Harit spelled it.
“Oh! Like in Harry Potter!”
“What?”
Ranjana clarified. “There’s a character in the Harry Potter books named Parvati.”
“Oh,” Harit said.
“She has a twin sister,” said Cheryl. “What’s the other one’s name?”
“Padma,” Ranjana said. “Actually, Parvati and Padma are the names of twin sisters in Midnight’s Children.”
“Oh—is that a TV show?”
Ranjana pushed ahead. “Harit works at Harriman’s.”
“Oh?” Cheryl said. “Do you get a big discount?”
“No,” said Harit.
*
It was something out of one of those indie movies that she and Mohan would see with Prashant—stories about white families who wore solid colors and moved in worlds of carefully plucked ukuleles. These characters always found some common bond, and it usually resulted from being in a car together. Here she was, surrounded by a mint-chewing coworker, a gay stalker, and an Indian man who thought it normal to bring pakoras on a road trip with strangers. Wes Anderson would have had a field day.
Naturally, Cheryl talked the entire time. She thought she had sciatica. She needed a new recipe for Rice Krispie Treats. She could never remember which one was Sasha and which one was Malia. She loved cashews more than walnuts. She could eat a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Wendy’s every day for the rest of her life and be happy. (“You should buy stock in Imodium,” Teddy responded.) She wanted to go to Bermuda because she was “fascinated by the Caribbean.” She had psoriasis. She had once done cocaine at a friend’s intervention. She loved eating popcorn with peanut butter on it. She had buried her dead cat in her backyard.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
What made this bearable for Ranjana was watching Harit’s reaction to everything. Cheryl might as well have been speaking Japanese backward. At one point, Harit rested his head against the frosty window and closed his eyes, though it would have been impossible to sleep while listening to this barrage of commentary. Nevertheless, Ranjana had to admire Cheryl, someone so unabashedly unaware of tact or discomfort. Even Teddy, for all of his similar inclinations, seemed to throw in the towel when Cheryl began her disquisition on using lemon juice to clean furniture. Finally, they found a rest stop outside Fort Wayne that had a Wendy’s. Ranjana stayed in the car, joining Harit and Teddy for ten blissful moments of silence while Cheryl went inside to enjoy her sandwich.
IN THE BEGINNING, Ranjana was wary of reading Pushpa Sondhi’s work. She first learned about the author in a praiseworthy New York Times story. In the glamorous photo that accompanied the piece, Sondhi was almost in profile, the light catching the right side of her face, her hair pulled behind her. She wore a ribbed turtleneck, the kind that a stylish professor or art curator would have worn, and her mouth fell into a calm half-smile. Because the photo was in black and white and the lighting was so bright, she didn’t look Indian. She looked like a South American aristocrat, maybe a wealthy Middle Easterner. The more that Ranjana ran her eyes over the photograph, the more she felt herself being effaced in two ways: by seeing a writer deemed important yet culturally neutered; and by thinking that a foreign, female author could not succeed on merit alone.
In protest, Ranjana avoided reading Sondhi’s first book, Wisdom of Ages. Only a couple of years later when she came across a paperback copy at a bookstore selling used books did her curiosity finally get the best of her. Mohan was working late at the university, so she took the book with her to a diner, where she sat with a piece of apple pie and a hot tea and read it cover to cover. She wasn’t one to cry when reading—and she didn’t cry then—but she felt the book in her gut as if she had eaten it along with the pie. The lyricism of the writing. Its stark depictions of immigrant life. Its even starker depictions of married life, which involved so many nuanced characters. The New York Times’s fixation on the author’s attractiveness had been no more than a brown herring.
Proud of herself for having judged the work instead of appearances, Ranjana felt justified in judging the attractiveness of Sondhi’s ensuing author photographs. The next one was even more arresting, another black-and-white photo shot in some kind of high resolution that made it seem like a portrait drawn in pencil. Not only had that first photo deprived Sondhi of her true ethnicity, but it had repurposed the lines of her face so that you couldn’t see its beautiful width, the round eyes that drew the light straight into them. Not so with the second photo, which seized upon those eyes to momentous effect, revealing more of her heritage. The sprawling silk shawl covering Sondhi’s shoulders gave off the air of otherworldly aristocracy.
Eventually, the photograph for The Forsaken, the author’s third book, got everything right: there she was, in color, her Indianness complete, her face earnestly tilted forward while a caftan-like blouse, zebra-striped, floated around her. It was the first photo that captured the integrity of the author’s background and the integrity of her beauty.
Ranjana had become a dedicated fan. She felt a bit predictable, since everyone who engaged her in any discussion about books always brought up Sondhi. Ranjana would usually slough off the conversation and move to another topic; she wanted to insulate her legitimate enjoyment of the author’s writing from any possibly racist observations that would have debased it. She felt a deep connection to the work—a connection that she viewed as unique, hallowed. The greatest skill that an author could possess, she thought, was the ability to make a reader see a book as his or her child, someone only the reader in question could truly appreciate, love, and protect.
Ranjana wanted to be able to take her robust knowledge of Sondhi’s work, shift it from the container of her brain to the tips of her fingertips, and pour some garbled but nevertheless potent version of it into her own writing. She wanted to believe that if you worked passionately enough, you could create the appearance of something truly great.
*
They all realized quite quickly that there was nothing more terrifying than a group of amateur writers.