No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  His father would have leapt up and started scolding him if he hadn’t been as dumbstruck as the other men. Prashant, exhilarated by how he had disarmed them with one expletive, felt his anger transform into bliss.

  “Are you fucking kidding? Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist? Are you hearing yourselves?” He saw his father stir slightly, in the beginning stages of a reprimand, but the steel in Prashant’s voice stopped him. “What kind of community is this if we start criticizing the first minority president? Did you guys ever think you’d see the day a person of color was the leader of the free world? It’s like you’ve taken thirty years of progress—that you started, mind you—and thrown it out the window! Can’t you see that Modi is just riling up nationalist sentiment, making puppets of you all? Shouldn’t you be focusing on that?”

  He felt like a hero, a sterling product of his college. This was exactly what he should have been doing with his education. He wasn’t even sure if he’d ever said Modi’s name out loud before, but here he was, proselytizing like a revolutionary.

  (He knew as he was delivering his tirade that he was doing it because it was the type of passion that Kavita would find sexy.)

  However, once the initial rush of this speech faded and he surveyed the room, he saw that all of his father’s friends wore bemused, condescending grins on their faces. He had seen this face before, a look that simultaneously laughed at youth and reiterated the superiority that these men had demonstrated in traveling halfway around the globe. They didn’t appreciate Obama’s struggle—his ascent from a mixed-race, gangly teenager to a highly educated senator to the commander in chief—because they already saw their own journeys as vastly more impressive. They were not looking for a sense of communion with other people. They were looking to lord their accomplishments over others, as they lorded their accomplishments over each other—who had bought which car and who had won whichever game of cards and whose kids had gotten into which college.

  Prashant’s father finally, hilariously shouted, “Prashant! Go to your room!” If Prashant were still in high school, he might have replied with an equally melodramatic “I’m eighteen; you can’t tell me what to do!” Instead, he snickered. He was better than this, better than these petty men. It was upsetting that they suffered from such myopia—he thought of this word specifically, savored it—but he didn’t need to save them. They couldn’t be saved.

  * * *

  Harit had never seen a child behave this way, and he greeted the moment with a surprising feeling: relief. The outburst made Prashant the oddity of the room, not Harit. If anything, Mohanji was more polite to Harit after Prashant’s spectacle. Mohanji seemed too proud to let a new guest in his house feel uncomfortable or inconvenienced. He offered Harit another drink, then made sure that everyone made it to the kitchen in an orderly fashion so that dinner could be doled out. He waited until everyone—the men, the women, the few grandparents tucked into corners like gifts, the two random young children—had served themselves food before picking up one of the sectioned foam plates and scooping dinner onto it.

  After a few minutes, the party appeared undisturbed. Prashant was, presumably, in his room. The women were chatting animatedly in the living room, the men had moved from political matters to money matters to school matters to family matters—who was sponsoring which family member to emigrate to the States—and Harit responded to all of this by tipping his head to the side in agreement or crinkling his head back in soft disapproval. He had worried that he would be the center of attention, but this was just another routine party for them; they did not fear such gatherings as Harit did.

  Just as he began to worry that he may not get a chance to converse with Ranjanaji, she tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he might help serve the chai. He didn’t need to be an expert at parties to know that this was rather unorthodox—a man helping a woman prepare chai? He knew that to object would make the situation even worse, so he followed her into the kitchen.

  She had taken down a large assortment of cups and saucers, and a shiny silver serving pot presided over them like a proud parent. Fancy, loose tea leaves, and containers of cardamom and ginger were at the ready. The kitchen was made beautiful with their smell. She was going to make true Punjabi tea.

  “So, ji, have you had a good time?” she asked, pretending to ignore the outburst in the other room that she had overheard. Then her face cracked into a playful smile.

  Harit laughed uncomfortably.

  “It’s OK, ji,” Ranjana said. “It’s Prashant’s first time home. I know that he misses school already. We’re not the easiest people to deal with, especially at a party. As they always say, you shouldn’t talk politics at a party.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Harit said, “but I do now.”

