by Neel Patel
“What?” she said, sharply.
I gawked at her. It was like the final moments before hitting a car. You know it’s about to happen, you know there’s nothing you can do about it, and yet you try, pointlessly, to avoid it.
“Nothing,” I said. And then, just as she was about to turn back around, “I like your hair.”
“What?”
“Your hair. It smells fresh. There’s this Chinese girl who sits in front of me in Trigonometry, and her hair smells like fried food. But yours is clean. I like it.”
I thought she would smile at me, the way she had smiled at other guys who paid her court, but she looked at me like I’d just soiled myself. Her nostrils flared as she turned around and twisted the bright silk slash of her hair into a knot, then inched forward in her seat. I told Deepak about this later, in my bedroom, after my parents had gone to sleep.
“You idiot.”
He was drinking a beer, one of the many pony-necked bottles he’d taken from a crate in our garage, hiding it under his sweatshirt (even though he was twenty-one). He’d offered me a sip, and, when I’d refused, he’d said I shouldn’t be such a pussy all the time.
“These white girls don’t even see you,” he said, taking a swig of his beer and stretching his legs over my bed. I was on the floor, studying the back pages of a Nas CD insert, memorizing the lyrics so that I could rap them out loud in the shower.
“All they see is what they can get from you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you study history?”
I shrugged.
I studied the variations of Alicia’s skin tone, how it was mottled and red after gym class, and how it shifted from alabaster to bronze in the summertime. I studied the way her breasts rippled like Jell-O every time she came rushing into the room. I studied, still, the way she mispronounced certain words in Spanish class, never bothering to correct herself—never needing to. I studied the way she glided up and down the stairs with such ease you would have thought the whole school was built in her honor, a monument to her beauty, which, if it were up to me, would have probably been the case.
Deepak finished his beer, belched loudly, and tossed the bottle into my backpack.
“Get rid of it for me.”
Then he got up and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Out.”
“With who?”
“Friends.”
I laughed. “You don’t have friends.”
It was true: the friends who’d once idolized Deepak, who sat around listening to whatever sordid exploits he’d gotten himself into, were all gone. They were in college now, studying to become doctors or pharmacists or dentists. Deepak spent his Friday nights in front of the television, playing video games.
“I have new friends,” he said, smiling. And he walked out of the room.
* * *
The new friend was sitting on our couch one afternoon when I came home from school, eating popcorn and jiggling her legs up and down. She wore leggings and a pink sweater that hung precariously over one shoulder, revealing the brown slope of her skin.
“Hi there,” she said, flashing a set of cherry-red nails.
Her dark hair was highlighted—orange strands over black ones—and her eyes were winged with mascara. She watched me as I dropped my backpack on the floor.
“I’m Deepika,” she said. “You must be Deep’s brother.”
I remembered the night Deepak had walked up to me in the parking lot, raising his finger to my nose. I shook the image from my mind. She told me that Deepak was in the shower; they had gone swimming at my parents’ motel after work.
“You work at the motel?” I asked.
She nodded her head. “Just until grad school. I’m studying epidemiology.”
“Are you dating my brother?”
She paused, a subtle smile playing across her lips. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I said, sitting down beside her. “But if you were dating him, if you two got married, it would be weird.”
“Why?”
“Because of your names: Deepak and Deepika. It sounds ridiculous.”
She laughed out loud, showing all of her teeth. I didn’t think it was that funny, but she dropped her bag of popcorn on the floor and held on to her gut, as if she were in pain. Then she grew still. “I don’t know if we’re dating,” she said, quietly, and I knew, by the way she looked at me, by the way she looked at my brother each day after that, that she hoped they were.
* * *
Soon, I was prepping for college, graduating from high school. There was a weird energy in the air. Suddenly, the people who had spent four years tormenting me, calling me names, weren’t so bad after all. It was like being trapped on an airplane with a bunch of people who were tired and miserable, and all of a sudden you were landing and everyone was in love. I would see classmates who previously ignored me take a sudden interest in my life. I saw Alicia once at the movie theater and she gave me a hug—she was going to community college that fall; she wanted to be a nurse. The day I left for school, Deepak helped me pack all of my things in milk crates and cardboard boxes and carry them out to my father’s van. He slipped a bottle of vodka into my suitcase. He told me not to become an asshole at college. He said that he would visit me sometime, that we would get drunk on campus and that he would buy all my roommates and girlfriends a round of beer. But he never did.
* * *
When I came back for Thanksgiving, he was depressed again. My parents had purchased another motel, and Deepak was driving there three times a week to manage it. This time he’d lost weight. His face was slimmer. His waist had thinned out. He said very little at the dinner table before slipping out to a bar. The next morning, my mother sat down with me in the living room, frowning.
“It’s that girl,” she said.
“Which girl?”
But I remembered her name. “Deepika?”
She nodded her head. Deepak and my father were at work. My mother was in her dressing gown. We were quiet for a while. Then she told me, very discreetly, that two weeks earlier, Deepak had proposed to Deepika in the honeymoon suite at the motel, and that she had refused. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.
