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by Sameer Pandya

  The booze hit me as soon as I got in the hallway, and I stumbled, dizzy. I didn’t want to go into a stranger’s room and ask him to give me beer. But I moved toward Steve’s door anyway. There was a similar party going on inside. Because so few people had commented on my costume all night, I’d forgotten I had it on. As this roomful of people, none of whom I knew, turned to look at me, I became aware of two things: one, that my costume might be in poor taste, and two, that it might, in the minds of others, align me, the only brown guy in the room, with a Middle Eastern dictator. I felt freakish, grotesque.

  “Saddam Hussein,” I said, pointing to my sign. “But it’s just a costume. Obviously.” One of the brothers made an exaggerated attempt at laughter. “Pavel asked me to get some beers from you guys. He said I should ask for Steve.”

  The laughing guy pointed to the back of the room. I walked through the group of people, opened the refrigerator, and grabbed two six-packs. One of the guys, who I assumed was Steve, looked at what I’d taken.

  “That’s too many,” he said. “Put one back.”

  I did as he said and quickly left. I wanted to go back to my dorm, but I thought I should see the night through. I walked back to John’s room; Pocahontas was the only one left.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “A song came on and they all went downstairs to dance,” she responded, a little dazed and fully drunk.

  I turned toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. “Come sit with me.”

  I went and sat next to her, trying not to stare at her suede top, trying not to think about Ursula, wherever she’d ended up.

  “I guess it’s just us Indians,” I said.

  She didn’t smile, or even seem to get the joke.

  “I love your bushy mustache,” she said, turning to me and tapping her fingers right above my lips.

  Before I realized what was going on, she leaned in and kissed me. I lay down on the couch and she got on top of me, her feathers beautifully disheveled. I was drunk enough to lose myself in the pleasure of her.

  But sometime later, a voice called into the room: “Ann?” And then louder: “Ann!”

  There was a guy at the door who had the distinct, surprised expression of a boyfriend. And while there were plenty of guys wearing football jerseys downstairs, this guy looked like he actually belonged in one.

  “Who’s this?” he asked in a calm voice.

  “Ben? What are you doing here?” Ann sat up and tried fixing her hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. He just started kissing me,” she said.

  “No, no,” I said right away, turning to Ann. “Please tell him.”

  She glanced at me but didn’t say anything. She looked as scared as I felt. Ben took a big step toward me.

  “I think I’m going to take off,” I said, getting up from the couch.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Ben said in the commanding tone of someone who’s caught a stranger in his house.

  “No, listen,” I stammered. “I didn’t know that Ann was attached. I wouldn’t have done anything if I had known.”

  “I told you to sit down,” Ben said.

  I tried again to leave, but Ben blocked me at the door with his substantially larger shoulder.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he yelled.

  He took another step toward me, and I darted behind him. I ran down the stairs, but I could hear footsteps behind me. I made it to the front door and thought I was in the clear, but someone kicked my feet and I fell onto the grass, which was wet from spilled beer. In seconds, Ben was on top of me, kicking and punching. I was too drunk and scared and confused to fight back. I could see a crowd gathering in the yard, though no one intervened. Ben landed a hard kick to my stomach, leaned down, and said, loud enough for everyone in the yard to hear, “No sand niggers allowed!”

  “Shut up, Ben,” John said, pushing him aside. He’d just made his way to the front yard. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “He was fucking with Ann.”

  “That’s your problem and hers, not his. He’s my guest.”

  John helped me up. My pants were wet, and my lip was bleeding. I saw Ursula in the crowd, clearly embarrassed. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for her.

  “C’mon back in,” John said. “I’ll help you get cleaned up.”

  I looked at him, then over at Ben. I bit at my cut lip, doing all I could not to let the tears come. I had never hit anyone before, and now I desperately wanted to know what it felt like. But I realized what a mistake it would be to get into a fight in front of this crowd. There was no one there who would have my back. I assumed Art Chu had wisely made his way back to the dorm already.

  “I’m good,” I said to John, and walked away.

  Two weeks later, when Ben and I went in front of a three-person university judiciary committee, he showed up wearing his number 24 football jersey, thinking somehow that it would help him. It probably did. He was clear and forthright when speaking to the committee. Yes, he had said it. But it was because of my costume, because I was dressed as Saddam Hussein. In the heat of the moment, with the alcohol, the crowd, all the news on TV, and the emotional toll of the night, he’d been overwhelmed, confused. “I would never say something so deplorable to a fellow student like Raj Bhatt. But Saddam is our enemy. I was so upset thinking about all the innocent people he’s killed. I shouldn’t have said what I said, but we’re at war with an evil, evil man, and at that party, coming face-to-face with a representation of that evil, I was overcome by my love for this country, for freedom.”

  “Even if he was saying it to my Halloween costume,” I said to the committee, “I think Ben was less upset that I was dressed like a dictator who has killed countless innocent Kuwaitis than he was by the fact that Saddam was making out with his girlfriend.” I don’t think the committee, or my eighteen-­year-old self, understood the full implications of my suggestion that Ben was angry because Ann’s white body was on top of my brown body.

