by Diksha Basu
A black Range Rover pulled up and she watched Karan step out, followed by his parents and Nono. Marianne dropped her phone down on the table and picked up The God of Small Things and pretended she was deeply absorbed. She looked up from behind the book. Karan’s mother was beautiful, she noted, wearing a cobalt-blue sari with a matching shawl draped around her shoulders. She was slim and tall and her hair was pulled into a low bun. Karan’s father, on the other hand, was wearing a plain, white kurta pajama set, stained with yellow haldi, and had a large paunch and a receding hairline. The standards were so much lower for men, Marianne noted. She hoped Karan would take after his mother or his grandmother.
“I don’t know why she wanted to do a haldi,” Marianne heard Karan’s mother say. “It’s a mess, a complete mess. And turmeric doesn’t wash out of anything. Shefali and her whims. Not one part of this wedding is following proper traditions. She’s just picked a riotous mishmash.”
“I like the way she’s made it her own,” Nono said.
“Mummy, stay in the car,” Karan’s father said loudly. “You’re too old to be walking around. We’ll quickly check the setup for tomorrow and go back to the haldi.”
“I can’t believe Colebrookes thought they were going to get away with patchy grass for the final reception,” Karan’s mother said. “Standards have really gone down here.”
“I told you I also want to confirm the lighting is being done properly,” Nono said. “And you don’t need to shout, son, I can hear perfectly.”
“Let her come,” Karan’s mother whispered. “It’s good for her brain to be engaged.”
“Yes,” Nono said. “Let’s slow down the dementia.”
She put her arm through Karan’s and they walked in the direction of Marianne’s cottage toward the lawn. Marianne stood up and waited to say hello. She pulled her back up straight and tucked her hair behind her ear. She was wearing the outfit Karan had got her and she hoped he’d notice.
“Hi!” she waved. “Karan, this is your family? Auntie, you look so elegant.”
Karan’s mother stopped and looked Marianne up and down. She gave a half-smile and said, “And you look lovely as well, my dear.”
“Thank you,” Marianne said. “This outfit, actually, Karan—”
“That outfit is nice,” Karan interrupted quickly. “Enjoy the wedding.”
They kept walking past Marianne and she heard Karan say to his mother, “Some friend of Shefali’s, I think. By the way, I told Bubbles to tell the bartenders to switch to the Chilean white for anyone who looks drunk enough that they won’t notice it’s cheaper. Save the expensive Marlborough for the sober guests at the start of the night.”
Marianne watched them go and sat down on the step of her cottage. She thought back to Riyaaz, who had ignored her over his graduation weekend. She thought back to Minh, with whom she had gone to Hanoi, and how he sat next to her at a coffee shop and talked to his friends in Vietnamese and how she smiled and nodded. She thought about Seydou telling her he thought black African women had much better bodies than white American ones and how she laughed as she agreed.
She picked up her phone again and looked at a picture from her first visit to Tom’s parents’ house in Cambridge. That day, Marianne was wearing skinny jeans and a beige sweater, black New Balance sneakers on her feet, and had her hair pulled into a ponytail. Tom’s sister, Jenifer, was wearing something almost exactly the same, except her sneakers were yellow and her sweater was brown. For lunch that day they had roast chicken, biscuits, an avocado-and-kale salad, and deviled eggs. Marianne made the salad, Jenifer made lemonade. They all sat in the backyard and Tom strummed his old high school guitar and then Marianne picked it up and played a slow version of “You’re Just Too Good to Be True,” and Tom’s mother had said, “Marianne, it’s like you’ve always been part of this family. We’re so glad you came to visit,” and Marianne had felt so safe and so comfortable and so happy. As if she were at home with her own family.
She wondered what Tom would be doing at the moment. He might be watching Narcos on Netflix. Or, more likely, reading. When she first met him, when she first went to his home and saw his wall of bookshelves exploding with books—books stacked on the ground, books stacked on the kitchen table, books stacked in the bathroom, books everywhere—her immediate thought was that he was the one. But then she got scared. A lot of the books were the same as the books on her shelves.
