by Rahul Mehta
Speaking with his grandfather now, Sanj realized that when his father was born, his grandfather must not have been much older than Sanj currently was. He considered the sacrifices his grandparents must have made to get his father out of that village, to send their son to America. The fare alone must have required months, if not years, of careful saving.
“I know fashion may sound frivolous,” Sanj said, “but it’s a very famous magazine. Anyone would want this job. My friends can’t believe how lucky I am.”
After that first night, watching La Double Vie de Véronique in Sanj’s basement, Sylvie and Sanj saw each other every day, sometimes twice. Mostly they watched movies at Sanj’s, downing margaritas or daiquiris or vodka tonics. From the stories Sylvie told, Sanj pieced together that she had taken classes at the community college, but had only lasted one semester. He learned she had spent much of the last year doing what his parents were doing in India now: helping to clean out the apartment of her mother’s mother, who had been terminally ill, and who had died just two months earlier.
One evening, Sylvie asked Sanj to meet her at her house. Sanj hadn’t been to Sylvie’s since high school. It was only a couple of miles from where he lived, just down the hill in the jumble of small houses crowded in the narrow valley close to the riverbank, in the part of town that flooded when it rained too much. Sylvie’s house was a compact, two-story structure that looked neglected, with peeling blue paint and a sagging front porch. A stone goose stood sentry on the front lawn; Sylvie’s mom liked to dress it according to the weather and the season—a yellow slicker when it rained, earmuffs in the winter, a red Santa hat around Christmas. Today had been beautiful, and the goose was wearing sunglasses.
Sanj knocked on the door that entered into the kitchen. Sylvie’s father swung the door open and shook Sanj’s hand. The kitchen was small, with a linoleum floor that needed replacing, and a floral curtain-rod ruffle over the window above the sink. The kitchen radio was set to an oldies station. Sylvie’s mother was standing at the counter, chopping carrots. She turned to Sanj. “We haven’t seen you in forever! Look at you!” Sanj noticed right away that they were both wearing sweatpants, just as he’d remembered them. They looked older, though, more so than the four years that had elapsed. Sylvie’s mother came toward him, her arms open, and hugged him.
Sanj saw Sylvie, who had been lurking in the doorway. She came over to him, grasped his hand, and pulled him away from her mother, whom he was still embracing. At first, her mother looked hurt, but then she resumed her work at the kitchen counter. As Sylvie dragged him into the hallway, Sanj thought he saw someone sitting on the couch in the other room watching television.
Upstairs, Sylvie’s door was shut and locked. It was a heavy bolt lock, the kind you would find on the front door of a house, not an inside bedroom. Sylvie fished a key out of her sweatpants’ pocket.
Her bedroom looked nothing like Sanj remembered. In high school, the room had been decorated with dingy wallpaper, some country theme, cornflowers perhaps, Sanj couldn’t remember exactly. Not that you could see the wallpaper. Almost every inch had been covered with posters or pictures clipped from magazines: bands Sylvie liked, models she admired, fashions she hoped to one day wear. He remembered, in particular, above her bed, a poster of Morrissey looking both sullen and seductive.
Now her room was stripped of all that, stripped, it seemed, of Sylvie, or at least the Sylvie that Sanj had known. The room was austere. The matted, beige wall-to-wall carpeting had been ripped up, leaving roughly finished hardwood floors. The walls and the door were painted blue, and the trim around the windows was green. Pushed against one of the walls was a narrow wooden bed made up with a scarlet blanket of rough wool. There were two straight-backed wooden chairs with straw seats. Arranged on a small wooden table in the corner of the room were a blue pitcher and a blue washbasin and a drinking glass. Three blue shirts—men’s shirts, from what Sanj could tell—hung on pegs along the back wall, and next to them, a straw hat. Everything about the room seemed odd to Sanj—unlikely, yet somehow familiar. It evoked another time and place.
Sylvie gestured for Sanj to sit on one of the chairs, which proved uncomfortable, while she took a seat on the other.
“You’ve redecorated your room,” Sanj said.
“It’s Van Gogh’s.”
