“Whoa, there. Calm down. We’ll find your stuff. Where are your friends?” he asked, helping me onto a barstool, and motioning for the bartender to bring me some water.
“I don’t know. I…I have to find my wallet!”
“No.” He pushed me back onto the seat by my shoulders. “You’re in bad shape. You stay put. I’ll find your stuff.”
I closed my eyes and tried to will myself sober. I didn’t want him, or anyone else, seeing me like that. He reappeared a few minutes later, dangling my keys before my eyes.
“Sorry. No luck finding anything else. Are you feeling any better? Did you see your friends?”
“No.” I stood up shakily, and tried to avoid eye contact. “I don’t know where anyone is. And I have to get home. I should never have come out tonight.”
He grabbed my arm. “And how will you get home without a wallet?”
“Nick,” I said, looking directly at him. I tried hard to maintain my balance. “I have to get out of here.”
“Okay.” He took me by the hand and led me toward the door. “Let’s go.”
Before I knew it, he was helping me into a cab. And then he got in behind me.
“So, where do you live?” he asked.
And then I woke up in his bed.
Holy Mary, Mother Of God, and Vishnu and Ram and Ganesh and Everyone Else…What Have I Done? I thought, while bristles of bedroom carpet made impressions on my naked butt cheeks. I must have thrown myself at him!
It was bad enough to have done something so sluttishly out of character. What was worse was not being able to remember if he was any good. I mean, he had to be! Look at that body! Wait, no. Stop it! Bad Vina. Bad, bad Vina!
I assumed he was fantastic. I hoped that lights had been low enough to spare him the mental image of my tummy-flab. I prayed that we had used a condom. There was only one correct way to handle this: I would slip quietly out the front door and refuse to admit that it had ever happened. After all, who would believe him?
I rose to my feet and took a deep breath. I peeked out the doorway and noticed the he was starting to squeeze fresh orange juice. What did he think, that this was going to turn into a relationship? That did it. He left me no choice. I had no time to waste; I had to get out of there as quickly and quietly as possible. I crept silently around the room, recovering my dress, bra, panties and purse easily enough. I could’ve sacrificed my pashmina to appease the wrathful-gods-of-the-one-night-stand, but my favorite Bruno Maglis simply could not be left behind on the battlefield. And they were nowhere to be found. Not behind his desk. Not under his bed. Not dangling from his ceiling fan.
A-hah! I spotted the familiar pink strap trailing from inside his closet. But when I tried tugging on the shoe, I noticed that it was wedged in tightly by the mirrored sliding door. In my rush, I then must’ve used a little too much force because the door flew entirely open.
I blinked. And then I blinked again.
It wasn’t the video camera that bothered me. It was the three video cameras. On swiveling tripods. Aimed at the bed. Surrounded by professional lighting equipment. And stored alongside hundreds of videocassettes.
Oh, my god, he taped us! And these were probably videos of hundreds of other unsuspecting women he had lured home from the gym! He was making porn at home! Oh, my god, he was a porn producer! An illegal online porn producer! And I was his latest unwitting co-star! What a freak! He was probably Web-casting his bedroom onto the Internet…live…right now! Which meant that thousands of greasy, balding perverts around the globe had just watched me get dressed! For $3.95 per minute!
This was too much for the good Indian girl to comprehend, no matter how modern I considered myself. I lost my balance, gasped for air, staggered, and knocked over a chair.
“Vina?” Nick must have heard the thud.
I was confused. I was so angry that I couldn’t breathe. And so embarrassed that I couldn’t speak. My temperature was rising, while the walls of my throat were closing in. No better than a celebrity whose “personal” home video ends up on the Web, but without any of the proceeds, I had been used and digitally hung out to dry. Like a rock star who takes the groupie’s word for it when she claims to be of age, I had made a not-so-innocent mistake, which I feared was built to last.
Whatever had happened the night before, it shouldn’t have. And whatever I may have degenerated into, Nick had no right to benefit. He was the best friend of the gay man my parents wanted me to marry, and dammit, that entitled me to a little common decency. I scooped up my shoes and what was left of my self-respect, darted out of his bedroom and down the hall. I slammed the door as hard as I could before I sprinted toward the elevator.
Walk of shame, indeed.
16
Having too much time on my hands has never been a good thing, because my mind tends to run amok. That Saturday evening’s trip on the Long Island Railroad was proof positive. I had bitten my nails down to the stubs by the time the train pulled into Great Neck station. I had also convinced myself that:
The ticket collector was smiling because he recognized me from the Web-cast,
Nick had probably given me an STD, and
None of the above mattered in the end, since I was going to die alone, anyway.
In the thirty minutes since Penn Station, I had figured it all out. Actually, this conclusion wasn’t random. It was right there in the numbers. And I can tell you as an overpaid number cruncher that the numbers, unlike men and advertisements for weight-loss programs, almost never lie. Like I said: too much time on my hands. So, with whatever limited knowledge of the U.S. census I could guesstimate off the top of my head, here is what I managed to come up with.
Consider the following:
There are approximately 300 million people living in the U.S.
