“I have some very good news for you, ji,” Ranjana said.
Mohan didn’t say anything but looked up. Ranjana had made idli sambar, and Mohan’s fingertips were stained brownish green. An uneaten idli rested in his right hand.
“I have been offered a receptionist position in Suneel Butt’s office.”
Mohan had the ability to turn his entire face into a frown. His bushy eyebrows furrowed, threatening to eclipse his eyes. His cheeks dropped; even his nose seemed to elongate. It was some cruel trick of nature that he looked handsomer like this, a thinness restored to his face from years ago.
“Why were you offered this?” he asked.
“Because I applied for it. Seema’s friend recommended me.”
Already he was sputtering. The idli fell back onto his stainless steel plate. He did not care for Seema, obviously. She was too wanton for him, and the only reason why he hadn’t threatened to put an end to Ranjana’s friendship with her was because he was too lazy. “I do not care what Seema—”
He stopped. Oh, how simple it was to see his face contort into revelation. Ranjana could see the exact workings of his mind: he was making the connection between Seema and Dr. Butt, then making the connection between Dr. Butt and the racket club, then making the connection between the racket club and himself. “Hm. Well.”
“And you know this will help with the expenses for Prashant’s books,” Ranjana said. “The cost for this semester alone was eight hundred dollars. We cannot ignore that.” She sighed. She saw that she was going to have to broach the tennis subject directly, to solidify it in his mind. “And you know what? Dr. Butt has a gold membership to the club. I am sure he would welcome the opportunity to treat his receptionist’s husband to a match or two from time to time.”
The frown was back, the nose stretching. Ranjana understood the inner tennis match of her husband’s mind: on the north end of the court, Allowing His Wife to Work and Therefore Signaling Financial Distress to Their Friends; on the south end of the court, Mohan Chaudhury, Suited and Booted, a Truly Golden Boy in the Club. Would his nose keep stretching, a toucan husband? Or would it retract?
“How many hours would you be working?” he asked, his nose shrinking.
* * *
Cheryl, Ranjana’s coworker, was not very organized. She was a sweet woman, a fact reinforced by how well stocked she kept the candy dish, but she was also that rare, most dangerous thing: a receptionist with a faulty sense of alphabetical order. J, K, L, and M were particularly perilous, and she could never figure out if Mc- preceded Mac. Her disposition was perfect for the job (in a proctologist’s office, it was especially necessary to put patients at ease), but even though Cheryl was always ready with a comforting or amusing comment, she made innumerable mistakes that Ranjana always had to correct.
At first, Ranjana wondered why Dr. Butt had even hired Cheryl in the first place. Ranjana found out during lunch one day.
“He got me cheap,” Cheryl said at Wendy’s. In front of Cheryl sat a Spicy Chicken sandwich, a bloom of rectangular fries, and a “Biggie” Diet Coke the size of a water tower. With only a modicum of embarrassment, Ranjana loved Wendy’s (though she drew the line at a Frosty, which she found creepy in its beige ooziness). Wendy’s wasn’t as greasy as McDonald’s, and Ranjana found their fries to be perfection, as crisp and delicious as food from a cart in Delhi. “Charlie had just lost the job at Chase, and there was no more time for me to keep looking, so I didn’t even negotiate.” Charlie was Cheryl’s husband; he now worked as an assistant manager at Whole Foods.
“Why don’t you ask for a raise?” Ranjana said, spearing one of the mandarin oranges in her Asian Salad. She couldn’t imagine any instance in which Cheryl could be justified in receiving a raise.
“Can you imagine asking that man for more money? I want to make at least a little more, but instead, here I am.” She motioned to the Wendy’s, as if it were where they worked.
Despite Cheryl’s flightiness, Ranjana was glad not to have a crabby coworker. More important, Ranjana enjoyed the job. In fact, it shocked her sometimes how much she liked being confined in the small square of their cubicle, behind a ledge and sliding window. She never tired of seeing the inquisitive, concerned faces of the patients as they came into her view. She saw them as individual pieces of theater, each with its own story, although it didn’t strike her until a few months after working in the office that she was something of a theater piece to the patients, too. Everything in the office was either white or a muted earth tone—beige carpet, beige cabinets, dull silver medical implements, the white puffs of cotton swabs—but Ranjana was deep brown, her black hair streaked with gray.
