“Table for deux, please,” Teddy told the pimple-faced hostess.
Her eyes flicked from Teddy to Harit and back. “Two of you?” she asked, already plucking two menus from a stack and turning on her heel.
“Yes, darling,” Teddy said as they walked down the middle of the restaurant. “Honey, you need to get yourself some nicer pumps.” He pointed to the girl’s old shoes even though her back was turned. She ignored him.
Their booth was in the far corner of the restaurant, under an oblong window that looked out on the mall instead of the parking lot. Through the window, Harit could see a girl standing attentively in a hat and apron at the cookie shop in the food court—waiting for anyone at all to bite.
“It’s about time we did this,” Teddy said, opening his menu and scanning its contents with one outstretched finger, the way one might do to a tax form. It struck Harit how out of place Teddy was. Harit had only ever seen him in the store and, once, briefly in the parking lot, but now, against the red and orange swells of the bar and grill, Teddy looked like a paper doll that had been plucked from a book. “What are you gonna have?”
Harit had never had a drink with another person in his life. He’d never had a drink, period, until after Swati’s death. A week after the tragedy, Gital Didi came by with a few groceries for his mother, and in the middle of pulling bundles of coriander, tubs of yogurt, and flour from the brown paper bags, she pulled out a six-pack of Bud Light and set it on the counter, as if it were the most natural thing to give him. Harit froze in the middle of the kitchen, eyeing the beer as if it were a squirrel that had bounded in through an open window. Gital Didi said, “Perhaps that will help,” and turned away to put a gallon of milk in the refrigerator. Later, after his Swati act, while reaching for that milk to make a nighttime lassi, Harit saw the beer, large and prominent on the small shelf. He lifted the whole six-pack up, the cans thumping against each other, and eyed the cold metal carefully. Then, as he had done at ten years old when extracting an orange Fanta from his parents’ icebox, he set the package back on the shelf and pulled off one can. He took it to his room, sat on his bed, opened it—the psst of the can making a much louder sound than he had expected—and had to shove it into his mouth to stop the foam from hitting the floor. He sucked at it, the bubbles burning his throat and the taste acrid and so bitter compared to soda. By the time he finished the can, he was already drunk. He spent the rest of the evening moaning with heartburn into his pillow, but the next night, he drank two more cans, finally realizing why people got drunk—to forget things.
By now, he was used to the scratch of the alcohol at the back of his throat, but he also had no idea what it was like to drink in front of someone—or, more precisely, what it was like to be drunk in front of someone. It was this worry that made him order a Coke.
“A Coke?” Teddy said. “I didn’t take you out so that you could order a Coke, sweetheart. Time for a big boy’s drink. I’ll have a vodka soda, and make his a rum and Coke,” he said to the waiter, a butch young man with spiked hair, huge arms, and orange-tanned skin.
“Sir, please, a Coke,” Harit said, stroking his hair nervously with his right hand.
“Absolutely not!” Teddy laughed. “Rum and Coke. Rum and Coke.” He pounded on the table with his fists and chortled. The waiter gave an exasperated sigh and walked away. “Well, what’s her problem,” Teddy said. His face transformed from gleeful mockery to discomfort as his fleshy checks and thick neck erupted in a hectic blush. Harit was confused, assuming that Teddy was referring to the hostess, who was not even in sight.
A minute later, the waiter reappeared with a glass of clear liquid over ice for Teddy and a Coke for Harit. Teddy sat quietly as the waiter set the drinks down and walked away.
“Well, cheers, dear,” he said, raising his glass into the air. Harit picked his drink up, clinked it against Teddy’s glass, and took a sip. He gagged. The burning sweetness in his mouth must have been rum, and the rum must have been half-piss. Teddy burst out in laughter again.
Harit had always thought the jolly dry heave of Teddy’s laugh to be comical, but here, in this crowded restaurant where the people in the booth next to theirs peered over the partition to give a stern eye, he hated it.
“Honey, don’t tell me you’ve never had rum before.”
