It was this job that threw me into close contact with the Dayal women for the first time in a month. At the end of May, my whole family donned our Indian clothes and headed to a big party celebrating the Bhatt twins’ graduation. I scratched at the blue kurta my mother had made me wear. Talk on the way there focused on the honorees: Jay was Ivy League–bound in the fall, while Meena would attend a state school, and not one of the “better” ones, in my parents’ eyes. Meena’s fate offended my mother.
“She fooled around all high school, didn’t she?” my mother said to Prachi. This was the latest tactic in the wake of Prachi’s Spring Fling moral miscarriage. My mother would ask her to recite the fates of those who “fooled around”—which might, in her view, include anything from neglecting to take AP Biology to shooting up hard drugs. She educated us about the wider world by assembling a kind of shoe-box diorama of other people’s lives—a cardboard drama. She arranged the characters, moved them about, and showed you how they were doing it wrong, turning the diorama into the set of a morality play.
Upon arriving at the Bhatts’, I prepared to abscond to the basement. Basements were the safest places to survive an Indian party in the suburbs. In a basement, the itchy clothes could be loosened, the girls’ dupattas dropped on the floor and trampled upon, the guys’ kurtas removed to reveal that all along someone had been smart enough to wear a T-shirt beneath the fabric, and jeans rather than churidars below. In basements you never encountered garish images of multiarmed gods, or family portraits shot in the mall photography studio—sisters draped in lehengas and brothers’ hair stiff with gel. In basements you found foosball and Ping-Pong tables, big-screen televisions, and, depending on the benevolence of the parents, video game consoles. In basements, I learned the secrets of sex, according to information curated from older brothers who were certainly still virgins. In basements, a semblance of our due—American teenagedom.
The Narayan family basement was, by the way, unfinished.
“Lavish-shmavish,” my mother whispered as I made for the underground. This was her general opinion on the Bhatts, and on any carpeting or televisions below the earth.
New graduates kicked back in oversize leather recliners. Meena Bhatt sat on the lap of George Warner-Wilson, who had spent high school as one of the only white people among Asians. He was going to Georgia Tech in the fall, where he might continue dwelling at this demographic crossroads.
“Neilo, Neilium, Neilius,” he said through his sinuses, saluting me. I waved. “Your crew’s in the exercise room.” He pointed.
As I opened the door, I heard Meena sigh, with a voice less damned (per my mother’s diorama) than insouciant: “Can someone bring me something that’s not frickin’ Indian food?”
The gym looked unused. Half the walls were mirrors. Folded up against an un-mirrored wall was a treadmill draped in plastic. Mounted in one corner, a television, and beneath it, a video game console. A report of gunfire went off on-screen.
“Fuck you, Osama, this is America!” yelled Kartik Jain, as Aleem Khan’s avatar, a square-jawed white soldier, expired.
Anita sat cross-legged on the floor, examining a glossy magazine. She hovered a pencil above the pages, marking off answers in some quiz.
“Oh, good, Neil! Everyone was wondering where you were,” she said in that brisk voice of hers. Her eyes alighted on me for only an instant. Anita was a bit like a windup toy, capable of spinning fast for a period—laughing easily, tending to social niceties—only to run out later, in private. When it was just the two of us, she’d always been slower, laxer.
Amnesia, I thought viciously. Ignoring me all spring, and now here she was, bending over the magazine so that I spied the top of her newly grown chest.
Now Anita was turning to Aleem, saying, “You got ‘mostly B’s,’ so your future wife is Lauren Bennett . . .” (giggles from Manu at the improbability). “But really, don’t take it too seriously—these are designed for girls.”
Anita loved these games and quizzes—anything that offered a prognostication, anything to help her better articulate her future, no matter how trite. I understood why. A positive result—you’d marry Melanie Cho!—could turn you briefly dreamy with a picture of a life to come. The worst result you could land in one of these divinations? Shruti Patel.
“Who’d you get, Anita?” I asked.
“Jake Gyllenhaal.” She smirked.
“Doesn’t count.”
