“Who was it?” she felt obliged to ask, though she knew the caller’s identity was as unknown to him as it was to her. Mohan let out an unintelligible swear and then rolled back into sleep. Now Ranjana really began to worry. She could not sleep the rest of the night.
The next day at work, she was useless. She was more tired than she had been in a long while, perhaps since Prashant’s early high school days, when he would come home, his backpack containing so many books that it looked like a giant sea turtle, and she would stay up with him as he sorted through his myriad assignments. Today, she tried to yawn inconspicuously, afraid more of Cheryl’s attention than of Dr. Butt’s surely taciturn reaction. Her fears were confirmed when Cheryl bothered her an hour before lunchtime.
“Babe, if you yawn one more time, I’m gonna think you have mono.” Cheryl crossed her index fingers over each other in an exorcist-like staving-off.
“I don’t have mono, Cheryl,” Ranjana said. “Someone called while we were sleeping last night, and I couldn’t get back to sleep.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Ohmigod, are you being stalked?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ranjana admonished, but as soon as she heard the word stalked come out of Cheryl’s mouth, she realized how scared it made her. Could it be true? Why? Who? How?
Cheryl picked up on her fear. “Ohmigod, maybe you should file a police report.”
“Cheryl, it happened just this once. You’re running away with this. Haven’t you ever had a wrong number in the middle of the night?”
“Oh, honey, I’ve had many a wrong number in the middle of the night.” From somewhere, she pulled out a small packet of sugared pecans and started to munch on them. She had a habit of producing snacks as if they grew on her. “All I’m saying is that you wouldn’t look so tired and worried right now if it didn’t have you scared.”
“It’s nothing Wendy’s can’t cure,” Ranjana replied, knowing that the mere mention of fast food would save them from exploring the topic any further.
As they ate their lunch—Cheryl alternating between dipping her sandwich in hot mustard sauce and barbecue sauce—it dawned on Ranjana that Teddy may be her secret caller. She recalled his general fidgety nature, his eagerness to know her and befriend her, and this thought made her even more frightened than the idea of Achyut or a stranger. It was silly, to be afraid of such a goofy man, but it still unsettled her. She reassured herself that it had nothing to do with his being gay, but at the same time, she felt guilty about the idea of assuming him harmless simply because he preferred men sexually. Was it bigoted to assume that gay men didn’t have the fortitude to be stalkers?
About an hour after lunch, she realized: Harit. It was clearly Harit. The tone of the breaths—it was the first time she had ever thought of breath as having a tone—something in it mimicked the overall carriage of Harit’s body, the weightiness mixed with a dispersion of energy. It was Harit. All sense of fear left her and was replaced with compassion. Harit. Friendless except for Teddy—alone and meek and with that swaying shyness from the temple.
She thought back to a tense memory from many years ago, soon after her arrival in the U.S.: a picnic table, its bright checkered surface crowded with an assortment of large bowls, each one filled with a colorful fruit or vegetable salad, the sickening but increasingly reliable smell of cooking meat, a lawn fragrant and strewn with freshly cut shards of itself, the laughter of children, her own newly pregnant belly under her hands. It was a faculty picnic, a gathering of white women with tapered hair and freckled noses, and their spouses, long-locked at the temples and wearing wide ties and long shoes. She had been standing, holding her stomach, not saying a word to anyone for a good twenty minutes, just taking the scene in, trying to find some connection between the world she had known and this one. She settled on the table itself as the only comforting sight. It reminded her of the one that had been behind her house in Delhi and on which she’d made mud pies with her next-door neighbors. Their voices were lighter and more joyous than the cries of American children, who always seemed to be doing something to each other instead of simply being with each other. The palpable sense that she would likely never know what it felt like to live simply, now that every moment was overwhelming. Her reverie was broken by an older woman who had spilled punch on her cream blouse, a blood rose of fruitiness. The woman approached Ranjana in a panic with some club soda and salt—because Ranjana’s skin had turned her into a servant—and Ranjana used them properly, something she couldn’t remember having learned explicitly, which meant she had learned it from the endless depths of her TV watching. She vividly remembered that sense of connection as she helped this woman, then the distance returned as the woman thanked her tersely and resumed a conversation at the other end of the table.
Ranjana had not thought of this moment in a long time. She had thrown out the dress she had worn for that occasion, her body having shifted after Prashant’s birth. But something about how she had felt at that party was echoed in the breaths that she had heard on the phone, and Ranjana knew that she would confront Harit the next time it rang.
It happened, luckily, when she was home alone. Before a second breath was even huffed out, she said, “Haritji?”
She expected him to hang up, but then she heard him say, “… Ji?”
“Haritji, kya haal hai?” She wanted to sound nonchalant, not wanting to frighten him off.
“Theek hai,” he managed to get out. He sounded like he was in an airtight chamber. Perhaps he was calling from the bathroom.
“All is good?” she continued in Hindi, not sure what else to ask. She should let him lead the conversation. He obviously had something important to tell her.
“Fine,” he repeated. “Just fine.”
Ranjana wasn’t sure what to ask next. “Can I help you with something, ji?”
The breaths came again, and she realized that he was crying. Not a full-on sob, but it sounded as if his whole body was trembling. The muscles in her upper back tightened. All this time, she had seen him as some shy creature, but in this instant, she sensed something much darker and more significant.
She wasn’t sure how to respond, but she tried. “Would you like to meet for some tea?” She began to give him directions to the coffee shop where she’d met Achyut, but when Harit stuttered on the other end, she remembered: he had no car. She volunteered to pick him up, and when another series of stutters came through, she cut him off and said, “It’s no problem.” Like that, he burst out with the address, and she jotted it down so quickly that she feared that she may not be able to read her own handwriting later. She was more intent when writing a note to put on the fridge for Mohan: Went out to get a couple of things from the store. Then she was on her way.