Her knees went wobbly. Drawing in a slow breath, she flattened her hand against the counter for support, then turned her attention to the cup the barista was shoving across the table. She hadn’t wanted to think about this—in fact, she’d trained her mind not to travel in that direction. It would be better if she didn’t notice the gentle swell of Desh’s biceps against the cotton of his shirt or the movement of his shoulders beneath the cloth. It was unnerving to be standing so close to a warm, breathing, vital man she hardly knew, and with whom, in less than three months, she’d be sharing a nuptial bed.
“Bocce,” she muttered, with a swift nod. “Bocce it is.”
Dhara followed Desh out of the coffee shop in a mutually awkward silence, clutching her drink as they strode through James J. Walker Park. She was grateful the day was warm but not oppressively humid. She welcomed the early-evening breeze that set the leaves rustling over their heads and went a little way toward cooling her skin. Maybe bocce was a good idea. Clearly, sitting across from him close enough to map the swoop of his cheekbone and the pronounced hollows underneath was not the best way for her to logically, and unemotionally, share her intimate secrets.
But then again, she was growing increasingly convinced that sharing her secrets might be the stupidest idea ever. For Desh continued to live up to her initial impression of him. He was a really nice guy.
As they approached a series of narrow courts, an older man sitting on a folding chair called out with familiarity. Desh waved and exchanged a few words with him as they passed by. Once on the empty court, Desh clanked his sports bag on the ground, crouched down, and unzipped it.
“Hey,” she said, “did you just speak to that man in Italian?”
“Badly.” Desh pulled out eight fist-size red and green balls and set them in lines. “I spent my junior year in Florence, but I learned all the Italian I know from him and his crazy Sicilian friends.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Is that why he’s laughing?”
“Not entirely.” He hid his face by peering deeper into the bag. “He’s teasing me about you.”
With sudden embarrassment, Dhara returned the grinning man’s wave, then turned away as Desh launched into an explanation of the game. He tossed a small white ball—called the jack—down the length of the court. With brisk efficiency, he explained that the point of the game was to get as many balls close to the jack as possible. Each ball ahead of his was worth one point. They would play to sixteen.
Sixteen. Didn’t seem so long. Maybe, just maybe, it was long enough for the inner traditional Dhara and the outer hypereducated Dhara to wrestle to some kind of hybrid Indian-American solution. She wouldn’t mind being unimpaled from this cultural fence.
“So,” she said, lobbing the first ball toward the jack, frantically searching for a neutral topic of conversation. “My parents mentioned that you were a professor, but they didn’t tell me you were a professor of philosophy.”
“It’s a dirty, dirty secret.” He stepped up and weighed the ball in his hand. “Like my aunt Chunni’s divorce, we don’t discuss it in public.”
“Let me guess: they wanted you to be an engineer.”
“They’d have settled for a chemist, or even an accountant.” He stepped forward, lobbing the ball in one smooth, effortless motion. “I told my father that the world needs only so many bridges.”
“I took a philosophy course once.” She didn’t mention that she’d done it only because she needed to fulfill some humanity requirement in a schedule full of hard sciences. “Problems of Philosophy, it was called. If it weren’t for Wendy, I’d have failed it altogether. So much talk, so much probing, and so few answers.”
“There are no answers.” He handed her a green ball, waving her to the head of the court. “Only questions. Three of them, if you go by classical Greek philosophy.”
“There have to be more questions than that.” Like how did I get myself in this situation? Why the hell am I playing bocce? Does he really need to know the truth? And how can a man smell like both soap and saffron?
“Three questions,” he reiterated. “And they’re deceptively simple. What is there? What should we do? And how can we know? Essentially, it’s about the nature of being, the nature of ethics, and the nature of logic. And now,” he said with a laugh, “I sound like I’m starting a lecture.”
“Full confession.” She gave him an apologetic little shrug. “Philosophy gives me a headache.”
