No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  He thanked the Lord yet again that he had no roommate, especially when he saw his parents come bustling in. They examined his room as if they were auditing him, and his mother was, yet again, trying to dress half her age. She had on a loose-fitting pink blouse, tight white slacks, and sandals. Immediately, he noticed that there was something different about her. She had trouble concealing her thoughts—something that he had always seen in her “group of aunties.” They assessed each other as if they had a superpower that rendered their faces unreadable, but you couldn’t have read their judgments more clearly if they were scribbled across their foreheads with a Sharpie. He remembered seeing Seema Auntie examine his mother’s hair across the room, and from the way that Seema Auntie’s jaw tugged downward, it was as if someone had actually put the hair in her mouth. Here, in his room, his mother’s face bore a smirk, but there was a lightness around her eyes. She seemed content, and for a moment, Prashant was hurt. He had taken some solace in his mother’s addled state, the thought that his absence may have caused her pain. Instead, she seemed to be doing just fine. Better than fine. He wondered what was up.

  His father sat on his bed while his mother leaned against his desk.

  “So, you are keeping up with your studies?” his father asked.

  “Yes,” Prashant said. “More than keeping up. I’m leading my thermodynamics class.”

  “Very good, beta,” his father said, putting both hands in the air, as if in surrender. “I was always very good at that subject.”

  “Yes, I know, Dad. That’s why you told me you would ‘hold your head in shame’ if I got anything less than an A.”

  “Well, it’s true,” his mother said. His father shot her a grumpy look. They had clearly fought about something in the car, but her sunny disposition persisted.

  “Have you made some fun friends?” she asked. “Can we meet them?”

  “It’s a busy time of day, actually. People are usually leaving class right now and studying before dinner.” It was five thirty, and he wanted to get them to a restaurant for a quick meal before stuffing them back into the car. He didn’t want them to meet any of his fledgling friends—and he certainly wanted as little opportunity as possible for them to come across Kavita Bansal. He could imagine how much his mother would dote on her.

  He took them to Zorba’s Brother, a Greek diner that was cheap and reliable. He was obsessed with their falafel sandwich, a warm and mushy flavor-bomb that acted as everything from a study snack to a dinner feast. His whole family was vegetarian, so this was a great option: a gathering of slightly spiced vegetables and chickpeas and bread.

  “So, Mom, what’s new?” he ventured. “You look great.”

  She brightened at this, pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “Why, thank you, beta. Everything is fine. Work is the same. Been going to temple more often. Are you going to temple here?”

  “There’s an Indian group that I visit from time to time,” he lied. It wasn’t like his family was all that religious, but he felt a sudden urge to profess duty to the gods and to his parents.

  “What do you discuss?” his father asked. He had taken on that demeanor he usually had when he was enjoying his food: quietude tempered with dipping sauces. Tzatziki, baba ganoush, hummus, and hot sauce gleamed joyfully on his plate.

  “Oh, just various passages from Gita and all that.” Could they tell he was lying? His father’s insistent chewing and his mother’s small sips of Diet Coke betrayed nothing.

  “How is work with you, Dad?” he asked. Perhaps they could connect on some science-related topic, though his father didn’t intercede in his studies all that much. People probably assumed that he had been instructed expertly by his father through the years, but he had just been a smart guy who understood math and science easily. The connection between him and his father was osmotic.

  “I tell you, some of these students are so lazy,” his father said. “All they want is partial credit. No one wants to get everything right. They just want to do the bare minimum and get out.” The way his father pronounced “bare minimum”—beer meeneemoom—made him sound like some small bird. God, his parents were so weird. Maybe it was seeing them after this short but intense stretch of preppy living that made them seem so peculiar. He felt a quick and delicious sense of having become a full snob. He had been biding his time, waiting to be clear of high school, before he could assert his own snobby tendencies. He was Indian, after all. Although his parents were decidedly more reserved and, frankly, less rich than their friends (a college professor and a receptionist were not, say, an engineer and a doctor), they had been in the company of many wealthy families, and this had taught Prashant what to revere when it came to social superiority. Looking out the window of this restaurant, he saw the Gothic structures and sturdy gates of the university and felt a distance growing between himself and his parents. This riveted him.

  To his surprise, they didn’t seem all that upset when he told them that he needed to get back to his dorm and start on his homework. His mother still bore that bemused look on her face; his father was already in his PTSD-like post-meal state, quasi-catatonic and rubbing his paunch as if he were keeping a bag of rubies in it. They hugged him good-bye. His father rolled down both front windows as they pulled away, waving one hand out of his window as his mother waved both of hers out of the passenger side. After their departure, he found himself walking past his dorm and in the direction of the Student Center. He really did need to get back to work, but he felt restless and thought that a coffee might do the trick. What he was denying, at least till he was halfway to the building, was that he was inventing tasks around campus in the hope that he would come across Kavita. It was a compact campus, and with the trees lifting themselves regally over his head, the sun now descending and the light in the sky purple and important, he felt the likelihood of running into her was high because there were only so many places she could go. She could be in the library or finishing up food in the dining hall, but the Student Center seemed like the most logical place.