Today, Ranjana watched as Cheryl put down the wrong date for a patient’s hemorrhoid operation. Dr. Butt’s directions could not have been clearer: he had come up with the woman’s chart and said in his high whine, “Cheryl, please note that Mrs. Wilson will be coming in next Friday for her operation.” Ranjana, already on the lookout for errors, saw Cheryl enter the operation into the computer for the following Saturday. Ranjana was all the more incredulous of this mistake because they didn’t even do surgeries on Saturdays. Cheryl, oblivious, clicked her bubble gum and went back to filling out her Sudoku.
It was a Wednesday, and the office was in its last appointments of the afternoon. Ranjana was in a depressed mood, still smarting from her writing group the day before. The women hadn’t been that critical, but Ranjana knew this about herself: she had a tendency to scrub away anything good in the interest of self-critique. It was like a disinfectant that burned as it cleaned.
Her melancholy vaporized when she looked up to see a very attractive Indian man standing in front of her. He had sweeping black hair and a striking face, with a trace of red in his cheeks and a pink bloom for a mouth. He was wearing a simple black hooded sweatshirt and jeans, but his looks transformed these ordinary garments into high fashion. He was gay, Ranjana could tell. Dr. Butt had a lot of gay patients.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning, sir,” Ranjana said.
“I have a four P.M. appointment with Dr. Butt.” He laughed, his shoulders fluttering and his hair moving with them. “Ohmigod, that never gets old.”
“You bet your butt it does,” said Cheryl from the back of the cubicle. The muffle of her voice meant that she was still nose-down in her Sudoku book.
The patient laughed as he signed in. He sauntered away and plopped himself down next to the magazines. Ranjana waited for it—the disappointment as he flipped through the available selections: Time, Popular Science, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Redbook, the last of which Cheryl had chosen. He tossed them aside and pulled out his phone.
His name was Achyut Bakshi. As Ranjana pulled up his chart, she was shocked to see that he was twenty-two. He looked so much older. Some of the gay men who came to see Dr. Butt seemed to be way beyond their ages. Some of them were HIV-positive, and Ranjana, in spite of herself, still didn’t feel entirely comfortable around them. Lately, she had heard Dr. Butt talk of HIV’s prevalence in India and how it was spreading wildly there, so Ranjana felt that she was being confronted by it in more ways than one. She didn’t worry that she would catch the virus simply by interacting with someone, but it unsettled her that Prashant was close in age to some of the young, positive men who came in. Ranjana tensed slightly as she glanced at Achyut Bakshi’s chart and checked his status. He was negative, and she felt awful for having pried—she was supposed to look only at patients’ basic information and not their medical details.
Mindy, one of the nurses, came for Achyut’s file and called him into an examination room. He hopped up excitedly and went with her. How could he be so happy? It seemed like such a difficult life, full of so many potential problems and fears and cruelties. As a Hindu, she could only assume that Achyut had done something divinely reproachable in his past life. Perhaps he had been straight, an adulterer, and here was his corresponding curse: gay life and a visit to t
he proctologist’s office.
Ranjana wasn’t sure if Achyut’s fate was better or worse than working in a proctologist’s office. If it were better, then in her own past life, she may have been the spurned wife of that very adulterer, due for a step up in this life. If it were worse, then perhaps she had been the hussy who had seduced Achyut long ago. From some silky underpinning of her soul, some fantastical longing that she could not position, she felt herself wishing it were the latter. She wanted to be one of the characters in the stories she read and wrote.
Dr. Butt was getting ready to leave the office. Wednesday was the day of the week when he and Mohan played tennis together. Yes, it had happened: faster than Ranjana could have predicted, Mohan had wiggled his way into Dr. Butt’s good graces and made himself a regular tennis partner at the racket club. Mohan had the odd distinction of being somewhat lazy off the court but very determined while on it, and Dr. Butt commented frequently on how his own game was improving under Mohan’s athletic auspices.
Dr. Butt rushed out the door with his duffel bag and bid Ranjana and Cheryl a quick good-bye.
“I gotta run, too,” Cheryl said. She was tucking her Sudoku notebook into her bag, from which sprouted countless gum wrappers and her own copy of Redbook. “Do you mind locking up tonight?”