When reading, Tom would often stop to quote a passage to Marianne. Recently, he had been reading aloud from a long academic article on the literature surrounding motherhood when he paused and said, “I wish there was more writing on fatherhood. I get that the physical and emotional brunt falls on women but by excluding fathers from the conversation, we’re giving them a free pass to not be involved. Not that I’m even sure I want kids, you know?”
Marianne had responded by saying she felt like sushi for dinner.
She saw Mr. Das coming around the corner by himself and watched him undo his belt and refasten it on a looser hole. Mr. Das noticed Marianne standing on the patio of the cottage she was sharing with Tina.
“Marianne, dear, where has my daughter disappeared?”
“Food poisoning, Uncle. Where are you off to? Where’s your date? I think you’re very brave, Uncle,” Marianne said. “Being willing to try again at your age. It’s impressive that you’re putting yourself out there again and I’m cheering for you.”
Mr. Das stopped at the steps to the patio and looked at Marianne.
“You tell Tina to give me a call when she’s awake,” Mr. Das said. “And to drink plenty of fluids. Poor girl. I wonder how she got food poisoning—everything seems very clean here. Marianne, what is wrong with your nose? Why is it so red?”
He leaned forward and squinted.
“Is that pus?”
“I’m fine,” Marianne said. She touched her nose ring gently again. She needed more Neosporin. It would heal soon. Nose rings probably just took longer to heal than earrings.
Mr. Das nodded and continued on his way. He had always liked Marianne but found her a little unnerving. He had seen Marianne go through many huge changes since she became friends with Tina at Yale and every change was made with such commitment and dedication that Mr. Das marveled at her sense of self. Or was it her lack of sense of self? She never seemed to question, remember, or mourn the person she had been the previous day—she simply was who she was, or was it that she wasn’t who she was? He had a lot to learn from her.
He pulled out his phone and called Mrs. Sethi.
“Have you left?” he asked.
“I’m just getting to my car,” Mrs. Sethi said.
“Wait there,” he said. “I’ll nap when I get back to America.”
In his cottage, Mr. Das quickly brushed his teeth, picked up his wallet and phone, and walked back out to find Mrs. Sethi. Should he have invited her to join him in his cottage? he suddenly wondered. But he wasn’t ready to be in an enclosed, intimate space with her, even though their very first date had been at her home. There had been no expectation of intimacy then, but would there be now? Despite their ongoing interactions, Mr. Das hadn’t really given this much thought. He had never been driven too much by lust or sexual desire. It had always upset Radha that he saw sex as a necessity to release stress or to procreate because she thought it meant he was not attracted to her but it was never about her. And now he had to think about this again. And as he was walking to find Mrs. Sethi and thinking about his sex life, he saw Radha walking toward him, holding a small earthen pot of hot chai.
“Going back for more food?” she asked.
“I’m sorry about my sex drive,” Mr. Das said.
Radha coughed a bit of chai and cleared her throat.
“You’re beautiful,” Mr. Das continued. “You know that, I hope? Even at your age, you’re quite striking. I have to run.”
Radha watched him walk away with a smile. She’d hated his compliments accompanied by insults until suddenly she started loving them. She remembered the day it happened. They had been married for about two years and had started discussing the possibility of having a baby. They were in the airport waiting to board a flight to Delhi for the summer holidays and it was crowded and loud. Mr. Das was sipping from a can of Coke and saying, “Remind me to stow away some of the mini cans from the plane.”
Radha, the way Radha did, was methodically going through the pros and cons of getting pregnant at this stage of her career. Mr. Das, never the kind to say a pregnant woman was glowing, said, “Well, we’re young now so you can get fat and then get slim again and go back to being pretty. But hopefully you won’t get too slim because you look better with a few extra kilos.”
