No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  Which is almost exactly what she did, except when she reached for the bhajans, she espied an old Mukesh tape covered in a compact rectangle of dust. She popped it into their years-old stereo, which Mohan never let her touch—he always asked her what she planned to listen to and then put the cassette in for her, so protective was he of his electronic things, which seemed to have spirits and souls to him—and the music came wafting out in violins, sliding chords falling like sheets onto a bed, then the steady pulse of tabla and flutes, then Mukesh’s voice, singing about a young woman and the man she had yet to meet. Ranjana danced a dance that she had learned twenty years ago. She did not know how she remembered the steps, but her body repeated them now. Her feet, soled in the hoarfrost of age, moved in patterns that had last been inscribed into the floor of her childhood home. The world was telling her to go back to that time, before marriage, before motherhood, when anything was possible. She took the bobby pins from her hair, then resumed her dancing, pulling her fingers through that thick mess and imagining that her hair was much longer, straighter, and shinier. When she closed her eyes, she could be every bit the earth-tickling siren she wanted to be, especially with the right soundtrack.

  * * *

  Achyut knew about Mohan’s trip, and reliable as ever, he e-mailed Ranjana Friday morning to invite her out for the evening. That is, he invited her to come to the bar where he worked. A group of his friends was getting together that night at a nearby diner and then planned to head to the bar at around 10:00 P.M. Even though Ranjana had now hung out with Achyut several times—more trips to Paradise Island, random cups of tea at different cafés, even a trip to Panera for cinnamon rolls—Ranjana had never made plans for that late in the evening.

  She replied that dinner was out of the question. She could not, in good faith, join a group of his friends in a brightly lit public place and pretend that she belonged among them. No, she would dress up for the evening and meet Achyut at the bar, simply because she wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into anyone that she knew. “Don’t expect me to drink alcohol,” she wrote. “I don’t drink and will not make an exception for you.” This wasn’t entirely true; she had been known to take a sip of wine in rare cases, but she did not have any interest in making this one of those rare cases, especially because she was going to be driving.

  If the Indian women in her set had known what she was planning, she would never have been allowed into their confidence again. Even Seema, so progressive, would find a way to spin it into some lurid tale. Like any good bevy of Indians, they passed judgment on everything, from the way in which a woman wrapped her sari to the type of napkins that she provided at dinner parties. They were all subjected to the sort of intense scrutiny that defined murder trials, purchasing a home, or sizing up jewelry. The most talked-about social occurrence in all their years had been when Sonya Mehta, a former model whose likeness had been used as the logo for a film company in Bombay, had told them about one of her dreams.

  “In my dream, I was on a bicycle,” she said, stroking her sari where it was draped off her shoulder. She was wearing a dozen gold bangles on each arm, and the wide plane of her forehead seemed to glimmer. “I was in Delhi passing through a market and saw a tomato stand. There was a shopkeeper placing the final tomato on top of a stack, but when he saw me, he fell forward and knocked over the whole stand. It was only then that I realized I was naked! I was naked and riding a bicycle through town!” She was giggling, pressing one hand to her mouth, as if stifling a sin, her nails spackled in magenta. No one in the circle echoed her laughter. The subject changed immediately to the amount of homework that all of their children had. Sonya stayed and sipped her tea quietly, giggling periodically so as to bring the story back into discussion, but the group had already erected a wall of disapproval around her. Fifteen minutes later, she was getting up to use the restroom, leaving behind, with a model’s uncanny grace, an air of being above her companions and worthy of their biting criticism. Naturally, it was all anyone could discuss for weeks afterward; Sonya’s “naked story” was recapitulated in countless phone conversations and e-mails. Seema, who had been in the kitchen during that particular conversation, was obsessed with hearing an account of the incident. Soon, she was cracking jokes about it to the other women as if she had been there all along.