“Sure.” Ranjana was debating whether or not to get some quick writing done before she headed home. The end of the workday was peaceful, free of the loud noises that Cheryl made all day—her gabbing, her typing, during which she hit the keys so hard that the noise sounded like hail, her gum chewing, her Sudoku scribbling, the general noises of an oblivious person.
But seeing what a beautiful day it was outside, Ranjana decided that she might as well take advantage of the nice weather and go for a little drive before heading home and doing her writing there.
After making sure that her workstation was powered down, she pulled out her set of keys, stepped outside, and snapped the front door shut. Locking it with a click, she realized that someone was standing right next to her. She flinched.
It was Achyut Bakshi. He was grinning, a newly smoked cigarette still fresh on his breath. In the daylight, he looked even older.
“Mr. Bakshi,” Ranjana said, putting a hand to her chest. “Did you forget something?” Even though his demeanor was far from threatening, Ranjana could not shake the general unease of being surprised by a man.
“No, auntie.” Ranjana was taken aback that he would call her this. He had skipped professionalism entirely and was on a decidedly friendly basis. “I was wondering if you might want to get a coffee.”
Ranjana’s voice caught in her throat.
“Or a chai,” he said. “Would you like to get a chai?”
She laughed at this, and Achyut chuckled nervously. His nerves made her wonder if she had been mistaken. Perhaps he was not gay. Perhaps he was making a pass at her. She had seen his chart, though; he had checked a box indicating that he had sex with men. Just to be safe, she said, “I’m married, Mr. Bakshi.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you, auntie. I just don’t have many Indian people in my life right now, and I could use someone to talk to.”
Ranjana almost said yes. She looked at this young man and remembered his age: he must be just out of college. She thought of Prashant, and she softened. Then her mind darted to Mohan; she imagined him in his ridiculously high tube socks and too-tight tennis shorts and the determination in his eyes when he lunged for a ball, his tummy jiggling. If he could have his fun afternoon, couldn’t she have hers?
No, she couldn’t. She could write about doing something daring, but it was much harder to do daring things in real life. “Thank you, Mr. Bakshi,” she said, “but I must be getting home.” She hurried to her car and drove away as if he had been yelling after her, but in her rearview mirror, he was silent and motionless.
* * *
“You don’t get out enough, yaar,” Seema said, placing some pastel-colored sweets on a plate and setting them in front of Ranjana. Seema was growing in health, a fact made evident by her bare arms, which seemed to have been dipped in a fountain of youth: her elbows were like ripe walnuts, the folds of her armpits as smooth as a baby’s mouth. “When was the last time you did something for yourself?”
Ranjana wanted to tell her about the encounter with Achyut Bakshi but wasn’t sure how to explain it. She worried that Seema would turn it into something vulgar, would suck out all dignity or grace that it might have contained.
“I do my writing,” Ranjana said. “What could be more personal than that? I still don’t share that with Mohan.”
“That’s not all you don’t share with Mohan, yaar,” Seema said. She grinned as she broke up a pink, powdery chunk of barfi and placed the crumbs on her tongue as if counting them. “When was the last time you had sex?”
“Seema!” Given what she had recently discovered about Mohan, Ranjana did not find this question even remotely funny, even as Seema continued to grin and put more sweet crumbs on her tongue. Ranjana wanted to stand up and storm out, but she knew that Seema would see this only as entertainment and learn nothing from it. “You go too far.”
“No one else is home, Ranjana,” Seema said. “You can tell me. Don’t pretend like you don’t think of these things.”
“‘These things.’ This is one thing, and it would be nice if you respected the privacy of such matters.”
“Arré, don’t act like you visit me to ‘respect such matters,’ Ranjana. This is what girlfriends do. This is how we keep each other sane.” Seema switched into Hindi for this last sentence, an obvious effort to make the conversation respectful, at least linguistically.
“Seema, this is not your yoga class,” Ranjana replied back in Hindi. “I am not like those women. You should learn to understand the difference.”
“I think you should learn to let out your frustration, Ranjana. I’ll tell you what: Satish and I have sex once a week.”
“Seema!”
“And not just some preplanned day of the week, like Monday mornings or Wednesdays at midnight or something. We keep track of each other.”
