No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  At Teddy’s insistence, Ranjana ordered a salad with many ingredients and the French onion soup (making sure that it was a version with vegetable broth instead of meat broth). Then it was over to Harit, who was so confounded by the entire process that he blurted out that he’d have exactly what Ranjana was having. This elicited a chuckle from Teddy, who let him have his soup but changed Harit’s entrée to a different salad with many ingredients. (Evidently, ordering the exact same courses was poor form.) Just before the waiter left, Harit remembered that he had originally wanted the vegetable quiche and switched his order. His waffling indicated a nervousness to please Ranjana—and he did want to please her, but his actions made him seem more nervous than he actually was. It was a heightening of feelings that weren’t quite there.

  “Now, honey, when did you immigrate, again?” Teddy said. Ranjana, taking a sip of water, clearly thought that this was addressed to her before seeing that Teddy had, in fact, turned to Harit. Thank God—Harit was not the only one thrown off by the use of the word honey.

  “In 1999,” Harit said, intentionally not mentioning his mother and sister, how all three of them had come here after his father’s death in India. He had always thought of 1999 as being relatively recent—and it was, by most standards—but as he said it now, he realized that it carried within it many years of interactions, none of which approached this evening in terms of oddity.

  “And you, sweetheart?” Teddy asked Ranjana. Harit took some comfort in noticing that Teddy had veered away from trying to pronounce Ranjana’s name, as well.

  “My husband and I immigrated in 1991,” Ranjana said, and Harit noticed a stiffening when she said “husband.” He felt sorry for her; this was no situation for a woman. The other people in the restaurant probably thought the same. He chanced a look around the room, and there did seem to be a few others casting bemused looks in their direction. What a sight they must have beheld: Harit in his herringbone sports coat, his frazzled hair a perfect complement to Ranjana’s own poofy version, and then this jolly, over-the-top host between them.

  Where was Ranjana’s husband, after all?

  As if reading Harit’s mind, Teddy said, “And where is your man tonight?”

  This also seemed to unsettle her. Good. She was not some reckless woman with no regard for family or rules. “He is playing tennis. He does it every Wednesday night.”

  “Do you ever play with him?” Teddy prodded.

  The question was evidently so original to Ranjana that she turned a quarter ways toward Teddy. She was contemplating it earnestly. In that moment, there seemed to be a calm in her face that was directly opposed to the weirdness of the question, to the weirdness of the situation, to the weirdness of the evening.

  “No, I never have,” she said. “I think my presence would make too much of … a racket.”

  Teddy laughed and flicked his hand at her again. Harit, on the contrary, was not sure what to make of this quick reveal of humor. Was tonight an occasion for laughter? He thought once again of his mother. The glimmer of his dinner plate was so much brighter than the turned-off TV that she faced now, its surface the dull gray of a pencil scribble.

  * * *

  Wine was to Indians what garlic was to vampires. That’s what Ranjana thought before Teddy even ordered it. She knew that he would order a pinot noir even though she didn’t drink much wine. Ever since that movie Sideways had come out, people blindly followed the wisdom of the main character, who extolled the savory benefits of the stubborn pinot grape. Conversely, merlot, for which the character had razor-sharp contempt, had become an unwanted stepchild.

  She had to stop herself—she was already looking for reasons to find Teddy annoying. This was unfair—counterproductive and mean-spirited. If anything, he had saved her from the situation of staying at FB with Achyut and his ragtag friends. Teddy’s appearance had given her the opportunity to strike up a conversation in which she could look truly engaged before announcing her fatigue convincingly to the others. They had waved to her as if she were going on a long journey instead of merely driving home. Teddy had kept her outside the club for another fifteen minutes, telling her everything he could about Harit in a meandering way.

  “Darling, you just have to meet Harit.” He said the name as most others would have—Huh-REET—but he mispronounced it with such conviction that one would think he were in the right. “He is the sweetest, but he’s so lost. I think he needs someone to bring him out of his shell. He really is a frightened turtle. And we need you to be the turtle whisperer.”

  Perhaps Ranjana was getting cocky—now that she had ignited her obsession with humor and the having of it—but that comment wasn’t funny. It was probably what made her tell Teddy that she would be delighted to meet up with them. Pity, not wine, was really the ultimate social lubricant.

  Her pity continued into this evening. She really did feel for Harit. He was entirely out of his element here, and it was surely his first time in a restaurant like this. The look on his face when he opened the menu and saw its cursive innards was the present version of her immigrant past. How many menus had confounded her over the years? She tried to remember the first time that she had been to a French restaurant. She couldn’t remember it, but she did remember a time, with Mohan: a professors’ dinner, during which an arsenal of shiny salades niçoises and slimy chicken paillards was deployed among the non-Indian people while she and Mohan munched on confounding piles of ratatouille. Ranjana had learned something from that experience, which was that there was something to be gained in every social interaction. You could take the various experiences and store them inside yourself like you were a curio cabinet, and later, after you had gone through a succession of situations, you could stand back and marvel at the cohesive collection they made. That was what a person was—a curio cabinet of experiences.