But then when had it started to go wrong? Radha wondered now. Was it when she first said that she didn’t want more children? Or was it when she agreed to one more child but then couldn’t get pregnant again? Mr. Das seemed convinced that she couldn’t get pregnant again because she wasn’t putting her mind to it. He believed it depended on the intention they brought to their lovemaking—his term, not hers—and while she agreed that that maybe played a small role, she also didn’t think you could deny science. And in any case, if it was about the mindset you brought to the sex, it hardly helped that her husband charted her ovulation to time their sex. And then, before she knew it, things started to unravel. And they did nothing to stop it.
Radha watched her ex-husband turn the corner and disappear from view.
Mr. Das stopped and called Mrs. Sethi.
“Why don’t you come to my room?” he said. “You said you’ve always wanted to join Colebrookes so you should come see the cottages. And then I’ll have the car get us from here.”
He told her how to get there and rushed back to his cottage to make sure it looked presentable. He pushed all his shirts and pants and underwear and undershirts into the cupboard and shut the door. In the bathroom, he took a hand towel and wiped down the countertops and even scrubbed the dry toothpaste off the mirror above the sink. The rest of the cottage looked fine because he wasn’t the kind to spread out in a temporary situation. Most of his clothes were still in his suitcase and he had just a small toilet case on a shelf in the bathroom. What more did a man his age need? He was always shocked when he looked at Tina’s suitcases filled with boxes of shoes and smaller boxes of jewelry and mesh bags of brightly colored underwear that embarrassed him, and bottles of potions and lotions for her skin that still had the elasticity of youth even though she didn’t think so. Radha wasn’t like that. Radha was old enough to have curated items and neutral underwear and little else. Everywhere they went, a small bottle of Chanel No. 5 appeared on a shelf in the bathroom.
There was a knock on the door. He opened it to Mrs. Sethi and said, “What’s your favorite perfume?”
“Chanel No. 5,” she said without missing a moment. “You really start with intimate and urgent questions.”
“Chanel No. 5?”
He picked up her wrist and took a deep breath of the heavy floral scent. Maybe he didn’t have a good sense of smell after all because this evoked nothing at all. He was relieved.
“It’s nice,” he said.
And he held on to her wrist for a few extra seconds and then let go and stepped away from the door to let her in.
“I need to know how many other men you’re seeing. And I need to know what you’d write about in this book. Even if we never see each other again after this week, I need to know everything,” Mr. Das said.
Mrs. Sethi looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the cupboard and said, “Well, that’s a lot.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “Let me call Anita and tell her to pick up the vegetables for dinner so we can talk in peace. My New Zealand avocado can wait.”
THURSDAY EVENING
Colebrookes: The Pedicurist at the Salon Prefers Male Clients Because They Rarely Get Pedicures So They Have Low Expectations
AFTER MRS. SETHI WENT HOME, Mr. Das decided to take his daughter’s advice and get a pedicure. He hadn’t kissed her—no perfect moment had presented itself and then, despite his tall claims about napping when he got to America, he started yawning and Mrs. Sethi smiled and touched his hand and said, “Get some rest, Neel. I also better go,” and left his room.
Mr. Das had incredibly soft feet and had always prided himself on them even though, as a man, he rarely had the chance to show them off to the world. But Tina had said it was more about the soothing aspect of the whole pedicure so he agreed to go to the Colebrookes salon. Did one wear shoes to a pedicure? What was the etiquette? He had washed his feet more thoroughly than usual, sitting gingerly on the edge of the tub to really scrub in between the toes and on the heel. He didn’t want the staff to judge his feet, these feet he was so proud of.
He and the pedicurist were the only men in the salon but he quite liked the cold, clinical smell—it reminded him of his father’s clinic. He settled into the soft black chair with a cup of ginger tea while a woman massaged his shoulders from the back. Near the row of mirrors, two women sat, one clicking away on her phone while two women worked different colors through her hair, and the other staring straight into a mirror while one woman cut her black hair. Both the women had black capes draped around their shoulders. To his right another woman was leaning back on a chair holding her eyebrows while a woman ran a thread to pull out the extra hairs. Mr. Das was glad he was a man.
