought your wife didn’t want you to go to sinful Vegas,” Pierre said.
Vic hadn’t even told them her name. From the moment they knew he was married, they enjoyed poking fun at him. If he didn’t want another beer, they’d sneer, “He’s married.” When he didn’t turn to look at a girl with a tight-fitting dress, they would mock him, saying, “Has your wife put a detective on you?”
About six months ago, he got fed up, and said, “Look, I can get unmarried anytime. But none of you can get married just like that,” he clicked his fingers, making a sharp sound. For a while they stopped the “he’s married” joshing, but it had recently crept back.
The irony was that Priya had actually been very happy when he first told her about his new hobby. “It’s good you are making men friends,” she stated, and he had harrumphed, wondering which talk show or movie she had learned that from.
Even when he started meeting them for drinks, she had not said anything. But she blew up when he got a DUI ticket three months ago.
The men had warned him that the police did not like bikers and took any opportunity to give them tickets. Pierre said that one time he slowed down at a crosswalk, saw that the woman was talking on her phone, and so accelerated. Next thing he knew, a pig of a policeman had given him a ticket. When he tried to argue that the woman had given no indication that she wanted to cross the street, the pig told him to take it to court. “But you won’t win,” he said. “I’ll make sure I’m there.”
Vic knew about the police. Back in the 1990s, they used to pull him over all the time. They assumed that a brown man could not possibly own a Mercedes. But these days brown men were driving all sorts of cars, including Jaguars, and Vic had long ago stopped watching out for cops.
So when the men told him their stories, he didn’t think it applied to him.
He had been the first to leave that evening, and a cop had been waiting to bust whoever came out of the bar. The DUI turned out to be an unexpected seal of acceptance from the group. They each had one, or two, or three. “You are finally one of us,” Pierre had bought him a drink to celebrate.
Priya, on the other hand, had been hysterical. She had cried and carried on. She worried that he would get into an accident and die. She couldn’t comprehend that he wasn’t a drunk, that he had only had a few beers, that the cop was probably trying to make his quota for the day. She fretted that this would get out in the Indian community, and it would tarnish their name.
He had been more concerned about getting his license reinstated. He had only had two beers; he knew how to control himself. Priya did not need to worry that he would ever get caught again.
But the DUI had changed Priya’s attitude about his biker friends. She claimed that she was never easy when he went with the group. She did not like him wearing tight T-shirts that showed off his muscles. She didn’t object to his exercising, she said, because that was good for his health, but the thin T-shirts made him look like a low-class gunda.
“In actuality,” Vic now told Pierre, “my wife would be more than happy to cancel the party.”
“Then make her happy and make yourself happy,” Pierre recommended. “Vegas is something you should not miss, especially the Vegas we can show you.”
“I can’t go that weekend,” Vic said firmly. “Sorry. You all go and have a good time. I’ll let you make your plans. Good-bye.” He left before they could say another word.
Not wanting to go home, he headed for the beach. He had never seen the ocean before coming to UCLA—his family had never, ever gone on vacation.
As Pitaji used to say, “The land does not allow us to rest.”
“Unless you are the seth,” Vikram had reminded his father, while his mother told him to keep quiet in case someone was listening and reported back to the fat man who owned their land and controlled their destinies.
People in America were surprised that though he had grown up quite close to the Taj Mahal, he had only seen it once. He never told them that he had gone there after living in America.
Vic sat on the soft, yellow sand and gazed at the water. If he returned tomorrow, it would be the same view, except that it wouldn’t be the same water. The constant change used to fascinate him.
But he was too distraught right now to do anything but think about all the things that had gone wrong today.
He had hoped that planning for the Vegas trip would improve his mood. Instead, the men had annoyed him. Why did they make fun of his wife? He used to enjoy their company, but these days he only went for the rides.
Priya, too, made him angry. She was the one who had made Nikhil into a sissy who loved cooking more than sports. She had never liked canned and frozen foods, so from the very beginning, had cooked as if they lived in India. Her only allowance that this was America was to use the blender to make the masalas, instead of grinding the spices by hand.
When Nikhil took rice and dal and vegetables for his lunch, his classmates used to make fun of his food. Priya had wanted to give him sandwiches, but Vic had stopped her. “He will always be different,” he told his wife. “Let him learn early how to make it work for him.”
