Paradise Island. It sounded like one of those horrid reality shows that her coworker Cheryl was always talking about: bright-haired twentysomethings dumped on an island for sex, fluorescent drinks, and black-and-white video clips in which their teeth, hair, and bathing suits gleamed in the same grainy hue. Yet Paradise Island’s intrigue had to do with elusiveness, not visibility.
The tension of not knowing what it was invaded her thoughts. Its meaning to her life was magnified by her need to know exactly what it was meant to be. She did not understand what kind of marketing tactic this was, this forced mystery. It was one thing to whet a public’s appetite, but to prolong the process had the adverse effect on people. They became annoyed, obsessed with something that had never even existed.
One day Ranjana took the exit and drove to where the sign indicated Paradise Island would be. She could not drive all the way up to the sign. Instead, she was stopped by a chain-link fence, behind which sat various piles of earth and debris indicating a work in progress. Afterward, she stopped at a nearby Starbucks to have some tea.
“Excuse me,” she said to a blank-eyed employee who was collecting used cups, discarded lids, and trampled napkins with a broom and dustpan. The boy barely looked up when Ranjana spoke. “Do you know what this ‘Paradise Island’ is?”
He snorted. “The hell if I know. You’re, like, the tenth person to ask me that today.”
“But what is it? They’ve been building it for months.”
“Look, I wish I knew, ma’am. My manager is pissed. He thought it would get us more customers. But that thing’s just been sitting there for months, and we have no effing clue.”
Ranjana went home and, enjoying the silence of an empty house, fixed herself a mooli paratha. If she wasn’t going to find out what that bloody Island was, she was going to gorge on something that she didn’t have to share with her husband. She stood at the kitchen counter, dunking hot pieces of the paratha into a pot of yogurt. She loved the contrast of the cool and hot on her fingers. In the pot, the yogurt looked like glaciers giving off a soft radiance.
* * *
Nothing taunted Ranjana more than a blinking cursor. Her eyes were beginning to cross as her computer screen burned into a hot indigo.
There had to be something besides the premise of the story itself; that was easy enough. Ranjana had devoured all of the series, knew all of the tricks. She had read about southern vampires—she often replaced the word southern with Madrasi in her mind—and she had read about Yankee vampires (she labeled these “Punjabi”). She had read about vampires that loved men and women alike. She had read about teenage vampires, nineteenth-century vampires, vampires with roots in Egypt, vampires with roots in India. Aztec vampires. Vampires with hearts of gold, vampires with fangs of steel. What was there to do with a vampire that hadn’t already been done?
So, tonight, she settled on the idea of an arranged marriage involving a vampire. She was capable enough as a writer to understand that she was drawing a deliberate parallel between her life and the lives of her characters. Ranjana had had an arranged marriage, and recently she saw something cold and almost menacing in Mohan. But instead of being drawn to the vampire-husband in question, she was repelled by him. What if vampires were not creatures of icily inviting mystery but, rather, creatures as threatening as our human instinct would have us believe? Sex would not be alluring, then. Romance would be as dead as a vampire’s body.
Ranjana put her head in her hands and tried to massage the purple flashes out of her eyes. She knew why she was seizing upon this idea right now, but she wasn’t sure how she could turn it into a viable story about vampires. The flashes dissipated from her eyes and were soon replaced by vulgar words in block letters across the computer screen, as if from some tabloid news story. But instead of MURDER or DRUGS, they were awful words used to describe the female anatomy.
How could Mohan be so reckless? If he was going to search such things online, why would he not cover his tracks and delete them from the search history? But he hadn’t, and Ranjana, before writing, had clicked on the search history and come across site after site about—she could barely bring herself to think of this term when it referred to her husband—“oral sex.” Page after page showed a white woman with pink skin, her legs opened to the face of a tan man with curly hair. Page after page gave explicit tips on how to perform this act—an act that Mohan had never performed on Ranjana.
Ranjana pulled her head out of her hands and looked at the blinking cursor again. Of course: if Mohan was looking up this stuff, it wasn’t in service of her. He was learning these things for someone else. He had a pink girl somewhere. It was this realization that propelled her fingers forward and made her start typing so furiously that the cursor didn’t even have a chance to blink again.