It took Sanj a moment to understand. Then he remembered the painting—Van Gogh’s Room in Arles—which was famous, and which he’d seen at the Art Institute in Chicago one summer when he was visiting his cousins.
“Why?” Sanj said.
“I don’t know. I guess I felt a connection.”
“A connection to the monastic atmosphere, or to the desperate guy who sliced off his ear?”
“Both.”
He wondered, too, about the locks—what was it she was trying to keep out? or was it something she was trying to keep in?—but he didn’t ask.
“Was that Chris I saw downstairs?”
“Probably,” she said. “He’s back again.”
“What’s he been up to?” Sanj asked, trying to sound casual, though he was eager to know.
“He had a baby with Trisha Meyers, but they’re not together anymore. He installs car stereos. Ironic, since he lost his driver’s license. DUI. He’d been smoking pot that night, but believe me, when it comes to drugs, that’s the least of what he does. Did? Does? I don’t even know anymore. I asked recently, and he said he was clean, but I don’t believe him. There was a time when we could never lie to each other. We were so close: we’re twins, after all. But that time is long gone.”
The room was very quiet. They could hear beneath them, through the thin floor, the faint sounds from the kitchen: the oldies station (“All the leaves are brown . . .”), kitchen cabinets slamming, dishes being stacked. Sylvie said, “Let’s not talk about Chris anymore. It makes me tired.” In fact, the story was all too familiar, echoed in the lives of countless other young men they’d known in high school.
Sanj said, “I got a call from one of the Vogue editors today. I might get to write a piece. Well, really just a blurb, maybe three or four hundred words. But it’s exciting nonetheless, partly because the story was my idea. See, I know this guy in L.A., a graffiti artist, a friend of a friend. He recently sold his novel. It won’t be out until next year, but I pitched the article as a ‘next big thing’ piece. No one knows about him now, but this time next year everyone will be talking about him.”
Sylvie smiled. “I’m happy for you,” she said, though her eyes said otherwise. Sanj heard a tightness in her voice as she continued. “It seems like things have come easily for you since high school. First USC, now New York. Not that you haven’t worked for it, or that you don’t deserve it. It just seems to have been easy for you. Not for me.” She leaned forward. “Why do you think that is?”
At first, Sanj wasn’t sure if it was a rhetorical question, or if Sylvie expected a response.
After a minute, he said, “I’ve been lucky.”
Sylvie sighed. “Lucky.”
The sun was setting. The light in the room was fading; they were almost sitting in the dark.
She stood up. “Let’s go downstairs. Maybe Chris will be gone.”
Sanj’s parents called every two or three days to check on him and his grandfather. When they’d call, it was morning in India, but evening in America, and Sanj would often be out. His grandfather would leave scribbled messages.
On the days Sanj did talk to his parents, he reassured them about his grandfather. “He’s fine. You know him. He spends all day shut up in his bedroom doing puja.” Sanj’s mother would want to know about food. “Is it lasting?” Before leaving for India, she’d cooked nonstop for days, and filled the freezer. “If you run out, you can always call any of the aunties to bring something.”
Sanj was on his way out the door to meet Sylvie when his father rang. “How’s it going?” Bipin asked. “How’s your grandfather?”
“Fine,” Sanj said. “What about over there?
”
“It’s been tough for everyone, especially for your grandmother. She knows she’ll probably never return here, not to this house anyway. Sorting through all her belongings has dredged up years’ worth of memories, which hasn’t made it any easier.”
After a minute, Sanj’s father said, “Do you remember that card you made for Dada when he was in the hospital? You must have been ten. You drew a carnival, remember, with a Ferris wheel, bumper cars, a shooting game with cartoon ducks? You raided the photo album, cutting out the heads of all your cousins, aunts, and uncles to paste on all the bodies you drew, even on the ducks. Your mom was so mad; they were the only copies of the photos. Dada was so proud, he showed it to all the nurses and doctors at the hospital. Your grandmother kept that card all these years.”
Sanj had forgotten about the card, though he had a vivid memory of the trip to India a few weeks later, after his grandfather died. It was the same trip when he’d visited his father’s village.
