by Anne Cherian
“I’ve felt like an idiot all these years when I’ve told people you had an MBA,” she said.
She had supported his every change of job; she had never told him that he would have more confidence if he did get his MBA. She knew he was afraid that someone would uncover the truth and kick him out of the company. That was why he never minded switching jobs, never lobbied for better pay. When she began doing well during the boom years of real estate, she hadn’t flung her bigger paycheck in his face. She hadn’t told him that she felt like an idiot for marrying a man who had studied at UCLA but who could not provide her with an upper-class life. Never once, during all their squabbles, did she compare him to their neighbor Jason, who had gotten his MBA from Northridge but whose wife didn’t need to work because he did so well.
Jay remembered putting off writing that stupid paper. Next week, he had told himself. Then he walked across the stage at graduation, moved the tassel on his cap, and started the job. Slowly the need to finish faded. He had gotten the job based on having an MBA, and for a while he didn’t feel bad, because he kept thinking he would write the paper. He even called the department to see how much time he had before they would not accept late work. Years passed, and though he kept telling everyone he had the degree, the knowledge that he did not, that anytime someone could out him, began to bother him almost on a daily basis. America was a forgiving country, but companies don’t forgive liars. He had made his bed and now had to lie about it.
He grew ashamed, felt unworthy, didn’t try for better and bigger jobs.
His father would never understand such stupidity. Papa had always done everything correctly. Thank God Papa hadn’t asked to see his transcripts.
Frances had known, and she had kept the lie.
He had never felt so vulnerable in his life.
“Frances?” Lali came into view, her voice hesitant, her step tentative. “Your younger daughter is looking for you.”
“Is everything all right?” Frances switched immediately to being a worried mother. When Lily was five years old, she had been running around at a birthday party and tripped over an exposed tree root, fracturing her arm. They had gone from waiting to hit the piñata to waiting in the ER.
“Yes, yes,” Lali said. “She wants to know if you will allow her to play some game on the Wii. I didn’t feel that I could give her permission.”
“I’ll go,” Jay said, and walked away quickly, making sure to smile at Lali as he strode past her.
Frances saw the eagerness with which Jay took off. It was clear that he wanted to get away from her. Did that mean he always wanted to distance himself from her? But he was leaving her to take care of Lily. It gave her hope, made her think that perhaps he would want to continue being part of a family with her.
LALI APPROACHED FRANCES. She was standing in the strip of land that divided Vic’s house from his neighbor’s. The neighbor must have been invited to the party, because the house was dark. There was just enough light from the strings of bulbs out front for Lali to see the debris left from Frances’s crying jag. Mascara encircled her eyes, her quivering mouth was bare of lipstick, and even her hair was disheveled, as if she had pulled at strands.
She had known that Jay and Frances were “talking” and hadn’t wanted to disturb them, but Lily really wanted her mother. She was glad she hadn’t sent Lily herself to find her mother.
Frances was too distraught to do anything, so Lali took charge. She started walking toward the back of the house to see whether she could sneak Frances inside that way and find a bathroom. She tripped over something and looked down to see the undulating length of a hose. Jonathan always called it the garden hose. She sometimes referred to it as a hosepipe, which made him laugh. This hosepipe was reassuringly attached to a tap. They did not need to find a bathroom after all.
“Frances, come here,” Lali called softly as she turned on the faucet.
She didn’t say a word the entire time Frances was washing her face. Lali found a packet of tissues in her purse and handed them over.
Frances wiped her face and put on some lipstick, her fingers trembling as she outlined her lips.
“There’s something under your right eye,” Lali said and wiped it off.
“Thanks,” Frances sniffed, then blew her nose into a tissue.
“You want me to send some gundas after that harami?”
Frances wished she could laugh. “Just keep him away from me,” she said.