* * *
She never thought she would obsess over vampires and witches and werewolves and ghosts, but this was the way in which Ranjana could permeate the wall that separated her Indian life from the omnipresent glitz of American pop culture. She read Anne Rice first, in 1995, once she had been in this country for four years. Elaine Bush, a nosy neighbor, recommended Interview with the Vampire because the movie was coming out at that time. Ranjana bought a paperback from the grocery store and tore off its cover and title page so that Mohan would not judge her. She stayed up reading it late into the night, on the couch, her nightgown soaking up the cold of the early morning and making her shiver all the more as the story progressed.
The thing that surprised her most about the book was that, in terms of plot, it did not surprise her that much. She had expected to be scandalized—had wanted to be scandalized—but the more she read, the more the story seemed like a hidden affirmation of herself. It was like discovering that she had a second spine. Contrary to what she had expected, there were things in India that had prepared her for white-skinned corpses and young damsels in the brambled backwoods of Louisiana. The grandeur of white houses with shapely verandas called to mind temples that she had seen at six years old on a family trip to Kerala. The vampires themselves seemed like countless depictions of demons pierced by Krishna’s or Rama’s sword, blood gushing forth. Except in these Western vampiric fantasies, it was the evil demon winning the battle, not the dew-skinned gods. As she read Dracula, then Charlaine Harris, then Laurell K. Hamilton, then Sherrilyn Kenyon, then joined the ageless hordes devouring Stephenie Meyer, she found no true scandal in what she read. She worried that the books would be full of sex—and they were—but she had prepared herself for this fact beforehand, so its impact proved less injurious. Or so she convinced herself. Now that she had stumbled across Mohan’s online secrets, she could not help but feel that she had brought this upon herself. She had carved out her secret world and relished its seduction, but it was an entirely different thing to watch your own life become corrupted by such seduction. Real-life stories often found their way into fiction, but the opposite could be true: fiction could, cruelly, become real life.
* * *
“I tell you, I never laugh as much as I laugh in yoga class,” Seema said. “These skinny white people, all twisted up, trying to copy us. Yesterday, instead of wearing pants, a woman came in wearing the bottom of a salwar kameez. She’s one of these girls with a nose ring, you know, so many of them have them. And she thinks she is so Indian. She came up to me and started talking to me about all of these poses we’d done, as if she were the Indian woman and not I—and her Sanskrit pronunciation was terrible! Absolutely terrible.”
“Yes, but you don’t speak Sanskrit, either,” Ranjana interrupted, straining the tea and watching the beige-colored beard that clung to the bottom of the strainer as the milky liquid fell through it.
“Yes, but I do not go around pretending that I do. I barely know how to speak Hindi anymore!”
They had known each other for years, had spent countless weekend pujas and parties sitting next to each other and discussing children and films, but for a long time, there had never been any occasion to spe
ak about their own lives with any sense of consequence. They knew that their relationship to each other was the result of communal responsibility; they were like chunks of pineapple and honeydew in a fruit salad—tart and plump but there merely for the collective purpose of volume. Motherhood solidified their friendship further. Seema had one child, like Ranjana. All of the other women in their circle had at least two kids, but Ranjana and Seema were the odd women out—Ranjana because of her own physical limitations, Seema because of her own choice. Seema’s insistence on having one child and one child only had made her anathema to the other Indian women for years. What sort of woman stopped at one child, of her own accord? And Seema had a daughter, not a son; at least a son, a sturdy heir, would have made sense. But a daughter—and a daughter like Gori, so sour and uninspired. Like Prashant, Ranjana’s son, Gori had just left for college—barely, it seemed. And what was she going to study? God only knew.
Seema did not seem particularly concerned. She went to her yoga classes and cooked fancy meals at her monthly dinner parties—for white friends—and generally seemed to love her life now. She had given birth to Gori at twenty-one, and now that Gori was off at school, even though it was only an hour away, Seema was a free woman. Her husband, Satish, did not pose much of a problem. He came home at seven o’clock every day and, according to Seema, seemed to be content with his life. He played tennis and tended his garden and watched Zee TV until he fell into a gurgly slumber. True, he did behave like an old man, not like a man in his early forties, but Seema seemed genuinely entertained by him.
