Samosas and mango chutney for you ladies, made by yours truly.” Kavita handed Darya a plate covered with a dishcloth. “I told Shenil that if he doesn’t learn to appreciate the virtues of his domestic goddess soon, he’ll find himself with a ghost of a wife in search of a bon vivant Clark Gable for romantic times tout de suite!”
Darya let Kavita in and led her to the dining room. It was their third math club since Darya had started her spreadsheet class at the library. In class, she and Sam sat next to each other. They’d talked a little. She’d learned that he lived on his own, had no kids, and that he liked fly-fishing. She had no idea what fly-fishing was. Catching fish with flies? He was so . . . American. They chatted before class and sometimes after, and during “break” they went outside while others smoked or ran to get coffee from Starbucks. Darya and Sam never got coffee. They just stood together under the starless New York sky, and Sam told her about his students. He taught guitar. Not violin. Not piano. Not Persian sitar, which would’ve been really impressive. But guitar. That wasn’t a “high-class” instrument in Darya’s book.
“I do believe you have wafted to the fjords!” Kavita said in her high voice. “My dear, what has gotten into you? What puts you so deep in thought, darling?”
“Oh, nothing! I love your samosas, you know that!”
Kavita arched her overly tweezed eyebrows. “I do believe, Darya dear, that our guitar hero with whom you are so besotted has convoluted your mind and gotten you in a tizzy. What tomfoolery! Who would’ve ever supposed that math-obsessed Darya would find her heart flying out to a children’s music instructor, ey? The world does not cease to amaze moi!”
Darya had confided in Kavita and Yung-Ja over equations and samosas and dolmeh. Confided wasn’t the word. She’d shared. Wasn’t that the expression? So American, so Sam. They had asked her about her new class, and she had answered. Only unlike Parviz, who believed that her fascination with the class lay in mathematical precision and tennis balls on chair legs, Kavita and Yung-Ja had caught on that there was a certain someone whom she liked to sit next to and read her xeroxed handouts with. She’d insisted that it was nothing more than that, but Kavita and Yung-Ja had chuckled and giggled and snorted and wheezed. They were convinced that Darya was “besotted,” as Kavita called it, with American Sam.
Well, they were wrong. It was nothing like that. She loved her husband. Sam was just different, that was all. A “laid-back” person who was always “mellow.” Darya didn’t know too many mellow people in the Persian community.
The bell rang. It was Yung-Ja, holding a Tupperware dish filled with kimbap, or “Korean sushi” as Yung-Ja described it. Over the years, math camp had turned into math camp with food. Which none of them minded because they all loved to show off the cuisine of their homelands and, more than that, they all loved to eat.
“It’s the early onset of menopause that has me all aflutter,” Kavita said. “My face is burning half the time, and sometimes I truly feel as though smoke is emanating from my ears. When Shenil smirks at me, I am tempted to take my hand and slap the side of his face for no reason whatsoever other than this rise of feminine hormones that plagues us all at this stage in the wild charade that we call life.”
Darya sighed. Yung-Ja looked confused. Yung-Ja’s English, even after years in the United States, was still not that strong, and half the time she could barely understand Kavita. Darya was used to Kavita’s unique excessive verbiage, her British English sprinkled with French, her constant references to her husband as some kind of menace when he was actually a charming, sweet biology professor and hardly thoughtless. Kavita loved to joke about cheating on Shenil, although her only points of reference seemed to be Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, and Spencer Tracy. Kavita now focused on who American Sam looked like.
“Humphrey Bogart?” Kavita asked eagerly.
“Who’s that?” Yung-Ja said.
“No, no. Not Bogart.”
“Jack Lemmon?” Kavita quizzed.
“No. I saw a movie from the video store the other day—wait, what was it called? Crimes of the Heart. He looks like the man in that movie. Sam Shepard, I think is his name,” Darya said.
“Who’s that?” Yung-Ja asked.
“Never mind,” Darya said. “Let’s just do math.”
As Darya placed the samosas and kimbap on the table and got out the math workbooks, she wished that she had never told Kavita and Yung-Ja about Sam because they were making it out to be more than it was, when it was actually nothing. But part of her also enjoyed having friends to chat with about something so silly. She couldn’t tell Parviz, of course, because he might think it was actually something, when it wasn’t, and she couldn’t tell Mina or her sons because, well, that just wouldn’t be right. So, grateful for the company of Kavita and Yung-Ja, and for the equations they were about to tackle, and for the smell of spicy samosas and sweet kimbap, Darya sharpened her pencil and asked her friends to take a seat.
FOR A SOLID FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, they lost themselves in math. That was their rule. To stick to the project at hand for forty-five minutes, no veering, no break. They were allowed to talk, but only about the math problems. No one could go off topic. And they stuck to that rule strictly because all three of them loved rules, and all three of them had deep disrespect for people who broke them. That’s what brought them together. Strong convictions about math and life. Love of numbers. A need to solve. They scribbled and thought and broke things down and built them back up. They showed their work and argued about how to arrive at the answer. Darya had even invested in a big white dry-erase board. She loved the squeak of the markers on the board, loved seeing how the solutions all made sense. When they were finished with their work for the day and reemerged into the real world around them, it was as though they had been swimming underwater and were now coming up for air.
And they were starving. The samosas had an excellent kick, the kimbap hit the spot, and Darya’s handmade baklava was the perfect accompaniment to tea. When Darya hosted, math camp always ended with tea. She had even succeeded in stopping Kavita from putting milk in hers.
After math, they were allowed to talk about anything. Usually, they talked about their children and husbands. Occasionally, they discussed politics. Darya and Yung-Ja competed over who had suffered most in the twentieth century: Iranians or Koreans. Whenever Darya brought up dictatorship, military coup, torture, war, Yung-Ja said, “Ya. Korea had that.” To which Kavita would say, “Yes, but do you two ladies have a country that has been artificially manipulated into two based on nothing more than the false gods of organized religion and the fallacies of fatuous farts in office who wish to portend great power and prestige?”
And then Yung-Ja would be silent because she didn’t understand what Kavita had just said, and Darya would get up to open a window because when Kavita discussed “The Division,” as she called the topic of India and Pakistan, she got overly animated and menopausey and before long would be dripping with sweat and asking Darya for a glass of water and a wet washcloth for her forehead.
Today’s math camp ended with a short discussion about their respective children’s inability to truly understand the gifts of America and how they were all so sheltered in New York because they knew neither war nor bombs nor true poverty. “These children of ours do not know the pain of prolonged prostration under the piddling paucities of pauper politicians turned princes,” Kavita said.
That was another thing. Sometimes the combination of calculus and menopause made Kavita extra alliterative. Made her “mull over the messy and malleable morphings required to manage magnificent mathematical mountains from mere marginal molehills.”
At the end of math camp they did the dishes together. After that, Yung-Ja, who was the best at calculus, reviewed the best way to answer some of the harder equations. Then Yung-Ja took her Tupperware dish, Kavita took her empty samosa plate, and Darya kissed her friends good-bye.
Whenever math camp was over, Darya felt a certain emptiness. She loved these afternoons with her friends. She loved being in her dining room with two women who, unlike most Americans (and this included Sam), knew a thing or two about war and dictatorship and “the pain of prolonged prostration.”