How could Mohan be so reckless? If he was going to search such things online, why would he not cover his tracks and delete them from the search history? But he hadn’t, and Ranjana, before writing, had clicked on the search history and come across site after site about—she could barely bring herself to think of this term when it referred to her husband—“oral sex.” Page after page showed a white woman with pink skin, her legs opened to the face of a tan man with curly hair. Page after page gave explicit tips on how to perform this act—an act that Mohan had never performed on Ranjana.
Ranjana pulled her head out of her hands and looked at the blinking cursor again. Of course: if Mohan was looking up this stuff, it wasn’t in service of her. He was learning these things for someone else. He had a pink girl somewhere. It was this realization that propelled her fingers forward and made her start typing so furiously that the cursor didn’t even have a chance to blink again.
*
She never thought she would obsess over vampires and witches and werewolves and ghosts, but this was the way in which Ranjana could permeate the wall that separated her Indian life from the omnipresent glitz of American pop culture. She read Anne Rice first, in 1995, once she had been in this country for four years. Elaine Bush, a nosy neighbor, recommended Interview with the Vampire because the movie was coming out at that time. Ranjana bought a paperback from the grocery store and tore off its cover and title page so that Mohan would not judge her. She stayed up reading it late into the night, on the couch, her nightgown soaking up the cold of the early morning and making her shiver all the more as the story progressed.
The thing that surprised her most about the book was that, in terms of plot, it did not surprise her that much. She had expected to be scandalized—had wanted to be scandalized—but the more she read, the more the story seemed like a hidden affirmation of herself. It was like discovering that she had a second spine. Contrary to what she had expected, there were things in India that had prepared her for white-skinned corpses and young damsels in the brambled backwoods of Louisiana. The grandeur of white houses with shapely verandas called to mind temples that she had seen at six years old on a family trip to Kerala. The vampires themselves seemed like countless depictions of demons pierced by Krishna’s or Rama’s sword, blood gushing forth. Except in these Western vampiric fantasies, it was the evil demon winning the battle, not the dew-skinned gods. As she read Dracula, then Charlaine Harris, then Laurell K. Hamilton, then Sherrilyn Kenyon, then joined the ageless hordes devouring Stephenie Meyer, she found no true scandal in what she read. She worried that the books would be full of sex—and they were—but she had prepared herself for this fact beforehand, so its impact proved less injurious. Or so she convinced herself. Now that she had stumbled across Mohan’s online secrets, she could not help but feel that she had brought this upon herself. She had carved out her secret world and relished its seduction, but it was an entirely different thing to watch your own life become corrupted by such seduction. Real-life stories often found their way into fiction, but the opposite could be true: fiction could, cruelly, become real life.
*
“I tell you, I never laugh as much as I laugh in yoga class,” Seema said. “These skinny white people, all twisted up, trying to copy us. Yesterday, instead of wearing pants, a woman came in wearing the bottom of a salwar kameez. She’s one of these girls with a nose ring, you know, so many of them have them. And she thinks she is so Indian. She came up to me and started talking to me about all of these poses we’d done, as if she were the Indian woman and not I—and her Sanskrit pronunciation was terrible! Absolutely terrible.”
“Yes, but you don’t speak Sanskrit, either,” Ranjana interrupted, straining the tea and watching the beige-colored beard that clung to the bottom of the strainer as the milky liquid fell through it.
“Yes, but I do not go around pretending that I do. I barely know how to speak Hindi anymore!”
They had known each other for years, had spent countless weekend pujas and parties sitting next to each other and discussing children and films, but for a long time, there had never been any occasion to speak about their own lives with any sense of consequence. They knew that their relationship to each other was the result of communal responsibility; they were like chunks of pineapple and honeydew in a fruit salad—tart and plump but there merely for the collective purpose of volume. Motherhood solidified their friendship further. Seema had one child, like Ranjana. All of the other women in their circle had at least two kids, but Ranjana and Seema were the odd women out—Ranjana because of her own physical limitations, Seema because of her own choice. Seema’s insistence on having one child and one child only had made her anathema to the other Indian women for years. What sort of woman stopped at one child, of her own accord? And Seema had a daughter, not a son; at least a son, a sturdy heir, would have made sense. But a daughter—and a daughter like Gori, so sour and uninspired. Like Prashant, Ranjana’s son, Gori had just left for college—barely, it seemed. And what was she going to study? God only knew.
Seema did not seem particularly concerned. She went to her yoga classes and cooked fancy meals at her monthly dinner parties—for white friends—and generally seemed to love her life now. She had given birth to Gori at twenty-one, and now that Gori was off at school, even though it was only an hour away, Seema was a free woman. Her husband, Satish, did not pose much of a problem. He came home at seven o’clock every day and, according to Seema, seemed to be content with his life. He played tennis and tended his garden and watched Zee TV until he fell into a gurgly slumber. True, he did behave like an old man, not like a man in his early forties, but Seema seemed genuinely entertained by him.
“What else are we supposed to do? The first eighteen years of our parenting are over,” Seema argued. “Gori is gone, and there is nothing to be done until she graduates.”
This was Seema’s take. But in this, she was also different from the other Indian mothers. Most of them found a way to insert themselves into the lives of their children while they were at college. At least once a week, Shilpa Jindal took a foil-wrapped casserole dish to Neil’s dorm; Ranjana once saw her place it in the passenger seat of her BMW so lovingly that it could have been an infant. Everyone knew that Anita Aggarwal’s son, Alok, had changed his cell phone number to prevent her from getting through to him at all times of the day. Some of the mothers had changed their own telephone habits, lest they meet this same hurtful fate, but within a week, they were all back to their old ways. Ever the anomaly, Seema seemed unconcerned, even though it was generally assumed by the other parents that Gori smoked pot all of the time. Perhaps that was why Seema let Gori do these things—she was probably smoking pot herself. That would explain so much, especially why she went to these sad little yoga classes with white women who pierced their noses and had tattoos wrapped around their upper arms like snakes.