The Invitation

by Anne Cherian

  But the more she went, the more awkward she felt. She didn’t know how to explain her change of feelings to Jonathan. It wasn’t that she was a Bible-thumping Jacobite Syrian Christian, and it wasn’t that she thought less of Judaism. She just didn’t belong, the same way she had felt like an outsider those times she had gone to Hindu temples. Both the church and the temple had incense, yet they had different scents; both the priest and the rabbi used the Bible, but the stories sounded different.

  It didn’t help that the yarmulke on Jonathan’s sandy hair made him look, for the first time in their lives, foreign, like a figure in a photograph. One morning she had a headache and stayed home. The next Saturday she had a hair appointment, and soon it became normal for him to kiss her good-bye before leaving for the synagogue.

  Then Jonathan decided to take religion classes on Saturday evenings and needed more time to study. One evening he was even reluctant to join their neighbors, the Reidels, for a barbecue.

  Lali explained that he had to go. She had already RSVP’d that both of them were coming, and that he was bringing his famous potato salad.

  “I’m taking this class that’s challenging,” he told the Reidels when they suggested going to a movie the following week. The Reidels, themselves nonreligious Jews, were amazed and delighted that Jonathan was studying the Talmud.

  “Always wanted to,” James Reidel said, “but never had the time.”

  Jonathan had smiled and said, “Got to make the time.”

  She wanted him to make time for her, and, thinking about his love of music, bought tickets for a concert conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, an old favorite of Jonathan’s. He went with her, but she saw him looking at his watch. They drove straight home after the concert and he disappeared into his study.

  Lali sat on the bed, alone, desolate, frightened, wondering what she was going to do about the growing distance between them. They had become the sort of couple who lived in the same house, ate at the same table, and read at the same time—except that they were on very different pages.

  He tried, and every time he did, she was hopeful.

  One day he saw her reading People magazine online and said, “Honey, why don’t I get you a subscription?”

  “No, please don’t do that,” she responded immediately, embarrassed that he had caught her reading such trash. “I don’t like supporting paparazzi publications.”

  “Reading it off the screen isn’t supporting it?”

  “It’s not the same thing. The parts I read are free on the web. A subscription is over a hundred dollars a year, and uses paper.”

  “If you say so,” Jonathan agreed, and she knew, once again, that he did not understand her.

  Their lives were filled with such instances of disconnect. Was it all due to Judaism, she wondered? Should she go back to the synagogue? But she was already so far behind him.

  Did he now see her as a shiksa, and resent the fact that, because of her, their son would have to convert to become a Jew?

  She had always thought she was very lucky to have married Jonathan. Even her parents, who had disapproved initially, had been assuaged by the fact that he was a Harvard-educated cardiologist (“No one in Kerala can say anything negative about that,” Amma had noted with satisfaction), and they were relieved that he was family-oriented. Appa had read that so many American men were more interested in their hobbies than having children. When Lali took Jonathan to India, he had not made a fuss about the food, and he had been interested in everything from how rubber is tapped to the little children fishing with makeshift rods in the flooded paddy fields. She had felt that she had married a man who was the best representation of the West precisely because he was open to the ways of the East.

  Then he had parted the curtains to his own religion, and she found herself offstage.

  “I know he’s not having an affair,” she confessed to Mary one day in the office, “but it feels as if he is.”

  “First of all, be happy he’s not seeing another woman. It’s just religion. He’ll stop when the studying gets tough,” Mary prophesied.

  She hoped Mary was right, but Jonathan kept at it. Every now and then, he would confess that he felt he was moving backward rather than forward. Lali would be sympathetic on the outside but jubilant inside. But he never stopped reaching for his books, and she realized that he was going to stick with Judaism.

  She just didn’t know how she fit in. And what she was going to do about it.

  “Excuse me,” a voice brought Lali back to the café, “can I use this chair?”

  “Sure,” Lali said. There was no chance that Jonathan was going to join her. He didn’t even know she was here.

  He left for the temple and she took off for Starbucks. She always made sure to return home before he got back. Jonathan would wonder why she needed to take her computer to the café. He knew she used it only to write to her friends and to read People magazine, neither of which was urgent.

  Lali was just about to go to the People magazine site when a small box appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the computer screen.

  Her heart did a somersault.

  Aakash was online.

  “Are you there?”

  “Just looking out at another beautiful day,” she responded, blood surging through her entire body as if she had just come off a gravity-defying roller coaster.

  “If I were there, you would not have to look outside to find your sky,” he wrote, alluding to his name, which meant sky in Hindi. She laughed. She did not recall his being this playful when they had met at UCLA. She had known him for a brief, intense time back when she was getting her master’s degree. She had not thought about him for years and years.

  Then, six months ago on a Friday, Jonathan called to say that a new friend from Berkeley had just invited them to Shabbat, and he had accepted.

  Lali was furious. “You told me you were free, so I bought movie tickets. I thought we could get a quick bite before seeing it.”

