Not even daring to open the Web browser—lest she dwell too much on Mohan’s deviance—she wrote until the pit bull tired itself out and curled into a ball in its paint-chipped doghouse, until the Turners’ kids turned off their infernal machine and shut their TV-ravaged eyes for the night, until the world outside became a dimmer, quieter version of itself. Then she tended her hair with a comb she kept by the desk, opened the door, tiptoed into the master bedroom, where Mohan, now in his pajamas, was still reading the newspaper, and she inserted herself into the stale sheets and imagined her characters whispering her to sleep. Her reverie was interrupted occasionally by the click of Mohan’s saliva as he chewed on a mint-dipped toothpick, the newspaper unfolding and refolding every few minutes, the sound like a bucket of water being poured on a big rock.
* * *
Ranjana’s late-night writing sessions were not the only artistic secret that she kept from Mohan. After seeing a flyer on a bulletin board at the grocery store, she had joined a writers’ group that met once every two weeks at the YMCA. They gathered in a multipurpose room that housed a massive collection of rainbow-colored plastic toys. The organizer, Roberta Shuster, was a mild woman in her midfifties who lived alone in a condo near the building.
The participants in this group were not unlike the ones in Seema’s yoga class—aiming for the ethereal, but with frequently hilarious results. The most vocal member, Stefanie, was in her late thirties and wore at least three layers of dark clothing, the top layer normally shiny. She had a storm of hair, a collection of titian dyes, that made it seem as if she were wearing a mud-covered fox on her head. She wore a silver necklace with a pendant of a snake curled around a dagger, and when she got particularly excited, she would tug at the pendant until Ranjana thought the necklace would snap and send the dagger flying into someone’s eye. Stefanie had presented three works in the past few months—a novella about mermaids living in a sea-bound hostel off the coast of Normandy, a collection of poems inspired by Elizabeth Taylor, and her “magnum opus,” a manuscript that now exceeded a thousand pages and that she had been writing, she claimed, for the past fifteen years.
The plot of Stefanie’s novel, even given its copious length, was still somewhat elusive to the group. The main premise was that women had become so dominated by the awfulness of men that once a woman had been wronged significantly by three men in her life, she acquired lupine powers and became immortal, hungry for their blood, and, as a result of these first two circumstances, sexier than ever. The main character, Stasy, was obviously Stefanie. Stefanie changed the character’s hair color to blond, but she did not change the fact that Stasy loved to dye her hair practically every other week. Furthermore, Stasy wore a necklace just like the one that Stefanie wore, with the notable difference that Stasy’s snake was curled around an arrow instead of a dagger.
The foil in the group to Stefanie’s grand presence was Cassie, a soft-spoken woman in her midtwenties who normally dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater and who was, undoubtedly, the best writer of the lot. Unlike Stefanie, Cassie had presented only one work, a lavishly written story about a teenage girl who had the ability to move people’s hearts from one body to another, thereby changing whom her victims loved but without changing the knowledge they had of their pasts. It was a strange pitch—or “log line,” Roberta would have said, referring to how an editor at a publishing house might log in a submission—but the writing itself was so gorgeous that very few people in the group could offer legitimate criticism. Naturally, they were all jealous of Cassie’s ability, even Ranjana, especially because Cassie was considerably younger than the rest of them. She showed up in her dumpy clothes and no makeup—presumably straight from a nap, given her overall sleepy appearance—and bested them all.
Perhaps more revealing was when Cassie offered her criticism of other people’s work. In this, she was both reverent and utterly cutthroat. She knew that she was the best of all of them, and she milked her commentary, saying, “Well, hm,” biting her lip, looking down at the floor for a moment, then offering something candid like “I don’t think that your story is going anywhere. And how many times can you use the word rippling in one paragraph?”
This particular comment had been directed at Wendy, a woman in her early forties whom Ranjana had overheard tell at least five people she was “Yes, named after Wendy from Peter Pan, and did you know that J. M. Barrie made up the name Wendy? So, like, compared to most other names, which have been around for centuries, even millenniums, my name is like a rare breed of creature, like evolution or something.” Wendy would giggle after she said this and lick her teeth, which were about as sharp as Stefanie’s dagger and which had a smudge of lipstick on them at least 70 percent of the time. Other than this blemish, however, Wendy was undeniably attractive, with green eyes and luscious blond hair. She worked as a private massage therapist and had once held a free session for the entire group after one of their meetings. Her hands had jiggled Ranjana’s back as if it were a door that she had been trying to unlock, but Ranjana had felt very refreshed afterward.
If only Wendy were equally adept at writing. It was true that Wendy overwrote; Cassie wasn’t exaggerating when she accused her of using the same decadent words over and over again, and everyone in the group seemed to wonder how Wendy could be so passionately invested in her work when it seemed, from these repetitions, that she never revised it. But Wendy was so nice that Ranjana felt herself empathizing with her, if only because Ranjana knew that she would never have the courage to withstand Cassie’s provocations.
