Quarantine

by Rahul Mehta

  “Community college,” she said snidely.

  “You can transfer somewhere better next year.”

  “I’m not going to college.”

  “Then lose the weight,” Sanj said. “I don’t understand why you didn’t lose it in the first place. Ten pounds. That’s nothing.”

  “It’s easier for boys,” she said.

  They were in the wood-paneled rec room at Sylvie’s, watching MTV’s 120 Minutes: two full hours devoted to alternative music videos—The Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees—musicians never played on the pop rock station in their small town.

  Sylvie’s twin brother, Chris, had wandered through twice already, on his way to and from the kitchen. He was a football player. He was on the starting lineup, even though he wasn’t very good. Chris wasn’t very good at anything. His grades were appalling, one year so low he was disqualified from sports. He wasn’t even particularly good-looking. But for some reason Sanj had secretly fallen for him. Maybe it was the way he padded around the house, always in sweatpants, always shirtless, regardless of the temperature outside, his muscles taut and toned. Maybe it was his curly hair, ringlets framing his face, and the rattail he grew in the back, unfashionable even then. To Sanj, part of what was seductive about Chris was the thought that this was the best time of his life. It wouldn’t get any better. He wouldn’t get better looking. He wasn’t skilled enough to go further in football. He wasn’t going to college. This was it for him. For Sanj, being around someone who was living the best years of his life, while Sanj was living perhaps the worst of his, was seductive.

  Sylvie’s was a sweatpants household. That’s all Sanj had ever seen any of them wearing, at least at home. Sylvie was the exception. Even when she didn’t need to be, she was stylish. Tonight she was wearing designer jeans and chandelier earrings.

  Sylvie and Sanj had been outcasts in high school, each the other’s only friend. They were proud of their status. As far as they were concerned, no one in the high school was worthy of their friendship.

  In spring, they’d attended the senior prom together. (“Just as friends,” Sylvie had said. Sanj hadn’t told anyone he was gay, but he wondered if Sylvie had guessed.) Neither had particularly wanted to go, but Sylvie, at the last minute, had said, “What if we don’t go and regret it for the rest of our lives?” Sanj instantly recognized that she was quoting the nerdy character from a teen soap that had been their Thursday-night guilty pleasure. He shot back, “What if we do go and regret it for the rest of our lives?” but in the end he relented. He was glad. At the prom, he was proud to have Sylvie on his arm. While the other girls wore tacky pastel confections, Sylvie wore couture. Well, not quite couture, but close: an emerald green Yves Saint Laurent cocktail dress she’d picked up on sale at Bergdorf, where she’d stopped after her interview at the modeling agency. It was an unbelievably extravagant expenditure for her, and she’d had to use all the money she’d saved over two years working part-time at the mall; even then, she’d had to charge the rest to her parents’ credit card. But she’d thought of it as a reward, and reasoned that she would need such clothes for her new life in New York.

  During an R.E.M. video—“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”—Sylvie reached for Sanj’s hand and said, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me here.”

  Sanj squeezed her hand and said, “I’ll always be here for you.”

  Three days later, the day Sanj left for college, Sylvie came to say good-bye. He and his father were almost finished packing his new Jeep Cherokee—a graduation gift—which they would be driving together cross-country to L.A. They had a circular driveway, with a large fountain in the middle. Sanj’s mother was perched on the front porch of the house supervising when Sylvie pulled up in her dented Toyota Tercel.

  Sanj saw his mother’s face before he saw Sylvie; he saw her jaw drop, her eyes widen, her arms fold tightly. She’d never liked Sylvie. She didn’t like where Sylvie lived, or what she knew of Sylvie’s brother and parents, not that she’d ever met them. She’d said as much to Sanj, as gently and tactfully as she could manage, coming to his room one evening as he was preparing to meet Sylvie. “Most people around here won’t amount to much. We are not like them.” She’d taken his chin in one hand. “Sanju, beta, find better friends.”

  Looking at Sylvie on their driveway, Sanj saw why his mother was clicking her tongue and shaking her head. The last time Sanj had seen Sylvie, her hair was long, luxurious, honey-blond, falling halfway down her back. Now she was completely bald.