“Physics used to give me a headache. And I bet you aced it. There—you’re a little short,” he said, eyeing her throw. “Right now, what I’m studying has a lot to do with linguistics—what each language develops as their verb ‘to be’ says a lot about their philosophy.” He got into position to lob another ball. “And if I go into this any deeper, you’ll need a fresh chai.”
“Linguistics…That explains why you know Italian?”
“And Hindi and Urdu. I tried a little German. Frankly, I thought I was going to be a language major in college, but though I enjoy parsing out foreign grammar, I can’t get my tongue around the Italian r’s.” He handed her another ball after his fell too long. “Why did you become a cardiologist?”
The question vaulted Dhara right back to her youth when she visited her uncle the pediatrician. Unlike her siblings, who screamed whenever they passed through his door, Dhara had adored him and all the shining implements of his office—the stethoscope, the stainless-steel tools, the measurements cleanly marked on charts, and even—though she winced when she got them—the sharp efficiency of the vaccinations. Medical school had always been a certainty.
“My uncle Japa inspired me,” she mused. “But choosing to become a cardiologist, that was a process.”
“A difficult one, I imagine.”
“Not really. The heart is the body’s motor—the source of all power. While I was in school, I just became fascinated with it. It’s vital to all life, yet so fragile. It’s amazing how easily some crossed electrical signals can make it erratic, how human behavior like smoking, drinking, and diet can so thoroughly affect it in the long-term.” She lobbed her last ball, a little farther than the others. “Heart muscle cells are the only cells in the body that can’t regenerate.”
“That is,” he said, tilting his head thoughtfully, “philosophically perfect.”
“I suppose. What it really means is that you have to take special care of your heart. Once part of it dies, it’s gone forever.”
A shadow passed over her. She shook the shadow away as Desh led her to the end of the court to count points.
“I do know,” Desh said, “that your family is very proud of your accomplishments.”
“Ah, my family.” Dhara focused on the pattern of balls by the jack. “I feel guilty sometimes the way I strung them along all those years. Had they any idea that it would take me so long to be certified, to have a real position…well, they probably would have nipped the idea of medical school in the bud while I was still in college.”
“No, they wouldn’t.” Desh put up the score—two points to zero—on the battered scoreboard screwed into the cement wall. “I watched them during the engagement party. They dote on you.”
Dhara felt a little bubble of warmth. Her parents had doted on Desh too, squiring him around to all her crazy relatives. And Desh had gone right with the flow, even greeting her grandmother by bending down and touching the old woman’s feet without hesitation and with great reverence. Desh made it all so effortless. There was no awkwardness. No strained smile. No panicked looks from across the room, amid milling crowds of curious aunts.
Stop.
“It’s one of the many reasons,” Desh said, crouching down to line the balls up in the dirt as they reached the end of the court, “why I agreed to this arrangement. You can tell a lot about a woman from the way her family behaves around her.”
He unfolded himself from the ground and looked at her. Behind the rim of his glasses, she met his soft brown eyes. Steady, honest eyes. And Dhara felt
a little shiv of guilt slide between her ribs.
Dishonesty. That’s what had killed her relationship with Cole. The lies he kept from her, the truth he was unwilling to confess. That was the reason she had to confess to Desh the one secret that concerned him, before he made the irrevocable step of tracing the vermilion upon the part in her hair.
She took a deep, shaky breath. “You seem like a very sweet man, Desh.”
He froze for a moment. “Now I know I’m in trouble.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I always hope for dashing or romantic. I’d even settle for interesting.”
“Desh—”
“Distinguished even.” He tried a casual shrug. “Maybe rugged.”
“There’s nothing wrong with sweet.” She swept up a ball, weighing it in her hand. “Not many men are sweet.”
“You are trying to be kind.” He stepped back, ceding the space so she could throw. “But I suspect you called me because you are having second thoughts about this arrangement.”
The guilt shiv slid a little deeper. Why did she think she could hide her motives? Desh understood how out-of-the-ordinary this unchaperoned date really was, in Indian eyes.
