No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  There was nothing for it but for her to seize upon the first full set of earrings she could find, a tawdry pair of faux pearls that looked like pieces of a candy necklace. As Mohan moved on to grumbling about something involving Avnish Doshi’s “money-making house-flipping plan,” Ranjana tugged on the earrings. Over time and age, the hole of each earlobe’s piercing had come to resemble the mouth of the man in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. When a party was beginning with fierce antagonism toward her earlobes, there was little hope for a smooth evening ahead.

  * * *

  Harit had never been in a confined space with a younger person like this—not since he had been young himself—so he held on to the revelation about Prashant’s switch in major as if it were a source of oxygen. It was clear that Prashant hadn’t meant to divulge this fact, but it was also clear that both of them were enjoying some relief from its admission. Contrary to what Harit often thought, he wasn’t totally out of it: he knew very well that literature was not a common course of study for Indian kids, and he could only wonder what Ranjanaji would make of Prashant’s confession. She seemed like a supportive woman, and perhaps she would delight in her son’s unique choice. But even before arriving at the gathering tonight, he knew that the other Indians there would frown upon it, and he felt sorry for the boy.

  He felt a bit calmer by the time they pulled in front of the house. He understood, however, as he got out of the car—feeling as if his body were moving of its own accord while his mind exercised above it—that the car ride was to be the least uncomfortable part of the evening. Here was the real challenge: an entire houseful of new people. It was enough to send him screaming back into his sari. He soon saw, though, the benefit of having been sent for by the hostess’s son, which was that he was the first guest to arrive.

  The Chaudhurys lived in a modest two-level home that was still much wider and taller than Harit’s house. It was much newer, too. His own house often felt like it was performing a miracle simply by not collapsing. Every desi house had its own version of Indian cooking smell, and the one here—heavier on onion than was typical—had been undercut by air freshener. The Chaudhurys’ living room wasn’t garnished solely with embroidered Indian art or gold plates or plants. Instead, Ranjanaji had brought her own touches, like Western paintings in pastel swirls and odd little dishes in sharp colors and, even, a black statue of some non-Hindu goddess dancing while a row of birds paused in flight above her delicate hands.

  Harit saw all of this eventually. First, he followed Prashant through the side door, through a laundry room still shining from cleaning fluid, into the kitchen, which was the biggest room in the house. There was Ranjanaji, wearing an apron that Harit knew they sold at Harriman’s—red apples on its front. It made a peculiar sight given her maroon salwar, which boasted several sequins and an intricate trim along its hem. She looked noticeably better in Indian clothing. Not just because she was Indian but because she didn’t seem to be pretending.

  They exchanged Namastes, though hers was rushed, given the number of things she had going on. To look at all the food, a hundred guests were expected. She had a series of pots on the stove and an even more impressive number of covered dishes on the island. She had made samosas, of course, then pakoras, aloo gobi, mattar paneer, chole, some eggplant concoction that looked highly experimental, raita, and a jolly-looking mass of dough for roti that had yet to be parceled, rolled, and cooked.

  “Hope you brought your appetite,” Prashant said as he strode out of the kitchen. Harit would have taken offense at how quickly the boy discarded the intimacy they had constructed during their car ride, but he was too busy noticing that Prashant hadn’t said a word to his mother. Ranjanaji took note of this:

  “Please pardon Prashant. Ah, how alliterative!” she said, tittering, not noticing or caring that Harit didn’t understand what that word meant. “I’ve just gotten used to how he disappears for stretches at a time. I tell you, kids these days see their phones as faces. They carry on more conversations with those things than you and I do with each other.”

  Harit wasn’t really listening to her because he was remembering his biggest fear about the evening: how to deal with her husband.