So even if I were to date one new man per week, every week, only one out of every 7,000 heterosexual and single men in New York City in my age range would be a potential match. That means I had a better chance of striking oil in my parents’ backyard than of finding one potentially suitable man. Even if I had started dating while I was in diapers, the sad fact was that my eggs would have long since expired by the time I found the love of my life.
And now I’m a low-budget Internet porn star with an STD, I thought. Faaaaaaantastic.
I’ll admit it; I was frantic. But I had a right to be. It’s never as simple as a quiet family dinner on Long Island. To begin with, setting foot in my parents’ house instantly takes a decade off my emotional age. I leave midtown Manhattan as a fully functional, semirational, fairly-well-put-together adult woman. I enter 34 Woods End Road as a cranky, bratty and misunderstood teenaged girl. With unruly eyebrows. And perpetually un-ironed pants. Who has no idea where she’s headed. And who could not, for the life of her, locate the drawer in which a matching pair of socks might be hidden.
That wasn’t the worst of it. Still reeling from having stumbled onto Nick’s porn arsenal that morning, I was abnormally vulnerable to my parents’ good intentions. Naturally, the last thing I needed to find in their home was exactly what was waiting for me when I arrived.
I had to stifle a shriek when I walked into the dining room.
“I am serious, Shardha. This Navratan Koorma is the best I have ever eaten.” Prakash’s mother was kissing up to my own. “You must tell me your secret.”
My jaw was spending so much time hanging open lately, that I considered leaving it that way. Especially since I’d never close it again if, as I suspected, I had just walked in on my own surprise engagement party. Cousin Neha and her husband Vineet were seated alongside Prakash, his parents, my Nani and my own parents.
“Vina,” my father said, motioning to me. “Come. Sit. Isn’t it wonderful that Prakash and his parents have been able to join us for dinner tonight?”
This time, the onset of my neck stress was sudden and fierce. Why doesn’t life come with a pause button?
Prakash glanced uneasily at me, and then looked quickly away. Neha
and Vineet nodded simultaneously in my direction.
Thankfully, before any of my thoughts could spill out, my Nani intervened.
“Beti, before you sit down, you must first help this old lady up the stairs. I am tired. I need to go and lie down for some time.”
Gratefully, I pulled her to her feet, excused myself and helped her up to her room.
“Sometimes we must do things for our parents. For the good of the family,” she said to her own ref lection in the bedroom mirror a moment later. She massaged one arthritic hand with the other. “Even if it is only for appearances.”
“Nani,” I said, ferreting the bobby pins out of her bun, “this dinner was not my plan. I did not agree to this.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. Vina, Prakash is a nice boy.” She turned and looked me in the eye. “A nice…gentle boy. I can see this. I can also see that he loves his parents very much. He is a good son.”
My remaining grandmother is seventy-two years old. She was born poor in rural Punjab, married off at the age of fourteen and widowed with three children before she reached twenty-five. She was illiterate, but managed to ensure that her own children would graduate from college by loaning out the money she borrowed against the small plot of land her husband had left her. She suffered marriage to a stranger as an innocent child bride and the impropriety of those who considered widows free game. She survived two miscarriages and a stillbirth in a village that lay the blame solely on the woman. She endured countless hours of labor without benefit of anesthetic, and a sleepless night in 1947 hiding in a closet holding on to her children for dear life, while all hell broke loose on the streets outside their home as Pakistan was being ripped from India.
“I give laughter from one eye while I give tears from the other,” she had once told me, when I asked her how she weathered everything that had happened.
Private moments with her reminded me that my life was an enormous slice of cake, with a pitcher of champagne on the side. And that I was complaining because I’d drunk myself into a hangover.
I tucked my grandmother under the covers and kissed her forehead. Taking a deep, fortifying breath, I donned a fake smile, and marched back down those stairs.
“But in order for there to be karma for us to contend with the next time around, don’t you agree that we need the freedom to make our own choices this time around?” Neha pointed her fork at my father.
Uncle Ved patted the chair beside him, and I quietly took my seat. Though not related by blood, he was referred to as an uncle since he had known my family for over twenty years. A forty-five-year-old importer/exporter from Mumbai, Uncle Ved had the unnerving habit of believing that since he was single we had something in common.
“Definitely, definitely.” He heaped more rice onto his plate before passing the dish to me.
I settled into my spot while my mother spooned a helping of Dhal Makhani wordlessly into my bowl.
“Yes, of course,” Prakash’s mother concurred, to the approval of her on looking husband. “Nothing in Hinduism says that you do not have free will.”
“So then,” Neha continued, “this means that there were potentially five different career paths I could have chosen, or five different men I could have chosen to marry. Right?”
With a mouthful of Saag Paneer, Vineet stopped mid-chew to stare his not-so-blushing bride into silence. Predictably, Neha relented, removing her elbows and her opinions from the table.
“Perhaps,” my father answered. “But this is why you have a family. These people are here to guide you to choose the right path. Your parents have this responsibility to you—this karma. That is why you were given to them as a daughter. They can fulfill their obligation only by making sure that you understand which ones are the correct choices to make.”
