Is it a consolation that Malcolm doesn’t laugh in return? Is it a relief to have his eyes meet mine and to see his jaw drop in dismay?
His mouth moves, forming my name. But I can’t hear anything. All I know is that I’m saying something in return. I’m saying the words I should have said a week, maybe even a month ago:
“I don’t want to see you anymore.”
* * *
He doesn’t leave me alone for the next hour.
Phone calls that I don’t take. Texts that flash across my screen—it was a mistake. it was never supposed to happen. susan, will you please talk to me?—and that I leave unanswered. An hour later, a Facebook message: i’m outside your building.
I freeze. My thumb hovers over the app, ready to delete it, when another message pops up: if you don’t see me, i’m coming upstairs to your apartment.
“You wouldn’t dare,” I say out loud.
But something tells me he might. I may have not known Malcolm for long—not known him at all, come to think of it—but I know he is more than willing to do this and risk my parents’ fury in the process. I’m still wearing my school clothes from the day so I go into the living room, school binder in hand.
“Amma, my friend Heather is downstairs to pick up some homework. Can I go drop it off?”
“Huh?” Amma looks up from the television, a little disoriented. She has been like this ever since I returned home, so out of it that I wonder if she even knows I’m here. “Oh, of course, Suzy. Of course.”
I’m lying to you, I want to tell her. Do you know that, Amma? I’m openly lying to you and you don’t seem to care anymore.
But I don’t push my luck. Appa is out for the day, doing God knows what, but he might come back any moment. I pull on my winter boots and coat, grab my keys, and slip out the door. I’m not entirely surprised to find Malcolm waiting in the lobby, talking to the security guard. Like my father, Malcolm can talk to anyone anywhere, at any point in time. He straightens when he sees me approach. I force a smile for the guard and then, without another word, walk out of the lobby. I know Malcolm will follow.
The tarmac in the parking lot outside is covered with a layer of frost. My nose chills in the air, but for the first time, I welcome the cold. I lean against the wall next to a giant spherical ashtray. My skin prickles the way it always does when he comes close and then pauses a few inches away, against the wall.
“It was Justin,” Malcolm says abruptly. “He was in the hospital. He got into a fight.”
I say nothing. It’s a tactic I have seen my mother use, her silence often pushing someone to reveal more than they originally intended.
“Afrin was a mess,” he continues. “I took her to the hospital first. She and Justin’s mother had a fight there. I swear I was only comforting her. I didn’t mean to—”
“Did you kiss her back?”
“What?”
“Did. You. Kiss. Her. Back?”
I turn to look at him: the sharp slant of his cheekbones, the stubble over them, his funny, flat nose, those shrewd, beautiful eyes and the new shadows under them.
He licks his lips now. “Yes.”
I close my eyes, my stomach roiling.
“It was more of a reflex than anything else!” A note of desperation creeps into his voice. “But I know that doesn’t count. I messed up, Susan. I have no excuses.”
I think of my parents. Of a relationship that was supposed to last and didn’t. I think of Afrin with her beautiful face and perfect body and wonder what Malcolm sees in me. Has he already seen what he needed to? I wonder now. Did he get bored? If not, then how much longer before he does?
“It’s not only about that kiss,” I tell him finally. “We’re not a normal couple, Malcolm. We will never be a normal couple. My parents will never approve of me dating anyone right now—let alone you.”
“We’ll continue seeing each other in secret!” he insists. “I told you I don’t mind. I never did.”
“You don’t mind now. But you will.” Once the romance of sneaking around wears off. Once frustration and disappointment begin to creep in. My parents have taught me as much. “Seeing you with Afrin today … maybe it was a sign.”
“You seriously don’t mean that.”
“I think we should take a break.” My mouth goes dry. “See other people.”
“I don’t want to see other people!”
“I’m sorry.”
His face crumples for a split second before hardening again. “Fine. If that’s what you want.”
“Fine.”
There’s a tight feeling in my ribs, like a hand reached in and twisted what was left of my heart.
