Nayana stepped off the bus and stood there on the sidewalk for a moment. Outside it was damp and gray, because when wasn’t it in London? She was going to meet the dean. Just the year before, he had called her in for a meeting regarding changes that would occur as a result of the school’s impending incorporated status. As a relatively recent hire, she’d been sure then, too, that she would be let go. Instead he told her she was his choice for the department’s full-time evening lecturer. She’d been so surprised and relieved by the offer that she hadn’t had the wherewithal in the moment to consider the repercussions of refusing the honor, which she did for fear that a larger class load would drain the creative life from her—she’d begun to think she might return to the book she abandoned in graduate school. She had no doubts about today’s meeting. Whether it was irony or not, the part she’d played in arriving at this point today, about to be terminated, was not lost on her. And yet had Nayana been a man, a white, English man, there would undoubtedly have been no meeting at all.
Soon after she’d refused the promotion, Nayana realized her mistake, that she had offended the dean’s sensibilities, that he regretted ever going to bat for her. He resented Nayana. It was not an unfamiliar position for her once she recognized it. She was a woman, foreign—an Indian in England—and she was expected to take whatever was offered, grateful to have been noticed and offered anything at all. Her preferences were inconsequential and her value diminished as soon as she forgot her place, that is, when she claimed to have one. It wasn’t as though she were instructing the queen’s greatest minds at Oxford; she was in West London teaching evening higher education courses. Her Tuesday night class was taken away in the new year, and now she was certain he would tell her the next semester would be her last.
The dean had Nayana sent in right away. He had taken to making her wait since she’d refused the full-time position, but he must have been eager today. He was unusually friendly in greeting her, inappropriately so, she thought, considering the task at hand. He asked her to sit and began to conduct the first part of their meeting with a faux-friendly formality that reeked of stale, colonial air. Would the British ever actually accept that the sun had set on the empire?
“It’s jolly bad luck, Nayana,” he said, eventually coming to his point, through an ugly grin. “We’re still restructuring, you see, getting settled in our new setup, as it were, and, well, we just have no justification for two part-time appointments in addition to Jonathan.”
Jonathan was the white man who’d received the position she’d been offered. The dean didn’t even bother to subdue the pleasure he was taking in delivering the news of her dismissal, making it clear as well that she’d fallen from first to third place, become expendable. He kept using her name, overemphasizing the second syllable, as he always had done, as he danced around the subject of their meeting the previous year. It was as if he wanted to remind her that she’d had the audacity to refuse him while avoiding any acknowledgment that she was ever a candidate in the first place. After a while she stopped paying attention to his words, though she did follow his lips with a kind of disgusted glee, as the flabby expressions bounced about his pallid face. He’d probably expected her to weep or beg, or worse. That she’d been silent so far was, no doubt, another disappointment, so he kept repeating himself, perhaps hoping for a reaction.
“I see,” she said, finally interrupting his redundancy. “Well, I guess it’s good I don’t have an office to pack up.”
He didn’t like her cheek, and she was pleased to see his complexion find a little color. It was something she’d taken pleasure in doing to her adviser in graduate school as well. These men and their prejudices, the way they pretend everything a woman does is extracurricular and therefore not a serious loss when taken away. They forgot she was actually qualified to be there. What did they see besides a pretty Indian girl? Did they congratulate themselves on finding a place for her in their ranks? The dean, unamused, closed the file on his desk and informed Nayana with a bland authority that she would finish out the autumn term, but in fact she would not be required to return in the new year. Her classes had been redistributed. This wasn’t what she had expected to hear. If she was going to leave sooner than planned, she’d wanted to be the one to say so. But she was determined not to listen to this man gloat. She scooted to the edge of her seat and forced a cool countenance.
“So only a week to go?” she said, imitating his initial jolliness.
“That’s right,” he said, standing, with his arms immovable at his sides. He could no longer look at her, but she took pleasure in looking at his face for, she hoped, the last time. “Good luck, then.”
