by Akhil Sharma
The arrested men stood in a cell on one side of a brightly lit room. It was a little after midnight. A short, stocky policewoman was taking mug shots. When she was done, she came over and, looking bored, her hands on her hips, said, “You know, when you have sex with a prostitute you might as well be having sex with every guy she’s slept with.”
A bearded Hasidic man sidled up to the front of the cell. “I was just e-mailing the girl,” he said. “I only offered money to help.” He had a high cracking voice, and his eyes were very wide. He spoke so sincerely that he seemed to believe himself. A Latino guy in a blue mechanic’s uniform was crouched in a corner of the cell, speaking tenderly through the bars to an underage prostitute who was seated on a folding chair, her slender wrist handcuffed to a bar. Until he began talking to the girl, the Latino had said only one thing, while being shoved into the van: “Shit, it’s my birthday.”
Around two in the morning, the men, all chained together, were led shuffling down the precinct steps. Gautama was near the end of the chain. The cold night air felt alien. He saw cars go by, their wheels hissing, and wanted to hide his face in his shoulder. The men ahead of him began climbing into the back of a white van. Gautama waited his turn, and as he did he felt that he and the other men had entered some strange narrow world—there was a world that was spacious and normal, where people drove home at night, and, next to it, off to the side, was another world that was so constricted that living in it was like walking between two pressed together walls.
In Central Booking, the men were led one by one into separate cells. The cells had bunk beds and steel toilets. In Gautama’s cell, the wall beside the toilet bore long fingerlike streaks of shit. He lay down on the lower bunk. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt. He hugged himself and pulled his knees to his stomach.
Gautama was from Gwalior, a small city in Madhya Pradesh, one of those wretched places where the streets are narrow and crowded and where shopkeepers in the central market sell illegal postcards of suttees sitting on bonfires. When a merchant sold one to you, he’d touch the card to his forehead as if he wanted a last blessing before letting the goddess leave.
Gautama was an ordinary middle-class boy. He knew he would have to get married one day, and he hoped to have as much sex as possible before then, but he also believed that any Indian girl who had sex before marriage had something wrong with her, was in some way depraved and foul and also unintelligent. He wished he could have sex with Sunny Leone.
Gautama rolled over to face the cinder-block wall. From down the hall came the voice of a young man who had been in the holding cell with him. The young man had tried to start up conversations by asking the other men about their jobs. “I have cigarettes,” he now called to whoever might be listening. “You OK,” someone answered in fake solidarity.
Gautama’s favorite thing about hiring prostitutes was negotiating the price. This was because actually having sex with a prostitute seemed so immoral that it was hard to enjoy it. As soon as he’d called a prostitute and left a message with a made-up name, he’d start to feel scared of what he’d set in motion, and a part of him would not want the woman to call back. If she did, he’d get excited. His mouth would go dry. He’d ask whether the hundred and fifty roses she asked for in her ad could be reduced. Often the woman hung up. Periodically, he and the prostitute would reach an agreement and set a time for her to come over. Most often then, in a panic, he would hurry out of the apartment. He lived in the Bronx, next to a bodega near the Grand Concourse. He would rush to put some distance between him and his building and then walk for hours, his heart racing. Whenever people glanced at him, he’d feel as if they might grab him and beat him.
Occasionally, Gautama stayed in his apartment and waited for the woman to arrive. His building was a walk-up, and he lived on the fourth floor, in a studio with a single large window, which was divided by metal brackets into many small panes. When the prostitute got to his apartment, she’d be out of breath and look irritated at having had to climb the stairs. He would invite her in and then tell her that she didn’t look like the photos she’d texted and ask her to reduce her price again. As he did this, he was hoping that the woman would just demand cab fare and leave. Usually, she shouted at him. Sometimes, cursing him, she reduced the price by ten or fifteen dollars. The actual sex after all this was almost always wretched: Gautama wearing double condoms, and the woman beneath him looking angry, telling him, “Don’t touch the breasts.”
As he lay on his side in the cell, a thought came to him: he should just get married. Most of his cousins who were his age were married already. He felt that if he were married he wouldn’t hire prostitutes, he wouldn’t be ridiculous, he wouldn’t do things like call a hooker and ask if the “afternoon delight” rate still applied, even though it was evening.
AT ELEVEN THE NEXT morning, Gautama was released.
For two days, he went to a park and picked up litter while wearing an orange vest. Kids went whizzing by him on bicycles, calling, “What you did, punk?” When he didn’t respond, one of them, emboldened, stopped a few feet from him and shouted, “I’ll make you my bitch!” It seemed to him that this was the world that his actions had brought him into. He picked up garbage and imagined being married, being a father, having a son. He imagined working hard and earning money to take care of his family. Imagining this, he felt comforted, as if he were already living that life.
Nirmala was a little over five feet tall. She had a round face and a round body and shiny black hair. She liked to gossip and laugh, especially about politicians. She, too, was from a small city, from a family of doctors. She had not been able to get into medical school, so she was getting a Ph.D. in biology. Nirmala was popular among the foreign graduate students. Partly this was because she was cheerful. Partly, also, it was because she was kind. She always remembered people’s birthdays and tried to organize a cake or a dinner or at least a card. When somebody was sick, she visited and brought food. Gautama had spoken to Nirmala only a few times. Since other people respected her, he assumed she was admirable.