  Harit tried, in these moments before Mohanji appeared, to imagine what an Indian man like Mohan would think of him. Even though Harit had few male friends besides the Indian boys that he saw sometimes in the stockroom, he knew that Indian men had little room for emotional engagement when it came to each other. (Teddy had shown him an article in The New York Times on the custom of men holding hands in India, but Harit chose every day to forget that this had ever happened.) They measured in material things—a fact that Indians tried to conceal from Americans. Americans, according to Indians, focused on making everything bigger—houses, cars, bank accounts. The only things they focused on making smaller were their bodies, which revealed the excesses of their gluttonous eating. Although Indian men tried to act as if they were different, they were very much the same. Their responsibilities were to provide for their families an Americanized sense of material wealth while still sticking to the Indian courtesies—in essence, to justify a well-turned sitting room, a spacious kitchen, and a fancy car by pointing to a child’s mathematical prowess, a rigorous schedule of temple-going piety, and carefully planned marriages.

  None of this seemed surprising to Harit. These were the same old things that people said about immigrants of all stripes. What was continually surprising was that these Indian men didn’t seem to realize that they were falling into the stereotype. Each carried himself with a combination of poise and slovenliness that he thought was unique, but since Indian men never discussed these things with one another, they could never fully understand what they had in common.

  Although it was clear from this home that Mohanji wasn’t stupendously wealthy, Harit was sure that Mohanji would look at him as inferior in every way. Unmarried and living with his mother—without the promise that a family represented, Harit was hardly worthy of much. He prepared himself accordingly, crossing his arms behind his back and rocking gently to calm himself down.

  “Ji, I’m so glad that you came,” Ranjana said. She was jumping from task to task, pulling a stack of napkins out of its plastic skin, liberating plastic forks, knives, and spoons and placing them in a trio of foam cups, producing a fully stocked tray of spices and garnishes out of thin air. Harit couldn’t help but feel that the bond that had brought him here was broken, that the party as an entity mattered more to Ranjanaji now than he did. He tried to dispel these thoughts. She was a hostess, and naturally, it was her job to attend to her guests. The more successful the party was, the more successfully he had joined them. The less attention paid to him, the better.

  The party had been scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M., and although Harit knew it was customary for the guests to be delayed in arriving, he didn’t think it was customary for the man of the house to remain out of sight. At last, Mohanji appeared ten minutes later. Harit watched him through the arched doorway between the kitchen and sitting room. Mohanji was busy sweeping imaginary dust off shelves, tabletops, and the TV. His hair was still dripping from the shower, and there seemed to be remnants of shampoo still mixed in with his streaks of gray. He was the kind of man who grunted at the littlest thing. Finally, after running a hand through his slick hair and pulling a last cushion into place, he darted into the kitchen, ready to say something to Ranjanaji. He stopped when he saw Harit.

  “Namaste, ji,” he said, barely putting his hands together. Harit had hoped that there would be an understanding between the two of them that the night was awkward enough without making their interactions even more strained, but that wasn’t going to be the case. Mohanji clearly had a problem with his being here, and Harit couldn’t fault him for that. Everything involving Ranjanaji, it seemed, was required to be strange.

  * * *

  An hour into the allotted start time, there were only six people in the house besides the Chaudhurys and Harit. Then, as if th
e other guests had conspired, they arrived all at once in their luxury cars, transforming the curb into a de facto showroom that you could view from the front window. These people smelled like money—but money mixed with something else, something musty and sweet at the same time, the smell of an antiques store.

  Harit sat in the corner in a comfortable armchair. The divot in the middle of its seat indicated that Mohanji spent a significant amount of time planted there. Ranjanaji made a grand show of introducing him to the others, but perhaps sensing his discomfort at being presented this way—always with a flourish of her hand and a reassuring nod of her head—she soon transitioned into merely saying his name and letting him do the rest. He bowed, mumbled a few words about being happy to be in attendance, and then returned to the armchair and watched as the women began to clump together in the kitchen and as the men trundled into the den with their tumblers of whiskey. He had rarely observed this ritual up close, and he soon realized that it would be his duty to join the men and leave the haven of his corner behind. He felt entirely unprepared for this maneuver yet knew that the longer he avoided it, the worse it would be. If only he could have a moment in which one of the women pulled him aside and started chatting him up in front of the men, just so that he could stay behind without being judged. Instead, he was left alone to make his way into the den. Then he remembered his empty hands, his drinkless state, and pondered what to do.

