When I was younger, I consisted of little but my parents’ ambitions for who I was to become. But by the end of ninth grade, all I wanted for myself was a date to the Spring Fling dance. A hot one. The dream was granted, by chance. Finding myself unaccompanied in the final days before the event, I begged my neighbor and childhood best friend, Anita Dayal, to take pity on me. Fine; I could be her “escort,” she allowed, putting the word in air quotes as we readied for that rather fateful night.
Before the dance, I was set to meet Anita and our crowd at the mall. We’d take photos outside the TCBY, all trussed up in our Macy’s finery. My mother deposited me on a median in the middle of the parking lot, early, then sped off to my older sister’s picture party. Prachi had been nominated for Spring Fling court and was living a more documentable high school life. Prachi, the Narayan child who managed to be attractive and intelligent and deferential to our cultural traditions to boot, was headed to Duke, we were all sure. Earlier that day, cheeks blooming with pride, my mother had fastened a favorite, slim gold chain of her own, gifted by our ajji, around Prachi’s neck. My sister kissed my mother’s cheek like an old, elegant woman and thanked her, while I waited to be dropped into my own small life, in an ill-fitting suit.
I waited on the median, growing anxious. There was no sign of Anita. I paced and fidgeted, watching the others pin corsages and boutonnieres, and readied myself, after fifteen minutes, then twenty, to give up and trek down one of those horrible sidewalk-less stretches of great Georgia boulevard back home to Hammond Creek. I was already turning away from the fuss, attempting to loosen my father’s congealed-blood-colored tie, when Anita and her mother screeched up in their little brown Toyota. I knocked my knee against the concrete dolphin-adorned fountain and shouted, “Shit!”
A wall of mostly Indian and Asian parents regarded me with a collective glare. Yes, I consisted largely of my parents’ ambitions, but some part of me was also made of the ogling, boggling eyeballs of the rest of our community.
And another part—a significant part—was Anita, who was now stepping out of the double-parked car, smiling blithely. Anita had bright eyes: muddy brown, lively, roving, liable to flick over you quickly, as though there was something else more interesting or urgent in your vicinity. It made you want to stand squarely in her line of vision to ask for her full attention; when you got it, it felt like the warming of the late-morning summer sun.
“Neil, I told her we were late, but stubborn girl wouldn’t listen!” Anita’s mother, Anjali Auntie, said. She was dressed like she planned to attend the dance herself, in a bright green sheath framing her breasts, a dress that reminded me she was unlike other mothers.
“I got invited to Melanie’s picture party first,” Anita said. “I IM’d you!”
A betrayal: cherry-cheeked and universally admired Melanie Cho had laughed off my invitation to the dance weeks before, leaving me itchy with self-loathing. Anita’s grin—the grin of the newly anointed popular—matched the crystal studding along her bright blue bodice.
Anjali Auntie positioned us shoulder-to-shoulder. Anita linked her arm through mine so the insides of our elbows kissed. This was how we’d been posed in Diwali photos as kids, when our families got together and Prachi dressed Anita up as Sita and assembled a paper crown for me, her spouse, Lord Rama. The posture suddenly seemed foreign.
There was no time to be angry. I smiled. In the photos, I am washed out. She, in electric blue and crystal, beams, her eyes settled somewhere just above the camera lens.
The dance: People were learning to inch closer to each other, and some girls didn’t mind the short guys’ heads bobbing below theirs, and some guys didn’t mind the girls with braces. The teachers on chaperone duty patrolled the bathrooms, where kids who were not my crowd might engage in “nonsense,” as my mother put it, nonsense that was inaccessible to me at the time.
As with any other event at Okefenokee High School, the room was semi-segregated. A handful of white kids mosh-pitted in the middle of the party; others made their way to those nonsense-filled bathrooms or the parking lot. The good-looking Indian and Asian girls hung by the long banquet table. The debate, math Olympiad, robotics, etc., Indians and Asians were the likeliest ones to be bopping around, because though none of us could really move, the dancing offered a prescribed activity for the evening, a script. I depended on scripts in those days, before anyone asked me to invent my own life.