“No.”
“Have you ever had a drink before?”
Harit looked at Teddy angrily and said, “Yes. I have had several.”
“Oh, really?” Teddy was chortling again. “When?”
“After my sister died.”
Harit hadn’t expected to be so mean-spirited, but the words came out of his mouth quickly. He didn’t regret speaking them. If anything, he felt empowered, especially when he saw Teddy’s face fall and his blush darken to purple.
“Oh, my God, I am so sorry,” Teddy said. “How did it happen?”
Instead of responding, Harit took his glass and tipped the rest of its contents down his throat. He closed his nose as he had done years ago when taking his mother’s sore throat remedy of honey, black pepper, and masala. Then he said, “Where did the waiter go?”
* * *
The inaugural outing ended as Teddy gave Harit a ride home in his beige Camry, Harit fumbling to find his house key because he was tipsy and because it was ten after nine and the baseball field lights had gone off. He had just enough presence of mind to make his costume look presentable and carry on the usual level of conversation as Swati with his mother (which wasn’t much). Contrary to what he thought would happen after the initial rush of rum at the restaurant, he did not get sick but fell into a pleasant sleep the moment he lay down. He woke up two hours late the next morning. He sat up in bed and was greeted with a pain that reminded him immediately of how he had felt upon spotting Swati’s crumpled body at the foot of the stairs—a punch to the forehead. He managed to get dressed and take a few sips of water from the kitchen tap, and then he realized that he had not given his mother her usual cup of tea that morning. Her grief and fading vision had confined her, and she relied upon him to do little things like these when Gital Didi wasn’t around.
He looked into the living room. His mother’s head was drooping, and there was no music playing. He started forward but then noticed over the rim of her sunglasses that she was looking at her hands. He realized, his brain like a rusty machine sputtering into action after neglect, that she had been in this exact same position last night. She had not met his eyes but had been looking at her hands, and he had been so worried that she would not believe his clumsy disguise that he had not thought about why she had been doing so. Now, he saw that she was holding a teacup, and he realized that he had no idea how long it had been there. It could have been since yesterday morning, although he normally remembered to take it out of her hands before leaving for work. He had no recollection if he had. The pain in his forehead was making him forget.
“Ma, are you all right?”
She looked up at him and shook her head.
Harit wanted to ask her if she needed another cup of chai, but for some reason he felt that the room had become menacing, that another word would make his mother crumble or disappear. He heard a car whiz past outside, then another car’s engine start. He heard the drip of the kitchen faucet, which never stopped making noise however hard he twisted its knobs shut. And there was the swish of his mother’s breath as it exited and entered her nostrils. He could not remember the last time that he had looked at his mother like this, without speaking. Perhaps more notable, he could not remember the last time that his mother had observed him. Despite her failing vision and her oppressive eyewear, she seemed to be seeing right into him.
Now was the moment when he should come clean. He could stop this charade and tell his mother the truth. No more nights twisted into a sari, no more makeup, no more tiptoeing.
As he looked at her, he thought of a story that his mother had told him when he was a child: a crow, weary from flying, chanced upon a jug of water in the fo
rest. He perched on the rim of the jug, his ribbed black claws clutching the clay, and put his head down to drink. However, his beak was far too small to reach the water. He tried several times, and every time, he found himself even wearier than when he had begun. Eventually, he had no choice but to fly away, cursing the fact that he had ever stopped.
“But you see,” his mother said those many years ago, “another crow came along, and after seeing that his beak was far too short to reach the water, he thought of a plan.”
Harit could see his childhood bedroom now—its yellowed walls veined with cracks, the blue stripes of his bedsheet, the honey-like spill of a lamp lighting his mother’s lively eyes, and Swati’s hair, spread like a dark wooden fan on her bed, which sat opposite his.
“This clever crow grabbed a nearby pebble in his claws and plopped it into the jug. He found another pebble, and another, and another, until the level of the water came to the rim of the jug. He then dipped his beak in and drank to his heart’s delight.”