  “Honey, I’m sorry. It’s just that we never seem to do anything, so I accepted the invitation. I think you’ll enjoy the evening. His wife works in advertising.”

  “I really don’t want to drive across the bridge,” Lali said, hoping that would make him change his mind, her own churning with the unfair “we never seem to do anything.”

  “I’m sure they’ll understand,” he said.

  She was just about to say she would make the drive, when he suggested, “Why don’t you go see the movie yourself?”

  She wanted to strangle him. What was the use of having a husband if she had to go to the movies alone? Besides, he thought he was being magnanimous, but he was just doing what he wanted to do—and didn’t want her to stop him.

  She had stayed home, sulking on the couch, trying to find something good to watch on TV, when she decided to turn on the computer.

  “It’s my new best friend,” she had joked with Mary.

  “I thought I was your best friend,” Mary responded.

  “That’s true during the week. But on the weekends you become a wife, with a husband who wants to do things with you.”

  “Yeah, he drags me all over the city to look at houses we can’t afford to buy. It’s making me crazy.”

  “Mine stares at books all day. You know, I always thought people loved their jobs because they enjoyed the work. I don’t really like providing the same student with the same information for the nth time, or giving yet another prospective parent the college website address. I just like being around people who pay attention to me. I’m pathetic, aren’t I?”

  “Nah,” Mary said, “you’ve just been married longer than I have. Give me a few years. I’m sure Larry and I will start doing different things. I keep telling him I want to train for a marathon. Larry will never give up his beer and couch to go running. So who knows? One day I might be running the Boston Marathon and he might be watching the Celtics on TV.”

  Lali looked at the blue screen of her “best friend,” at the wo
rds Aakash was writing.

  She blamed the computer for getting her into this situation.

  That Friday night when she had turned on the computer to go to the People magazine site, she had seen ads for Class of 1985 and Are you looking for someone? She had read about people who had connected with each other after ten, twenty, thirty years. She had no desire to find classmates from her all-girls college in India. She had not maintained any friendships after she left Bangalore, and even if she suffered a sudden bout of nostalgia, she would not know how to find them, because they were married, with their husbands’ surnames.

  She was still in touch with Jay and Frances from UCLA, and she exchanged Christmas cards with a few others from her department.

  Then she remembered him.

  Aakash Khan wasn’t a very common name. All she had to do was type in the words.

  They had met each other at the Student Store at UCLA. He was wearing a khadi kurta with jeans, very comfortable in the mix of Indian and American clothes.

  He suggested they go out for a chai, and ten minutes later they were sitting in a small café in Westwood.

  He was studying engineering, and informed her that he was dating an American woman named Claire who was spending the semester at Cornell.

  “What makes you think that you have to tell me this?” she had inquired, immediately dismissing him as one of those Indians with a severe case of “white fever,” desperate to marry a white girl.

  “I just think honesty is the best policy, and I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

  She was taken aback by his answer. She had presumed of course that he liked her. Had he only suggested tea because she was Indian, and there weren’t that many Indians then at UCLA?

  Their encounters continued and became lunches, matinees, even the occasional late-night teas that reminded them both of India. He made her a tape of Madonna songs, and she proofread one of his papers.

  When her former roommate Sharon invited her to a party, she told Lali to bring along her boyfriend. “He’s not my boyfriend,” Lali said—but she had taken Aakash.

  It was the first time in her life that she had gone to a party with a man. Until she arrived in America, she had only sat beside a strange man in a bus, never in a classroom. The males she knew were the ones her parents knew. And those males knew better than to ask her out.

  Her mother had cautioned her to remain true to herself, to keep away from boys. But Amma had always couched her warnings: “Those Americans are not like us, so please be careful. They like to go out with girls, but they don’t believe in marriage.”

  Aakash wasn’t an American, and she felt no guilt as she waited for his phone calls, then rushed out to meet him.

  She had, however, felt uncomfortable the time they ran into Frances and Jay. Frances was always open about being Jay’s girlfriend. Goans made love marriages, and Frances had said that if she didn’t find a man on her own, her parents weren’t going to come up with one. But Lali was a Malayalee, and her parents were even now looking for a suitable husband. She had purposely not told Frances anything about Aakash because she did not want to answer questions. When they saw each other outside Royce Hall, she pretended not to hear Frances’s whispered “good-looking bloke you have.”

  “We should get together,” Jay had suggested before they drifted away to study in the library.

  “Get together?” Aakash had asked after they had gone, then repeated, “Get together? What sort of friends do you have, anyway? They are so smug and happy with themselves. And what’s with the kissing you on the cheek? Does he think that makes him European? Fraud!”

  “They’re not that bad once you get to know them,” Lali said, though she too was a little tired of the way Jay and Frances acted as if everything they did was the best. But she was feeling more charitable, because Frances had recently told her she wasn’t sure whether Jay was ever going to marry her.

