“Don’t you feel like you belong here?”
“Not really. Do you? I mean, we ended up here more or less by chance. Our fathers got jobs here, and then they just stayed. We both ended up at Kent State because it’s the closest four-year college. Plus, I got free tuition because my dad’s a professor. There’s nothing special about northeastern Ohio for our families. We could be anywhere, and our parents would want the same things. They’d want to keep doing their poojas and having their parties, while taking full advantage of the financial and shopping opportunities offered in the U.S. That’s what all Indians are like.”
Rasika’s thoughts about the diamond ring ended abruptly. Was Abhay right? Were her parents and their entire Indian community that shallow? “I don’t think you can make a blanket statement like that about all Indians.”
“Fair enough. But I’ll say that for many of the Indians I know, the U.S. is just a place to get a high-paying job and buy stuff. That’s the way it’s been for my parents, at least, and I think for yours, too. They’re just here on assignment; they run back to visit India every chance they get.”
“We go to India almost every year,” Rasika agreed.
“I went every three or four years when I was a kid until I finally put my foot down, right before my senior year in high school, and refused to waste my summers that way. I feel like I have no particular roots in India or in Ohio. I have no roots anywhere, and neither do you.”
“That’s so depressing. I can’t believe that’s true.”
“Are your parents citizens?”
“Not yet. My mom almost became a citizen when I turned eighteen and went through the process, but then at the last minute she decided not to. She said she couldn’t see any reason to go through the trouble. And for my dad, it’s an emotional thing. He likes having an Indian passport.”
“That’s right. It’s cultural loyalty. My parents aren’t citizens yet either. What’s holding them back? It’s only because they don’t really think of themselves as Americans. They don’t want to vote. They don’t want to get involved with the local community.”
“We have our own community here. The Indian community.”
“Exactly my point. Your parents probably have very few non-Indian friends, right?”
Rasika had to admit this was true. “So what? People of every culture prefer to hang out with others like them. Anyway, Ohio’s not such a bad place. We have friends here, connections.” Rasika felt like she was grasping at straws. She did want to stay in this area. She wanted to be near the people who knew her and appreciated her high quality. The Indian community here valued her impeccable taste when it came to both Indian and Western clothes, gifts, and other social niceties. If she went elsewhere, would anyone even care about how special she was? She couldn’t say this to Abhay. He would think she was vain. Not that she cared what he thought.
“In a way, it’s good that I don’t have any ties here,” Abhay said. “I can choose to settle anywhere, and I certainly wouldn’t choose this place. The only thing people seem to care about around here is building more shopping malls and parking lots. In other parts of the country, they’re putting in bike lanes and creating more parks. I come back here and see more housing developments everywhere. They’ve ripped up perfectly good fields to put in more buildings, more pavement.”
“Abhay, you’re being kind of naive. People do need to shop. They need to live somewhere.”
“They don’t need to buy a bunch of stuff made by people working for slave wages in factories in China and Mexico. They don’t need to buy a bunch of plastic that’s going to break and go into a landfill.” Abhay waved his arms as he talked, as though trying to foment some action out of the air.
Rasika laughed. “Do you think the world will ever be the way you want it to be?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at his toes, scratched his knee, and then gazed up into the sky. “I’m searching. I’m feeling kinda lost right now.”
“I guess I feel closer to India because I was born there, and I didn’t come here until I was eight.”
“But you don’t feel Indian anymore, do you?”
Rasika rubbed a palm over the tan skin of her forearm. She was Indian. She knew that. Yet she was also aware that, since she’d arrived in the U.S. in the third grade, her feeling of being Indian had grown more and more tenuous. “Once I get married, I’ll feel completely Indian,” she said.
“It sounds like you want to get married to find yourself.”
“I’m not lost. Not like you.”
He glanced at her for a moment, and then sat up straight and turned his face to the sky. She followed his gaze. High above them a pale moon had appeared in the blue evening sky. Rasika fixed her mind on the engagement ring again. She hoped Viraj hadn’t gone and picked out the ring himself. She didn’t necessarily care about a large diamond. She wanted one of high quality, very clear and sparkling. Some men—and she could certainly imagine Viraj in this category, given what she knew about him—just thought bigger was better. And what if his mother had bought the ring from an Indian jewelry store? It would be set in that bright yellow Indian gold, and it wouldn’t be a high-quality stone. Diamonds mined in India generally weren’t the highest quality. If Viraj had bought the ring already, she wondered how she could persuade him to do things her way, without coming across as spoiled or difficult.
“Have you already decided to marry this guy?” Abhay asked. “The one you’re meeting tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course,” she said flatly. “I’m not going to turn him down after they’ve traveled all the way out here. My parents have wanted me to get married since I graduated from college. It’s been hard to find someone that we all agree on. Now we’ve found him. It’s time for me to get married, and he meets all my criteria. It’s as simple as that.”
“What kind of future do you want to have?” He was sitting sideways, one bent leg resting on the bench, looking at her intently. “What do you really want out of life?”