“That’s what I said,” Isha Arora put in. “No celebrities.”
“Whatever,” Anita said. “It’s not like we know the people we’re going to marry now. Like, what about the whole rest of life? I could meet Jake Gyllenhaal sometime. Or whoever.”
“My parents met when they were sixteen,” Juhi said.
“Yeah, and got an arranged marriage.” Anita gave a little shiver of revulsion, one I’d seen before when she spoke about the parents of Hammond Creek, whose lives she roundly disdained. “Anyway. It’s not like I’m going to marry an Indian guy.”
Everything hung dead in the air for a moment, and then Juhi and Isha started to guffaw, looking around at me and Manu and Kartik and Aleem. The video game was forgotten; a soldier spun on-screen, displaying his machine gun impotently.
“I mean, no offense,” Anita said to the air.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like I’m going to marry—” Manu was saying, when in came Shruti Patel. The room stiffened at the sight of her, standing there in her wiry, frizzy manner. Her presence fractured a party. You were too aware of the sounds of her mouth-breathing, the way her face contorted when she tried to participate. It required emotional labor to include her, and it was simpler to dispense with all the kindergarten rules of engagement and ignore her. That day, Shruti seemed to know more than ever these facts about herself. Those bushy eyebrows, which so often met in the middle of her forehead as she considered a problem in class, raised almost to her hairline and then flattened. She wanted us to believe she had never given us any thought at all, though behind her Mrs. Bhatt was saying, “See, Shruti, I told you all your classmates were hiding out down here.”
Which was when Isha, eyes on Anita, said, “Guess who you’re going to marry, Shroots?” She and Juhi snickered. Manu’s eyes met mine as we both considered intervening. But you had to save your ammo for yourself; the derision could land on you anytime, and even among friends, it had the effect of total destruction. It took so much to gather yourself up into some semblance of a person every morning. A rash of mocking could undo all that in an instant. I sat with my back against the wall and laughed as quietly as possible.
Shruti, always quick in her own defense, quick enough that you could believe she didn’t mind the banter, retorted, “I’m not planning on getting married, Isha. I happened to punch the last guy who asked me, you know.” And if we hadn’t all heard the strain in her rebuttal, seen the whitening of her lips, it might have been funny.
Anita stood, and though she had frequently used Shruti as a punch line, this time she spared a withering glance for Juhi and Isha. She could afford to, from her new position above the rest of us. “Come get some food with me, Shroots,” she said.
I remembered the day Shruti arrived in seventh grade, fresh off the boat. Anita made me cross the cafeteria to sit down with the new girl, who rolled her r’s too hard. The three of us ate our white-bread sandwiches. Kraft singles in mine, peanut butter and banana in Anita’s. Red and green chutney with potatoes in Shruti’s, emitting a distinct spicy smell. “It’s easy to make this yourself,” Anita advised Shruti, opening her triangles to reveal the smush of browning fruit and crunchy Skippy. “But I like mine,” Shruti had said.
We had since distanced ourselves from her. But you could never properly avoid, shun, renounce, extract, or untangle yourself from any other desi in Hammond Creek. You were all a part of the same mass. Some days you trampled on one another. Other days, you hid in the same basement, seekin
g shelter from the same parental storms.
“Yeah,” Isha called as Anita and Shruti made their egress. “Anita, enjoy the food—I mean, you must be so at home, eating this stuff.”
Aleem turned to me. “You hear my middle sister didn’t get into any schools?”
“None?” Manu gasped.
“What’s she going to do?” I had a vision of Shaira packing up the Khans’ station wagon and zooming west, a female Muslim Sal Paradise (I’d recently read—and treasured—On the Road). What if she just went . . . anywhere? Sought out the mad people? “She could do anything.”
“She’s applying again. More safety schools. This time she’s writing her essay on 9/11.”
“Why are you all so gay for college?” Kartik fiddled with the video game controller. School didn’t come easily to him. So, soon enough, we let him redirect the conversation to one of those teenage-boy brain trusts: “You know the secret to getting any in high school?”
We asked him to enlighten us.