Now, of course, America had gone mad for “real cooking,” and it was fashionable to be vegetarian an
d eat ethnic. Their neighbors were always asking Priya for recipes, and she had even demonstrated how to cook a few dishes in Nandan’s school. Every now and then, Nandan returned home hungry, because some classmate had begged him for his lunch. Indian food was popular, and though not as chic as Japanese sushi, it was garnering a lot of attention.
But Nikhil needed to realize that Americans were fickle where food was concerned. Their interest in Indian cuisine would go away, they would go back to eating meat—but computers were here to stay.
Now he worried that Nikhil wanted to go to India. Was this a recent plan or did it go back to when he wanted to give up MIT and take cooking classes in various parts of the world, including India?
Vic would have to stub out this new, stupid idea. His son did not know the real India. He was being seduced by the news, which was coming from the mouths of foreigners who would never understand India—and politicians, who never told the truth. Vic discounted every statistic that claimed India was on the cusp of becoming great. The country was too corrupt—from the government on down—to ever move ahead. Didn’t Nikhil realize that he himself would return to India if it truly was a better place? Here he could run VikRAM Computers the way he wanted to, hire the best people, and not worry as long as he kept to the law and paid his taxes. In India, he would have to bribe all sorts of officials and everyone, from relatives to the friends of friends of friends, would demand a job. Perhaps he should tell Nikhil exactly why Rajesh wasn’t working for him anymore.
He couldn’t allow Nikhil to go to India. His son was raised in America. He would have no idea which hand to oil, how to grease the system.
Vic heard some shouting. A group of people were running into the water. They were Nikhil’s age, maybe younger. They laughed and pushed each other, as if nothing were wrong with their lives. When, he wondered, was the last time he had been so free? Had he ever really been unfettered, allowing the future to come to him, not wanting to control it by doing, planning, thinking ahead?
His first taste of any freedom had come when he was at UCLA. His classes had been easy, and he only needed to study a little in order to ace his exams. He got a job as a teaching assistant and did tutoring on the side. His combined income allowed him to rent a tiny studio apartment that was close enough so he could walk to campus. He also had a phone, a small black-and-white TV, and a well-stocked fridge. He even had money left over to send home every month. His parents still weren’t happy that he was so far away, but his dollars had paid off the onerous loans Pitaji had taken from the seth when the harvest failed. Yet Vic hadn’t felt burdened, and every now and then he enjoyed a restaurant meal.
He had loved those early years in America. He had tasted meat for the first time but had quickly gone back to being a vegetarian. These days, he no longer had to explain his food choices to people, and he had recently hired a man who was vegan.
He had even slept with white girls at UCLA. He had been so surprised the first time it happened. He was tutoring a very pretty girl, and she suggested they meet in her apartment rather than at the library. He didn’t care where they met, as long as she paid him his fee. She had opened the door dressed in her nightgown. There had been no studying done that day, or the next time, or the time after. But he made sure that every girl knew that he was not available for marriage. They found his concern very “gentlemanly,” one girl said, but each assured him that marriage was not in their near future. They simply wanted to have fun, experience new things. He was in the novel position of being wanted just for himself, and he luxuriated in the many girls who chased after him. But he never fell in love, never had the desire to keep up any relationship. And, unlike so many Indians he met these days, he didn’t get a case of “white fever.”
It was while he was at UCLA that he took the initial steps toward forming his own company. Even that had been easy. Many people approached him, and the system was set up in such a way that he could get help with his business plan as well as find out who might give him seed money.
It had all worked out, right down to having two sons who would carry on his name and his work.
“James!” a girl shouted as she ran right in front of Vic, kicking sand onto his legs. He suddenly thought of Jay. He had first seen Jay at the UCLA orientation party, watching from afar as he smiled and spoke and charmed everyone. And of course a man wearing blue jeans and a silk shirt would go up to one of the few Indian girls present and start a conversation. Vic had been talking the entire time to another computer nerd from Japan. Kevin Ozaki had come to UCLA with the same ambition of starting a company, except that he planned to do it in his hometown of Kyoto.