Harit remembered how joyous the story had made him. Like every child, he thought his mother had made the story up herself—a sentiment echoed by the look in Swati’s own eyes and, of course, in the grin that bloomed on her face.
It was not until a few years later that he heard from a schoolyard acquaintance, Ranga, that not only was the story an Aesop’s fable, but that his mother also had changed it in an odd way.
“There are not two crows in the story,” Ranga said, raising his hands in the air, palms up, as if each one were a crow. “There is only one crow, and he figures out the puzzle for himself.” He brought his palms together, bowed as if he were a servant, then erupted in laughter.
Harit was hurt that his mother had changed the story, especially because he couldn’t understand why she had made the change at all. Why put another crow in the tale, especially when its story was so tragic?
* * *
By the time Harit got to work that morning, it was ten o’clock. He had never been late to work before, and he didn’t know what to do. Most mornings, he arrived at five minutes before eight, clocked in at his register, then waited in the break room for his coworkers to show up. It was a drab space, with a quartet of buzzing appliances—a vending machine of candy bars, a watercooler, an off-white refrigerator, and a tea-and-coffee machine that spat liquid into fragile paper cups. A collection of plastic chairs and round tables, scattered by day’s end, was always set right by the janitor come morning, and Harit loved having this order to himself. (Having once been a janitor, he appreciated this dearly.) Since he hated the tea that the machine in the break room made, he brought Taj Mahal tea bags and simply pressed the HOT WATER button to make his own brew. He toasted Mr. Harriman’s portrait—his sole companion—and drank up the tea and silence.
By eight-thirty, the fifteen or so salespeople of the morning shift would gather and loiter with their coffees, bagels, stinky fast-food breakfasts, and gossip. Since the store was such a beloved establishment, the majority of the employees had been working there for years. Most of them were women who smelled sweet and wore dresses as puffy as their hair. It wasn’t that they were mean to Harit, but except for a smile in passing or an odd question about his ethnicity (“When do you plan to move back?” “In India, do you drink eight glasses of tea a day instead of water?”), they rarely engaged him directly in conversation. One of them, Ruby, was in her seventies, and Harit originally attributed her reticence to old age; but one afternoon, when he asked her if the store was closed on New Year’s Day, she looked up from folding a blouse and said, “I’m busy.” Her voice, which had always been warbly, was resolute in its judgment of foreign people.
For the most part, they left the socializing to Teddy. His status as Harit’s companion in Men’s Furnishings made him the obvious stand-in for a conversation partner, and there was an unspoken relief that no one else had to handle Harit. With Teddy around, a greeting, a question, a discussion involving Harit was replaced with a head nod. That was good enough for his coworkers, and truthfully, that was good enough for Harit.
On Monday mornings, Mr. Harriman came into the break room and gave them a short speech—which things on sale were particularly desirable, or whose morale was highest and therefore most exemplary. Then he would say good-bye and give the floor to Stella, who would read off a list of employees who had sold “instant credit cards”—Harriman’s charge cards that gave preferred customers discounts on merchandise. Every time you rang someone up, you had to ask the customer if he or she wanted to “open an instant credit”—a carefully monitored Harriman stipulation. People had been fired for failing to pop the question within earshot of Mr. Harriman—or so the word went. Marla Palmer, a woman in her fifties who was the acknowledged star of cosmetics, held the record for the most instant credits ever opened—well over a hundred—and hers was always the first name called. Every week—every single week—she turned on one heel when her name rang out, then bent in a curtsy and screwed her heavily rouged face into a “surprised” grin. Harit rarely hated people, but he absolutely loathed her. He preferred Ruby’s type of obvious dislike to this put-on humility.
Or maybe it was the fact that he had never opened an instant credit. Not one. After two months at the store, Mr. Harriman pulled him aside and said that he no longer had to ask people to open them. “Teddy has done such a stand-up job opening ICs”—a handy store abbreviation—“that it would be overkill to have both of you asking.” Harit wanted to point out how only one of them ever helped a customer at a time, so how could Teddy ask one of Harit’s customers to open an IC? But Harit picked up on the motive behind Mr. Harriman’s leniency and knew that he was being given a break.