I wait. I watch.
I wonder if he will turn around and come back, try to win me over with another argument.
But he doesn’t. After one last look, Malcolm keeps walking down the driveway and then disappears around the bend leading to the bus stop.
Malcolm
There’s this trend among people in their thirties, where they write letters to their teenage selves, telling the younger version how everything that goes wrong during these years will be righted again. It appeals to romantics like my sister and to people like Freny who constantly reminisce about the good old days in Mumbai.
It never made sense to me—what was the likelihood of going back in time anyway?
It makes more sense to leave notes to your future self. The future is still a possibility, murky or otherwise. It’s probably irony, or simply the universe having a joke at my expense, when I find one such note to myself while looking for a pencil the day Susan breaks up with me; the note is scribbled hastily on a yellowing, looseleaf page at the back of my school binder, written right over a badly drawn pair of middle fingers:
Dear future self—
Love still stinks.
* * *
When it comes to love, Mahtab says I’m masochistic. “You like to suffer as much as humanly possible. It’s like that’s the only way you know it’s real.”
Suffering, as the Buddha said, is caused by desire, I think drowsily the morning after our breakup. Desire for cigarettes. Vodka. Susan.
I burrow deeper into the comforter, shutting off the alarm. It’s Saturday. The day of Susan’s driving test. My fingers rest next to the phone on my pillow. I could wish her luck, I think, before throwing out that idea.
Or I could wallow in my sorrow. Wallow deep. Without anything to smoke or drink. I should’ve stocked up, I think, instantly followed by, Mahtab will kill me.
A knock on the door. “Malu! Come out of there.”
Speak of the devil.
The knob jiggles. Locked. “I hate when you do this! I hope you’re not drinking in there!”
My mouth waters. I close my eyes.
“That’s it!” Mahtab shouts. “I’m calling for reinforcements!”
An hour later, when she knocks on my door again, I shout: “Go away, Mahtab!”
“It isn’t Mahtab, it’s Freny!”
This was my sister’s idea of reinforcements?
“Someone is here to see you.” Freny’s voice is oddly cheerful.
“Who, the police?” I mutter under my breath. Then, louder: “Tell them I’m not home.”
“It’s your Mancher Mama!”
She’s lying. My uncle is still in Bermuda on vacation. Isn’t he? I squint at the calendar on my phone, trying to remember.
“Fine.” I’ve never heard Freny sound this assertive in my life. “I’ll tell your mama that his favorite nephew doesn’t want to see him. Let him deal with you.”
I curse, tossing the comforter off my head. “Okay, okay! I’ll be right down.”
Normally, I would never come down at Freny’s request. For anything. But my mom’s brother Manchershaw Bhikhaji Panday is a different story. Back when he and my father were wrestlers for the Indian Railways, Mancher Mama was known as Ek-Dus—a man who had the capacity to fight ten men at a time.
“Now you eat the food of ten men a
t one time,” my old man once told him sarcastically.
“What, this?” Mancher Mama poked the rounded flesh bulging over his belt. “Forgot you have one, too, Tehmtun? The way you forgot your wife?”
Mancher Mama takes crap from no one and I love him for it. The trouble? No one also includes me. If I don’t go down to the living room, my uncle will come up and probably break open the flimsy lock on my bedroom door. Mancher Mama, full-on drama. Mahtab wasn’t kidding when she mentioned reinforcements.
I’m still scowling when I go downstairs. Freny jumps up from the armchair and says she’ll be in the kitchen if we need her. Mancher Mama occupies most of the love seat, part Hulk, part Budai, his bulk a decent combination of muscle and fat. His face, browned even more than usual from being in a country that isn’t as cold as this one, breaks into a grin when he sees me.
“Malcko!”
Trust adults in the Parsi community to come up with perfectly innocuous and awful nicknames. In spite of my annoyance, I feel myself smile. “Hey, Mama. How was Bermuda?”
“Hot. I miss it already. Give me a hug, gadhera.”
