He closed his eyes and tried to envision himself in some of the clothes that he saw in the store. It was shocking that he had never thought to do this; he had somehow never picked up a Geoffrey Beene shirt and considered how it may look against his chest. How could he extol the benefits of a French cuff to a prospective buyer without thinking how it would fit against his brown neck? He wondered these things, yet he knew the answers. He didn’t picture himself in stiff, colorful fabric because it seemed like a joke to think of his appearance as important. When he saw a new white collar, he immediately thought of the scrubbing it would take to undo the eventual ring-around-the-collar, an inevitable result of his sweaty skin rubbing against the threads all day. When other men put shirts on, did they think about this?
The hardest part of these thoughts was knowing that he was in the dark but not knowing what he didn’t know. If he couldn’t think of something as simple as his neck without imagining the grime it would impart to a starched collar, how could he imagine someone kissing that neck? Worse: if the first thing that he associated with his neck was its potential for grime, he would never know what it felt like to think of only what it felt like to have someone kissing his neck. For the rest of his life, regardless of how he tried to rethink it, he would always have experienced the potential of grime first. Meanwhile, people who had never had this thought would never understand that a whole other level below their worry existed. It was as if they thought they were on the last rung of a ladder, completely unaware that the ladder pierced through the earth beneath, where, underground, Harit was clawing his way through the dirt and roots. Harit—and Harit alone—knew that he was looking up from his ignorance and seeing a ladderful of people fretting over their deepest despairs.
RANJANA WAS SHAPING HER LIFE into a plot from her romance novels. In all of those books, a simple-seeming but truly remarkable woman found herself saddled with a slob of a husband who paid her little attention—especially sexual—and sought out what was missing from her life in the arms of a quiet but romantically robust man. Or if the husband wasn’t a messy pig, then he was a milquetoast, a stick in oversize shirts and pants who put the “oaf” in “loafers.” In fact, if she removed herself from the world of potboilers and down-market romances, if she examined a book like, say, Madame Bovary, she still found the same conceit—the boring husband whose wife looked for excitement outside marriage. She felt doubly guilty—for trying to fit Mohan into this idea and for betraying her love of the genre itself by lamenting a situation in which her life mimicked it. The women in her writing group, whatever their faults, still thought of their writing as vital, and they would never laugh openly at its contrivances. The reason why so many people—women, in particular—read romances of all kinds was because they found them legitimately compelling. They also bought fully into the idea of Romance with a capital R—and all its attendant glamour. Irony, sarcasm, haughty literary criticism—these were not things they cared about.
Still, Ranjana couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t help but notice, for instance, that she could guess almost to the exact minute when Mohan would take to his armchair every night, like the lights they had on a timer for the front porch. No matter how much she didn’t want to, she noticed how, when he burped, he always did so in three distinct humps of liquid and air. The constant utterances that came from him during a cricket match on TV; the way he would mutter Ar-RE when leaning over to pick up something; the blanched crud of his shaving cream remnants in the sink; the monochromatic forest of his dress shirts hanging in the closet; his ever-pervasive smell of Aramis cologne and armpit activity. These all seemed like staples of a literary cuckold. If Mohan wanted to be more dynamic, then he would have to shun these things.
Here is where she was truly wrong, though: Mohan wasn’t choosing anything. It wasn’t like he behaved this way to seem off-putting or uncaring. It was simply who he was. What she wanted was more wanting on his part. She wished that he could show his hand more often. If he could get legitimately worked up about something besides finances and sports, he might be more interesting.
She could feel an arrogance rising in her, the sense that she was Working on Herself and it bothered her that a similar sizing-up was not occurring on her husband’s part.
It reminded her of something that Prashant had said under his breath last New Year’s Eve. His scheduled plans with the other boys had fallen through due to a freak outbreak of pink eye, and as he sat on the couch watching TV with his parents, he muttered, “If only you guys drank…” At first, Ranjana was baffled by this comment—what kid admitted to his parents that he craved alcohol, and what kid wanted to drink with his parents?—but she held her tongue to keep the evening lighthearted. A few days later, as she was pulling laundry out of the dryer and the fabric softener’s soapy dryness hit her nostrils, she realized what Prashant meant. He didn’t want them to be drinking with him; he wanted them to be drinking for themselves, to lighten up their moods. He wanted his parents to be a bit more unpredictable, cooler, more capable of having a good time. He wanted them to be as surprising as the act of doing laundry was mundane. Ranjana was wishing a kind of tipsiness on Mohan: she wanted him to be a bit more spontaneous. She wanted him to surprise her in ways she hadn’t seen since the early days of their marriage. All the same, she wondered if his actions back then had been surprising simply because everything was surprising back then.
When they first arrived in America, they didn’t have a telephone. They didn’t know all that many people, and they hadn’t been in the habit of talking on the telephone that much back in India. They soon realized, however, that not having one was a huge problem here, where people seemed to take pride in how tangled the cords on their phones were.
