The Invitation

by Anne Cherian

  “She keeps a kosher house,” Jonathan inserted.

  Lali laughed and said, “Honey, I told you that most Indians separate their meat from their vegetables.”

  “Kosher and all I don’t know. Although,” Thomas ruminated, “there used to be a Jewish merchant by the name of Sam Kodar—Kodar, not Kosher—who had the biggest furniture shop in Cochin. Is your family knowing him?” he asked Lali.

  “My family doesn’t—I mean didn’t—know a single Jew in Cochin. I think by the time I was born, most of them had emigrated to Israel. How do you know so much?”

  “I am from Kottayam, but I worked in Cochin for some years before coming Stateside.”

  “Do you really think Lali’s family might have been Jewish?” Jonathan asked.

  “Jews have been in Cochin for two thousand years. It is my understanding that some converted to Christianity. My own family has only been Christian, but with a name like Chacko, who can tell?”

  “Honey,” Jonathan was excited, “why don’t we find out if you’re Jewish?” He turned to Thomas and asked, “Is there any way my wife can get that information?”

  “There are always ways, but I am not sure how to find the path,” Thomas said, and, as if his inability to further the conversation meant it was over, he left them to join another group.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Lali warned Jonathan.

  Thomas sounded knowledgeable, but she knew from past experience that many Indians pretend to know a lot, even if they don’t. One time she had gotten into a great discussion with a Gujarati doctor at Jonathan’s hospital about where exactly one can see the northern lights. The man had rejected everything she said, even though he confessed that he didn’t know much about that part of the world.

  “Wouldn’t that be a coincidence?” Jonathan beamed. “I mean, I don’t mind you being a Christian, but if it turns out you’re actually Jewish, I certainly wouldn’t complain.”

  Jonathan’s enthusiasm was contagious, and Lali felt the first brush of excitement. She had always assumed that a Hindu ancestor had converted to Christianity. Was it possible that Thomas was correct—that centuries ago a Jewish man had changed his name and religion? She would call and ask Amma. Her mother was at the age when such questions didn’t upset her. Just last month, Amma told her, “I have lived so long, and seen so many peculiar things, that nothing really surprises me anymore.” So Amma wouldn’t mind checking the family history to see whether it contained a Jewish element. All her children were married, and if she worried about how that could affect her grandchildren, she could simply hide any newfound Jewish ancestor.

  A Jewish connection would only help her marriage, Lali knew. Jonathan would be thrilled, Aaron would not have to convert, and she would no longer be an alien in the synagogue. They would welcome her as a member of the tribe, and she could tell them about Jew Town in Cochin, a place she had visited often to check out the antiques stores. It would be a replay of that first year at UCLA. In those days, she had been a novelty because many students had never met an Indian, and they were fascinated by her ability to speak English, her long hair, her toe rings.

  SITTING IN THE car as they drove south toward Newport Beach, Frances kept touching her hair, kept sneaking looks in the side mirror.

  The highlight kit that was supposed to have fixed the dye problem had proved to be a disaster. She had started out scrupulously following the instructions, carefully selecting thin strands of hair. But half an hour later, she was only a quarter of the way through, her arms were aching, and she was afraid she would never be done in time. So she decided to speed things up by spreading the paste all over the top of her hair. She imagined a halo appearance, similar to the result when she used to henna her hair back in India. But when she blow-dried her hair, she saw, immediately, that she should never have deviated from the directions on the box. Her hair looked like raw silk, the two colors competing against each other, a glaring advertisement of home dyeing gone horribly wrong.

  By then it was 4 p.m., far too late to correct it. She wished she could cover the mess with a hat, but it was an evening event. She would have to go looking like that.

  Jay hadn’t said a word, though Sam had asked, “What’s wrong with your hair, Mom?”

  Loyal Lily had immediately said, “I like it. It’s lighter, isn’t it?”

  Frances had smiled and nodded, but all the calm certainty that her life was on the upswing was replaced by the same feelings that had surged through her when she had stared at the invitation for the first time.

  It was as if she had stepped away from firm land and was in a morass, where everywhere she looked, starting with the mirror, she saw her desires unfulfilled. She had desperately wanted to meet her friends with her head held high, a replay of the old days.

  How she wished that her life was like it had been while she was at UCLA. She could not stop herself from going back in time, to when she had met Vic and Lali and had believed that she was going to have the best life of them all.

  She had heard the curled syllables of Lali’s Malayalee accent at that orientation party and had known, immediately, that even though the other girl had studied in Bangalore, she, Frances, was better equipped to succeed in America. She had the Western name, had eaten with a fork and knife all her life, and, unlike Lali—who said she felt “out of century” when she stepped off the plane and walked through the very modern buildings at LAX—Frances had thought she had finally come home. She had rejoiced at hearing the fragments of a dozen English conversations, so different from the languages bantered about at the dirty train station in Goa.

  As Frances told Lali, she wasn’t a typical Indian who speaks three languages. “I never bothered to learn Konkani or Marathi, you know,” she explained, “and the only Hindi words I remember are cuss words. I used to say harami all the time, and the best part was, very few people in Goa knew that I was saying bastard. Most assumed I was speaking Portuguese!”

