“Ranjana, the tea is going to be like melted ice by the time you get it over here, yaar.” Seema slapped the table and giggled.
Ranjana was being distant. The truth was that she was wondering just how strong her friendship was—if she could safely divulge what she had learned about Mohan to Seema. Yes, Seema was an entertaining and dedicated friend—if Ranjana had an emergency at three in the morning, she would dial Seema immediately—but this was the kind of information that felt horribly explicit in their community. The fact that it was so salacious made it harder for Seema to use it as gossip with the other women, but at the same time, they all complained about their marriages constantly, so Seema wouldn’t feel that out of line bringing it up. Ranjana lifted the cups carefully and turned; in her rumination, she had not only strained the tea three times but had also poured it so absentmindedly that it threatened to spill. In all her years making tea, she had never spilled a drop. But then something odd happened: as she set the cups on the table, she glanced at their shiny porcelain and saw it transformed into gleaming fangs. Startled, she pulled her right hand back, and the cup in that hand, which she had intended for Seema, shot forth a stream of hot tea.
“Arré!” Seema screamed, rising from her chair and clutching her wrist like she was Spider-Man about to shoot a sticky web at a rooftop. The tea couldn’t have been that hot, but that was Seema for you—angling for the dramatic. “Yaar, what is the matter with you? Ho, it burns!”
“I am so sorry, ji,” Ranjana said, turning around, tearing a paper towel from its roll, and rushing to the fridge. She pushed one of the two shiny pedals on the front of the fridge and felt the cold jostle of ice cubes as they hit the towel. She returned to Seema and placed the ice on her wrist. “I have never spilled a drop of tea in my life.”
“This is going to leave a mark,” Seema said, looking at her newly red wrist. It was an unspoken understanding between them that Seema was not worried about her skin but about how this burn might affect her yoga poses.
“No, it won’t,” Ranjana said. “It will be better before you know it.”
Still, Ranjana felt that this momentary lapse in her behavior was the start of something bigger, a result of the secret that she had uncovered.
*
Ranjana knew that she didn’t know all that much about sex, but she knew enough to know that she had never had an orgasm. Clearly, the discomfort that she had felt years before, when they were still having sex, the relentlessness of it all, the way in which she could count the huffs and puffs that Mohan made into her ear—she knew that none of it constituted what people described as that great release. She read about it all of the time—Anne Rice had as many orgasms in her books as commas—and she wondered if the precarious feeling that she experienced during sex could be equated with the tense lust found in vampire stories. Was a fumbling, uncomfortable lovemaking session with Mohan the equivalent of being gripped at the neck with some undead’s teeth against her skin-hooded vein? They were both situations of physical discomfort laced with a foreboding sense of danger.
She looked for opportunities in which she could transform Mohan into someone enticingly threatening. Sometimes—and she hated herself for this when she thought of it—she wished that she were like Mona Gupta or Sushil Patel, women whose husbands, everyone knew, beat them regularly. Maybe if Mohan were violent, she would at least feel something legitimately passionate in her marriage. Instead, the firmest slap that Mohan could deliver would be flipping a puri onto his plate.
But no—she did not really believe or want this. Nobody wanted to be in an abusive relationship, and although she could never be sure how people were defining feminism these days, she was rather certain that this was a decidedly antifeminist mind-set.
It seemed like an American myth that people ate to replace the lack of romance in their lives; Ranjana thought that this was too easy an explanation for so complicated a problem. Yet now, for example, she was leaning against the kitchen counter, eating bondas and dipping them in a thick raita that she had made early this morning before work. As her tongue sang with flavor, she realized that just last night, she had been lamenting the sour hub of Mohan’s body in her bed. She had been thinking about how little desire she felt for him, or, rather, how she felt none at all, and she had gotten up today with a craving for bondas and raita. She had replaced her husband with a feast. The soft contours of her body, made softer every day, were due to her sexual frustration. To be fair, the spare tire around Mohan’s torso was due to her own reticence toward him. They were getting fatter in their sexual sadness.
Ranjana was still in her scrubs. The doctor’s office had her wear scrubs even though she was not an RN, just a receptionist, but the office claimed that patients would feel more trusting if they believed a legitimate nurse was attending to them. This made her feel disingenuous, but the scrubs were as comfortable as wearing a salwar kameez. Nevertheless, all she wanted to do was change into a nightgown and take a nap.
Alas, here was Mohan, bustling into the house, back from his own office, settling into his recliner with the newspaper.
“There is some leftover okra, and I can make roti,” she proffered. This was a low point: proposing what they should eat for dinner while she was already eating.
Mohan sighed and shifted his newspaper, then said, “I don’t want leftovers.…”
Ranjana echoed his sigh and said, “I can make chole”—and she could make it because she had picked up some chickpeas on the way home, having known all along that Mohan would not eat the okra. Later, Ranjana would eat the okra herself, after she had eaten the chole, after she had made roti, rice, and some impromptu lassi that had Mohan farting into his armchair postdinner. They watched Zee TV and caught up on the news, the anchorwoman’s cloud-like hair and lilting voice a stark contrast to the weight of Mohan’s gas. Then Ranjana got up and said that she was going to work on her recipes.
“Working on recipes” was Ranjana’s cover-up for her writing. She told Mohan that she wanted to create a cookbook for Prashant so that he could make Indian food for himself at the dorm. Both Ranjana and Mohan knew that Prashant would never do such a thing and would therefore never need the cookbook, but Mohan evidently took some comfort in Ranjana’s efforts to keep their son more Indian and more “self-sufficient.”