“Actually, I bought it here, but it is from India,” Ranjana said. “And thank you. You look wonderful, too, Cheryl.”
“Oh, it’s not often that this girl gets out, sister.”
Ranjana placed her purse at her feet and straightened the salwar kameez that Cheryl had just complimented. It was teal blue with gold embroidery, and she had worn it with a strategic purpose in mind. If this was a writers’ conference and she needed to impress publishers, then she needed to present herself as a beguiling Indian woman. After all, Pushpa Sondhi was one of the most beautiful women in the world. Ranjana had to aim for some kind of elegance.
“Teddy is, you know—he is gay,” Ranjana said. She tried to say the word gay nonchalantly but ended up prolonging the long a sound.
Cheryl widened her eyes. “You made friends with a gay man? Aren’t you something.”
Ranjana took this as a signal that everything was fine.
Her chest tightened as they drove the few miles to Harit’s house. After Teddy had called her, she had called Harit, reassuring him that telling Teddy wasn’t such an imposition. As they pulled up to his house, he looked—could it be?—excited. He was holding a dish of some sort, and he had also dressed nicely—crisp brown slacks, tan jacket, shiny black shoes, a thick wool coat. He had combed his long hair. It didn’t matter how dated the clothes were or how forced the hairstyle seemed; there was something charming about his having made an effort.
Ranjana got out of the car to greet him.
“Namaste, ji,” she said, and he repeated her greeting. “Did you make something?”
“I brought some pakoras,” he said, offering them to her as if they weren’t both getting in the car. She took them anyway, then motioned for him to get in the backseat. She knew that he would feel weird if she opened the door for him, and she would have felt weird, too. So they opened their respective doors as Cheryl’s voice spilled out.
“Why, hello, there! I can’t believe that I’m finally meeting one of Ranjana’s friends! I’m Cheryl, but you probably already know that.”
“Of course.” Through the visor mirror, Ranjana could see Harit nod kindly.
Ranjana had printed Google directions to both Harit’s and Teddy’s houses, but Cheryl had a GPS device clipped to her dashboard that she insisted on using, so she typed in Teddy’s address while Ranjana recited it. Harit interjected, saying that he knew the way, but Cheryl insisted, saying that she had a way of getting lost even when people were giving her directions. Ranjana and Harit caught each other’s eyes in the mirror at the exact same time.
“So, how long have you been in America?” Cheryl asked, shouting over the robotic GPS voice as if it were a football game.
“Over fifteen years,” Harit said.
“And you live in that house all by yourself?”
“No. I live with my mother.”
“Oh, I see. God, I would die if I had to live with my mother. I mean, she’s dead already, but I mean if she were still alive.”
“How is your mother?” Ranjana asked Harit quickly. In her haste, she had asked the question in Hindi and was aware that this would make things harder for all of them. “I asked him how his mother is doing,” she said to Cheryl, who nodded.
“She is fine,” Harit said shortly, the statement thudding.
“Great,” Ranjana said. She was actually looking forward to picking up Teddy now.
“What’s your mom’s name?” Cheryl asked.
“Um, Parvati,” Harit said.
“Um-par-vutty. What a pretty name,” Cheryl said, of course. “How do you spell that?”
Harit spelled it.
“Oh! Like in Harry Potter!”
“What?”
Ranjana clarified. “There’s a character in the Harry Potter books named Parvati.”
“Oh,” Harit said.
“She has a twin sister,” said Cheryl. “What’s the other one’s name?”
“Padma,” Ranjana said. “Actually, Parvati and Padma are the names of twin sisters in Midnight’s Children.”
“Oh—is that a TV show?”
Ranjana pushed ahead. “Harit works at Harriman’s.”
“Oh?” Cheryl said. “Do you get a big discount?”
“No,” said Harit.
* * *
It was something out of one of those indie movies that she and Mohan would see with Prashant—stories about white families who wore solid colors and moved in worlds of carefully plucked ukuleles. These characters always found some common bond, and it usually resulted from being in a car together. Here she was, surrounded by a mint-chewing coworker, a gay stalker, and an Indian man who thought it normal to bring pakoras on a road trip with strangers. Wes Anderson would have had a field day.
