“A pandit comes to the house,” Harit said, “and performs rituals.”
“What kind of rituals?” Teddy asked. Harit imagined what might have popped up during Teddy’s online research. Perhaps he had found pictures of a stooped pandit, legs crossed, hands pecking at uncooked rice or crushed flowers or ghee, garlanded portraits of deities flanking him while a couple dozen families surrounded him, their legs also crossed, backs straight, bedsheets carpeting the carpet underneath them. This is what Harit described to Teddy, who took it all in and seemed to understand the image that Harit was creating (possibly because Teddy had, indeed, looked up images online already).
“You know, I might be able to skip my art opening that night and come with you…,” Teddy began, but Harit immediately said no.
“Ugh, fine. I would have been so good as your wingman,” Teddy said, but even though Harit didn’t know what that meant, he was sure it was the last thing in the world that he wanted Teddy to be.
*
Things with Harit’s mother started to shift. She had become a nonentity in the house, a responsibility that ebbed and flowed depending on the ebbing and flowing of Harit’s drinking. Harit had gotten used to her stillness, and as awful as it seemed, he had begun to think of her as something that needed to be polished instead of cared for. His guilt would have been stronger if she had given him anything, but by maintaining her stillness, she indicated to him that she didn’t want to be moved, didn’t want to be handled, didn’t want to be part of his life. Swati was who she wanted, not Harit.
But two mornings ago, he had come downstairs to find her standing in the middle of the room, the sari fallen from her head and trailing behind her like a wedding gown. Her eyes were still unseeing, but there seemed to be a sense of purpose in her posture. For her to be standing, in the daytime, was a breach of their unspoken rules. To move around during the day was a Harit thing to do; Swati was a nighttime creature. Had his mother begun to sense that something was amiss?
He approached her carefully, asking her if she wanted more chai. She barely moved, her chin dipping slightly, and then he moved her back to her chair, as if repositioning a mannequin in the store. Once she was seated again, he instinctively reached for her throat, as if there were a tie there that he needed to tighten, then stopped himself.
A few minutes later, he heard Gital Didi shuffle her key into the front door and scurry in. She stopped short when she saw him hovering over his mother.
“Ji,” she said. She was holding her usual family of grocery bags. Her expression was mysteriously unreadable, and Harit challenged it with an equally taciturn expression of his own. “Kya hua?” she asked defiantly. What’s the matter?
“Nothing,” he said dismissively. “Ma was out of her chair.”
Gital Didi tsked, then headed into the kitchen. “She likes to get her exercise.”
Harit broke his stance and followed her into the kitchen. Under his breath: “No, she doesn’t. You know she doesn’t.”
Gital Didi was ducking into the cold shelves of the refrigerator and placing coriander into the crisper. “She likes to exercise lately. You just didn’t know because you’ve been occupied.” Although her back was turned to him, he saw the sneer that framed the word “occupied,” as if it had ricocheted off the refrigerator’s walls and into his eyes.
Harit didn’t know what rejoinder to give, so he strode out of the kitchen and upstairs to his room. Fine. If Gital Didi wanted this badmash, she could have her.
Her mother wouldn’t pay attention to him, but she cared about Gital Didi. Her vision was blocked by white fissures, but she apparently liked exercise. Did she understand where he was headed this evening? Perhaps Gital Didi was helping her piece together his social engagements. No, his mother had been incubated for so long that she probably didn’t even remember the staid dowagers who sat guard at every Indian get-together—white-bunned, cardigan-clad women with hands like gathered rope, nodding their approval or assent when necessary, reminders that every adult in the room was nothing more than an aged child. His mother could have been one of these women—had, in fact, been one before Swati’s passing. What if he could take her with him, steer her into an armchair and lend his presence a bit more importance?
If he were thinking of logistics alone, this would not work. Harit, of course, had no car in which he could drive his mother—and he was not going to ask Gital Didi to be their escort. In any case, Ranjana had arranged for her son, now on “fall break,” to pick him up and bring him to the party. This struck him as particularly awkward, but Ranjana had insisted, saying that it was “no problem.” If Harit had learned one thing, it was that “no problem” never meant no problem, especially when teenagers were involved.
He didn’t know much about Prashant, but he could imagine a pimple-faced, slouching youth sighing with every turn of the steering wheel. What would they possibly talk about? Harit knew that he should play the inquisitive adult, finding out all he could about Prashant’s time at university and his studies, yet he knew that Prashant would have to draw conversation out of him like water out of a shoddy well. As Harit tightened his own tie and smoothed his bramble of hair back in front of his bedroom mirror, he thought of possible topics besides academics and the weather—new Bollywood films, the holidays, did Prashant want a discount on some suspenders?
He couldn’t remember the last time that he had gotten dressed up (that is, when a sari wasn’t involved), and he had forgotten how nice it felt. He spent his days helping other men buy accoutrements to make themselves look handsome, and he had become so used to other people grooming themselves that he typically set aside such concerns when it came to his own appearance. It was here in front of this mirror that he decided to dive into his small savings and buy some new dress clothes in the store. If he wanted to change the course of his day-to-day existence, he was going to have to prolong this sense of being “suited and booted,” as Swati used to say.