No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  Sonia Gandhi was not American, of course, but Ranjana did find some solace in the idea that a nonconforming woman could enter and fully master a culture while respecting it all along—and be embraced by it! It was possible to move to a new country, to absorb it and to be encouraged. Ranjana wanted this kind of encouragement from the non-Indian women that she knew—especially from ones who had the secret, fragile material of her writing in their hands.

  “I just wish that these women—at the very least—would see me as equal to themselves,” Ranjana said, plainly.

  Satish sucked in his cheeks and went back into the kitchen. Seema just batted her hand in the air.

  A few minutes later, Ranjana was back in her car, driving home, and her forehead tingled from all of her confusion. She had driven to Seema’s house with the aim of commiserating about her treatment at the hands of American women, but something flashed into her head now: she wasn’t sure whose side Seema was on. She felt scrutinized, beaten down by the constant anxiety of dealing with her writing class (not to mention her writing itself), but she didn’t exactly feel comforted when she was with Seema and Satish. Not only had their conversation become something more of a comedy act—something they performed for her rather than a true translation of their feelings—but now that she had her own problems with Mohan to deal with, she felt every one of their “jokes” as small, burning reminders of her own problems at home. And they would engage with her only to a certain extent: Seema was more focused on organizing her lipsticks than listening to Ranjana’s concerns.

  As she pulled into her driveway and saw the pale lights on in her living room, Ranjana thought of Harit—someone neutral, someone also caught between social circles, someone equally confused. She had always hoped that there would be some friendship with an American woman that would zap her out of her status as an Indian immigrant and legitimize her connection to America, that she would find a sidekick who truly understood her and introduced her to the complex social structure of this country. But what she hadn’t considered was that another Indian immigrant, one who was stuck between India and America, could play this same role, and perhaps more effectively. This man, this prisoner between worlds, might be the confidant that she had been searching for all this time.

  HARIT DID NOT HAVE RANJANA’S luck: he had to see Teddy at the store, so he had to face Teddy’s entreaties to hang out in person. Harit’s response was to propose more trips to TGI Friday’s.

  He and Teddy were sitting at their usual table and having martinis. Harit had come around on martinis; they were like alcoholic bombs, targeted and potent. Accompanying the drinks was a large plate of mozzarella sticks, which Harit found irresistible. The tang of the cheese resembled the taste of really firm paneer, and the crunch of the breading felt like an achievement when your teeth clamped down. Harit had taken to asking for crushed red pepper to mix into his side of marinara sauce. Teddy recoiled from such a taste and said that his head would pop off and land in the kitchen’s deep fryer if he ate it. Harit imagined the sight of Teddy’s head dipped in batter. He chuckled into his glass.

  They had gotten down to one stick, and Harit reached for it, feeling no bit of remorse whatsoever. If Teddy wanted more, he could order more, and he would likely eat all of them. But as Harit was lifting the stick off the plate, Teddy slapped his hand playfully and said, “Naughty girl!” Teddy was giggling, an act that made him seem even older. Harit offered a smile back, though he felt strange about the moment in a way that he couldn’t quite place.

  They felt it before they heard it; you can feel spite.

  “Look at these fucking fags.”

  A trio of college-aged guys was standing near the table, their faces cracked in two—grin on the bottom, glare on the top. All three young men wore heavy coats and baseball caps, and a gold chain gleamed from the neck of the one on the right. Harit had endured his share of racist experiences, but he understood in this instant how different a gay comment felt. It felt alive, like he could pull the slur off of him and feel it pulsing in his hands.

  Both Teddy and Harit were silent. Then, to Harit’s surprise, Teddy spoke softly, “Please leave us alone, guys,” and leaned forward to take another sip of his martini. Harit almost started to stop him, because he could see, in this action, Teddy’s effeminacy at its full impact, the pursed lips, the grand lift of his arm as the glass neared his mouth.

  “Oh, we should probably leave you fags alone so you can drink your faggoty martinis,” the one on the left said. His voice was deeper, though goofier.

  Teddy set his drink down, betraying his efforts at composure by spilling a bit. To Harit, he said, “Don’t listen to them, hon—” and then caught himself. Here, in this riveting, crushing moment, he finally seemed to truly hear the tone that he affected when addressing Harit.

  “Don’t listen to them, what, faggot?” the one on the left coughed out, coming closer to the table. The three were all laughing now. It was the funniest bloody thing that they’d ever heard in their lives.

  Just then, Harit and Teddy’s butch waiter walked past the table, and one look from him sucked out some of the menace in the air. A guy like him could tell when guys were trying to act like him.

  “Everything fine here, fellas?” he said. Harit and Teddy had recently discovered that his name was Brian. Harit held on to that fact now as if it were some precious gem.

  “Just enjoying this little show,” the middle one said, pointing unabashedly at the table.

  Brian sighed and said, “OK, come on, now, guys. Let’s move it along.”

  “Come on,” the one on the left said. “We’re just having a little faggoty fun.”

  “Heyyy,” Brian said, like they’d just spilled wine on his shirt. “OK, let’s not do that, guys.”