  He wasn’t sure what he would do once he found her. They still hadn’t spoken since the samosa study break, and he had avoided liking any of her posts on Facebook or Instagram because the thought of overstepping his bounds even further was bloodcurdling. He should just turn around now and wait to run into her naturally, but then again, didn’t college students stock up on coffee all the time? What was so bad about stopping to get a cup postdinner? He had to stop second-guessing everything. Girls wanted a guy who was assertive, who made decisions and stuck to them and didn’t question his own intentions.

  The café in the student center was a dim, oak affair. A row of booths ran across one wall, while an assortment of tables and chairs and a couple of plush couches finished the space. Innocuous pop music played over the stereo, peppered with the occasional R & B song that seemed to restore people’s energy. Prashant got in line behind two other students, both in baggy sweats and flip-flops—odd, since it was autumn and therefore chilly outside—and he scanned the room as subtly as he could, finding no trace of Kavita.

  He ordered his coffee, then sauntered out of the café. He could feel himself trying to copy the gait of the preppy jock. Those guys felt at ease because they were stars on the field or the court, but he felt that his own proficiency in science should be regarded as equally valuable. He walked around the two main floors of the student center, then took the elevator up to the third floor, which contained another small library and a smattering of tables where people sat hunched over books, with half-eaten granola bars and Nalgene water bottles scattered among them. He had given himself over to the insanity of his hunt now, and he sipped in a leisurely manner as his sneakers plodded over the carpet. People’s heads bumped up as he passed—a delinquent in their midst—but he responded with curt head nods and a further scanning of the room. No sight of her. He pictured his parents, small-talking on their car ride home, and he wondered what they would make of this somewhat crazed mission.

  O
nly when he caught his own reflection in one of the long windows did he understand how foolish he was being. He really did have a difficult problem set to finish, and he was probably going to go over it late-night with Charlie. He couldn’t let himself get distracted from his studies. If anything, Kavita’s accomplishments would demand more studying from him. He tossed his half-full coffee into a trash can, then walked back home through the evening, under lamppost after lamppost, feeling with each step that he was contributing to his own success. He didn’t want to be his mother and father eating a rudimentary Mediterranean dinner. He wanted back on the train to status and success, if only so it could deliver him to the girl of his dreams. These dreams may have been recently formed, but he felt committed to them with a newfound sense of adulthood. There was no question that this place was making him feel more adult all-around, and it was not an issue of studies and chemical equations and grades and moving up the social ladder that befit this sentiment. It was more that he felt romantically engaged for the first time in his life. His worries that he would be a loser, a virgin, a sexually frustrated guy forever—they were scattering like leaves off a tree.

  HER PARENTS NAMED HER PARVATI not because of the goddess but because it sounded like parivartana, the word meaning “change.” They needed a change. Her father was a farmer on a flat plane of land with a dozen sullen cows. All of the cows had died the summer of her birth, when the sun was so hot that it looked larger than the face of the person right next to you. A dozen dead cows was the gravest luck—was actually no luck at all. “Bad luck” was a term for something that didn’t exist; you either had good fortune or you had none.

  They named her Parvati, and everyone imagined Shiva’s consort, beautiful and supine on a lotus. But they wanted her to be Shiva himself. Strong and determined, no slave to a field of dead cows.

  A neighbor boy, Ashwin, who lived a long field and a mountainous ridge away, gave her a pair of overalls. He took them off himself and was naked. Neither of them thought anything of it, though Parvati had never seen anything like the lazy flop at his waist. She took the cross of cloth onto her body, wore it until it stank of dirt. Her room—small, wooden, a third of her home—was both spacious and oppressive. Sitting on her cot, she painted her toenails red and wanted another girl to admire the job. She practiced kisses against her arm and imagined that her arm looked like her but with long hair.

  She led the new cows into their pen while pushing her short hair behind her ears.

  At dinner, at their table of five wooden planks, a kerosene lamp quivering on one of its joints, she touched herself in her overalls, in front of her parents, and didn’t realize until she was back in her room, when her center shivered, that what she had just experienced was not to be discussed with others yet. She turned on her side and nuzzled her arm.

  “What are we going to do to have Parvati meet someone?” her mother said, resting her forehead on her hands. She had given birth to Parvati at fifty, and since she had grown up in Delhi, she knew how strange this was. She had escaped to this farm because of it.

  “There’s the boy over there,” said her father, sipping a frothy cup of milk while nodding to the ridge far away. Her mother kept rubbing her forehead into her hands, and Parvati pulled up the overall straps at her shoulders, ran her tongue under her lower lip, and walked into the field.

  Over the ridge, there were other people who would know more, who wouldn’t put their heads in their hands but who would put a hand on her shoulder and point to something on a blackboard. She’d seen this in the newspaper. She knew that all of this was temporary. She would be here for a time and then go somewhere else for a time and would end up in America. All she had to do was sip her milk and study the wooden walls of her room and wait for it to happen.

