by Diksha Basu
What would Mrs. Jha do, she wondered, if Mr. Jha died? Would she focus all her love and attention on poor Rupak and make life miserable for his wife? Mrs. Jha worried that Rupak had figured out that an American girlfriend would be a good way for him to avoid responsibility. She watched enough American television shows to understand that it would not be an easy choice for Rupak to return to India. Everyone in India was going on and on about the country changing and, yes, there were malls with high ceilings and better roads and more freedom for young people, but India was not America.
Of course, more and more Americans were coming to India for holidays, but within a few months, once they had done yoga and tried halfheartedly to teach English to prostitutes’ children, they got on planes back to their homes in Michigan or Texas. Mrs. Jha saw these young white people in Connaught Place and Janpath with their Fabindia kurtas, looking like they were the latest Mother Teresa. They laughed with the slum children and pretended not to mind touching their filthy hands. Of course they didn’t mind. It would be easy to touch those children if you knew you were leaving and next week you would be back at home, drinking tea in your nice big kitchen telling people how those children laugh and smile even though their lives are so difficult.
“Are shoe polishers silly?” Mr. Jha came into the room where Mrs. Jha was packing.
“Like the cobbler downstairs? Why would he be silly?” Mrs. Jha said.
“No, no. Not like the cobbler. Shoe-polishing machines. Like they have in hotels. You know—where you put your foot in and the shoe gets polished.”
“I don’t know if silly is the right word. Where have you been all day?”
“Why are you sitting on the ground packing things so slowly?” Mr. Jha said. “I told you, you don’t need to do that. The movers will take care of everything.”
“I don’t want the movers touching your papers. They smoke bidis all day. I’d rather put the important things in boxes myself so they don’t touch anything,” Mrs. Jha said. “But I was thinking—why don’t we go out for dinner tonight? Just the two of us.”
“Bindu, do you know how much this move is costing me? We can’t go out for dinners all the time. Can you just make something quick? And where is Rupak? He hasn’t called in almost a week. Frankly I am getting a bit worried about how useless he is. It will be embarrassing if he has to come back and find some midlevel job here.”
“What’s wrong with working here? You work here, lots of good companies and intelligent people work here. I think it would be good for him to come back,” Mrs. Jha said. “It will be different for him than it was for us.”
“He’s probably fallen in love with some American girl already,” Mr. Jha said.
At six p.m. the next Friday, Rupak got a surprise. Sitting at the bar at Stella’s was a woman not anything like what he had expected. Serena was slim and wearing tight black capris and a dark red silk shirt with thin straps that showed off a set of darker red bra straps. Her black hair hit at her prominent collarbones. She was fiddling with her phone, her face lit up by the blue light, when Rupak entered.
“Serena?” he asked, worried that she’d say no.
But it was her. And she looked up at him and smiled and stood and leaned forward and gently touched her cheek to his and said, “Rupak, it’s nice to meet you.”
She smelled nice and her voice was deep, like a smoker’s. He sat down next to her and looked down at his own cargo shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops and quickly motioned the waiter over to order drinks to settle his nerves. He asked for a beer and turned to Serena.
“I’ll just have a cappuccino, please. With skim milk.”
“Are you sure?” Rupak said. “It’s a Friday night, after all.”
“Thanks,” Serena said. “But I have to get to a dinner after this.”
Rupak already didn’t want her to leave.
“So you’re doing your MBA at Cornell?” Serena said once they were settled in with their drinks in front of them.
He had been rejected from Cornell. The first year that he applied, he had been rejected from all the Ivy League universities, and MIT and the University of Chicago. When he applied again the following year, he changed his approach and applied to NYU, Boston University, University of Michigan, and, what he thought would be just a safety school, Ithaca College.
So Ithaca College it was. With no fellowship money even though, from what he heard, almost all graduate students got at least some fellowship money. Rupak knew it wasn’t the most prestigious of universities, but by that point, he really just wanted a way out of India, so he didn’t care about the brand-name universities.
“I’m doing my MBA but I’ve always had a real interest in film. What are you studying?”
No part of that sentence was a lie.
“I’m doing my master’s in performing arts. I just finished class across the street at the Schwartz Center. Have you been to any shows there?” Serena asked.
Rupak motioned for another beer before he had finished his first one.
“Not yet. First year was really busy.”
Still no lies. He continued, “I write a little bit but I would love to move into directing. Does performing arts mean you’re an actress?”
Was that too obviously flirtatious? You could only ask pretty women if they acted, everyone knew that. But Serena laughed and said, “No, I don’t act. I tried for a while but it didn’t go anywhere.” She smiled.
They waited in silence while the bartender brought Rupak’s second beer over and poured it into the glass.
“Do you think you’re going back to India after this?” Serena continued. “I hear your parents are shifting to Gurgaon.”
Despite seeming uninterested, she seemed to be investigating his future plans, Rupak thought. It was a good sign. It was probably best to downplay his interest in film.
