No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  This experience might have instilled ire in many a wife—the public embarrassment of her husband—but Ranjana felt pity for Mohan. Even though she did not understand the particulars of what he was teaching, the chalk equations on the blackboard like scattered rice, she did know that there was an order and intelligence to them. Even though he had been teaching for more than twenty-five years, he seemed to be engrossed in what he was describing. Ranjana had rarely seen him so excited. This both saddened and heartened her. He had his equivalent of her writing: his teaching. She could not begrudge him the satisfaction he felt in exercising this part of himself, yet she couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss on her part. Why couldn’t Mohan get so excited about her?

  She diluted her anger with logic: she couldn’t reproach Mohan because she wasn’t excited about him, either. Who had started this? Had Mohan’s coldness triggered hers? Or was it her unattractiveness that had begun all of this? After all, it was her looks that had fled first, not Mohan’s. Mohan had still been attractive before Prashant’s birth; he had that thick head of hair, the long, smooth face, and he still smiled. Ranjana had never felt particularly attractive, but then again, such things had not been huge concerns for her before marriage.

  Marriage, however, brought out the self-scrutiny. All along, she had thought that having a child would mitigate the tension of being a spouse; you had a child and then focused on giving everything to the child. But as her hips widened, as her hair became courser and started to thread with gray, as her complexion changed with each of Prashant’s childhood milestones, she knew that not caring about beauty had been foolish. All that time, she should have been as narcissistic as those girls she had always mocked, the ones who thought themselves important and enjoyed being fawned over, stars like Rekha or Madhuri Dixit or Nargis. She should have been treating her hair and skin as carefully as if they were children. Now, here she was, a grown woman without the experience of beauty. She had not cultivated beauty, so now she lived without it. To Mohan, a man enthralled by science, how could uncultivated beauty—never cultivated beauty—ever be as beautiful as a blackboard full of equations?

  * * *

  Achyut Bakshi didn’t have another appointment for two weeks, and Ranjana, already guilty that she had looked at his HIV status, forbade herself from checking why he had come to see Dr. Butt in the first place. She didn’t tell Cheryl about Achyut, for fear that she would become emotional. Clearly, she didn’t have feelings for him; that would have been trite and downright impossible, given their limited interaction. Yet his youth had invigorated her simply by way of its proximity. She could not help but think that his presence might present the opportunity to succeed where she continually failed with Prashant.

  After all, her conversations with Prashant were the same, again and again. Yesterday, he had called her on his cell phone as he was walking to the dining hall, and their words to each other were almost exactly what they had been the week before:

  “Hi, beta.”

  “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Not much. Your dad is taking a nap. How are you?”

  “Fine. Just walking to dinner. Had a quiz today in math. Went OK.”

  “It went OK?”

  “Yes. I just said it did.” He had adopted a tone of resigned annoyance with her. He sounded like a jaded criminal—answering her questions without conviction or passion.

  “How is everything else, beta?”

  “Fine. Work is good?”

  “Never a dull moment,” she said. He snickered, either because he found her comment amusing or he pitied the boredom of her job. What did he tell his friends about her work? Did he brush it off, or did he make fun of it? Was Prashant proud of his mother?

  “OK, well, I’m at the dining hall, so I’d better go. Tell Dad I said hi.”

  “I will. Eat well, beta.”

  “Yup. Love you, bye.”

  At least he always said that he loved her, even if it was always followed with a “bye” in one swift breath. That was not something that she could expect from Mohan, and it was certainly not something that she needed from someone like Achyut. She simply wanted to feel like a woman worthy of attention from someone in the prime of youth. Then she wouldn’t feel so detached from everyone, including herself.