  Sanj didn’t need to ask her why she’d done it. A few months ago, they’d watched an interview with Sinéad O’Connor on 120 Minutes. She’d said that before she shaved her head, no one took her seriously; she was too pretty. Her decision, she said, had changed everything.

  Sylvie walked up to Sanj and threw her arms around him. He pulled her close, stroking her bald head. “Your hair.”

  “We’re both starting new lives,” she said bravely, and for a moment he believed her. Then he noticed she was trembling.

  “You’ll get out of here, too. One day soon. I’ll help you. I promise.”

  He didn’t see Sylvie again for four years. During that time, he barely even spoke to her on the phone. When he first moved away, she called fairly often, leaving messages on the answering machine in his dorm room. He was always out. He rarely returned her calls. They had drifted apart, it was natural. He didn’t understand why they should pretend to be friends forever just because they had clung to each other during a few miserable years of high school.

  So he wasn’t quite prepared for what he saw when he ran into her in the pharmacy. It must have registered on his face. She had gained a little more weight, but that wasn’t what threw him. Her whole being seemed to have changed. Whatever bright light had shone from her in high school was gone. She resembled neither the siren in the emerald green cocktail dress, nor the beautiful bald young woman Sanj had last seen. Now she wore gray sweatpants and a bulky, navy hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mountaineers football logo. Her hair, long again, was pulled back in a ponytail. Sanj wouldn’t have recognized her, wouldn’t have thought to say hello, had she not approached him, saying his name timidly, tentatively. . . . Sanj?

  “Sylvie?”

  “It’s great to see you.”

  “You, too,” he said.

  “Are you here long?”

  “Just a couple of weeks,” he said. “I’m taking care of my grandfather while my parents are in India.” He held up the white paper bag from the pharmacy. “Heart medication.”

  “How’s California?”

  “I live in New York now. I work for Vogue.” Sanj struck a pose from the Madonna “Vogue” video. He saw a flicker of pain flitter across her face. He’d forgotten she’d once dreamed of being photographed for such a magazine.

  “I’ve only been here a few days. I’d been planning to call you,” he said, though the truth was that he’d had no intention of getting in touch.

  “I’m at the same number.”

  He said, “I’ll call.”

  Sanj had only been living in New York for four months when his parents summoned him back to West Virginia to stay with his grandfather. At first he’d said no. “I can’t take off just like that. I have a job.”

  “Internship,” his mother corrected. “Unpaid. Vogue isn’t paying you. Your parents are paying for you.”

  “Even so, I’ve made a commitment.”

  “He doesn’t need to be taken care of,” Sanj’s mother said. “You won’t have to do anything. I wouldn’t even ask you, except I don’t feel comfortable leaving him alone for so long.” After a minute she said, “Don’t make me beg.”

  Later, Sanj called her back. “Fine. Three weeks. That’s it.”

  His parents were going to India to close up his grandmother’s house in Rajkot, to sort through and sell her possessions, and to bring her to live in America for good. This was his mother’s mother. The grandfather
they wanted him to look after was his father’s father, who had been living with them since Sanj was a child. His mother’s mother didn’t want to come. She didn’t want to leave Rajkot to live—for the first time in her life at the age of seventy-eight—in America, in West Virginia, but Sanj’s parents insisted she was too old to live alone.

  Sanj wasn’t exactly living in New York, not in the city anyway. He was living on Long Island with family friends. Chandu had been Sanj’s father’s childhood friend growing up in Gujarat in a village near Ahmedabad. They were like brothers. Chandu and Sanj’s father, Bipin, had immigrated together to America at age seventeen. Literally together. Together, they had taken a bus from their village to Ahmedabad, a train from Ahmedabad to Bombay, a ship from Bombay to Spain, a train from Spain to London, a ship from London to New York, and finally, a Greyhound bus from New York to Oklahoma, where they were both enrolled, premed, at the university in Norman. (Later, Bipin told Sanj that his only ideas about Oklahoma, before arriving, were from the movie version of the musical.) Their journey took close to two months. Eventually, he and Chandu would attend different medical schools, do their residencies in different hospitals, settle in different regions, but they always kept in touch and saw each other as often as they could. Over the years, a surprising number of young men from their village ended up immigrating. Now, every four or five years, they’d have a big reunion, in rotating cities where one or the other lived, and everyone would bring their families. Sanj remembered one, years ago. He remembered in particular watching the men—soft in middle age—playing volleyball. They seemed so happy, like they were in the village again, like they were twelve.

