No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  “That was your best writing yet,” Cassie said, still looking at the floor.

  “Yes. It certainly was … intriguing,” Roberta said.

  “The Force is with you,” Colin said.

  Stefanie made a short humming noise.

  “What’s it part of?” Roberta asked.

  Ranjana didn’t know what to say. “I don’t even know, really. I haven’t quite figured out if it really is part of a novel or if it’s just a story.”

  Their looks of approval shaded into looks of consternation. They were not in the habit of writing as an exercise and an exercise alone. Cassie, however, nodded her head.

  Ranjana backed up and bent down, groping for her seat with one hand behind her. Once she found it, she felt some stress slip out of her body. She hadn’t realized how tense her body had become.

  “How can you not know if you’re writing a novel or not?” Stefanie asked. Ranjana saw a desperation behind her eyes, as if Stefanie herself were just coming to the realization that not every wayward thought that came into her mind had to be committed to the depths of her phantasmagoric opus.

  “She’s perfecting her technique,” Cassie said. The exhaustion in her voice made Ranjana wonder, as she often did, why Cassie deigned to participate in this class at all. Ranjana knew why, though: there was a satisfaction in being the star of the class when you felt that you were surrounded by fools.

  “Maybe I don’t feel like something’s real unless I write about it,” Ranjana said. This was helpful to vocalize. She felt herself shed a further layer of stress simply upon saying it.

  “Well, I think that’s a lovely idea,” Roberta said, clasping her hands together as if she had organized a tea party and they’d just finished their finger sandwiches. “Who else has something to share?”

  Cassie started to say something, sitting up in her chair, but Wendy piped up and unfolded her stash of papers, which were light green today. Ranjana and Cassie exchanged a look, an understanding that the past few minutes had been edifying for the two of them.

  It occurred to Ranjana as they all got up to leave that what she had just felt with Cassie was the kind of warm moment that she and Prashant used to share when he was young, when she would teach him something helpful or, more often, when they would commiserate about Mohan’s idiosyncrasies. This is why she found it all the more comforting when, just as she was getting in her car, she heard Cassie call out, “Ran-ja-na?”

  “Yes?” Ranjana said. As Cassie ran to her, her hair bouncing up and down and her legs thin and agile, Ranjana could see how young and energetic she really was. Ranjana suspected that she was a completely different person outside of class—gregarious, funny, perhaps mischievous.

  “I was hoping that you may be able to come to this with me,” Cassie said, handing her a pamphlet. In large white lettering, against a red background, were written the words The Writer’s Journey.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a writers’ conference,” Cassie said.

  “What’s a writers’ conference?” Ranjana asked.

  “It’s a lot of readings by authors and workshops to improve your writing, but the best part is that they have all of these professional editors and agents read your work and tell you if you have what it takes to get published. I went last year and learned a ton, and although I got a lot of passes from the people I saw, they told me to come back this year. I really think that you’d enjoy it. I don’t think you need me to tell you this, but you and I are the only people in this class who belong there.”

  Ranjana didn’t know what to say.

  “Please say you’ll come,” Cassie said. “It’d be a great experience for both of us.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Ranjana said, with a flatter voice than she intended. Cassie met her tone with a slight frown, but her face still seemed hopeful. She said good-bye and hurried over to her own car.

  On the drive home, Ranjana realized that she would be a hypocrite to judge her classmates and then demur when an event like this came along. She had a distant cousin who lived not far from Chicago, where the conference was taking place, and she could use visiting her as a pretense to placate Mohan. As she pulled into the driveway and saw her husband’s slight silhouette cutting through one window, she knew that she would have to go.

  She had just acknowledged publicly that writing made her feelings real. Attending this kind of event would make her appreciate herself infinitely better than she did now—which, as she entered the house and saw the expectant look of hunger on Mohan’s face, was very little, indeed.