They would go to the department store together, arm in arm, as if they were Americans visiting the grave of a deceased beloved, and while Mohan tried, in vain, to bargain on a clock, an end table, or a bookcase, Ranjana would wander through the store and marvel at the high prices. It was during one of these strolls that she encountered the glassy, flashy collection of TVs in the electronics department. Mohan found her standing in front of one of them. He had apparently called her name several times, but she was so engrossed in a football game—of all things—that she hadn’t heard him. They couldn’t afford a TV, of course, he said. They didn’t even have a telephone! Yet Ranjana couldn’t stop thinking of how marvelous it would be to have one in their home. Seeing a fancy TV up close made her recognize how much she loved to witness good storytelling and how it could be the very thing to make her new life here engaging. So she had marched up to the salesperson and implored him to give them a discount. “We know all of the Indian families, and they’ll see this beautiful TV and want one of their own. I can guarantee you at least a dozen more sales.” The salesperson looked astonished and impressed, and soon, Ranjana and Mohan were watching as their TV was carried into their living room by two able-bodied men. Mohan could not stop talking about how beautifully Ranjana had negotiated the TV’s way into their house. It was easily the most impressive thing that she had ever done. Although this thought troubled her, she also felt great pride in having pulled it off.
This was the kind of surprise that Ranjana wanted from Mohan. She wanted him to do something charming, something unprecedented and unpredictable, much as she was doing with Harit. She wanted him to drop whatever romantic conquest he was pursuing and direct some love toward her. She deserved it. She deserved to be a sought-after heroine.
But how could she forget? There very possibly was a sought-after heroine, just not her. Ranjana had noticed that Mohan was home less often. She had even checked the odometer on his car, the way that Mohan used to check the odometer on the Camry that they shared years ago, so obsessed was he with conserving as much gas as they could. He was driving somewhere now, in small increments. Driving to her. So, perhaps Ranjana couldn’t predict his every move, after all. Perhaps Mohan really had done something out of the ordinary and become a brazen hero—Monsieur Bovary—
to someone else.
OVER FALL BREAK, when Prashant entered his house for the first time since leaving for school, he detected a difference in its smell. It wasn’t just the pungent film of masala and onions that covered every surface—something you could smell only after having been away from the house for more than a few days. The scent was stale; the ground floor had the air of a basement. It was as if his departure had sapped all sense of youth or energy from the house.
What surprised him most was that his mother’s behavior had prepared him for something livelier. The depression of the house seemed directly at odds with her disposition, which was noticeably elevated. This created a tense but still dreary atmosphere. No matter how many bowls of chaat or plates of samosas his mother set out, no matter how thoroughly his father scrubbed the bathrooms and puffed flowery air freshener through each room in atomized garlands, his parents nevertheless seemed out of sorts.
Ten minutes into his return—he had taken a Greyhound bus, of all things—his mother asked that he pick up Harit Uncle. This is how she referred to him—Harit Uncle—with no preamble or further explanation. Prashant had to ask her to explain, and she said that Harit Uncle was a new member of their circle. Prashant should have been used to hasty additions like this. His mother took pride in cultivating a catchall social world; the odd Indian had a tendency to creep into their crowd as she assumed the role of guide and adviser. There was Sita Kumar, a bumbling woman in her midfifties whose husband, Tipu, constantly licked his black lips; it was silently decided by their circle of friends that Sita Auntie was far too loud, and the strategy was to let her talk herself tired until another woman swooped in and changed the subject. There was the interloping Mahajan family, transplants from Kenya whose two young sons, Shawn and Ritesh, weirded everyone out with their inexhaustible, preternatural knowledge of physics and who clearly—at least to Prashant—suffered from an undiagnosed form of Asperger’s. Despite this, his mother gathered the Mahajans into the house like found treasure, and it was silently decided by their circle of friends that the Mahajan matriarch, Mina, was beautiful enough and fluent enough in Punjabi to socialize with them. (In time, Shawn and Ritesh, wise beyond their years, learned that they were going to be each other’s best bet for conversation, so they sequestered themselves in whichever corner was closest and discussed their equations in private.)
And now this Harit Uncle. Prashant found it odd that a man would come to visit them by himself, but he figured that Harit Uncle would be some old widower with burlappy jowls and hair like milkweed. Consider Prashant’s surprise, then, when the GPS led him to a mustachioed, middle-aged man in a blazer and tie waiting outside a small house. He wasn’t wearing a coat or a scarf, which was odd, given that there was a sharp fall chill in the air. Harit Uncle couldn’t have been older than fifty, and he seemed petrified to approach the car. He looked like someone checking to see if an animal were alive or dead. The whole awkwardness of the situation propelled Prashant out of his seat, and he found himself opening the door for Harit Uncle, marveling at the sheer volume of the man’s obviously thinning hair.
Prashant hoped that their ride together, albeit brief, would not be nearly as strange as he feared. He regretted driving his father’s Acura; its quiet maneuvering was usually enticing, but it rendered their situation eerily silent. (One of his snobby thoughts hit him: he realized that his parents were the only ones in their group not to have a Lexus or a Mercedes.)
To his surprise, Harit Uncle was the first one to speak.
“Beta, thank you very much for picking me up. I do not have a car.”
