by James Frey
“Indeed. Might you be persuaded to join me for a chai after school?”
Shari tenses. “I, uh, I don’t do that.”
“You don’t drink tea?”
She can feel a blush rising in her cheeks. “No, I don’t . . . you know. Go out. With boys.”
It’s not like her to stammer. But then, none of this is like her.
“Never?” he says. “Not one single date?”
“Never.”
It’s not actually a rule for the Player designate, more of an unspoken tradition—she’s not supposed to have anything in her life that could distract her from her purpose. It’s never mattered much before.
He laughs. “Then it’s a good thing I wasn’t asking you on a date.”
“Oh.” Now her cheeks are on fire. She tells herself that it doesn’t matter what this stranger thinks of her, that she’s beyond such trivial things, that she’s spent years making herself a placid surface, hard as diamond but smooth as glass. All of this is true, and yet she still wants to drill a hole in the earth and sink into it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to presume; I simply—”
“Chill out,” he says, an Americanism that doesn’t sound so foreign in his strange accent. She doesn’t like to be told to calm down—she doesn’t like to be told anything. She is Shari Jha, solely in charge of herself. But the timbre of his voice has its intended effect: she chills. “I could use someone to give me the lay of the land. Haven’t had a good chai since I got here, so if you know where to go, that’s a start.”
“Do I know where to go to get a good chai?” Shari echoes. “You’ve asked the right question, Jamal Chopra, new kid of grade ten. Pay attention, because I’m about to change your life.”
Shari watches him carefully as he takes his first sip. She likes this boy well enough, but if he can’t appreciate a steaming mug of Rayamajhi chai, he’s not worth much.
There are some who claim the best chai in Gangtok will be found at Golden Tips, while others swear by the café in Pagdandi Books, but as far as Shari is concerned, these people don’t know what they’re talking about. The third best chai in all of Gangtok is the tea that Jovinderpihainu’s wife used to make, a recipe lost with her death. The second best chai is made by Shari’s own mother, served with a ginger and lemongrass mixture sprinkled across the top. But the best chai in the city—in all the world, in Shari’s opinion, at least in the 36 countries she’s visited—is the mouthwatering blend served in Sri Rayamajhi’s tiny café off Nehru Road. It doesn’t look like much: The door, squeezed between an old bookshop and a car repair shop, is barely visible from the street and layered with rust. The four tables inside all wobble on crooked legs, and Shari once fell through the seat of one of the rickety chairs. The air is thick with dust, the ceiling crumbling plaster. Sri Rayamajhi is ancient, and as mean as he is wrinkled. He treats Shari with respect, because of her position—but his version of respect is barely concealed contempt. She doesn’t mind; as long as his chai continues to taste of nirvana, the old man can scowl at her as fiercely as he’d like.
“Well?” she says, when Jamal places the mug back on the table and closes his eyes. He sighs deeply.
Finally he opens his eyes. “This makes it all worthwhile,” he says.
“What?”
“Moving, again. Moving halfway across the world to some random mountain in some random country where I don’t know anyone. Inviting myself out to tea with a very intimidating girl. All of it, worth it for this.” He takes another sip. She forgets her own tea, so absorbed is she by his expression of pure joy.
She’s never brought anyone here before, not even her siblings. The tea shop is her private solace, somewhere she can come to be alone with her thoughts and her chai without having to worry about who she is or who’s watching. It’s as much a home to her as her parents’ house, and she thought it might feel strange to bring Jamal here—wrong, even—but being with him is, in a way, like being alone.
“So, what’s the story at school?” Jamal asks, once he’s taken sufficient pleasure from his drink.
“What do you mean? It’s a school like any other,” Shari says.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve been to”—he counts on his fingers, lips moving silently through a list—“eleven different schools, and I’ve never seen one quite like this. Sure, there are always groups, cliques, that kind of thing, but here? It’s like there’s a line drawn down the middle of the student body that no one ever talks about. Like you’re all inhabiting the same building, but you’re completely different schools, if that makes sense.”
Shari understands exactly what he means: this is the invisible line between the Harrapan who know about Endgame and all the rest of the line. She’s just surprised that he noticed. The division is subtle, something that even new teachers take a few months to notice.
“When you move around as much as I have, you learn to suss things out pretty quickly,” Jamal says, anticipating her question.
She seizes the opportunity to change the subject. “Why have you moved so often?”
“My father’s business,” he says. “International finance—lots of Very Important Opportunities with Very Important People, you know how it is. Or at least that’s how he said it was. You ask me, I think he just always wanted to be somewhere else. It always felt like he was running away from something.” Jamal shrugs like he doesn’t care, but Shari knows how to read people—she can see it as an act. “Maybe that’s stupid. Occam’s razor, right? He was probably just running away from us, and too polite to ask us to stop following him.”
There’s a bruise here that Shari doesn’t want to press, not yet. “Tell me about it,” she says. “The world. The places you’ve seen.”
