“Nope. I love spice. I was excited about coming here for the food. I mean, obviously the project too,” Emma added quickly, not wanting Jas to think she’d just come here to eat. “I’m really hoping we can really wow the company and make a dramatic impact on ROI with this app.”
“Me too.” Jas looked off in the distance. “Rishi, come join us!” he called.
Her cheeks and neck grew hot, and not from her breakfast. She turned back to Jas, who was talking about something, but all she could think about was how to get the flush from her cheeks. When Rishi came to the table, he would see the bright red in her cheeks and nose and know it was about him, Mr. It’s Quite a Big Snake himself.
Breathe.
She was fully rested, logic had regained its ground, and she would not let Rishi stand in her way.
Breathe. And eat your idli.
Rishi’s tray plunked down on the table, next to her forearm. She smiled at him, maybe a little too broadly, because he looked at her askance, as if she were an untrained dog with the potential to bite. The way he shifted his body away from her when he sat down told her he hadn’t forgotten about yesterday.
“Rishi, glad we ran into you,” said Jas. “I was just filling Emma in on some project details. I think the two of you should spend part of the day together discussing the back-end infrastructure. Give her a primer on the stages we take to develop apps.”
Rishi took a bite of his idli after dipping it into the sambar and chutney. “Sure, boss.”
Emma looked at her hands, the sambar and chutney muddled on her fingers like a grainy red oil slick. She wiped them off on her napkin, hoping Rishi hadn’t noticed how dirty they were. Somehow his and Jas’s fingers were clean, even though they’d been eating with their hands as well.
“I would love that. Are you free after breakfast, Rishi? Why wait to get started?” Emma asked. Jas needed to see she was a team player, a delightful employee, and that she and Rishi had no issues whatsoever. Besides, why wait to tackle the problem sitting beside her?
He seemed to hesitate as he examined her face. What was he thinking? If she’d read the book last night? How she was eating like a messy five-year-old?
She sat back in her chair and attempted to channel a sense of cool and calm. Shrugging, she said, “I mean, if you have other priorities, I have stuff to work on if you’re too busy. No big deal. I could read a book about it.”
His face suddenly came to life. “Oh, I saw you’d brought the one . . .” He furrowed his brow into a faux-pensive look as he rubbed at his chin. A smile teased at the corners of his lips.
She should have seen that coming. Rishi 3, Emma 0. “I’ve been studying it. That is, a book on app dev.”
“Which one?” Jas asked.
Emma’s eyes darted in a panic to Rishi, who seemed to find such amusement that he cracked the first full grin of the morning. “App Coding for Dummies, was it?” he asked.
Emma blew out a huge sigh and glanced sideways at Rishi, who was still smiling at her like they were sharing some kind of joke. Were they?
“Don’t worry: we can meet when you’re done.” He picked up a piece of idli and stuffed a big, fluffy bite into his mouth.
“Perfect! Why read a book when you can do it together?” Jas said.
In simultaneous slow motion they both looked at him. Emma swallowed. If Jas only knew. He stood up and grabbed his tray. “I knew you’d be great together. And I love those Dummies books. I got one to train my dog.”
As Jas strolled away, the awkwardness between her and Rishi simmered, as thick as the sambar that had burned her tongue.
“App Coding for Dummies? Seriously?” she whispered.
He just laughed and got up to get some water. Now what? There wasn’t enough chutney in existence to cure this fiery tension between them.
CHAPTER 14
“I’m going to get a coffee first,” she said. “Then do you want me to meet you at your desk?” Emma asked Rishi when he came back to the table.
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Do you want me to get you one too?”
“Yes?” It had definitely come out like a question as he thought of all the things she could put in his coffee for revenge—arsenic, spit, her finger. He was regretting it even as she shook her head at him, muttering something as she walked off.
Rishi sighed and walked toward his desk.
