“Classes are going OK?” she asked. She was doing something while she talked; there was the clattering of a pan and the snap of some taut vegetable. This comforted him. It wasn’t like she was sitting in the recliner in the living room with the lights dimmed and some sad Hindi music playing while she dabbed at her eyes.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. Just a lot of work.” Did he sound as rude as he felt? Guilt had begun to seep into his phone conversations with her, and he felt at once resentful and justified in this. “How’s the office?”
He hadn’t been upset about his mother’s decision to take the job working in that doctor’s office, but he did hate having to ask about it. The job seemed, to put it in a snobby way, beneath her. A few years ago, he had come upon Manju Auntie, his friend Parul’s mother, working the drive-through at Burger King after her husband’s death, and the sight of her in that askew visor, to say nothing of her huffing the words “BK Broiler” into a headset, was the most depressing thing that he’d ever seen.
“Oh, the office is the same,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, beta. Just your sad old mother hen checking in.” She laughed, but there was an unmistakable sadness to it. God, this was awful. “I’ll let you go.”
I’ll let you go was the most damning of sentences, passive-aggressive and wounded at the same time.
“Sorry that I’m so preoccupied. This homework is just really hard.”
“No problem, beta. Good luck. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
As he hung up and bent back over his work, he wondered if he could confide in his mother about Kavita. He had never done such a thing—he had never even dated anyone—so he wasn’t sure how his mother would take this. But if she were so invested in seeming hip, she would probably welcome the discussion.
No—he would be a total mama’s boy if he did that. He was certain that his friends from high school would do no such thing, and not just because they hadn’t really dated anyone, either. Anyway, his mother had no concept of dating. Indians, on the whole, were ignorant of this process. Of course, Americans wrongly assumed that all Indians were the “victims” of arranged marriage—and his parents’ marriage had certainly been arranged—but marriages these days weren’t so much arranged as urged, like marriages out of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James: a series of social conveniences that capitalized on people’s proximity to each other.
He really was beginning to think in literary terms; he’d have to file this thought away as a possible topic of conversation with Kavita. After all, it was his duty now to catalog impressive thoughts in order to convince her of his attractiveness.
IT BECAME A RITUAL: Harit and Teddy went to have drinks on Thursday after work, always at TGI Friday’s, always in the booth at the back of the restaurant, always with the same hostess and waiter. The waiter was not particularly thrilled with this arrangement, and he had given up speaking to them altogether. He delivered their drinks “as if they were on flombay”—another Teddyism—which meant that he spilled a part of the drinks on the table with every visit, and it was a rare evening when Teddy didn’t have to take a napkin and sweep up the swirls of liquid before they trickled off the edges. Teddy brought to this action the same sort of flair he had for de-linting suit jackets and wrapping a scarf in tissue, and Harit had to admit in spite of himself that he loved the way Teddy’s agile fingers pulled at the napkin and brought it fluttering onto the tabletop like a light bird.
When he drank, Harit began to notice things about Teddy that he had never noticed before. This ran counter to what he had always thought happened to people when they drank; he had always assumed that drinking dulled one’s brain and made important details go flying past. But the sugary tartness of the rum heightened his senses, and he saw in Teddy a mixture of pathos and humor. Harit had never been one to laugh easily, but there was so much to laugh about when it came to Teddy. Not laugh at, but about.
Teddy’s nose was like a tiny, pink egg on his face. The color of his hair resembled barfi—white laced with yellow. His wardrobe was composed entirely of garments from Harriman’s, and those garments usually came with piping. More than anything, the funniest thing about Teddy was his shape. With his sizable paunch, he looked exactly like the cash register in the Men’s Furnishings department—an old-fashioned register, with a sloped interface and a stout money barrel. In fact, with his full jawline and pudgy chin, Teddy had a head like a miniregister atop the register of his torso. Whenever Harit drank, he imagined Teddy’s mouth opening and a tray of bills shooting out.
Their chat in the store was usually a series of fey observations by Teddy about customers, clothes, and coworkers. However, Harit learned a great deal about Teddy during their second outing. Teddy was from somewhere in Ohio but had moved to New York after high school. He had “tried to make it” in the city, the meaning of which Harit didn’t fully understand, but from Teddy’s mention of “auditions,” Harit assumed that it had to do with singing. “Honey, I’ve lived a million lives. I’m like a cat. But a really feisty cat. I’m Cleocatra.” Teddy looked at Harit questioningly. Harit stared in return. “You totally didn’t get that joke, did you?”
Harit threw back his head and laughed. He was surprised to realize that it was not the rum making him do this but the fact that he found Teddy’s comment genuinely funny.
Humor aside, he found something very strange about Teddy’s viewpoint. From the way Teddy talked about his past, it sounded like he should have been a very old man, in his seventies. He reminded Harit of some of the ancestrally English gentlemen in Delhi who had visited the movie theater: just as the carriage of their bodies conveyed something elegant, something pearled in appreciation of the Raj, Teddy moved and spoke as if he came from an older time. Harit tried to imagine Teddy as a boy, but he found it difficult. All Harit could picture was a little American boy in piped clothing and a little cash register paunch, and now it really was the rum that was making him laugh so hard.
“Honey, you are blotto,” Teddy said. He supplemented this strange word with a shake of his now-empty glass. He had learned to use gestures so that Harit could understand his slang.
“No, I am not. I know when I am drunk, Teddy. I am fine.”
“It’s OK if you are, you know. I’m really happy that you’re finally living a little.”
“This is ‘living’?” Harit motioned to the restaurant, its candy-striped tablecloths, baskets of sauce-slathered foods, and the four monstrous flat-screen TVs that sat above the bar.
“You know, you have a point there,” Teddy said. “Do you want to go to a bar?”
“There’s a bar here. This is a bar.”
“No, I mean a proper bar. A good gentlemen’s establishment.”
“Yes,” Harit said. Then he realized that he had actually just said, “No, I can’t.” Even the rum was not letting him stray.