At last I saw Anita. She was walking to the fashion show to join DJ Jai Zee. She didn’t nod, smile, or pretend at concern. That vision I’d had of her here and there, in the days leading up to the expo—gold slicking her lips before she brought them to mine—went out, like a light suddenly cut.
I reached a point of clarity as I heard her voice reciting the names of the fashion show sponsors over the loudspeaker before DJ Jai Zee ignited the soundtrack, thumping Goa trance.
It was all for her mother. She didn’t think I could be trusted. She thought I was smaller than the sum of my lusts.
“We’d better get to that raffle, Prachi,” I muttered. I didn’t dare look at Minkus, who was still being scolded by Linda.
“Now, I told her she’d better hire a security firm, sir,” she was saying, “but I am only too happy to escort you out, I will not have this behavior, I don’t know how you people do things.”
A swell of voices intervened, some woke ABCD suggesting Linda ought not use that phrase, you people; a fobby uncle addressing Minkus, “Mr. Jhaveri, do not make us look so bad, like this only people will think Indians are trampling on each other, sets very bad reputation.”
Freed by the nosy, gossipy horde, Prachi and I arrived at the packed fashion show. The Jhaveri gold prodded me through my jeans but I didn’t dare transfer it to my bag. Anita stood on the raised platform while DJ Jai Zee polished his sunglasses on a bright red mesh Adidas T-shirt. Beneath, he wore ’90s Reebok track pants, white stripes on black. His hair was buzzed. His chin dimpled. He was grinning at Anita lasciviously.
“So hot,” a girl behind me whispered.
The models swished up and down the runway. On one skeletal girl: a crimson hoop skirt large enough to hide a flock of small children. On another: a corset-like bodice, scaly as a mermaid tail, culminating in ruffled pants. Prachi pooh-poohed a few. (“Gaudy,” she whispered.) She began taking notes as DJ Jai Zee name-dropped designers and Anita interspersed commentary. I turned my head, slowly as possible. I saw no sign of my armed rival. Still, I sweated.
When the white-clad women completed their walk, Anita declared that it was time for the raffle announcement. She held up a red box, shook it, then extracted a green ticket. She mouthed the numbers back to herself. I could see, from my seat, the fear passing over her, the momentary terror that she’d misremembered. But then she spoke them aloud. Some hundred brides fiddled with purses and wallets. Prachi was still writing on her legal pad when a lovely tall dark-skinned girl stood, only to have someone else say, “No, Sonia, that’s not you.”
“Prachi?” I whispered. “Check and see?”
Behind us: “Ey, wave yours, who says they’ll look?”
Prachi laughed. “I never win anything,” but then she dug in her purse as Anita read the numbers out once more. Prachi’s head swiveled in my direction, her face tainted with suspicion.
“Here!” A helpful auntie raised my sister’s hand high in the air. Prachi yelped, because said auntie’s hand was done up with still-wet mehendi. The fecal henna oozed down Prachi’s arm. “Go on, go on,” the auntie said, and up Prachi went. There, Anita held Prachi’s new deep red Manish Motilal lehenga. It was enormous, with enough fabric to be fitted to the body type of any possible winner. The blouse was silk starred with golden pricks; muslin overlaid the shoulders. It culminated in a huge fanned skirt.
Behind me, someone said, “Look at that girl. Too-too skinny.”
“Stop telling me to lose weight then, hanh, Mummy?”
“There’s curves, then there’s fat, Rupali.”
Prachi’s limbs buckled when the dress made contact with her arms.
* * *
• • •
“Congrats, wow, that’s some dress, huh—sorry, not dress, lehenga—are you going to wear it? Do you think Mom will like it?” I said to the bundle of fabric blocking Prachi’s face.
We followed Anita to the tailor, a bespectacled uncle wearing pleated brown pants and a half-sleeve collared shirt, relic of a closet-sized Bangalore shop. “This is Mr. Harsh,” Anita said. We absconded to a cluster of conference rooms at the west side. Feet away: two staircases. Exits sans metal detectors. The highway coiling toward the sea.