  When both girls realized that Americans were uncomfortable hearing the ubiquitous bastard and bloody that most Indians blithely insert into sentences, Frances taught Lali to say harami. They grumbled about a harami professor who gave them a lower grade, a harami driver who didn’t stop long enough for them to cross the street, the harami man in the photocopy shop who laughed because they did not know how to use the machines. Jay had been amused that out of the vast vocabulary offered by Hindi—including, he reminded them, jodhpurs and cummerbund—they only made use of a single cuss word. Vic was the only one who refused to use harami.

  Then there was the matter of her clothes. Poor Lali had arrived in Los Angeles with a suitcase full of salwar kameezes that looked crumpled no matter how much she ironed them, and sarees that required dry cleaning. Frances had encouraged Lali to give up the long kameezes, and had helped her change her wardrobe from head to toe.

  Lali had worn one of those sarees at the orientation party, and though many Americans made much of the color and material, she, Frances, in her pants and top, had been the one who had caught Jay’s eye.

  Lali also hadn’t made good use of her time at UCLA and had left as she had arrived, a singleton. Back home, people would prefer Lali’s racial purity and make fun of Frances’s Portuguese heritage, but her Western upbringing of wearing frocks and talking to boys gave her the edge and was the main reason, Frances firmly believed, that she was born to succeed in America.

  Jay’s future was even more assured. He had been given every privilege of an upper-class Indian, which rendered him a colossus, able to prosper anywhere in the world, East or West.

  Yet she and Jay had never had the money to throw a big party, and they were driving to this one in a Lexus that had been sideswiped while they shopped at the mall. They had long forgotten about fixing it. As Jay said, “Don’t judge a car by its paint job. The mechanic says this one is going to last for years.”

  Now she wished that Jay hadn’t kept in touch with Vic. And Vic being Vic had gone and invited Lali. Frances had been surprised
by Lali’s excited e-mail. She hadn’t expected Lali to come to the party. She was intrigued to meet the cardiologist husband, but she was also envious that while things had kept getting better for Lali, the different threads of her own life were so limp.

  Tonight her worries were as great as the number of people invited. She wouldn’t just be meeting old friends who had done so well. She was also going to be surrounded by doctors, lawyers, engineers, each one playing the immigrant game of one-upmanship.

  Jay called it the social version of cricket. “The conversational ball comes your way,” he had joked after a party they had attended years ago, where one man had bragged about the size of his house, the leather seats in his car, and the tuition at his children’s private school. “You hold out your responsive bat, and then you whack the show-off ball as hard as you can. If your house is bigger, or your car is a newer model, then you get to run between the wickets, and it’s your score.” Frances had laughed and laughed, secure in those days that Jay’s hit would always be stronger than anyone else’s.

  But these days Jay had nothing to tout. His triumphs—boarding school, St. Stephen’s College—were in the past. His current job wasn’t at a high-profile company, and if people at the party started digging, he would have to tell them that he had started with the new company only five months ago. It was common knowledge that anyone who moved as often as Jay had done these past years just wasn’t doing well.

  She, too, had nothing to flaunt that would cause the others to look at her with envy. The O’Sullivan deal that had delighted her this morning would only remind people that she hadn’t completed her PhD. She could talk up her real estate career in India, but in America, everyone knew it was essentially a menial job that anyone with some people skills could do.

  She looked at Jay, at his full head of hair, the strong jawline she had noticed when he walked toward her with a wine glass. Thank God he was still handsome and, unlike so many Indian men, did not wear his suit like it was a costume. It literally suited him. She knew she was being superficial, but Mama had taught all her daughters that even though their family wasn’t rich, just a few adjustments in outfits and hair could make them stand out in a crowd. That early training was one reason Frances was so good at her job. She always ensured that her houses made an excellent first impression. If the owners did not want her to stage their homes, she compensated by bringing in flowers, moving a few pieces of furniture, suggesting small changes that invariably made a huge difference—and usually brought about a sale. She had prevailed upon the Millers to relieve their rooms of the heavy, dark furniture, and it was right after they moved the side tables, bureaus, and cabinets into the garage that they had received the offer. Perhaps that was why they had told the O’Sullivans about her.

  Today she had staged her family.

  Frances turned around and looked at the three heads sitting in the back seat of the Lexus. Lily looked studio-ready in her white dress, the red satin ribbon in her hair matching her beloved shoes. Frances had shown her how to arrange the skirt so that it did not get crumpled, and had warned her not to spill anything on the dress. Lily’s pride in her appearance was apparent in her careful posture, the faint smile that hadn’t left her face from the moment she got ready.

  Sam looked grown-up in his new jacket.

  “Go show your father,” Frances had suggested.

  Jay had said, “Wow!” then added, “Sam, all you need is a briefcase, and you will be ready to go work in an office.”