“I doubt it. I’ll probably get a job in New York. Maybe L.A. Investment banking. I’m also looking at consulting jobs. What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to go back to Delhi,” Serena said. “I produced a small play there this summer and it did pretty well. My sister and I want to set up a theater company. I really feel there aren’t enough non-Bollywood voices there.”
Rupak was worried she was going to fire back more questions about his professional plans, and he had no professional plans, so he pressed her to tell him more about her theater company. She had moved into the production side of theater after trying her hand at acting. It was hard, she said, doing theater in Delhi, in the shadow of Bollywood, but she didn’t expect to make massive amounts of money out of it. She and her sister were living at home with their parents—“My father isn’t doing too well at the moment so I think it’s nice for them to have us at home.”
“How did you first start acting?” he asked. “Did you also model?”
He noticed a message flash on the screen of her phone. Serena glanced down at the phone, smiled, pressed the button on the top right to darken the screen, and looked up at him distracted and said, “Sorry, what did you say?”
“How did you start acting? Did you also model?”
Suddenly an image of Mrs. Gupta passed through his mind. Had she also once been young and beautiful, sitting with a man, drinking a cup of coffee? Was Serena related to Mrs. Gupta through her mother? Were those her genes? No. He shook the image out of his head. There was no reason to ruin his evening.
“I did not model, no. Modeling and acting are not interchangeable, even though everyone in India seems to think that. I always liked the stage—even in school, I always auditioned for the plays. I never got the lead roles. I should have taken that as a sign.”
Serena laughed and Rupak used that laugh as encouragement to ask, “Are you sure you won’t have a drink?”
Serena looked into her coffee cup and tilted it toward her as if, perhaps, the answer lay beneath all the foam. She checked her watch, bit her lower lip, and said, “Sure. I think I can fit in a quick one. I’ll just have a glass of pinot grigio.
”
Rupak’s phone flashed then, and it was his turn to look down and check his screen. There was a message from Elizabeth.
Drinks at Benchwarmers tonight. Come after your romantic date. See you there.
It hadn’t occurred to him that he might have needed to lie to Elizabeth about where he was going tonight.
Elizabeth always woke up early on Sundays, even if, like the previous night, they had been up late drinking.
“Sundays make me think of death anyway,” she would say. “If I slept for half the day, I’d go crazy.”
When he first heard her say that, he was intrigued but too hungover to ask more, so he had just rolled over and gone back to sleep while she sat near the window in the living room with a cup of coffee and a book. And it wasn’t just the hangover; in the image he had of her, there was no space for being anxious about mortality. Like so much else, it didn’t fit so he didn’t ask.
Rupak had been thinking about Serena all of Saturday and still couldn’t quite get her out of his mind this morning. She had stayed for another glass of wine on Friday, and they had discovered that they had both grown up going to the Delhi Book Fair in Pragati Maidan every year—he only went to buy comic books but he didn’t tell her that—and they also both discovered how nice it was to talk to someone who remembered what Pragati Maidan used to be. Speaking to her that night, he had felt a fleeting moment of nostalgia for Delhi, despite the fact that her version of the city was quite different.
But even though she had been on his mind since Friday night, there was a deep pleasure he felt when he was around Elizabeth. This Sunday morning he could hear her in the living room, on the phone with her parents. He heard, through the door that was pulled shut but not fully, the sizzle of bacon hitting a hot pan. The smells of Sunday morning breakfast in America crept in and he looked around her bedroom. On the wall above the bed was a framed print of the painting of the American flag by Jasper Johns. He hadn’t heard of Jasper Johns until he had met her and when he first saw that flag he thought, yes, she was as American as he had hoped. But it turned out that the flag was actually considered a piece of art, not a symbol of patriotism. If he was outside this room and had to describe it, he would have reached into his American sitcoms and filled this room with posters of Marilyn Monroe and maybe one of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but that wasn’t what the room was at all.
Elizabeth was never turning out to be what he expected. He thought back to their first meeting. It was after the first-year orientation, where they had briefly locked eyes. Later that afternoon, he was waiting at the bus stop to go to the grocery store and she had driven past in her Jeep. She stopped at the bus stop and shouted out to him, “Hey!”
He looked around, uncertain that this beautiful blond woman would be shouting out to him, but the only other person at the stop was an older Chinese woman who was knitting while waiting and did not even look up.
“You were at orientation this morning, right? Are you waiting for the bus? Do you need a ride somewhere?” Elizabeth said.
“I’m going to get groceries,” he said.
“Me too,” Elizabeth said. “Get in. It’ll be easier to bring stuff back in the car.”
It worked out well because he bought much healthier food than he would have if there hadn’t been a beautiful woman in line with him at the store. They had then gone back to her apartment for dinner and wine and stayed up talking until two a.m., and Rupak was mesmerized. He remembered asking her if she had been a cheerleader in school or undergraduate, but now he didn’t remember her answer.
He stretched and stepped out of bed. He walked out of the bedroom and saw Elizabeth, no longer on the phone, in her shorts and black tank top, hair loose, standing in the kitchen while bacon and eggs cooked on the stove. Would his parents’ new life ever look like this, he wondered? He loved this. He loved the smells and the sights and, yes, in Delhi they could now buy bacon and fancy coffee, but the feel, the feel of this room and this space with Elizabeth in it was not something money could buy.