“What’s your problem?” my mother said, sharply. “Why are you laughing?”
But I couldn’t control it. It rose from my gut, bubbling over my lips. I dropped the remote control and hunched over the living room sofa, laughing and laughing, until tears streamed from my eyes.
“Be sharam,” my mother exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “To laugh at your brother this way.”
But later, in my bedroom, it was Deepak who laughed. We were drinking a beer—I’d developed a taste for it by then, along with Bailey’s Irish Cream—when he shook his head.
“Don’t listen to Mom,” he said, pushing one of my baseball caps over his head. “She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.”
I didn’t know whom to believe, but after a few days it didn’t seem to matter. As soon as I had arrived it was time to leave again, and I was packing suitcases with the sweaters I’d left behind, thick thermals and jeans, tall boots for the blustery treks to class. I kissed my tearful mother and shook my father’s hand, and dodged Deepak’s swift punch to my left shoulder. He could still overpower me—I had stopped growing, and, at five foot eight, I was far shorter than he.
This didn’t seem to matter at school, where I noticed a budding interest from girls, Indian girls mostly, whom I mostly ignored. I continued to harbor crushes on white girls, only now they weren’t so unattainable. At parties, I would touch their breasts or their ass as we navigated a crowd, filling their cups with rum punch, watching their lips turn purple or red. Sometimes I would go home with one of them, fumbling with the zipper of my jeans. I grew bolder, asking for one phone number and then another, taking them out for coffee, sometimes not calling at all. Once, a girl named Aubrey fell in love with me, showing up
at my dorm room at 3 A.M., screaming and crying until the RA had to escort her home. I developed a thick skin, not minding when girls started calling me names, only this time it wasn’t “Aladdin” or “Ali Baba” or “Apu”; it was “asshole”; it was “prick”; it was “motherfucker.” Instead of asking me where I was from, they asked me how I could be so heartless and cruel. I realized that we weren’t so different after all, the girls and I—that, when it came to love, everyone was from a foreign place.
* * *
Deepak certainly was. Shortly before spring break, he drove six hours to the University of Michigan and proposed to Deepika right outside her apartment. To everyone’s surprise, and her parents’ disgust and dismay, she said yes. My parents were thrilled; they threw a big party for Deepak and Deepika over spring break, inviting 150 people, renting long tables and chairs, setting up a tent and catering food from the local Indian restaurant, Mughal King. My father went to Sam’s Club and bought ten bottles of Black Label scotch and thirty bottles of white wine. On a bright Saturday afternoon, Deepak and I unfolded chairs and carried bags of ice over our shoulders, dropping spoons into large vats of food: chicken tikka masala, two types of dal, potatoes and eggplant swimming in saffron-tinted oil.
I drank a beer in my bedroom. Deepak joined me. We glanced outside to watch the stream of my parents’ friends in their saris the colors of tropical fruit candy. Deepak pulled back the curtain, frowning.
“It’s like a circus down there.”
I laughed.
“This will be you someday,” he said. He chugged his beer and opened another one. I could tell, by his eyes, that he had been drinking somewhere before. He wore dress slacks and a collared white shirt, and he was examining himself in the mirror when he turned around and smiled. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
It was the first time he had expressed an interest in my life. Usually, when I talked about school, Deepak would nod along vacantly—as if he were listening to one of the many stories my parents had told about their childhoods in India, with the vague expression of someone who had never lived there before. But this time he was rapt.
“No,” I said, shyly. Though this was a lie. I did have a girlfriend. Her name was Kara, and she had called three times that afternoon—in spite of my instructions not to.
“Why can’t I come?” she’d asked. When I’d told her why, when I had explained to her the glaring differences between her world and mine, she had cried and cried until she couldn’t breathe anymore, saying it didn’t matter, that we were all just people in the end.
* * *
Two hours later, Deepak was drunk. I could tell by the way he was dancing. The DJ was playing Panjabi MC, and Deepak was waving his arms around like a rapper. I was talking to a girl I’d had tennis lessons with—Rachana Desai—who was a first-year at Yale. She wore a crushed silk sari. She talked about the Whiffenpoofs. She kept adjusting the straps of her bra. At one point I imagined myself kissing her, taking her up to my room. I imagined what she looked like between her legs, how dark or soft or wet. By then I’d had sex with three different girls—all of them white. All of them had rosy nipples and porcelain skin. All of them stripped off their clothes with a confidence I had never seen before in a girl. I was thinking about this when my cell phone bleated and I saw Kara’s name in the window. I excused myself, winding my way through the crowd of uncles and aunties and friends, sneaking a beer from the bar, until I was alone in the house. I went upstairs, where I would be away from prying eyes, and opened the bathroom door.
“Oh, shit,” I said, turning my head. “Sorry.”
It was Deepika. She was standing in front of the mirror, adjusting the straps of her blouse. Her hair was spun up in a jeweled mound on top of her head. She looked beautiful. Normally she wore leggings and sweatshirts and gym shoes and socks, but here, in her colorful lengha, with a bindi between her brows, she looked regal. I had no idea she was crying. I didn’t realize it until she turned her head.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing,” she replied.