Naturally, Cheryl talked the entire time. She thought she had sciatica. She needed a new recipe for Rice Krispie Treats. She could never remember which one was Sasha and which one was Malia. She loved cashews more than walnuts. She could eat a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Wendy’s every day for the rest of her life and be happy. (“You should buy stock in Imodium,” Teddy responded.) She wanted to go to Bermuda because she was “fascinated by the Caribbean.” She had psoriasis. She had once done cocaine at a friend’s intervention. She loved eating popcorn with peanut butter on it. She had buried her dead cat in her backyard.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
What made this bearable for Ranjana was watching Harit’s reaction to everything. Cheryl might as well have been speaking Japanese backward. At one point, Harit rested his head against the frosty window and closed his eyes, though it would have been impossible to sleep while listening to this barrage of commentary. Nevertheless, Ranjana had to admire Cheryl, someone so unabashedly unaware of tact or discomfort. Even Teddy, for all of his similar inclinations, seemed to throw in the towel when Cheryl began her disquisition on using lemon juice to clean furniture. Finally, they found a rest stop outside Fort Wayne that had a Wendy’s. Ranjana stayed in the car, joining Harit and Teddy for ten blissful moments of silence while Cheryl went inside to enjoy her sandwich.
IN THE BEGINNING, Ranjana was wary of reading Pushpa Sondhi’s work. She first learned about the author in a praiseworthy New York Times story. In the glamorous photo that accompanied the piece, Sondhi was almost in profile, the light catching the right side of her face, her hair pulled behind her. She wore a ribbed turtleneck, the kind that a stylish professor or art curator would have worn, and her mouth fell into a calm half-smile. Because the photo was in black and white and the lighting was so bright, she didn’t look Indian. She looked like a South American aristocrat, maybe a wealthy Middle Easterner. The more that Ranjana ran her eyes over the photograph, the more she felt herself being effaced in two ways: by seeing a writer deemed important yet culturally neutered; and by thinking that a foreign, female author could not succeed on merit alone.
In protest, Ranjana avoided reading Sondhi’s first book, Wisdom of Ages. Only a couple of years later when she came across a paperback copy at a bookstore selling used books did her curiosity finally get the best of her. Mohan was working late at the university, so she took the book with her to a diner, where she sat with a piece of apple pie and a hot tea and read it cover to cover. She wasn’t one to cry when reading—and she didn’t cry then—but she felt the book in her gut as if she had eaten it along with the pie. The lyricism of the writing. Its stark depictions of immigrant life. Its even starker depictions of married life, which involved so many nuanced characters. The New York Times’s fixation on the author’s attractiveness had been no more than a brown herring.
Proud of herself for having judged the work instead of appearances, Ranjana felt justified in judging the attractiveness of Sondhi’s ensuing author photographs. The next one was even more arresting, another black-and-white photo shot in some kind of high resolution that made it seem like a portrait drawn in pencil. Not only had that first photo deprived Sondhi of her true ethnicity, but it had repurposed the lines of her face so that you couldn’t see
its beautiful width, the round eyes that drew the light straight into them. Not so with the second photo, which seized upon those eyes to momentous effect, revealing more of her heritage. The sprawling silk shawl covering Sondhi’s shoulders gave off the air of otherworldly aristocracy.
Eventually, the photograph for The Forsaken, the author’s third book, got everything right: there she was, in color, her Indianness complete, her face earnestly tilted forward while a caftan-like blouse, zebra-striped, floated around her. It was the first photo that captured the integrity of the author’s background and the integrity of her beauty.
Ranjana had become a dedicated fan. She felt a bit predictable, since everyone who engaged her in any discussion about books always brought up Sondhi. Ranjana would usually slough off the conversation and move to another topic; she wanted to insulate her legitimate enjoyment of the author’s writing from any possibly racist observations that would have debased it. She felt a deep connection to the work—a connection that she viewed as unique, hallowed. The greatest skill that an author could possess, she thought, was the ability to make a reader see a book as his or her child, someone only the reader in question could truly appreciate, love, and protect.
