This particular comment had been directed at Wendy, a woman in her early forties whom Ranjana had overheard tell at least five people she was “Yes, named after Wendy from Peter Pan, and did you know that J. M. Barrie made up the name Wendy? So, like, compared to most other names, which have been around for centuries, even millenniums, my name is like a rare breed of creature, like evolution or something.” Wendy would giggle after she said this and lick her teeth, which were about as sharp as Stefanie’s dagger and which had a smudge of lipstick on them at least 70 percent of the time. Other than this blemish, however, Wendy was undeniably attractive, with green eyes and luscious blond hair. She worked as a private massage therapist and had once held a free session for the entire group after one of their meetings. Her hands had jiggled Ranjana’s back as if it were a door that she had been trying to unlock, but Ranjana had felt very refreshed afterward.
If only Wendy were equally adept at writing. It was true that Wendy overwrote; Cassie wasn’t exaggerating when she accused her of using the same decadent words over and over again, and everyone in the group seemed to wonder how Wendy could be so passionately invested in her work when it seemed, from these repetitions, that she never revised it. But Wendy was so nice that Ranjana felt herself empathizing with her, if only because Ranjana knew that she would never have the courage to withstand Cassie’s provocations.
Colin, the lone man of the group, owned as many Star Wars T-shirts as there were Star Wars movies and had thick glasses and ponytailed hair that made him seem like a nearsighted painter whose eyesight had worsened over time. None of his characters was ever fully human; the closest one of them had gotten to being so was a half-wombat woman who ate only bark and grass. Thankfully, Colin didn’t overly sexualize his characters; on the contrary, he erred on the side of romance, writing more about the sharpness of their intellect than the curvaceousness of their bodies. Still, whenever a sex scene did occur, it was so overly studied that it was as if Colin were wearing a sign that read I’M A VIRGIN.
Today was Ranjana’s day to present. She had stopped home momentarily to print out her pages, which she now held rolled up, the paper crinkled and worn, as if it had been printed centuries before. She berated herself for this nervous habit; everything always became rolled up when in her hands. As she sat in the classroom now, she wondered if she had been trying to erase the work she’d done, ashamed of its mediocrity.
The first time that she had read in this class, it was a very short story, about a young Indian woman pining for a young neighbor on her small farm. It was an exercise, a trifle, a raffle ticket for admission to this group of writers. They smiled sweetly at her, all of them too absorbed in their own work to care what Ranjana had to give them. The second time she had read, she had stopped herself midway and apologized, saying that she had to revise more. Again, they were sympathetic, Stefanie twirling her necklace, Cassie exhaling softly and looking elderly in her judgment, Wendy placing a hand on her heart and tugging gently, as if ready to pull it out and present it to Ranjana as a condolence, Colin adjusting his thick glasses while nodding his head. The next two classes belonged solely to Stefanie and Cassie, and then Roberta had broken the rhythm the next week with her own book, which was a romance novel in the Jude Deveraux vein, all sloping hills and horses and bodices torn like wrapping paper. The listeners all shifted uncomfortably, the tight bun of Roberta’s hair so much at odds with the salaciousness of her story.
Now, Roberta was looking expectantly at Ranjana, and the other writers all perked up in their chairs. Ranjana smoothed out her pages, cleared her throat, and began to read. She could feel Cassie’s wry stare burrowing invisibly into her cheek. The section she was reading wasn’t from her manuscript; it was a tepid story based on a recent ceremony at her temple. As she read, her voice quavered, as if made of liquid. She had rarely felt so judged by other people, had not experienced anything quite like it since her adolescence, when other Indian mothers constantly seemed to be judging everyone’s children. As she finished the last sentence of her five-page excerpt, her throat tiring, she wondered if it were even necessary to have villains in her stories. There were enough enemies sitting right here.
IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT PRASHANT had ever had a crush on an Indian girl.
As with most other areas in his life up until now, he had directed his attention to all things American. He fixated upon the thin, almost weblike skin and candy-scented hair of the white girls around him. The girl whom he had treasured in high school above everyone else, Amber Ferguson, had no Indian foil, nothing in common with any of the desi girls in his class. Her long legs, the blue of her eyes, her skin so fair it matched her teeth, her hair so fine it moved together because not to do so would have seemed criminal, transfixed him as only an exotic creature could. She didn’t want anything to do with any of the Indian boys, which made her even more elusive and therefore desirable. She cringed whenever one of them let his gaze linger even a split second on her, and there was her boyfriend, Chase, who looked like Bradley Cooper.
So it was fitting that, in his first week at Princeton, Prashant should fall for Kavita, a fully formed ABCD—an American-Born Confused Desi. In many ways, Kavita was just as American as Amber, but she held on to the two Indian aspects that were always the most compelling—religion and language. She was a self-professed “proud Hindu.” Apparently this had been the crux of her admissions essay, the paragraphs of which, it was rumored, she had structured according to the layout of the Upanishads. This drove Prashant totally crazy with desire because his own Hinduism was shoddy at best. His parents had always been relatively lazy when it came to practicing their religion, and, well, we all wanted what we didn’t have.
He had just written a paper about this for his introductory literature course. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes maintained that men and women were amorphous, dual-gendered beings that had been split into the two sexes, forever yearning for each other to make themselves whole. (Prashant’s professor, a recent transplant from Vanderbilt with a lilting southern accent, played the class a song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch that told this very story.) In the same course, they had been reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the story of Narcissus appears. Prashant argued in his paper that Narcissus was doomed to fail because he lusted after something exactly like himself: himself. To follow Aristophanes’ line of thought, this was antithetical to human nature; we wanted not ourselves but the unattainable other. Prashant had obviously been thinking of Kavita, had infused the essence of her into the paper and felt the prose flowing easily from his fingertips onto the keyboard because the slant of her eyes, the bounce of her ass, willed it so. She was Indian but still unattainable, representing some part of his culture but still eluding his grasp, and if he was going to tumble headfirst into a cesspool of his own making, at least he wouldn’t be like Narcissus, chasing after someone like himself.
The teacher gave him a B+, commending his connection between the two texts but questioning where homosexuality would come into play; was Prashant intimating that Plato, of all people, allowed nothing for same-sex longing? It was at this point, while Prashant held his paper in his hands and contemplated the vermilion scribbles covering it, that he realized his instructor was not simply genteel but most likely gay. Any man who could not properly contemplate something as perfect as Kavita Bansal’s ass had to be.