Today was a Friday, though, and there was no meeting on Fridays. These mornings were usually boisterous, since everyone had to discuss their plans for the weekend, and Teddy often brought in doughnuts for everyone. This morning, by habit, Harit went to the register to clock in, then realized that he probably should not be seen until he knew how upset Mr. Harriman was at his tardiness. He took a look around to see if he could spot Teddy. Sure enough, he was busy helping a woman pull a red canvas suitcase from a high shelf. In the midst of tilting the suitcase to show the customer an extra pocket, Teddy caught Harit’s eye and nodded, as if to say, “I’ll be right there.” Harit went into the storeroom to flick through stacks of shirts and shake shiny boxes of dress shoes. Even though he and Teddy didn’t get to sell these objects—seeing as shirts and shoes belonged to Men’s and not Men’s Furnishings—they were still tasked with taking inventory of them.
“Well, well, if it ain’t Mr. Fashionably Late—literally!” Teddy said.
“I am so sorry, Teddy. I have never been late before. Is Mr. Harriman angry?”
“Dear, calm down. Calm down. Harriman is just fine. I told him that your power was out this morning and that you were waiting for the electric company. I could have also told him that you don’t have a cell phone, but I figured that he could do without that piece of information, honey.” Teddy called Harit “honey” so much that Harit had started to wonder if Teddy simply couldn’t pronounce his name. “He just said that he would dock you one emergency day.”
They had five emergency days in a year without monetary punishment. After five days, you had to pay fifty dollars for each day missed. Harit was not particularly happy to have lost one of his days, but he had taken only two days off work since beginning at Harriman’s, and those had been because of Swati.
“Why the sad face, honey? You’re totally fine. I’m going to go man the station. Go ahead and just do inventory today. I’ll take care of the register.”
Harit was relieved to have an easy task. His headache had subsided even though he had drunk only one cup of tea this morning and not his usual second cup in the break room. In fact, he felt strangely peaceful amidst the nice-smelling leather of the shoes. Instead of bending over with his clipboard and examining the shelves and stacks, he decided to plop the boxes on the floor, lie down with his back
against the wall, and comfortably take notes about how many pairs of each design remained in stock. It felt comfortable because it felt like something he would have done as a child. He was one step away from emptying the contents of these boxes on the floor and lying in a bed of shoes just to be wrapped in their leathery smell while he dozed off.
He couldn’t remember the last time that he had thought of something so frivolous. And why was he, a Hindu, enjoying the smell of leather? That was blasphemy. His body felt braided with energy. He could feel himself shaking.
Then Harit wondered how Mr. Harriman had believed Teddy’s story. If Harit’s power had been out and he had no cell phone, how would Harit have called Teddy to let him know this in the first place? It didn’t make sense.
Perhaps Teddy was right and Harit was paranoid. Mr. Harriman had better things to do than worry about him.
FOR TEN MONTHS, A LARGE, GREEN SIGN HAD been flashing beside the highway: COMING SOON: PARADISE ISLAND—BEYOND YOUR DREAMS. That was all it read, not a single hint as to what Paradise Island was. The effect of this was thrilling. Traffic slowed as people drove past, and Ranjana took some comfort in thinking that others shared her curious fascination with the sign. All the same, she felt that it had been placed there for her benefit or her entertainment or, very possibly, her unraveling. She felt a particular communion with the concept of “Paradise”; it was a word that so many Americans used to euphemize India when they were being polite, when the truth was that, to them, India was a whole host of other things before it was Paradise (dirty, crowded, impoverished). To Ranjana, India did often represent Paradise; she missed parts of it as an angel would miss Eden; and to see the word Paradise every day to and from work was like passing her childhood temple or a favorite movie house. As a writer, that was how she saw things—not as what they were but as what they represented.
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