“Please tell me that you’re not just eating pizza the entire time you’re on campus,” his mom said. “What about all of that food that we brought you?”
“No offense, but I went through that in, like, two weeks. I’m a growing boy.”
“You’re not giving it to your friends, are you?” his dad asked.
“No, Dad.”
“At least charge them if you do. Don’t give it away for free.”
“I didn’t give anything away.”
“Do you know how much it cost to buy all of that food?” his father continued. “I can’t believe that you would give it away.”
“Ji, didn’t you hear him? He didn’t give anything away.”
They were speaking as if they were in their eighties, not their forties. Again, he couldn’t take the temperature in the car. Were they willfully playing at being mad, or had something terrible happened? Repartee was not a word that he attributed to his parents. Prashant was pretty sure that his dad didn’t even know what it meant.
They pulled into a Domino’s. His father hated the idea of delivery because he hated the idea of tipping, so when he could actually be convinced to eat pizza, he insisted that they carry it out. He went into the store to order and then stayed inside. He always did this to make sure that the order was prepared properly.
“So, tell me all of the stuff that you can’t tell your dad.” His mom was disposing of the orange peel in a plastic grocery bag.
“Oh, Mom. What kind of stuff would that even be?”
“Girls. You’re with girls now, aren’t you?”
There was that stack of books on his lap again—Kavita. “Mom.”
“What—you are, aren’t you?” she said.
Something was definitely up. His mother never engaged him in talk about dating—a holy, holy blessing that he had never fully appreciated until this moment.
“Mom.”
“Oh, beta, I’m just joking, but you know you can talk to me if you need to discuss it.”
“Did you just watch an after-school special? What is this?”
His mom turned around in her seat. He hadn’t noticed until now, but her hair was different. It was cut to shoulder length and was inexplicably straighter. It looked nice.
“Wow. I can’t even remember the last time you changed your hairstyle. Have you ever changed your hairstyle?”
His mom simply shook her head no. She had this weird smile on her face. She looked high.
“Mom … are you high?”
“Beta!”
“If you’re going to ask me if I’m not a virgin anymore, I can ask you if you’re smoking something.”
She gave him a stern look, then turned back around and was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I cannot wait for that pizza.”
“Mom!”
CHERYL LOOKED PUZZLED when Harit insisted that she take the wheel. She did so anyway, her eyes less wild but still roving. Now, Harit stood outside the door to his house, Teddy beside him, both of them teetering.
They entered, Harit moving slowly but confidently. He could hear Teddy’s timid footsteps behind him—the first person he had ever invited over the threshold. Without having to turn around, Harit could see his house through Teddy’s eyes—the careful emptiness of the counters and tabletops, the tapestry of browns and dusty greens, the silence and the torpor. He could sense the shift in Teddy’s body as they crested the doorway to the sitting room. Harit was reminded of fairy tales, the feeling of impending fire when a knight neared the nexus of a dragon’s cave, the telltale refuse of dismantled skeletons and purposeful splatters of blood.
There she was, steady and silent and thrown into relief by strategic shadows. Equally quiet and still was Gital Didi, kneeling beside her and clasping her hands. When Teddy assumed a position beside Harit, his mother turned her head toward him.
Her face brightened as if a plate of candles had been placed before it. Instead of freeing her hand from Gital Didi, she tightened her grasp and sat up, flicking her eyes upward for a brief moment before settling them upon Harit, upon Teddy, upon Harit, upon Teddy.
Harit still was not accustomed to seeing her look at things with firm resolve, but that’s what she was doing, ingesting the sights of the room through her eyes. He understood that there was a fundamental shift in behavior happening, an allowance of sorts, and he moved to her feet, knelt at them and kissed them, felt their cracks against his lips as if they were coconut flakes. Teddy remained behind, but his mother kept looking at him.
“Ma, I’d like you to meet my friend Teddy,” Harit said.
“Harit, I’d like you to meet my friend Gital,” his mother replied.
WHATEVER MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED recently in their friendship, Ranjana decided to tell Seema about Mohan. After her pot incident, she woke feeling that her bones were flimsy, that her skin was sagging. She was losing control of herself as if she were a car on an icy road.
She knew what was causing this: the anxiety of thinking about Mohan and his indiscretion was coming to define who she was, and the only way to stop it dead was to tell someone. Someone who had one foot in Ranjana’s past and the other foot in her cultural reality.
They met at the mall food court. For all of her gestures at holistic healing, Seema could not shake a crippling addiction to frozen yogurt, and the mall’s installment, Freeze ’n’ Cold, provided mounds of soft serve and toppings at prices so low that it was as if the store had low self-esteem.
Ranjana and Seema wiped down a flat white table and set their full bowls on top—Seema’s bustling with blackberries and kiwi while Ranjana’s was Oreo-encrusted.
“You’re having an affair, aren’t you?” Seema said.
Ranjana coughed as a fleck of cookie flew down her throat. “What?”
“With Haritji? That man from your party?”
“No!”
“Yes, you are. That’s why you brought up that Paradise Island place. It’s where you two go.”
“Seema. I am not. We are just friends.”
“Well, everyone’s talking about it.”
Ranjana stabbed her spoon into her yogurt and leaned back. Around them, people were shoving cheesy pizza slices into their mouths and little children were crawling on the ground.
If Seema knew that people were saying these things about her, then Seema had been part of those conversations. Ranjana cringed internally, sad to second-guess Seema’s loyalty yet again.
“I am not having an affair with Harit. We are friends.”
“Then why did you want to come here? Something’s obviously bothering you.”
“Mohan’s having an affair.”
It was Seema’s turn to choke. She raised a hand to her mouth, her bangles pealing like a group of gossips. “Mohan? Wow. I wouldn’t have imagined it. How did you find out? Who is it?”
“I don’t know. But he’s been researching … things on the Internet.”
“What kind of research?” Seema pushed her unfinished yogurt to the side and leaned over the table.
“Online. Learning how to do certain things.” Ranjana felt the words tugging themselves out of her mouth even though she worried about saying such things to Seema. “Sex things.”