  She ventured to speak to Harit directly, in Hindi.

  “Do you have other relatives here, Haritji?”

  This was clearly an uncomfortable subject. Harit shook his head and said, in English, “Just my mother and I. And you?”

  Teddy was holding his wineglass by his lips as if it were a mouthpiece through which he was giving clues to 007.

  “My brothers and my sister live in California,” Ranjana persisted in Hindi. “It is my husband, my son, and I here.”

  He, again, in English: “It is my bad memory, I am sure, but I do not believe that I have seen you at temple. Do you go on Sundays?”

  It was an inevitable question, and there was no way to answer it properly. If she lied and said yes, he would try to see which friends they had in common (though she suspected that he had few social connections). And if she said no—which she decided was the best choice simply because it was the truth—she was casting herself as a blasphemer who didn’t attend temple regularly.

  “Sadly, it has been quite some time since we went. We do puja at home.” This was partly true; it occurred once every, oh, century. “The complications of raising a teenager in this country…”

  As she had anticipated, this seemed to cause him no small amount of concern, but she decided that this wasn’t entirely her fault. It was, rather, the fault of his small social circle. Temple was not just a religious place for him but a sanctuary—the sanctuary that it was truly supposed to be. She knew the type, the Indian who needed the reliability of a religious space. To be sure, there was no end of companionship that one could derive from a temple’s smiling gods.

  * * *

  So she didn’t go to temple regularly, but what had he expected, exactly? It was true that families had a tendency to dissipate when their children grew into adolescence. Or, well, some families. Many were fierce in their dedication, their attendance rising. But even Harit himself had seen his own dedication waver in light of his association with Teddy; he now went once or twice a week instead of his usual three times. He normally sat in the corner where the elderly men alternately gurgled prayers and dozed. He stayed away from the chirping aunties in the ki
tchen and the kids who ran rings-around-the-rosie in the lobby. He found solace in the prayers, and he listened attentively to the words of wisdom that the pandit added in between them. Harriman’s presented numerous chances for him to feel alien, but a temple, even though fragile compared to its counterparts in India, surrounded him in familiar moments that knew nothing of long-gone sisters and distant mothers.

  To be fair, Ranjana had not been through his family’s tragedy, so what did she need of temple? Her family was her temple. Yet Harit also sensed that there was something fragile about her home, as well. Her stiff reaction to any mention of her husband indicated this.

  Their soups arrived. Harit had never wanted to mutter an expletive so much. He liked onions. He liked soup. But what was this invincible sealing of goo on top? He punctured it with the spoon that lay alongside the bowl; then he pulled a wand of cheese toward himself, brown dewdrops of broth sliding down it.

  He looked across the table and met Ranjana’s eyes. At long last, they had the first genuine, shared laugh of the evening. Teddy, bending over his bowl and looking up through a mouthful of soup, practically spat it out.

  “Ji, do not worry,” Ranjana said, now twirling a turban of cheese around her spoon. “I have never been able to figure out how to eat this.” She tugged her spoon and snapped the stuff free. A string of cheese flopped over the rim of the bowl and onto the saucer beneath it—messy, unseemly, but not to be helped. Then she ate the bite daintily. It was a merciful gesture. It hinted at sympathy.

  What sort of person was he? What was it that mattered most to him now—now that his sister, his role model and inspiration, was gone? He found mockery in the word relation, because it was so easy to live your life in relation to family. To think of your life as defined by the lives of the ones around you simply because they bore your name. Swati had been a loveable force by which he had crafted his own life. This evening, he needed her approval; he needed to know how she ate soup, how she sat in a booth, and how she managed to do these things while fluent in conversation. Her accent had been comparable to his, but her manner of speaking would have eventually, outside of death, reached Teddy-like levels of good humor. Could he now ever achieve a similar level of conversation without Swati to guide him?

  Ranjana seemed to be equally proficient in becoming American. The way she pulled the cheese, the way she managed a small sip of wine without its looking overly studied, it was clear that she had honed her social skills to something beyond culture. As Harit watched her eat, he wanted to seek out things that he did routinely here in the States that would never have been part of his days in India. He had an image of ties, of his ability to straighten them and make them into a fan of cloth, and that simple image sustained him throughout the rest of the dinner, even when his large quiche arrived, even when he saw the facility with which Teddy chewed his veal and Ranjana parceled her salad into frizzy, compact turns of a fork. He would find small gestures and moments like these that he could master, and these would move him out of his sheltered existence and into an assured, confident life. Life was digestion, then sustenance.

  Naturally, Teddy insisted on dessert when they finished their entrées. He held the dessert menu toward the waiter, pointed to one item, and held up three fingers in the European way, with his thumb extended. As they had eaten soup together, they would eat sweets together. By now, Ranjana was looking at her cell phone every few minutes. She was mindful of the time, and Harit again felt supportive of this, the distinct attention to her husband. How reliable Indian women were! The reliability of Ranjana’s dedication as wife, the reliability of Swati’s smile, the reliability of his mother’s silent mourning. The last of these was particularly persistent. Harit had heard Jewish coworkers at the store speak of “sitting shiva” when a family member died, and he had originally thought that it was an homage to Shiva, the god of destruction. If ever a phrase had been appropriate for his mother, it was that one. She had been sitting shiva so thoroughly as to destroy most identifiable elements of herself. But in Ranjana, in this moment, Harit saw the opposite, the Brahma to his mother’s Shiva—newness, and creation.