  Chandu’s wife, Lala, didn’t speak English, which made it difficult for Sanj to communicate with her, since he himself didn’t speak any Indian languages. Almost thirty years she had been living in the United States, and she’d learned barely a handful of words and phrases. Sanj was shocked by this. True, Long Island had a vibrant Indian community, and Lala had plenty of people to talk to in her native languages. And true, Lala had never worked outside the house, and so she didn’t need English for those purposes. But still, how had she passed her driver’s exam? How did she manage while shopping?

  Chandu and Lala had three daughters, all a few years older than Sanj. They all still lived at home. They were beautiful, with thick black hair. They were good Indian daughters: practical, responsible, accomplished. One was in med school, one was in law school, and one had just finished business school. Chandu seized every chance to brag about them.

  The Princess Jasmine association wouldn’t have occurred to Sanj, except that someone from Gita’s MBA program told her she looked like her, from the Disney movie Aladdin. “Isn’t that a little culturally insensitive?” Sanj had said at dinner. “Princess Jasmine isn’t even Indian.” But no one else thought so, and Gita liked the comparison. She thought it was flattering. Princess Jasmine was beautiful, even if she was just a cartoon. The more Sanj thought about it, the more he agreed: she did look like Princess Jasmine. In fact, all three sisters looked like Princess Jasmine. So, privately, that’s what he started calling them: The Princess Jasmines, or sometimes just The Jasmines.

  The Jasmines had the entire third floor of the house all to themselves. Each had her own bedroom and her own en suite bathroom. It smelled like hair products up there.

  The parents’ room was on the second floor, as was Sanj’s. He stayed in what was usually the family’s puja room, where they did their morning and evening prayers. There was a small mandir with statues and framed pictures of various gods. Sanj slept on a foldout futon.

  He liked to sleep late. Mornings, the family members came in, one by one, whether or not Sanj was awake. If he woke up during their prayers, he would shuffle off to the bedroom of whichever Jasmine was already awake and climb into her empty bed to catch a few more minutes of sleep. The parents didn’t like this, Sanj could tell. The father seemed particularly bothered. It was inappropriate, borderline scandalous. After all, Sanj was a young man, and these were young, unmarried women. The Jasmines didn’t like it either. But no one was going to say anything. Sanj was the son of their father’s dear childhood friend. They had traveled together in search of new lives in a new country, and together had weathered difficulties others could only imagine. A few transgressions from Bipin’s only son could be overlooked.

  The Jasmines hated New York. They thought it was dirty and crowded and expensive. They wanted to move to L.A. Sanj said L.A. was superficial. The Jasmines said New York was overrated. They narrowed their eyes. “You’ll hate it here. You’ll see.”

  Sylvie asked, “Do you still have that huge screen, with the projection television and the sprawling sectional?”

  Three days after running into her at the pharmacy, Sanj had called and invited her over to watch a movie. She said she would bring the video.

  When she arrived at the house, she rang the doorbell at the front door instead of the side door, where anyone who knew the family would have rung, and where Sylvie herself would have rung back in high school. Back then, Sylvie didn’t even need to, she could just walk right in.

  Sanj greeted her at the door, and, glimpsing the same dented Toyota Tercel, he remembered their good-bye in the driveway more than four years ago. Sanj invited Sylvie in.

  The house’s foyer was designed to impress. The ceilings were almost thirty feet high, and there was a five-foot-tall bronze statue of Nataraja Shiva, dancing his dance of destruction and re-creation. Sanj’s parents had had it shipped from Chicago, along with other decorative items, including several large tapestries and an ornate indoor swing. They patterned their house after the fancy havelis in Bollywood films. The verandas in the back had floors of imported marble (as did the foyer) and ornate columns with gold-toned scrolls.