Soft Bollywood music played and Mr. Das thought this was the perfect time to call Mrs. Ray, the matchmaker, and fill her in on his dates with Mrs. Sethi. He was ready for the next step but he wasn’t sure what the next step was or how to go about taking it.
Mrs. Ray was still on holiday in Goa when she saw Mr. Das calling. She was sitting on a large, round swinging chair on the hilltop in Vagator drinking coconut water from a coconut and watching the sunset with her husband, Upen Chopra. She didn’t particularly want to answer but Mr. Das was her first American client and she was charging him in dollars so she couldn’t exactly ignore his calls. If she managed to set him up successfully, she would be able to consider opening a branch in Edison, New Jersey, or maybe even Silicon Valley. Imagine. The widow from Mayur Palli, the wrong side of the river, the CEO of a multinational dating agency.
“I have to get this, darling,” she said to Upen, who was reading The Economist and drinking a glass of white wine. “It’s Mr. Das again.”
Upen looked over at his new wife sitting on a large white chair wearing white linen pants and a long pink kurta, large brown sunglasses on her head, a laptop on the table in front of her. She was glamorous and being a widow only made her more so. A woman who had suffered, Upen thought, was more beautiful than the rest. He smiled at her and said, “My businesswoman. Answer all the calls you need. I’d be happy to retire and be a house-husband.”
“Tch,” Mrs. Ray said. “I could never be married to a house-husband. Don’t go getting any ideas or I’ll shut down my business.”
“How can I help you, Mr. Das?” Mrs. Ray said on the phone, still smiling over at Upen.
“Mrs. Ray,” he said, watching the bubbles around his feet as they soaked in a tub of hot water. “I like Mrs. Sethi quite a lot.”
“Yes, I thought you would,” Mrs. Ray said. She leaned forward and took another sip of her coconut water. She opened her laptop and opened her notes on Mrs. Sethi and Mr. Das. She minimized the document in which she was working on her memoir and opened their files. Yes, yes, she was not surprised that this connection was working well. Mrs. Sethi had been difficult to set up so far—men seemed intimidated by her—but Mr. Das’s ex-wife had clearly trained him well.
“So now I need to know, what next? I have only a few days,” Mr. Das asked. “What does a man my age do when he’s interested in a woman?”
The woman who was staring into the mirror broke eye contact with herself and looked back at Mr. Das. He lowered his voice a little and added, “I haven’t even, you know, done anything physical yet.”
Mr. Das took a sip of his tea and noticed the woman who was getting her hair colored was leaning back with her hair wrapped in little pieces of foil—what was that for, he wondered—while someone started painting some sort of white substance on her face.
Nono walked in then and stopped and looked at Mr. Das sitting in his chair with his khaki pants folded halfway up his calves. Mr. Das nodded hoping she would move along but she stopped in front of him, shook her head, and said, “Feminism has gone too far. Is this why your wife left you?”
“No,” Mr. Das said. “No, no. This is my first pedicure ever. My daughter insisted. I would never do this. My feet are naturally soft as can be.”
“What do your feet have to do with this, Mr. Das?” Mrs. Ray asked on the phone.
“Nothing, nothing,” Mr. Das said. “I was talking to someone else.”
He gestured toward his phone hoping Nono would continue on her way but she stood there watching the pedicurist at his feet and muttering about men no longer being real men.
“So what do I do, Mrs. Ray? About my situation?” Mr. Das asked.
Nono didn’t move.
“What did you do with your ex-wife?” Mrs. Ray asked.
She thought back to the start of her own relationship with Upen Chopra. It had involved long walks and hot tea and glasses of wine and romantic dinners in dimly lit restaurants.
“That was a long time ago, Mrs. Ray,” Mr. Das said.
“Who is Mrs. Ray?” Nono asked, still standing by Mr. Das.
