His mother’s eyesight had turned blurry by then, and there had been times when she had confused Harit with Swati. The brother and sister could not have looked any different—Harit with his large eyeglasses, mustache, and messy, long hair sprouting from a receding hairline; Swati with her beautiful face, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, and that smile. Her teeth were not terribly white or straight, but her smile brightened up her entire appearance, and that was something that no amount of dissembling could give Harit, who hardly ever smiled and, maybe worse, did not understand why smiling was such a big deal. He practiced Swati’s smile in his bathroom mirror before offering it to his mother. He looked as if he had indigestion. But it was a sign of just how far his mother’s eyesight had dimmed that she took this horrible version as the real thing.
He first approached her three days after the funeral, after they took Swati’s body to the entirely un-Indian local crematorium, after the people there burned her off with a lack of ceremony that stunned not just Harit but all of the families gathered. At the end of it, the owner handed Harit his sister’s ashes in an urn that seemed too plain—What did an ideal urn look like, though?—and Harit was surprised at how light it was. Since Swati’s passing, their mother had not spoken—or wept, for that matter—and generally stayed clear of Harit, so it wasn’t very difficult to hide the urn from her. She was folded into the backseat of a car by three aunties who stood by like ladies-in-waiting, while Harit was driven home in a separate car by the pandit’s wife. For the next three days, his mother sat in her armchair, not moving, not speaking, not even getting up to use the bathroom.
At the end of the third day, soon after the lights from the baseball field had gone out and left them in the gray dust of a nighttime house, Harit entered the room dressed in his costume. He was almost as dazed as his mother and, later, would remember the experience as if it were something he had seen years ago in a strange movie.
“Is that you?” his mother asked when she saw him, and it startled him to hear her voice, not just because she was speaking but because she said this sentence as matter-of-factly as if Swati had come in with a cup of chai. He had expected her first words after this long silence to be torn, exhausted, hollow.
“Yes, Mother. It is Swati.”
He didn’t have time to worry if she believed his impression because his mother broke down. Her outburst lasted only a few seconds, but Harit would never forget the way that his mother’s body unfurled, as if she were a ball of paneer expanding after being freed from a cheesecloth.
“Arré, beti, you scared me so much. I was so scared! I was—Don’t ever leave me like that again. I would—I don’t know what I would do. My child is home. My child, my child…” She was weeping horribly, hitting her eyes with her hands. Harit had seen her cry only once before, when he was seven and her cousin Jyoti had died of tetanus. Instantly upon hearing her cry now, he felt just as he had then, vulnerable and terrified, a weak child with a weak mother. He backed away from the living room and ran to his bed, rocking himself to sleep in his sister’s sari and wishing that Swati were there to pat him to sleep, as she had done for so many years.
*
“You know, in French, the word sale means dirty,” Teddy said. “So you can imagine what French people think when they come here.”
Teddy was always dropping French into conversation. He once tried to teach Harit how to speak the language, but Harit’s “merci” kept coming out like “mercy,” and that is exactly what Teddy gave him after the fourth, and final, lesson. The funniest thing was that Teddy didn’t seem to know that much French, either.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Harit heard the short sound of metal on glass—the tip of a hanger flopping onto the counter as Teddy looked at him in anticipation. Harit was fixing a round table of ties. Red was the color of choice that summer, so the assortment before him contained varying shades of it, each tie shooting its color outward, as if mimicking the tongue of Kali.
“Uh, yes, I heard,” Harit said. He nudged one of the ties back into place and then looked up. Teddy was holding a blue blazer with gold corduroy lapels.
Teddy snorted. “Someone’s in a mood today,” he said, taking the blazer and walking it over to where its colorful clones were hanging. Harit watched him saunter, feeling, as he often did, that every interaction with Teddy, regardless of how brief, had to Mean Something.
Harriman’s was a department store that had undergone several evolutions of decor since its birth forty years before. Harit often thought of what he must have been doing while the store was being built. He would have been four then. The faux-wood walls were hoisted against real-wood planks while he had his first taste of sweet halwa. The original tan carpet—tufts of which Harit could still see popping up between layers of the newer, navy blue carpet—was rolled into place while he sat in his open-air classroom, seeing the skeletal script of words he had, until then, known only by sound. The marble staircases were given a final polish as Harit’s equally pristine soles bounded up the red stone steps of his temple. As Harriman’s opening day came to a close, coiffed housewives shuttled out of the glass front doors, milk shakes from the second-floor parlor in their bellies; Harit sat on his house’s front step, licking the cool dribble off a mango Popsicle.
He found the job through Gital Didi’s friend Sameet, who had worked briefly in the storeroom. Sameet had been charged with the task of moving gigantic boxes of women’s shoes from one end of that musty concrete bunker to the other. Harit, on the other hand, parlayed his interview into the more important position of working in the Men’s Furnishings department. Not the Men’s department, which included dress shirts and slacks and sweaters. The Men’s Furnishings department, which involved “accoutrements” (another Teddyism): ties, cuff links, suspenders, wallets, clips, hats, pocket squares, scarves, and—partly because the space devoted to it was adjacent to the Men’s Furnishings section, but more because it didn’t fit into any of the store’s other categories—luggage. The department was the also-ran of the store, but working in it still beat the storeroom, even if Harit came to realize that twiddling one’s thumbs was only slightly better than sweating.