  Soon she left the farm and took a job as a seamstress so that she could pay for her schooling. She understood that not everyone behaved the way that she did. They gave her weird looks as they shuffled the sabji on their plates and yelled at each other under frenzied ceiling fans. She wore overalls as a matter of course, and men, more so than they did with most women, picked at the cloth on her legs and ran their hands over her stomach. She kept her hair short, and she became so accustomed to the feeling of men’s spit against her neck that she couldn’t tell it apart from the landing of mosquitoes. When she spoke with other women, she stood with a hand on one hip and a snack in the other and wiped her hands on the front of her clothes when she was finished. They found this distasteful, clicking their tongues and dispersing, but she had seen South Indians who dipped their entire forearms into their plates of food and licked the length of food off with their tongues, so she didn’t understand why her behavior was so off-putting.

  One day when she was feeling particularly alert during her literature class, she raised her hand six times and answered six different questions assuredly. After class, the teacher sat on her desk and looked at her over the glasses on his nose. His manner was generally mild, but he could be wry and had an annoying habit of overusing the word perhaps.

  “How is your English so good? Are you a diplomat’s daughter, perhaps?”

  People wondered this about her often. Her casual appearance read as the arrogance of snobbery.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Then how did you learn?”

  She was genuinely surprised by this question, in light of where it was being asked. She held an open palm toward Ivanhoe, which they were reading in class. “Through literature.”

  Her professor sighed through his nose, a grumble crawling up his throat. “That is a very rare thing, you know. For someone, especially a woman, to learn English in such a fashion. And so well.”

  She had nothing to say to this, not because of shyness but because of spite. She hated this type of attitude. Already, in the scant time that she had been in Delhi, she had seen how little women could become in men’s eyes—smaller than men’s eyes, smaller than their reflections in men’s eyes.

  The professor, dyspeptic by her silence, rubbed his stomach. “I think that perhaps you are too advanced for this course. Perhaps you should think of taking one of the graduate courses.”

  “Perhaps I should,” she said, getting up. She heard him stifle a burp as she walked out of the room. Down the hallway she went, to the registrar’s office, and demanded to be switched into a graduate course on rhetoric in the work of Kant. She was sitting in it and raising her hand the next day.

  She had few friends. She was disconcerted to find that women could be as abrasive to her as men. They poked her in the back and picked at her hair; they often fled a room when she entered it, though she couldn’t tell if they did so in jest or out of actual fear. From time to time, she tried to switch her behavior: she would stay silent in class and try to engage others in conversation in the hallways. But group criticism could be startling, its fluctuations as smoothly guided and controlled as a school of fish making a turn. She had never felt trapped. She had always had the mountains over there and the field over there and the sky, big and friendly, but she found it enormously unfair that a place that was intended to expand the mind could become its cage.

  As it was, the person to befriend her was a man. He was a teaching assistant in a course on fairy tales—a course that focused on Western tales and made no mention of their frequent basis in Indian folklore. She wanted to write about this, wanted to give credit to the centuries of countryside storytelling that had traveled continents to reconstitute themselves in the European parlors of les précieuses and Charles Perrault. Parvati took an interest in this teaching assistant, who was named Jaideep, though her interest did not feel romantic, only intellectual.

  “You have short hair, and I have long hair,” he said right after she introduced herself. His hair was straight and shiny like the hair of an East Asian woman, and he wore it in a ponytail. What he did not say, and what was more important, was that he looked almost girlish, while she had the stern countenance of a man. (Not just any man—a taciturn uncle, so
me guardian of an orphaned ward out of a Dickens novel.)

  “You have on a brighter shirt than mine.” He did. It was fire orange under a navy blazer.

  “One must always be ready to make a colorful impression.”

  She thought, briefly, that he was going to be one of those people, one of those men, who told her how good her English was. Instead, he said, “Have you chosen your dissertation topic yet?”

  She had to inform him that she was, in fact, still an undergraduate. His lips parted at this, the closest he would come, she could see, to showing astonishment.

  “Well, then, perhaps I can advise you?” he asked. This time, the word perhaps felt earned and natural.

  They began to meet in his small office, the darkness of which he tried to mitigate by keeping all of his papers and books in tight order. She would hand her typed pages to him and watch as he read—his ponytail remained still against his back, like some sleeping animal—and she would note that he took her own work much more seriously than he took his own. As his eyes flicked over the pages, she could see that he had decided to make her work his work, that the two of them would find academic solace together. He would finish reading and immediately begin talking, bringing forth a sharpened pencil and drawing out his revisions as if they were a complicated cricket strategy. What stuck with her during these sessions was how her body, the rumblings and pressures of which she felt constantly, disappeared. In its place, her mind became her dominant feature. After a short lifetime of feeling judged physically, this felt like liberation.

  Despite the grand differences in their looks, they were still different from everyone else, so they were seen as a couple. This was scandalous, but it was a covert scandal, judged silently and without direct commitment from their usual critics. They didn’t quite savor this détente—its very existence was disturbing—but they did take advantage of it, laying claim to study rooms and classrooms and picnic tables when they needed to do work.