  He had already consumed a quick drink back at the house to alleviate his preparty stress. That effect had worn off already, and he wanted another. He couldn’t get drunk in front of these people, yet he also knew, without having to be told, that he couldn’t join those men without seeming like he could hold his liquor. Thankfully, the whiskey bottle was on the kitchen counter instead of in some fancy decanter in the den, so Harit swerved around the chattering women and poured himself a neat glass.

  He nodded at Ranjanaji and she at him, and he knew that she understood how uncomfortable he felt and what he was about to do, and it made him able to do it.

  The fears of childhood never went away. He might as well have been trying to join a gathering of bullying classmates on a dirty pitch of land outside his primary school. He might as well have been entering the staid setting of his father’s weekly card game back in India, its huffy men and sparse cigarette smoke.

  There was only the slightest break in the men’s conversation as he came upon them, a momentary silence before Mohanji, with every bit of stress that Harit could have expected, motioned to an open spot on the couch next to two more slender men who were already halfway through their tumblers. Harit gave them Namastes, wondering if they had expected him to shake hands, though they hadn’t offered theirs.

  The conversation was about a Pakistani car salesman who had just set up a gigantic lot on the outskirts of town. Harit had not seen it, but Avnish Doshi gave a long, detailed, practically enraged description of its grounds, its teal-colored light posts and newly poured blacktop and rows and rows of shiny cars. The whole group agreed that the place was a foolish, foolish undertaking, the work of a madman, and there seemed an implicit understanding that the man’s folly was a result of his nationality.

  Harit was so busy keeping track of his own movements—well-planned head nods, slight but effective grunts of agreement—that he had not noticed who the man was seated to his right, on the perimeter of the conversation. It wasn’t a man at all: it was Prashant. Harit realized that there was no one else in attendance who was Prashant’s age, so the teenager had nowhere better to be but here. If Harit had been Prashant, he would have used this as a convenient excuse, shutting himself away in his room and relishing his solitude. Then Harit saw the expression on Prashant’s face when Avnish Uncle went to refill his glass of whiskey, and Harit understood the intrigue: Prashant was sitting in wait for a chance to drink, as a dog may wait for leftovers.

  Avnish Uncle noticed this soon enough. “Prashant, beta,” he said, reaching out as if to pat Prashant, even though he was seated once again on the other side of the room, “perhaps you should join us in a whiskey. You look just like me as an eager young man.” The room chuckled in unison, and Prashant clearly considered the possibility of this actually happening, his eyebrows rising and his spine straightening. A brief shake of the head from his father set the chuckles aside and reminded everyone that such depravity would never be condoned in polite company like this.

  In hearing Avnish’s comment about being an “eager young boy,” Harit realized that he didn’t share this point of view at all. He didn’t see Prashant as a younger version of himself. There was Young Harit, whom Harit had a difficult time picturing as anything but a younger version of his current self, so Young Harit didn’t look like a young man but like a less-stooped, less-disheveled, less-sallow, less-troubled man. Harit no longer saw life as a forward-moving thing but as a carefully maneuvered looking-back. Alongside his day-to-day life, there had been a constant assumption that he could go back and take up the life that he had always wanted. In other words, he was in the habit of living a version of his life, all the while forgetting that there were no other versions but the one life itself. Trying to go back and correct what he saw as the mistakes of his life was not merely implausible; it was impossible. Not only was Prashant far from what Harit had been as a young man; he was something Harit never would have been. You either did something, were something—or you didn’t, weren’t.