He might as well have said “good riddance.” Nayana left his office and felt herself flush as she walked, on instinct, to the break room down the hall.
What would Ramesh say about so sudden a change? What would she tell him? He would want her to rest anyhow once he knew she was pregnant. She could easily use it as an excuse not to return to work after the holidays. Again she could get away with lying to him. Why was it always so easy? Why did she continually take advantage? She knew the lies were adding up. Soon they would crush her—or, worse, they would crush Ramesh—completely. There would be the loss of income as well. It wasn’t that they would suffer horribly without it, but it had enabled Nayana, for instance, to send money to her sister. Not a lot, but enough for her nephew’s school and whatever else Aditi chose to spend it on. Nayana had been trying to get her to spend some of it on a phone installation for a year at least. If she had only not waited so long, Nayana might just call right now and tell Aditi the whole story—about Daniel, too—shocking her sister, yes, but ultimately Nayana would be relieved just to have heard Aditi’s voice, even her dismay, perhaps especially that. The day she told Aditi she was going to stay on in London after university, to pursue a master’s, she heard both Aditi’s disappointment and her admiration. That now undeserved praise remained, however many failures later, haunting every letter Aditi wrote. When Nayana told Aditi of Ramesh’s proposal of marriage, her sister had only asked if the wedding would interfere with Nayana’s schooling. By wedding, she knew that Aditi had meant the whole of married life, just as she’d meant Nayana’s career when she said schooling. Despite the very different path Aditi had chosen for herself, already married and starting a family of her own, in Varkala, of all places, her faith in Nayana to do more had never faltered. Even when Nayana had only managed to do less. It must be such a burden, she thought, for her sister to have to hide that much disappointment.
Nayana opened the break-room door with more strength than necessary, interrupting a colleague and his sad lunch, which he ate while reading and marking up student essays. She didn’t know the daytime faculty well, and they weren’t inclined to know her, either. She checked her mailbox and enjoyed the thought that soon her name would disappear, that she would one day never return to that break room—or the campus, for that matter. She didn’t even enjoy teaching, not really. When the students took a real interest, it was easy to care about their progress, their learning, but mostly they were just ticking off boxes, uninterested in reading and writing, which were all Nayana wanted to do in life. Why wait? she thought, removing her name from under her mailbox and throwing it in the trash.
In the corridor, she smiled at the thought that there were only a few class meetings left before she would be set free. Few thoughts had made her so happy recently. And then there was Daniel, walking toward her. He’d clearly thought her smile was meant for him, for he returned it with a relish she suddenly found repulsive. She couldn’t turn around, and there was no point in avoiding him.
“You’re looking well,” he said.
“Not too bad for someone who’s just got the sack.”
Her greeting proved the perfect detour from his awkward entreaties. He laughed at what he assumed to be a joke. And by the time he realized it wasn’t, all threat of flirtation was gone. He reached for her shoulder to comfort her, but she retreated and smiled widely.
“It’s a blessing in disguise, actually.”
It was over now—seeing him again had just confirmed this—and she wished he could figure that out as well. Their meetings had been for one purpose only; she thought he’d known this. That he was still trying to get a read on her, perhaps hoping she was merely being coy, was now annoying her.
“I’ve just come to pick up some papers,” he said. “Wait for me?”
She stepped into the courtyard outside. He looked different today, no longer as boyishly handsome. He appeared simply disheveled up close and smelled bitterly of cigarette smoke. She kept her distance when he rejoined her and relayed the highlights of her meeting with the dean. Daniel seemed genuinely upset, and Nayana softened to his sympathy, but she remained determined. He needed to get that it was over.
“I won’t beat around the bush, Daniel. Perhaps you’ve gathered that our little interlude has reached its end as well. In any case, I wish you good luck. I do.”