He settled into his seat and surveyed the mess on his desk. It was like a tornado had hit his desk as he’d rushed to Seattle, and he’d never cleaned up the wreckage.
“Ready?”
Rishi jumped in his seat, his heart a jackhammer in his chest. The voice to his left jerked his head and his thoughts straight into Emma’s breasts. He whipped back around.
“Aw . . . did I scare you?” she said, an expression of mock sympathy teasing on her face.
“You didn’t. I mean, it’s fine.” Why did he sound like an adolescent half the time when she was around? Like when he was twelve and he avoided asking questions because his voice was changing and always cracked at the end.
She made a small noise in the back of her throat that was a hint of a laugh but sounded like she’d swallowed a baby bird. He wouldn’t have put it past her.
Rishi tried to straighten up his desk. His hands fumbled as he grabbed a stack of notes and papers and books. The entire stack slipped out of his hands, spreading even farther on his desk and knocking two half-empty coffee cups over in the process. He glanced at Emma, who sat down in a chair and pressed her lips together to suppress a laugh. He would have thought it was funny, too, if anyone but Emma had been laughing at him.
“Messy desks are one of the seven habits of highly effective coders, didn’t you know?” she said.
“That makes sense,” Rishi grumbled, scanning the room. “Looking around here, some of the others must be bad posture, carpal tunnel, and needing to get—”
He’d almost said get laid but had caught himself before he finished. He couldn’t believe he had almost said that to Emma. To a woman. To a coworker he was on perilous terms with. That was the kind of language that slipped out of his mouth when he was hanging out with his friends, watching cricket and drinking beer.
“I mean. I guess there’s just the two,” he finished, and he opened up the bug list he’d been working on earlier.
“You clearly thought there was a third,” Emma said.
“No.”
“What was it?”
“Nothing.” An exasperated sigh grunted out of him, like it was on autopilot-Emma mode.
“Hopefully at some point you can act like a professional, and we can just have a normal conversation.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes at the same time.
Rishi couldn’t believe her insistence. “It was nothing. Can we get started? Professionals and all?”
Her mouth parted as if she was going to say something, but then she slumped back against her chair. With a sigh, she opened her laptop. “Fine. Before we start talking about app dev 101, I’ve been thinking about how to make the app more gamified with the current content and wanted to see if you had any ideas.”
Work. They had work to do. “Okay. Do you have some examples of mobile games you like or that you want to emulate?”
“Just a few. Let me know if you think we could design it like any of these screenshots.” She turned her laptop toward him and clicked through the images. Rishi couldn’t help but notice a name in one of the bottom tabs. Marriage code.
“Is that my algorithm you’re working on?” He pointed at it.
“Yes, but I haven’t had a chance to do much else with it since the plane. But don’t worry. We had a deal. You were going to help me, and I will help you. That’s still the plan, right?” She turned to him. “Are you on board?”
Rishi tried to lean back in his chair, but something about her presence made him unable to relax. More time with Emma. His body was weirdly stiff as he thought about it. If she was as good as he thought, it shouldn’t be much long
er before he’d have the results.
“Yes, that’s what I want.” His words reluctantly agreed with her.
“Okay, good. Let’s schedule time to finish up your code, and we can get on with our lives and start focusing on this project.” She pulled up her calendar.
“Sunday?” he asked.
“Sunday it is.”
And just like that, as she created a meeting in her calendar, his fate was tied up with hers.
CHAPTER 15
Emma had in tow four new bags of clothes from her day out shopping. She’d gone with her new team member, Preeti, who’d graciously agreed to show her the best places to shop. As soon as they opened the door to the air-conditioned coffee shop, her body heaved a sigh of relief. Coffee and cool air. Two things she hadn’t realized she desperately longed for that afternoon. “This is perfect. And my treat, since you’re my unofficial stylist.”
Preeti laughed. “Maybe that can be my job if coding doesn’t work out.”