“I was already planning to do that. Now let me look at you.” Lali took a step back and surveyed her friend. “You look fine. You’re lucky your eyes don’t get small when you cry.” She recalled her own face, and how she had worried that Jonathan would see her scrunched-up eyes and figure out something had happened while he was giving his paper.
“I’m lucky I have you for a friend,” Frances said.
Lali felt like a hypocrite. What would Frances think if she knew that Lali had initially found the Ricardo encounter quite amusing? It was only when she noticed Frances’s knuckles that she realized her friend was suffering.
“Let’s go. We need to make sure Jay has taken good care of Lily. Men,” she said, shaking her head, then thought, belatedly, that this time Frances would not find the put-down funny. They stepped onto the lighted, warm, canopied lawn and were taken aback by the bustle. “Dinner must be served.” Lali pointed in the direction of the buffet, which was crowded with people.
“Mom, I’ve been looking all over for you.” Mandy hurried up to them. “What happened to you?” she asked.
“I—” Frances struggled to come up with a response and then stopped as Lali took over. “I wanted to spend some alone time with your mom, so I spirited her away to the side of the house. But she tripped over the garden hose and her hands got dirty, and then her face got dirty, so we ended up turning on the hose to get her clean.”
“Oh.” Mandy accepted the long explanation, then turned her attention to why she had been looking for her mother in the first place. “Can we go to Delhi when we go to India?”
“Yes, of course,” Frances said, not sure why her daughter was suddenly asking questions about their itinerary, instead of screaming that she was never going to India.
“Good. Nikhil and I were talking, and he said that if we go to Delhi, he’ll give us a culinary tour. He says they have the most amazing street food. I’ll go tell him that we’ll see him there.”
“When are you going to India?” Lali asked, hoping that the new topic would give Frances something else to think about.
“I’m taking Mandy there next month,” Frances answered.
“Oh, a nice mother-and-daughter trip,” Lali said. While she was pregnant with Aaron, she had read a newspaper article about mothers and daughters traveling together and had decided that if she had a girl, she would at the very least take her to India and show her where she had gone to school, buy kulfi at her favorite ice-cream stand in Bangalore.
“Mom,” Mandy rushed back, “Nikhil wants to know if we can go to Delhi in October. That’s when he’ll be done with his classes in Europe.”
“I guess,” Frances shrugged, eyes scanning the crowd for Jay. At this point, she would agree to anything.
“Thanks, Mom, I’ll go tell him.” Mandy ran back.
“You’re staying that long?” Lali asked. “Won’t Mandy miss a lot of school?”
Frances was too empty to come up with an angle for their trip. Mandy’s failures were already out there. So be it.
“Mandy hasn’t been doing well in her classes here, and I’m taking her to Bangalore to finish high school.”
“Really?” Lali thought back to the letters about Mandy’s grades, her piano recitals, her swimming cups. When she had met Mandy, she had assumed she was seeing the class valedictorian, a female version of Nikhil.
Frances kept looking at the groups of people but did not see Jay or Lily. Then she realized that he must have gone to the game room Vic had told them about.
Lali felt a jolt of
guilt. Frances was being so honest about her daughter. She opened her mouth to tell Frances about Aaron, then closed it. They were two different problems. Aaron was doing well academically. He simply didn’t like Harvard. Mandy was not cutting it in high school. She remembered Aaron’s tenth-grade report card. “You know, Aaron went through a rebellious phase in high school, but it passed by pretty quickly,” Lali said, wanting to help Frances. The poor woman was coping with so much this evening. If Aakash had showed up at the party, and if Jonathan and she hadn’t sorted things out, she would have been the one with the sad face.
“I can handle a phase,” Frances said. “Mandy needs to do well in her last year, and there’s nothing to do in India except study.”
“Are you nuts?” Lali looked at Frances in astonishment. “When was the last time you were there? Now they have all the same distractions—TV, computers, everything electronic. And the games are much cheaper because they are pirated. India’s not like it used to be in our days.”
“I’m going to be putting Mandy in a Catholic school.”