Prachi deposited the Manish Motilal on the table and Mr. Harsh, tape measure round his neck like a garland, beckoned Prachi to stand before a three-sided mirror. Anita dragged out a bamboo room divider to hide Prachi from my view, and more important, me from hers.
“I’ll just be over here,” I called unnecessarily. “I’ll just be over here while you guys do your girl thing over there, don’t worry.”
I fingered the lehenga, laid out on the conference table. It was surprisingly rough.
“It’s amazing, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not sure it’s totally my style, Anita,” Prachi said. “And it’s a summer wedding, in Georgia—it’ll be so hot.”
“Give yourself a chance to get it altered,” Anita said. “You’ll fall in love with it when Mr. Harsh sizes it perfectly. Trust me, I’ve seen Deepika Padukone in this, you two have the same figure, and it looks like a lot, yes, but when it hangs on you, ooh, it’s stunning. If you hate it, give it to a cousin or something. Mr. Harsh will leave space for a few sizes, right?”
I began to pull the Jhaveri gold from my pockets and the Screwvala and Mehta pieces from the bag; felt inside the skirt for the trick pockets, each one sewn into the middle liner . . . there, there was the first one. I grabbed at the loose thread and felt something give way. I shoved the first bangles in, then retied the string.
It was so much less gold than we’d planned on. What if I didn’t bother with smuggling it in the lehenga, just carried it out on me? But then came Anita’s determined eyes, peering round the bamboo. She didn’t know how little I’d gathered. And besides, what if someone—what if Minkus Jhaveri, or the single security guard—demanded I empty my bag? No one would guess about these trick pockets. I kept at it. I tried to work without the awareness of Anita’s gaze on me. Leave you, she’d made me recite how many times. If something goes wrong, I leave you, and I take everything to Anjali Auntie.
You know I’d have to leave you, too, right, Neil? she’d said to me. You understand that if something goes wrong, I will get to my mom first?
“Turn. Arms up.”
“I hate to ask, Anita, but . . .” Prachi was saying on the other side of the divider.
“Arms down.”
“It was all . . . fair and square, wasn’t it? I mean, I don’t want you to do something, like, to get me to like you. Because you feel you need approval from our family?”
“Of course it isn’t that.”
I finished tying up the gold in the skirt. I smoothed the lehenga. I stepped back and saw Mr. Harsh gripping my sister’s hips like they were flanks of meat.
The tailor drew a datebook from his breast pocket. “Thursday after next,” he said, head waggling, that indeterminate promise.
Anita removed the bamboo divider to see what was happening on the other side: I was lifting the lehenga, gathering it up to me. Her eyes landed on mine, and I saw some comprehension dawn on her.
“You all good with that, Neil?” she said.
“Neil, what are you doing, be careful!” Prachi cried.
“I thought,” I said, stealing the line in the script that was supposed to belong to Anita, “I thought I might take it to Mr. Harsh’s; didn’t one of you say it’s on my way back up to Berkeley? I’m actually pretty tired of all this, Prachi, it’s very girly, and I’m exhausted, I have to get home and do a whole lot of work on my dissertation, and if I just drop this off, I’ll just zip over to Berkeley, and—”
Anita reached for the lehenga. “Neil,” she said. And I could tell that now she didn’t want to abide by that original plan; she didn’t want me to be alone with the goods. Her fingers closed around the silk, but they were so small, and I was stronger
than she was. “Why don’t you let me take the lehenga to Mr. Harsh’s shop? And he and I should talk more about, as you say, girly design issues.”
“I wish I had you guys fighting to run my errands all the time!” Prachi said, mildly bewildered.
“No,” I said. “Really, it’s no trouble. It’s no trouble at all.” I reached for Mr. Harsh’s card, which he’d left on the table for Prachi, and in the same movement, I hugged Prachi with one arm. My sister was looking strangely at me and Anita, and I rolled my eyes, hoping to signify that it was just an innocent romantic spat. And then I turned, pulling the lehenga from Anita’s grasp with ease. I pushed the conference room door open, and the last thing I saw behind me was Anita’s mouth hanging half-open, as I proved right every doubt she’d ever had about me.