Most people she knows have never left Gangtok. Shari listens eagerly as he tells her of the sights he’s seen: the spires of Notre Dame, the Great Pyramid at Giza, the view of Victoria Harbour from the Peak in Hong Kong. He assumes, of course, that she’s never seen these wonders for herself, and she lets him. It doesn’t feel like lying, because everything looks different through his eyes. Yes, she’s been to London, but only to break into the British Museum and steal back a handful of Harrapan artifacts that were stolen by British colonizers centuries before. She’s seen the Mojave Desert, but only through a feverish haze of thirst and hunger, when she was left there on her own for several weeks without food or water. She learned how to survive, and how to retreat from desolate solitude into the secret caverns of her inner mind, but not how to appreciate the beauty of bare rock and sheer cliffs burning orange in the setting sun.
By the time he finishes listing his many homes, their cups have emptied. Without having to be asked, Sri Rayamajhi bangs two fresh cups before them with a clatter. Shari presses her palms to the sides of her mug, soaking in the heat.
“And now you’ve come to India. How long before you have to leave?” She tries to make it sound like she doesn’t particularly care, because there’s no logical reason she should.
“My mother says this time’s for good,” he says.
“But what about international business, Very Important People, your father—”
“My father’s dead.”
“Oh.” She curses herself for overstepping. Now he will politely excuse himself and disappear, so as not to have to answer painful personal questions. It’s what she would do. “I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t kill him,” he says. “Unless you’re a heart attack wearing a very good costume?”
It’s not like before. He’s not acting, not pretending away pain. He’s signaling her that this is not forbidden territory—that she’s allowed to ask more questions.
“So why have you come here?”
“My father was born here,” he says. “Lived here until he was a teenager, then took off—in the middle of the night, to hear him tell it—and swore never to come back again. We don’t know much about his family, but I guess I’ve always thought . . .”
“Yes?”
He looks down.
“I’ve always thought that if he was running from something, it must be something here. And maybe that’s what my mom thinks too. She’s from Mumbai, but she wanted to come here. To feel closer to him, she said, but I think she’s expecting to find some kind of answers.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Shari says, honestly confused. She’s a stranger to him, who’s given him no reason to assume she can be trusted. The more truth you reveal about yourself, the more vulnerability you offer a potential enemy—this is something that’s been impressed on her from childhood. But here he is, spreading himself wide open for her, like a kitten exposing its soft belly.
“I don’t know,” he says, sounding somewhat confused himself. “I’ve never told anyone that. But . . . you asked.”
“You didn’t have to answer.”
“Isn’t that what friends do?”
And so they are friends.
Her first friend.
Her best friend.
She shows him Gangtok, not just the city’s obvious attractions—the Rumtek Monastery, Ganesh Tok, Tsomgo Lake—but the Gangtok she loves. The scents of the marketplace on a Sunday morning, cinnamon, curry, sandalwood; the sensation of biting into a steaming Tibetan momo, fresh from the vendor’s pot. The narrow alleyways that twist and turn, climbing up and up into the clouds. The shifting views from the cable car—the rainbow of houses bright in the afternoon light, the way the hillside seems to catch fire as the sun sets. She takes him to her favorite viewing overlook, and they watch Mount Kanchenjunga’s snowy peak poke through the dissipating fog.
He tells her everything: About his childhood, growing up with his mysterious and often absent father, his dissatisfied mother. About how it felt to come home and see his mother’s expression gone hollow, to know before she told him that his father was finally gone. He tells her about his favorite bands, and through him she discovers a love of music she never knew she had, music from across the globe and through the decades: the Mountain Goats, Titica, Rilo Kiley, Julieta Venegas, Pompeya, the Hold Steady, Thelonious Monk, Renaissance chanting. They share earbuds and listen over and over to Tom Waits’s “Alice,” which becomes their favorite song, something about it feeling like the voice of great Kanchenjunga itself.
She tells him nothing and everything, all at once.
All the important facts of her life, the list of truths that make up Shari Jha, she keeps to herself. She doesn’t tell him that she will be the Player, or what that might mean. She doesn’t tell him that she knows six variants of martial arts and can kill a man twice her size with her bare hands, though she’s never chosen to do so. She doesn’t tell him how she spends the afternoons when she’s not with him, long hours in the gym honing her fighting skills or in the library deciphering the mysteries of the past, nor does she reveal where she goes on those days or weeks she disappears on a training mission—and he doesn’t press her for answers, because he understands her enough to know that there are answers she’d rather not give. She doesn’t tell him that she’s asked around about the Chopra family, about who his father might have been and what he could have been running from, and has gleaned that the man was Harrapan, knew enough to know about Endgame. He was one of the chosen few ushered into the inner circle, sworn to the sacred responsibility of supporting the Player however she might need—and had most likely, shamefully, run scared from his duty and his gods and the end of the world.
But the things she does tell him . . . they feel more important, somehow, because they are the private, secret things that no one knows.
What it is to be lonely.
How it feels to have her future decided for her by her family. The alignment of the stars at her conception and birth.
How she sometimes slips away from school in the middle of the day and sneaks into a movie theater, losing herself in the noise and color of someone else’s life.
She teaches him yoga and helps him practice his rudimentary Nepali; he teaches her to appreciate sushi and makes her laugh.
She advises him on girls, how they think, how they might be thinking of him; he teaches her, by example, how to flirt.