What could he say? It was all so neat, his dismissal following the tale of her own. She left him there, his raised hand frozen in a parting gesture. She would have felt something for him, some pang of regret at her own laconism, at least, if it weren’t for the disarray of her life. Next up on this day of reckoning: her meeting with the gynecologist. She might as well know exactly where she stood in her life. Except, of course, she wouldn’t; pregnant didn’t mean pregnant by Ramesh.
The midday traffic seemed to attempt to drown out her thoughts like a kindness as she sat on a concrete wall behind her bus stop. She allowed herself now, as she sometimes did, to imagine her life in a more dramatic telling, a more desperate tale, in which she simply walked into the stream of cars, as those before her had walked, laden with rocks, into other currents. But that was not her story. She would never do that to Ramesh, who would somehow find a way to blame himself. Nothing was his fault, of course. And he would be thrilled to learn of her pregnancy. But what if she had reached her limit? If she couldn’t tell another lie? What if she could only deliver that news along with everything else: the lost job, Tuesday nights, Daniel? What if she saw his face and confessed everything? That she had failed again, at work, in their marriage?
Her bus had arrived and was departing without her by the time its presence registered. She wouldn’t wait for the next one. She stood and began to walk to her transfer point, running her fingers along the waxy leaves of the hedge bordering the sidewalk, trying to undo any damage to Ramesh that hadn’t yet been done. She would make him something nice for dinner, his favorite. She would try to remember how, in the beginning, it had been a pleasure to do simple things, to want to make him happy with some small gesture every day. When and why did it get so hard? And how could she find her way back?
Nayana passed a pay phone and thought of her sister again, of the two letters still waiting for replies. She passed through a noxious peroxide cloud that hovered in front of a beauty salon. It was time to trim her ends again. They now reached her tailbone when she let her hair down. If Aditi were only in London, she could do that for Nayana as well.
She was adding cream and tomato paste to the chicken when the door to the flat opened. Murgh makhani was a dish Ramesh loved and ordered often in restaurants. She rarely took the time to make it at home and hadn’t done so once since she’d started teaching. She remained at the stove with her back to the hallway, stirring in the cream and hoping Ramesh would say hello and keep walking. He stopped at the entrance to the kitchen, and the muscles in her shoulders and neck contracted.
“That smells good. What are you making, jaanu?”
“Butter chicken and some spinach with rice.” She didn’t turn around. She fiddled with the knobs and lids, sensing that he wasn’t leaving the doorway. Go on, she begged silently, and squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted him to carry on to the bedroom, change out of his work clothes, then sit in his study as he always did, decompressing. She needed their routine, the table and food between them on those nights when she was home and cooked. “It’ll be ready soon,” she added.
She heard the strain in her voice. Did he? He didn’t leave. A chair slid a few inches gently, across the tile floor. He set something down. His briefcase?
“So how did it go with the dean?”
“What? Oh, yes, fine,” she lied.
He approached from behind and rested a hand on Nayana’s hip, sending a wave of sensations—guilt, pleasure, hope—that finished with goose flesh up her arms. And then he smoothed that over with the soft skin of his palms, parting her hair and breathing in the nape of her neck from behind. She set the spoon down and let her hands fall from the stove, limp at her sides. A tear fell as well. Her body began to fold into his. He kissed her neck now, and she was reminded how long she’d deprived herself of him, even on the occasions they’d been together, how she’d cut herself off from his affection.
“I’ve missed you, jaanu,” he said.
His voice was soft and penetrating, her body once again permeable to his love. He pulled her even closer, as if she could pass right through his skin and into him, his body a place to hide, even from herself. This embrace unleashed the part of her that had forgotten to want him, to trust absolutely in him, in their love. Why hadn’t she gone there first? Why had she ever left? And how did he know she was ready to come back to him now? She hadn’t even known it for certain herself. She turned to face him. He was smiling with more affection than she felt she would ever deserve but as much as she might ever need. He turned the stove off and took her hand.
“The cat,” she reminded him.
He guided her out of the kitchen and into the hall, toward their room.
“Felix,” he said, “can wait.”