I followed Anita onto the floor, expecting to join the circle dancing around Hari Chopra, who was attempting to prove his B-boy abilities to the Kanye song that was ubiquitous that year, flicking a finger across an imaginary flat-brimmed hat in the warm-up. But Anita veered toward a cluster of girls that included my sister and Melanie. I stopped at the edge of the squeaky gym floor in my dress shoes, which were vast, boatlike, slippery, and made me sweat.
“Anita,” I whispered frantically, but she mouthed, Just a second, and darted into the girl cluster—as though she was crossing the finish line in a race I hadn’t known she was running. She’d grown spritely and uncatchable lately, always squinting at a secretly looming horizon line.
I didn’t see my date again until the end of the evening, let alone dance with her. The ghost of her touch on me—the inside of her elbow against the inside of mine—lingered on my skin. I felt insubstantial.
I spent the party with Kartik Jain and Manu Padmanaban and Aleem Khan and Jack Kim and Abel Mengesha (who was Ethiopian but clocked most of his time with the Asians), avoiding Shruti Patel, with whom Manu had agreed to come, and whose electrified bristly hair and eager gopher teeth discomfited us. Jack was counting the girls he’d made out with at computer camp the year before, in an effort to overcome the fact that he was here tonight alone. I had been at that camp and knew the single kiss he’d received was dumb luck, the result of a double dog dare.
I was supposed to return home with Anita and her mother at ten—their house sat catty-corner from ours in the Hammond Creek cul-de-sac. Ten; I only had to last till ten. I watched the egg-shaped clock on the wall above the banquet table tick. I drank the sugary punch; it stained my tongue Coke-can red.
Just before nine thirty, people began to gather for the announcement of Spring Fling royalty. At the swell of a tantalizingly sex-infused slow song—Crash into me, and I come into you—I went looking for Anita. I wound through the gym, all elbows and too-long hair that curtained the top of my vision. No Anita. No Prachi. I sidestepped out of the gym and down the hallway carpeted in green and gray—the swampy colors of Okefenokee High School. It occurred to me that I might find the girls in the parking lot. The parking lot, full of nonsense.
I pushed open the first door I encountered, missing, in my annoyance, the sign that read emergency exit. The alarm wailed. People’s hands flew to their ears, and heads turned toward me. A white guy gripped a handle of some clear verboten substance. Someone cursed. Someone shrieked. Someone laughed. I stood mute as they scattered. When Coach Jameson came striding outside to bust up the party, he noted my presence, held up a large, meaty finger, and said, “Wait there.” I froze, darkened by the shadows behind the gym.
Girls were crying. Not Anita, I don’t think. It took a lot to make her cry. From somewhere came my sister’s voice, in the buttery lilt that never failed her: “Coach, I just came out here to find my necklace, it fell off, it’s my grandmother’s, you know I don’t drink—”
“I’ll ask, missy,” he said. “What were you doing to cause you to, ahem, lose a necklace?”
I shuddered and didn’t catch Prachi’s reply because Anita stood behind me, propping open the door whose alarm had at last been killed.
“Neil, get inside, you’ll get in trouble,” she whispered. Her glossed lips quivered and for a moment I was suffused with a premonition that something phantom wished to be spoken aloud but that no one—not me, not the people around me—could find the language. Anita clamped her mouth shut and blinked very fast, as though beating back that ghost, and there we remained, still rooted to our finite asphalt selves.
I said Prachi was out there and it didn’t sound good. “The coach already saw me,” I added. “I’m not supposed to move.”
“Are you kidding me, Neil?” Anita was framed in the doorway as the hallway light streamed out around her. “My mom’s waiting, like, right now.”
“I wasn’t drinking.”