She wondered how to address Abhay’s questions. She didn’t want to come out and tell Abhay her dearest wish, which was to impress people with her taste, beauty, and elegance. It would make it sound too crass to say it out loud.
She’d always been confident of her own high quality, as she liked to think of it, but it had sometimes been difficult to persuade others to see this. Growing up, some of the other kids just thought she was aloof. In high school, she stuck with classic clothes, mostly jeans and sweaters, and had avoided most of the fashion horrors other kids were embracing, such as extra-short baby doll dresses, and dirty flannel shirts, and baggy overalls (although one year she had gotten her hair cut in the popular bouncy, shaggy style of the character Rachel on Friends). Of course at that age she never flirted with boys. During her sophomore year, she’d made friends with Ashley Smith, the most popular girl in the school, a head cheerleader. Ashley had invited Rasika to a party one Saturday night. Rasika had worn a pretty sweater over her jeans, and had taken a box of chocolates for Ashley’s mother. When she got to the house, the mother was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the father. The house was dark and milling with bodies, some of whom she recognized from high school. Pounding music filled every room. The focal point of the party was the keg of beer in the basement. Rasika retreated to the kitchen, where she left her chocolates on the table, called her father, and waited at the end of the driveway for him to pick her up.
After that, she hadn’t made much effort to be friends with the popular girls at school. She’d mostly just kept to herself, and maintained her friends from elementary school. Her teachers loved her poise and good manners. As she grew older, in college and the work world, some of her peers came to appreciate her elegance and sophistication.
“I just want what most people want,” she finally said to Abhay. “A nice place to live, a family. And we’ll have that, Viraj and I.” It sounded strange to couple his name with hers. She�
�d get used to it.
“What are you passionate about?”
She was passionate about—she didn’t know. Besides inappropriate men, that is. Could a person be passionate about material objects? She loved beautiful things. Sometimes she wished she could have been a jeweler, but that wasn’t a suitable career for her family. So instead, she had to deal with the idea of money, with numbers on a computer screen.
It was best, she felt, not to be passionate about anything. Passion had steered her into the arms of the wrong man enough times. She crossed her arms over her chest. Of course, she hoped she would feel passion for Viraj. That would be fitting.
“I’m trying to figure out how other people make decisions,” Abhay said. “Do you feel drawn, or pulled, to do certain things? Is it an emotional decision, or an intellectual decision?”
She wanted to put an end to these questions, in a gracious way. She turned to him and raised her eyebrows. “I’m a pretty simple person, Abhay. I just want what most people want.” She stood up, strolled a few steps away, and stopped with her back to him. She was aware that he was gazing at her, and that her slim figure made a pretty picture against the fading sky.
“I mean, I hope you’re not doing this just out of obedience to your parents,” Abhay said.
“I’m not. This is what I want to do.” She was still facing away.
“Your parents want you to be happy. They think the way to make sure you’re happy is to try to run your life for you. But you don’t have to let them.”
“You’re one to talk. It’s not like you’ve figured your life out.” Rasika’s phone sang again. She grabbed for her purse on the bench.
“I hate it when people are slaves to their phone,” Abhay said.
“Let me just see who it is. My mother’ll keep calling if I don’t pick up.”
Instead, Benito’s name was on the screen. She shoved the phone to the bottom of her purse. Benito was her gym trainer—very sweet, very encouraging. He had been interested in her for months. She clutched the purse in her lap until the phone went silent, then set her purse on the bench again. “What were we talking about?”
“The fact that you’re held captive by your phone.”
“Before that.”
“You were telling me that I haven’t figured my life out.”
“Right.” She crossed her legs and leaned her knees toward Abhay. “Life’s not so hard. Just pick something and do it. Get a job. Make some money. Get on with things.”
“You sound like my dad,” he said. “I thought I had figured it out. I thought I’d live and work at Rising Star all my life. I thought I’d experience a working-together feeling, but without the judgmental nature of traditional cultures. It didn’t work for me.”
The air was cooler now, and she slipped on her jacket. “You can’t solve all the world’s problems by yourself.” Talking to Abhay made her appreciate her own life. She wanted to be ready for tomorrow, ready to meet her future husband. “What do you know about tennis?”
“Why?”
“Viraj is interested in tennis. I need to know the latest news.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I don’t want to appear completely clueless.”
“So you want to pretend like you know all about tennis?”
“At least enough to ask a few intelligent questions.”
“The U.S. Open is coming up.”
“What should I ask him about that?”
“Ask who he thinks will win.”
Rasika considered this. That might draw him out. Men always had opinions on the future results of sporting events. “What are some of the names of the players?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s it going to be?”
“Somewhere in New York.”
Her phone rang again. She dug it out of her purse. It was her mother this time. She turned off the phone and stood up. “I need to get home. I’ll give you a ride to your house.” She felt ready to face her real life now, after this little interlude with Abhay.