It’s true that she doesn’t date, and she lets him believe that this is because her family is a traditional kind, that someday they will make her a match. She lets him assume that this is the circumscribed fate she alludes to when she says, wistfully, that sometimes it might be nice to decide for herself what the shape of her life would be. There are many families in the city who intend arranged marriages for their children, and no reason for him to believe the Jha are not among them. No reason to tell Jamal that she doesn’t date because she sees no point in it, not with the deadline looming two years hence. Once she takes her place as the Player, there will be no time for love or courtship, no space in her life or heart for anything but her training, her mission. She suspects that even friendship will have to fall by the wayside, which makes these days with Jamal all the more precious.
She tells herself that’s all it is.
Friendship.
There are, of course, many families in Gangtok who have embraced the more modern version of courting, and their school is filled with girls willing to date—all of them, it seems, more than willing to date Jamal.
Shari likes watching him flirt in the schoolyard. She still uses the time to meditate in quiet corners, but often, now, she will interrupt her session to check on his progress with one girl or another. She knows him well enough that she can tell what he’s talking about just from the way he stands or waves his arms. He moves one way when he’s excited by a new band, another when he’s complimenting a girl’s clothing, yet another when he’s complaining about a teacher. She enjoys playing these games with herself, as she enjoys watching him flirt, because she can always catch the distinctions between the way he acts with these girls and the way he is when the two of them are alone together. These girls don’t know him, but Shari does, and that makes her feel like the two of them are sharing a silent secret.
Still, even if she doesn’t mind him flirting, she doesn’t like it when the girls flirt back.
They meet frequently in the tea shop, or for long walks through the city, and he asks her for advice: Should he ask Kaili or Sita to the movies? Does Samana like him too much; does Menka like him at all? Why does Kamala always lean in his direction and twirl her long black hair but refuse to accept his gifts or let him walk her home?
“She thinks you’re a flirt,” Shari points out. The monsoon season is abating, and the sun has finally lost its shyness, poking out from beneath the clouds. They are picnicking on a hillside, in the shadow of Mount Kanchenjunga, tinny music playing from the speaker of Jamal’s phone.
“Why ever would she think that?” Jamal asks, sounding indignant.
“You’ve been in Gangtok for, what, three months now?”
“About.”
“And you’ve kissed how many girls?”
“A gentleman never tells.”
“I suspect Kamala has decided you’re no gentleman,” Shari teases.
Jamal pops a samosa in his mouth, moaning with the taste of it. This is one of Shari’s favorite things about him, how little it takes to make him happy. He loves food especially, and unreservedly, and she loves watching him eat.
“Then I suppose she’s smarter than she looks,” he says.
She gives him a light shove. “Be nice.”
“I can be nice or I can be honest,” Jamal says. “And I know you prefer the latter. It’s what I like about you.”
Shari swallows. If he knew how dishonest she was with him, how much she never told . . .
“Then tell me honestly,” she says. “Why is it that you bounce from one girl to the other so quickly. Is there no one in all of Gangtok good enough for Jamal Chopra? Or do you simply have an attention deficit?”
“Very funny.”
“No, I’m seriously asking. Don’t you want something more, sometimes?” She has long imagined the life she will have, s
omeday, when she’s lapsed, the husband who will love her, the children who will cling to her, the life filled with embraces and laughter. It seems like such an impossibly long time to wait, and it mystifies her that someone like Jamal, who could have so much right now, denies himself.
“You’re seriously asking?” Jamal has been lounging backward, like a sunbather, but now he sits upright, fixes her with a quizzical look. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. Is that so difficult to believe?”
“Well, frankly, yes,” he says. “I assumed it was obvious.”
“What was?”
“Shari, don’t you know?” There’s a helpless note in his voice, almost pleading. “Don’t you know why I distract myself with these other girls, why none of them can matter?”
She shakes her head.
But even as she’s doing so, she does know.
Something in her, the voice of prudence and responsibility, says, No.
Says, Remember, this can’t happen.
This cannot be yours.
“It’s you,” Jamal says. “There’s no one but you,” and Shari silences the part of her that knows better, listens only to the wind in the trees and their favorite song, their “Alice” on the breeze, and the melody of his surprised laughter when she twines their fingers together and closes the distance between them.
They keep it a secret, the thing between them.
The love between them.
That’s what it is, of course; Shari can’t deny that. This is no flirtation, no casual thing that can be shrugged off, tucked into the margins of her life, abandoned without a backward look once her tenure as a Player begins.
She hides it carefully from her trainers, most of them aunts or uncles who love her almost as much as they love the line—almost, but not quite. Their job, their life, is devoted to making sure that Shari is the best Player she can be, that she has the best chance possible of winning Endgame. And she knows that their vision of the Player’s life doesn’t include love.
So she lies to them.
She lies to them, and she lies to Jamal.
“What do you do all that time, hiding away at home?” he asks her finally, after an intense weekend of training takes her away from him for 48 hours straight, and—much as she hates it—she lies. “What are you going to do after high school?” he asks her, assuming that, like everyone else at school, she has a choice in the manner, and she lies.