“I know you weren’t drinking,” she said. No, more like—“I know you weren’t drinking.” I wondered how she had come by all her new wisdom, how she had grown so fast, so far ahead of me. “Did you set off the alarm?”
I nodded miserably.
“Dude,” Anita said. “People go out the food delivery door.” She pointed. She spoke rapidly, percussively, with a bravado that might have masked her nerves at being so near trouble.
“C’mon, kid.” Coach Jameson led his small troupe of prisoners inside, beckoning me with that meaty finger, holding the alcohol pinched in his other hand like a used rag. The captured students followed, heads bowed—two white guys I didn’t know, Katie Zhang, Mark Ha, Prachi. My sister mouthed, What? at me while Coach Jameson looked Anita up and down and added, “And you, rubbernecker.”
“I just got here, Coach,” Anita said. Her voice caught in her throat before she switched to a clipped tone like the sort my mother used on work calls. I could feel her straining to be someone with whom she had not yet become fully acquainted. “Actually, we were trying to leave. My mom’s outside, you can ask her—”
“Y’all well know not to be in the parking lot.”
“I just got worried, see,” she tried again, in a slightly sharper pitch. “Because—”
“What’s your name?”
“Anita Dayal.”
“And yours?”
“Neil Narayan.”
He repeated. “Anita Dial. Neil Nay-rannan. Y’all’re freshmen?”
“Yes, sir,” Anita said.
“Stay away from this crowd,” Coach Jameson said grandly. “Getcherselves home.”
He escorted his captured cool kids past us. The scent of our innocence—or mine, anyway—was strong enough to overpower everything else.
Some kids my age drank alcohol, but I was afraid to, not because of the things the health class teacher cautioned would happen to your body and brain but because of my mother’s warnings that engaging in nonsense could abort all you were supposed to become, could in fact abort the very American dream we were duty-bound to live out. Take the case of Ravi Reddy, whose parents had shipped him to Hyderabad to finish high school upon smelling beer on his breath. No one had heard from Ravi since, but my mother had hinted that she and my father were not above taking a leaf out of the Reddys’ book.
I would not have wished such a fate on anyone, let alone my sister, so I said to Anita, “Can you get your mom to wait two minutes? My sister lost our grandmother’s gold necklace, and she’ll be even more screwed.”
Anita bit her lip. Something shifted in her posture, brought her into a new alertness, like when she was asked a question to which she knew the answer in algebra.
“Oh.” She retrieved her pink flip phone from her fake-pearl-encrusted purse. “Mama. Coming. But Prachi lost this gold necklace, and Neil—” A pause. She hung up. “My mom says be quick.”
“My sister doesn’t drink.” I held up a flashlight that connected to my Swiss Army knife and house keys. Nothing showed itself on the asphalt, just the black Georgia ground beneath the black Georgia sky. Puddles of yellow lamppost light revealed the riddled texture of the parking lot. There were no secrets here; in this stupid place, what you saw was what you got.
“All of them drink,” Anita said, peeling away. “You can’t run in that crowd and not drink.” Did Anita drink? A pang in my chest—for wasn’t she now in that crowd? “She ditched with Hudson Long because she knew she was going to lose Spring Fling Princess.”
“She lost?” I sighed. Even if Prachi escaped Coach Jameson, she’d be smarting from defeat. I didn’t fancy enduring one of her performances of grief, wherein she refused to make eye contact with us for days, or ensured I overheard her vomiting in the bathroom. “See anything?”
“Nah,” Anita called, a little nasally.
I cast my light beneath the dumpster, knelt and got a smashing stench of cafeteria chili and old bananas and a number of other smells both animal and human. I covered my nose, stood, ran the beam in a long line like a searchlight hunting a fugitive in desolate farmland, sweep, one, sweep, two, but nothing on the asphalt glinted like gold. “Nothing?” I called.
“Nothing.” Anita was kneeling by the wretched emergency exit door and reaching for something on the ground.