  They both laughed, Ranjana more so. The water was boiling. She sprinkled the tea leaves into its pitching heat, their smell instantly more fragrant. “Ji, can you get the milk from the fridge?” she asked. The word “fridge” struck him like a coin tossed in his face. As Harit extracted the cool carton from its shelves, he wanted, as always, to be as well-versed in such turns of phrase as Ranjana was.

  “What did you think of President Obama?” Ranjanaji asked. Harit had not expected this question. The truth was that he didn’t follow political matters very much. It wasn’t like Obama’s health care initiative had affected how many tea bags Harit bought or how many nonmeals his mother ate. He had never visited a doctor in the U.S., and neither had his mother. The only thing he had thought about Obama was that it was peculiar to see a black man as president of the United States. Compared to the complex political makeup of India—Modi’s constant struggle with Musharraf, the old days of the Gandhis, the constant upheaval in Kashmir—this American landscape wasn’t particularly new.

  “I don’t know, ji,” he replied, honestly.

  “Between you and me,” Ranjana said, “I thought he was wonderful. Not perfect, but I certainly didn’t think he was a Muslim or a terrorist. I wouldn’t want you to think that I thought those things.”

  Harit nodded. He was queasy discussing this with anyone, but especially with a woman while preparing tea. Nevertheless, he found himself strangely compelled. He had been in several unexpected situations in recent weeks—the dinner with Ranjanaji and Teddy, his confession about Swati’s death. But this, being in this cluttered kitchen, so much brighter and alive than the one in his gloomy, dark house, with the chitchat of men in one ear and women in the other, and speaking to this woman, this progressive, Americanized, compassionate woman—this was the most significant oddity of all.

  And now, a revelation. He felt something along the lines of real affection for this woman. She was at once plain and fascinating, her hands preparing tea as every other woman did, her bangles clinking innocently, her face scrunched up in mild concentration, her hair doing its usual free-form billow, her motions mundane but her intentions unlike those of anyone else. It had taken him too long to make the obvious connection: there was something of Swati in her. The same spontaneity, the same joy, even if it was conditioned with some sort of disappoint or boredom. Harit understood the root of such boredom—being surrounded by others who didn’t stimulate you.

  Ranjanaji paused in the middle of her tea preparation. She was staring at the tea, watching the steam rise from it. Her face was bent so far over it that the steam seemed to be breaking against her face. It must have been scorchingly hot, yet she seemed unfazed by it. Harit was leaning in to ask her if she was all right when she pulled back. “I’m so sorry, ji,” she said. “I’ve been feeling under the weather these days.”

  He had already been leaning forward to say “Ranjanaji,” and in this moment, as she pulled back, his hand met her forearm. She looked at him, and he could see in her eyes that she also understood that their friendship was strengthening, bringing them closer and providing a sense of security.

  They separated from each other and finished preparing the tea. As Harit helped Ranjana to distribute the teacups
to everyone, he found his mouth incapable of not shooting into a grin.

  EVENTUALLY, PRASHANT WAS SUMMONED from his room by Ranjana and charged with driving Harit home. Given the events of the evening, the ride was even more stilted than the one that had preceded it. Harit tried to pay no mind to this. He was still basking in the moment that he and Ranjana had shared in her kitchen, and he wasn’t going to let this car-confined awkwardness, nor the thought of his mother at home, diminish its joy.

  When they reached his house, he let himself out of the car and gave Prashant a short head nod. Prashant did the same, clearly ready for Harit to shut the door and be gone. Harit obliged, then strode across the lawn and made his way into the house.

  He hoped that Gital Didi had already taken her leave for the night. And she had. Perhaps it was the relief of her absence that propelled him forward, that made him drop to his knees in front of his mother and begin sobbing, the sounds caught in his throat, as if a creature were trapped there.

