An hour into the allotted start time, there were only six people in the house besides the Chaudhurys and Harit. Then, as if the other guests had conspired, they arrived all at once in their luxury cars, transforming the curb into a de facto showroom that you could view from the front window. These people smelled like money—but money mixed with something else, something musty and sweet at the same time, the smell of an antiques store.
Harit sat in the corner in a comfortable armchair. The divot in the middle of its seat indicated that Mohanji spent a significant amount of time planted there. Ranjanaji made a grand show of introducing him to the others, but perhaps sensing his discomfort at being presented this way—always with a flourish of her hand and a reassuring nod of her head—she soon transitioned into merely saying his name and letting him do the rest. He bowed, mumbled a few words about being happy to be in attendance, and then returned to the armchair and watched as the women began to clump together in the kitchen and as the men trundled into the den with their tumblers of whiskey. He had rarely observed this ritual up close, and he soon realized that it would be his duty to join the men and leave the haven of his corner behind. He felt entirely unprepared for this maneuver yet knew that the longer he avoided it, the worse it would be. If only he could have a moment in which one of the women pulled him aside and started chatting him up in front of the men, just so that he could stay behind without being judged. Instead, he was left alone to make his way into the den. Then he remembered his empty hands, his drinkless state, and pondered what to do.
He had already consumed a quick drink back at the house to alleviate his preparty stress. That effect had worn off already, and he wanted another. He couldn’t get drunk in front of these people, yet he also knew, without having to be told, that he couldn’t join those men without seeming like he could hold his liquor. Thankfully, the whiskey bottle was on the kitchen counter instead of in some fancy decanter in the den, so Harit swerved around the chattering women and poured himself a neat glass.
He nodded at Ranjanaji and she at him, and he knew that she understood how uncomfortable he felt and what he was about to do, and it made him able to do it.
The fears of childhood never went away. He might as well have been trying to join a gathering of bullying classmates on a dirty pitch of land outside his primary school. He might as well have been entering the staid setting of his father’s weekly card game back in India, its huffy men and sparse cigarette smoke.
There was only the slightest break in the men’s conversation as he came upon them, a momentary silence before Mohanji, with every bit of stress that Harit could have expected, motioned to an open spot on the couch next to two more slender men who were already halfway through their tumblers. Harit gave them Namastes, wondering if they had expected him to shake hands, though they hadn’t offered theirs.
The conversation was about a Pakistani car salesman who had just set up a gigantic lot on the outskirts of town. Harit had not seen it, but Avnish Doshi gave a long, detailed, practically enraged description of its grounds, its teal-colored light posts and newly poured blacktop and rows and rows of shiny cars. The whole group agreed that the place was a foolish, foolish undertaking, the work of a madman, and there seemed an implicit understanding that the man’s folly was a result of his nationality.
Harit was so busy keeping track of his own movements—well-planned head nods, slight but effective grunts of agreement—that he had not noticed who the man was seated to his right, on the perimeter of the conversation. It wasn’t a man at all: it was Prashant. Harit realized that there was no one else in attendance who was Prashant’s age, so the teenager had nowhere better to be but here. If Harit had been Prashant, he would have used this as a convenient excuse, shutting himself away in his room and relishing his solitude. Then Harit saw the expression on Prashant’s face when Avnish Uncle went to refill his glass of whiskey, and Harit understood the intrigue: Prashant was sitting in wait for a chance to drink, as a dog may wait for leftovers.
Avnish Uncle noticed this soon enough. “Prashant, beta,” he said, reaching out as if to pat Prashant, even though he was seated once again on the other side of the room, “perhaps you should join us in a whiskey. You look just like me as an eager young man.” The room chuckled in unison, and Prashant clearly considered the possibility of this actually happening, his eyebrows rising and his spine straightening. A brief shake of the head from his father set the chuckles aside and reminded everyone that such depravity would never be condoned in polite company like this.
In hearing Avnish’s comment about being an “eager young boy,” Harit realized that he didn’t share this point of view at all. He didn’t see Prashant as a younger version of himself. There was Young Harit, whom Harit had a difficult time picturing as anything but a younger version of his current self, so Young Harit didn’t look like a young man but like a less-stooped, less-disheveled, less-sallow, less-troubled man. Harit no longer saw life as a forward-moving thing but as a carefully maneuvered looking-back. Alongside his day-to-day life, there had been a constant assumption that he could go back and take up the life that he had always wanted. In other words, he was in the habit of living a version of his life, all the while forgetting that there were no other versions but the one life itself. Trying to go back and correct what he saw as the mistakes of his life was not merely implausible; it was impossible. Not only was Prashant far from what Harit had been as a young man; he was something Harit never would have been. You either did something, were something—or you didn’t, weren’t.
*
Prashant wondered if his mother had witnessed one of these conversations before. Did she know the ridiculous things that were coming out of the mouths of these so-called men? They were lambasting Obama, blaming his presidency for all of the turmoil in the Middle East and the rest of Asia. Prashant knew that many Indian men were Republicans due to their frugality—they appreciated a tight-handed fiscal policy—yet this type of blatant delusion truly mystified him. Just now, Avnish Uncle said, without a trace of humor, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim!” Prashant had half a mind to invoke the name of Ted Kaczynski.