“Is that it?” I half jogged over.
“Nope,” she said. “It’s not here.”
I was right next to her now. “You didn’t find it?”
“I just said I didn’t. My mom’s gonna be mad; we have to go.”
“Your mom’s never mad.” I waved my hand dismissively. Anjali Auntie was different—a given—and Anita could not believably invoke her as a threat. “What’s in your hand, Anita?”
For her fist was clenched, her knuckles bloodless. She looked ready to slug me.
Her jaw tightened. Then she growled through her teeth, as though she’d been trying to tell me something and I’d been too dense to hear it. “Neil, you are such a freak! Prachi lost her necklace because she’s drunk and making out with Hudson Long, and I’ve got enough to worry about without helping you fix her shit.”
She opened the door and stomped over the green-and-gray carpeting. I followed. I couldn’t do anything but slide into the back of the Toyota. Anita and her mother sat in wooden silence up front. Anjali Auntie’s eyes landed searchingly on mine in the rearview mirror a few times before settling sidelong on her daughter’s taut expression. Her own face remained impassive; I could not tell if she was surprised at the coldness between Anita and me.
Back home, in my room, I wrenched myself free from my father’s tie and tried to fall asleep as the landline rang and heels sounded below me—Prachi coming home, Prachi in trouble, my parents’ voices rising. (“Who were you with?” “Open your mouth, show your breath!” “Where’s Ajji’s—?” “Ayyayyo!” “You’ll jolly well tell us—!”) Prachi, the golden child, fallen from grace, some essential blessing lifted from her.
I dreamt in shards, and I encountered Anita in my sleep—an Anita who had Melanie Cho’s red lips and was wearing a bright green dress like her mother’s, an Anita who removed said dress to display the body of one of the porn stars I had become familiar with, which meant a white body, ivory skin, and dime-sized, pert nipples. I woke up and found that my boxers were wet. In the bathroom, I tried to scrub away all that had happened that night.
I sat at the dinner table one evening the following week, poking my bisibelebath around with my fork, listening as Prachi stood in the kitchen and called our grandmother to issue a formal apology with regard to the necklace. (“Ajji!” Prachi overarticulated, glancing pleadingly at our mother, who had mandated the call. She wound her fingers through the cream-colored curlicue phone cord. “Ajji, it’s Prachi! Can you put your hearing aid in?”) I looked up to see my father poking his food around, just like I was. My mother furiously scrubbed the white Formica countertop, which was irrevocably stained with splatters of hot oil and masalas, and glowered at Prachi.
In our house, it took only one gesture in the direction of India to compound an already grave situation. The accusation was that Prachi had flouted her responsibility as a daughter, a sister, a former Spring Fling princess, and yes, a granddaughter, too. She had imperiled the very nature of the sacrifice of crossing oceans. My parents relished that phrase, “crossing oceans,” as though they had arrived in steerage class aboard a steamship instead of by 747, carrying two massive black suitcases with pink ribbons tied around the handles and the surname narayan written in blocky letters on masking tape along the side.
My father, miffed, gestured at the two empty plates on my mother’s Walmart imitation-Indian paisley-print place mats. The bisibelebath and reheated aloo sabzi were all growing cold. I reached for some potato, but my father shook his head, and I got the sense that poking food around was the way we were going to ride this out, so back I went to that.
As Prachi continued her breathless apology, I looked out the breakfast room window, toward the Dayals’. Anita might step outside at any minute.
“It just got lost at a dance, Ajji,” Prachi was saying. “It was a very bad mistake, and I’m really sorry about it.” I could picture widowed Ajji on the other end of the line in Mysore, her long graying hair pinned against the nape of her neck, puzzled, perhaps unable even to remember what had been lost—she was forgetful these days—or if she did remember, thinking: Why are you calling me about a lost necklace when bigger things were lost in the move to America? Prachi signed off. “Love you, Ajji, see you soon. No, I don’t know when, but soon, right.”