The door banged shut behind me. Little puffs of the sleeves poked me in my eyes. I thought of Chidi admonishing me when I worked out with him and pled exhaustion . . . Neil, you can do anything for thirty seconds. I moved through the next minutes in thirty-second blocks. Nudge open the conference room door, hustle down the hallway, thirty seconds. Clunk downstairs, each footstep echoing cavernously. At the bottom door, work knob; thirty seconds of fear at its stickiness, as the lehenga dropped to my ankles. Thirty seconds as I realized I’d been turning it the wrong way. Outside. Thirty seconds, into the parking lot. Thirty seconds of terror as I realized a horde of women were exiting the front entrance en masse, slowed, presumably, by the metal detectors restricting that door . . . I had parked, where, in aisle A, row 30? Aisle B, row 20? Fucking where?
I tried my key. Heard the poink-poink of my car. Saw women caroming away from the main entrance as, through them, came the thumping feet of Minkus Jhaveri.
“That’s the fucking punk!” he shouted. He was perhaps eight feet to my right. My car had poink-poinked perhaps ten feet to my left. I felt the heat of a cocked weapon that has eyes only for you. My hands gave way. The lehenga landed at my feet. My arms rose, instinctively, white-flagging. I saw him in full profile: Minkus Jhaveri, buzzed hair and hefty belly, leading with the Smith & Wesson, hands clasped with purpose.
“I know your type,” I heard him say. “Some people have the balls to at least come armed. But the sneaky ones. That’s how fucking Indians do it. Little pussy pickpockets. Like beggars. Where’d you put it? Where’d you put it all?”
“I don’t,” I whispered, “know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The gun shook—not because of fear, no, it was thrill. Sweat beads formed on his brow. Behind Minkus Jhaveri, women crouched behind their cars. I felt sure I could hear everyone breathing, shallowly and gaspingly.
And then, over Minkus’s shoulder, I saw orange-haired Linda approaching, her eyes narrowing. She knelt. She was lifting up her pant leg and loosening something around her ankle. I tried to mouth Don’t, but Minkus saw my lips move, and he jerked his head around, taking with him the gun. I heard the shot, but I dove for the lehenga, and didn’t see whose weapon fired. I collected the dress, bear-crawled to my Honda. I drove with my head low like I’d seen in movies, eyes beneath the steering wheel, not straightening till I had to look at the main road.
The convention center became a half-moon in my rearview. The sky blooming out in all directions was clear, but through it the smoke of an unlikely pistol still coiled. I was three miles, then five miles away, and my sister and Anita were back there, in the vicinity of the shots.
Q: If something happens?
A: Go straight to Sunnyvale. The faster the lemonade gets made, the sooner the evidence is gone.
My phone was vibrating atop the tulle, making a frizzy noise. I saw the waning power, 3 percent battery, as Prachi’s name dissipated on the screen. It began again, Prachi once more. The ringing abated. Then started again.
It went like that for a few minutes. I never saw, not once, Anita Dayal flash up. Then the phone blackened. I had no charger. And I was still going, driving not southwest to Sunnyvale but instead wailing northeast on 680, approaching Berkeley, then passing it. Behind me the sky and the highway, that mingling of blue and gray that had always been the Georgia horizon, too, twined south, running the spine of the state all the way to Los Angeles. This endlessly striving state at the end of America, where everyone was always going somewhere, and fast.
11.
I took a seventy-dollar motel room outside Marysville. I’d zoomed there on instinct, as if toward some holy ground. I could not go home, where I might be found so easily. The motel seemed the thing to do. The owners, I was disappointed to discover, were Gujaratis, and gave me that knowing one-two sweep of brown on brown.
In my room, I stalked the grainy local news channels and found nothing about shots fired at a desi bridal expo. No talk of a mass shooting, certainly. But I refused myself optimism. The events at a parochial convention in Santa Clara might simply have been forgotten. Especially amid the nonstop election coverage: leaked emails, leaked tapes. I turned off the TV, took a walk to a corner store a half mile away, bought Jim Beam and a phone charger, began drinking from the bottle.
Somewhere nearby was a river that I’d once imagined saving my gold digger, turning him from an outlaw to a man at home in America. Somewhere nearby, a story of this country I’d wanted to believe in. But the magic I’d dreamt up had been carried downstream with the arrival of that news clipping in my wire mailbox.