Only Mancher Mama can call me a donkey in Gujarati and get a hug in return. Anyone else—as Steve can attest—gets sucker punched.
“So,” Mancher Mama says once I’m settled in the armchair across from him, “popular with the ladies, are we? Or maybe not so popular anymore.”
“Mahtab told you.” I need to remind Mahtab that not everything in my life is everyone else’s business.
“What, am I some stranger? Of course, your sister called me at once!”
I try hard not to roll my eyes. My mom was an excellent emotional blackmailer, but Mancher Mama has raised it to an art form with that hangdog expression, disappointment oozing from every pore. But maybe it’s because Mancher Mama isn’t a stranger, because he looks so much like Mom—and like me—that I begin telling him everything. Afrin and Justin. Susan. The whole mess of what followed.
“So yeah. I get why she broke up with me. But the thing is that I didn’t even like that kiss with Afrin. It was truly a reflex—a douchebag reflex—but still.” I rub a hand over my face. “God, how do I make her see that?”
“You don’t,” my uncle says simply. “You were, as you so eloquently put it, a douchebag.”
I scowl. “Thanks, Mama.”
“Only being truthful. But it’s also true that this is not the insurmountable obstacle your teenage mind is telling you about.”
“I resent that comment, but will let it pass—what do you mean not insurmountable?”
“Neither of you has been in a real relationship before—or at least one where there is actual give-and-take and compromise. Your mami and I have been married twenty years and I still mess up from time to time. Granted I never kissed another woman while I was married to her—”
I groan.
“—anyway, the point is: relationships are difficult for everyone. Plus, your girl is going through trouble at home. You need to give her time to overcome that.”
“I can help her with it!”
“You can’t, Malcko. Some people need time to themselves to figure things out. They don’t like going to others with their problems. Your mami is like that. So is your father.”
I stiffen when I hear the last word. As mad as I am at Susan, she’s nothing like my old man.
“Listen to me. This is your heart.” Mancher Mama holds a giant fist up to his chest. “It is not made of glass. Your heart is made of muscle, tough and resilient, meant to pump two thousand gallons of blood in a day. Two thousand gallons. That’s over fifteen thousand water bottles! It’s strong enough to weather most things, including emotional storms. Naturally, in the nature of muscle, the heart also has its weaknesses. It retains memories, good and bad. But muscle can be retrained, reshaped, can be made to learn new habits.”
“So you’re saying I should find another girl to, er, exercise with?”
Mancher Mama grins the way only uncles can at their nephews’ bawdy jokes. “Oh, I don’t think you’ll be looking for other girls, or will even need to. But I do think you need to do something to occupy your time instead of turning into a Devdas.”
Devdas. The brooding Bengali hero from a novel, who turned into an alcoholic over the woman he loved.
“Does it ever go away?” I ask. “The pain.”
“It will.” Mancher Mama opens and closes his hand. “One day your heart will move the way it used to when in pain, and you will realize it isn’t pain, but only a reflex. Like that kiss of yours with Afrin.”
I frown, rolling the words over in my head. “Afrin called last night. She said I didn’t love her anymore.” I don’t tell Mancher Mama that she was trying to change my mind about it. That she wanted us to try to start over.
“You don’t love me either,” I told her. “But Justin? He likes you. A lot. Why are you trying to cheat on him?”
“I am cheating on him!” she insisted.
“Doesn’t count if I’m not a willing participant.”
She had no response to that.
“What do you think?” Mancher Mama asks now.
“I care for Afrin,” I admit. “It is why I went with her to the hospital in the first place. But I don’t want a relationship with her. I don’t love her. Not like—”
I clamp my mouth shut. Love. How did that word come out of my mouth?
“From here,” Mancher Mama says, pointing to his chest, and I know I’ve spoken the last thought out loud. “It’s always from here.”
“A reflex?”
“Not everything is a reflex, Malcolm.”
Malcolm, not Malcko. “You’re serious.”