Colin, the lone man of the group, owned as many Star Wars T-shirts as there were Star Wars movies and had thick glasses and ponytailed hair that made him seem like a nearsighted painter whose eyesight had worsened over time. None of his characters was ever fully human; the closest one of them had gotten to being so was a half-wombat woman who ate only bark and grass. Thankfully, Colin didn’t overly sexualize his characters; on the contrary, he erred on the side of romance, writing more about the sharpness of their intellect than the curvaceousness of their bodies. Still, whenever a sex scene did occur, it was so overly studied that it was as if Colin were wearing a sign that read I’M A VIRGIN.
Today was Ranjana’s day to present. She had stopped home momentarily to print out her pages, which she now held rolled up, the paper crinkled and worn, as if it had been printed centuries before. She berated herself for this nervous habit; everything always became rolled up when in her hands. As she sat in the classroom now, she wondered if she had been trying to erase the work she’d done, ashamed of its mediocrity.
The first time that she had read in this class, it was a very short story, about a young Indian woman pining for a young neighbor on her small farm. It was an exercise, a trifle, a raffle ticket for admission to this group of writers. They smiled sweetly at her, all of them too absorbed in their own work to care what Ranjana had to give them. The second time she had read, she had stopped herself midway and apologized, saying that she had to revise more. Again, they were sympathetic, Stefanie twirling her necklace, Cassie exhaling softly and looking elderly in her judgment, Wendy placing a hand on her heart and tugging gently, as if ready to pull it out and present it to Ranjana as a condolence, Colin adjusting his thick glasses while nodding his head. The next two classes belonged solely to Stefanie and Cassie, and then Roberta had broken the rhythm the next week with her own book, which was a romance novel in the Jude Deveraux vein, all sloping hills and horses and bodices torn like wrapping paper. The listeners all shifted uncomfortably, the tight bun of Roberta’s hair so much at odds with the salaciousness of her story.
Now, Roberta was looking expectantly at Ranjana, and the other writers all perked up in their chairs. Ranjana smoothed out her pages, cleared her throat, and began to read. She could feel Cassie’s wry stare burrowing invisibly into her cheek. The section she was reading wasn’t from her manuscript; it was a tepid story based on a recent ceremony at her temple. As she read, her voice quavered, as if made
of liquid. She had rarely felt so judged by other people, had not experienced anything quite like it since her adolescence, when other Indian mothers constantly seemed to be judging everyone’s children. As she finished the last sentence of her five-page excerpt, her throat tiring, she wondered if it were even necessary to have villains in her stories. There were enough enemies sitting right here.
IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT PRASHANT had ever had a crush on an Indian girl.
As with most other areas in his life up until now, he had directed his attention to all things American. He fixated upon the thin, almost weblike skin and candy-scented hair of the white girls around him. The girl whom he had treasured in high school above everyone else, Amber Ferguson, had no Indian foil, nothing in common with any of the desi girls in his class. Her long legs, the blue of her eyes, her skin so fair it matched her teeth, her hair so fine it moved together because not to do so would have seemed criminal, transfixed him as only an exotic creature could. She didn’t want anything to do with any of the Indian boys, which made her even more elusive and therefore desirable. She cringed whenever one of them let his gaze linger even a split second on her, and there was her boyfriend, Chase, who looked like Bradley Cooper.
So it was fitting that, in his first week at Princeton, Prashant should fall for Kavita, a fully formed ABCD—an American-Born Confused Desi. In many ways, Kavita was just as American as Amber, but she held on to the two Indian aspects that were always the most compelling—religion and language. She was a self-professed “proud Hindu.” Apparently this had been the crux of her admissions essay, the paragraphs of which, it was rumored, she had structured according to the layout of the Upanishads. This drove Prashant totally crazy with desire because his own Hinduism was shoddy at best. His parents had always been relatively lazy when it came to practicing their religion, and, well, we all wanted what we didn’t have.
He had just written a paper about this for his introductory literature course. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes maintained that men and women were amorphous, dual-gendered beings that had been split into the two sexes, forever yearning for each other to make themselves whole. (Prashant’s professor, a recent transplant from Vanderbilt with a lilting southern accent, played the class a song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch that told this very story.) In the same course, they had been reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the story of Narcissus appears. Prashant argued in his paper that Narcissus was doomed to fail because he lusted after something exactly like himself: himself. To follow Aristophanes’ line of thought, this was antithetical to human nature; we wanted not ourselves but the unattainable other. Prashant had obviously been thinking of Kavita, had infused the essence of her into the paper and felt the prose flowing easily from his fingertips onto the keyboard because the slant of her eyes, the bounce of her ass, willed it so. She was Indian but still unattainable, representing some part of his culture but still eluding his grasp, and if he was going to tumble headfirst into a cesspool of his own making, at least he wouldn’t be like Narcissus, chasing after someone like himself.
The teacher gave him a B+, commending his connection between the two texts but questioning where homosexuality would come into play; was Prashant intimating that Plato, of all people, allowed nothing for same-sex longing? It was at this point, while Prashant held his paper in his hands and contemplated the vermilion scribbles covering it, that he realized his instructor was not simply genteel but most likely gay. Any man who could not properly contemplate something as perfect as Kavita Bansal’s ass had to be.
