She replied that dinner was out of the question. She could not, in good faith, join a group of his friends in a brightly lit public place and pretend that she belonged among them. No, she would dress up for the evening and meet Achyut at the bar, simply because she wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into anyone that she knew. “Don’t expect me to drink alcohol,” she wrote. “I don’t drink and will not make an exception for you.” This wasn’t entirely true; she had been known to take a sip of wine in rare cases, but she did not have any interest in making this one of those rare cases, especially because she was going to be driving.
If the Indian women in her set had known what she was planning, she would never have been allowed into their confidence again. Even Seema, so progressive, would find a way to spin it into some lurid tale. Like any good bevy of Indians, they passed judgment on everything, from the way in which a woman wrapped her sari to the type of napkins that she provided at dinner parties. They were all subjected to the sort of intense scrutiny that defined murder trials, purchasing a home, or sizing up jewelry. The most talked-about social occurrence in all their years had been when Sonya Mehta, a former model whose likeness had been used as the logo for a film company in Bombay, had told them about one of her dreams.
“In my dream, I was on a bicycle,” she said, stroking her sari where it was draped off her shoulder. She was wearing a dozen gold bangles on each arm, and the wide plane of her forehead seemed to glimmer. “I was in Delhi passing through a market and saw a tomato stand. There was a shopkeeper placing the final tomato on top of a stack, but when he saw me, he fell forward and knocked over the whole stand. It was only then that I realized I was naked! I was naked and riding a bicycle through town!” She was giggling, pressing one hand to her mouth, as if stifling a sin, her nails spackled in magenta. No one in the circle echoed her laughter. The subject changed immediately to the amount of homework that all of their children had. Sonya stayed and sipped her tea quietly, giggling periodically so as to bring the story back into discussion, but the group had already erected a wall of disapproval around her. Fifteen minutes later, she was getting up to use the restroom, leaving behind, with a model’s uncanny grace, an air of being above her companions and worthy of their biting criticism. Naturally, it was all anyone could discuss for weeks afterward; Sonya’s “naked story” was recapitulated in countless phone conversations and e-mails. Seema, who had been in the kitchen during that particular conversation, was obsessed with hearing an account of the incident. Soon, she was cracking jokes about it to the other women as if she had been there all along.
Ranjana shuddered to think what would happen if someone caught her going to a bar, and at ten o’clock at night. If she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she had ever been in a bar. She had been in restaurants that had bars in them, but she had never gone to a separate space, certainly not with the intent of imbibing. None of the women in her circle drank, not even Seema. Prashant drank, she knew, but it had never impaired his judgment or, more important, his grades. Mohan had a couple of drinks when he and the other men met at their Saturday parties, but if he were ever drunk, he didn’t show it. Although many of the men nursed their Johnnie Walker throughout the evening, Mohan opted for Budweiser, drinking it out of a tall can on which America’s red, white, and blue were repurposed into a florid design. Mohan’s breath, exiting his nostrils in the quiet car ride home, would waft over to Ranjana, the smell steely and yeasty, like stale chapatis.
Fretting over her Indian group would just ruin the night, so Ranjana tried to push it out of her mind. She had enough to worry about just getting ready for the evening and socializing with Achyut in a group setting. Speaking to him at a bar, while he flitted from customer to customer, was the exact opposite of whispering to him across a car, next to Paradise Island, as it lay slumbering in yet-to-be-ruined ruins.
To manage her stress, she cleaned her closet for the first time in two years. (Before beginning this process, she broke down and flipped frantically through Mohan’s shirts, sniffing them to see if they smelled of someone else’s perfume and shaking their fabric to see if any stowaway hairs fell off of them. Only after finding nothing objectionable or actionable did she begin her closet-cleaning in earnest.) She took everything out and laid it on the carpeted floor of the master bedroom, then put it all back in relatively neat order after paring her choices down to four outfits. None of them was Indian; she knew that she could never get away with wearing a sari or even a salwar kameez in a bar. Any depiction of a bar that she had seen always involved a crowd of men and women swaddled in tight clothing and a variety of hats—baseball and cowboy. Prashant had given her a pair of blue jeans last year during Christmas (at his behest, they celebrated the holiday every year with a plastic tree that they assembled out of a kit), but she had never worn them, not just because she found jeans crude but also because she didn’t think she could fit her thighs into them. If she wore the jeans, she could wear a blouse on top, as well as some nice earrings, her wedding ring, and some bangles. She pulled the jeans off the bed and spread them across the front of her body, the denim barely wider than her hips.
*
Achyut worked at a bar called FB, which Ranjana understood to be an abbreviation of Facebook. The bar was located much closer to Ranjana’s house than she had imagined. Her sense of propriety had placed it on the other side of town, but in reality, it was only four miles from her house, on a harelip road just off the exit that she took every day. She arrived ten minutes early and waited in her car, glad that the bar was tucked away behind a batch of trees and a high metal shoulder that shielded it from the highway. The parking lot was not brightly lit, and the bar itself was covered in small, red lightbulbs, like a demonic Christmas tree. A burly white man, a stool next to him, stood guard at the door. Ranjana had never shown her ID to anyone other than the bank or an airline. To kill some time, she pulled out her pocketbook and extracted her driver’s license from one of its dank plastic windows. Part of the print came off on the plastic as she pulled, and she was worried at first that this had rendered it illegible. Thankfully, most of the ink remained, and anyway, it wasn’t as if the man at the door would be looking at anything besides her hideous picture. She had opted to keep the same one throughout the years, and she didn’t know if the distortion of the photograph made her look better or worse. The obvious mess of hair, the separation of her eyes exaggerated by a slight ripple in the picture’s surface, the maroon background making the flash-brightened pallor of her skin all the starker—this photo was either a reinforcement of her appearance or a mockery of it.