“As I said earlier, I appreciate honesty,” Cheryl said. Having finished her ravioli, she touched her napkin to the red-tinted corners of her mouth. “So let me say this: I grew up in our town. I’ve lived there my whole life. I’ve seen my childhood friends grow up, get married, push out kids, get fat, not learn anything. They drink and smoke and stay the same. They’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. But what people forget sometimes—people who haven’t grown up in our town, people who turn their noses up at us from far away or even close by—is that some of us choose to stay there. It’s not because we’re too dumb to move away. It’s because we’ve found something comfortable. Comfort is a really underrated thing, Ranjana. My son didn’t know much about it. And I wish he had. I’m not stupid. I know I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I do know one big thing: being cheery, even when you’re not feeling cheery, even when you actually feel like walking into traffic from being so sad, brings cheer into your life somehow. I’m smart because I know that. Don’t you forget it.”
Forcing yourself to be cheery. Happiness begetting happiness. Ranjana wanted to think it ridiculous, yet that is why she had come here: to tell stories. To fabricate things. This was its own kind of forced emotion. If you had the capacity to install fear in a fictional person’s heart, if you had the capacity to shove love into a princess or fury into a winged monster, you had the capacity to generate passion or mirth or humility or patience in yourself. It wasn’t just pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard. It was through your own generosity of imagination that you made yourself good.
SCRIBBLED CHECK AND LIFTING up from the table and the carpet’s paisley and weaving out of the doorway and the weight of Teddy even heavier than you thought and there are people in the lobby in some bright T-shirts must be some other conference and the woman behind the front desk in her sailor-like outfit and her face is looking concerned but detached she doesn’t want to deal with it tonight and this is what happens at hotels anyway and they’re at the elevator and it takes a long time to come the numbers are lighting upward as one elevator ascends away from them and the numbers are lighting downward closer to them but someone must be getting out at the seventh floor and saying bye because it continues to take a long time and Teddy suggests that maybe they should take the stairs and they make a few steps in that direction but it’s too hard so they turn around and there’s the elevator, at last, so they get onto it and can’t remember which floor they’re on and Teddy starts to hit every floor in a row but Harit remembers that they’re on the tenth floor and so they go into the elevator and then they’re stumbling out of the elevator and down the hall and Harit accidentally swipes a plant off of a decorative table and hears it hit the ground with a thump and they’re staggering down the hallway and there’s no sound except for their feet plodding on the carpet and their breath, which is rhythmic and heavy, and then they’re in front of a door—is it Harit’s or Teddy’s?—and it must be Teddy’s because Harit is magically in the room without having used a key and then he stumbles into the room as the light is coming on and feels himself give way to the ground and he’s on the floor and his cheek is against the carpet and it feels so, so comfortable and it’s actually the most comfortable he’s ever been.
*
Harit wakes up in a small lake of his own saliva. Directly in front of him is the large mahogany dresser, gold knobs up its front like a soldier’s buttons. Harit feels like a being contained within his clothes. He shifts and finds that he is less light-headed than he expected. He hoists himself up and checks the clock on the nightstand. It is 2:28 A.M.
Teddy isn’t in bed. Harit hears something from the bathroom. The door isn’t closed, so he walks forward and peers into it. Teddy is just rising from his hands and knees. Harit pulls away slightly, fearing that Teddy has been sick, then sees that Teddy holds a dirty towel in his hand: he’s been cleaning.
“Don’t worry about it,” Teddy says. Harit feels his stomach and mind flip at the same time. It’s his vomit that Teddy has been cleaning up.
A flickering recollection of pushing himself up and retching his drinks into the toilet and missing, then retreating back into the room and onto the ground.
“Teddy, I’m so sorry. Let me help.”
“There’s no need to help now,” Teddy says, chuckling—but not bitterly. He knows to disarm Harit’s self-punishment by offering a bit of laughter. Teddy is walking out of the bathroom. Harit has to step aside to let him pass. Harit has no idea what time he fell asleep. How long has Teddy been cleaning the bathroom?
“How are you feeling?” Teddy asks. He opens the closet and pulls out pajamas that hang blithely on a hanger. They are silken and night blue, like an expensive kurta.
Harit actually feels fine, so he says so.
“Good,” Teddy says. “I’m going to change.” Harit steps aside again, to let him pass, and then the bathroom door closes.
Harit doesn’t know if he should go back to his room or not. He feels indebted to Teddy because Teddy has just taken care of his mess—a mess from his body, horrible to clean up even if it were your own—but Harit also feels that he is hovering for a reason. Upon hearing Teddy’s movements, the clothes being taken off and jettisoned for his pajamas, Harit feels a lift of his body. It feels like a lift of Harit’s whole body, not just the lift of one part. He is eavesdropping on his friend and taking pleasure from what he hears.
Harit ventures back into the room and sits on the end of the bed. The place where he lay on the beige carpet looks like a rough patch of sand. He thinks again of Teddy bent over the toilet, the gentle care in his posture. He thinks of the countless times that he’s wanted to smack Teddy across the face but then can’t think of anything but the funny curve of that face and the cartoonish expressions in which it often contorts itself. He has convinced himself all along that he has no friends and that no one truly understands him; he’s been trying to build his first true friend with Ranjana. He now realizes that Teddy has been the steadfast one—the one who has tried to smooth out his tragedy until it is no longer a barrier in his life but simply a thing that happened, a thing to be dealt with and then discarded.
He has studied the art of restraining his sexual self so fully that he never knew what lay beyond the restraint. He has thought of ballet dancers whose legs stretch farther than he could ever stretch his; this is because they are used to years of bending and stretching and scurrying. He has thought that he couldn’t attempt a leap where he has only ever attempted a walk.
But now he sees that he has to. He has to learn these things now or he will simply stay in the same spot, trapped while people like Ranjanaji try to show him that a leap is possible. She has come into his life so that he can open himself up and begin to answer some of the questions about his life that he has been afraid to answer for so long.
Teddy comes into the room and seems about to say something until he sees the wonder in Harit’s eyes. He sits down next to Harit and sighs. The sigh carries with it an air of understanding mixed with exhaustion. He does not move. In fact, he does not move for so long that Harit sees that he will not move. It is not Teddy’s movement to make. So Harit puts his hand on Teddy’s, and Harit nestles into Teddy’s chest. In a short but thorough monologue, Harit tells Teddy everything about Swati and his mother—everything, that is, but his many times wrapped in a sari. He has just now decided that he will keep this between his mother and himself. He will not even tell Ranjana about the sari. This confidence makes him finish his monologue gracefully and strongly. Only then does Teddy lean his head on Harit’s head and wrap his arm around him.