One weekend, in December, she was in her bedroom, Facetiming with Kylie while they did their homework. Prakrti had her phone in bed next to her, Kylie’s voice coming from the speaker.
“So, anyway,” Kylie said, “he comes to my house and leaves all these flowers on the front porch.”
“Ziad?”
“Yeah. He leaves them right there. Like grocery-store flowers. But a lot of them. And then my mom and dad and my little brother come home and find them. It was so embarrassing. Hold on. He just texted me.”
While she waited for Kylie to read the text, Prakrti said, “You should break up with him. He’s immature, he can’t spell, and—I’m sorry but—he’s large.”
When her phone pinged a moment later, Prakrti thought Kylie had forwarded the new text from Ziad, so they could discuss it and decide what to write back. She opened the text without looking at the sender, and the screen of her phone filled with the face of Dev Kumar.
She knew it was him by his pained, overeager expression. Dev stood—or had been posed, most likely—in flattering light before the convoluted limbs of a banyan tree. He was skinny in a developing-world way, as though deprived of protein as a child. Her cousin Rajiv and his friends dressed the way boys at Prakrti’s school did, maybe a bit better. They wore the same brands and had the same haircuts. By comparison, Dev was wearing a white shirt with absurdly large seventies-style lapels and ill-fitting gray pants. His smile was crooked and his black hair shiny with oil.
Normally Prakrti would have shared the photo with Kylie. Selfies of guys who were trying too hard, guys who sent chest pics or used filters, were normally guaranteed to send them into fits of laughter. But that night Prakrti clicked her phone shut and put it down. She didn’t want to explain who Dev was. She was too embarrassed.
Neither, in the passing days, did she tell her Indian friends. A lot of them had parents whose own marriages had been arranged, and so were used to hearing the practice defended at home. Some parents advanced the superiority of arranged marriages by citing the low divorce rate in India. Mr. Mehta, Devi Mehta’s dad, liked to bring up a “scientific” study in Psychology Today, which concluded that people in love marriages were more in love during the first five years of marriage whereas people in arranged marriages were more in love after thirty years of marriage. Love flowered from shared experiences was the message. It was a reward rather than a gift.
Parents had to say this, of course. To do otherwise would be to invalidate their own unions. But it was all an act. They knew things were different in America.
Except that sometimes they weren’t. There was a group of girls at Prakrti’s school who came from super-conservative families, girls who’d been born in India themselves, and partly raised there, and who, as a consequence, were totally submissive. Though these girls spoke perfect English in class, and wrote essays in a strange, beautiful, almost Victorian style, among themselves they preferred to speak Hindi, or Gujarati, or whatever. They never ate cafeteria food or used the vending machines but brought their own vegetarian lunches, packed in tiffins. These girls weren’t allowed to attend school dances or to join after-school clubs that had boys as members. They came to school every day and quietly, dutifully did their work, and, after the last bell sounded, they trooped out to Kia sedans and Honda minivans to be returned to their quarantined existence. There was a rumor that these girls, protective of their hymens, wouldn’t use Tampax. That inspired the nickname Prakrti and her friends had for them. The Hymens, they called them. Look, here come the Hymens.
“I don’t know why I like him,” Kylie said. “We used to have this Newfoundland, Bartleby. Ziad sort of reminds me of him.”
“What?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Sorry,” Prakrti said. “Yeah, no. Those dogs are gross. They drool.”
She deleted the photo.
*
“So now you’re giving out my number to random guys?” Prakrti said to her mother, the next day.
“Did you get the picture from Dev? His mother promised to make him send one.”
“You say never to give my number to strangers and now you’re giving it out?”
“Dev is hardly ‘random.’”
“He is to me.”
“Let me take a picture of you to send back. I promised Mrs. Kumar.”
“No.”
“Come on. Don’t look so gloomy. Dev will think you have a terrible disposition. Smile, Prakrti. Do I have to force you to smile?”
*
Why don’t you just sign my body?
At dinner, in a restaurant near campus, while making conversation with members of the lecture committee, Matthew kept hearing the girl’s words in his head.
Did she mean what she said? Or was it just the kind of dumb, provocative statement American college girls made nowadays? Equivalent to the way they danced, bumping and grinding, twerking, sending out messages that were unintentional. If Matthew were younger, if he were remotely the same age, maybe he’d know the answer.
The restaurant was nicer than he’d expected. A woody, farm-to-table place, with a warm interior. They’d been given a room off the bar, Matthew seated, importantly, at the center of the table.
The woman next to him, a philosophy professor in her thirties with frizzy hair, a broad face, and a pugnacious manner, said to Matthew, “Here’s my cosmology question. If we accept an infinite multiverse, and the existence of every conceivable kind of universe, then there has to be a universe in which God exists and one in which He—I mean, She—doesn’t. Along with every other kind of universe. So, which one are we living in?”
“Fortunately, one that has alcohol,” Matthew said, raising his glass.
“Is there a universe where I have hair?” said a bald, bearded economist two seats away.
The conversation went on like that, quick, jovial. People peppered Matthew with questions. Whenever he opened his mouth to answer, the table fell silent. The questions had nothing to do with his talk, which had already faded from their minds, but were about other topics: space aliens, or the Higgs boson. The only other physicist there, possibly resentful of Matthew’s relative success, didn’t say a word. On the walk over to the restaurant, he had told Matthew, “Your blog is popular with my undergrads. The kids love it.”
After the main course, while the dishes were being cleared away, the chair of the committee instructed the people sitting closest to Matthew to switch seats with those farther away. Everyone ordered pudding, but when the waiter came to him, Matthew asked for a whiskey. The drink had just arrived when his phone vibrated in his pocket.
The new person who sat down next to Matthew was a birdlike woman with pale skin, dressed in a pantsuit. “I’m not a professor,” she said. “I’m Pete’s wife.” She pointed to her husband across the table.
Matthew took his phone from his pocket and held it discreetly below the table.