  Although she hadn’t looked at Achyut’s chart, she had looked up the date of his next appointment in the computer. Consequently, in spite of herself, she had been looking forward to today for the past two weeks. Like the last time they had met, she lamented the fact that she had to wear scrubs. It wasn’t like she had that many fancy outfits, but it would have been nice to wear a blouse and some nice pants, just in case Achyut apologized and asked her to chai, just in case their conversation left the confines of her glassed-in cubicle again. She had spent ten minutes fixing her hair this morning, using an emerald-encrusted butterfly clasp that she had unearthed from an old jewelry box in her closet. She had pulled the messy poof of her hair in one hand and secured it with the butterfly, anchoring it at the nape of her neck.

  Cheryl commented on it as soon as she saw her, of course, calling it “purty.” Ranjana hoped that Cheryl would let it drop, lest Achyut become aware of her efforts when he came in for his appointment. True to character, though, the butterfly grew in intrigue to Cheryl as the day passed.

  “Hey, Dr. B,” she said when he surfaced after a particularly long consult. “Check out this one’s hair.” She used a vernacular with Dr. Butt that Ranjana could never have pulled off. Dr. Butt, usually so buttoned up, somehow seemed to find Cheryl amusing, perhaps because her cheerfulness put the patients at ease and made them fond of coming to his office. “Don’t you think it looks nice? Like a princess.”

  Ranjana wheeled around and gave Cheryl a death stare.

  “Do you have princesses over there in India?” Cheryl asked.

  “It looks nice,” Dr. Butt said, uncomfortable and clearly eager to change the subject. “Cheryl, please schedule a follow-up for Mr. Docker.”

  Achyut’s appointment was at three in the afternoon, which seemed like an eternity the more that Ranjana waited for it. She had brought a lunch of two aloo parathas, and before noon even arrived, she was unzipping the Ziploc bag and tearing off little bites that left a thin film of grease on her fingers and spice on her breath. Aware that she was a mess, she deigned to ask Cheryl if she could have a piece of gum to get rid of the odor.

  Three o’clock came, then ten after three, and Ranjana worried that Achyut was not going to come at all. He was merely late, sauntering in just before three fifteen in the same clothes that he had been wearing last time. If he was as nervous to see Ranjana as she was to see him, he didn’t show it. He was even handsomer than Ranjana had remembered. She felt ashamed again, mainly because this was a man only a few years older than her own son.

  He walked up to her and signed in, his head bent, as if he were actively ignoring her.

  Cheryl spoke. “Hey, hon, welcome back.” She had been crunching peppermint candies all morning, and Ranjana could smell the sweetness of her breath as it wafted forth. “Did you see what Black Beauty did to her mane?”

  Mortifying.

  At least the comment made Achyut look up. He examined Ranjana’s hair, and his features softened. “Well, look at you,” he said.

  * * *

  Ranjana shouldn’t have been associating with a patient, but whatever. Without having to ask Achyut, she assumed that they would meet as they had last time—outside after work hours. It was Wednesday again, another evening when Mohan and Dr. Butt had their tennis match, and it was as easy as pie to get Cheryl out the door early. “I’ll close up,” Ranjana said. Cheryl protested unconvincingly, already picking up her bag to leave as she demurred. As Ranjana turned off the lights—the fluorescent bulbs flickering out as if sighing themselves to sleep—she felt as if their energy were flowing into her body.

  They went to Buzzed, a new coffee shop located a couple of blocks from Dr. Butt’s office. Ranjana figured that it w
ould be the kind of place that Achyut liked—metallic and full of students and twentysomethings like himself. She hadn’t thought enough about how incongruous she would be in such a venue, not until she looked around and saw countless pairs of mascara-ridged eyes staring at her. The wind had somehow picked up during their short walk over, and Ranjana could feel the wispy mass of her hair expanding like the smoke from a volcano. Worse—she was still in her office scrubs, which made her look even wider and less kempt than usual. Achyut shuffled forward, his hands deep in the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt.

  “What can I get you?” he asked.

  “Tea, of course.”

  “English Breakfast?”

  “What an imperialist!” Ranjana quipped.

  Achyut smiled, getting or not getting the joke. “Maybe. No, really—what do you want?”