  * * *

  It was her own fault that Cheryl found out about the conference. Typically, Dr. Butt frowned upon the use of their work computers for anything other than official business during operating hours (though he must have known that forbidding Cheryl from such a thing was a fool’s wish). Ranjana rarely broke this rule, but there was a lull in the office that afternoon, so Ranjana typed in the Web site from Cassie’s pamphlet. A bright, busy page greeted her with the faces of some authors she recognized, some she did not. The biggest image was of Pushpa Sondhi, the megabestselling writer, who was the keynote speaker. Ranjana felt scared just seeing this image. This conference was the big leagues.

  Just as she was looking at a page about a workshop on “International Culture and Fiction,” Ranjana smelled Cheryl’s mint-scented breath over her shoulder.

  “What’s this all about? You changing jobs and not telling me?”

  “Shhh!” Ranjana snapped, whipping around and making sure that Dr. Butt hadn’t heard. “No, I am not changing jobs. It’s a conference.”

  “A conference for what?” Cheryl asked, shifting to get another look at the screen while Ranjana shielded it.

  “For writing,” Ranjana said quietly. She had never mentioned this to anyone besides her classmates, Seema, and, sadly, Achyut.

  “Writing what? Like Fifty Shades of Grey? Who knew you were such a deviant!”

  Ranjana looked over the desk to see if the three patients in the waiting room had overheard. They were all pretending to read magazines but were clearly holding back snickers. “No,” Ranjana said, even though she had read the entire Fifty Shades series and kept it tucked away discreetly on a shelf in her “study.”

  “It’s nothing,” Ranjana continued. “Just something I thought might be interesting.”

  “I love to write,” Cheryl said as she sat down. She was wearing large earrings that looked like golden tortellini, and they jiggled every time she moved. “You may not know this about me, but I love to write poetry.”

  “I see,” Ranjana said, closing the writers’ conference window on her screen. Then, as if it were a burp that Cheryl had been trying to suppress:

  “Maybe I should come to this conference with you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “Why not? It’s a writers’ conference, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but, well, I wasn’t even sure if I was going myself.”

  “Now you have a good reason to go! Two sassy girls on the road! It’ll be like Thelma and Louise. Or more like Thelma and … Sorry, I don’t know any Indian names that start with L.”

  “You don’t know any Indian names at all.”

  “Oh, snap!” Cheryl said, smiling all the same. “I know yours. And I know Dr. Butt’s name. Don’t I, Butt?” she shouted, craning backward and lifting a hand to her mouth as a mock-megaphone.

  “I have to check with my friend Cassie,” Ranjana said, feeling the word friend sour in her mouth. “She’s the one who invited me.”

  Dr. Butt soon emerged, mercifully ending their conversation, but Ranjana knew that the damage had been done. She knew that there was absolutely nothing that she could do to deter Cheryl from coming. The more excuses she invented, the more defiant and assertive Cheryl would become in her responses. It was like struggling in quicksand. Ranjana did come up with one potential deterrent—the conference did not actually encourage poets to attend, since it dealt ex
clusively with prose—but Cheryl cheerily informed Ranjana that her writerly gifts were not confined to poetry and that she had several short stories somewhere. Ranjana e-mailed Cassie to float out the idea of Cheryl’s joining them, but the response was both pleasantly surprising and somewhat hurtful: Cassie hadn’t planned on traveling to the conference together; she had merely encouraged Ranjana to attend for her own edification.

  Next, Ranjana tried to suggest that taking the train would be the best option. If anything, it would spare her from tussling with Mohan about taking the car, but more important, it would spare her being in such a confined space with Cheryl (the office was bad enough already). No luck: Cheryl insisted on driving because she had always wanted to take a “girls’ road trip.” Already, the journey had become much more frightening than anything in Ranjana’s novel.

