“For fun. You don’t seem to be having too much fun at work, so you must look for it elsewhere.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said sarcastically. “Working as a receptionist is tons of fun.” Achyut laughed, again. She was entertaining him consistently, and it fortified her. “I’ll tell you what I do for fun: I try to figure out what Paradise Island is.”
Achyut’s eyes widened. “Ohmigod, right? What the eff is that place? It’s driving my friends crazy.”
“Not just your friends, Achyut. It’s driving me mad, too. I don’t understand what they are attempting to do to us.”
“My buddy Eric says they ran out of money, that it was supposed to be done by now, but they just abandoned it. There’s supposed to be all of this development in Cleveland now because New York and L.A. and all of those cities are becoming too expensive. But maybe there isn’t as much demand as they’re saying.”
“What was it supposed to be in the first place? No one seems to know.”
“Seriously. Ohmigod, I can’t believe you just mentioned that. You’re, like, totally awesome, auntie. My friends would effing love you.”
Ohmigod. Ranjana had heard Indians using this term all the time, even young immigrants she met at temple or at parties, though the Indians pronounced it with a t sound at the end: Ohmigot.
“Paradise Island…,” Achyut said ruminatively. “Paradise wasn’t even an island, was it? Wasn’t it a garden? But that’s Christianity. I’m a bad Hindu: I don’t even know what the version of Paradise is in Hinduism. All I know is that you probably need good karma to get in, and I don’t exactly have that.”
Achyut’s muddled interpretation of these two religions confused Ranjana almost as much as Paradise Island itself. In truth, she wasn’t sure what his karma would be. On the one hand, he had to see a proctologist. This meant that he wasn’t doing particularly pious things with his body. But as little as Ranjana knew him, she didn’t feel that he was ill-intentioned. His attentions to her, though suspect at first, did not feel predatory. If anything, it had been her own prejudices that had transformed his actions into something sinister. She was hardly justified in passing judgment on him anyway, given the books that she read in private and the stories that she attempted to craft. She saw him now as a young man in need of guidance. He needed someone to confirm that his cheery outlook on life was justified, that he could continue to enjoy himself, even if he was dealing with weighty matters. He needed a distraction.
“I’m sure that your karma is just fine,” Ranjana offered, not because she knew it for certain but because she felt that this was a time to be affirmative, not judgmental.
“Yeah, but I think that our culture has made it pretty clear that being gay is not all that good for it.”
So he had been thinking what she had been thinking. It made her feel all the more guilty for having thought it in the first place.
“Most religions want gays to roast in Hell.” He said this matter-of-factly. He leaned forward and blew on his coffee, then slurped up a sip by leaning over it, as a little kid would do. He had the beginnings of a beard, and a couple wayward droplets of coffee shone in it like tiny, amber beads. He was tall, well over six feet, and he resembled one of those plastic birds that Ranjana had bought Prashant years ago, one that flipped forward on the axis of its long legs, its beak sucking up a bit of water. “Don’t you think most Hindus want gays to roast in Hell?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said, shuddering at the bluntness of his words. “Our Paradise, so to speak, is not like Christianity’s, you know. It’s more of a spiritual plane than an actual end point. And just as our Paradise is different, we don’t really have what Americans think of as Hell. There is a Hell, but it is more like a judgment in court. People must perform tasks related to the sins that they committed and can earn back their karma. I like to think that no one burns in Hell forever.”
“I’m pretty sure my punishment for being gay is going to see Dr. Butt. I love him, but that is one dude that I don’t want up there.”
Ranjana couldn’t help but giggle. She couldn’t believe that she was sitting in a café talking about a rectal exam.
“My friends and I were really upset when the Section 377 decision was overturned,” Achyut said, referring to the law that had recriminalized gay sex in India. “I think that we all thought that things in India would keep getting better little by little, that all of the changes here in the U.S. would have a positive effect, but I dunno. That also seems like a really na?ve way of thinking because we can’t just assume that change over here will lead to change over there. We actually have to acknowledge that India doesn’t always see the progress over here as a good thing.”
Ranjana had heard only vague details about 377 and the ramifications it had for the community that Achyut was talking about. “In all honesty, Achyut, I do not know much about this subject.”
“I’m not surprised to hear that,” Achyut said, leaning back with his coffee cup in his hand and looking more serious. “It’s hard to know how much to care about something like that if you’re not gay or know someone who’s gay. I’m assuming that you don’t have a good gay friend?”
“I have you,” Ranjana ventured.
“Yeah, look at us—already discussing Hell. We’re fast friends already.”