As Shobha drove the Audi on 101 to get to her office in Cupertino, her mind whizzed with the possibilities. It was almost ten at night. At the office, it was just going to be Vladimir, Pavan, who was the product manager, and herself. There was some problem with the product that was to be released soon and Shobha wanted to brief herself on how long it would take to fix the bug so that she could present the case in front of the executive committee the next day.
She hoped the product launch would not be delayed; if it was, this would be the second time in two quarters, and Shobha knew that she'd need to start looking for a new job and soon.
Success was not as firmly lodged in her pocket as everyone assumed. She'd climbed to the position of vice president, but she still managed to fuck things up. She should've been worried about her job, about the product launch, about the end of the quarter, but all Shobha could think of was Vladimir's callused hands and thick fingers. Oh, he'd be able to find her G-spot. She was sure of that.
To die … to die without ever having an orgasm during sex, damn it, she wanted more out of life. Devi, now, Devi probably had had several thousand orgasms thanks to her hundreds of disreputable boyfriends. If Shobha killed herself today, there would be nothing to say. She never had an O-moment, that's what they would say. Worse, they'd think that she'd lived the perfect, happy life and now … ah, she was dead, what a waste.
She parked in the outside parking lot, scared of going into the basement at this hour of the night. A heady feeling inundated her as she raced up the stairs and slipped her key card into the designated slot. There was a bleeping sound and the security light next to the door changed from red to green.
Vladimir and Pavan were sitting in the server room, their faces glued to a computer screen.
“Okay, what's the problem?” Shobha asked without preamble as she stepped inside the room and the glass door squeaked shut behind her.
“Looks like we might have found it…,” Pavan began sheepishly in his heavy south Indian accent and then shrugged. “Still, it will take at least a week.”
“Right,” Shobha said, breathless. Vladimir was smiling at her. His cotton shirt was unbuttoned almost to midchest and the jeans were still as snug as ever.
“Okay, one of you give me the rundown and let's see what we can do,” Shobha said and sat down at a desk. She opened the drawer at the desk, pulled out a writing pad, and rummaged for a pen in her purse.
“All right, let's start.” She was scribbling on the writing pad even before Vladimir opened his mouth to tell her what was wrong and how they were planning to fix it.
It was almost eleven by the time they were done. They had come up with a plan of action and how to present the scenario to the executive committee the next day.
“I could eat a pizza and have a cold beer,” Pavan said with a sigh. “But I have to go home and eat dal and sabzi.”
Pavan had gone to India three months ago and like many of his Indian friends had come back to the United States with a wife. The marriage was arranged by his parents; he only saw his wife's picture and spoke with her on the phone before the wedding.
“Well, then maybe you and I can go and get a beer,” Vladimir suggested to Shobha after Pavan left. “I don't have a little wife waiting for me at home.”
“No, I should go home,” Shobha said, her reluctance obvious.
“Come with me,” Vladimir said playfully. It could be just a friendly gesture, not a come-on. Shobha wasn't sure.
An O-moment was not worth a professional nightmare, Shobha thought, and shook her head. And then there was the chance that Vladimir was a real duffer in bed and that accent was just a pickup line and nothing more.
“My husband is waiting for me,” Shobha lied easily. “I'll see you tomorrow.”
She didn't start hyperventilating until she got inside the car. What the fuck was going on? Shobha thought angrily. It was Devi who'd tried to kill herself, so why the hell did she feel she had to make up for lost time?
Shobha had never thought she'd have an arranged marriage. She'd assumed, like everyone else, that one day she would meet the right man, fall in love, marry him, and have a couple of kids. She'd never doubted her ability to find a husband or have children. Devi and she usually complained about arranged marriage, said that it was for people who were incapable of finding their life partners, losers who were looking for other losers.
Saroj would first try to convince them that arranged marriage was the best way to marry and then would plead that they only fall in love with good boys from the right caste and from good Indian families. Neither Devi nor Shobha thought she'd end up with an Indian in the first place so the matter of caste and family was moot.