Ranjana wanted to be able to take her robust knowledge of Sondhi’s work, shift it from the container of her brain to the tips of her fingertips, and pour some garbled but nevertheless potent version of it into her own writing. She wanted to believe that if you worked passionately enough, you could create the appearance of something truly great.
* * *
They all realized quite quickly that there was nothing more terrifying than a group of amateur writers.
All the attendees were jittery—clutching their folders and messenger bags and dog-eared books and rubber-banded manuscripts. Even though each writer was allowed only a twenty-page sample to share with the visiting editors and agents, many seemed to have printed out their lifework. They held the manuscripts to their chests as if they had to be fiercely guarded, lest someone steal their ideas through the pages.
Ranjana, Harit, Teddy, and Cheryl checked in at the front desk, then were signed into the conference by a perky young woman who looked as if she could have imagined no greater gift than passing out name tags on lanyards. Both of Ranjana’s names were misspelled, which would normally have been unsurprising, but this was a writers’ conference, so it seemed particularly egregious. Harit’s first name was fine, but his last name had two letters switched.
“Maybe we should just switch name tags. No one will notice,” Harit said, and Ranjana laughed out loud. Despite the ordeal that it had taken for them to get here, Ranjana knew: she was glad that they were doing this, pleased to discover that you could feel a friendship’s construction if you took the time and care to notice it.
“Should we drop our stuff off and then head to the panel?” Cheryl asked. She had signed all of them up for one of the first panels: “Who Should an Author Be?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Teddy said. Having been steamrolled by Cheryl during the road trip, he seemed newly energized.
They headed up in the elevator. It was a bit tense, given that Harit and Teddy were taking separate rooms while Ranjana and Cheryl were inhabiting the same one. Ranjana and Cheryl got off on the ninth floor, and Teddy and Harit headed to the tenth floor—of course, they had ended up mere doors apart from each other.
* * *
Despite the reinvigorating change back at his house, Harit felt the emptiness of his hotel room as if it were a long-coveted gift. There was poetry in the smooth comforter, the stiff curtains, the tasseled pillows, the sheen of the dresser and end tables. When he sat on the bed and caught his reflection in the mirror, he saw it as a portrait that had taken decades to paint. He felt a catch in his throat. He had worried that he might cry as soon as he got into this room, and he bent over and let it happen. His voice snagged on his sobs before laughter overtook them, and soon he was lying flat on the floor and feeling the rise of his stomach under his hands. It seemed so simple, but perhaps what he had needed was to be in a different city—to be somewhere away from the small square mileage of sidewalk, bedroom, bus, and aisle that had been his life for so long. He had never seen this ceiling, would probably never study its cake-smooth whiteness again, and he loved it for that. He loved it for its newness and its unimportance and its fleetingness. For a weekend, this room was his and no one else’s. Hotels let you be as selfish as you wanted, and he was going to be selfish, selfish, selfish.
* * *
Harit was the last to rejoin them back in the lobby. He seemed to have splashed some water on his face and combed his hair. They headed to where the panel was being held, a compact space made all the more compact due to the partition that had been dragged across the room to separate it from another event. About forty chairs were arranged in neat rows, and very few of them were empty. Ranjana asked if a few people might shift to accommodate her group, and they rearranged themselves quickly, mostly because no one wanted to be the last person standing up and complaining when the event began.
The room fell silent as a group of three professionals, two women and a man, was led in. The women had the easy fashion of New York City diehards, but the man was unkempt, with long, curly hair and an outfit of half-unbuttoned shirt, chinos, and loafers.
A woman in a bright yellow blouse greeted the room and asked everyone to turn off their cell phones, which was met with a titter of laughter and no activity on anyone’s part.
