The café in the student center was a dim, oak affair. A row of booths ran across one wall, while an assortment of tables and chairs and a couple of plush couches finished the space. Innocuous pop music played over the stereo, peppered with the occasional R & B song that seemed to restore people’s energy. Prashant got in line behind two other students, both in baggy sweats and flip-flops—odd, since it was autumn and therefore chilly outside—and he scanned the room as subtly as he could, finding no trace of Kavita.
He ordered his coffee, then sauntered out of the café. He could feel himself trying to copy the gait of the preppy jock. Those guys felt at ease because they were stars on the field or the court, but he felt that his own proficiency in science should be regarded as equally valuable. He walked around the two main floors of the student center, then took the elevator up to the third floor, which contained another small library and a smattering of tables where people sat hunched over books, with half-eaten granola bars and Nalgene water bottles scattered among them. He had given himself over to the insanity of his hunt now, and he sipped in a leisurely manner as his sneakers plodded over the carpet. People’s heads bumped up as he passed—a delinquent in their midst—but he responded with curt head nods and a further scanning of the room. No sight of her. He pictured his parents, small-talking on their car ride home, and he wondered what they would make of this somewhat crazed mission.
Only when he caught his own reflection in one of the long windows did he understand how foolish he was being. He really did have a difficult problem set to finish, and he was probably going to go over it late-night with Charlie. He couldn’t let himself get distracted from his studies. If anything, Kavita’s accomplishments would demand more studying from him. He tossed his half-full coffee into a trash can, then walked back home through the evening, under lamppost after lamppost, feeling with each step that he was contributing to his own success. He didn’t want to be his mother and father eating a rudimentary Mediterranean dinner. He wanted back on the train to status and success, if only so it could deliver him to the girl of his dreams. These dreams may have been recently formed, but he felt committed to them with a newfound sense of adulthood. There was no question that this place was making him feel more adult all-around, and it was not an issue of studies and chemical equations and grades and moving up the social ladder that befit this sentiment. It was more that he felt romantically engaged for the first time in his life. His worries that he would be a loser, a virgin, a sexually frustrated guy forever—they were scattering like leaves off a tree.
HER PARENTS NAMED HER PARVATI not because of the goddess but because it sounded like parivartana, the word meaning “change.” They needed a change. Her father was a farmer on a flat plane of land with a dozen sullen cows. All of the cows had died the summer of her birth, when the sun was so hot that it looked larger than the face of the person right next to you. A dozen dead cows was the gravest luck—was actually no luck at all. “Bad luck” was a term for something that didn’t exist; you either had good fortune or you had none.
They named her Parvati, and everyone imagined Shiva’s consort, beautiful and supine on a lotus. But they wanted her to be Shiva himself. Strong and determined, no slave to a field of dead cows.
A neighbor boy, Ashwin, who lived a long field and a mountainous ridge away, gave her a pair of overalls. He took them off himself and was naked. Neither of them thought anything of it, though Parvati had never seen anything like the lazy flop at his waist. She took the cross of cloth onto her body, wore it until it stank of dirt. Her room—small, wooden, a third of her home—was both spacious and oppressive. Sitting on her cot, she painted her toenails red and wanted another girl to admire the job. She practiced kisses against her arm and imagined that her arm looked like her but with long hair.
She led the new cows into their pen while pushing her short hair behind her ears.
At dinner, at their table of five wooden planks, a kerosene lamp quivering on one of its joints, she touched herself in her overalls, in front of her parents, and didn’t realize until she was back in her room, when her center shivered, that what she had just experienced was not to be discussed with others yet. She turned on her side and nuzzled her arm.
“What are we going to do to have Parvati meet someone?” her mother said, resting her forehead on her hands. She had given birth to Parvati at fifty, and since she had grown up in Delhi, she knew how strange this was. She had escaped to this farm because of it.
“There’s the boy over there,” said her father, sipping a frothy cup of milk while nodding to the ridge far away. Her mother kept rubbing her forehead into her hands, and Parvati pulled up the overall straps at her shoulders, ran her tongue under her lower lip, and walked into the field.
Over the ridge, there were other people who would know more, who wouldn’t put their heads in their hands but who would put a hand on her shoulder and point to something on a blackboard. She’d seen this in the newspaper. She knew that all of this was temporary. She would be here for a time and then go somewhere else for a time and would end up in America. All she had to do was sip her milk and study the wooden walls of her room and wait for it to happen.
Soon she left the farm and took a job as a seamstress so that she could pay for her schooling. She understood that not everyone behaved the way that she did. They gave her weird looks as they shuffled the sabji on their plates and yelled at each other under frenzied ceiling fans. She wore overalls as a matter of course, and men, more so than they did with most women, picked at the cloth on her legs and ran their hands over her stomach. She kept her hair short, and she became so accustomed to the feeling of men’s spit against her neck that she couldn’t tell it apart from the landing of mosquitoes. When she spoke with other women, she stood with a hand on one hip and a snack in the other and wiped her hands on the front of her clothes when she was finished. They found this distasteful, clicking their tongues and dispersing, but she had seen South Indians who dipped their entire forearms into their plates of food and licked the length of food off with their tongues, so she didn’t understand why her behavior was so off-putting.
One day when she was feeling particularly alert during her literature class, she raised her hand six times and answered six different questions assuredly. After class, the teacher sat on her desk and looked at her over the glasses on his nose. His manner was generally mild, but he could be wry and had an annoying habit of overusing the word perhaps.
“How is your English so good? Are you a diplomat’s daughter, perhaps?”
People wondered this about her often. Her casual appearance read as the arrogance of snobbery.
“No,” she replied.
“Then how did you learn?”
She was genuinely surprised by this question, in light of where it was being asked. She held an open palm toward Ivanhoe, which they were reading in class. “Through literature.”