Ranjana put her face in her hands.
“Fine, yaar, we don’t have to go into ‘such things’ now. But I am simply trying to help.”
“How?” Ranjana slurped through her hands. “By reminding me that it’s been years since Mohan and I did that?”
“Years?”
“Oh, don’t act like you didn’t know that, Seema,” Ranjana said, switching the conversation back into English and dropping her hands back into her lap. “Years. I couldn’t tell you the last time we did … that.”
“It wasn’t when Prashant was conceived, was it?”
“Oh, Seema.” Ranjana smashed up her own piece of barfi and dropped the carnage into her mouth as if downing a fistful of pills.
No, Prashant’s conception had not been the last time. But Ranjana was not lying; she did not know the last time that she and Mohan had made love. Ha—made love. As if it had ever had that tinge to it. She found the expression horrible and cruel anyway. Making love could not be confined to a bed. You could be reminded by any number of things that you weren’t making love, that love wasn’t being made. When Mohan grabbed a roti off a plate, a plate that contained rotis of decreasing heat as one went farther down the stack, the stiffness with which he performed this act made no love at all, just carelessness or annoyance. The way in which he slumped in a series of maneuvers, like a beached seal, while turning in his recliner—what sort of love did that make? The bony grip of his fingers on the steering wheel when he was driving, Ranjana’s own hands clasped in her lap or massaging her temples—what sort of love did any of this make? They were making excuses—that’s what they were making. A marriage was a series of excuses made with your bodies in tragic, taxing collusion.
The thing was, he wasn’t a bad man. If he were a bad man, if he made belittling her his primary hobby, she probably would have left years ago. He was still capable of romance, tho
ugh. It hadn’t fled entirely. Sometimes he cooked for her. She’d come home to find him sitting at the kitchen table, a couple of dishes steaming up their glass lids. He didn’t make many things, but what he made was good—aloo gobi, or egg curry, or even dosa (which he made from a mix, and which he filled with his aloo gobi, but he got an A for effort). As with most men, there was a get-out-of-jail-free card attached to these offerings. If Mohan cooked for her one month, he was exempted from repeating such a task for the next three months. At one point, Ranjana had sat down with a calendar and tried to figure out if Mohan’s advances were cyclical, but she stopped herself, realizing that such an act was both debasing and mean.
To his credit, he did work hard. He got up very early in the morning—which, yes, most Indians did—but his regimen was sound. He would do a series of exacting yoga exercises for about twenty minutes (another reason why he disliked Seema was her willingness to pay an American person to lead her in Indian exercise). Then he would have his breakfast—two hard-boiled eggs, a cup of tea, a grapefruit, and a handful of cashews. He would spend the rest of his day at the university, teaching and advising, pouring his energy into the minds of inquisitive young chemists.
* * *
Fleeing from Seema’s invasive questioning, Ranjana decided to do something that she had never done: she drove to the university to sit in on one of Mohan’s classes. She had never attempted this because Mohan always said that he wasn’t comfortable with her entering his professional arena. Ranjana often humored herself by thinking that the real reason why he said this was because he felt anxious about impressing her. Now, in light of what she knew, she wanted to see if his behavior at school was appropriate. For all she knew, he was flirting horribly with a number of students in his class.
Once she was in the dim auditorium, she saw the main reason why he had advised her against attending: the students were rude, lazy, and defiant. Defiant laziness really was the mark of so many of these American children, and Ranjana prided herself on the fact that Prashant did not exude such disrespect. During Mohan’s lecture, as she sat in the dark anonymity of the last row, she witnessed the following acts: at least four students sleeping, one of them snoring; a boy texting frantically on his gigantic phone, which resembled one of Prashant’s childhood Transformers; a boy and a girl passing notes to each other incessantly, the occasional kiss sealing their collaboration; a girl knitting a scarf in pink wool, although she took notes every few minutes; and one Indian boy who kept drawing concentric circles in his notebook until Ranjana thought he’d drill a hole through the page, the desk, the wooden floor, and Earth itself. This last culprit was the most heartbreaking: not even an Indian kid was paying attention to her husband’s chemistry lecture. What if this kid failed the course? That would be the end of India as an emerging global superpower.
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