  “Earl Grey. But please go find a seat. This is on me. What do you want?”

  He made a short sound of disapproval, and Ranjana put up one hand in protest as she dug in her bag for her pocketbook. “Just a regular coffee, black,” he said.

  As she paid the cashier, she wondered how on earth she had agreed to this. She didn’t know this person at all, and he was a patient. She looked around again, then understood the looks that she was seeing on people’s faces: they assumed that she was Achyut’s mother.

  She found him in the one corner that was not near a window, with his hood up and his face even more striking under it.

  “So, Mr. Bakshi, what do you want to tell me?”

  “Are you really going to keep calling me ‘Mr. Bakshi’?”

  “Achyut.” Simply saying his name made her hot with nervousness. She never addressed Mohan by his name.

  He sighed and took a sip of his coffee. Ranjana noticed the flick of heads as people snuck surreptitious glances at him. Even under his hoodie, he commanded attention.

  “So, are you a student, Achyut? Recently graduated?”

  “Just graduated, yeah. From the University of Pittsburgh.”

  “What did you—?”

  “English. That’s always the next question that people ask. And yes, an English degree is just as useless as it ever was.”

  “You were born here, I take it?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been to India?”

  “No.”

  “Are you interested in going?”

  “Of course. I wish I could just fly there and tool around. A buddy of mine did that, but he’s rich.”

  “And what do you do now, Achyut? For work.”

  “I’m a bartender.”

  “That must pay well.” Did this sound condescending?

  “It does, actually. So much for my English degree, right?”

  “I am sure that people appreciate an educated bartender. You can dispense advice from the works of great writers.” She could feel an edge to her voice, something steely yet playful: flirtation. Her knees were together, her feet apart. It was wrong to be here.

  “What do you do for fun, auntie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For fun. You don’t seem to be having too much fun at work, so you must look for it elsewhere.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she said sarcastically. “Working as a receptionist is tons of fun.” Achyut laughed, again. She was entertaining him consistently, and it fortified her. “I’ll tell you what I do for fun: I try to figure out what Paradise Island is.”

  Achyut’s eyes widened. “Ohmigod, right? What the eff is that place? It’s driving my friends crazy.”

  “Not just your friends, Achyut. It’s driving me mad, too. I don’t understand what they are attempting to do to us.”

  “My buddy Eric says they ran out of money, that it was supposed to be done by now, but they just abandoned it. There’s supposed to be all of this development in Cleveland now because New York and L.A. and all of those cities are becoming too expensive. But maybe there isn’t as much demand as they’re saying.”

  “What was it supposed to be in the first place? No one seems to know.”

  “Seriously. Ohmigod, I can’t believe you just mentioned that. You’re, like, totally awesome, auntie. My friends would effing love you.”

  Ohmigod. Ranjana had heard Indians using this term all the time, even young immigrants she met at temple or at parties, though the Indians pronounced it with a t sound at the end: Ohmigot.

  “Paradise Island…,” Achyut said ruminatively. “Paradise wasn’t even an island, was it? Wasn’t it a garden? But that’s Christianity. I’m a bad Hindu: I don’t even know what the version of Paradise is in Hinduism. All I know is that you probably need good karma to get in, and I don’t exactly have that.”

  Achyut’s muddled interpretation of these two religions confused Ranjana almost as much as Paradise Island itself. In truth, she wasn’t sure what his karma would be. On the one hand, he had to see a proctologist. This meant that he wasn’t doing particularly pious things with his body. But as little as Ranjana knew him, she didn’t feel that he was ill-intentioned. His attentions to her, though suspect at first, did not feel predatory. If anything, it had been her own prejudices that had transformed his actions into something sinister. She was hardly justified in passing judgment on him anyway, given the books that she read in private and the stories that she attempted to craft. She saw him now as a young man in need of guidance. He needed someone to confirm that his cheery outlook on life was justified, that he could continue to enjoy himself, even if he was dealing with weighty matters. He needed a distraction.