  * * *

  Prashant wondered if his mother had witnessed one of these conversations before. Did she know the ridiculous things that were coming out of the mouths of these so-called men? They were lambasting Obama, blaming his presidency for all of the turmoil in the Middle East and the rest of Asia. Prashant knew that many Indian men were Republicans due to their frugality—they appreciated a tight-handed fiscal policy—yet this type of blatant delusion truly mystified him. Just now, Avnish Uncle said, without a trace of humor, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim!” Prashant had half a mind to invoke the name of Ted Kaczynski.

  Forcefully and acutely, as if it were being pushed into his limbs, he could feel the insanity of this moment breeding with another problematic thought, one completely disassociated from political matters:

  It came upon him like someone putting a coat over his shoulders: a powerful feeling of spite. He felt a dart of metal flick up his throat. He was sizing up Avnish Uncle, his blocky torso, face encased in thick glasses and topped by a shiny, perfectly symmetrical swath of black hair. Here was a man who had never worried about his appearance in his life. Sure, he had to be mindful of hygiene—he had likely learned, via his mother, how to chew aniseed to keep his teeth clean and how to put baby oil into his hair to keep it soft. But these concerns were dictated by routine, not by the motive of wanting to seem attractive. If he had a sense of his appearance, it was cultivated by tradition, not vanity. Diploma and engineering expertise in his hands, he had been married off to Manjeet Auntie and had continued his life methodically. Here he was, exactly where he wished to be, successful by every measure he valued.

  And yet, what use did he have for that hair? None. He had never really had any use for it. Sure, not being bald had perhaps made him a more sensible suitor, but Prashant was pretty damn sure that during their courtship, Manjeet Auntie had never pined for the thick strands of Avnish Uncle’s hair, never imagined her painted fingernails running through it. If she thought of it, it was in miniature, how it would give rise to children with equally black strands of hair. It made Prashant furious that he, now in the throes of love for someone as polished, classy, and beautiful as Kavita–who not only deserved but needed someone handsome—was saddled with this horrible puffball of hair while someone like Avnish Uncle got the hair that Prashant deserved.

  Whether God was one or several entities, he was cruel. Prashant pictured the numerous portraits of Ram, Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva that he had seen over his lifetime, and in every one, God had an enviable cascade of hair that could be styled and cut and p
rimped into any number of impressive styles. Prashant, meanwhile, a mere mortal, had this mess on his head to deal with. And Avnish Uncle—far from a hero but, rather, an extra in a film—got the prized looks. Avnish Uncle had not only been given everything that he desired; but he also had been given things that Prashant desired, both a certainty and nonchalance about the pleasures of life that Prashant didn’t know if he could ever experience. The fact that he continued to second-guess every move he made with Kavita confirmed this. Even if, by some miracle, Prashant cleared that hurdle, he would still know that, deep down, he was fragile and vulnerable.

  He wanted to start from scratch. He wanted to be born again and restart his entire history with women. He would be more assertive, focus less on masturbating and more on sex, do away with his high schools friends’ “bros before hos” mentality and instead focus solely on hos, the way true players did. For all of his pretension, for all of his newly groomed snobbery, for all of his collegiate airs, what he wanted was to be a straight-up cad. But a smart cad—a hardworking, bright, smart cad with legitimately phrased political opinions. Was that so much to ask?

  Hearing these men talk about the president in such a demeaning way—this was unbearable. He needed to get up, leave the room, and blow off some steam. Maybe he’d take a drive; maybe he’d find Gori’s number and see if there still remained a spark—or at least a joint—from his long-ago fling with her.

  As soon as he made a motion to rise, Avnish Uncle gave him an odd crick of the neck and asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” Prashant said dismissively, but Avnish Uncle laughed and nudged him ever-so-slightly down.

  “Beta…”

  Avnish Uncle had chosen the wrong time to touch him. What may have been intended in that moment as a friendly jibe was, to Prashant, no less than a shove.

  “Fine,” he said. “You want to know what the matter is? It’s the fact that you’re all fucking bigots.”