  Bipin had been the first Indian to move to the small town. The job at the local hospital was the first one he’d been offered after his residency, and, eager to find a place where he could settle so he could bring his new bride from India, he’d taken it. Not long after, he decided to open his own oncology practice. When it was time for him to expand, he recruited an Indian. Then another. Other Indian doctors followed: family members, friends of friends. Word spread that there were opportunities in the area, and those who had nowhere else to go, who had Indian degrees and few options, began arriving. Most were doctors. Some were engineers, working in the chemical plants that dotted the river valley. Many of them lived with Bipin’s family for a time—two, three weeks, sometimes longer—until they could find their own places and send for their wives and, in some cases, children. Bipin’s family lived in a smaller house then, and the young men would sleep on a foldout in a room that doubled as Bipin’s study. Now, thirty years later, there were more than twenty-five families. They were some of the wealthiest residents in what was otherwise a poor stretch of Appalachia.

  Not only was Bipin the first Indian in town, he was also the first to buy land in Mulberry Hills, the first to build a house, custom-designed with a basement large enough to accommodate most, if not all, of the Indian community. This was useful, since Diwali celebrations could no longer be held in the recreation hall of the Episcopal Church, not since a janitor had told the deacon about the statue of the elephant-headed god, the chanting and dancing and burning of incense. Other Indian families followed, building several houses in a row. At Diwali and Holi and Navratri and at the monthly dandiya parties, the guests could easily hop from one house to the next. The Indians referred to Mulberry Hills as Malabar Hill, after the tony Bombay neighborhood.

  The circular driveway and the accompanying fountain were added a few years after the house itself. Bipin had bought them for his wife as a surprise for their twentieth anniversary. Meenakshi had gone alone for a short trip to India, and when she returned—only half awake after the long journey—the driveway she pulled into was this one. The driveway itself was fairly simple; it was the fountain that was the real gift. It was exquisite. What made it so extraordinary
, aside from its sheer size, were the hand-crafted tiles encircling its base. Most had standard decorative motifs Bipin had selected from a showroom: curlicues or geometric patterns or sunflowers. But scattered among them were a few very special tiles Bipin had commissioned to document his and Meenakshi’s lives together—a tile with a mangalsutra exactly like the one Meenakshi had worn at their wedding; a tile depicting the Taj Mahal, where they had gone on their honeymoon; one with a baby’s crib and the birth date of their only child; one with a palm tree to represent the trip to Hawai’i they had taken on their second anniversary, staying at an expensive resort, long before they had yet made the kind of money to afford such a vacation or resort, telling themselves the trip was an act of faith, a message to the universe that this was the kind of life they expected and that they would settle for nothing less.

  Three years later, when the driveway needed to be repaired (long before it should have), Bipin, unable to secure the contractor who had originally built it, hired a local man. After the work was done, the two men argued, the local man demanding much more money than his original quote. The man got angry, shouting, “You foreigners don’t know how hard it is. You all live in mansions. One day, come see where I live. Then you’ll understand.” Bipin ended up paying the man the extra money, though he continued to complain about it even years later.

  Shortly after the driveway and fountain were built, Sanj’s grandfather, getting into the car one day, said, “Life is a circle. One way or another we return to the beginning.” The comment had irritated Sanj; it seemed to him both sentimental and false. In fact, it had become an inside joke between him and his parents. Bipin would imitate Sanj’s grandfather in an exaggerated Indian accent, stabbing the air with his finger, “Life is a circle,” and Sanj and his mother would laugh. Though now, standing in the grand foyer with Sylvie, Sanj wondered if his grandfather hadn’t had a point. After all, here Sanj was, four years after leaving, back where he started. But that was temporary. What Sanj hadn’t mentioned to his grandfather, when his grandfather first made the observation, was that the driveway, though circular, did have an entrance, and, importantly, an exit, and Sanj had every intention of using it.