Shobha had been at Cal, going through the grind of Berkeley under-grad,when she met him. He was doing his MBA and they met through a friend of a friend. He was not Indian, not from a good family (his mother had two ex-husbands, his father had four ex-wives, and someone, a brother or an uncle, had spent some time in prison for armed robbery), and definitely not what Saroj wanted. He was working for Intel and doing his MBA part time. He was an engineer on the management fast track.
His name was Dave Anderson. He was white, as white as they came, with blond hair, and very blue eyes. He was different from the men Shobha had previously been interested in.
No one at home knew about him. Shobha was living in the dorm and didn't think it was anyone's business that she was seriously dating an American. She'd dated before, had had boyfriends, but that had been innocuous, almost platonic really.
Dave was the first man she had sex with and Shobha admitted that the earth didn't rock and the bells didn't ring. After Dave came Girish, and that didn't turn out to be much of an improvement. But at least she'd been madly in love with Dave.
Dave unfortunately was interested only in sleeping with Shobha and after the first pathetic night of sex, Dave was gone. All of a sudden there were no messages on the answering machine, no phone calls, no nothing. Shobha, at the age of twenty-two, experienced firsthand what it meant to be dumped. She could hardly believe it. Other people got themselves into situations like this, not Shobha Veturi. She mourned for a while and then swore she would never ever get into this relationship business again. Dave made her feel cheap and used and thanks to him Shobha developed a healthy, if racist, attitude toward the alleged loose morals of the American white male.
When Saroj started talking about arranged marriage a few years later, Shobha said, “Yes, go find me a boy and I'll marry him.”
Her father tried to dissuade her.
“You're so young, Shobha, you'll meet someone. What's the rush?” Avi said, but Shobha wouldn't budge. It was time to be married (after all, she was twenty-seven and by all Indian standards past ready for marriage) and since falling in love was out of the question, there was only one alternative left: arranged marriage.
Girish was also not the type to walk into an arranged marriage and his parents weren't the type to force the matter, but it happened all the same. Girish's paternal grandmother was adamant that the girl be a Telugu Brahmin and that the marriage be arranged. The woman was dying of cancer and Girish, who'd never had more than a few short-term relationships with women, thought there would be no harm in getting married the arranged way. After all, they had been doing it for years in India, and it seemed to be working well for all parties involved.
Saroj met Girish's grandmother at the seemantham of the pregnant daughter of a common friend. Between piling fruit in the lap of the girl in her seventh month of pregnancy and eating sweet payasam, Saroj and Maha Lakshmi got talking about their respective daughters and grandsons. Shobha and Girish seemed like a pair made in heaven, and when their horoscopes were matched discreetly, both Maha Lakshmi and Saroj were convinced that as matches went, this one was near perfect.
For two independent, well-educated, non-Indian-raised people, Shobha and Girish walked into arranged marriage with blind-eyed optimism. It could've worked, Shobha was sure, if only they had chi
ldren.
Sex, which had never been the cornerstone of their marriage, was now a rare event that occurred only when they felt that they had to do something about their marriage. Sometimes it was Shobha who felt guilty and instigated their insipid physical relationship. Sometimes, it was Girish. In neither case were the unions satisfying for either of them.
They never talked about their current situation or discussed if it could be remedied. They both let things slide into normalcy and soon neither was upset or worried that they had no marriage and no real future together.
Then one day the unthinkable entered Shobha's mind, and it wouldn't leave. It started as a cliche: how many times had she seen a movie where the wife found an earring in her husband's car/coat/office/person that belonged to the other woman?
It wasn't like she ever got into Girish's car alone. She didn't have reason to when he wasn't there, but that day had been different all around. Shobha drove out of the driveway only to be hit by a kid in a beat-up Toyota (what impertinence). Though no one was hurt, Shobha's Audi looked like it had been in a small brawl and needed AAA assistance. Shobha was in a rush, and Girish didn't have to be at the university until later in the afternoon.