  “Ma, I have made a real friend. A real Indian friend. And it is a woman. And she is not like anyone I’ve ever met. She … listens to me and respects me and wants to make others listen to me and respect me. And just being around her—it makes me wish that we still spoke to each other. That I could tell you everything that I want to tell you.”

  He paused for a moment to let the creature in his throat struggle a bit more, and then he let several strong breaths in and out, trying hard to calm himself down as much as he could. Then the words poured out of him, as he began to tell her about how, exactly, he had met Ranjana, about the party she gave, about her kindness to him. He wasn’t sure why he was speaking or why he was telling her all this. He felt the recklessness of it all, how it would only injure his mother further, to know that he had found some kind of version of—no, replacement for—Swati. But he could not have foreseen what happened next.

  His mother moved, decisively. She pulled off her purple sunglasses, and she stood. Not the stark position in which he had found her earlier, right before Gital Didi had come in and interrupted, but a position of resolve, of meaningfulness.

  “Harit, beta,” she said, her voice tough and smooth, like a healed wound. “You’ve finally saved us.”

  * * *

  She spoke to the point of being long-winded: she told him that she had been waiting for him to finish his mourning and find his own way before engaging with him. She explained to him that she could see, that Gital Didi had taken her to the doctor, that her cataracts were manageable—and that, because of this, she knew full well that he had been dressing up. Harit froze at this, this information almost too much for him, but she touched his face, ran a finger over his mustache, then pulled him close, and they wept against each other. There was something about the way that she both received his weight and pushed against it that acknowledged that Swati’s passing was not his fault. Even given the pleasure of having a conversation with his mother after all this time, Harit saw this physical language as perhaps the most wonderful revelation of all.

  Then Harit told his mother the kinds of thoughts that he never believed that he’d be able to tell anyone, let alone her. How, in India, it had been very easy for him to plan his future: his family would find him a girl when he was the right age—midtwenties, perhaps—and there would be a lovely but brief ceremony, an exchange of gifts, and he would continue living his life, giving his wife a child or two and feeling terror over being a father. In the end, bolstered by his wife’s responsibility and goodwill, he would settle into the role and assert his fatherhood by way of routine tirades. This is what he saw other men doing, so he assumed it was what he would be expected to do. Knowing his own shyness, he feared this entire process, but at least he knew what the process would be.

  All of this was the plan until his father clutched his chest, until the sweat collected in the grooves above his collarbone and his eyes became protrusions in his head, the whites expanding, and Harit knew, even as he saw the violent knocking of that body on the kitchen floor, that everything he had assumed about his life was going to change. The family flew across the world, as far away as his mother could get from the tragedy, not knowing that she would trade tragedies just as she would hemispheres. As Harit watched the world unspooling under the plane, he couldn’t tell what was stronger—his terror at having to decipher America or his relief at having dodged married life, at least for the time being. He had been in India just long enough to see his marriage prospects pale in comparison to other men’s, to see how undesirable he was. As the world changed, as American culture inserted itself into Indian life more than he could have predicted, women were starting to introduce rules and standards where few had been before. It was possible now for the girl down the street, so convinced until recently that she deserved nothing more extravagant than a market owner, to expect an attractive husband where an industrious one may once have sufficed. The same woman would make it understood that Harit was not handsome, that his hair and his rumpled clothing and his rumble of a voice were not so valuable, after all, not when the Internet was making layers of romance more visible than ever. There were no longer categories as simple as “handsome” or “ugly”; there were subcategories of “marriageably handsome” or “unmarriageably ugly.” As Harit explained all this, standing in his living room, his mother wiped more tears from her eyes, then hugged him once more, her physical gesture telling him that he was being too harsh on himself.

