Ranjana laughed again. She could feel herself creating the sound, since she was simultaneously fending off a sense of embarrassment. This shocked and annoyed her. She wanted to be comfortable with befriending a young gay man, in front of other people, in a state of quasi-flirtation, with a hot cup of tea in her hands and adrenaline surging through her body. She was here, after all, and could start enjoying her life more, as Seema had encouraged. The truth was that, like Achyut’s karma, her self-doubt had accumulated over many years.
When she was no more than eleven years old, she had told her next-door neighbor Sandeep that she loved him. He was fourteen at the time, already handsome, eyebrows like storm clouds on his burgeoning brow. He had plucked her hand off his shoulder and told her that she was crazy. It was a tiny scar on a knee, the memory of a childhood fall, this sight of Sandeep walking away from her. It was, in truth, the solitary spoil of her love life. As she walked around the fire with Mohan on their wedding day, she still remembered Sandeep, his abandonment. Abandonment! So scant was her experience with actual romance that she had seen this tiny infraction as the most damaging of rejections. There was no such thing as a little heartbreak, a tiny loss. Not to a person like her, not to a woman who took desperate pride in clipping a butterfly to her aging hair. Sandeep had moved away a year after his refusal, and she had never seen or heard from him again. Sitting at a coffee table now with Achyut, she saw so little separating that damaging moment and her current anxiety. An attempt to transcend one’s physical station in life, she thought, was a futile thing. Perhaps her own karma, too, was volatile.
Achyut must have seen how lost in her thoughts she was because he broke her silence with an exclamation:
“Ohmigod, you know what we should do? Ohmigod.”
“What should we do?” Ranjana asked.
“Why talk about Hell when we can go to Paradise?”
*
With the exception of Prashant, Ranjana had never been the driver while a male companion was in the passenger seat. They parked next to a chain-link fence, beyond which lay the object of their disappointment. It was as unfinished as ever. Ranjana had hoped they’d at least see a tractor, something that hinted at a project in progress, but no, it was the same old piles of rubble and coarse earth. The back of the large wooden sign, its insidious message facing the highway, looked like an instrument of torture.
On the drive over, Ranjana confessed to Achyut that she was in a writing group (he was the only person who knew besides Seema now). The more she talked about her work, the better she felt, but she still couldn’t shake the overall feeling of negativity that she associated with it. As she turned off the ignition, Ranjana told Achyut about Cassie’s frequent criticisms of everyone’s work. Achyut waved this away with one hand like it was the stench of skunk on the highway.
“Please. She sounds like a loser. Look at you: you couldn’t possibly be more fabulous, auntie.”
“You can call me Ranjana Auntie, Achyut.”
“Ranjana Auntie,” he said. “What does ‘Ranjana’ mean, by the way?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How can you not know what your name means?”
“What does Achyut mean?”
“‘Imperishable.’”
“Well, well. That almost sounds like ‘Paradise Island.’”
“I always like to think about how it contains ‘Paris.’ I really want to go there.”
“You’ve never been?”
“Nope. But I feel like I would just love it there.”
“Usually, when I travel to India, my layovers are in Frankfurt or Amsterdam, but I did have a layover in Paris once. I didn’t get to leave the airport. I sat in a French McDonald’s and had a tea. But sometimes I lie and say I’ve been there.”
“I’d do the same thing. People who’ve been to France are just cooler.”
Ranjana was silent for a moment as she scanned the mess in front of them. “You know, in a way, this is very Indian. I’ve never really thought of it before, but Delhi is littered with buildings like this—unfinished buildings. Things shoot up there so quickly now. If you walk around the city, you’ll see dozens of structures like this, being built, abandoned. Or they’re crumbling.”
Achyut sighed and pulled down the sun visor in front of him. His face was brightened by twin strips of light. Ranjana could see narrow wrinkles already emphasizing his eyes.
She could feel a confession coming from him; his eyes were still with it.
“I got kicked out of my house. My parents found out.”
“That you’re … gay?” She’d rarely ever said this word aloud, and she felt the g catch in her throat before it came out.
“Yeah. ‘Gay.’ Gay, gay, gay. What a crock of shit.”
She was startled by his curse word, even though she’d heard him say others. She had never cursed in this car, and any time that Prashant did so, she pinched his cheek.
“Yeah, so, they kicked me out,” Achyut said. “Well, I guess ‘kicked out’ isn’t the right phrase. They told me that I had to change my lifestyle or take it elsewhere. So I’m staying with my friend Amber. She actually doesn’t have too bad a place. She works downtown and makes good money. I don’t see her all that much because I’m at the bar by the time she comes home from work.”
A terrifying thought came to Ranjana: Achyut was going to ask to stay with her. That’s what this was all about. He needed a place to stay, and that was why he was befriending her. Legally, it would be a nightmare. She couldn’t take in this man without inviting a darker reaction from his family. Not to mention Mohan’s reaction at such a thing.
Once again, Achyut read the expression on her face. “Auntie? Ohmigod, no. Ha-ha—no. I am not asking to stay with you.”
Until her shoulders melted back into their usual place, Ranjana hadn’t noticed that they had been hunched up to her ears. “Oh.”
“No—I’m just telling you this. I’m not gonna lie—it’s great to have a mother to talk to about this, even if it’s someone else’s mother. I mean, even though I didn’t grow up around you, I might have, in some other world. And even if that doesn’t sound like anything … it’s something. If I’m being honest, that’s why I approached you in the first place.”
He went on talking about his family and how they had found out about his sexual orientation. His mother had gone through his cell phone while he was asleep, snatching it up while it was not six inches from his head. Worse, it was not a boyfriend whose messages she had read but an older man he had slept with only once. His mother had woken Achyut up, then screamed for his father to join her in questioning him.
His parents ran an insurance company. His younger sister, Vandana—who listened to hard rock music, had pink hair, and seemed generally laid-back—still found his lifestyle abhorrent.