The Invitation

by Anne Cherian

  She could not stop going back to that night. Why had she invited him over? Why had she put her hand on his? Why hadn’t he just removed it, eaten the food, and gone away? She had even kissed him at the door when he finally left in the early hours of the morning.

  She no longer remembered whether he had kissed her back or just fled.

  She couldn’t sleep. The dark circles under her eyes grew blacker.

  She was too ashamed to tell Frances, and though her American friends were nonjudgmental, they hadn’t shared intimate details—“I’m so sad,” or “I don’t know what to do about this”—of their lives. They also seemed to consider breakups normal. When Angela’s boyfriend told her he was seeing another girl, she cut her hair as a way of moving on. The next week she was dating someone new, and shortly thereafter, she went on a double date with her old boyfriend and his partner.

  All Lali knew for sure was that she never again wanted to see Aakash.

  On the third day, she realized that she needed to rid herself of him—completely. She erased his name from her phone book. Threw away the teddy bear he had given her, “for no reason other than that you are also a Bruin,” he had said as he handed her the package. She changed the sheets. They smelled of him and of what they had done. She had just balled them into the laundry basket when she heard a knock on the door.

  Her hope jump-started. Was it Aakash, coming to see her with a change of heart?

  She rushed to the door. She was just about to open it when she raised her eye to the peephole. Black hair. Her chest felt as if it were going to explode. He had come back for her!!!

  “Lali Manali! Are you there?” Only Jay called her that silly name.

  She slumped against the wall. Was she really wrong? She looked again and then heard Frances. “You knock,” Frances was saying. “Maybe she can’t hear me because I’m not as strong as you.”

  Lali crept away from the door. She didn’t want them to know what had happened. Perhaps they hadn’t heard her.

  The knocking continued. It was shaking the walls and the constant rat-a-tat was driving her crazy. Finally, she went back to the door and whispered, “I’m sick.”

  “Open up,” Frances insisted. “We can take you to the hospital.”

  Lali knew there was no getting away from them.

  “Just you,” she whispered. “Tell Jay I’m not fit to be seen.” Tears leaked down her cheeks as she thought of the last man who had stood outside her door.

  Frances made her a cup of tea. Checked her temperature. Then she asked Lali what had really happened.

  Lali had never felt so vulnerable in her life. She could not think of a lie, so she told Frances part of the truth, that she and Aakash had been going out for a while but he had gone back to his American girlfriend.

  “That harami,” Frances said. “If we were in India, I’d get some gundas to break his legs.”

  It was comforting to hear Frances’s outrage. But she wanted Frances to leave, wanted to get back to her bed, wanted to go to sleep and wake up a virgin.

  She didn’t tell Frances that she had slept with Aakash and Frances didn’t ask. After that morning, Lali refused to talk about Aakash.

  But Lali always wondered whether Frances had guessed that she had done more than “go out” with Aakash.

  Frances told her that the best revenge was not to let people like Aakash dictate her life. She needed to throw him out of her mind, get back to the plans she had been making. Frances insisted that she start by taking a shower. “Change of clothes, change of attitude,” Frances said firmly. She made her eat a sandwich. Then she walked Lali to the library and sat with her as she started writing the overdue paper.

  “I’m better,” Lali acknowledged, regretting that she had laughed when Aakash said that Frances and Jay were the sort of people who got into bed and made love to themselves, not each other. She felt bad that she had automatically assumed Frances would belittle her. It was her own insecurity, the knowledge that she hadn’t behaved as a proper Indian, the fear that another who found out what she had done would find her lacking.

  If Frances hadn’t come to her aid, she would still be in her apartment.

  “Thanks,” Lali said, and repeated, “I’m better, so you can stop worrying about me.”

  But Frances shook her head. “Not yet, you’re not. First you feel sad because things didn’t work out, then you feel an even greater sadness for what you think you have lost. You have to wait until you get angry to know that you are getting better.”

  Lali listened, then asked, “How do you know so much?”

  Frances shrugged and responded, “Cosmopolitan magazine? It’s better than that People magazine you always flip through in the checkout line when we go grocery shopping.”

  Lali never reached that last stage, but she did return to her routine, took tests, wrote papers, applied for and got a job in San Francisco, and counted the days to graduation, grateful that it was just two months away.

  The day before Lali left LA, a newly engaged Frances came over to help with the packing. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I ran into that harami Aakash last week. He was alone. I tried to get some information from him, but he was very cagey. He’s going back to India, but he didn’t mention anything about getting married. He said to say ‘Hi’ to you.”

  Lali didn’t respond, just kept on stacking books into a carton.

  “You okay?” Frances asked.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Lali lied.

  Frances’s news stayed with her all day. She tried to think of other things, even went to see a movie alone, but she finally rushed back to her room and picked up the phone.

  She dialed his number, her fingers remembering the digits that were no longer in her phone book.

  She had no idea why she was doing this, what she was going to do about the cardboard boxes and the job waiting for her in San Francisco.

  The sound of the connection buzzed in her ear, as various possibilities jumbled together in her head.