  Frances was alarmed because she had just heard that Loretta, her good friend back in Goa, had been dumped by her boyfriend. The boyfriend had gone to study in Wisconsin, and right after Loretta had spent a fortune sending him flowers on his birthday, he wrote her a good-bye letter. Frances was worried that the same thing was going to happen to her.

  Lali had reminded her that she wasn’t stuck in India, Jay and she were in the same school, and besides, she was absolutely positive Jay wasn’t a “use them and leave them” guy.

  “Well, you might put up with them,” Aakash said, “but I’m sure that swashbuckling Jay isn’t going to be putting up with Frances’s puppy eyes much longer. I bet you anything he’ll ditch Frances and go home and marry the girl his parents have chosen for him. I’m his complete opposite. I’ve already told my parents that I’m going to propose to Claire when she comes back.”

  “She might say no.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “More sure than of you,” he’d thrown back at her. “When I saw you looking at the windbreakers in the Student Store, I thought you were a surfer! How was I to know you were a bevakuuf and didn’t know the difference between a windbreaker and a jacket!”

  They were getting to know each other’s stories and habits. Lali automatically sprinkled his coffee with cocoa, and he knew that she drank her tea black.

  Then, one day, Aakash told her it was over with Claire. He didn’t seem sad, just matter-of-fact, the information divulged between sips of tea.

  Lali already liked him, and his sudden availability made him very desirable.

  All week long she pondered how to let him know that she liked him—not as a friend but as a man. And that she liked him enough not to care that her parents would go berserk because he was a Muslim.

  She invited him to dinner. Bought a bottle of wine. Made brownies because they were his favorite dessert. After all the plotting and sweating about how she would let him know her change of feelings, it had seemed natural to place her hand on his. She looked into his eyes. Didn’t say a word. He, too, didn’t speak. When she finally spoke, they were on the bed, clothes on the floor, and she whispered, “Yes, it’s okay, keep going.”

  “Why me?” he asked, when it was all over.

  “Because.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  She thought those two words meant everything, until he didn’t call the next day. Or the day after. When she finally broke through her pride and phoned him, he said that he was very sorry. Claire had flown back unexpectedly. Told him she had made a mistake to break up with him. He had proposed, and she had accepted.

  “I told you about her from the beginning,” he reminded Lali.

  She was too devastated to remind him that he had also told her it was over between them. He hadn’t given her any details of the breakup, and she had stupidly assumed that he had been the one to pull away—because of her.

  She felt foolish, betrayed, terrified.

  She had slept with him. She knew that even Frances hadn’t gone all the way with Jay, though they had been dating for almost two years.

  She was a fool. But it had seemed so—natural. Ever since she had come to America, she had seen couples behaving in ways not possible in tradition-constrained India. Men and women kissing, holding hands, leaving a party together. It had made her feel, for the first time in her life, that she was missing something. Did she really want her parents to provide a husband for her? Couldn’t she be like the other girls in her class and find her own man?

  Many American men asked her out, but she was not comfortable enough to say, “Yes.”

  She definitely wasn’t attracted to the ones who liked her because she was exotic. They were easy to spot because of the way they looked at her when she wore Indian clothes. They weren’t interested in getting to know her; instead, they made her feel as if she had just posed for National Geographic, wanting to know about the bindi on her forehead and the rings on her toes. She got so tired of their questions that she started making up stories.
She told one man that she had come to America to escape her evil mother-in-law who kept demanding that she ask her parents for more money, that the dowry she had brought with her just wasn’t enough. From there, it had been easy to embroider more, and Lali had said she was married at fifteen, had three children by the time she was seventeen, and had left them all behind. Part of her was intrigued that the man still wanted to go on a date, but a greater part thought that anyone who believed such a story was an idiot not worth her time.

  The men she liked presented an entirely different problem. Since she had never dated before, she had no idea how to gauge a suggestion for tea versus dinner, how to react when they leaned forward to kiss her. She envied her American friends, who had sorted through all that when they were teenagers and knew how to behave on dates.

  Aakash had been the perfect blend of East and West. She had worried that an American man might mock her for being a virgin in her twenties. Aakash would expect it, and would know exactly what it meant that she had given up her virginity to him.

  His betrayal was—brutal.

  Not only had he rejected her, he was already engaged to another woman. Lali had never seen a picture of Claire. Her very name was the epitome of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Clairol woman. The semester at Cornell meant she was smart. The fact that Aakash would so readily go back to Claire right after they had slept together for the first and only time proved the other woman was incredibly alluring.

  Lali was heartbroken with disbelief as she put down the phone after their brief conversation. She kept hearing his flat “I’m sorry,” as she slumped on the edge of her bed and got under the covers. She stayed there. She was never going to leave her studio apartment. She didn’t want to risk running into them.

  She didn’t care about missing classes, or the paper that was due. She ignored the phone and didn’t eat. The pan of brownies grew mold, and she threw them away. Then she threw up in the sink. The brownies were just like her, stupid and unwanted.