Bold as it was, this request didn’t surprise Matthew all that much. Every class he taught had at least one pushy kid in it. Kids who’d been building their résumés since kindergarten. They wanted to meet for coffee or come to his office hours, they wanted to network, hoping to line up recommendations or internships down the line, or just to relieve for a few minutes the anxiety of being the stressed-out, hyper-competitive people the world had fashioned them to be. This girl’s intensity, her buzzing enthusiasm that came close to nervousness, was a thing he recognized.
Matthew was away from home on business, with free time on his hands. He didn’t want to spend it serving as an undergraduate advisor. “They’re keeping me pretty busy while I’m here,” he said. “Full schedule.”
“How long are you here for?”
“Just tonight.”
“OK. Well, at least I’m coming to your talk.”
“Right.”
“I was going to come to your Q and A tomorrow morning but I have class,” the girl said.
“You won’t miss anything. I usually just repeat myself.”
“I bet that is so not true,” said the girl. She picked up her backpack. She seemed on the point of leaving but then said, “Do you need anyone to show you where the auditorium is? I still get lost around here but I think I can find it. I’m going there, obviously.”
“They’re sending someone to fetch me.”
“OK. Now you think I am stalking you. It was nice meeting you, Professor.”
“Nice to meet you.”
But still the girl didn’t leave. She continued to look at Matthew with her weird intensity that was also a vacancy. From out of this vacancy, as if delivering a message from another realm, the girl suddenly said, “You’re better-looking in person than your photos.”
“I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”
“It’s a statement.”
“I’m not sure it’s good news, though. Given the Internet, more people probably see photographs of me than my actual living self.”
“I didn’t say you looked bad in your photos, Professor,” the girl said. And with a touch of hurt feelings, or an indication that their interchange had been, after all, a slight disappointment, the girl shouldered her backpack and walked away.
Matthew turned back to his laptop. Stared at the screen. Only when the girl had left the coffee shop and was passing by the front window did he glance up, conscientiously, to see what she looked like from behind.
* * *
It wasn’t fair.
Even though a third of the kids at her school were Indian, Diwali wasn’t an official holiday. They got off for Christmas and Easter, of course, and for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but when it came to the Hindu or Muslim holidays there were only “accommodations.” That meant teachers excused you from class but still assigned homework. And it meant that you were responsible for whatever material they went over that day.
Prakrti was going to miss four days. Almost a whole week and at the worst time possible: right before exams in math and history, and during her crucial junior year. The thought of it filled her with panic.
She’d pleaded with her parents to cancel the trip. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t celebrate the holiday at home like everyone else they knew. Prakrti’s mother explained that she missed her family, her sister, Deepa, and her brothers, Pratul and Amitava. Her parents—Prakrti and Durva’s grandparents—were getting older, too. Didn’t Prakrti want to see Dadi and Dadu before they vanished from the earth?
Prakrti made no reply to this. She didn’t know her grandparents well—saw them only on intermittent visits to what was, for her, a foreign country. It wasn’t Prakrti’s fault that her grandparents seemed strange and attenuated, and yet she knew that to publicize this fact would put her in a bad light.
“Just leave me here,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
This didn’t work either.
They flew out from Philadelphia International on a Monday night in early November. Sitting in the rear of the plane next to her little sister, Prakrti switched on the overhead light. Her plan was to read The Scarlet Letter on the way over and write the related essay on the flight back. But she couldn’t concentrate. Hawthorne’s symbolism felt as stuffy as the cabin’s recirculated air; and though she sympathized with Hester Prynne, punished for doing what anyone would nowadays, as soon as the flight attendants served dinner Prakrti used the excuse to put down her tray table and watch a movie while she ate.
By the time they arrived in Kolkata, she was too jet-lagged to do homework. Too busy as well. Insisting that they shouldn’t nap, Aunt Deepa took Prakrti, Durva, their cousin Smita and their mother shopping first thing. They went to a fancy new department store to buy utensils, silver forks, knives, and serving spoons; and, for the girls, gold and silver bangles. After that, they walked through a covered market, a kind of bazaar lined with stalls, to get the rice and vermillion powder. Back at the apartment, they began decorating for the holiday. Prakrti, Durva, and Smita were given the task of making Lakshmi’s footprints. Barefoot, the three girls stepped into trays of moistened powder laid outside the front door. Carefully, they stepped out again, and made a path inside. They created two sets of footprints, one in red and one in white; and because Lakshmi was supposed to be bringing prosperity, they didn’t miss a room, making footprints lead in and out of the kitchen, the living room, even the bathroom.
Rajiv, their other cousin, who was a year older than Prakrti, had two Xboxes in his bedroom. She spent the rest of the afternoon playing Titanfall with him, in multi-player mode. The apartment’s Internet connection was super fast, and didn’t glitch. On previous trips to India, Prakrti had pitied her cousins’ obsolete computer equipment, but now, like Kolkata itself, they had leapt ahead of her. The city looked almost futuristic in places, especially compared with poor old Dover with its redbrick storefronts, its leaning telephone poles, its roads full of potholes.