  Ben and I had to leave the room while the committee deliberated. He seemed comfortable and nonplussed, sure that there weren’t going to be any consequences for his actions. When we were called back in, the committee gave Ben a stern warning to watch what he said. But nothing more. With that, I received a warning of my own: not all invitations should be accepted. There were some groups I would never belong to.

  Ben walked up to each member of the committee, shook hands with them, apologized profusely, and thanked them for their time. After seeing how easily they accepted his apology, I just walked out.

  I never stepped into a fraternity house again. For much of my freshman year, I’d been drunk at least three nights a week. But when I returned for my sophomore year, I became deeply involved in my classes, never earning anything less than an A-minus for the rest of my college career. I fell in with that crowd of pipe smokers. We wore tweed jackets ironically and Doc Martens in a nonfascist way. We read Gramsci and Fanon, and reserved Friday afternoons for drinking expensive beers. Though I’d not known this when I entered college, this was who I had wanted to be. A thinker of sorts.

  As I was getting ready to graduate, I heard through the grapevine that Ben had been accepted to Georgetown Law School. It took me some years to understand that I had gone to college with a lot of Bens: guys who could spend four years drinking too much and not studying enough, kicking around whomever they wished along the way, without ever endangering their future prospects.

  * * *

  Was “BigBen24” the same Ben? Maybe. I could imagine him having come across the article in between depositions. If it was, his haiku suggested he still lacked a certain imagination. “Hey there sand nigger / Mount that big camel now please / Iraq awaits.” I sat in my dark office, clapping out the syllables. He’d missed the final one.

  I texted Eva. “Talk?”

  “Running into a meeting. Everything OK?”

  “Yep. Chat later.”

  I waited a few m
inutes—Eva was disciplined and put her phone away during meetings—and then sent her the link to the article, adding, “Don’t read the comments.”

  I heard the key in the door. I fumbled around and quickly closed the browser on my computer. I wasn’t quite ready to talk to Dan about the video. He walked into the office and found me sitting in the dark.

  “You know the university can see your surfing history,” Dan said, switching on the overhead light.

  “Of course,” I said, getting up from my desk, smiling off his joke.

  He looked me over, once and then once more. However outwardly bad I might have seemed to Dan, it was nothing compared to how I felt. Even though so many years had passed since that night, I still felt nauseated every time I thought of it.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you look like shit,” Dan said.

  He noticed my bare feet. I shifted my foot slightly so that he wouldn’t see the bloodied bandage.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your toes before. They’re perfectly nice, but flip-flops seem a little comfortable for work, don’t you think?”

  “After Monday, I don’t think you get to comment on how anyone else dresses in this office,” I said. “I wasn’t planning on coming in. I needed to grab something. How was class?”

  “Same old.” Dan noticed my empty hands. “What did you need to grab?”

  Dan would have understood the absurdity of the couple of days I’d just had. He might even have given me some much-needed perspective, or at the very least, made some joke about racist Mercury being in retrograde, which would have made me laugh. But I felt a little too vulnerable about it all to share with him now. I would later.

  “These,” I said, slowly turning both my middle fingers toward him, before leaving the office and heading to my car.

  I made one stop on my way home: a store in town that sold overpriced modern furniture. I walked in and was greeted by a severe, very tall saleswoman.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  “Do you have desk lamps?”

  She pointed to the back. I found about ten of them, all lit up, all sleek and metal and perfect. As I’d walked into the store, I’d decided I would splurge and spend a hundred dollars. Good light didn’t come cheap.

  Clearly, I’d underestimated the extent to which that was true. The first lamp I saw was $600. Sure, the lamp was beautifully designed—three pieces of smooth metal, seamlessly attached and producing even, soft light. But still. The next few were less expensive, but not by much.

  “Good light isn’t cheap,” the saleswoman said.

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “Let me know if you have any questions,” she said.

  I nodded and continued checking out the lamps. I could go to a hardware store; a lamp would be so much cheaper there. But I couldn’t let go of the vision of walking into my office with something new and sleek, something fancy. I needed to treat myself.

  I picked the cheapest one—$250. The body was silver, and the light emanated from a structure the size of a large blooming tulip. I liked the lamp well enough. Not $250 worth. But I was determined not to walk out of the store empty-handed.

  My phone rang while I was finishing up at the cash register. The saleswoman pointed to a sign on the counter: NO CELL PHONES PLEASE. I walked several feet away, sat down on an Eames lounge chair, put my feet up, and answered the phone.

  “Is this for real?” Eva asked.

  “Which part?”

  “The comments.”

  “I told you not to read them.”

  “The comments are the story. Who took the video?”

  “Some asshole in my class. They’ve also filed an official complaint against me with the dean’s office.”

  “For what?”

  “Reverse racism.”

  “Oh, Raj. This is crazy.”

  “One group thinks I don’t like black people and another thinks I don’t like whites. How did I get here?”

  Eva didn’t answer.

  “Did you read all the comments?”