  Teddy was getting tipsy now, having had custody of the wine bottle all this time. His cheeks were flushed, and he had now unbuttoned the top button of his meringue shirt. “I’ve never been to India, you know,” he was saying. “Always wanted to go. A friend of mine is a flight attendant and gets to travel all over the world. Said India’s one of his favorite destinations. People there are so friendly—obviously—and he said the food is amazing as long as you know where to eat.”

  “How did he find the proper places to eat?” Ranjana asked.

  Teddy brought his wineglass back to his mouth, and his eyes glazed over in thought—a look that Harit now understood as an expression he often made himself, during their mall outings. He decided to avoid doing so in the future; it was incredibly off-putting.

  “Well, that’s a good question, now isn’t it.” Teddy took a sip. “I suspect it was from the other flight attendants, but who even knows with that lot.” He chuckled, a sound as bitter as the wine, and Ranjana met Harit’s eyes. It was a complicit moment; it was clearly the two of them against Teddy, and although Harit felt guilty for being “against” the man who was trying to help him make a new friend, he realized that in any group of three, there were always two people against a third. Better to be part of the winning two.

  Their desserts arrived. “Crème brûlée,” Ranjana said helpfully to Harit, and then Teddy spelled it. When he said the first e, he slanted his right hand one way; when he said the u, he brought his fingertips together, his palms facing downward to form a flesh roof. Harit remembered this from his aborted French lessons with Teddy—the occasional marks above letters that he found much less interesting than the ones in Hindi.

  “Where do you have your hands manicured?” Ranjana asked Teddy, who flicked his hand at her again.

  “I just want to take you home and wrap a big bow around you. I do them myself. I don’t trust other people to touch these babies. How about you?”

  “I do them myself most of the time, too, but I treat myself every once in a while. Now that my son’s off at college, I think I should go more often.”

  “Her son’s a freshman at Princeton,” Teddy said to Harit. Ranjana had blurted this out that night outside of FB.

  “Yes. He is quite bright. He really wanted to go to Stanford. Since we begged him to be closer to us, he has set very strict rules for me and my husband. I guess he learned from the best.”

  Harit chuckled—and was conscious that he was “chuckling.” It was a word he attributed to Teddy, to Mr. Harriman, to other people, but not to himself. He hadn’t enjoyed too much wine, either, so the chuckle was coming from something true. He had never been so happy to be the opposite of serious.

  “What sort of rules did your son set?” Teddy asked.

  “We can call him only once a day, and we can go visit only once a semester.”

  “Wow—that sounds harsh, given that you’ve spent every day of his life with him.”

  “It is a bit harsh, yes. But he will be home for fall break. And he made a good case for himself. He is majoring in chemistry, and his schedule is very grueling. He did very well on his AP exams and tested out of many early classes, so he is in very advanced classes already.”

  “And your husband does not mind this?” Harit asked. He felt the difficulty with which he pronounced the word husband. It felt indelicate to be questioning Ranjana about her family. Still, he was genuinely curious.

  “My husband is a professor of chemistry,” she said. “He, more so than anyone, understands the importance of one’s studies.” Harit recognized in this statement a tone of memorization. It was the type of tone he used when he explained his work at Harriman’s to other Indian people: It is a very helpful look at American culture.

  “How did you and your husband meet?” Teddy asked.

  Harit and Ranjana exchanged another knowing glance, the wrinkles a
round their eyes agreeing in amusement. It was a question that Americans loved to ask, but it went directly against the decorum of Indians, who knew that meeting for them did not often have the serendipity that Americans expected.

  “We were promised to each other.” Again, a tone of memorization.

  It was always surprising to see Teddy’s interpretation of being sorry, and this was one of those moments. He set his wineglass down and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “My apologies. I always forget about … the … arrangements.”

  Harit and Ranjana shared another moment, another glance. “Americans are always finding different ways of saying ‘arranged,’” Ranjana said. “What I think they forget is that many American marriages are arranged, too. Not as obviously as many Indian marriages are, but people are certainly encouraged here, especially among the richer families. I am sure that Prashant—that’s my son—will encounter a certain number of them at Princeton.” Ranjana was holding her own wineglass by her mouth now, and there was a new confidence in her posture.

  The feeling of loneliness kept returning to Harit like a cap placed back on his head. He had to remind himself not to forge too much of a kinship with Ranjana. It was so easy to find a sisterhood in her, to share their culture as they did dessert, in similar bites of sugary crisp. But though the food was the same, the mouths it entered were not twins. Ranjana’s mouth, as this latest exchange had shown, was capable of issuing eloquent, knowing sentences, whereas Harit’s mouth knew more of stutters. They were both Indian, but they had different types of wisdom.

  * * *