“I remember seeing the house where you were born,” Sanj said.
“I went there over the weekend,” Bipin said. “Just for the day. Just to look around again.”
Visiting the village, Bipin had had his own flood of memories. He had thought about the day he left for America, meeting up with his friend Chandu that morning. Chandu’s mother had made them hot paranthas and potato vegetable, and even though Bipin had eaten breakfast at his own house just half an hour earlier, he ate again.
The journey had been exhausting. He remembered in particular an incident during their stopover in Paris. Chandu and the two other Indian men with whom they’d been traveling wanted to go to a burlesque show. “Paris is famous for them,” they’d said. Bipin said he had a stomachache. In truth, he felt awkward about going. It seemed somehow wrong, although, even after the men left, there was a small part of Bipin that wished he’d gone, not just for the titillation, but also because he wished he were the type of man who would go: adventuresome, fearless. Instead, he stayed in the hotel and wrote his father a long letter thanking him for the sacrifices he’d made to send him to America, assuring him that they wouldn’t be for nothing. “I’ll make you proud,” he’d written. When he went to the post office, he got flummoxed, struggling to understand the French system, and ended up never mailing the letter, pocketing it instead and carrying it with him to America. Months later, he ran across it while sorting through some things. It was the end of his first year in college. Reading the letter, he was struck with homesickness, and he wanted so desperately to go back to India, if not for good, at least for a long summer visit. But he had no money. In fact, it would be another six years before he’d set foot in India, before he’d see any of his family. Bipin spent days moping in his room, refusing to come out.
It was Chandu who had rescued him. He organized a summer sublet, a large Victorian house in disrepair, which he and Bipin would share with four other foreign students who also had nowhere to go. In exchange for free rent, the men would fix up the house so the owner could sell it at the end of the summer.
That first night in the house, Chandu prepared a Gujarati feast. Well, not quite a feast, but Chandu had done the best he could with what ingredients he could find locally and with what limited cooking skills he possessed. Still, Bipin was impressed. He wondered where Chandu had learned to cook. Eating the food, Bipin swelled with memories of home, understanding, too, that as long as Chandu was there with him, he wasn’t alone.
Bipin had never told his son this story. There was so much he’d never said. He’d never told him how many days he’d cried in Oklahoma; or how scared he was, when he brought Meenakshi to America, that he would disappoint her or fail her somehow; or how much he’d struggled. What Bipin did tell his son about his early life in America is what he thought he needed to know: that he had come with nothing and that it hadn’t been easy, but he had worked hard and now here they all were. When Sanj asked his father why he came to America, Bipin answered, “For a better life,” which was, in Bipin’s estimation, what they now had. As for the details of what he’d been through, why would his son want to know? Bipin barely wanted to know himself.
Toward the end of their phone conversation, Sanj mentioned he’d been seeing quite a bit of his old friend Sylvie. “You remember Sylvie Pearson, right?”
“Of course,” Bipin said. “You two were best friends.”
When Sanj said he was eager to return to New York, Bipin said, “I’m glad Chandu Uncle is looking after you. I can’t imagine how I would have survived in America without him. I don’t know how either one of us could have survived.”
The next time Sylvie came over, they watched Sid & Nancy. It had been one of their favorite movies when they were in high school. They were watching a scene in which Sid and Nancy are lying in a bed in the Chelsea Hotel, barely functional after shooting heroin. As Sid passes out, his lit cigarette accidentally singes Nancy, and she flicks it into a pile of rubbish on the ground—discarded clothes, empty fast-food containers, the crumpled wrapper of a Burger King Whopper—which catches fire. Instead of extinguishing it, Nancy merely watches the blaze, her eyes half-closed, as she curls her body against Sid’s. Sid awakens, lights another cigarette, flicks the match into the growing fire. Neither of them does anything to save themselves.
Sanj paused the movie.
“What’s wrong?” Sylvie asked.
He wanted to tell her the truth. He wanted to tell her he didn’t work at Vogue and that his grades at USC had been dismal. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t lucky, as he’d claimed in her bedroom (as he’d claimed to his grandfather, too), at least not lucky in the way she thought. He looked at her. The light of the television was blue on her face, though the fire on the screen was yellow and red.