“I'll call the garage, you take my car,” he suggested, dangling his car keys in front of her. “I can always walk to work or get a cab.”
Shobha didn't have to be asked twice. She dumped her laptop and leather bag behind the driver's seat and drove away after saying a hasty thank-you to Girish. Nothing happened all day. She got through her meetings, did her work, everything was normal. Normal until she went back home.
Papers from a file she'd brought from work spilled out from the passenger's seat. Shobha bent down to grab them from under the seat and that was when she saw it.
A small, round, pearl earring encased in gold.
It belonged to an Indian, no doubt about that. The gold encasing the pearl was twenty-two karat, not fourteen or eighteen, and only an Indian would go around wearing twenty-two-karat extra-shiny gold. She didn't even think that the earring could be a colleague's, a friend's, a stranger's whom Girish gave a ride to. She simply knew that it belonged to the other woman, the one who was having the good sex with her husband.
As soon as she saw Girish, who was in the kitchen, immersed in a book, sipping coffee, she asked him, point blank, accusation rippling through her words, “Whose earring is this?”
Girish looked up and shrugged vaguely. “Should I know whose it is?”
“This was in your car,” Shobha informed him, wagging the earring in front of his face.
Girish shrugged again, just as vaguely as he did before. “So what?” he asked, going back to his book.
“So whose is this? Someone special?” Shobha asked, incredulous that he was unmoved, anger making her voice quiver.
Of all the reactions she'd imagined, this was the wrong one.
Girish burst out laughing. “Good God, Shobha, do we have to be part of a bad Hindi movie where you come and ask me if I have a … what do they call it in Telugu, chinna illu, small house, where I keep my mistress?”
When he put it that way it did sound ridiculous.
“Well, you're right of course, who'd want to be your mistress?” Shobha said, hiding her doubts behind suddenly developed nonchalance. With the same affected casualness, she put her sensible black-shoe-clad foot on the trash-can lever and tossed the earring on top of a blackened banana peel before closing the can.
And almost instantly she regretted throwing the earring away and not keeping it as evidence. Because once sown, those doubts wouldn't die. She was convinced, or a part of her was convinced, that Girish was having an affair, and with an Indian woman. Another part of her was convinced that Girish was not having an affair with anyone and Shobha just wanted him to, so that her irresponsible thoughts about her newly hired Ukrainian engineer would seem less irresponsible.
“I think he's doing it with someone else, G'ma,” Shobha told Vasu when she was visiting.
“Shush, Shobha. You're imagining things. Girish is a decent man,” Saroj admonished, immediately taking the son-in-law's side.
They were in the kitchen. Saroj was making her famous (all of Saroj's dishes were somehow her famous this or that) rajma, which she made with dried kidney beans, not the tasteless ones you got in a can that the lazy Indians in the United States used.
Vasu, who was sipping a hot cup of Darjeeling tea—Saroj kept it stocked just for her visits—didn't skip a beat at Shobha's declaration.
“Why would you think that?” Vasu asked calmly.
“I just know,” Shobha said, uncomfortable talking about the pearl earring she'd found in Girish's car. It was too cheesy, too much of a soap opera, and she was embarrassed that it was something as silly as an earring that had triggered this line of thought.
“Is it because you don't do it with him often enough that you think someone else is?” Vasu asked, looking Shobha right in the eye.
Oh, that was a little too much on target.
“G'ma, whose side are you on?” she demanded.
“On yours,” Vasu said without hesitation. “And that's why I think you should ask yourself why such an idea is even lurking in your mind. Saroj, you've been married more than three decades; have you ever thought that Avi was cheating on you?”
Absolutely not,” Saroj replied instantly.
“There,” Vasu told Shobha. “See, that is trust. They may not have the perfect marriage, but there is trust.”
After that the conversation went to hell in the proverbial hand-basket because Saroj wanted to know what Vasu meant by they may not have the perfect marriage and Shobha did not bring up the topic of Girish's alleged infidelity ever again.