  Ironically, he told her, he had always had Swati to protect him from women. Dazzling—so dazzling, in fact, that she dazzled herself out of the marriage game—she had been such a large part of his life that he had no reason to seek the charms of women outside his home. Sex was something discussed in vulgar terms by other boys in passing, and Harit, so accustomed to turning away from the other daunting things in life, turned away from it, too. He turned to Swati, to the only embrace that truly mattered. And how he missed Swati! How he knew his mother missed Swati! Swati—a word that they now passed back and forth like a prayer.

  “Swati taught you more than I could,” his mother said. Harit shook his head no, but she stopped him. “I have been wrong about many things. Swati was the better teacher. But what I did get right was hope itself. I hoped that you would come to discuss these things with me, in all the ways that I have not been able to discuss them with you. I’ve failed—but my hope did not.”

  This admission, that hope had never left them, allowed Harit to consider a question, a question that was in itself an answer, yet he had to ask it instead of state it, so afraid was he of telling her too much before he even understood it himself:

  “What if who I want—in that way—is not a woman at all?”

  At that, Harit’s mother told him one last story: the truth about her and Gital Didi.

  Harit fainted.

  PRASHANT RETURNED TO CAMPUS from fall break not knowing what his mood was. It shifted quickly from moment to moment, to the extent that he wondered about his mental health. He had seen a commercial for an antidepressant that featured a succession of people sitting on couches one moment, riding a bike the next, and he considered going to the school’s medical center to discuss whether he should go on medication. He found himself so swept up in his schoolwork that it was as if academics had made the decision for him: he didn’t need a prescription. He needed to study.

  For reasons he couldn’t quite process, he actively avoided Kavita. There were no more desultory trips patrolling the student center, no unnecessary coffees in cafés simply for the sake of crossing her path. Instead he kept mainly to his room; it was oddly suited to getting work done even when the inviting berth of his bed lay mere feet away. He learned to deliver the line “I can’t—too much work” with a credible inflection that deterred people from asking him to hang out at all.

  His efforts paid off: another A on a quiz or problem set, another shout-out from the professor, another passive-aggressive exchange with a classmate who envied his success. He came to see himself as two separate people
: the Prashant who second-guessed his every move, who constantly lamented the late start he had when it came to social interactions, and the Prashant who was beyond social acceptance, who needed only to sharpen his mind. He came to see this second self as not only more desirable but practically Einsteinian.

  All the while, he was conscious of why he had desired Kavita so desperately: she was these two selves concurrently. She didn’t need to make a choice. She simply had to be.

  Thanksgiving came soon after fall break, but he decided to stay on campus. It would have been melodramatic to say that he was avoiding his parents’ house due to his outburst at their party, but regardless, he was relieved that he was not spending the holiday with them. He could detect the lack of concern in his father’s voice when he told them his plans. His mother, for her part, seemed genuinely sad, but he also sensed the same air of detachment that had clouded her presence during the past several weeks.

  He spent Thanksgiving dinner at the house of one of his chemistry professors, Gary Dominick, a man who had lived several lives. On his faculty page, the professor listed the numerous professions that he had attempted before his current career: dishwasher, guitar player in a café, hotel concierge, fire inspection specialist, the now-ubiquitous yet amorphous term “social worker.” His wife, Gina, was equally versatile; she was a former high school biology teacher who now had some moderate success as a songwriter for P!nk. Although they were both in their late forties, they had a one-year-old baby who seemed, magically, theirs and not the result of adoption or surrogacy. To celebrate the miracle of conception and the joining of their genes, they spent a great part of the evening hoisting her like a rocket above their heads, at one point narrowly missing an unkempt bookshelf when the professor’s wife tripped on their Oriental rug.

  The Dominicks lived in one of the stately, stunning mansions that stood on flat, unobstructed lawns outside of town. Their place was a series of high-ceilinged rooms with thick, dusty curtains and pale green paint flaking along the walls. Dilettante debris lurked in corners like pets—a dulcimer; a fanned-out collection of tarot cards, midprediction; an old rocking horse; decorative plates from Africa and South America; a fragile-looking cabinet with Japanese characters in red paint on its front.