“I’m Sandy Gearhardt, one of the founders of the conference and a writer myself.” She tossed her head to one side and licked her lips as the audience produced a small burst of claps. “I want to welcome you to today’s panel, ‘Who Should an Author Be?’ Our guests are Suzie Hart, owner of her own boutique literary agency; Cathryn Calyer, senior editor at Spectacle; and Ezra Mann, publisher and editor in chief of Green Umbrella Press. All of them are successful and accomplished publishing folk who count Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestsellers, and yes, superstar YA authors among their lists. Please join me in welcoming them.”
A labored round of applause echoed around the room.
“We’ll start with an easy question,” Sandy said, settling into a seat and pulling out a series of salmon-colored index cards. “How much does an author’s personality have to do with whether or not you decide to publish his or her work?”
The publishing trio sighed, its members looking at each other as if they’d never seen each other before and would never speak to each other again. “I guess I’ll start,” Suzie said, freeing a strand of chocolate-dyed hair from her cheek by flicking her head. “If I’m being prim and proper and ‘literary’”—at this word, she rolled her eyes and jutted out her jaw—“I’ll say that it doesn’t matter at all. It’s all about the writing. It’s all about what I see on the page. It’s all about that lightning moment of finding a writer with a fresh, surprising point of view. It’s about the truth and power of the written word. But the truth is that I’ve definitely turned down books after speaking with the author and finding out she’s a total basket case.”
A few gasping laughs popped up.
“You see, I’m an agent,” Suzie said. She flipped her hair again. “It’s not just about the writing. It’s about forging a longtime collaboration with someone you’re going to do book after book with. And if the person writes like a dream, that’s what you want; that’s fantastic. But if the person can’t carry on a conversation like a normal human being, then who wants to work with that for years? I had an author once who was like Rumpelstiltskin. She would take the English language and spin it into beautiful sentences and stories. And I loved her; I really did. But she was always having some crisis that I couldn’t even try to deal with. She was one of these people who always sounded like she was collapsing under the weight of her own genius. And when that constant collapse gets in the way of being able to sign a contract or deliver a manuscript on time, it’s just not worth my fucking time.”
Then sh
e added, “Sorry—time. Not ‘fucking time.’”
“Well, that’s one way to put it,” Ezra began, leaning on the table and holding his head up with one hand. “As a publisher, I must respectfully disagree. Our job is to publish great writing. It’s to nurture great writers. It’s to show that, in this tiny, oft-forgotten forum of the literary arts, that we are capable of putting aside psychological trauma and its victims and getting wonderful stories in front of readers. That’s what we do. That’s the job. At least it is for me.”
The laughter in the room was becoming more strained.
“And you, Cathryn?” Sandy asked.
Cathryn didn’t look as if she wanted to enter into this discussion.
“Um, I just like to publish fun stuff!” she said, eliciting more genuine laughter amidst the tension. “I don’t really think it’s rocket science. Writers are inherently kind of loony. I mean, it’s the truth! You have to be a little bit insane to want to write anything down and have people read it. It’s sheer madness. With all of the things that people have in the world to divert their attention, with media and texting and whatever people are doing—”
“With social media,” Ezra muttered.
“With social media! It’s so hard to know what the writing life is that we have to be a little off-kilter to even enter into this world. So I always take authors with a grain of salt. Honestly, though, I feel like we’ve veered somewhat off topic.”
“Well, sorry,” Suzie said, coughing out a bitter laugh.
“Let’s move on to the next question,” Sandy said. She flipped to the next card, frowned, then flipped to another, then another. “How about we talk about who your favorite authors are. Ezra, how about you?”
“You mean which of my Pulitzer winners do I love the most?”
* * *
Afterward, there was a buffet lunch in one of the ballrooms. Although they had been encouraged to socialize with other people and keep their literary conversations going, Ranjana, Harit, Teddy, and Cheryl huddled at their own table. There was surprisingly a lot for Harit and Ranjana to eat; they piled steamed vegetables and rolls and fruit onto their plates while Teddy and Cheryl assembled towers of thick cheese and cold cuts.
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