“Dhara, let me tell you something.” He traced patterns in the dirt with his feet. “I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve been a full professor for three years now. You’ve probably heard that this is not my first serious relationship.”
Dhara remembered her aunt Nisha’s secretive little whisper about the American girl Desh chose not to marry.
“It’s a difficult thing, for someone without an Indian background, to understand my situation.” He squinted as he gazed to the end of the court. “My brothers have their own families, their own houses, but I am the youngest and the last. I will take care of my parents in a house we will share. Perhaps you can imagine that this has been an issue with the women I’ve brought home to meet my family.”
Dhara could almost hear Marta clacking her fingernails, in her post-Tito-breakup era, over a man she’d once met. Mama’s boy, Marta had called him—a man in his thirties who still lived with his mother.
But in a traditional Indian family, a mother-in-law ruled the house and expected to rule the bride. Dhara adored Desh’s mom, a dumpling of a woman who’d hugged her so enthusiastically at the engagement party. His mother was round and energetic and bursting with good humor—a dream of a future mother-in-law.
“And so,” he continued, gesturing for her to go ahead and toss the ball, “I finally decided that it was time to stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I needed an Indian bride who would understand my family obligations.”
An Indian bride. A soft, malleable virgin, who’d submit without question to the will of her husband.
Dhara lobbed the ball blindly. It fell considerably short of the jack.
There would never be an easy way to say this.
“I had a serious boyfriend also.” She spoke softly, backing up off the court. “And he was so not Indian. He was raised by a single mother, with no other family at all. His life was as unfettered as mine was grounded.” She watched as Desh idly picked up a ball but made no attempt to take his position or lob it down the court. “I think that was part of the appeal. I never knew what he would do next. Just being around him was…”
Intoxicating.
She was talking too much. Telling too much. And yet, not telling enough.
“I know how this ends.” Desh rolled the ball from one hand and then, thoughtfully, to the other. “You couldn’t take him home.”
“On the contrary. I did take him home.” She backed up and felt the bite of the concrete divider against her hip. Blindly, she reached for her iced chai sitting on the flat top. “And my wonderful parents swallowed their many reservations, and they welcomed him. With open arms.”
His knuckles went white around the ball. “You loved this man.”
She felt a surge of feeling, a sudden rush of emotions, tangled up and so complicated. She remembered one fall afternoon sitting under the huge sycamore outside the Vassar Library, trying to read Milton while Cole lay with his head in her lap, a Frisbee on his stomach, grinning up at her.
“It was a very long courtship. I resisted getting involved.” She took a swift sip of her drink, trying to swallow the lump rising in her throat. “But in our thirties, in everything but name, he was my husband.”
There. It was spoken. She tilted her chin, but she couldn’t muster the courage to look him in the eye. She felt ashamed, and yet at the same time, strangely defiant—the same mix of tugging emotions that had kept her unnerved, uncertain, and in a terrible flux for too many days. The fact that the moment ticked away in an increasingly tense silence told her that Desh wasn’t about to gently laugh this off, as one deep part of her had secretly hoped.
Already, she was thinking forward to the inevitable confrontation with her mother when she would have to explain why, suddenly, the Bohara family had backed out of the engagement. A result that became increasingly more certain as she listened to the clack of bocce balls being thrown in other courts, the creak of a branch swaying in the wind, and the chatter of two mothers pushing carriages across the paths. Dhara suspected Desh would be circumspect no matter what. He was a kind man. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell her mother the truth. It would hurt her too deeply.
Then Desh moved, ambling across the court toward her, finally resting a safe distance away against the divider. “Now,” he said, “I understand why you called me today.”
She was doing the right thing. Yes, she was. If he couldn’t accept this truth, it was best she know now. Even if it did kill the marriage agreement, her family’s bubbling happiness, and her plans for the future. She would be free.
To do what, she couldn’t even fathom.