  All three laughed and shrugged. “Whatever,” the middle one said. “What-ever. Let’s go. No one wants to be at homo hour.” Brian was gesturing around them to the manager, who was acknowledging the issue from across the room.

  They steered the men out, and both Teddy and Harit could see the group crossing the mall floor outside. The man with the chain turned around. Harit and Teddy ducked down quickly, as if someone were about to shoot a gun. Harit looked over at Teddy, crouched amidst the mess of dirt and gum on the ground.

  They lifted themselves up. Teddy started laughing nervously. Harit stared into his martini glass. He felt a combination of drunk and ashamed, then realized that the two things often went hand in hand.

  “I’m so sorry—” Teddy said, leaving a breath where a “honey” would’ve once lived. “It’s … it’s nothing. That sort of stuff happens all the time. They’re just stupid kids.”

  “What if they’re waiting for us outside?” Harit asked. He wanted to be in bed.

  “They won’t. They won’t. They’re stupid kids. They have a frat party to go to or something.” Teddy started giggling again. It was awful.

  They asked for their check. “Thank you,” Teddy said to Brian, who said back quickly, “Don’t worry about it. Sorry for that, guys.” Brian: their unlikely savior.

  As they left, Harit felt a desire to cling to Teddy and a will to never see him again. In the parking lot, he could feel both of them trying not to look around. A burst of laughter came from somewhere, and they both cringed. They got into Teddy’s car and took off. Neither spoke, and when they got to his house, Harit left the car wordlessly, running to the back door.

  He dreamed that night of the guy on the right, who had never said a word at the restaurant but who, in the dream, seemed full of them. Yet Harit couldn’t make out his words, only a sensation of them. The sensation crept its fingers into his chest and opened it slowly; a sliver of pink smoke curled up from it. It took Harit what seemed like hours to register that this thread of smoke was some version of his heart, which was no longer solid but which could blow away if the air caught it. He understood that he had been foolish about sex, or what he thought about sex. Those men, despite their boorishness, had hit upon some funda
mental element of his urges. He was a middle-aged man who put on woman’s clothes (for something necessary, but he still did it), and who was he to deny the harsh name-calling of those men when he had never explored another person’s body—woman or man—to see what would give him comfort? The real danger of an insult, even in sleep, was that it put into slurs what you put into poetry in order to protect yourself.

  THE CALLS BEGAN INNOCENTLY ENOUGH. Ranjana would be coming in the door from work, hear the cordless phone warbling in the kitchen, and rush to pick it up. “Hello?” she would say, and then there would be a few short puffs—not frenzied or sexual, thank God, but still serious—and then a quick hang-up. Immediately, she thought of Achyut, his pretty face twisting into anxiety under its scruff. At one point, a call came in the night while she and Mohan were both asleep. As she awoke, she heard Mohan grumbling. He slammed the phone back into its position beside their bed.

  “Who was it?” she felt obliged to ask, though she knew the caller’s identity was as unknown to him as it was to her. Mohan let out an unintelligible swear and then rolled back into sleep. Now Ranjana really began to worry. She could not sleep the rest of the night.

  The next day at work, she was useless. She was more tired than she had been in a long while, perhaps since Prashant’s early high school days, when he would come home, his backpack containing so many books that it looked like a giant sea turtle, and she would stay up with him as he sorted through his myriad assignments. Today, she tried to yawn inconspicuously, afraid more of Cheryl’s attention than of Dr. Butt’s surely taciturn reaction. Her fears were confirmed when Cheryl bothered her an hour before lunchtime.

  “Babe, if you yawn one more time, I’m gonna think you have mono.” Cheryl crossed her index fingers over each other in an exorcist-like staving-off.

  “I don’t have mono, Cheryl,” Ranjana said. “Someone called while we were sleeping last night, and I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Ohmigod, are you being stalked?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ranjana admonished, but as soon as she heard the word stalked come out of Cheryl’s mouth, she realized how scared it made her. Could it be true? Why? Who? How?

  Cheryl picked up on her fear. “Ohmigod, maybe you should file a police report.”

  “Cheryl, it happened just this once. You’re running away with this. Haven’t you ever had a wrong number in the middle of the night?”

  “Oh, honey, I’ve had many a wrong number in the middle of the night.” From somewhere, she pulled out a small packet of sugared pecans and started to munch on them. She had a habit of producing snacks as if they grew on her. “All I’m saying is that you wouldn’t look so tired and worried right now if it didn’t have you scared.”

  “It’s nothing Wendy’s can’t cure,” Ranjana replied, knowing that the mere mention of fast food would save them from exploring the topic any further.

  As they ate their lunch—Cheryl alternating between dipping her sandwich in hot mustard sauce and barbecue sauce—it dawned on Ranjana that Teddy may be her secret caller. She recalled his general fidgety nature, his eagerness to know her and befriend her, and this thought made her even more frightened than the idea of Achyut or a stranger. It was silly, to be afraid of such a goofy man, but it still unsettled her. She reassured herself that it had nothing to do with his being gay, but at the same time, she felt guilty about the idea of assuming him harmless simply because he preferred men sexually. Was it bigoted to assume that gay men didn’t have the fortitude to be stalkers?