  A solution to this two-person confinement occurred to her while she was stirring daal. She loved hovering over the pot longer than was normal, letting the steam float up and heat her face until it came close to burning. It was her version of a face mask. It reminded her of when she had been sick as a child: her mother would scoop the crystal goo of Vicks VapoRub out of its sapphire jar and drop it into a pan filled with just-boiled water. She would then tip Ranjana over the searing mixture, covering Ranjana’s head and the bowl with a damp towel as one might cover a parakeet’s cage. Unlike her siblings, Ranjana never once complained about this or pulled her face away from the heat. Instead, she would pretend that she was a princess in a goblin’s lair, like one of the heroines in a George MacDonald Fraser tale.

  Something about the imagination that it took to retrieve this memory triggered a response: she thought of being in a cave, and then she thought of Harit’s house.

  She had been looking for ways to entertain him after the party, which had been too tense for her taste. Not just because of Prashant’s outburst—though that had certainly been the most cringeworthy part—but also because Mohan’s enmity toward Harit had been so palpable. She had to make it up to him somehow, and a small journey, though in the presence of Cheryl, would provide a unique opportunity. Who knew—maybe he was even a fledgling writer himself? He may very well find it cathartic to put into writing the story that he had told her about Swati. If the act of writing was proving so helpful to her, perhaps it could have a similar, welcome effect on him.

  The phone rang, pulling her out of her daze and making her see that the daal was starting to burn at the bottom. Reaching for the cordless with her left hand, Ranjana jabbed at the burned bits on the bottom of the pan with the spatula in her right hand, pressed the phone’s ON button, and said, “Hello?”

  “Hello, stranger.” It was Seema. Ranjana felt instantly guilty. She had been so lax at keeping in touch with Seema recently.

  “Ji. Hello. I’m so sorry. Things have been so crazy around here.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. But we have to keep in touch, Ranjana. If we don’t get to the gossip first, others will beat us to the punch.”

  “True.” Ranjana was only half-listening, since the burnt daal was drifting around in the pan like debris in a flood.

  “Can we hang out soon? Why don’t you come over for lunch tomorrow?”

  “I can’t. I’m working.” A thought zapped into Ranjana’s brain. She was suggesting something before she knew it: “Hey, do you know where Paradise Island is?”

  “That weird … thing they’re building? What about it?”

  “Meet me there after work tomorrow—I mean, after I leave the office.”

  “What? Did you join the CIA or something?”

  “Just do it. We’ll chat.”

  Seema was silent on the other end of the phone.

  “Ji?”

  “What’s this I heard about a new friend that was at your party when we were in Pittsburgh? You’re acting very strange, Ranjana.”

  Ranjana tried to flip this comment into a joke. She didn’t feel that she had the energy or patience to succumb to a serious conversation. “Don’t we always act strange? That’s our thing.”

  Seema sighed, annoyed. “I’m not meeting you at some hidden place like we’re planning an assassination, Ranjana. Call me when you have time to have lunch like a normal person.”

  Seema hung up, and Ranjana took out her surprise on the daal by sloshing it around the pan until the nicely cooked and badly burnt pieces collided. “A normal person”? Seema was one to talk. In fact, Seema really was one to talk; she was probably calling someone else right now to relay the odd conversation that they’d just had. In one phone conversation, Seema had managed to solidify Ranjana’s thought that Harit—peaceful, earnest, nongossiping Harit—was just the person she needed right now.

  SEVERAL DAYS HAD PASSED after Ranjana’s party, and Harit worried that he’d never hear from her again. Perhaps she had found their moment in the kitchen strange instead of special. But soon enough, she called him. He could hear the frustration in her voice immediately.

  She went on to describe her upcoming trip, which sounded odder than most things he had encountered. Harit couldn’t quite understand what she meant by her “writing,” but she sounded so desperate for his attendance that he found himself assenting. When he told his mother about it—When he told his mother; he could still not believe that he could do such a thing now—she encouraged him to go.

