The thing was, he wasn’t a bad man. If he were a bad man, if he made belittling her his primary hobby, she probably would have left years ago. He was still capable of romance, though. It hadn’t fled entirely. Sometimes he cooked for her. She’d come home to find him sitting at the kitchen table, a couple of dishes steaming up their glass lids. He didn’t make many things, but what he made was good—aloo gobi, or egg curry, or even dosa (which he made from a mix, and which he filled with his aloo gobi, but he got an A for effort). As with most men, there was a get-out-of-jail-free card attached to these offerings. If Mohan cooked for her one month, he was exempted from repeating such a task for the next three months. At one point, Ranjana had sat down with a calendar and tried to figure out if Mohan’s advances were cyclical, but she stopped herself, realizing that such an act was both debasing and mean.
To his credit, he did work hard. He got up very early in the morning—which, yes, most Indians did—but his regimen was sound. He would do a series of exacting yoga exercises for about twenty minutes (another reason why he disliked Seema was her willingness to pay an American person to lead her in Indian exercise). Then he would have his breakfast—two hard-boiled eggs, a cup of tea, a grapefruit, and a handful of cashews. He would spend the rest of his day at the university, teaching and advising, pouring his energy into the minds of inquisitive young chemists.
*
Fleeing from Seema’s invasive questioning, Ranjana decided to do something that she had never done: she drove to the university to sit in on one of Mohan’s classes. She had never attempted this because Mohan always said that he wasn’t comfortable with her entering his professional arena. Ranjana often humored herself by thinking that the real reason why he said this was because he felt anxious about impressing her. Now, in light of what she knew, she wanted to see if his behavior at school was appropriate. For all she knew, he was flirting horribly with a number of students in his class.
Once she was in the dim auditorium, she saw the main reason why he had advised her against attending: the students were rude, lazy, and defiant. Defiant laziness really was the mark of so many of these American children, and Ranjana prided herself on the fact that Prashant did not exude such disrespect. During Mohan’s lecture, as she sat in the dark anonymity of the last row, she witnessed the following acts: at least four students sleeping, one of them snoring; a boy texting frantically on his gigantic phone, which resembled one of Prashant’s childhood Transformers; a boy and a girl passing notes to each other incessantly, the occasional kiss sealing their collaboration; a girl knitting a scarf in pink wool, although she took notes every few minutes; and one Indian boy who kept drawing concentric circles in his notebook until Ranjana thought he’d drill a hole through the page, the desk, the wooden floor, and Earth itself. This last culprit was the most heartbreaking: not even an Indian kid was paying attention to her husband’s chemistry lecture. What if this kid failed the course? That would be the end of India as an emerging global superpower.
This experience might have instilled ire in many a wife—the public embarrassment of her husband—but Ranjana felt pity for Mohan. Even though she did not understand the particulars of what he was teaching, the chalk equations on the blackboard like scattered rice, she did know that there was an order and intelligence to them. Even though he had been teaching for more than twenty-five years, he seemed to be engrossed in what he was describing. Ranjana had rarely seen him so excited. This both saddened and heartened her. He had his equivalent of her writing: his teaching. She could not begrudge him the satisfaction he felt in exercising this part of himself, yet she couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss on her part. Why couldn’t Mohan get so excited about her?
She diluted her anger with logic: she couldn’t reproach Mohan because she wasn’t excited about him, either. Who had started this? Had Mohan’s coldness triggered hers? Or was it her unattractiveness that had begun all of this? After all, it was her looks that had fled first, not Mohan’s. Mohan had still been attractive before Prashant’s birth; he had that thick head of hair, the long, smooth face, and he still smiled. Ranjana had never felt particularly attractive, but then again, such things had not been huge concerns for her before marriage.
Marriage, however, brought out the self-scrutiny. All along, she had thought that having a child would mitigate the tension of being a spouse; you had a child and then focused on giving everything to the child. But as her hips widened, as her hair became courser and started to thread with gray, as her complexion changed with each of Prashant’s childhood milestones, she knew that not caring about beauty had been foolish. All that time, she should have been as narcissistic as those girls she had always mocked, the ones who thought themselves important and enjoyed being fawned over, stars like Rekha or Madhuri Dixit or Nargis. She should have been treating her hair and skin as carefully as if they were children. Now, here she was, a grown woman without the experience of beauty. She had not cultivated beauty, so now she lived without it. To Mohan, a man enthralled by science, how could uncultivated beauty—never cultivated beauty—ever be as beautiful as a blackboard full of equations?
*
Achyut Bakshi didn’t have another appointment for two weeks, and Ranjana, already guilty that she had looked at his HIV status, forbade herself from checking why he had come to see Dr. Butt in the first place. She didn’t tell Cheryl about Achyut, for fear that she would become emotional. Clearly, she didn’t have feelings for him; that would have been trite and downright impossible, given their limited interaction. Yet his youth had invigorated her simply by way of its proximity. She could not help but think that his presence might present the opportunity to succeed where she continually failed with Prashant.
After all, her conversations with Prashant were the same, again and again. Yesterday, he had called her on his cell phone as he was walking to the dining hall, and their words to each other were almost exactly what they had been the week before:
“Hi, beta.”
“Hi, Mom. What’s up?”
“Not much. Your dad is taking a nap. How are you?”
“Fine. Just walking to dinner. Had a quiz today in math. Went OK.”
“It went OK?”
“Yes. I just said it did.” He had adopted a tone of resigned annoyance with her. He sounded like a jaded criminal—answering her questions without conviction or passion.
“How is everything else, beta?”
“Fine. Work is good?”
“Never a dull moment,” she said. He snickered, either because he found her comment amusing or he pitied the boredom of her job. What did he tell his friends about her work? Did he brush it off, or did he make fun of it? Was Prashant proud of his mother?
“OK, well, I’m at the dining hall, so I’d better go. Tell Dad I said hi.”
“I will. Eat well, beta.”
“Yup. Love you, bye.”