  Sam, who had not wanted to wear what he called a monkey suit, started to take it off, until Frances assured him that his father had paid him a compliment, that he looked like a teenager, and teenagers work. Sam was at the age when he wanted to look older than he was, and this new information pleased him inordinately. He had kept on the jacket, and didn’t grumble about wearing black shoes instead of his usual Nikes. He had even combed his hair, which exposed more face than Frances had seen in years. The hair, rather than the clothes, made him look older, but the overall effect was good.

  She was sure that everyone at the party would be charmed by her younger children. If only Mandy had listened to her. But her older daughter had tuned her out, just as she was doing right now, earphones stuck in her ears. Mandy was slumped against the window, unaware that her dress was askew. She had waited until the last minute to get dressed and then had refused to wear stockings. Mandy’s delaying tactics had made Frances anxious that they might end up being rudely late to the party, instead of just fashionably delayed. The defiant “No!” to the stockings had enraged Frances. She was just about to shout when she realized it didn’t matter. The party was at night. No one was going to be peering down at Mandy’s feet.

  She was counting on the darkness to hide the mess she had made of her own hair.

  Her stomach started tightening as they got nearer to Newport Beach. Jay was so different from her. They were going to the party and he was going to have a good time. He had grown up rich and the feeling of being better than everyone else was still with him, which was why their current financial situation did not bother him as much as it plagued her. Even though they lived paycheck to paycheck, he never thought twice about ordering the most expensive item on the menu and always left a big tip.

  Now he was teaching Lily his version of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” He had got into his “let’s have fun” mood as soon as he started the car, and Frances envied what he called his happy-no-matter-what personality, even as it irritated her.

  Jay was perfectly aware that Frances didn’t want to attend the party. He could feel her tension, see the rigid lines in her neck, but he also knew that there was nothing he could say to make her feel better. She was always nervous before going to parties.

  Today the bad dye job had exacerbated her anxiety. He knew better than to joke about her “hair-raising problem.” At the same time, he didn’t want her nervousness to affect the children. They didn’t go to many parties as a family. They might as well enjoy the evening. He was about to start their usual car game, “I’m going to a party and I’m taking an aardvark,” and then have Lily come up with something for the letter B, when he saw the license plate in front of him: lv 4 btls.

  Like all his compatriots in school, he, too, had loved the Fab Four. He had discovered them when he was ten and had determined to learn all their songs one summer. But the new records weren’t available even in New Delhi or Bombay. His only hope was the radio, and even there, he was limited to just one English station. It was broadcast from what used to be Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and the announcer spent half the time reeling off the names of people who had requested songs. Manisha Dasgupta from Ranchi has requested “Strawberry Fields Forever” for her grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother Satish, sister Usha, and her best friend in the whole world, Madhuri Chatterjee. When the songs finally came on, either the distance or the quality of the radios distorted the lyrics.

  He had the worst time trying to figure out the words to “Michelle.” Every time the song played, he’d crank up the volume, listening carefully. So the most key vo tray be on some bell didn’t make any sense. When he returned to school, he asked his roommate about it, hoping that because his parents lived in DC he would know the words. But his roommate did not even like the Beatles.

  “In America, we’re nuts about Simon and Garfunkel,” he had said.

  Finally, another classmate, Vinod, who lived in Paris, told Jay that the Beatles had incorporated French lyrics in the song. He had even explained the meaning of sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble.

  Vinod, who had a poster of John and Yoko during their “honeymoon bed-in in Amsterdam” on the wall of his room, and was a Beatles know-it-all, had memorized the words of every song, and told Jay that Paul had written “Let It Be” for John’s son after his parents got divorced. He taught Jay the bastardized version of “We Three Kings,” and it became his favorite song. For a while, the corridors had resounded with the names of the Fab Four.

&nbs
p; “Want to learn a new song?” Jay asked his children, then he started singing, somewhat surprised that he remembered the lyrics.

  We four Beatles from Liverpool are,

  John on a scooter and George in a car,

  Paul on a bicycle eating an icicle

  Following Ringo Starr.

  Lily and Sam started laughing and begged him to sing it again.

  Jay, who knew just the one stanza, obliged, rendering it with gusto.

  Frances wished she could suck the joy out of this moment that Jay was consciously creating, but she saw Vic’s mansion in her mind and felt diminished.

  “Why are you singing a Christmas carol in the summer?” she asked. He had only started celebrating Christmas after they were married, and, as far as she knew, had never sung a carol until then.

  “I want the children to be prepared,” Jay said jovially.

  “Do you know another song like that, Dad?” Lily asked. “It’s so much more fun than the real words.”

  “I do know another one, but I think your mom might get angry. . . .”

  “Oh, no,” Lily said staunchly. “You won’t get mad, will you, Mom?”

  It was difficult to go against those pleading eyes, the voice that, so far, had never shouted, “I hate you,” the lips that kissed her softly on the cheek every night.

  Frances didn’t respond.

  Jay decided to take that as a “yes.” He was glad that the children weren’t silenced by Frances’s mood.

  “Okay, are you ready?” he asked. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, we are,” Lily and Sam said in unison.

  We four merchants from Trafalgar Square,

  Selling plastic underwear