But the doubts lingered. Was it a student? A friend of hers? A friend of his? A married woman? A single woman? A call girl? (Did they have Indian call girls in the United States who wore twenty-two-karat gold when they met their clients?)
And because she wondered if Girish was slipping it inside some woman at a Motel 6, Shobha felt no (or only very little) guilt when she imagined Vladimir's hands on her body. The sensations she was sure would be exquisite. Sex, the word had meant nothing to her for all these years, but now that she was deprived and there was a red-blooded male who wanted to take her in every which way she could imagine, sex had started to mean the world.
Shobha used her key to go inside the house, which was dark except for the small night lamp glittering green against the white walls of the living room.
It was almost midnight and Girish was still not home. Shobha wondered if she should call his cell phone and check on him, make sure he had a ride back from her parents’ house, and then decided against it. If he didn't have a ride back and she called, he'd expect her to come and pick him up and she didn't feel like doing that.
She changed quickly into the T-shirt she slept in and then, when she still didn't hear any Girish sounds, snuck into her husband's study. She had been going there often since the “pearl earring” discovery, rifling through his papers, checking his e-mail (his password was always just GIRISH—what a nightmare for his IT department), and sometimes even reading his research papers. She was convinced that somewhere here was evidence of Girish's adultery, of his imperfectness.
Everyone always told her that Girish was wonderful, a perfect gentleman, and therefore a perfect husband. Even Shobha's closest friend, Jaya, remarked how perfect Girish was.
Jaya once visited with her husband, Akhil, from New Jersey, and Girish had been a wonderful host, as he always was. After that, whenever Shobha complained about Girish, Jaya would remind her that Girish unlike Akhil didn't have a bad temper causing him to throw things and yell the place down. Akhil hadn't hit her—and by God, let him try, she would have his balls in a blender—but still, Jaya said she would trade husbands any day.
“So bloody what if he can't find your G-spot? Buy a vibrator. I did and it keeps me happy and happy and happy,” Jaya instructed.
Shobha gave t
he vibrator serious consideration, but the idea was simply too classless for her liking.
There was another reason why adultery seemed to be the next imminent event in her life, and that was curiosity. Would Girish care? Would he find out? What would he do if he found out?
She wondered if there would be a The Grass Is Greener moment where Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum duel it out for Deborah Kerr. Would Girish turn from stodgy man to loving husband, like Cary Grant? Would there be a Robert Mitchum? Would she stay with Grant or go with Mitchum or find a third man to have another affair with?
She wanted to cheat on Girish. That was a fact. She really, really wanted to, but she felt her vagina closing off every time she thought about it. Years of programming, Saroj's brainwashing, stayed with her. Good Indian girls didn't cheat on their husbands: That was also a fact.
But she was neither good nor truly Indian. Unfortunately, all this deliberation, she knew was for nothing, as the only candidate for an extracurricular fuck seemed to be Vladimir and he was unavailable for professional reasons. The last thing she needed was a sexual harassment lawsuit. Since her marriage was pathetic, the only thing that Shobha truly cared about was her career and she was definitely not going to fuck with that.
Killing with Kindness
After Shobha stormed out of the house to go back to work, Avi suggested that maybe Devi could drive Girish home. It would be a break for her and she could drive back alone. He seemed nervous as he made the offer, and once again Devi felt the mixture of panic and peace she'd experienced while lying in the bathtub a week ago, contemplating how deep to make the cut and where.
“But you'll have to come back right away,” Avi warned her, and Devi nodded, carefully, slowly. She didn't want anyone to think she was too eager. But she was, oh, how she was.
She was not the claustrophobic kind. She didn't mind being stuck in an elevator full of people or walking into a crowded room. Things like that didn't bother her, but this, this constant incursion into her privacy, was stifling. Someone was always there, constantly looking, wondering. Did they think she'd try the bathtub again? Didn't they realize that it would never be the bathtub again? Just looking at a bathtub gave her goose bumps. She wasn't sure if she saw a bathtub as an opportunity lost or a slim escape from death.
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