I didn’t plug in my phone. I sat on the floor of the motel room and ran my hands along the rough carpeting—ridiculously, I thought, Good, my prints are being callused away. I listened to the raspy air-conditioning unit and the pipes full of other people’s fluids swishing through the thin walls. I stared at the drawn drapes, expecting them to become suddenly illumined with kaleidoscopically spinning red and blue lights as sirens sounded and law enforcement screeched in. In the back of their vehicle I would watch the red and blue fall in long columns along the rippled cornfields and the apricot orchards.
But no lights came, no yowl of sirens.
I drank, drank more.
Night fell and, in the darkness, I finally dared bring the Manish Motilal lehenga up from the trunk of the car—I’d moved it there at a piss stop on the way north, the same place I did the last of the coke and tossed the baggie. I’d been afraid to carry the dress to my room in the daylight; I didn’t know what I might look like to the thin-lipped girl staffing the front desk. A runaway groom, having murdered his bride, on the lam, prepared to engage in some kind of necrophiliac ritual with her couture? I laid out the lehenga atop the faded floral duvet and observed it like it was in fact a body. What was my body count now? Just Shruti? Linda the liaison? One of the aunties cowering behind her car in the expo parking lot? Would they keep amassing over the years? I wondered not for the first time if one day Jay Bhatt or one of our other Hammond Creek victims would turn up dead and someone would mutter, in hushed gossip at the funeral, “It all started when he stopped excelling at math—what happened?” Or Prachi—if one day Prachi would suddenly weaken, and as she declined, confess that in the summer of 2006, she had been sapped of something unnamable yet essential, and had never quite recovered.
There was nothing to do but throw the skirts up and begin gnawing on the tight strings with my teeth. I loosened each secret pocket like this. The sexual tantrum of it all was not lost on me. Next door: an unarousing moan. Downstairs: one of the owners’ voices calling, Shubhaaaa!
I lined up the pieces on the peeling wooden desk and switched on the lamp. One mangalsutra. Three rings. Five bangles. A single jhumka earring. A tiny flower-shaped stud—for a nose? A rhomboid tikka. A few thousand dollars—grand theft—and yet only six or so months of lemonade. About the quantity I’d hoped to nab for myself, leaving the rest to Anjali Auntie.
I drank. The liquor stung. The warmth encircled my core.
The room, suddenly stifling. I jimmied the window, opened the drapes. That unpolluted night—not a lick of moon
, no clouds within the gloaming, just an unmoving tarmac sky.
Everyone wants something from someone else. I paced and eyed the gold pieces and swigged again, stomach sloshing acidly. Did I owe Anjali Dayal anything? She, like her daughter, had left me alone with grief and guilt for ten years. I grunted massively and threw myself on the bed next to the rumpled Manish Motilal.
I remembered how to do it, didn’t I? Fire. Flux. Lemons and sugar. I recalled with clarity the singsong of those foreign words; the incantation had meandered in and out of my dreams for years. But there were other substances that went into the vessels whose names I’d never learned. When I’d asked, Anjali Auntie had brushed me off—It’s untranslatable, she’d say.
The truth: I didn’t know how to make the damned thing on my own. I was useless without the Dayals. They had made me. I couldn’t remake myself. I was going to be sick. I slept.
* * *
• • •
The pounding on the door—it could only be the cops. I smelled something on the floral duvet, dribbles of my own vomit. I rubbed the duvet into itself to spread the vomit, as though that would limit the stench. My eyes filled. I tasted sweat and metal as tears and snot slicked down my cheeks. I wiped and wiped on my T-shirt, staining it like a little boy. I had only wanted to see that it everyone kept talking about. That thing they all knew. That conviction about love, about the absolution love brings. I saw myself in the mirror, the T-shirt discolored with bodily gunk, cheeks beginning to darken with stubble. Redness veined my eyes.
When the cops cuffed me, what motives could I offer? That I’d only wanted to give the girl I loved a bit of jewelry? I pictured it like that—me, declaring I loved her, articulating the thing I’d not spoken aloud, saying it for the first time in salacious newsprint.
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