Nirmala worked at the circulation desk in the big atrium at Bobst Library. Gautama began drifting among the shelves of reference books to look at her. Normally, she took her lunch break at twelve thirty. One day, he walked up to the circulation desk. He felt self-conscious about his face, about his long body, about the fact that his breath might smell of coffee. “Do you want to have lunch?” he asked, and giggled.
“With you?”
“Yes.”
The graduate students from India, even when they didn’t know each other well, treated one another with the politeness of people who live in the same lane.
Gautama and Nirmala went to a seminar room to eat. There was a conference table, a whiteboard, a projector on a rolling table. They had brought their lunches in plastic grocery-store bags, and when they sat down, she asked what kind of water his city had. “Hard water,” he said, and she told him that she still found it amazing that in America one could drink from the tap.
They removed the aluminum foil their rotis were rolled up in. The crinkling of the foil sounded loud to Gautama. At first, they ate in silence, like people traveling together on a bus. Gautama had been imagining what kind of marriage he wanted, and he felt he needed to be as honest as possible in order to have the sort of relationship he was envisioning. He told Nirmala the thing that felt most precious to him.
“My sister has epilepsy.”
Gautama’s parents had not told his sister, his only sibling, what condition she had. They had told him instead, because he was a boy. His sister was four years older than he was, and his relationship with her had always involved his feeling that he’d had good luck while she’d had bad. He was haunted by the image of his sister swallowing pills whose purpose she didn’t understand, standing beside the kitchen sink, taking one pill from their mother’s outstretched palm and then a second and then opening her mouth to show their mother that it was empty.
In India, public kn
owledge of his sister’s epilepsy would have marked the whole family as defective. Telling someone about her for the first time, Gautama felt careless, immature, selfish. “When we began looking for a boy for her, my parents had to tell whoever was considering her about the epilepsy,” he said. Several of the families his parents negotiated with declined to pursue a marriage. One finally agreed to it after his parents promised a house in the city, a farm, and a foreign car. After the dowry had been agreed upon, the groom’s grandfather, feeling that he had not been adequately consulted, forbade the marriage.
Gautama was seventeen then. He went with his father to the electronics shop that the groom’s family owned. They stood in the parking lot outside the shop, surrounded by scooters. The sun was hot, and the diesel in the air hurt Gautama’s eyes and throat.
His father pleaded with the grandfather, who was wearing a white kurta pajama. “What is the matter?” his father said, touching the old man’s elbow. “She is a good girl. We have ordered the food for the engagement.”
“You tried to be smart, didn’t you?” the old man scolded. “Trying to hide your shame with such a large dowry.”
Because of her epilepsy, his sister, who had a bachelor’s degree, was now married to a laborer who had not finished high school. The man lived in Saudi Arabia doing construction work, and his parents treated Gautama’s sister as a servant.
As Nirmala listened, she looked concerned. After he’d finished speaking, she was silent for a while. Softly, she said, “When your sister’s children are ready for education, you can pay for it.” She said this because she knew that sometimes the only relief possible is the thought that one day we’ll be able to help in some small way. But Gautama had so much adrenaline in him that he had a hard time understanding what she was saying. She seemed to be talking about something other than what he had just told her.
Several hours later, sitting in an office chair, looking at a computer screen, in a very cold lab, he began to feel an unclenching. Having told somebody about his sister made the world feel bigger, as if there were more space around him. Simultaneously, the way fresh air can cause a cut to sting, a new sense of horror arrived at the image of his mother standing by his sister, making her swallow pills whose mysteriousness frightened her, and then saying “Open” until his sister opened her empty mouth.
NIRMALA AND GAUTAMA began having lunch together every day. After a few days, Gautama stopped being nervous about asking her to join him.
They ate in seminar rooms that had glass walls and whiteboards. When they finished eating, they’d wipe down the table with wet paper towels. Then they’d take the plastic bags they’d brought their lunches in into the hallway and put them in the trash cans there, so that the odor would disperse. They did this because they felt self-conscious about the stereotype of how Indians smell.
Nirmala was flattered by Gautama’s attention. She saw herself as fat, lumbering. Once, a friend, a white girl who also worked at the circulation desk, gestured with her head toward Gautama as he walked over to them. “Your shadow has arrived,” she said. Nirmala knew that her friend was teasing, but having a shadow pleased her. She thought more often about Gautama, and as she thought more often about him he began to gain in importance for her.
After his arrest, Gautama had stopped going onto Backpage. Once he started having lunch with Nirmala, he also stopped looking at pornography. He did this because he wanted there to be no shame in his relationship with her.
