*
It became evident to Prashant that he had chosen the wrong major. Given his father’s profession, he had always felt rather acutely that he had a predisposition for the scientific. He was one of those kids who didn’t feel particularly threatened by his father’s line of work. He didn’t see his own tendency toward chemistry as something strictly dictated by his father’s background. It was merely logical to Prashant that he should find interesting a subject that made up his father’s vocation. He was an even-keeled kid, a good student, and as someone who didn’t feel a penchant for the dramatic or overly emotive, he found that science was very much in keeping with his demeanor.
He had been assigned the usual books in his high school English classes—The Great Gatsby, 1984, Brave New World; later, the heftiness of Moby-Dick, a book whose more staid passages on whaling he found enthralling (he kept this to himself). Then there was the hilarity of being assigned A Passage to India, a book that he was forced, along with his other Indian classmates, to analyze as if he had nothing in common with the characters in it. In many senses, he didn’t. It wasn’t like he could relate to being an Indian man accused of rape in the hills. (“Not yet,” his friend Vipul quipped moronically.) He realized that he approached a book, regardless of its emotional dealings, from a somewhat disassociated perspective. He applied a scientist’s cool assessment to the otherwise shifting, swirling cosmos of literature. Oddly, his teacher loved this. The comment “Very cogent” appeared with alarming consistency on his papers.
Something had shifted recently, and even though he attempted to deny it, he knew that Kavita was the reason why. Although she had gotten a 2400 on her SATs (a common achievement at their school), although she had won some huge science fair by examining how she could save wildlife during oil spills, and although her own parents were both doctors, Kavita had chosen English as her major. Prashant began to see, as he “bumped into” her on campus, that she almost always had a book in hand. She read as she walked, and accessorized her books with a complicated series of sticky notes, something that Prashant noticed even from afar. This kind of system seemed unnecessary, since many people claimed that she had a photographic memory. It was generally acknowledged that she would have been the most hated person on Earth if she were not the most beloved. Teachers fell under her spell as soon as everyone else did, if not earlier.
Prashant wished with a painful fierceness that he could be in one of her classes, but he wasn’t in her classes because his major was chemistry, not English. That one intro-to-lit course was all he could manage because the rest of his schedule was overtaken by science. His major was not just chemistry; it was a laboratory’s worth of chemical studies. (One of his classes, an accelerated amalgam of two separate courses, had the nickname “Turbo-Chem,” which sounded like a lame superhero.) Still, he didn’t find his coursework all that crippling because he was good at it—really good at it. As Dr. Moore, one of his professors, put it, he was “preternaturally inclined to the study of chemistry.”
He should have found his teachers’ collective encouragement comforting, but it had the opposite effect in him. He didn’t want to be another stereotypical South Asian kid who was “good at math.” He didn’t want to be easily inclined to something; he wanted to be challenged. It took no great rumination on his part to draw a connection between this and Kavita. She challenged who he was as a man more than anyone he’d ever met. Ha—“a man.” He couldn’t refer to himself as a man without snickering. He was short, with a slight belt of fat at his waist and thick, intractable hair that he had clearly inherited from his mother. He often wore clothes a size or two too big. This was true of a lot of his Indian friends, as if, subconsciously, their parents had dictated that they buy clothes into which they could grow eventually, even though their mothers did not want them to put on weight. For every “Eat something, beta,” he got an equal and sometimes stronger reaction of “Really—another samosa?” It was no surprise that his emotions were equally conflicted. The more confusion that people lobbed your way, the more you overanalyzed everything; the more that you were challenged, the more being challenged became a kind of comfort.
He had reached a point when all of those SAT vocab cards he’d studied were infusing themselves into his daily speech. The truth was that he did not find chemistry the most compelling forum for this newfound mental capacity. Inspired by Kavita, he now wanted to apply his verbally inspired skills to something that lay outside the realm of equations. He wanted to move people with his words. This made him feel less Indian than ever—a state in which he luxuriated.
*
They appeared like magic: flyers indicating Kavita Bansal’s candidacy for freshman class president. A third of the flyers simply disappeared, tucked under mattresses (and held in left hands) all over campus.
Prashant stole one, of course, but the shame he felt over this dissipated when he realized, in the dining hall one night, that he was far from alone. He had made a couple of reliable guy friends, both from his chemistry study group: Doug, an African-American, fellow chem major from Connecticut who was on the ultimate Frisbee team; and Charlie, a mechanical engineering student who was the only one of the three of them who might be considered cool. Charlie had gone to Exeter but was from California. His father was the long-retired head of a large bank, and his mother was a former Miss California. Girls seemed to find Charlie irresistible, something Prashant attributed in part to his name. Girls often imparted a singsong tone to it—“Char-leee”—and Prashant sighed internally at the thought that no one would ever be able to do such a thing with his name. Instead of pronouncing his name correctly—“Pruh-shahnth”—people pronounced the first syllable of his name as if it rhymed with a lamb’s “baa,” and the second syllable became something you stuck into a wound—“Praaa-shunt.”
Charlie addressed this:
“Dude, we need to find you a nickname. A good one.”
Prashant bristled but knew his friend was right. “But this is my name. I shouldn’t have to leave my name behind just because of other people’s ignorance.”
“It’s not ignorance, man. People just can’t do it. Why do you think I dropped my Italian class? I can’t roll my r’s. That doesn’t mean I hate the Italian language. It’s just a fact. So I’m taking Japanese instead.”
Of course. Charlie was the type of maddening individual who would see studying Japanese as tantamount to studying Italian.