  Ranjana shuddered to think what would happen if someone caught her going to a bar, and at ten o’clock at night. If she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she had ever been in a bar. She had been in restaurants that had bars in them, but she had never gone to a separate space, certainly not with the intent of imbibing. None of the women in her circle drank, not even Seema. Prashant drank, she knew, but it had never impaired his judgment or, more important, his grades. Mohan had a couple of drinks when he and the other men met at their Saturday parties, but if he were ever drunk, he didn’t show it. Although many of the men nursed their Johnnie Walker throughout the evening, Mohan opted for Budweiser, drinking it out of a tall can on which America’s red, white, and blue were repurposed into a florid design. Mohan’s breath, exiting his nostrils in the quiet car ride home, would waft over to Ranjana, the smell steely and yeasty, like stale chapatis.

  Fretting over her Indian group would just ruin the night, so Ranjana tried to push it out of her mind. She had enough to worry about just getting ready for the evening and socializing with Achyut in a group setting. Speaking to him at a bar, while he flitted from customer to customer, was the exact opposite of whispering to him across a car, next to Paradise Island, as it lay slumbering in yet-to-be-ruined ruins.

  To manage her stress, she cleaned her closet for the first time in two years. (Before beginning this process, she broke down and flipped frantically through Mohan’s shirts, sniffing them to see if they smelled of someone else’s perfume and shaking their fabric to see if any stowaway hairs fell off of them. Only after finding nothing objectionable or actionable did she begin her closet-cleaning in earnest.) She took everything out and laid it on the carpeted floor of the master bedroom, then put it all back in relatively neat order after paring her choices down to four outfits. None of them was Indian; she knew that she could never get away with wearing a sari or even a salwar kameez in a bar. Any depiction of a bar that she had seen always involved a crowd of men and women swaddled in tight clothing and a variety of hats—baseball and cowboy. Prashant had given her a pair of blue jeans last year during Christmas (at his behest, they celebrated the holiday every year with a plastic tree that they assembled out of a kit), but she had never worn them, not just because she found jeans crude but also because she didn’t think she could fit her thighs into them. If she wore the jeans, she could wear a blouse on top, as well as some nice earrings, her wedding ring, and some bangles. She pulled the jeans off the bed and spread them across the front of her body, the denim barely wider than her hips.

  * * *

  Achyut worked at a bar called FB, which Ranjana understood to be an abbreviation of Facebook. The bar was located much closer to Ranjana’s house than she had imagined. Her sense of propriety had placed it on the other side of town, but in reality, it was only four miles from her house, on a harelip road just off the exit that she took every day. She arrived ten minutes early and waited in her car, glad that the bar was tucked away behind a batch of trees and a high metal shoulder that shielded it from the highway. The parking lot was not brightly lit, and the bar itself was covered in small, red lightbulbs, like a demonic Christmas tree. A burly white man, a stool next to him, stood guard at the door. Ranjana had never shown her ID to anyone other than the bank or an airline. To kill some time, she pulled out her pocketbook and extracted her driver’s license from one of its dank plastic windows. Part of the print came off on the plastic as she pulled, and she was worried at first that this had rendered it illegible. Thankfully, most of the ink remained, and anyway, it wasn’t as if the man at the door would be looking at anything besides her hideous picture. She had opted to keep the same one throughout the years, and she didn’
t know if the distortion of the photograph made her look better or worse. The obvious mess of hair, the separation of her eyes exaggerated by a slight ripple in the picture’s surface, the maroon background making the flash-brightened pallor of her skin all the starker—this photo was either a reinforcement of her appearance or a mockery of it.

  Ten minutes later, when she walked up to the man and presented her license to him, he looked at the picture and Ranjana in quick succession, then let her through without a blink. To Ranjana, this meant that the picture was, sadly, a likeness.