“Avoid the Indian girls.”
“Why?” Manu said.
“They’re afraid of dicks. Every one of them. That’s what my brother says.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“Three reasons to not fuck with Indian girls,” Kartik continued. “One: they’re afraid of dicks. Two: they’re hairy, like, gorilla hairy. Three: they bleed a lot.”
“What do you mean bleed a lot?” I said.
“I mean it’s a biological fact that they have the thickest—what’s it called—the thing that breaks when chicks get reamed for the first time.”
“The hymen,” Manu said professorially.
“Right, they’ve got the thickest in the world, so blood everywhere.” He emitted an explosive, diarrheic noise, making fireworks with his hands, puffing cheeks out, spewing air.
“Who’s that girl you debate with?” Aleem asked me. “Wendi Zhao? She’s kind of hot.”
Kartik leaned against the mirror. “Wendi Plow,” he said. Then he added, in case we didn’t get it: “I’d plow Wendi Zhao, all I’m saying.”
“Dude,” Manu said, turning to me, and I cringed, because he was about to do that thing—the male version of that thing Shruti did—where he deepened his voice and tried to access the patois of our generation. “Dude, I bet Anita totally likes you, though.”
“What did I just say?” Kartik moaned.
* * *
• • •
Eventually I got hungry and excused myself. I passed, on the way out of the basement, the sixty-inch television, on which home videos of Meena and Jay streamed. Currently, a little Jay was holding up a piece of construction paper to the camera. It featured a stick figure standing atop a mountain of green rectangles—dollar bills. Below, written in red marker, with a few letters facing adorably in the wrong direction: when i grow up, i want to be . . . rich!
I reached the buffet table in the Bhatts’ emptied three-car garage. Anita’s mother was there, reaching one of her slender arms up to a wire shelf to grab something. I ached to be tall enough that I could reach a shelf she could not. On the table were chaat fixings and mango lassi in a sweaty glass jug and yellow fluffy dhokla and a pile of mini cheese pizzas, in concession to the littler kids’ whitewashed diets.
“Neil!” she said. “Ani’s just gone home. She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Gone home with who?” You couldn’t walk back to our neighborhood from this side of Hammond Creek; you could hardly walk anywhere in Hammond Creek.
“Shruti’s parents decided to leave, so they took her.”
“She gets tired,” I said, thinking of that windup key in Anita’s back slowing, threatening the vigor of her public persona. These days I couldn’t imagine who she was in private, what she dreamt of or loved.
“You haven’t been coming by,” Anjali Auntie said airily. “Are you sick of my food?”
“It’s been busy.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Anita might like some company soon. She’s been busy, too. Here, you want to come help? I lost my best set of extra hands.”
I joined her behind the buffet table and began piling up napkins from the package she had pulled from the shelf. People had mostly come through for their first round of food already, so though the dishes were hot and everything was still laid out, our corner of the party was quiet. From inside, high-pitched Hindi music sounded, and I knew some auntie would try to get everyone to dance and some uncle would give a speech about Meena’s and Jay’s futures and then the party would end and we, the non-Meenas and non-Jays, would go home to begin our summers of striving to become Jays and not Meenas. I would be spending my break up to my ears in debate research and, at my father’s behest, suffering through supplemental Kumon math courses. Thinking about this made me want to linger in the garage, to postpone the coming months.
“Have some dhokla,” Anita’s mother said, placing one on a Styrofoam plate. She drizzled it with tamarind and coriander chutneys. It melted into my gums.
“It’s good,” I said.
“I offered to make ice cream, but they said no. I should have said kulfi. Should have said, ‘I’ll make some saffron or pista kulfi,’ and then the Bhatts would have said oh yes oh yes please.” She said that last bit in a put-on accent. Anita’s mother did not speak like the fobbier parents; her vowels were wide and practiced, and she did not strike her consonants too hard. Her voice was all mongrel, almost English on some words (you knooow, she’d say in a pinched pitch) and mimicked American drawl and zing on others (you guuyz). My parents referred to this accent as “pseud.” They had kept their r’s and v’s and w’s just the way they had been when they crossed the ocean.