“I went to one of those too, you know. But even those types of schools have changed. My mom keeps telling me about ten-year-olds checking porn on the computer, and girls as young as twelve going on dates. She says that these days parents work and the servants don’t monitor the children. From what I gather, the electronic world is so new over there that they don’t have any rules. Kids are going crazy.”
“That may be, but I think they study harder.”
“That’s probably true,” Lali agreed, “but you need to consider the effect on Mandy. If someone like Mandy had come to my school when I was young, everyone would have wanted to be her friend. But India’s opened up and people travel outside the country easily, which means foreign-returned folk aren’t exciting anymore. I’ve heard horror stories of children being mean to those who return from abroad. They might even figure out why she needed to return and tease her.”
“Look, I can’t talk about this anymore,” Frances shook her head.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to overload you.” Lali wished she hadn’t gone on about the new India. Who was she to tell Frances what to do? “Let’s get something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“It smells great,” Lali cajoled. “Let’s go find our table and then hit the buffet. Remember that Vic went to check on the meat items. They might be serving pork vindaloo.”
“I’m not hungry.”
That morning years ago, Frances had made tea for Lali, joking that while the British had created many problems in India, they had also given them a pot filled with an all-powerful palliative. She had cleaned the kitchen, waited until Lali had a shower, and insisted she fill her stomach—first with the tea and then with a sandwich.
“Look at me, Frances.” Lali stood squarely in front of her friend. “Don’t let that man have such power over you. He’s nothing. He’s less than nothing. Forget about him. That’s what you told me about Aakash, remember? Now, you are going to eat and enjoy yourself and act as though he doesn’t exist.”
Frances sighed. It wasn’t just Rich she was worried about. It was Jay. She still hadn’t seen his gray-and-black-haired head anywhere.
“The children,” Frances brought up as a last-minute strategy to keep away from the food. “I should check on them.”
“They’re probably playing inside. You just saw Mandy. She seems to be managing nicely on her own. Come on, let’s go.”
JAY SETTLED LILY in front of the Wii and looked around the game room. It was much bigger than their own living room—the sectional couch, large-screen TV, and various games still leaving a lot of space. Lily and Sam were playing Halo, a game that Frances had refused to let them buy. But, as both children had told him, they had played it many times in their friends’ homes. Jay had almost given Lily the same, Frances-inspired, “We do things differently in our house” answer, then thought, why not? Someone had to have a good time at the party.
It had been a while since the kids had begged him to play with them. These days, they viewed him as an interruption, perhaps because by the time he came home, they were often in the middle of a game and didn’t want to stop and let him join in.
Jay sat down on the couch, and the plush cushions pulled him in. He had no desire to go outside. He wanted to leave the party but knew that Vic would be hurt. Vic was an odd bloke. Did he even understand what had transpired after he made those introductions? He had blithely gone off to see about the dinner.
Jay could smell fried onions, ginger, garlic, and chili, the definitive aromas of Indian cuisine. He usually assuaged anxiety with food, but not this time. The pakoras seemed to be drowning in a sea of oil in his stomach. He thought of his mother, who used to give him bicarbonate of soda any time he complained of a tummy ache. He was now a father of three and yet he felt young—unprepared for an ex-fiancé, a daughter not doing well in school, children asking if they can play certain games. He felt as if he were still in college, waiting to finish that paper.
How had Frances known about that bloody paper? He had never told anyone. Even if she had gone through his desk one day when he wasn’t there, she would not have found any information about it. American professors don’t pressure students to do their work. It was the reason Frances was taking Mandy back to India.
Maybe this was the best time for her to go. They could, as the Americans say, take a break from each other, see what happened.
The idea was terrifying. He was Indian. He had always assumed they would leave this earth still married to each other.