  “I’m sure that your karma is just fine,” Ranjana offered, not because she knew it for certain but because she felt that this was a time to be affirmative, not judgmental.

  “Yeah, but I think that our culture has made it pretty clear that being gay is not all that good for it.”

  So he had been thinking what she had been thinking. It made her feel all the more guilty for having thought it in the first place.

  “Most religions want gays to roast in Hell.” He said this matter-of-factly. He leaned forward and blew on his coffee, then slurped up a sip by leaning over it, as a little kid would do. He had the beginnings of a beard, and a couple wayward droplets of coffee shone in it like tiny, amber beads. He was tall, well over six feet, and he resembled one of those plastic birds that Ranjana had bought Prashant years ago, one that flipped forward on the axis of its long legs, its beak sucking up a bit of water. “Don’t you think most Hindus want gays to roast in Hell?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” she said, shuddering at the bluntness of his words. “Our Paradise, so to speak, is not like Christianity’s, you know. It’s more of a spiritual plane than an actual end point. And just as our Paradise is different, we don’t really have what Americans think of as Hell. There is a Hell, but it is more like a judgment in court. People must perform tasks related to the sins that they committed and can earn back their karma. I like to think that no one burns in Hell forever.”

  “I’m pretty sure my punishment for being gay is going to see Dr. Butt. I love him, but that is one dude that I don’t want up there.”

  Ranjana couldn’t help but giggle. She couldn’t believe that she was sitting in a café talking about a rectal exam.

  “My friends and I were really upset when the Section 377 decision was overturned,” Achyut said, referring to the law that had recriminalized gay sex in India. “I think that we all thought that things in India would keep getting better little by little, that all of the changes here in the U.S. would have a positive effect, but I dunno. That also seems like a really naïve way of thinking because we can’t just assume that change over here will lead to change over there. We actually have to acknowledge that India doesn’t always see the progress over here as a good thing.”

  Ranjana had heard only vague details about 377 and the ramifications it had for the community that Achyut was talking about. “In all honesty, Achyut, I do not know much about this subject.”

  “I’m not surprised to
hear that,” Achyut said, leaning back with his coffee cup in his hand and looking more serious. “It’s hard to know how much to care about something like that if you’re not gay or know someone who’s gay. I’m assuming that you don’t have a good gay friend?”

  “I have you,” Ranjana ventured.

  “Yeah, look at us—already discussing Hell. We’re fast friends already.”

  Ranjana laughed again. She could feel herself creating the sound, since she was simultaneously fending off a sense of embarrassment. This shocked and annoyed her. She wanted to be comfortable with befriending a young gay man, in front of other people, in a state of quasi-flirtation, with a hot cup of tea in her hands and adrenaline surging through her body. She was here, after all, and could start enjoying her life more, as Seema had encouraged. The truth was that, like Achyut’s karma, her self-doubt had accumulated over many years.

  When she was no more than eleven years old, she had told her next-door neighbor Sandeep that she loved him. He was fourteen at the time, already handsome, eyebrows like storm clouds on his burgeoning brow. He had plucked her hand off his shoulder and told her that she was crazy. It was a tiny scar on a knee, the memory of a childhood fall, this sight of Sandeep walking away from her. It was, in truth, the solitary spoil of her love life. As she walked around the fire with Mohan on their wedding day, she still remembered Sandeep, his abandonment. Abandonment! So scant was her experience with actual romance that she had seen this tiny infraction as the most damaging of rejections. There was no such thing as a little heartbreak, a tiny loss. Not to a person like her, not to a woman who took desperate pride in clipping a butterfly to her aging hair. Sandeep had moved away a year after his refusal, and she had never seen or heard from him again. Sitting at a coffee table now with Achyut, she saw so little separating that damaging moment and her current anxiety. An attempt to transcend one’s physical station in life, she thought, was a futile thing. Perhaps her own karma, too, was volatile.