“I have to check with my friend Cassie,” Ranjana said, feeling the word friend sour in her mouth. “She’s the one who invited me.”
Dr. Butt soon emerged, mercifully ending their conversation, but Ranjana knew that the damage had been done. She knew that there was absolutely nothing that she could do to deter Cheryl from coming. The more excuses she invented, the more defiant and assertive Cheryl would become in her responses. It was like struggling in quicksand. Ranjana did come up with one potential deterrent—the conference did not actually encourage poets to attend, since it dealt exclusively with prose—but Cheryl cheerily informed Ranjana that her writerly gifts were not confined to poetry and that she had several short stories somewhere. Ranjana e-mailed Cassie to float out the idea of Cheryl’s joining them, but the response was both pleasantly surprising and somewhat hurtful: Cassie hadn’t planned on traveling to the conference together; she had merely encouraged Ranjana to attend for her own edification.
Next, Ranjana tried to suggest that taking the train would be the best option. If anything, it would spare her from tussling with Mohan about taking the car, but more important, it would spare her being in such a confined space with Cheryl (the office was bad enough already). No luck: Cheryl insisted on driving because she had always wanted to take a “girls’ road trip.” Already, the journey had become much more frightening than anything in Ranjana’s novel.
A solution to this two-person confinement occurred to her while she was stirring daal. She loved hovering over the pot longer than was normal, letting the steam float up and heat her face until it came close to burning. It was her version of a face mask. It reminded her of when she had been sick as a child: her mother would scoop the crystal goo of Vicks VapoRub out of its sapphire jar and drop it into a pan filled with just-boiled water. She would then tip Ranjana over the searing mixture, covering Ranjana’s head and the bowl with a damp towel as one might cover a parakeet’s cage. Unlike her siblings, Ranjana never once complained about this or pulled her face away from the heat. Instead, she would pretend that she was a princess in a goblin’s lair, like one of the heroines in a George MacDonald Fraser tale.
Something about the imagination that it took to retrieve this memory triggered a response: she thought of being in a cave, and then she thought of Harit’s house.
She had been looking for ways to entertain him after the party, which had been too tense for her taste. Not just because of Prashant’s outburst—though that had certainly been the most cringeworthy part—but also because Mohan’s enmity toward Harit had been so palpable. She had to make it up to him somehow, and a small journey, though in the presence of Cheryl, would provide a unique opportunity. Who knew—maybe he was even a fledgling writer himself? He may very well find it cathartic to put into writing the story that he had told her about Swati. If the act of writing was proving so helpful to her, perhaps it could have a similar, welcome effect on him.
The phone rang, pulling her out of her daze and making her see that the daal was starting to burn at the bottom. Reaching for the cordless with her left hand, Ranjana jabbed at the burned bits on the bottom of the pan with the spatula in her right hand, pressed the phone’s ON button, and said, “Hello?”
“Hello, stranger.” It was Seema. Ranjana felt instantly guilty. She had been so lax at keeping in touch with Seema recently.
“Ji. Hello. I’m so sorry. Things have been so crazy around here.”
“Oh, I’m sure. But we have to keep in touch, Ranjana. If we don’t get to the gossip first, others will beat us to the punch.”
“True.” Ranjana was only half-listening, since the burnt daal was drifting around in the pan like debris in a flood.
“Can we hang out soon? Why don’t you come over for lunch tomorrow?”
“I can’t. I’m working.” A thought zapped into Ranjana’s brain. She was suggesting something before she knew it: “Hey, do you know where Paradise Island is?”
“That weird … thing they’re building? What about it?”
“Meet me there after work tomorrow—I mean, after I leave the office.”
“What? Did you join the CIA or something?”
“Just do it. We’ll chat.”
Seema was silent on the other end of the phone.
“Ji?”
“What’s this I heard about a new friend that was at your party when we were in Pittsburgh? You’re acting very strange, Ranjana.”
Ranjana tried to flip this comment into a joke. She didn’t feel that she had the energy or patience to succumb to a serious conversation. “Don’t we always act strange? That’s our thing.”
Seema sighed, annoyed. “I’m not meeting you at some hidden place like we’re planning an assassination, Ranjana. Call me when you have time to have lunch like a normal person.”
Seema hung up, and Ranjana took out her surprise on the daal by sloshing it around the pan until the nicely cooked and badly burnt pieces collided. “A normal person”? Seema was one to talk. In fact, Seema really was one to talk; she was probably calling someone else right now to relay the odd conversation that they’d just had. In one phone conversation, Seema had managed to solidify Ranjana’s thought that Harit—peaceful, earnest, nongossiping Harit—was just the person she needed right now.
SEVERAL DAYS HAD PASSED after Ranjana’s party, and Harit worried that he’d never hear from her again. Perhaps she had found their moment in the kitchen strange instead of special. But soon enough, she called him. He could hear the frustration in her voice immediately.
She went on to describe her upcoming trip, which sounded odder than most things he had encountered. Harit couldn’t quite understand what she meant by her “writing,” but she sounded so desperate for his attendance that he found himself assenting. When he told his mother about it—When he told his mother; he could still not believe that he could do such a thing now—she encouraged him to go.
The next day at the store, Teddy approached Harit, who was, shockingly, completing a very successful sale: five pairs of cuff links, a belt, and an expensive Kenneth Cole bag that he managed to suggest subtly to the customer, an amiable guy in his twenties. Perhaps it was the momentary gush of excitement about this rare achievement that led Harit to say “I’m going on a trip!” when Teddy asked him if he had any plans for the weekend.
“With whom?” Teddy asked. Harit struggled for one second to provide a lie, but Teddy was too fast: “Ranjana?”
Harit knew better than to lie now; there was no way that he could pull it off convincingly.
“Yes.”
“And what merry event awaits you?”
“I’m not sure,” Harit said, relieved to be able to deliver this response in absolute honesty. “Some kind of conference.”
“A conference?”
“Yes,” Harit said.
“How fascinating. And you’re just going as friends?”