Why hadn’t Frances told him about her American fiancé? Was it really shame? Back home, a broken engagement was hardest on the girl. No matter why the engagement ended, it was always the girl who suffered. He recalled Mummy telling him about her cousin’s daughter. Her parents had found a nice Indian man living in America. He had returned, as Vic had done, and they had gotten engaged. But once he went back to finish his PhD at Rutgers, he phoned his parents with the news that he had married his German girlfriend. It had taken Mummy’s cousin three more years before she was able to find her daughter a suitable husband.
Goans might claim they are different from Indians, but a broken engagement is a broken engagement. Even in America, land of the free to divorce and home of the bravely divorced, it evoked some shame. He wasn’t surprised that Frances had come here to get away from the nosey parkers in her town.
Had she married him on the rebound? He had never planned to marry her. Guilt, along with love, had prompted his proposal. That final semester had been an obstacle course of finishing classes, going for interviews, getting a job—and, for him, dealing with Frances’s asking face. He had even talked to Vic about his ambivalence, had envied his friend’s clean life. In the end, he had asked Frances, a little shocked that he was going against his parents’ wishes yet at the same time pleased that he was doing something so different.
“Dad?”
The word invaded his inner torment.
“What?”
“I’m hungry.”
“You’re in the right place,” Jay recovered, and smiled. “I think I can smell dinner.”
“I know,” Lily said. “I can see the men with the food.” She pointed to the doorway that led farther into the house. Just then, a waiter passed by holding a large platter.
“That’s tandoori chicken,” Jay said, surprised to see the mounds of meat. Then he remembered Rajesh asking Vic whether the meat should be on a separate table.
“It’s my favorite Indian food,” Sam said with satisfaction.
“It’s the only Indian food you eat,” Jay reminded him. “Why do you think Mom and I haven’t taken you back to visit?” When their neighbor Lucy once asked them why they didn’t visit India, Jay had explained that it was difficult with the children, because they missed American food too much. Sam had been standing beside him and nodded, saying, “It’s too spicy.”
Now Sam said, “Let’s go tell Mom she was wrong. Sh
e told me Uncle Vic doesn’t eat meat, so there would only be vegetables. I bet she’s gonna love eating the chicken.”
Jay knew they couldn’t hide out forever.
He had reluctantly stepped outside, hyperaware that Rich and Frances were among all these guests, when someone shouted, “Speech, Nikhil, speech!”
“What’s going on, Dad?” Lily asked.
“Someone wants Nikhil to make a speech.”
“That’s because he’s a vad-e-lic-to-ri-an,” Lily said the big word slowly, with grave importance.
“You’re right, Lily,” Jay said, “which means he’ll make a short speech.”
“Speech, speech.” The refrain was picked up by other groups.
“Oh, God, these Indians will never learn,” Lali groaned. “If they wanted to hear a speech, they should have attended his graduation. I hope it’s short, at least.”
Frances wanted to tell Lali that’s what Nikhil had said about being a valedictorian, but the words stuck in her throat. She had heard them an hour ago, when her family was intact, Jay standing beside her, their plans certain even if their future wasn’t so great.
She looked toward the house—and saw Jay. Her heart lifted. He hadn’t left the party. She knew he wouldn’t, but she was so insecure that she wasn’t convinced he was still here until she saw him. Lily and Sam were standing next to him. Their glances interlocked. Jay broke away, and Frances, feeling the long-distance slight, turned her head. Mandy was standing by herself. She didn’t look caged, just a girl taking in all the noise around her.
Right behind Mandy was Rich.
Her heart dove to her toes. She took a step toward Mandy to pull her away, then realized that Rich hadn’t met her daughter. Even he wouldn’t talk to a total stranger. As she watched, Mandy met her gaze and started walking toward her.
“Speech! Speech!” The word sounded like rounders, as it was shouted by group after group.
VIC WISHED HIS friends weren’t so—traditional. How could he tell them that Nikhil didn’t want to give a speech? They expected it. They would also be shocked to learn that Nikhil hadn’t wanted a big party in his honor.