When Abhay got out of Rasika’s car in front of his parents’ ranch house, it was about seven o’clock. He saw his mother at the dining table behind the picture window. She had taken over the dining room to display her product samples. He pushed open the door, kicked off his sandals, and dropped his backpack inside the door.
The heavy, dark chairs and china cabinet took up all the air space in the small dining room. A few small, lonely photos arranged in no particular order hung on one wall: his grandparents, his graduation photo, his sister Seema’s school picture. The china cabinet contained a haphazard collection of useless items too nice to throw away: cloth dolls and little wooden toys from India, a carved soapstone pen caddy someone had given him for a graduation present, various cutesy porcelain figures Mom had received from the “girls” she used to work with.
“Good time you had?” Mom gave him her new, practiced smile. She sat at the table, which was covered with a lace tablecloth under a clear plastic protective sheet. She was reading a book called Unleash Your Selling Capacity and jotting notes on a legal pad.
“I ran into Rasika.” He pulled out a chair and sat down in front of a stack of educational game boxes. The cover of the top game showed two crudely drawn anthropomorphic animals with huge eyes, playing with a spinning dial with numbers on it.
“Rasika.” Mom tapped her pen on her legal pad. “Her mother I must call. Sujata said she will give name of someone to host sales party.” She pointed her pen at Abhay. “Key to success is networking.”
Growing up, Abhay had often wished his mother would find some interests of her own and stop meddling in his life. Yet he never imagined his steady, sensible mother would have been taken in by this company. He lifted one of the educational game boxes closer to him. “Mom, do you really know what you’re getting into? How much did these samples cost, anyway?”
She thumped her palm on the table’s plastic covering. “It is investment,” she said. “In myself I must invest.”
Abhay was glad his father wasn’t around. He’d not only make fun of Mom’s bad English—which was for some reason worse than that of most other Indians they knew, and certainly worse than his father’s perfect speech—but also of her new sales talk.
Despite his mother’s poor English, his parents always spoke English at home; they didn’t actually share a common Indian language. Abhay’s mother had grown up all over India, as her father was posted here and there for his government job. Her family had spoken an odd mixture of Telugu, Hindi, and English at home. His mother could get by in five or six languages, but according to his father, she had never learned any language properly. His father, in contrast, had grown up in Bangalore and had mastered a fluent, literary-quality Kannada (at least in his own opinion). To practice his English, he used to listen to speeches by Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru. Abhay’s parents had not felt it necessary to teach him or his sister any Indian language.
“It’s really difficult to make any money with these pyramid scheme things. It’s a scam, Mom,” Abhay said. “Only people at the top make anything. They get you to pay them for these samples, and then you’re stuck. And when you do make a sale, everyone else above you gets a cut.”
“I will not listen to negative talk. Anyone will make money who works hard.”
“Why are you doing this, Mom? I thought you liked your job.”
“I want to follow passion,” Mom said.
“Your passion?” He’d never once heard his mother use this word. He’d been trying to prod Rasika into stating her passion, and here his own mother, who had a very nice path to follow, had suddenly found some crazy desire.
A door opened down the hallway, and they heard a faint, insistent drumbeat. His sister Seema listened, very quietly, to a rhythm and blues station from Cleveland. He was surprised at her musical choices. She was six years younger than him, eighteen—thin, shy, and almost friendless, as far as he could tell. While they were growing up, he had
n’t paid much attention to her. But he knew her enough to notice she’d changed while he was away, becoming more odd and reclusive. Then the door closed again, and the house resumed its tomblike silence.
“Education is passion for me,” Mom said. “Learning will be fun with the games. Look. They come with video. Kids will love video.” Mom set the appropriate boxes in front of him as she spoke. “Letters . . . numbers . . . addition . . . spelling. Even geography.”
“There are so many educational games out there already.”
“These are different. Children will self-teach. Child watches video and learns to play. Game is self-correcting. See?” She opened a box and displayed the game board, cards, and playing pieces. “While mother is cooking, child will be learning.”
“What kids need is more time with their parents, not more time watching a video.”
“What you know about raising children? Anyway, parent can play with child. Very versatile these games.”
She must have picked up these words—self-correcting, versatile—at her sales meetings. Outside the dining room picture window their neighbor, Mrs. Tully, was taking an evening walk with a tiny terrier on a leash. Abhay had a crush on her daughter, Michelle, during high school. He could still picture her long, dark-blond hair. He’d sent her a “secret valentine” cupcake during the student council’s fund-raiser and had asked her to several school dances. Michelle never spoke to him, not even when they were waiting for the school bus together at the corner.
“So, Mom—have you set up any parties yet?”
“Almost. This close I am.” Mom held up two fingers a centimeter apart. “At least I think you will support.” She set her pen down. “Seema is embarrassed because mother is trying something new. Your father does not want me to keep things in dining room. Where should I keep? Everyone else has own space. Your father has whole room for home office. I have no place. Kitchen is my place, yes? No more.”
Abhay had no idea his mother had ever felt resentful of her role within the family.
“You said I should do this,” Mom said. “Now even you are against.”
And Laughter Fell From the Sky Page 3