“How can you not know if you’re writing a novel or not?” Stefanie asked. Ranjana saw a desperation behind her eyes, as if Stefanie herself were just coming to the realization that not every wayward thought that came into her mind had to be committed to the depths of her phantasmagoric opus.
“She’s perfecting her technique,” Cassie said. The exhaustion in her voice made Ranjana wonder, as she often did, why Cassie deigned to participate in this class at all. Ranjana knew why, though: there was a satisfaction in being the star of the class when you felt that you were surrounded by fools.
“Maybe I don’t feel like something’s real unless I write about it,” Ranjana said. This was helpful to vocalize. She felt herself shed a further layer of stress simply upon saying it.
“Well, I think that’s a lovely idea,” Roberta said, clasping her hands together as if she had organized a tea party and they’d just finished their finger sandwiches. “Who else has something to share?”
Cassie started to say something, sitting up in her chair, but Wendy piped up and unfolded her stash of papers, which were light green today. Ranjana and Cassie exchanged a look, an understanding that the past few minutes had been edifying for the two of them.
It occurred to Ranjana as they all got up to leave that what she had just felt with Cassie was the kind of warm moment that she and Prashant used to share when he was young, when she would teach him something helpful or, more often, when they would commiserate about Mohan’s idiosyncrasies. This is why she found it all the more comforting when, just as she was getting in her car, she heard Cassie call out, “Ran-ja-na?”
“Yes?” Ranjana said. As Cassie ran to her, her hair bouncing up and down and her legs thin and agile, Ranjana could see how young and energetic she really was. Ranjana suspected that she was a completely different person outside of class—gregarious, funny, perhaps mischievous.
“I was hoping that you may be able to come to this with me,” Cassie said, handing her a pamphlet. In large white lettering, against a red background, were written the words The Writer’s Journey.
“What is it?”
“It’s a writers’ conference,” Cassie said.
“What’s a writers’ conference?” Ranjana asked.
“It’s a lot of readings by authors and workshops to improve your writing, but the best part is that they have all of these professional editors and agents read your work and tell you if you have what it takes to get published. I went last year and learned a ton, and although I got a lot of passes from the people I saw, they told me to come back this year. I really think that you’d enjoy it. I don’t think you need me to tell you this, but you and I are the only people in this class who belong there.”
Ranjana didn’t know what to say.
“Please say you’ll come,” Cassie said. “It’d be a great experience for both of us.”
“I’ll think about it,” Ranjana said, with a flatter voice than she intended. Cassie met her tone with a slight frown, but her face still seemed hopeful. She said good-bye and hurried over to her own car.
On the drive home, Ranjana realized that she would be a hypocrite to judge her classmates and then demur when an event like this came along. She had a distant cousin who lived not far from Chicago, where the conference was taking place, and she could use visiting her as a pretense to placate Mohan. As she pulled into the driveway and saw her husband’s slight silhouette cutting through one window, she knew that she would have to go.
She had just acknowledged publicly that writing made her feelings real. Attending this kind of event would make her appreciate herself infinitely better than she did now—which, as she entered the house and saw the expectant look of hunger on Mohan’s face, was very little, indeed.
*
It was her own fault that Cheryl found out about the conference. Typically, Dr. Butt frowned upon the use of their work computers for anything other than official business during operating hours (though he must have known that forbidding Cheryl from such a thing was a fool’s wish). Ranjana rarely broke this rule, but there was a lull in the office that afternoon, so Ranjana typed in the Web site from Cassie’s pamphlet. A bright, busy page greeted her with the faces of some authors she recognized, some she did not. The biggest image was of Pushpa Sondhi, the megabestselling writer, who was the keynote speaker. Ranjana felt scared just seeing this image. This conference was the big leagues.
Just as she was looking at a page about a workshop on “International Culture and Fiction,” Ranjana smelled Cheryl’s mint-scented breath over her shoulder.
“What’s this all about? You changing jobs and not telling me?”
“Shhh!” Ranjana snapped, whipping around and making sure that Dr. Butt hadn’t heard. “No, I am not changing jobs. It’s a conference.”
“A conference for what?” Cheryl asked, shifting to get another look at the screen while Ranjana shielded it.
“For writing,” Ranjana said quietly. She had never mentioned this to anyone besides her classmates, Seema, and, sadly, Achyut.
“Writing what? Like Fifty Shades of Grey? Who knew you were such a deviant!”
Ranjana looked over the desk to see if the three patients in the waiting room had overheard. They were all pretending to read magazines but were clearly holding back snickers. “No,” Ranjana said, even though she had read the entire Fifty Shades series and kept it tucked away discreetly on a shelf in her “study.”
“It’s nothing,” Ranjana continued. “Just something I thought might be interesting.”
“I love to write,” Cheryl said as she sat down. She was wearing large earrings that looked like golden tortellini, and they jiggled every time she moved. “You may not know this about me, but I love to write poetry.”
“I see,” Ranjana said, closing the writers’ conference window on her screen. Then, as if it were a burp that Cheryl had been trying to suppress:
“Maybe I should come to this conference with you.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Why not? It’s a writers’ conference, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but, well, I wasn’t even sure if I was going myself.”
“Now you have a good reason to go! Two sassy girls on the road! It’ll be like Thelma and Louise. Or more like Thelma and … Sorry, I don’t know any Indian names that start with L.”
“You don’t know any Indian names at all.”
“Oh, snap!” Cheryl said, smiling all the same. “I know yours. And I know Dr. Butt’s name. Don’t I, Butt?” she shouted, craning backward and lifting a hand to her mouth as a mock-megaphone.