Emma ordered two cappuccinos for them, and they sat at one of the small tables in the brightly lit shop.
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to work out for you.” Emma laughed. Preeti was the most enthusiastic coder on the team. She was younger than Rishi and had less experience, but she made up for it in her willingness to do anything. “Did you always want to go into coding?”
“I don’t know what else I would have done. I’m glad I had the opportunity. I mean, twenty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college for engineering, and my parents would have married me off. My dad is living in another time.” She laughed it off, waving the jab away with her hand.
Emma winced in sympathy. Working as a woman in IT was a struggle anywhere. Her quest to find a balance between pushing herself to excel and demanding the same of others had cost her. Cost her more than one unflattering nickname. Cost her free time. And cost her the ability to find men who could handle it. But she couldn’t imagine getting married after college. And obviously, she couldn’t imagine it now.
A week had gone by since she’d left, and Jeremy hadn’t even emailed her. Not an instant message, not a social media like, nothing. But to be fair, she hadn’t reached out to him either. In fact, she’d been so busy dealing with her new life in a new country that she hadn’t even given much thought to what had happened. Or maybe she was trying to block it out of her memory.
The barista set two cups of perfect cappuccino in front of them. She inhaled hers and took a sip. “So are you planning to get married anytime soon, or are you waiting?”
“My parents are looking for someone, but I’m not in a hurry.” Preeti grinned. “I can be a bit choosy.”
“I hope your parents have good taste in men!”
“Me too. But they’ll find someone good. They’re like a search party. They bring back all the spoils from their journey, and I get to choose the one I like the most. They have my best interests in mind.”
She could appreciate the approach. She was in no hurry to start dating, which, before Jeremy, had felt like a part-time job. Relentless nights on dates fueled by some pinprick of commonality on a dating app. Clinging to the idea of what could be rather than what actually was. In the past year, she’d heard more horror stories from her friends than hopes of potential relationships. Horror stories that she was likely to add to if she went down the same route.
At least with an arranged marriage, your family was involved, so no one could be too horrible without someone finding out or them vetting the person first. It begged the question of why Rishi wasn’t using his parents and family to help with his search. He was going through all this trouble when he could have just taken Preeti’s approach. In fact, if Emma could do the same, she would. “That sounds like a really good system. I wonder if I can make arranged marriages a trend back home.”
“Well, of course there are love marriages, too, but it’s difficult sometimes.”
“Is it because of the caste and community and state you’re from?” Emma asked. Maybe she could find out why Rishi hadn’t found someone on his own yet.
“So you know about all that?” Preeti looked impressed. “Yes, mostly. Each of us has our own traditions and way of living, so it’s difficult sometimes to bridge that gap. I mean, I don’t even know all our traditions. When I have kids, I’ll have to have my mom teach me half of them so they can continue to be passed down.”
Emma tried to take stock of her family traditions. Or if they even had any. The traditions of her own family had been so generic they could fit into any random working-class household in America. And maybe hers were even weirder. Frozen meals on Thanksgiving. Shopping for Christmas presents the day after Christmas, since everything was on sale. And Velveeta seemed to take center stage like some on-screen narrator as she thought about her childhood.
She tried to fathom having so many traditions that you didn’t even know half of them by the time you were in your twenties. Impossible.
“Like what kind of traditions, if you don’t mind me asking?” Now Emma was just curious.
“Oh, I mean, there is the difference of language and religion and where you’re from. But then there is how you pray and which festivals you celebrate and how you celebrate them. How you cook food and whether you’re a vegetarian or not. And then there may be certain foods you don’t eat on top of that. And there are things like what kind of clothes you wear or how you wear them. Oh, and what kinds of jobs are acceptable to your parents.” She took a break to inhale. “I think that’s it.”
“So basically your entire life.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. Our generation is more open minded about it, I think, but there are a lot of people out there, and a lot of parents haven’t really come around to the idea.”
