Perhaps Ranjana was getting cocky—now that she had ignited her obsession with humor and the having of it—but that comment wasn’t funny. It was probably what made her tell Teddy that she would be delighted to meet up with them. Pity, not wine, was really the ultimate social lubricant.
Her pity continued into this evening. She really did feel for Harit. He was entirely out of his element here, and it was surely his first time in a restaurant like this. The look on his face when he opened the menu and saw its cursive innards was the present version of her immigrant past. How many menus had confounded her over the years? She tried to remember the first time that she had been to a French restaurant. She couldn’t remember it, but she did remember a time, with Mohan: a professors’ dinner, during which an arsenal of shiny salades ni?oises and slimy chicken paillards was deployed among the non-Indian people while she and Mohan munched on confounding piles of ratatouille. Ranjana had learned something from that experience, which was that there was something to be gained in every social interaction. You could take the various experiences and store them inside yourself like you were a curio cabinet, and later, after you had gone through a succession of situations, you could stand back and marvel at the cohesive collection they made. That was what a person was—a curio cabinet of experiences.
She ventured to speak to Harit directly, in Hindi.
“Do you have other relatives here, Haritji?”
This was clearly an uncomfortable subject. Harit shook his head and said, in English, “Just my mother and I. And you?”
Teddy was holding his wineglass by his lips as if it were a mouthpiece through which he was giving clues to 007.
“My brothers and my sister live in California,” Ranjana persisted in Hindi. “It is my husband, my son, and I here.”
He, again, in English: “It is my bad memory, I am sure, but I do not believe that I have seen you at temple. Do you go on Sundays?”
It was an inevitable question, and there was no way to answer it properly. If she lied and said yes, he would try to see which friends they had in common (though she suspected that he had few social connections). And if she said no—which she decided was the best choice simply because it was the truth—she was casting herself as a blasphemer who didn’t attend temple regularly.
“Sadly, it has been quite some time since we went. We do puja at home.” This was partly true; it occurred once every, oh, century. “The complications of raising a teenager in this country…”
As she had anticipated, this seemed to cause him no small amount of concern, but she decided that this wasn’t entirely her fault. It was, rather, the fault of his small social circle. Temple was not just a religious place for him but a sanctuary—the sanctuary that it was truly supposed to be. She knew the type, the Indian who needed the reliability of a religious space. To be sure, there was no end of companionship that one could derive from a temple’s smiling gods.
*
So she didn’t go to temple regularly, but what had he expected, exactly? It was true that families had a tendency to dissipate when their children grew into adolescence. Or, well, some families. Many were fierce in their dedication, their attendance rising. But even Harit himself had seen his own dedication waver in light of his association with Teddy; he now went once or twice a week instead of his usual three times. He normally sat in the corner where the elderly men alternately gurgled prayers and dozed. He stayed away from the chirping aunties in the kitchen and the kids who ran rings-around-the-rosie in the lobby. He found solace in the prayers, and he listened attentively to the words of wisdom that the pandit added in between them. Harriman’s presented numerous chances for him to feel alien, but a temple, even though fragile compared to its counterparts in India, surrounded him in familiar moments that knew nothing of long-gone sisters and distant mothers.
To be fair, Ranjana had not been through his family’s tragedy, so what did she need of temple? Her family was her temple. Yet Harit also sensed that there was something fragile about her home, as well. Her stiff reaction to any mention of her husband indicated this.
Their soups arrived. Harit had never wanted to mutter an expletive so much. He liked onions. He liked soup. But what was this invincible sealing of goo on top? He punctured it with the spoon that lay alongside the bowl; then he pulled a wand of cheese toward himself, brown dewdrops of broth sliding down it.
He looked across the table and met Ranjana’s eyes. At long last, they had the first genuine, shared laugh of the evening. Teddy, bending over his bowl and looking up through a mouthful of soup, practically spat it out.
“Ji, do not worry,” Ranjana said, now twirling a turban of cheese around her spoon. “I have never been able to figure out how to eat this.” She tugged her spoon and snapped the stuff free. A string of cheese flopped over the rim of the bowl and onto the saucer beneath it—messy, unseemly, but not to be helped. Then she ate the bite daintily. It was a merciful gesture. It hinted at sympathy.
What sort of person was he? What was it that mattered most to him now—now that his sister, his role model and inspiration, was gone? He found mockery in the word relation, because it was so easy to live your life in relation to family. To think of your life as defined by the lives of the ones around you simply because they bore your name. Swati had been a loveable force by which he had crafted his own life. This evening, he needed her approval; he needed to know how she ate soup, how she sat in a booth, and how she managed to do these things while fluent in conversation. Her accent had been comparable to his, but her manner of speaking would have eventually, outside of death, reached Teddy-like levels of good humor. Could he now ever achieve a similar level of conversation without Swati to guide him?