  About an hour after lunch, she realized: Harit. It was clearly Harit. The tone of the breaths—it was the first time she had ever thought of breath as having a tone—something in it mimicked the overall carriage of Harit’s body, the weightiness mixed with a dispersion of energy. It was Harit. All sense of fear left her and was replaced with compassion. Harit. Friendless except for Teddy—alone and meek and with that swaying shyness from the temple.

  She thought back to a tense memory from many years ago, soon after her arrival in the U.S.: a picnic table, its bright checkered surface crowded with an assortment of large bowls, each one filled with a colorful fruit or vegetable salad, the sickening but increasingly reliable smell of cooking meat, a lawn fragrant and strewn with freshly cut shards of itself, the laughter of children, her own newly pregnant belly under her hands. It was a faculty picnic, a gathering of white women with tapered hair and freckled noses, and their spouses, long-locked at the temples and wearing wide ties and long shoes. She had been standing, holding her stomach, not saying a word to anyone for a good twenty minutes, just taking the scene in, trying to find some connection between the world she had known and this one. She settled on the table itself as the only comforting sight. It reminded her of the one that had been behind her house in Delhi and on which she’d made mud pies with her next-door neighbors. Their voices were lighter and more joyous than the cries of American children, who always seemed to be doing something to each other instead of simply being with each other. The palpable sense that she would likely never know what it felt like to live simply, now that every moment was overwhelming. Her reverie was broken by an older woman who had spilled punch on her cream blouse, a blood rose of fruitiness. The woman approached Ranjana in a panic with some club soda and salt—because Ranjana’s skin had turned her into a servant—and Ranjana used them properly, something she couldn’t remember having learned explicitly, which meant she had learned it from the endless depths of her TV watching. She vividly remembered that sense of connection as she helped this woman, then the distance returned as the woman thanked her tersely and resumed a conversation at the other end of the table.

  Ranjana had not thought of this moment in a long time. She had thrown out the dress she had worn for that occasion, her body having shifted after Prashant’s birth. But something about how she had felt at that party was echoed in the breaths that she had heard on the phone, and Ranjana knew that she would confront Harit the next time it rang.

  It happened, luckily, when she was home alone. Before a second breath was even huffed out, she said, “Haritji?”

  She expected him to hang up, but then she heard him say, “… Ji?”

  “Haritji, kya haal hai?” She wanted to sound nonchalant, not wanting to frighten him off.

  “Theek hai,” he managed to get out. He sounded like he was in an airtight chamber. Perhaps he was calling from the bathroom.

  “All is good?” she continued in Hindi, not sure what else to ask. She should let him lead the conversation. He obviously had something important to tell her.

  “Fine,” he repeated. “Just fine.”

  Ranjana wasn’t sure what to ask next. “Can I help you with something, ji?”

  The breaths came again, and she realized that he was crying. Not a full-on sob, but it sounded as if his whole body was trembling. The muscles in her upper back tightened. All this time, she had seen him as some shy creature, but in this instant, she sensed something much darker and more significant.

  She wasn’t sure how to respond, but she tried. “Would you like to meet for some tea?” She began to give him directions to the coffee shop where she’d met Achyut, but when Harit stuttered on the other end, she remembered: he had no car. She volunteered to pick him up, and when another series of stutters came through, she cut him off and said, “It’s no problem.” Like that, he burst out with the address, and she jotted it down so quickly that she feared that she may not be able to read her own handwriting later. She was more intent when writing a note to put on the fridge for Mohan: Went out to get a couple of things from the store. Then she was on her way.

  * * *

  Harit had heard people use the term “nervous breakdown” before, and because of his tendency to translate word-by-word instead of seeing a phrase whole, he had seen this term as particularly full of meaning. He felt, indeed, that his very nerves were breaking. It wasn’t until now, w
hen he felt himself falling apart, that he realized how much tension had crept into his body over time, how he had long ago given up full control over his movements and thoughts and actions. As with his Swati routine, he felt that someone else had taken over his behavior. It was done to him instead of something he did. This kind of passive behavior could be comforting: if he didn’t have to insert himself into the proceedings, he was free of responsibility. But now, he understood just what he had given up by resigning himself to such a thing. He had let his life be dictated by others and had shut down his own desires in doing so. He had lost not just his sister but his center.

  It surprised him that he had not yet had this breakdown in front of his mother. Certainly, she would have been an ideal audience for such a thing, present and therefore witness to his unraveling but unable to process it adequately and resent his insanity. Yet some part of the reverent relationship remained with his mother, and even in the midst of this agitated state, he could not let her see him like this. Plus, she could offer no care for him, as he was her caretaker. He needed the comfort of a woman, but he needed a woman who was comforting, and now with Swati gone and his mother a statue and the women at temple strangers in their giggles and gilded saris, he thought of Ranjana. He knew that she would understand.

  But understand what, exactly? What was he planning on telling her? My sister died and it’s my fault and my mother has gone insane and I am wearing saris to keep her stable? How could he begin to explain this to anyone? Every night, he cataloged these problems in his head and thought how much easier it would have been if one or more of them could be erased. Each one was devastating, but taken together, they created a broken man.