  She couldn’t have been more ill-prepared if she had walked into a spaceship. That was exactly what the place resembled with its slab of a bar, behind which hovered an intricate chandelier of glasses, bottles of alcohol, and vases. It was as shiny as chrome, an evenly spaced collection of red-cushioned stools huddled next to it. On the ceiling, light fixtures with rainbow-colored bulbs rotated frantically. The brilliant offal of their lights moved in healthy riot on the floor, then crawled up the rippling bodies of people in the bar. In a booth above and beyond the crowd, a DJ held one hand to his ear and moved the other in a seductive beckon to the crowd. Ranjana was bumped to the side by a man who was being supported by two young companions; the cologned grit of their bodies filled her nose. She spotted a woman with bouffant hair, then realized that the person was too big to be a woman. She reexamined the men who had just passed her and knew that she would find similar clusters throughout the bar. Achyut had neglected to tell her what sort of place this was, and she vowed to have one cup of soda before making her exit.

  Achyut’s outfit of a hooded sweatshirt and jeans had become as expected to Ranjana as his thick black hair and the thin slice of his grin. So to find him bare-armed, his hair alive with product, was as surprising to her as the bar itself. His arms looked like Ranveer Singh’s in a Bollywood movie. Her reservations about befriending him skyrocketed. She had never been in the presence of someone who had the universal allure he had; men leaned on the bar invitingly, Achyut the nexus of a carousel and they his painted horses. A black light hung over the bar, and when Achyut smiled—as he did at every guest—his mouth erupted in neon purple. Ranjana waited for two men in front of her to finish ordering so that she could lean over the bar and catch his attention. Both of the men were wearing tank tops, their arms as chiseled as Achyut’s. As they ordered, she noticed that their arms brushed against each other incessantly, and neither man made an effort to stop this from happening. Then the man on the right reached around and placed his hand in the waistband of his companion’s pants. Ranjana looked away, saw two men kissing, and decided that the waistband marauders were the more desirable sight.

  The men in front of her finally walked away, and Ranjana charged to the bar, determined to catch Achyut’s attention, to bid adieu, and to leave straightaway. He didn’t notice her for at first; he was busy crafting a bundle of drinks in tiny glasses, hooking a tiny lime wedge in each. A lithe gentleman gathered them all in his hands, clasping his chin over them and grinning at Achyut. A companion of his swirled a twenty-dollar bill down to the bar for Achyut, and Achyut brought his hands together in a Namaste. Looking up, Achyut finally spotted her, his mouth gleaming once more.

  “I’m so glad you came!” he said, leaning over and hugging her, which he’d never done before. “Did you meet the gang?”

  “I didn’t realize there was a gang. But Achyut—”

  “They’re right here. Oh, wait—just let me help this guy and then I’ll introduce you.”

  Ranjana wanted to leave without waiting for him to come back, but her curiosity about his friends was too strong. Within five minutes, Achyut was back in front of her, pointing to the end of the bar, where a motley group was standing.

  One of Achyut’s friends was named Jesse, and he was as tall as Achyut, just as good-looking, with chocolate brown hair, dressed almost the same. Another was Tyler, baby-faced and wearing a navy blue T-shirt so tight that it seemed of a piece with his large arm tattoos. Sean was a short yet burly man from Ireland, about Ranjana’s height, which made his proximity to her all the more awkward.

  Then there was the pair of girls with them. Amber, Achyut’s roommate, had a dried cactus of dreadlocks atop her head and a generously exposed bosom that Ranjana could hardly ignore. Charity was the other girl, a platinum blonde and wearing a black turtleneck, paisley skirt, and an assortment of silver rings.

  Ranjana hoped that the collective personality of these friends was an assortment of wit and intelligence that would redeem this visual madness. She thought of her own acquaintances. Even though Achyut was Indian, would her friends have put him off the way that Amber’s fungus-like hairstyle repelled Ranjana?

  An encounter like this was proof: this experiment in culture, this gesture in the direction of assimilation, was doomed. You could not reconcile these two spheres of being. In the past few decades, this country had tried to instill a feeling of progress in not just Indian people but also in people of all colors. We were supposed to feel united, all of our children starting from the same place, where cultures melted into each other, yet the divide between Eastern ethnicity and this American setting was greater than ever.

  Example: The wide, hairy expanse of Mohan’s chest and his round belly, so unlike Achyut’s broad, hairless torso and his sculpted arms.

  Example: A stainless steel pot filling up with milky tea in the linoleum haven of your kitchen while, next door, someone was making a kale smoothie.