Then the president of UCLA came over and insisted Vic meet the other Indians at the party. Vic had tagged Jay, from the very first “Hello,” as the son of a rich man. It was there in the way he assumed everyone was listening when he spoke, in his casual shrug when he told the story of losing the textbooks he had just bought. They gradually began meeting each other more often, and Vic had been very amused when a few Americans thought they were cousins, friends, brothers. How could the Americans know that Jay would never have befriended Vic if they had met in India? Jay would have been the one in the first-class train compartment; Vic would have been in third class, just another body amid the hoi polloi.
Yet Jay’s rich beginnings hampered him in the United States. Jay expected things to work out; he didn’t work, really work, because he had never had to do so. His life had been decided from the moment he entered kindergarten in his fancy school, which fed into a top-notch college in India, which in turn gave him the right education to do well enough on the GMAT to gain admission into UCLA.
But all that did not help him in America when it came time to get a job. Vic had watched as Jay started to flounder without the societal support he had always enjoyed. When Vic had tried to help, Jay dismissed him. Jay thought he knew more, knew better.
“Why don’t you come with me to check the job listings?” Vic had suggested. He wanted to keep all his options open, so, even as he set about creating his own company, he looked for a full-time position.
“I have an ‘in’ with this company my adviser used to consult for,” Jay shrugged. He was so sure that influence would get him a job. Jay did land a job, but Vic always thought that he would have done better if he had sent his resume to more, rather than fewer, companies.
Jay had let his guard down only once, when he spoke about his relationship with Frances. But Jay had drunk a lot that night, and Vic thought it was the liquor, rather than their friendship, that had caused Jay to blurt out his worries.
Vic hadn’t attended their civil wedding, but he had asked one of the girls he tutored what type of present to give. She had suggested towels, and he had bought them a matching set.
Their lives, as he had always known, had diverged after UCLA, but those few years had created a bond that gained in importance as he grew older. He had met hundreds of people since then, had made scores of friends. But only one took him back to his early days in America.
There had been such comfort in coming from the same country, comfort in knowing that none of the other students’ parents could eat with their fingers. There was so much he knew about Jay from just one glance, from hearing just one word. The Frenchmen? He would never be able to place them in their society, even though he had been in France.
Vic pulled out his phone. Jay hadn’t moved in years, and one of the benefits about being a computer expert was his facility with numbers. He pressed the phone against his ear as he heard the ringing. He’d ask Jay if he had received the invitation, tell him that this time he wasn’t going to accept any excuses. The thought of seeing his old friend melted his dissatisfaction with the Frenchman and his family.
The call connected, and he was all set to shout, “Hello, remember me, Vic the stick?” when the answering machine kicked on.
Jay’s voice was saying, “You know who we are, but we don’t know who you are. So tell us. And we’ll call you back. If we w
ant to.”
He hung up without leaving a message. Maybe he’d call again tomorrow. Maybe by tomorrow Nikhil would have come to his senses. But even if Nikhil was still resistant, they had to start planning the party.
FRANCES LOOKED UP the new listings and then scrolled back to the old ones. She loved seeing the jubilant sold banner across the photograph of the Miller house. The Millers had, after a long evening of going back and forth and asking for more money, accepted an offer that was $10,000 below their asking price. Frances had been unsure it would go through, because the first-time buyer had a Federal Housing Administration loan and was only putting down 3½ percent. But, as each day slipped into the next, nothing impeded the sale, and Frances told Jay, “I think the market is finally turning around, you know.” It had given her renewed faith in real estate, in her life in general, and she had recently signed up for a weekly class entitled “How to Increase Your Potential.”
She shut the laptop, satisfied that everything was in order. There was never much work on Saturday mornings, which meant that she could have a leisurely breakfast with the family.
Frances had just filled the kettle and turned on the stove when Jay joined her in the kitchen. “Well, Vic’s long-awaited day has finally arrived.” Jay said what had been on his mind from the moment he woke up.
He hadn’t thought much about the party until a few days ago when Harvey Goldman, his office mate, invited him to a talk at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
“I know you’re an alum, and my wife would rather go to a baby shower than listen to a panel of businessmen predict what’s in store for us. Don’t let this $350 ticket go to waste.” Harvey had waved the rectangular paper in Jay’s face.
Harvey was the office go-getter, and Jay was pleased to be the chosen one this time. “Let me make sure I’m available,” he said, checking his Blackberry. “Darn it, I have to go to a graduation party for a kid I haven’t seen in years.” Jay shook his head sadly.