“As serious as I can be without anything to eat or drink for a whole hour. Freny, my dear!” he calls out, turning to the kitchen. “Jara chai malse ke?”
Chai. Brewed strong on the stove, with a secret spice mix, slices of ginger, and sprigs of fresh mint. Mom’s favorite beverage.
I wonder if Mancher Mama will leave after the chai, but to my relief, he stays for lunch when Freny asks him to, and later for dinner. Mahtab is overjoyed and volunteers to bring out board games. Mancher Mama and I ignore her and play Call of Duty instead.
My old man is the only one who shows any sign of displeasure, but, as my uncle reminds me: “He has always looked like that.”
It’s only when Mancher Mama leaves that the burn in my chest, numbed by distraction and activity, starts up again. I think of Susan, wonder how she did on her test, before pushing aside the thought. My fingers shake with the need for a cigarette.
I head to my bedroom window and open it. A blast of chilly air hits, and I realize I’m not wearing my coat. I’m debating if it’s worth sneaking downstairs and out the back instead of down the pipe nailed to the outside of this wall, when a city bus pauses at the stop in front of my house, hazard lights flashing. In the quiet, I hear a series of beeps, the hiss of a platform lowering to let down a woman with a baby carriage. The sides of the vehicle are, as always, covered with ads. A tax company, a TV show, a real estate agent, a new Indian restaurant. I stare at the bus for a long moment before taking out my phone.
“Hey, Ronnie? It’s Malcolm.” My breath rises in a mist in front of me. “Listen, I think I might have an idea to get us more sponsors.”
Susan
“Reverse park between the red and white cars,” the driving examiner says.
It’s somewhat surprising that she’s asking me to demonstrate this. Joseph made sure I began the test by reversing the car out of the lot. “If they test you on backing out the car, it’s unlikely that they’ll test you on backing in,” he said.
My examiner, however, seems determined to make unlikely likely. She smiles at me, a shrewd look in her blue eyes that I recognize from years of being tested by teachers at Qala Academy—a look that seems certain I’m going to finally trip up. And I might, even though the test has been surprisingly smooth so far. With the exception of parallel parking, which I’ve always been ho
rrible at—but even there I didn’t hit the curb, which would have resulted in an automatic fail.
Be aggressive.
The words rang through my head while I was changing lanes (thankfully there was no snow or ice on the roads this morning) and vanished before I could give a name to the voice.
I nod at the examiner now, pretending this is exactly what I expected, and begin backing the car into the lot at the test center. Slow and steady, sweat trickling down my forehead and down my back inside the heavy winter coat I’m wearing. Turning the steering wheel, straightening the car in the lot. Park. Hand brake. Ignition off. My hands move through the motions automatically and I collapse against the seat, waiting for the examiner’s verdict.
She grimaces at the yellow sheet in front of her. “I’m passing you for now, but your parallel parking was really bad. Your reverse parking and general driving were much better—”
“I passed?” I blurt out.
She gives me a warm smile, the human side of her shining for a brief moment. “Yes, you passed.”
I tune out the rest of her words.
I passed. I passed. I passed.
Now I won’t always need to take the bus. Or depend on others for rides.
I passed.
My grin is so wide I’m sure my face is in danger of cracking. While waiting in line with Joseph for my temporary paper license, I call Amma with the good news.
“Praise the Lord! I am so proud of you, kanna! What would you like? Shall I make achappam today? How about chicken biryani or fish curry?”
“Achappam sounds great.” My mouth waters at the thought of the sweet, intricately shaped rice-flour rosettes my mother makes, usually only for Christmas or as a special treat. “And chicken biryani.”
“Rensil? Rensil, listen to the good news—Suzy passed her test!” I hear her say with such joy in her voice that for a long moment I forget my parents no longer want to be together.
Appa comes on the line to congratulate me. “Well done, Suzy! I told you that it was easy, didn’t I?”
My smile slips slightly. There was a person who helped me do this. A person whose number I still haven’t managed to delete from my phone.
The Beauty of the Moment Page 22