“I can leave,” I said, backing away, ignoring Kara’s missed calls. “I’ll give you your space. I was just trying to get away.”
“No, stay,” she said. She took a tissue from the counter and dabbed the skin under her eyes. Then she laughed. “I feel like a cliché.”
“The crying bride?”
“Bride-to-be,” she said. “I was thinking about something you said to me a while back.”
“Something I said?”
She nodded. “About Deepak and I, how if we ever got married it would be weird: our names. Deepak and Deepika.”
I was surprised that she even remembered it; it had already been two years.
“I guess it is kind of weird,” she said, staring at her reflection in the mirror. I remembered the way she had laughed in the living room when I had told her, dropping her bag of popcorn onto the floor. I wanted to ask her if she was okay, if she needed to talk, if my brother had done something wrong, but by then I had learned enough to know that sometimes, when a woman cried, it was best to say nothing at all.
Two years later, Deepak and Deepika got married, in a ceremony that made their engagement look like a small tea party. Kara wasn’t invited to that, either, and, three days later, after fighting all night in my room, we broke up. Sometimes I would remember that night of the party and wonder what Deepika had been crying about. A year after their wedding, when Deepak and I had what will forever be referred to as “the fight,” the thing that tore us apart, the thing that made us disavow each other and promise to never speak to one another again, I realized I never would.
* * *
It started with a girl. Her name was Marissa, and she went to my med school. She asked me for directions to the medical library and I asked her for her phone number. She wasn’t like anyone I had dated before. By the time she was twenty-four, Marissa had been to twenty-four different countries, posting pictures on her blog. She had long dark hair the color of red wine. Her eyes were like sapphires, but she was not beautiful in any conventional way. That is to say, it wasn’t her looks that drew me to her. It was her voice, the funny things she said, the way her eyes flashed wildly whenever I told her a story about my day. Over time, her beauty revealed itself to me like an undiscovered painting in an unknown wing.
We spent our weekends exploring the city of Chicago, where we went to school—going to restaurants and thrift shops and nightclubs and bars. She had an appetite for new experiences, suggesting foods I had never tried before, that neither Deepak nor my parents would ever deign to eat—Indonesian, Peruvian, Ethiopian. If we happened to go to an Indian restaurant, Marissa would skip past the chicken tikka masala and go straight for the lamb karahi. She ate with her fingers, explaining that her best friend in grade school, Sangeeta, was Indian, and that she had taught her this when they were twelve. I was in awe of her. Unlike other white women, who viewed my background as a barrier, Marissa was happy to accept me just as I was. At times she would ask me how to say something in Gujarati, and I was reminded of being a child, in school, teaching my classmates to say “namaste” with their hands.
I taught her “ben-chod” instead.
“That’s awesome,” she said, laughing, and later, when a waiter happened to be rude to us at a French restaurant, Marissa got up from the table and said it: “Arre ben-chod!”
I knew, then, that I was in love.
* * *
I also knew I couldn’t keep her from my family. By then, my mother had begun to suggest girls for me, some daughter of a friend who worked in an office or a bank—or, like me, was in med school. “Why have one doctor in the family when you can have two?” she’d say.
It went better than I thought it would; as it turned out, my parents had grown accustomed to the idea of mixed marriages. They brought up the friends whose sons and daughters had also married “whites,” who had Hindu-Christian weddings and light-skinned children, and who assigned these children Indo-Americ
an names, names like Dillon, which, in Hindi, would have been spelled Dhilan. They had heard that white people loved Indian culture, anyway, and that it wasn’t such a big deal after all. They were more than accepting; they were thrilled. I would have been, too, had I been announcing our engagement, but I wasn’t. We’d only been dating for a year.
“Bring her home,” my mother said, standing in the kitchen, frying a batch of samosas, making double of everything and wrapping it twice. “We want to meet her.”
* * *
On a cold autumn morning, Marissa and I boarded an Amtrak from Chicago to Bloomington, where my father was waiting for us with his van. He helped load our luggage into the trunk, avoiding eye contact with Marissa as he opened the door for her, behaving more like a driver than a dad. I was instantly annoyed. I was annoyed, further, by the abundance of food on the dining room table. I had told my mother a sandwich would do—it was Thanksgiving weekend, and there was no need to overeat. But of course she didn’t listen. She was solicitous, shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and dining room table, piling puris onto our plates, not bothering to ask if we were hungry. She pronounced Marissa’s name “Mareesa,” and she was overly chatty, telling her mundane facts about our town: about the groceries that were on sale, the two-for-one sweaters at Kohl’s. Marissa’s parents were both professors at Northwestern, and the one time we had gone to their house, we didn’t talk at all, listening to Buddha Bar and drinking red wine.
“Your family is great,” she said later, in the bedroom, when we were unpacking our bags. I wondered what she would think of Deepak. She hadn’t met him yet. He was at the motel, manning the front desk. I asked my mother where Deepika was and she rolled her eyes.