  The next day at the store, Teddy approached Harit, who was, shockingly, completing a very successful sale: five pairs of cuff links, a belt, and an expensive Kenneth Cole bag that he managed to suggest subtly to the customer, an amiable guy in his twenties. Perhaps it was the momentary gush of excitement about this rare achievement that led Harit to say “I’m going on a trip!” when Teddy asked him if he had any plans for the weekend.

  “With whom?” Teddy asked. Harit struggled for one second to provide a lie, but Teddy was too fast: “Ranjana?”

  Harit knew better than to lie now; there was no way that he could pull it off convincingly.

  “Yes.”

  “And what merry event awaits you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Harit said, relieved to be able to deliver this response in absolute honesty. “Some kind of conference.”

  “A conference?”

  “Yes,” Harit said.

  “How fascinating. And you’re just going as friends?”

  “Um, yes,” Harit said, but the slight pause before his response lifted Teddy’s eyebrows.

  “This is all such a coincidence,” Teddy said, his eyes ablaze. “I was going to ask you to go to a conference this weekend.”

  “What?”

  “Let me guess: you’re going to a writers’ conference.”

  The first thing that occurred to Harit, in spite of his Internet ignorance, was that Teddy had hacked into Ranjana’s computer. “Well, yes.”

  “I’m going to the same one! Pushpa Sondhi is speaking, as you probably know. Ever since I met Ranjana, I’ve tried to read everything of consequence when it comes to Indian literature, and I’ve already read all of her books. What’s the matter with you?”

  Harit was half-laughing, half-guffawing. Of course something like this would happen. Of course. God forbid that anything in life be easy, especially an outing between him and Ranjana. There was no way that he and Ranjana and her friend would escape Teddy’s detection now, so Harit revealed that they would all be attending the very same event. Teddy clapped his hands rigorously.

  “This is the most exciting thing that has happened in forever! Do you guys need a ride?”

  “Actually, Ranjana’s friend is going to be driving us, so I’m not sure if it would be polite to add another.”

  “Oh, forget ‘polite.’ This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I’ll ask Ranjana myself.”

  Harit didn’t understand how, exactly, this managed to make things less awkward, since Ranjana would then have to arbitrate between Teddy and her friend, but he decided to let it be. Ranjana was better equipped to handle social situations like this, and Harit had already seen how a passing
conversation could reveal too much too quickly.

  * * *

  Teddy called Ranjana, of course. Teddy chimed on and on about how he had seen a pop-up ad for the conference (“You order one Pushpa Sondhi book and you’re in the NSA’s system”). He had immediately thought of her and Harit and what a great adventure it would be for all of them. Somehow, Ranjana found herself sympathetic toward him. Whereas in the past she had been annoyed by his overeager approach and his lack of social delicacy, she could hear, as she did in Prashant’s voice, a combination of hope stirred with disillusion—the sense that Teddy was one disappointment away from becoming depressed. She couldn’t allow herself to find him annoying.

  Teddy and Cheryl would either adore or loathe one another. Now that Ranjana thought about it, they seemed almost like siblings. Yes, Teddy was over a decade older than Cheryl, and no, Ranjana had no idea how Cheryl would react to a gay man, but there was some undeniable overlap. Whatever the case, they were all in for a very long ride.

  * * *

  Cheryl picked Ranjana up in her Taurus, the one that they often used for their Wendy’s excursions. It had thankfully been cleared of its usual trash (fast-food wrappers, countless rubber bands, stacks of gossip magazines), and Cheryl had installed a peppermint air freshener. Ranjana had never seen Cheryl out of her office scrubs. Her outfit was actually more tasteful than Ranjana could have imagined—sleek black blouse under a leather jacket, tight blue jeans, brown boots. Ranjana was just about to compliment her when Cheryl spoke:

  “Why, don’t you look wonderful! Did you get a haircut?”

  “Yes,” Ranjana said. The hairdresser had chopped and shaped her hair into a subtle bob.

  “Nice. And your outfit—did you buy that in India?”