Her professor sighed through his nose, a grumble crawling up his throat. “That is a very rare thing, you know. For someone, especially a woman, to learn English in such a fashion. And so well.”
She had nothing to say to this, not because of shyness but because of spite. She hated this type of attitude. Already, in the scant time that she had been in Delhi, she had seen how little women could become in men’s eyes—smaller than men’s eyes, smaller than their reflections in men’s eyes.
The professor, dyspeptic by her silence, rubbed his stomach. “I think that perhaps you are too advanced for this course. Perhaps you should think of taking one of the graduate courses.”
“Perhaps I should,” she said, getting up. She heard him stifle a burp as she walked out of the room. Down the hallway she went, to the registrar’s office, and demanded to be switched into a graduate course on rhetoric in the work of Kant. She was sitting in it and raising her hand the next day.
She had few friends. She was disconcerted to find that women could be as abrasive to her as men. They poked her in the back and picked at her hair; they often fled a room when she entered it, though she couldn’t tell if they did so in jest or out of actual fear. From time to time, she tried to switch her behavior: she would stay silent in class and try to engage others in conversation in the hallways. But group criticism could be startling, its fluctuations as smoothly guided and controlled as a school of fish making a turn. She had never felt trapped. She had always had the mountains over there and the field over there and the sky, big and friendly, but she found it enormously unfair that a place that was intended to expand the mind could become its cage.
As it was, the person to befriend her was a man. He was a teaching assistant in a course on fairy tales—a course that focused on Western tales and made no mention of their frequent basis in Indian folklore. She wanted to write about this, wanted to give credit to the centuries of countryside storytelling that had traveled continents to reconstitute themselves in the European parlors of les précieuses and Charles Perrault. Parvati took an interest in this teaching assistant, who was named Jaideep, though her interest did not feel romantic, only intellectual.
“You have short hair, and I have long hair,” he said right after she introduced herself. His hair was straight and shiny like the hair of an East Asian woman, and he wore it in a ponytail. What he did not say, and what was more important, was that he looked almost girlish, while she had the stern countenance of a man. (Not just any man—a taciturn uncle, some guardian of an orphaned ward out of a Dickens novel.)
“You have on a brighter shirt than mine.” He did. It was fire orange under a navy blazer.
“One must always be ready to make a colorful impression.”
She thought, briefly, that he was going to be one of those people, one of those men, who told her how good her English was. Instead, he said, “Have you chosen your dissertation topic yet?”
She had to inform him that she was, in fact, still an undergraduate. His lips parted at this, the closest he would come, she could see, to showing astonishment.
“Well, then, perhaps I can advise you?” he asked. This time, the word perhaps felt earned and natural.
They began to meet in his small office, the darkness of which he tried to mitigate by keeping all of his papers and books in tight order. She would hand her typed pages to him and watch as he read—his ponytail remained still against his back, like some sleeping animal—and she would note that he took her own work much more seriously than he took his own. As his eyes flicked over the pages, she could see that he had decided to make her work his work, that the two of them would find academic solace together. He would finish reading and immediately begin talking, bringing forth a sharpened pencil and drawing out his revisions as if they were a complicated cricket strategy. What stuck with her during these sessions was how her body, the rumblings and pressures of which she felt constantly, disappeared. In its place, her mind became her dominant feature. After a short lifetime of feeling judged physically, this felt like liberation.
Despite the grand differences in their looks, they were still different from everyone else, so they were seen as a couple. This was scandalous, but it was a covert scandal, judged silently and without direct commitment from their usual critics. They didn’t quite savor this détente—its very existence was disturbing—but they did take advantage of it, laying claim to study rooms and classrooms and picnic tables when they needed to do work.
Their physicality with each other was effortless. They didn’t go so far as to lie down. She did not tuck his hair behind his ear with her thin fingers. Instead, they leaned into books together and touched shoulders. Parvati continued not to feel sexual about him, but she also knew that he was handsome and that, underneath his carefully beautiful presentation, there was a sensual person who knew how to give pleasure.
She spotted him on campus with a younger woman—one of the very women who had subjected her to taunt after taunt. The woman, Prabha, was growing prettier, a stack of books pressed against her breasts like a loved child. Unlike Parvati, she touched his hair, her sari lifting to reveal the smooth beckon of her bare stomach. Finally, Parvati felt a surge of attraction, but toward this woman. Afterward, when she studied with Jaideep, Parvati could smell the change in his body. His overall behavior didn’t change with Parvati in any meaningful way, but she found it hard to keep her calm with him. Something about the way he was with Prabha smacked of brutishness, and it reinforced Parvati’s own confusion about Prabha’s beauty while making her feel jealous of both of them.
“You saw that I am with Prabha, didn’t you?” he asked, looking at her intensely in his office, the way that he looked at her writing.
Parvati felt how exaggerated her shrug was. “Yes. She is very pretty.”
“You do not seem very happy about this.”
“You are very perceptive,” she said. They both heard the electric crackle of her tone, and they started giggling. Soon, they were crying against the table, their shoulders shaking against the wood. They were aware more than ever that their great emotional connection was with each other, not with other people. It was a connection of mind-set and demeanor, which seemed more important than one of the body.