As the days went by and they continued having lunch, he told her stories and found himself relieved of old anxieties. His family ran a nuts-and-dried-fruit business, and he told her how, when he was thirteen or fourteen, he had conspired with a family employee to steal money from one of the shops his family owned. The man had then blackmailed him. After he told Nirmala this, the guilt of having stolen from his family, the sense of self-disgust for being so weak that he could be blackmailed, dissipated almost immediately. It vanished so quickly that it was like waking from a nightmare and within minutes not being able to recall what had happened in the dream.
One night, a month after they started having lunch, they went out to dinner. An Indian restaurant had opened on crowded Macdougal Street, and Gautama had read in a magazine that the restaurant, for its opening weeks, while it worked out its menu, was allowing guests to pay whatever they thought was fair. Gautama’s plan was to pay nothing. It didn’t occur to him that Nirmala would mind this.
The restaurant was in a basement. They went down some steps and entered a room with a dozen or so tables with white tablecloths. Only a few of the tables were occupied. Eight young Indians, probably undergraduates, were seated around the largest table, in the middle of the room, and the manager, an Indian man with a mustache, went over to them frequently to see how they were liking the meal. He didn’t go as often to the tables with white customers. Gautama understood that the manager was suspicious that the Indians would try to get away with paying nothing. He saw this and felt in his stomach that he, too, would not have entered a restaurant with no intention of paying if it were owned by white people.
The manager came over to Gautama and Nirmala. He explained the pricing: “What would food like this cost in another restaurant? That is one way to think of it.” He spoke in the stretched vowels of an Indian trying to sound American. He left them to look at the menu.
Nirmala watched him go. “Are you planning not to pay?” she asked.
“I’ll pay something,” Gautama murmured. He stared down at the menu, which was a single page with a list of items on the left side and nothing on the right.
“Shrimp is expensive,” Nirmala said. “Fish is expensive. We can’t steal from these people.”
The fact that she wanted to pay when she didn’t have to surprised him. A part of him couldn’t believe it. He felt that she was showing off.
“I didn’t bring my purse. You should have told me to bring my wallet,” she said.
Hearing her frustration, he had the sense that he did not know her, that he had been revealing himself to someone who might have been thinking bad things about him.
The manager came back with a waiter. He explained again that they should bear in mind what the food might cost in another restaurant.
Nirmala ordered without looking up. She asked for the lentils, which would probably have been the cheapest item on the menu. “I’ll have the turmeric fish,” Gautama said, “and the seafood biryani.” He ordered two entrées because, despite the fear of embarrassment, he couldn’t pass up something free.
“It is a lot of food,” the manager said. At his American-sounding accent, Gautama felt even more judged. He kept looking down. The manager stood there for a moment and then left.
Gautama and Nirmala sat in silence. The food came. They began eating.
“This isn’t very good,” Gautama said.
“I don’t want to talk.”
He continued eating. He wondered what he should pay.
The meal ended. The manager came to their table and asked how they had enjoyed the food.
“It was very good,” Nirmala said. “We’ll come back.”
He put down a printout of all the items they had ordered. Gautama placed seventy dollars on top of it. This was all the money he had.
Outside, it was a cold February night. There were people waiting in lines to get into restaurants. Some of them were arm in arm. One couple walked in circles, laughing at how cold it was. As Gautama and Nirmala walked down the crowded sidewalk, Nirmala bumped into him. “Sorry,” Gautama said, not looking at her. After a few steps, she bumped into him again. He glanced at her.
“It’s over,” she said, and laughed.
Gautama felt relieved that he had not embarrassed himself before Nirmala.
AS HE GOT TO KNOW HER better, Nirmala began to seem more complicated to him. She told him that her father’s younger brother had “bothered” her. She didn’t say what he had done to bother her, but she said that, when her uncle was living with her family,
she had begun pulling out her hair. “I get white hair where I used to pull it out,” she said.
The fact that this had happened to her made Gautama see her as being like any other person, someone with her own past, someone who needed love, who was scared and embarrassed, who had pulled out her own hair and was convinced that it turned white because of this.
The two started going on walks in the evening in the West Village, near Nirmala’s dorm. One day, they held hands for the first time. It was mid-March. The air was cold and heavy with moisture. They were walking past a pizza parlor, and Nirmala put her hand in his. The first thing Gautama noticed was the calluses on her palms. But as soon as he had closed his hand around hers, he had the feeling that he would never need anything else. All the other things he worried about—his research, what job he would get, what might happen to his family in India—none of this mattered, because this thing was OK.
He looked on YouTube for guidance on kissing. He watched a video in which an old white-haired couple kissed and then told each other what they had liked about the kiss.
French kissing seemed disrespectful. Kissing with closed lips had the bravery of kissing—a declaration of not caring what society thought—but was also not vulgar.
Every new thing that he and Nirmala did, such as standing on a street corner, each with a hand in the other’s back pocket, gave him a sense of freedom. They began lying together on her bed in her dorm room, kissing until he stopped being able to think. He would move her hand to his crotch, and she would move it away.
Gautama began looking at pornography again. He felt that if he did not ejaculate he would go mad. The first time he did this, sitting at his small wooden desk in his apartment, his laptop open before him, he immediately wondered why he had worried so much about doing it.