  Example: Seema telling a traffic cop once that she didn’t understand how the speed limit worked, feigning ignorance until he ripped up the ticket and sent her on her way.

  Example: Prashant’s third-grade teacher, convinced that he had cheated on a math test because he had gotten a perfect score.

  Like the lime-skinned ghosts of sci-fi movies, Indian people existed outside the normal landscape of America. Ranjana thought of all of this as Amber approached her.

  “It is so good to meet you!” Amber said, pressing Ranjana against her bosom. Charity placed one hand on Ranjana’s shoulder and squeezed. Jesse deepened his hands into his pockets, just like Achyut always did; Ranjana wondered if this was a sign that they were boyfriends. Tyler shook Ranjana’s hand, his paw rough and meaty. Sean was easily excitable, and he began a long monologue on how many Indian people were in Dublin now.

  “There are a lot of Eastern Europeans, too, lots of Czechs, but I love the Indians the best. They’re so polite, and the food is so good.” His accent had a way of scattering his voice in many directions at once.

  “Ugh, I’ve never cared for Indian food all that much. Curry is gross,” Amber said, oblivious to how offensive this sounded.

  “Nice purse, Amber,” Charity said. Ranjana looked but didn’t see any purse on Amber’s shoulder. “I meant ‘personality,’” Charity pointed out, noticing Ranjana’s expression. “We abbreviate everything.”

  “Ah, yes,” Ranjana said. “My son does that a lot. Everything is an abbreviation. Like this bar—‘FB.’ He uses that phrase all the time.”

  Jesse laughed, an extended hiccup. Amber threw her head back and cackled, like a potted plant come to horrifying life. Charity put her hand out and squeezed Ranjana’s shoulder again; if Charity didn’t watch it, Ranjana would scratch her hand off with her newly manicured nails. Tyler shook his head and took a sip of his clear, condensation-pimpled drink.

  “Um, I don’t think that means what you think it means,” Sean said.

  “It means Facebook, no?”

  “No, no, not Facebook.”

  “Then what?”

  “FUCK BUDDY,” Amber shouted through her giggles.

  Ranjana’s head throbbed with shock.

  Achyut chose this moment to interrupt. “Hey, what can I get you, Ranjana?” He had dropped “Auntie” from her name.

  “I actually have to get going. I’m not feeling that well.”

  “Oh, Ranjana, I know a lie when I hear one. Do you have a problem with the bar? I didn’t men
tion it was a gay bar, did I?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Do you have a problem with gay bars?” Amber asked, and now Ranjana saw why she was being so aggressive: in some crazy way, she saw Ranjana as competition. Why on earth a woman of her stature and outlook and general spirit would feel threatened by Ranjana, who was so out of her element among these tank-topped musclemen, was an enigma.

  “No—I. I’ve just never been in one. And—well, just look at this place. Look at me. Some of the men in here are wearing more jewelry than I am.” She paused. “But mine’s nicer.”

  Everyone laughed, and Ranjana softened a bit.

  “Stay, Ranjana,” Achyut said. “Please. This is the least threatening place for women. Nobody’s going to hit on you.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to Ranjana that someone might try to hit on her. She had never been hit on before; the closest she had come to flirtation had been with Achyut, and that hadn’t been flirtation.

  So Ranjana stayed, and ordered a Sprite, sniffing it first to make sure that it didn’t contain alcohol, and stayed as quiet as she could, and grew truly antagonistic toward Amber’s chest, which she would have burned with a torch if one were within reach, and held her drink on whichever side Charity was standing so that she didn’t have to endure the shoulder squeeze again, and grew to pity Jesse for his reticence, and felt the beat of the music through her soles, as if the floor were dancing on her feet instead of the other way around, and saw a connection between the spastic moves of these dancing gay men and the ways in which desi teenagers threw up their hands and scalloped their bodies during bhangra, and wondered what her behavior might have been if she were drinking alcohol because now she was on the dance floor, trying to bob to the music and not look like a total lunatic.