We could now start dinner, which had gone completely cold.
Heroically, Prachi began to talk about the summer’s pageant as she heated everyone’s plates. My sister planned to be Miss Teen India Georgia and then Miss Teen India Southeastern Region, and then Miss Teen India USA. The prior November, she had placed second in the region, narrowly missing out on a spot at nationals, and was a favorite going forward. Prachi truly believed she was on her way to solving the riddle at the heart of the MTI: What does it mean to be both Indian and, like, American? One more shot at the tiara and she’d have the answer at last. She would communicate all this, and what it signified thematically and emotionally, on the Duke application she was to spend the summer filling out.
“Who’s Miss Teen India-India?” I inquired.
She glared. “The point is to empower Indian girls in America. Incidentally, your girlfriend’s going in for it, too.”
My parents’ eyebrows furrowed. They could not comprehend the utter impossibility of Prachi’s accusation that I, at five feet five, as brown, as me, could have a girlfriend.
“Who?” I said. My fist tightened around my fork.
“Anita Dayal.” Prachi sniffed. “She’s trying for MTI, too. Not that she’s ever been interested in exploring Indian American identity before.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, feeling a revolting feminine blush beneath my skin. “We’re barely friends anymore.”
“What happened?” This was my mother, surveying Prachi and me.
I twitched, looking not at my family but at what I thought was a figure stealing up the driveway of the Dayal house. I blinked; she, or it, was gone, or had never been.
“She’s a little climber,” Prachi said, accounting for my silence.
And my mother said, forgetting her anger for a moment, “Just like her mother.”
My father remained stoic the rest of the meal, but my mother thawed; that banter reunited the Narayan women. Gossip is to my mother what South Indian classical music is to my father—the virtuosic amalgamation of years of a community’s becoming. For as long as I can remember she has been a connoisseur of gossip, of the sounds it makes, the musicality, the overall gestalt, which is one that causes her to use the pronouns us and them, and the phrases these people and our people and such people, with confidence. One might call her ears—which are extremely large and loose lobed, with openings to the ear canal the size of a thumbnail—the place where the Indian immigrant public sphere gathers. In between wax and bristly dark hairs, the diaspora unscatters and lodges itself in my mother’s oversize hearing organs.
When I was younger, Anita and Anjali Dayal were held in perfectly fine favor at my house. Our two families mingled pleasantly; as a latchkey kid whose mother was less prolific in the kitchen than Anita’s, I often let myself into the Dayals’ house to rummage around in the fridge. The key beneath the watering can behind the azalea bush was mine to use. Our parents—the four brown adults in a largely white subdivision—collaborated to create a simulacrum of India in a reliably red Georgia county.
But over the past few years, Anita’s father, Pranesh Uncle, had grown conspicuously absent, discomfiting the other desi mothers. No one pronounced words like separation; it was stated only that Anita’s father was working in California, where he had founded a company with his classmates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. The official reason for Anita’s father living across the country while her mother remained in Hammond Creek was the daughter, and a desire not to interrupt her schooling. Which is why my mother was overtaken by a frisson of judgment when I came home at the end of May, weeks after Spring Fling, with the news that Anita would be leaving Okefenokee and, in fact, interrupting her schooling.
“California?” my mother said.
I could almost see the RE/MAX realty signs in her eyes as she dreamt of an open house, overdone chewy sugar cookies and fruit punch and information on the neighborhood’s property values. My mother adored open houses, their mild festivity, the red balloons, the way the houses were held in presentational limbo—vacuumed carpets and potpourri in the powder rooms—until the owners’ current unsatisfactory life had been traded out for a better one.
“To Buckhead,” I said.
