She went online to find other people in her situation. As usual with the Internet, it took only a few searches to locate message boards teeming with complaints, advice, rationalizations, cries for help, and expressions of comfort. Some women, usually educated and living in cities, treated the subject of arranged marriage with theatrical alarm, as though they were living out a zany episode of The Mindy Project. They depicted their parents as well-meaning people whose meddlesomeness, however infuriating, never kept them from being loveable. “So my mom keeps giving out my e-mail to people she meets. The other day I get this e-mail from some guy’s dad and he starts asking all these personal questions, like how much do I weigh and do I smoke or take drugs and are there any health or gynecological issues he should know about, in order to see if I’m marriage material for his lame son who I wouldn’t even hook up with if we were both at Burning Man on molly and I was feeling generous and/or horny.” Other women seemed resigned to parental pressure and scheming. “I mean, seriously,” one person wrote, “is it any worse than joining OkCupid? Or having some guy in a bar blow his boozy breath in your face all night?”
But there were heartbreaking posts, too, from girls closer to Prakrti’s age. Girls who didn’t write that well and who maybe went to bad schools or who hadn’t lived in the States long. There was one post, from a girl whose username was “Brokenbylife,” that Prakrti couldn’t get out of her head. “Hi, I live in Arkansas. It’s illegal here to get married at my age (I’m 15) unless you have parental consent. The problem is my dad wants me to marry this friend of his from India. I haven’t even met him. I asked to see a photo but the one my dad showed me was of a guy way too young to be a friend of his (my dad’s 56). So it’s like I’m being catfished by my own father. Can anyone help me? Is there some kind of legal aid I can contact? What can you do if you’re young and don’t consent but are too scared to go against your parents because of past issues with verbal/physical abuse?”
After spending a few hours on the Internet reading stuff like that, Prakrti was frantic. It made everything realer. What she’d thought lunacy was everywhere being put into practice, fought against, or given in to.
*
From Dorset Matthew takes the train to London, and then another to Heathrow. Two hours later, he’s in the air, heading to JFK. He’s chosen a window seat so he won’t be disturbed during the flight. Looking out the window, he sees the wing of the jet, the large, cylindrical, dirty-looking jet engine. He imagines opening the emergency door and walking out on the wing, balancing himself against the force of the wind, and for a moment it almost seems plausible.
In the four months he’s been in England, he has kept in touch with his children mainly by text. They don’t like e-mail. Too slow, they say. Skype, their preference, disorients Matthew. The streaming images of Jacob and Hazel that appear on his laptop render them simultaneously within reach and irreclaimable. Jacob’s face looks fatter. He gets distracted and frequently looks away, possibly at another screen. Hazel pays her father undivided attention. Leaning forward, she holds a fistful of hair close to the camera to show off her new highlights, which she’s dyed red, or purple, or blue. Often the screen freezes, however, pixelating his children’s faces and making them seem constructed, illusory.
Matthew is unnerved, too, by his own image as it pops up in a window at the corner of the screen. There he is, their shadowy dad, in his hideout.
All his attempts at joviality sound false in his ears.
There’s no winning: if his children seem traumatized by his absence, it’s terrible; if they seem distant and self-reliant, it’s just as bad. The familiar details of their bedrooms stab Matthew in the heart, the flocked wallpaper in Hazel’s room, Jacob’s hockey posters.
The children sense that their lives have become precarious. They have overheard Tracy speaking with Matthew on the phone, with her family and friends, with her lawyer. The children ask Matthew if he and their mother are getting divorced, and he tells them, honestly, that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if they will be a family again.
More than anything, what astounds him now is his stupidity. He’d thought his cheating only involved Tracy. Had believed that the trust he was breaking was with her alone; and that his deceit was mitigated, if not excused, by the travails of marriage, the resentments, the physical dissatisfactions. He’d careened out of control, with Jacob and Hazel in the backseat, and thought they couldn’t be injured.
Occasionally, during Skype calls, Tracy blunders into the room. Realizing whom Jacob or Hazel is speaking to, she calls out a greeting to Matthew in a strained, forgiving voice. But she stays back, careful not to show her face. Or to see his.
“That was awkward,” Hazel said, after one such episode.
It’s difficult to know what the children think of his misbehavior. Wisely, they never bring up the case.
“You made one mistake,” Jim told Matthew, in Dorset, a few weeks ago. Ruth was out for the night with her play-reading group, and the two men were smoking cigars on the terrace. “You made an error in judgment on a single night in a marriage of many hundreds of nights. Thousands.”
“More like a few mistakes, truth be told.”
Jim waved this away with the smoke from his cigar. “OK, so you’re not a saint. But you were a good husband, compared to most. And, in this case, you were enticed.”
Matthew wonders about that word. Enticed. Was it true? Or was that just how he’d portrayed the incident to Ruth, who’d taken his side, as a mother would, and then had given that impression to Jim. In any event, you couldn’t be enticed by something you didn’t already want. That was the real problem. His concupiscence. That chronic, inflammatory complaint.
*
There was a coffee shop near the university where Prakrti and Kylie liked to go. They sat in the back room, trying to blend in with the college students at the surrounding tables. If anyone ever spoke to them, especially a guy, they pretended to be first-year students. Kylie became a surfer girl named Meghan who was from California. Prakrti introduced herself as Jasmine and said she’d grown up in Queens. “White people can be so dumb, no offense,” she said, the first time she’d gotten away with this. “They probably think all Indian girls are named after spices. Maybe I should be Ginger. Or Cilantro.”
“Or Curry. ‘Hi, my name’s Curry. I’m hot.’”
They laughed and laughed.
In late January, as midterms approached, they started going to the coffee shop two or three times a week. One blustery Wednesday night, Prakrti got there before Kylie. She commandeered their favorite table and took out her computer.
Since the beginning of the year, colleges had been sending e-mails and letters encouraging Prakrti to apply. At first the solicitations had come from schools she wasn’t considering due to their locations, religious affiliations, or lack of prestige. But, in November, Stanford had sent her an e-mail. A few weeks later, Harvard did.
It made Prakrti happy, or at least less anxious, to feel pursued.
She logged into her Gmail account. A group of girls in bright-colored rain boots came in from the wind outside, smoothing their hair and laughing. They took the table next to Prakrti’s. One of them smiled and Prakrti smiled back.
There was one e-mail in her queue.
Dear Miss Banerjee,
That is what my brother, Neel, suggests I write as a salutation, instead of “Dear Prakrti.” Though he is younger than I, his English is better. He is helping me to correct any mistakes, so that I will not make a bad first impression. Maybe I should not tell you this. (Neel says that I should not.)