“Look how nice it is outside,” Elizabeth said to him. “We have to go do something. I was thinking we have breakfast and then go to Beebe Lake, maybe go for a run and have a picnic?”
“How are you not tired? We drank so much beer last night,” Rupak said, kissing the top of her shoulder and reaching over her to break off a piece of bacon that was on a paper napkin on a plate on the counter. “Were you a cheerleader in high school?”
“What? No. You ask me that so often and I always say no,” Elizabeth said. “Come on. Let’s go sweat it out, you’ll feel better. And we can take a bottle of wine for a picnic to help us through the hangover. Do you want a cup of coffee? Oh, that reminds me—next time you go to India, I want you to bring me back some South Indian coffee. I read an article about it last week and I want to try it.”
“Sure,” Rupak said, pouring milk into his cup.
“Or I could just come with you next time you go to India,” Elizabeth said. “I was thinking we could move there after graduation even. So many of the Indian companies recruit in America. It could be more interesting than just moving to New York like everyone else.”
“You would never move there,” Rupak said. “You would hate it there.”
“Why do you always say that? I think I’d actually love it there. I’m being serious about this.”
“It’s completely different there. You wouldn’t…I don’t know…you wouldn’t get it,” Rupak said.
“You moved here from India. That’s the same change as moving to India from here. You know you find my life in Florida as exotic as I find yours.”
“That’s different. Everyone knows what America is, no matter where they’ve grown up. It’s not unknown. All the world’s images are America, you know. It’s hardly a culture shock.”
“I just think it’s something to think about. From both a work perspective and a personal perspective, it’s an interesting idea.”
“Sure.” Rupak slipped his arms around her waist and leaned his chin against the back of her head. He was too sleepy to have this conversation right now. He couldn’t even bring himself to tell his parents about her; he would never be able to bring her to India. “Here, let me finish making breakfast. I’ll bring it to you in bed.”
“How romantic,” Elizabeth said with a laugh. “But I’m almost done. And I don’t want to go back to bed. We’re going out.”
“How can anyone say no to you?” Rupak said.
Dalwinder was sitting near the Chopras’ gate reading the gossip section of the Hindi newspaper he had borrowed from the guard two bungalows away when he saw the same Mercedes from earlier turn onto their small road. The new neighbors again! Mr. Chopra had told Balwinder to keep an eye on the driveway next door and report to him about everything he saw.
“If they have other cars, I want you to check what kind. If there is luggage being delivered, I want you to find out where it is coming from. If you can get close enough to tell me the brand of his watch, I’ll consider giving you a raise. If his wife comes, I want to know what she is wearing. Everything, Balwinder,” Mr. Chopra had said. “And if I’m at home when they come, you call me immediately.”
During the day, unlike a lot of other homeowners in the neighborhood, the Chopras did not require Balwinder to sit in the booth outside the gate. He usually spent the morning in the shade under the big banyan tree across the gate and napped in his room in the afternoon. Today the Chopras had taken Mr. Chopra’s brother, Upen, who had arrived the previous night, to the LRC for lunch, and Balwinder was waiting for them to return when the Mercedes drove down the lane. The Mukherjees had driven the Chopras mad with their quiet wealth, and he was curious to see what this family would cause. And he wouldn’t mind wooing the pretty maid in the starched sari despite the fact that she looked a lot older than him. Paying for sex—even though Sugandha had breasts that would make the sultriest Bollywood stars jealous—was starting to feel insufficient. He would see Johnny and his friends, all w
ith pretty girls on their arms, coming home night after night and wonder why he didn’t have the right to that. He was young, he was handsome, and he was definitely more intelligent than Johnny. Why was he stuck scrambling out of bed and opening the gate for them instead of slipping his hand up the shirt of a pretty young girl? The girls did not even look at him. Occasionally a nice one would mutter a thank-you, but mostly they just flicked their cigarette ash and walked past him without a care in the world. He had wanted, a few times, to grab the bottom of one of these passing beauties. When they came in late at night, with their eyes glazed and the boys’ hands all over them, they were unlikely to notice.
The Mercedes pulled up and Balwinder saw the same pretty maid get out and push open the heavy metal gate. They would need to get that gate replaced, he thought. It was about nine feet high and the sections in between the iron slats were covered with some sort of Plexiglas. The Mukherjees had been scared of having their home robbed again, so they had slowly built themselves a completely private fortress. Balwinder much preferred the Chopras’ gate. It was taller—about twelve feet high—and Mr. Chopra had had bird shapes bent into the wrought-iron rods. The gate next door was heavy and rusted in parts and looked bulky.
The driver’s-side window rolled down and Mr. Jha looked out toward Balwinder. Balwinder got up and rushed over, hoping he would be able to catch a glimpse of his watch.
“Namaste,” Mr. Jha said. “Is Mr. Chopra at home?”
“Good afternoon, sir,” Balwinder said. “Sir and madam have gone to the LRC.”
“The what?” Mr. Jha said.