  “Hello?” It was his voice, and her body lit up, arms attentive with gooseflesh.

  She was just about to respond when she heard a voice in the background. A soft, female voice. She broke off the connection and promised herself that she would never again be such a fool.

  A year later, she had met Jonathan in a grocery store in San Francisco. He had followed her to the vegetable aisle, he confessed a few months after they started dating, and came up with a question about how to choose eggplants.

  “Lame, totally lame,” he told her, “but I couldn’t think of how else to talk to you.”

  His question had caught her at a time in her life when she no longer believed the reasons that had kept her from refusing dates with graduate students at UCLA.

  She had decided to live in America, and she knew that her only chance to become a wife was to choose her own husband. She informed her parents that she did not want to have an arranged marriage. They would go about it assuming that she was a virgin. She could not risk telling a man the truth before they got engaged, or having him find out on their wedding night.

  Her parents were upset, but she was too far away for any pressure to be effective. When she called home, her mother whined about being the laughing stock of the Malayalee community in their town. “I’m the only mother whose daughter is still not married,” she kept saying. It always took Lali a few days to recover from the great guilt she felt during those conversations.

  But she had no one to blame but herself. She had removed the option of an arranged marriage when she gave herself to Aakash. He, too, would have known that, which was why his refusal to go all the way to marriage had been so painful.

  So she kept herself open to dating, but felt that her fiasco with Aakash had left her cursed, because she only met married or gay men in San Francisco. Jonathan had, from that initial encounter, been a wonderful surprise.

  But now, just when she thought they could return to the early days of season tickets and weeken
ds away, he had become a man she no longer recognized.

  Six months ago, while he was spending Shabbat with a new friend, she had Googled the name of an old one. She had not expected to get any information about Aakash. But when his name popped up, she suddenly could not resist doing more.

  Enough years had gone by, with enough successes, for her to be able to contact him without dissolving into shame. She was the wife of a cardiologist, the mother of a Harvard undergraduate. Her husband was white. She had no need to fear that Aakash’s life was superior to hers.

  Before she could change her mind, she wrote, “Are you Aakash from UCLA?”

  Aakash had responded immediately. She had been flattered. And had deliberately waited a whole week before writing back. Jonathan was home, but studying, when she answered his questions.

  She provided abbreviated bits of her life—I’m married and childed—and initially, she wrote more about Jay and Frances and their three children. He was amused that she was still in contact with them, surprised that Jay had actually married Frances. He did not remember meeting any Vikram or Vic, but he had heard of VikRAM Computers.

  “So you have friends in high places. I’m glad I make the cut.”

  He was still honest, still not given to providing details.

  “I’m living proof that one out of two marriages fail. Clare and I went kaput some time ago.”

  She had thought he was engaged to Claire, not Clare. Had assumed his marriage would last forever.

  “I’m sorry,” she wrote the right words, though she wasn’t. She was happy that he, too, had suffered. His failure allowed her to continue writing.

  He had, in the years since they knew each other, become flirtatious.

  “Maybe I should have listened to my parents. They always said Indian girls are the best. Are you still the best?”

  She began writing every Saturday, when Jonathan went to the synagogue. She spent the entire week thinking about what to write Aakash.

  It had been ages since she had felt so excited, so wanted. And it took her right back to her small studio near UCLA, where she would look at the phone, willing it to ring, hoping it was his deep voice on the other end. She used to change her clothes five times before going out to meet him, and after she returned, would dissect her conversation, looking for things she never should have said. She felt the same way now. Every newspaper article she read, any interesting tidbit she heard, was filtered through the “should I write this to Aakash” lens? Would he think she was smart? Would he compliment her?

  Then one Saturday Aakash wrote as she was online, and it seemed perfectly natural to fall into instant chat. But the give-and-take made her uncomfortable; what if Jonathan returned early?

  Starbucks provided a better alternative, so she started going there.

  She convinced herself that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was simply e-mailing an old friend. He was living in San Diego, and they hadn’t even spoken on the phone, much less made plans to meet each other. She was enjoying the Hindi words that crept into their e-mails, and was amused that he even threw in a few Yiddish ones. “Learned them from my boss. I find they perform the same function as our Hindi words.”

  He probably knew more Yiddish than Jonathan did.

  Now, in the aromatic café, she moved her tea out of the way and debated how to answer his very flirtatious, “I am your sky” declaration.

  “I prefer a blue sky,” she wrote, then added, “We don’t get too many such skies in San Francisco.”

  “Aren’t you a Marin memsahib?”

  She wondered how he knew that. She had only told him Jonathan’s first name. Then she realized he knew her surname from their e-mails, and he had attached that to Jonathan. Personal information was easy to get these days.

  They bantered on, recommending books, agreeing that it was nice, albeit strange, that Bollywood movies were now going mainstream.

  “We can thank Slumdog Millionaire for that,” Lali typed, “though I thought it wasn’t the genuine article.”

  “Definitely for the phoren moviegoers,” Aakash agreed. “No way a street chap could end up on TV!”

  Lali loved, again, that he both understood and agreed with her. If she said the same thing to Jonathan, he would believe her but would never really get what she was saying.