Anita had been accepted to a posh private school in Buckhead, one of the neighborhoods inside the perimeter. The perimeter, referring to Interstate 285, which neatly locked the suburbs away from Atlanta proper, was one of those things to which my mother sometimes mystically referred while in that open house headspace—a state of mind that I swear caused her very large ears to droop and soften, implying that she was listening to something otherworldly, something more splendid than terrestrial gossip. Someday, we might live inside the perimeter, she suggested. My father scoffed; in Hammond Creek we were close to my parents’ jobs, good public schools, and other immigrants. Inside the perimeter, he grumbled, were crumbling houses that white people would spend a million bucks on because they seemed Margaret Mitchellian.
Anita’s destination was a school I’d faced at debate tournaments a few times. They never failed to intimidate, showing up with four coaches from the best college teams huddled around them. They strutted about in blazers and ties and pearls and heels, while we mopped our sweat with our swamp-green Okefenokee High School T-shirts. Her school sat near the long low lawns of country clubs and the governor’s mansion. Its female students would be debutantes, and its alumni seemed—from my position outside its brick-winged gates, anyway—to waltz into Harvard and Princeton and Vanderbilt and Georgetown.
It made sense. Anita’s only plan in life, as long as I had known her, was to attend Harvard. What followed Harvard was a vaguely crimson-tinged blankness; Harvard was sufficient, would propel her into some life thereafter. The first step in achieving that life seemed to be leaving Hammond Creek, Okefenokee High School, and me.
Anita and I had been avoiding each other since Spring Fling. She now traipsed around the hallways ensconced in Melanie Cho’s pack, making it impossible for me to catch her eye. But I had not forgotten the dance. I wondered if by ditching me—or by stealing a queen bee’s coveted piece of jewelry?—she had completed some hazing ritual. I sought signs of change in her. Did her hair shine more than it used to? Had she grown lankier? I looked for her on AOL Instant Messenger, one of our regular sites of communication. She logged on only once. I began to type: wtf where u been? Then I deleted it, trying the softer, r u mad @ me? I cleared that out, too: sup, I wrote. Then came the heartrending sound of a door slamming. She’d signed off. Her avatar never reappeared. I guessed she’d blocked me.
So I did not learn the news about the school from her, but from Shruti Patel. Shruti was in all the gifted classes, and already taking Advanced Placement Physics as a freshman. She told me during Honors American History, the only class where she did not regard me as a flailing moron. (I liked English and history and scraped by in most other subjects.)
“How do you know?” I whispered as Mr. Finkler handed back the previous week’s tests.
“Ninety-four, good job,” Shruti said. Mr. Finkler had written the number in red and circled it twice on my blue book. She waved hers.
“Ninety-eight,” I conceded.
“Her mother told my mother at Kroger,” Shruti said. “I didn’t even know she was applying to private schools.”
I shrugged.
“You didn’t know either?” Shruti pressed. “Aren’t you two, like . . .” And she pulled an appalling face, aping something she had seen on television, a knowing-teenage-gossip face.
Desperate to put a stop to the way she was pouting her lips and raising her eyebrows, I said, “No, definitely not,” and it was true—we weren’t, like, anything. Not anymore.
Anjali Dayal did not work in the way my parents worked. My mother was a financial analyst. My father spent eight hours a day on his feet, in a white coat behind the counter of a Publix pharmacy. He had suffered years of study for that job, in India and in America, but in my eyes as a kid, I had a father who “worked at the grocery store.” When I said that once in front of my mother, I was swatted on the butt and duly corrected. My father was a pharmacist. The word clunked in my mouth—but never again would I say he worked at the grocery store.
Anita’s mother, on the other hand, would tell you she ran a “catering business.” She filled in for working Indian mothers who wanted to serve their families proper home-cooked fare but who lacked either the time or the skill in the kitchen to do so. Occasionally she would do a graduation or birthday party, but for the most part, Anjali Auntie answered calls placed in response to flyers she hung up at the temple and in Little India strip malls—those two-story off-the-highway structures housing Kumon math tutoring centers and restaurants called Haveli or Bombay Palace or Taste of India and threading salons where women pruned themselves of excess ethnic hair. She drove all over the suburbs and did much of her cooking in other people’s homes, as though the women hiring her wished to think of her the way they thought of the help back in India. To admit that the prettier, younger mother was the “proprietor of a small business” would have been strange and modern and white.