“Can you start boxing up leftovers? I have to get the cake from their basement and bring it upstairs for after their toasts. Know what? They made me put those kids’ faces on it.” She rolled her eyes. “These people.”
Someone with more sense of society than I possessed at the time might have called her bitter. But to me, Anjali Dayal was a minor thrill. She laughed at those who most annoyed me—the ones who so scorned her—and in that way, she debilitated them a little.
When the party wound down and the twins’ face-cake had been consumed—I got the corner of Meena’s kajal-lined eye—my family found me in the garage, still putting away accoutrements. Anita’s mother was carrying containers into the house so the Bhatts could freeze leftovers. My mother waved hello.
“Congratulations,” she said, a bit icily. “You and Pranesh must be very happy.”
Anjali Auntie blinked. “Pranesh?”
“About Anita’s new school.”
“Oh, yes,” Anita’s mother said, her voice suddenly at a steeper pitch. “Yes, I—we’re very excited—you know Pranesh, always so focused on her academics, good IIT man.”
“How nice that Anita has his brains,” my mother said. “We haven’t seen him in quite a while, isn’t it? Tell him Raghu and I say hello.” Before Anjali Auntie could reply, my mother turned to me. “Neil, come. We have to go to the Nagarajans’.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Another party?”
Prachi gave me a look as if to say, I’ve already tried. But I had something in me at that moment, something copped from the careless way in which Meena Bhatt had been draped over George Warner-Wilson, some absorbed averageness.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to another party. No one will miss me. I’m not going.”
My parents were, for a moment, rendered immobile; we rarely bristled against them. They must have felt dread, sensing the emergence of adolescent rebellion, must have feared it, in the wake of Prachi’s Spring Fling missteps. But I was thinking about the constrictions of the rest of the summer, of all I was supposed to achieve or become in the next three months, and I felt choked, and I reacted. I threw a finger in Anita’s mother’s direction. “Auntie ca
n take me.”
“Neeraj,” my mother hissed, using my damned real name. “Anjali Auntie might have things to do. Come.”
“Auntie,” I said, turning to face Anita’s mother, who was feigning deafness. She glanced back, her arms piled high with paper plates. “Would you mind bringing me home? I can help unload the car and stuff, since Anita’s not feeling good.”
She seemed to want to resist intervening, but I mouthed please, as though I was talking to one of my own friends, and she sighed.
“I can do it, Ramya,” she said. “It’s okay.”
My parents appeared torn, afraid to display disharmony, and Prachi glared, seeming to feel she couldn’t tag along since it had been my brilliant escape plan. And so they left. I packed up Anita’s mother’s Toyota with her, and answered her questions about debate, back in a Neil-and-adult script that excised me from the situation and concerned itself only with the exoskeleton of a human, teenage boy. When that had run out, silence filled the car and I watched the suburbs flail by—in the distance, the flank of I-285, that perimeter, and somewhere beyond, a city. From here, all I could discern were the churn of asphalt and concrete, a single white cross piercing the sky, and the flash of a few green highway signs.
At the Dayals’, I hauled in the leftovers the Bhatts had told Anita’s mother to take back for herself. The house was silent. “Anita sleeping?” I asked, and her mother said she must be. I went back to the car to grab the last bags, a couple of grainy cloth totes in the front passenger’s seat. Anjali Auntie arrived before me, brushing past so quickly I startled.
“I’ve got those. Thanks, Neil,” she said brusquely, reaching out to hoist them onto her shoulder. She stood in her driveway, watching me expectantly, framed by their house—mustard yellow with a red roof, comical in our neighborhood of brown bricks and gray stucco.
I’d made it home when I realized I didn’t have my Swiss Army knife on me. I’d taken it out while loading the trays into the Dayals’ refrigerator, because the Saran-wrapped dish of dhokla needed separating into two containers. I’d slashed the plastic open and put the knife—and the key chain it was attached to—on the counter. I had been distracted, wondering if Anita could hear me in her kitchen.
Gold Diggers Page 3
