“Well, well, someone’s in trouble!” Teddy gave Harit’s shoulder an encouraging rub. Harit wanted to punch him. But Teddy offered to help fix Harit’s mess, and Harit felt guilty for his initial anger. Soon enough, Teddy was plucking an expensive fedora off a rack, placing it on his head, and exclaiming, “I’m an old hat!”
Harit actually knew this phrase, and it was one of those coincidences that seemed divinely orchestrated, a random comment with a memory so firmly attached to it that he could have been living in a film. Old Hat was the name of a hat shop in his neighborhood in Delhi; its owners were a white couple from America. The woman had a face that must have once been pretty but that had been crinkled with time and then sunburned in the Indian climate. She wore hats all of the time, and it was unclear if she did this because it promoted her store or if the store had sprung forth from her penchant for headgear. The hat that she wore most often was wide-brimmed with a sunflower on it, and it stuck out unmistakably amidst the dusty heat of the Karol Bagh district. Her husband was an equally grand individual who sported kurtas but had hair long and braided like his wife’s. The couple befriended the shopkeepers to their right and left, both of them tailors. When Harit would pass the shop on his way to work, he would nod at the owners, but they were often preoccupied, chatting with their neighbors. They had moved to India to enjoy their retirement, it was said, but they never seemed to spend their spare time with Indian people. Since they lived above their shop, a string of other white couples would often enter the storefront, with corresponding silhouettes appearing in the second-floor windows moments later. Harit imagined Teddy having two such parents—free spirits with a flair for the dramatic. Harit then imagined what Teddy’s attempts at Indian fashion would look like.
It was the image of Teddy in a kurta, leaning on the doorway of Old Hat, that made Harit feel angry. The distinction between Harit, the Indian immigrant, and Teddy, the exaggerated American, was important to maintain, and to conflate the two images was bizarre. Thinking of that doorway made Harit think of the doorway to his house here in America, and thinking of his house here in America made him realize something: aside from repairmen, an American had never set foot in it.
As he continued to set up for the sale, Harit could not stop thinking about this—what an isolated life he led! He had always thought of Teddy as being his only American friend, but now, as he examined his life further, he came to the sad realization that Teddy was his only friend of any kind. The Indians who formed the core of his social interaction—the people he saw at temple, the handful of Indian men who came in when heavier shipments needed unloading—were merely accessories to his life. He was lonelier than the white couple in Delhi, who, though they had a limited circle, had still found people to entertain. How had Harit, in this socially voracious new land, managed to end up more isolated than those two?
*
That night, Harit tossed in bed, as was his routine now. There were times when he felt that he had forgotten what his body was for. The human body, after all, was made to be useful, to perform. Humans had hands for crafting and, yes, caressing. Private parts for procreation, private parts to pleasure and be pleasured. But none of Harit’s body parts seemed to play such roles in his life. His hands tagged ties and aligned belts. His mouth muttered single-syllable words, words so slight that they barely qualified as another language. His legs—his legs carried him to the bus that proceeded to do the real carrying.
And his private parts. Even as a very small child, he was aware of the stirring between his legs, the undeniable hardness whenever he came into contact with the firm plane of a floor or a wall. His first wet dream came at the age of thirteen, and he thought at first that he was simply wetting the bed again. A year before, he had eaten beets for the first time and screamed when using the bathroom afterward, thinking that he was bleeding from the inside. His mother, in what was meant to be a helpful tone but which sounded like anger, explained that it had been the vegetables themselves, their red color like that dye squirting from a pichkari during Holi. So Harit’s first reaction, upon seeing the sticky white liquid on his sheets, was that he had eaten something similarly surprising. Only a year or so later, during a perfunctory lesson on sex education in school, would he learn what had happened to him.
The truth of the matter was that the little he knew about sex was due to—arré, this was so embarrassing—due to Kama Sutra images he had seen in books and on dirty playing cards. He hadn’t even begun to allow himself to enter the dangerous world of porn—he’d never had a computer, anyway—so his induction into the world of Sexual Being had been a shoddy thing, comprised of masturbatory fumbles during which he envisioned the breasts of Kama Sutra drawings. And to avoid that pathetic fact, he had begun to focus less on what he thought sex was and more on what kind of pleasure his hand against his—arré, here it was again—lingam could give him. Sex for him was not defined by what body parts in general were capable of but rather what Harit’s right hand could do to Harit’s lingam. (Also, he assumed that his lingam was big but, devoid of real-life experience, he couldn’t quite be sure.) He had assumed that he could not be in the brotherhood of man, that he could not be part of something larger than himself. It was too hard to situate himself within that vast throng, so he pared himself down to the act of touching himself. And inevitably, after he was finished focusing on what Harit could do to Harit, he was left with the shame of having done something debased, which seemed all the worse not because he understood it but because he didn’t understand it. And it was so much harder to justify doing something if he didn’t understand it.
Tossing again in bed, he moved beyond the thought of his loneliness to the thought of love. Had he ever really envisioned a life in which he could find love? He wasn’t sure that he was capable of being intimate with anyone. It was one thing to espouse a feeling, an idea of companionship. But it was another thing entirely to imagine a life that was informed by the presence of another person and that person’s affection. Had he ever imagined calling his wife to see if she could stop at the grocery store on the way home? Had he ever imagined holding the eyelid-soft crook of her arm as they discussed having children? The horrible conclusion was that he had never thought of what it would be like to negotiate one’s physicality to that of another human because he had not thought it possible. Every look in the mirror confirmed this line of thinking for him.
Perhaps this was why pretending to be Swati felt cathartic to him; he could be someone else, someone whole. Of this, his mother could be proud.