  “A lot of them.”

  I wondered which ones had stood out to her.

  “There are over three thousand now,” she said.

  I almost felt a sense of pride. No one had ever paid this much attention to me.

  “Did you read the haiku?” I asked.

  “I missed that.”

  “I think that guy Ben from college wrote it.”

  “Ben?”

  “Halloween.” I had told her the story years ago.

  “Ah,” she said, remembering. “You think it’s the same guy?”

  “I do.”

  “Are you home?”

  “I’m headed there. I’ll get the kids and then I have a match tonight. Busy day?”

  “It’s OK. I’ll be home by five thirty.”

  I wanted to tell her about the biopsy, but I could see the saleswoman hovering in my peripheral vision. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  I hung up the phone. The saleswoman was several feet away, her face now bright red.

  I looked at her, smiled, and walked out with my expensive lamp.

  * * *

  That afternoon, when I went to pick up the kids from school, Neel’s teacher and the principal were waiting out front. The principal, Mr. Forman, assumed that running an elementary school meant maintaining an insistent seriousness at all times. He was married to Neel’s teacher, and during the school day, they scrupulously tried to keep their distance. Now they were standing a few feet from each other, not saying a word.

  “How are you?” I said as I headed to the playground.

  “Can we talk for a moment while the kids are still playing in the yard?” Mr. Forman asked. “We’d both like to discuss something with you.”

  I followed the two of them into his office, going through the possible list of things that Neel could have done. He could be impulsive and demanding at home, but while Eva and I were always waiting for some of these behaviors to appear in class, they never had. His teachers had mainly said that he started answering questions before they’d finished asking them and that he had trouble staying on task. It was the latter issue that had led to his ADHD diagnosis.

  Maybe I had no reason to be nervous. I wondered if I should have more faith in him; it could be positive news. Perhaps Neel had done well on a test and they wanted to congratulate me on the fact that my son was well on his way to winning a Fields Medal. I wanted to believe that was just as likely as anything else. But nothing about this week suggested good fortune was coming my way.

  Once we were in his office, Mr. Forman sat down, then gestured for me to do the same. Mrs. Forman remained standing.

  “We had an incident in class today,” Mrs. Forman said. She shared her husband’s seriousness, which she conveyed through careful articulation.

  “Before you continue, I do want you to know that Neel has always had some trouble transitioning to the start of classes,” I said. “He loves school, but he’s never been great with transitions.”

  “Today in class, the boy sitting next to Neel noticed something he was drawing,” Mrs. Forman continued, as if she had not heard me. “And it must have disturbed him deeply because he took it from Neel and brought it to me.”

  “Took it without his permission?” I asked.

  “Took it because it was very disturbing.”

  It was never the best idea to snatch something away from Neel.

  The teacher reached into her blouse pocket and placed a folded-up piece of binder paper in front of me. I opened it.

  It was a pencil drawing of two skyscrapers in flames. Next to them was a series of dollar signs. Below, Neel had written, in his poor penmanship, “Time to get paid / blow up like the World Trade.”

  I repeated the lines to myself. They sounded so familiar, and yet I couldn’t place them.

  “Neel is a wonderful boy. Smart, energetic, creative.” Mr. Forman prepared to deliver the shit part of the sandwich. “But it goes without saying tha
t this is very concerning for us all. In this time in particular.”

  “And what time is that?”

  “There are sensitivities.”

  “It’s a kid’s drawing,” I said, “not a Hezbollah manual.”

  “I completely agree,” Mr. Forman said. “But you also need to understand my position in a situation like this. I have to keep the whole school in mind ahead of the needs of any one student.”

  “Keep the school in mind? Do you think this is a threat?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  I was trying hard to resist the urge to get up and walk out. I focused instead on the words on the page, letting them run through my head. Finally, some synapse connected in my brain. Unwittingly, I laughed.

  “Is something funny?” Mr. Forman asked.

  “No, no,” I said. “I couldn’t remember where I knew these lines from, but I finally did. It’s a song lyric, something he heard in the car this morning. Christopher Wallace. You know, the Notorious B.I.G.? The rapper. Anyway, it’s just a metaphor.” I realized I was actually proud of Neel; he’d pulled the most interesting lyric from the song. The little fuck. “Perhaps it wasn’t the most judicious thing for him to be listening to adult rap lyrics,” I said before the principal could lecture me on proper parenting. “But it was the morning, and the kids were talking to each other, and I didn’t think he was listening that closely.”

  “That’s his special gift,” Mrs. Forman said. “Just when you think he’s doing something else, not paying any attention at all to what you’re saying, you realize that he was completely tuned in all along.”

  “It’s not a threat,” I said. “He was just doodling. I promise we’ll listen to Bach and Mozart in the car from now on.”

  “Well, it’s my responsibility to figure out what to do with all this,” Mr. Forman said.

  “What else is there to do?”

  “I need to think through the options.”

  “It seems to me that there are only two options,” I said. “We see this as a kid’s drawing and leave it at that, or you decide to make an example out of Neel.”