“I think we can all agree that we are lucky to have been born with parents who have our best interests at heart.” Prakash defused the situation, smiling at me for everyone else’s benefit.
I returned a smile, even though I felt last night’s mojitos threatening to re-repeat on me.
“My parents told me who to marry,” Uncle Ved blurted in confession. “I listened to them, and see what happened? That marriage ended in divorce!”
“Divorce?” Prakash’s mother whispered to herself, dropping her spoon into her Yogurt Rehta, and splattering little dots across her shawl.
“What? Uncle Ved, you were married? Nobody ever told me this!” I practically leaped at my mother, forgetting entirely about my manners and the fact that we had company. “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me this?”
She didn’t so much as blink.
“Because it is not for us to discuss. It is a family matter,” she said, then turned to reassure Prakash’s mother of the stability of our bloodline. “And Ved is not technically a member of our family. Not a blood relative, that is. In any case, Ved, how many whiskey sours have you had tonight?”
Ved took the hint, heard the warning and quickly averted his eyes.
“Vina, nobody is trying to tell you children who to marry,” Prakash’s father interjected. “We realize that it does not work that way with your generation. It is for the children to decide. We can only introduce suitable matches.”
“Well…” I began.
“Darling,” my mother cooed, spooning additional Gobi Aloos onto my plate, obviously uncomfortable with any acknowledgement of the elephant in the room, “why are you eating so little? Vina always takes very good care of her figure, you know. But I hope you are not trying to become too skinny like your friend Pamela. She looks so unhealthy. Honestly, I don’t know why her parents don’t tell her these things.”
“Mom, Pam looks fine. I just don’t have that much of an appetite tonight. And her parents don’t tell her what to eat or not to eat. Besides, they moved to Montana…I thought I told you that. Anyway, she’s perfectly healthy. But that’s not the point. I wanted to say that…”
“Don’t try to explain, Vina. These people will never understand. Pass the Bhindi, please?” Uncle Ved added, shaking his head.
I huffed helplessly. Nobody paid me any attention.
“Montana? Why so far from their daughter? They might as well live in Timbuktu,” my father decided.
“Really, Mom,” I tried to speak up, nudging away the ladleful of Bhurtha hovering above my plate, “I’m not hungry.”
“Oh, Vina, you have a lovely figure,” Neha said. “You don’t need to worry about becoming even more beautiful, like those obsessive American women, na?”
“Oh, come on.” Prakash leaned in and pierced me with his gaze. “How could Vina ever look more beautiful than she already is? And with so much charm and grace…well…I’m sure no man I know could resist her.”
Had he also gotten into the whiskey sours? An uncomfortable silence followed, during which I stared at him bewildered. What would possess him to say something so clearly inappropriate in front of our parents?
My mother, on the other hand, was oblivious to anything other than the fact that an acceptable match might have been made.
“All right then, darling. Would you please get the chai started for us?”
Before I was on my feet, Prakash’s mother followed suit. “Yes, yes. Prakash, beta, why don’t you go and help Vina in the kitchen?”
17
“Well, you really had me fooled—” Prakash began in a whisper.
We hadn’t even shut the kitchen door behind us.
“What? What are you talking about?” I poured the milk, f lipped the stove onto High and swung around to face him. “It looks like you’re the one that’s got my parents fooled. We had a deal, you maniac! What could possibly have possessed you to behave this way?”
His nostrils flared. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I hard-whispered, “And keep your voice down!”
He leaned one hand on the counter, and aimed his face so that he could meet me at eye level. “You had no right to walk out on Nick l
ike that this morning. You know he’s a good friend of mine. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
Well, this was unexpected. Where was the hair-rending? Where was the blubbering? Where was the guy who should have been lying prostrate before me, begging forgiveness for the evening’s emotional ambush? And who the hell did he think he was to judge me for being victimized by his sleazeball friend?
My mind spun before finally settling on the obvious. “No! And wait…I didn’t…How can you even say that? Why would I care if it got back to you, anyway? Listen very closely, you moron. You and I are not dating! You are gay!”
“I am well aware of that.” He straightened up, crossing his arms, shifting into a distinctly lawyerly tone, “And I am also aware that you are a grown woman. The bottom line is that you knew what you were doing last night. And you know that there was a better way to handle it this morning.”
“Okay, first of all, I cannot believe I’m even hearing this.” I started poking his chest, backing him into a corner. “But we don’t have time to argue about last night. This is about tonight. And you could’ve handled this dinner a helluva lot better, like by not letting it happen in the first place! The bottom line, as you put it, is that this is insanity. And you are insane for orchestrating it. I mean, what was all that garbage you were spewing out there in front of our parents? How could you let things get this far?”
He wouldn’t relent. “Hey, I didn’t know we were having dinner here tonight. My parents sprang it on me at the last minute, and I had no choice but to come with them. I…”
His eyes focused on something behind me, and then widened. “The pot!”
I looked over my shoulder. The milk was bubbling and foam was dripping onto the stove. I lunged for the pot handle.
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