Prakrti and Durva had packed their saris in plastic dry cleaner’s bags to keep them from wrinkling. That night, for Dhanteras, they put them on. They slipped the new bangles on their arms and stood before the mirror, watching the metal catch the light.
As soon as it got dark, the family lit the diyas and placed them around the apartment—on the windowsills, coffee tables, in the center of the dining table, and on top of her uncle’s stereo speakers. Music streamed from these black monoliths, as the family gathered around the dining table, and feasted, and sang bajahns.
All night long, relatives kept arriving. Some Prakrti recognized but most she didn’t, though they knew all about her: that she was a top student, a member of the debating team, and even that she planned to apply for Early Decision to the University of Chicago next year. They agreed with her mother that Chicago was too far from Delaware, and also too cold. Did she really want to be so far away? Wouldn’t she freeze?
A group of old women, white-haired and loud, wanted a piece of her, too. They clustered around her with their sagging breasts and bellies, and shouted questions in Bengali. Whenever Prakrti didn’t understand something—which was most of the time—they shouted louder, only to give up, finally, and shake their heads, amused and appalled by her American ignorance.
Around midnight, jet lag caught up with her. Prakrti fell asleep on the couch. When she woke up, three old ladies were hovering over her, making comments.
“That is so creepy,” Durva said, when Prakrti told her.
“I know, right?”
The next few days were just as crazy. They went to the temple, visited their uncles’ families, exchanged gifts, and stuffed themselves with food. Some relatives observed every custom and ritual, others only a few, and still others treated the week like one long party and vacation. On the night of Diwali they went down to the water for the festivities. The river that ran through Kolkata, the Hooghly, which looked brown and sludgy during the daytime, was now, under a starlit sky, transformed into a black and sparkling mirror. Thous
ands of people lined the bank. Despite the throngs, there was little jostling as people approached the water’s edge to release their rafts of flowers. The crowd moved like a single organism, any lurch of activity in one direction compensated for by a retraction in another. The unity was impressive. On top of that, Prakrti’s father explained to her that everything that was going into the water—the palm fronds, the flowers, even the candles themselves, which were made of beeswax—would decompose by tomorrow morning, the entire blazing ritual winking out and leaving no trace.
The glittery nonsense surrounding the holiday—Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, gold and silver baubles, shining knives, forks, and serving spoons—all came down to this, to light and its brevity. You lived, you burned, you spread your little light—then poof. Your soul went into another body. That’s what her mother believed. Her father doubted it, and Prakrti knew it wasn’t true. She didn’t plan on dying for a long time. Before she did, she wanted to do something with her life. She put her arm around her little sister and together they watched their candles drift out until they became indistinguishable in the sea of flames.
If they’d left on the weekend, as scheduled, the trip would have been tolerable. But after Bhai Dooj, the last day of the festival, Prakrti’s mother announced that she’d changed their tickets to stay a day longer.
Prakrti was so furious she could hardly sleep that night. The next morning, she came to breakfast in sweats and a T-shirt, her hair uncombed, her mood sullen.
“You can’t wear that today, Prakrti,” her mother said. “We’re going out. Put on your sari.”
“No.”
“What?”
“It’s all sweaty. I’ve worn it three times already. My choli smells.”
“Go put it on.”
“Why me? What about Durva?”
“Your sister’s younger. A salwar kameez is fine for her.”
When Prakrti came out in her sari, her mother was unsatisfied. She took her back to the bedroom to rewrap it herself. Next she inspected Prakrti’s fingernails and tweezed her eyebrows. Finally—a new thing entirely—she applied kohl around Prakrti’s eyes.
“Can you not?” Prakrti said, pulling away.
Her mother seized Prakrti’s face with both hands. “Be still!”
A car was waiting outside. They drove for over an hour to the outside of the city, where they stopped before a compound with walls topped with razor wire.
A gatekeeper led them across a dirt courtyard into the house. They passed through a tiled entryway, up a flight of stairs, into a large room with tall windows on three sides and wicker-bladed fans on the ceiling. Despite the heat, the fans weren’t running. The room was severely underfurnished, except in one corner, where a white-haired man in a Nehru jacket sat cross-legged on a mat. The kind of man you expected to encounter in India. A guru. Or a politician.
Across from him, a middle-aged couple occupied a small sofa. As Prakrti and her family came in, they waggled their heads in greeting.
Her parents sat opposite the couple. Durva was given a chair just behind. Prakrti was steered to a bench or platform—she didn’t know what to call it—slightly apart from everyone else. The bench was made of sandalwood inlaid with ivory. It had a vaguely ceremonial air. As she sat down, she caught a whiff of herself—she was beginning to perspire in the heat. She wanted not to care. Had an urge even to inflict her body odor on all these people and embarrass her mother—but of course she couldn’t. She was too mortified herself. Instead, she sat as still as possible.
During the conversation that followed, Prakrti heard her name spoken. But she was never directly addressed.
Tea was served. Indian sweets. After a week, Prakrti was sick of them. But she ate them to be polite.