“What else are we supposed to do? The first eighteen years of our parenting are over,” Seema argued. “Gori is gone, and there is nothing to be done until she graduates.”
This was Seema’s take. But in this, she was also different from the other Indian mothers. Most of them found a way to insert themselves into the lives of their children while they were at college. At least once a week, Shilpa Jindal took a foil-wrapped casserole dish to Neil’s dorm; Ranjana once saw her place it in the passenger seat of her BMW so lovingly that it could have been an infant. Everyone knew that Anita Aggarwal’s son, Alok, had changed his cell phone number to prevent her from getting through to him at all times of the day. Some of the mothers had changed their own telephone habits, lest they meet this same hurtful fate, but within a week, they were all back to their old ways. Ever the anomaly, Seema seemed unconcerned, even though it was generally assumed by the other parents that Gori smoked pot all of the time. Perhaps that was why Seema let Gori do these things—she was probably smoking pot herself. That would explain so much, especially why she went to these sad little yoga classes with white women who pierced their noses and had tattoos wrapped around their upper arms like snakes.
“Ranjana, the tea is going to be like melted ice by the time you get it over here, yaar.” Seema slapped the table and giggled.
Ranjana was being distant. The truth was that she was wondering just how strong her friendship was—if she could safely divulge what she had learned about Mohan to Seema. Yes, Seema was an entertaining and dedicated friend—if Ranjana had an emergency at three in the morning, she would dial Seema immediately—but this was the kind of information that felt horribly explicit in their community. The fact that it was so salacious made it harder for Seema to use it as gossip with the other women, but at the same time, they all complained about their marriages constantly, so Seema wouldn’t feel that out of line bringing it up. Ranjana lifted the cups carefully and turned; in her rumination, she had not only strained the tea three times but had also poured it so absentmindedly that it threatened to spill. In all her years making tea, she had never spilled a drop. But then something odd happened: as she set the cups on the table, she glanced at their shiny porcelain and saw it transformed into gleaming fangs. Startled, she pulled her right hand back, and the cup in that hand, which she had intended for Seema, shot forth a stream of hot tea.
“Arré!” Seema screamed, rising from her chair and clutching her wrist like she was Spider-Man about to shoot a sticky web at a rooftop. The tea couldn’t have been that hot, but that was Seema for you—angling for the dramatic. “Yaar, what is the matter with you? Ho, it burns!”
“I am so sorry, ji,” Ranjana said, turning around, tearing a paper towel from its roll, and rushing to the fridge. She pushed one of the two shiny pedals on the front of the fridge and felt the cold jostle of ice cubes as they hit the towel. She returned to Seema and placed the ice on her wrist. “I have never spilled a drop of tea in my life.”
“This is going to leave a mark,” Seema said, looking at her newly red wrist. It was an unspoken understanding between them that Seema was not worried about her skin but about how this burn might affect her yoga poses.
“No, it won’t,” Ranjana said. “It will be better before you know it.”
Still, Ranjana felt that this momentary lapse in her behavior was the start of something bigger, a result of the secret that she had uncovered.
* * *
Ranjana knew that she didn’t know all that much about sex, but she knew enough to know that she had never had an orgasm. Clearly, the discomfort that she had felt years before, when they were still having sex, the relentlessness of it all, the way in which she could count the huffs and puffs that Mohan made into her ear—she knew that none of it constituted what people described as that great release. She read about it all of the time—Anne Rice had as many orgasms in her books as commas—and she wondered if the precarious feeling that she experienced during sex could be equated with the tense lust found in vampire stories. Was a fumbling, uncomfortable lovemaking session with Mohan the equivalent of being gripped at the neck with some undead’s teeth against her skin-hooded vein? They were both situations of physical discomfort laced with a foreboding sense of danger.