Surely Anjali Auntie did not need this job—based on everything my mother said about Pranesh Uncle, money was flowing from the West Coast. But she did it nonetheless, perhaps because she was afraid, herself, of being left to do godknowswhat.
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, seeking 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 can 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.
I crossed the cul-de-sac again and knocked. The red door was framed by a few petal-shaped pieces of glass, as though the door were the pistil and the rest of the house the flower’s bloom. I didn’t see any light filtering through. But they couldn’t have departed so quickly. I knocked again, louder; no answer. I padded behind the out-of-bloom azalea bush, lifted the red watering can, and retrieved the spare key. In the foyer, I didn’t remove my shoes, only kicked any spare summer dust from their soles against the doorframe.
“Just gonna get my knife,” I said to no one. Anita’s house opened wide in either direction: to the left, her mother’s room, and a living room filled with formal stuffed chairs. To the right, a dining room with a long wooden table and a mahogany cabinet stocking china. Farther along, the lived-in parts of the place: the kitchen, a den with a plaid sofa and an unobtrusive television.
I made for the kitchen. But as I passed that china cabinet, I noticed an open door to my left, in the middle of the hallway—the door to the basement, which I knew to be unfinished, like mine, just cement floors and boxes and storage. Through the open door, light—the only light I could see anywhere in the house—was flowing.
I took one step toward the door, edged it further open with my toe, and listened for voices. All that came was a peculiar whirring and glugging. Something like a drill seemed to be buzzing, and I heard it the way you hear a dentist’s tools in your mouth: in your temples, in the space below your eyes. The sound lifted. Footsteps were coming up the stairs. I hurried to the kitchen and located, on the countertop, in the darkness, my knife.
The lights flipped on. Behind me were Anita and her mother. The door to the basement was flung open behind them. Anita looked perfectly vital, completely well. From Anjali Auntie’s arm dangled one of those totes that she had kept me from grabbing. In Anita’s hand was a glass that at first I thought was empty. But I looked again and saw that the bottom of it was filled with a kind of sunlight-yellow sediment. Some bubbles popped in a column. Anita quickly drained the sediment. That otherworldly yellow was gone through her lips in a moment.
“You look healthy,” I said. I held up my Swiss Army knife. “I left this.”
Anita was very still. Her breath seemed to be coming intentionally, as her chest rose and fell slowly.
The open basement door swung in my peripheral vision. Anjali Auntie took a step back and kicked it shut with her toe. She and Anita glanced at each other for the briefest moment. They really were starting to look alike. Anita was becoming a new creature and her mother had never looked much like a mother, anyway—no wrinkles, no crow’s feet, not a sprinkling of silver or gray in her hair. As Anita grew taller, grew breasts, it was as though they were not getting old and older but moving toward a prearranged meeting point in the middle.
“I was just making Ani some of the stuff my mother used to make me when I was sick,” Anjali Auntie said. I looked again at the glass. “You know turmeric milk, right, Neil?” she said.
I knew it: a horrible dark yellow thing my mother brewed whenever someone came down with a cold or cough or stomach bug. I knew turmeric milk, and I knew it had never and would never look like what had been in Anita’s glass just then.
“Sure,” I said. “Guess it perked you right up.”
I lifted my knife in the air again to remind them I had gotten what I came for, and walked to the door without saying anything else. I spent the rest of that night home, alone, attempting to wend my way through the gilded sentences of The Great Gatsby—my summer reading book—but instead staring out my bedroom window at Anita’s front lawn, where there was no seductively blinking green light like Daisy Buchanan’s, only a mustard yellow house with all its lights on, as though its denizens were having a party for just the two of them.