She missed her phone. She wanted to text her friend Kylie and describe the torture she was presently undergoing. As the minutes passed on the hard bench, and servants came and went, other people passed along the corridor, peering in. The house appeared to contain dozens of people. Curious. Nosy.
By the time it was over, Prakrti had made a vow of silence. She got back into the car intending not to say another word to her parents until they got home. So it was left to Durva to ask, “Who were those people?”
“I told you,” Prakrti’s mother said. “The Kumars.”
“Are we related to them?”
Her mother laughed. “Maybe one day.” She looked out the window, her face lit with a violent satisfaction. “They are the parents of the boy who wants to marry your sister.”
* * *
Matthew talked for forty-five minutes, as requested. His topic, that day, was gravitational waves, in particular their recent detection by twin interferometers located at disparate locations in the continental United States. Wearing a lavalier, and pacing the stage in a navy jacket and jeans, Matthew explained that Einstein had theorized the existence of these waves almost a hundred years ago, but that proof had only been found this year. To aid his presentation, Matthew had come equipped with a digital simulation of the two black holes whose merging, in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, had created the ripples that had passed invisibly and silently through the universe to register against the highly sensitive devices—in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington—that had been engineered for this purpose alone. “As acute as the ear of God,” Matthew described them. “In fact, a lot better than that.”
The auditorium was less than half full. Equally disheartening, most of the audience consisted of people in their seventies or eighties, retirees from the town who came to these lectures at the college because they were open to the public and given at a reasonable hour, and because they gave them something to talk about afterward at dinner.
At the book signing, those who remained bore avidly down on Matthew as he sat behind a table, armed with a Sharpie and a glass of wine. Many carried beige totes, the women wearing bright scarves and loose, forgiving sweaters, the men in shapeless chinos, all of them exuding anticipation and forbearance. It wasn’t clear from what people said if they had read Matthew’s book, or understood the science, but they definitely wanted their copies personalized. Most everyone was content to smile and say, “Thank you for coming to Dover!” as if he were doing it for free. Some men trotted out whatever they remembered from high school or college physics courses and tried to apply it to Matthew’s talk.
A woman with white bangs and red cheeks stopped in front of Matthew. She’d recently been to England to research her genealogy, she said, and she gave him an extended account of the pertinent gravestones she’d located in various Anglican churchyards in Kent. This woman had just moved on when the girl from the coffee shop appeared.
“I don’t have anything for you to sign,” she said guiltlessly.
“That’s all right. It’s not required.”
“I’m too poor to buy a book! College is so expensive!”
A little over an hour ago, the girl had struck Matthew as something of a bother. But now, drained by the procession of old, haggard faces, he gazed up at her with relief and gratitude. She’d taken off her baggy sweatshirt and now had on a little white top that left her shoulders bare.
“At least get yourself some wine,” Matthew told her. “That’s free.”
“I’m not twenty-one yet. I’m nineteen. I’ll be twenty in May.”
“I don’t think anyone will mind.”
“Are you trying to ply me with liquor, Professor?” the girl said.
Matthew felt himself blushing. He tried to think of something to counter this impression, but because what the girl had said wasn’t so far from the truth, nothing occurred to him.
Fortunately, the girl, in her hectic, excited way, had already moved on. “I know!” she said, her eyes growing wide. “Could you sign a piece of paper for me? That way, I can paste it into your book.”
“If you ever buy it.”
“Right. First I have to graduate and pay off my college loans.”
She had already swung her backpack
onto the table. The motion released her smell, a light, clean scent, something like talcum.
Behind her, a dozen people were still in line. They didn’t seem impatient but a few were staring to see what was holding things up.
The girl produced a small ringed notebook. Opening it, she searched for a blank page. As she did this, her black hair fell forward, curtaining them off from the people in line. And then a strange thing happened. The girl seemed to shiver. Some delicate or tormenting sensation traveled the length of her body. She lifted her eyes toward Matthew’s, and as if giving in to an irresistible urge, she said in a strangled, elated voice, “Oh, God! Why don’t you just sign my body?”
The avowal was so sudden, so absurd, so welcome, that for a moment Matthew was struck dumb. He glanced at the nearest people in line to see if anyone had overheard.
“I think I’d better stick with the notebook,” he said.
She handed it over. Laying it flat on the table, Matthew asked, “How would you like this?”
“To Prakrti. Want me to spell it?”
But he was already writing: “To Prakrti. A Fresh Person.”
This made the girl laugh. Then, as if making the most innocent request in the world, she said, “Can you put down your cell?”
Matthew didn’t even dare to look up again. His face was burning. He was desperate for the moment to be over and thrilled by the encounter. He scrawled down his phone number. “Thank you for coming,” he said, pushing the notebook away, and then turned to the next person in line.
* * *
The boy’s name was Dev. Dev Kumar. He was twenty years old, worked in a store selling TVs and video equipment, and was taking night school classes toward a degree in computer science. All this Prakrti’s mother told her on the plane back to the U.S.
The idea that she would marry this unknown person—or anyone for that matter, for a long, long time—was too preposterous for Prakrti to take seriously.
“Mom, hello? I’m only sixteen.”
“I was seventeen when I got engaged to your father.”
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