“Maybe they don’t want to lose all these traditions.” The idea that she could have had so many traditions to remember her parents by, and really had none to cling onto, made melancholy sweep over her.
“I think so. I know my parents are already talking about their grandchildren, and I’m not even married yet!”
“I guess that’s why it’s hard to have a boyfriend. You never met anyone at work?” Emma asked, wondering how boyfriends and girlfriends fit into this world of arranged marriages.
“No,” she said, looking down at her coffee. A smile emerged. “I mean, seriously, have you looked at those nerds?”
Emma laughed. Rishi popped into her head. With his polished shoes and tight jeans and messy flop of hair. She’d been too busy and, if she was being honest, concerned about him to take notice of anyone else at work.
Tonight she had to meet Rishi to talk about the algorithm. At a pub. Her idea had been that beer would serve as the referee and keep them from killing each other. Her stomach felt a bit fluttery, though. Another new adventure in a series of weekly adventures.
She’d been sitting in traffic in the back of a Maruti Suzuki for a full thirty minutes. Cars packed together in the street, forming a solid mass of headlights, exhaust, and honking. Scooters, motorcycles, and bicycles emerged from the cracks, weaving through a labyrinth of exposed pavement. When a gap opened, engines surged, each vehicle inching its way down the crowded street. Emma sat in the unmoving car, watching the smoke billow around in the headlights. People walked through the traffic, and she wondered if it would be quicker to do the same, even if it did seem like a smog-saturated death trap.
The life of the city streets beyond the uneven sidewalks was darkened, set against the glaring abundance of headlights. Emma caught glimpses of buildings and sidewalk but couldn’t see past the edges of the road. They were surrounded by people. There were countless couples on motorcycles, the women covering their faces with their dupattas or the hems of their saris to keep out the smog. A group of young women huddled together in an auto-rickshaw, laughing, looking at their phones. A man passed her, pedaling his bicycle in flip-flops and tired-looking khaki pants.
Emma stared into their lives and saw a glimpse of
what they might be doing—a woman going home to wash the soot out of her hair, girls going out to a pub for the first time, a man cycling home to a small one-room house where his wife had cooked rice and lentils for dinner.
As they inched closer to MG Road, the main thoroughfare in Bangalore, hundreds of young people crowded the sidewalks, their bodies meshed together like the traffic, packed in and barely moving.
What had Preeti said about it being difficult to have a boyfriend? Emma couldn’t imagine all these men waiting to touch a girl until they were married. She couldn’t imagine Rishi waiting at all.
Emma, it’s actually quite a big snake.
There it was again. Could she ever forget those words, or the way he’d said them? How his eyes had burned into hers, secret laughter boiling behind them, just waiting for her to say something, anything. Maybe he was just talking about cobras, but she couldn’t deny that, on impulse, her eyes had flitted to his crotch. Then, afraid she’d been caught, she’d turned mute. Speechless. A rarity for her.
But Rishi would just have to lean over a girl, flash her those metallic eyes, the muscles in his forearm vibrating at her, and with one carefully crafted sentence she’d be his victim. Poor things. There was no way he was saving himself for marriage.
The driver stopped in front of a tall office building bordered by a coffee shop and a grocery store. “Thank you!” She shut the door and walked into a dark wooded bar with cricket games playing on four different TV screens in each corner. The Rolling Stones drifted softly out of the speakers. Her stomach was in knots. And there was Rishi at a table in the corner.
She sucked up any lingering anxiety, the origins of which she couldn’t quite place, and walked over to him like she was auditioning for the role of cheerful, pleasant, yet dynamic coworker. “Hello.”
“Hey, Emma.” Rishi straightened up and put his phone down. “How’s it going?” His voice was tentative. Almost wary. Maybe she wasn’t the only person who was anxious over being together outside the office. Neutral ground, and yet not neutral at all. Wars had been started over similar circumstances, she was sure.
The Marriage Code: A Novel Page 11