She looked for opportunities in which she could transform Mohan into someone enticingly threatening. Sometimes—and she hated herself for this when she thought of it—she wished that she were like Mona Gupta or Sushil Patel, women whose husbands, everyone knew, beat them regularly. Maybe if Mohan were violent, she would at least feel something legitimately passionate in her marriage. Instead, the firmest slap that Mohan could deliver would be flipping a puri onto his plate.
But no—she did not really believe or want this. Nobody wanted to be in an abusive relationship, and although she could never be sure how people were defining feminism these days, she was rather certain that this was a decidedly antifeminist mind-set.
It seemed like an American myth that people ate to replace the lack of romance in their lives; Ranjana thought that this was too easy an explanation for so complicated a problem. Yet now, for example, she was leaning against the kitchen counter, eating bondas and dipping them in a thick raita that she had made early this morning before work. As her tongue sang with flavor, she realized that just last night, she had been lamenting the sour hub of Mohan’s body in her bed. She had been thinking about how little desire she felt for him, or, rather, how she felt none at all, and she had gotten up today with a craving for bondas and raita. She had replaced her husband with a feast. The soft contours of her body, made softer every day, were due to her sexual frustration. To be fair, the spare tire around Mohan’s torso was due to her own reticence toward him. They were getting fatter in their sexual sadness.
Ranjana was still in her scrubs. The doctor’s office had her wear scrubs even though she was not an RN, just a receptionist, but the office claimed that patients would feel more trusting if they believed a legitimate nurse was attending to them. This made her feel disingenuous, but the scrubs were as comfortable as wearing a salwar kameez. Nevertheless, all she wanted to do was change into a nightgown and take a nap.
Alas, here was Mohan, bustling into the house, back from his own office, settling into his recliner with the newspaper.
“There is some leftover okra, and I can make roti,” she proffered. This was a low point: proposing what they should eat for dinner while she was already ea
ting.
Mohan sighed and shifted his newspaper, then said, “I don’t want leftovers.…”
Ranjana echoed his sigh and said, “I can make chole”—and she could make it because she had picked up some chickpeas on the way home, having known all along that Mohan would not eat the okra. Later, Ranjana would eat the okra herself, after she had eaten the chole, after she had made roti, rice, and some impromptu lassi that had Mohan farting into his armchair postdinner. They watched Zee TV and caught up on the news, the anchorwoman’s cloud-like hair and lilting voice a stark contrast to the weight of Mohan’s gas. Then Ranjana got up and said that she was going to work on her recipes.
“Working on recipes” was Ranjana’s cover-up for her writing. She told Mohan that she wanted to create a cookbook for Prashant so that he could make Indian food for himself at the dorm. Both Ranjana and Mohan knew that Prashant would never do such a thing and would therefore never need the cookbook, but Mohan evidently took some comfort in Ranjana’s efforts to keep their son more Indian and more “self-sufficient.”
“Self-sufficient” in Mohan’s mind translated to “frugal,” and frugality was the thing that Mohan valued most. When Ranjana was pregnant with Prashant, an American woman had asked Mohan if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl, and Mohan had replied, “I don’t care, as long as it’s healthy and smart with money.” The woman had laughed nervously and joked, “And a boy, right?” Mohan’s answer, unironic: “Well, yes.”
So off to the spare bedroom Ranjana went, closing the door tight behind her. She sat at the tiny desk to pick up where she had left off the day before. No egg curry and biryani recipes for Prashant. Vampires and damsels for Ranjana.
It was easily her favorite time of day: work barely a memory, dinner accomplished, her husband appeased, a story her only world for an hour or two. It was at once fun and disorienting. She had traveled across the world not so that she could live in a different country, one of promise and prepackaged foods, but so that she could live in an imaginary country of her mind. She looked out the window and saw the Turners’ house next door, their pit bull barking into its bowl of water and the kids upstairs playing video games, and she felt incredibly lonely. Then she directed her eyes to the computer screen and went to the only place where she could comfort herself. That was what writing really was—an excuse to gild your loneliness until it resembled the companionship of others. It was entertaining yourself when you had no other entertainment. It was the way out.
No One Can Pronounce My Name Page 3