Harit Uncle had not said that he couldn’t drive. He had said that he didn’t have a car. Prashant wasn’t sure why he found this observation notable, but he did.
“It’s no problem.”
“So, are you enjoying school?”
“Yup. Yes.”
“And what are you studying?”
“Chemistry.”
“Chemistry. That is very interesting.”
Which was more than Prashant could say for this so-called conversation.
“I was never very good at chemistry in school,” Harit said. “I guess that’s why I never became a doctor.” He chuckled sadly, and Prashant felt instant sympathy for him. That’s all it took, evidently: self-deprecation. Prashant had become so agile with his own self-deprecation that he respected those who shared his tendencies. “Are you studying to become a doctor?”
The simple fact that Harit Uncle thought to frame this as a question indicated a larger understanding. Most Indians assumed outright that anyone who was studying chemistry was doing so for medical purposes, even when the person was the son of a chemistry professor. “I actually want to be a chemist,” Prashant said. “I’m fascinated by research.”
And then it just came out of him: “But lately, I’ve been thinking of switching my major to literature.”
He made this confession because Harit Uncle was like a blank slate. He knew virtually nothing about Prashant—aside from whatever pleasantries Prashant’s mother might have offered—and what did he care about some kid’s college concentration? It was a win-win: Prashant had confided something in him, and Harit Uncle’s raised eyebrows (even behind those ridiculous glasses) showed that he appreciated the confidence.
“Literature? That is something.” He pronounced the word literature with a grand lilt.
“We’ll see, though. I don’t really have to declare a major until sophomore year. What did you study in college?”
“I didn’t go to college.”
“Oh.”
Harit Uncle sighed. “Don’t worry, beta. It is not a big deal. I am much more concerned that you Indian kids here get a good education.”
Prashant had to stop himself from asking what Harit Uncle’s kids were studying. Obviously, he didn’t have any: he was unmarried. Harit couldn’t remember the last time he had met an Indian man this age who didn’t have a wife.
Wait a second.
Holy shit, this dude was gay.
Of course—he was wearing way too many accessories. Uncles were supposed to wear dress shirts—open at the collar—the skeletal silhouette of a T-shirt underneath them, and some gigantic wristwatch. Maybe a gold chain, though this seemed to be an accessory indigenous only to those who smoked. Yet Harit Uncle was wearing not only a blazer but a tie and a cardigan, as well as tinted eyeglasses, a slender watch, and actual loafers with tassels on them. There was also some kind of cologne in the air, as well as—what was that? Something sweet, like flowers.
Oh—it wasn’t just cologne. It was whiskey. Prashant was playing chauffeur to a gay alcoholic.
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a problem with this earlier?” Ranjana said as she was peeling a marigold-shaped bindi from its sticky backing and affixing it to her forehead. The first time she had ever noticed a worry line was when she was performing this action, and over the past few years, a single, small bindi had gone from covering one line to two.
“You said you were having a get-together! Not a welcome party.”
“It isn’t a ‘welcome party’ at all. It’s a get-together. Haritji is simply getting together, as well.”
“It’s not right. You know it’s not right.” Mohan was standing in his V-neck undershirt and briefs, both off-white with use, both marked here and there with faint spots of indeterminate origin.
“It’s only a big deal if we make it a big deal. He’s lonely, ji. You remember what it was like.”
“Heh? What what was like?”
She sighed, focused on digging the right earrings out of her jewelry drawer. She had to remind herself that Mohan hadn’t gone through her experience. He had never felt the kind of despair she had upon arriving in the States, what with his job and the quick assimilation it required of him. (She had this thought almost weekly, even though they had been in this country for years. It was astounding how many times you could discover anew the same revelation.) As much as she wanted to remain i
n this argument, she knew that her approach was inherently faulty. There was so little in common between Harit and Mohan, and she was trying to plan this party according to her logic, forgetting that she was an outlier and that Mohan, who had always viewed their community as solace, was unlikely to understand, let alone share, her empathy.
They were having yet another get-together in an ocean of get-togethers, and Mohan, in his half-dun undergarments and matted chest hair, was echoing his usual worries. How many years would it take for Indian people here to realize that they had to leave at least a bit of their Indian decorum behind? All of the women had smartphones, for God’s sake; surely, this was evidence enough that they had moved beyond the past. To have a stranger in their midst—even an Indian stranger—seemed enough to put Mohan over the edge, and Ranjana found this ridiculous.
She was both sad and glad that Seema and Satish couldn’t make it tonight. They were out of town, visiting relatives in Pittsburgh, and Ranjana could have used Seema’s moral support. At the same time, though, she felt protective of Harit and didn’t exactly need Seema’s gossip and scrutiny right now, especially after how Ranjana had felt at their own house.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love Mohan. She did, indeed, love him very much, or at least cared for him so much that the idea of love entered the picture—even if he could be so cold. The fact was, though, that she was interested now only in surprises. Once she saw that she was capable of not only changing but of discovering new things about herself—things long since abandoned, or perhaps never even considered—she was no longer interested in people who wanted only stability, who did not want to discover who they were but who wanted to live comfortably by firm principles.
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