He couldn’t say it.
“Would you like more vodka?”
“Sure,” Sylvie said. He got up to fix two more drinks. When he returned, handing Sylvie hers, he tried again to tell her, but said instead, “Let’s toast.”
“To what?” she asked.
He held up his glass. “To the future.”
“To the future,” Sylvie repeated, though her voice sounded more hesitant than Sanj’s. Her eyes looked away as they clinked glasses.
He pushed play. The scene resumed. The firefighters break down the door, dragging Sid and Nancy, against their will, to safety. In the doorway, Nancy looks back at the inferno with longing.
Sanj had heard rumors about a gay bar: a place called Diff’rent Strokes. It was located in the deserted downtown, under a highway overpass. It was next door to a biker bar, about which he’d also heard rumors: a woman could get a free drink if she gave the bartender her bra to hang on the wall, two drinks if she gave up her panties. The biker bar and the gay bar had abutting parking lots and back-door entrances.
He had to show his ID and pay a dollar and sign a registry. The bar was technically “members only” ever since there was a stabbing a few months earlier. Sanj looked at the names above his to see if he recognized anyone, perhaps someone he had heard whispers about growing up: the newspaper editor, the math teacher, the chef at the French restaurant. Sanj was nervous about signing his name. What if someone he knew saw it afterward?
Inside, the space was dark and narrow, dominated by a long bar with stools. The floors and walls and ceilings were painted black. There was a tiny dance floor and two pool tables that seemed smaller than regulation size. Besides Sanj, there were only six or seven other people, mostly middle-aged men, no one Sanj would be interested in. They didn’t seem particularly interested in him, either. Sanj knew they wanted rednecks in pickup trucks, not skinny little Indians. Sanj knew it, because that’s who he wanted, too. He stayed almost two hours. The crowd didn’t improve much, though at one point it peaked at about twenty. He shot one game of pool, though mostly he just sat at the bar.
Toward the end of the night, Sanj found himself talking to a guy who had come late and had sat next to him, a man in his late twenties or perhaps early thirties
. He was cute, and he wore a red baseball cap pulled low on his head. He introduced himself as Chad. Sanj thought he recognized him, but wasn’t sure. Sanj flirted with him. He took his baseball cap and put it on his own head. When Chad leaned in to retrieve it, Sanj kissed him long and hard. He whispered, “Take me home.” Chad said, “I can’t.”
Driving home afterward, Sanj remembered him: Chad Webster. His house was near Sylvie’s. He was a few years older than they were; in fact, Sanj remembered Sylvie saying he’d been her babysitter when she was a kid. Sanj remembered seeing him once, a few years ago, washing his car in the driveway—a sleekly beautiful ’69 Dodge Charger, plum-colored. At the time, Sanj had fantasized about riding in the passenger seat, driving into the horizon with Chad’s arm around him.
The next time Sanj talked to Sylvie, he asked about Chad.
“He went off to D.C. right after high school. He lived there several years, but then he got sick. He’s been sick for a while. ‘He’s come home to rest.’ That’s what his mom told my mom. Why are you asking?”
“No reason,” Sanj said. “I saw him in line at Foodland. He looked familiar, then I remembered he was your neighbor. I was just curious.”
At home that night, Sanj couldn’t stop thinking about Chad. Sick?
A few days before Sanj had left New York, he’d gone out to a bar in Chelsea. Soon after arriving, he downed three vodka tonics. Much of the night was a haze. A man groped him by the pay phones outside the bathroom. He’d introduced himself as Paul. He was accompanied by a young Indian man named Asher, who lived with his parents in Queens and was a med-school student, though apparently he was on the verge of failing out. Paul kept telling Sanj he and Asher were “just friends.”
When Paul was getting them drinks, Asher took Sanj aside and said, “Paul and I used to be a couple. We’re going through a rough patch, but he still loves me and I still love him. As a fellow Indian, you would never want to come between us. I’m trusting you. You are my brother.”