  “Freida Pinto a sex bomb?” Aakash queried. “These Hollywood types should go to Goa. They’ll find much prettier girls, and ones who can actually act, not pose.”

  “So you must have thought Frances was pretty, since she’s from Goa.”

  “God no. Forget Frances and Freida. I thought the children in Slumdog were excellent. Too bad they didn’t get more money.”

  That took them to a debate about Western power, and how amazing it was that so many people were interested in India today.

  “No one had heard of Bangalore when I first came. Now everyone seems to know about it,” Lali wrote.

  “I get frustrated by the ones who think they know more than me. Should I blame the History Channel or the newspaper articles?”

  When she finally noticed the time on the computer, she realized that Jonathan was going to be home very soon.

  “Gotta run. Have to pay the maid.”

  Aakash didn’t need to know that she left the house to keep in touch with him. And she wasn’t lying. She, not Jonathan, paid the maid.

  “Good-bye, memsahib. Till next Saturday. You know that I only get through the week because of Saturdays.”

  Lali rushed up the stairs to the house and apologized to Rosa for making her wait a few minutes.

  “Ees okay,” Rosa said, “I jus’ finish.”

  Lali stood by the bay window, watching Rosa walk down the street. She was glad that Jonathan, too, was a little late today.

  A blue-clad figure appeared on the horizon. The postman was trudging toward their house, pushing a cart that she guessed was probably filled with more junk mail than letters. Gone were the days when she used to rifle through the mail, looking for a letter from her mother, an unexpected note from a friend. Now she Skyped with Amma, and everyone used e-mail.

  She had just started making a sandwich when Jonathan opened the door.

  “Honey, there’s something Indian-looking for you.”

  Her hands froze. Had Aakash sent her something?

  How was she going to explain it to Jonathan? He trusted her.

  Then she calmed down. Aakash was too American to send anything too Indian. She was just suffering from her normal dose of Saturday guilt.

  Jonathan held out a large envelope, and the last remnant of fear disappeared. It was probably from one of the Indian doctors at the hospital. Jonathan had been so excited to make the introductions, but she hadn’t connected with any of them. The men were typically too pompous, and the women were often so caught up in their various Indian cliques of “who did what, when, where” that she had nothing to say to them. But because she was Indian, she and Jonathan invariably were invited to weddings and big parties.

  She checked the return label. She had been wrong on both counts.

  “It’s from Vic,” she said.

  “Do I know him?”

  “No. I knew him when I was at UCLA; he was always better friends with Jay.”

  It seemed odd that Vic would invite only her. She looked at the envelope. It was addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Feinstein.

  “It isn’t just for me,” she corrected him. “It’s addressed to both of us. He’s celebrating his son’s graduation from MIT.”

  “Isn’t that a little odd? Most people celebrate high school graduations.”

  She heard the surprise in his voice and, as so often in their marriage, felt the chasm between them. He would never understand what it meant to be Indian. She, at least, lived among Americans and knew them well enough never to have to ask such a question.

  “Vic’s very Indian. Any opportunity to throw a party. He must be very proud that his son is an MIT graduate.” Aaron had gotten into MIT but had chosen Har
vard because Jonathan had gone there. “Here, take a look.” She showed him the invitation.

  “Colorful,” Jonathan said. “What sort of party will it be?” he asked.

  Lali laughed. “It will be like the invitation, excessive. Vic will probably invite a hundred people at least. Lots of food. Loud Indian music. This must be a large event, because he’s inviting people from out of the area.” She imagined samosas and curries and people talking in accents caught between America and India, so they emphasized the r in party but still said tomahtoh.

  “We would have had a big party if Aaron had had a bar mitzvah.”

  Lali didn’t respond. She never knew what to say when Jonathan went Jewish nostalgic. He hadn’t had a bar mitzvah. Aaron didn’t want one, so she didn’t understand why Jonathan brought it up every now and then.

  “I think I’ll go,” she decided. The invitation was just another example of India reaching out to her these days.

  “When is it?” Jonathan asked.

  “June eleventh.”

  Jonathan checked his Blackberry. “I have a conference in Santa Barbara that weekend. My paper is in the morning, so I would be able to join you.”

  His offer was as unexpected as her response to it. She felt warm all over, happy.

  “That will be great,” Lali said enthusiastically. Perhaps this could be the start of other weekends away.

  She saw the added benefit of Jonathan accompanying her. He would be living proof of how well she, the odd one of the group, had done since leaving UCLA. Frances and Jay had each other, and Vic had his dreams. She had had no one and had gone limping up to a crummy job in San Francisco.

  Now she could fly down, not worry about paying for a hotel, and be able to look everyone in the eye and let them know that, “Yes, life has been good to me.” Jonathan would not be the phantom husband she had to talk about. If Aaron was home from Boston, he, too, could go. It would be nice to show her son his Indian side. It would be nicer to show her old friends her Harvard-returned son.

  “The eleventh is a Saturday,” Jonathan said. “Why don’t we go down to San Diego on Sunday?”

  Lali almost laughed.