* * *
It became evident to Prashant that he had chosen the wrong major. Given his father’s profession, he had always felt rather acutely that he had a predisposition for the scientific. He was one of those kids who didn’t feel particularly threatened by his father’s line of work. He didn’t see his own tendency toward chemistry as something strictly dictated by his father’s background. It was merely logical to Prashant that he should find interesting a subject that made up his father’s vocation. He was an even-keeled kid, a good student, and as someone who didn’t feel a penchant for the dramatic or overly emotive, he found that science was very much in keeping with his demeanor.
He had been assigned the usual books in his high school English classes—The Great Gatsby, 1984, Brave New World; later, the heftiness of Moby-Dick, a book whose more staid passages on whaling he found enthralling (he kept this to himself). Then there was the hilarity of being assigned A Passage to India, a book that he was forced, along with his other Indian classmates, to analyze as if he had nothing in common with the characters in it. In many senses, he didn’t. It wasn’t like he could relate to being an Indian man accused of rape in the hills. (“Not yet,” his friend Vipul quipped moronically.) He realized that he approached a book, regardless of its emotional dealings, from a somewhat disassociated perspective. He applied a scientist’s cool assessment to the otherwise shifting, swirling cosmos of literature. Oddly, his teacher loved this. The comment “Very cogent” appeared with alarming consistency on his papers.
Something had shifted recently, and even though he attempted to deny it, he knew that Kavita was the reason why. Although she had gotten a 2400 on her SATs (a common achievement at their school), although she had won some huge science fair by examining how she could save wildlife during oil spills, and although her own parents were both doctors, Kavita had chosen English as her major. Prashant began to see, as he “bumped into” her on campus, that she almost always had a book in hand. She read as she walked, and accessorized her books with a complicated series of sticky notes, something that Prashant noticed even from afar. This kind of system seemed unnecessary, since many people claimed that she had a photographic memory. It was generally acknowledged that she would have been the most hated person on Earth if she were not the most beloved. Teachers fell under her spell as soon as everyone else did, if not earlier.
Prashant wished with a painful fierceness that he could be in one of her classes, but he wasn’t in her classes because his major was chemistry, not English. That one intro-to-lit course was all he could manage because the rest of his schedule was overtaken by science. His major was not just chemistry; it was a laboratory’s worth of chemical studies. (One of his classes, an accelerated amalgam of two separate courses, had the nickname “Turbo-Chem,” which sounded like a lame superhero.) Still, he didn’t find his coursework all that crippling because he was good at it—really good at it. As Dr. Moore, one of his professors, put it, he was “preternaturally inclined to the study of chemistry.”
He should have found his teachers’ collective encouragement comforting, but it had the opposite effect in him. He didn’t want to be another stereotypical South Asian kid who was “good at math.” He didn’t want to be easily inclined to something; he wanted to be challenged. It took no great rumination on his part to draw a connection between this and Kavita. She challenged who he was as a man more than anyone he’d ever met. Ha—“a man.” He couldn’t refer to himself as a man without snickering. He was short, with a slight belt of fat at his waist and thick, intractable hair that he had clearly inherited from his mother. He often wore clothes a size or two too big. This was true of a lot of his Indian friends, as if, subconsciously, their parents had dictated that they buy clothes into which they could grow eventually, even though their mothers did not want them to put on weight. For every “Eat something, beta,” he got an equal and sometimes stronger reaction of “Really—another samosa?” It was no surprise that his emotions were equally conflicted. The more confusion that people lobbed your way, the more you overanalyzed everything; the more that you were challenged, the more being challenged became a kind of comfort.
He had reached a point when all of those SAT vocab cards he’d studied were infusing themselves into his daily speech. The truth was that he did not find chemistry the most compelling forum for this newfound mental capacity. Inspired by Kavita, he now wanted to apply his verbally inspired skills to something that lay outsid
e the realm of equations. He wanted to move people with his words. This made him feel less Indian than ever—a state in which he luxuriated.
* * *
They appeared like magic: flyers indicating Kavita Bansal’s candidacy for freshman class president. A third of the flyers simply disappeared, tucked under mattresses (and held in left hands) all over campus.
Prashant stole one, of course, but the shame he felt over this dissipated when he realized, in the dining hall one night, that he was far from alone. He had made a couple of reliable guy friends, both from his chemistry study group: Doug, an African-American, fellow chem major from Connecticut who was on the ultimate Frisbee team; and Charlie, a mechanical engineering student who was the only one of the three of them who might be considered cool. Charlie had gone to Exeter but was from California. His father was the long-retired head of a large bank, and his mother was a former Miss California. Girls seemed to find Charlie irresistible, something Prashant attributed in part to his name. Girls often imparted a singsong tone to it—“Char-leee”—and Prashant sighed internally at the thought that no one would ever be able to do such a thing with his name. Instead of pronouncing his name correctly—“Pruh-shahnth”—people pronounced the first syllable of his name as if it rhymed with a lamb’s “baa,” and the second syllable became something you stuck into a wound—“Praaa-shunt.”
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