“Now it’s my turn,” he said, “to tell you why I agreed to come today.” He leaned back against the divider, rubbing the sand from his hands with more concentration than the task required.
“Last summer,” he began, “my parents and I traveled to Ajmer. My father has some distant relatives in a little village outside the city.”
Her mind tripped over itself, seeking secret meaning in what was a common thing—an Indian family returning to their birth village to strengthen ties with the distant relatives.
“One afternoon, they took me to the house of a family I had never met before. My father gave me no warning.” A muscle flexed in his cheek as he scraped his hands on the divider behind him, bracing himself. “There was a young girl in the family. She was wrapped up in a pink sari. She wouldn’t look at me. It was then that I realized that my parents had brought me there to look her over. As a potential bride.”
Dhara began to understand. Many Indian-American men went back to their home villages to search for a bride of the appropriate caste and clan. It was a venerated cultural tradition, as old as time.
“The poor girl was maybe fifteen, not a day older.” Desh made a strange sound, somewhere between incredulity and frustration. “She didn’t speak a word of English. And she was trembling like a bird. I would have married that girl and brought her back here,” Desh said, “if what I wanted above all was a virgin bride.”
Dhara lifted her gaze and found Desh looking straight at her.
“I did not choose that Ajmer bride, Dhara.” His gaze traveled with slow intent from her hairline, across her cheek, and to her lips, where she could feel the heat warming her skin. “I chose you.”
that weekend
He’s a predator, Kelly,” Marta said. “You have to be especially careful. You’re more vulnerable than most women.”
Kelly shared a glance with Dhara and Wendy, silently wondering if they, too, sensed the irony in the statement. Marta hadn’t wanted to talk about her situation all month. They were trying to honor her wishes. But Marta, with feigned disinterest, had just pulled a box out of her pharmacy bag.
It was a home pregnancy test.
“You don’t have a bullshit detector.”
Marta unfolded the instructions with deliberate calm. “If you did, you would have known that Trey wanted nothing more from you last night than a hookup.”
Kelly flinched. Her heart still didn’t believe that. Cole had delivered the bad news earlier today. She hadn’t believed him. Even when Marta backed him up by saying she’d witnessed Cole throwing a punch at Trey in the cafeteria, Kelly had just figured Cole must have overreacted to some casual remark.
But on her lap lay the truth. Three pages printed from pickupartists.com, where TreyW300 spilled all the gritty details of his amorous adventures with an easy redhead, posted only hours after he rolled his warm body out of their bed.
“He’s my brother but he’s still an asshole, Kelly.” Wendy struggled with her anger. “When I see him again, I’m going to rip him a new one. But, God, I just wish you’d waited for us before leaving with him.”
Kelly plucked at the papers, grappling with the knowledge that she’d brought this upon herself. Last night as she’d nursed a rum and coke at the bar, cooling her heels until her friends came, she’d glanced up and glimpsed a dream. She knew who was sauntering toward her, though she’d missed the rugby game that afternoon. She’d seen photos of him in silver filigreed frames on the grand piano in Wendy’s home. The living, breathing version far overwhelmed the image in her fantasies. She kept blinking, not believing that tall, ruddy-cheeked Trey Wainwright, still in his grass-stained rugby shirt, was approaching her with interest in his whiskey-brown eyes.
He’d slipped his elbows on the bar and given her a look that could melt bones.
Beautiful redhead, tell me you’re free tonight.
“Well, I’ve got another rule,” Marta added grimly. “Don’t get involved with a guy until he gets the thumbs-up from your friends.”
Kelly knew Marta was right. Trey was a thousand miles out of her league. But last night a descendant of vice presidents and shipping magnates had swung his arm around her shoulders as he led her out into the spring night. Last night, Trey Wainwright had tugged her into his room in the Alumnae House and gently stripped off her clothing. He’d traced her cheek like she was something as delicate and precious as the china that filled the breakfront in the Wainwright parlor. He kissed her like he loved her, all the more ardently when she whispered that this was her first time.
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