“Self-sufficient” in Mohan’s mind translated to “frugal,” and frugality was the thing that Mohan valued most. When Ranjana was pregnant with Prashant, an American woman had asked Mohan if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl, and Mohan had replied, “I don’t care, as long as it’s healthy and smart with money.” The woman had laughed nervously and joked, “And a boy, right?” Mohan’s answer, unironic: “Well, yes.”
So off to the spare bedroom Ranjana went, closing the door tight behind her. She sat at the tiny desk to pick up where she had left off the day before. No egg curry and biryani recipes for Prashant. Vampires and damsels for Ranjana.
It was easily her favorite time of day: work barely a memory, dinner accomplished, her husband appeased, a story her only world for an hour or two. It was at once fun and disorienting. She had traveled across the world not so that she could live in a different country, one of promise and prepackaged foods, but so that she could live in an imaginary country of her mind. She looked out the window and saw the Turners’ house next door, their pit bull barking into its bowl of water and the kids upstairs playing video games, and she felt incredibly lonely. Then she directed her eyes to the computer screen and went to the only place where she could comfort herself. That was what writing really was—an excuse to gild your loneliness until it resembled the companionship of others. It was entertaining yourself when you had no other entertainment. It was the way out.
Not even daring to open the Web browser—lest she dwell too much on Mohan’s deviance—she wrote until the pit bull tired itself out and curled into a ball in its paint-chipped doghouse, until the Turners’ kids turned off their infernal machine and shut their TV-ravaged eyes for the night, until the world outside became a dimmer, quieter version of itself. Then she tended her hair with a comb she kept by the desk, opened the door, tiptoed into the master bedroom, where Mohan, now in his pajamas, was still reading the newspaper, and she inserted herself into the stale sheets and imagined her characters whispering her to sleep. Her reverie was interrupted occasionally by the click of Mohan’s saliva as he chewed on a mint-dipped toothpick, the newspaper unfolding and refolding every few minutes, the sound like a bucket of water being poured on a big rock.
*
Ranjana’s late-night writing sessions were not the only artistic secret that she kept from Mohan. After seeing a flyer on a bulletin board at the grocery store, she had joined a writers’ group that met once every two weeks at the YMCA. They gathered in a multipurpose room that housed a massive collection of rainbow-colored plastic toys. The organizer, Roberta Shuster, was a mild woman in her midfifties who lived alone in a condo near the building.
The participants in this group were not unlike the ones in Seema’s yoga class—aiming for the ethereal, but with frequently hilarious results. The most vocal member, Stefanie, was in her late thirties and wore at least three layers of dark clothing, the top layer normally shiny. She had a storm of hair, a collection of titian dyes, that made it seem as if she were wearing a mud-covered fox on her head. She wore a silver necklace with a pendant of a snake curled around a dagger, and when she got particularly excited, she would tug at the pendant until Ranjana thought the necklace would snap and send the dagger flying into someone’s eye. Stefanie had presented three works in the past few months—a novella about mermaids living in a sea-bound hostel off the coast of Normandy, a collection of poems inspired by Elizabeth Taylor, and her “magnum opus,” a manuscript that now exceeded a thousand pages and that she had been writing, she claimed, for the past fifteen years.
The plot of Stefanie’s novel, even given its copious length, was still somewhat elusive to the group. The main premise was that women had become so dominated by the awfulness of men that once a woman had been wronged significantly by three men in her life, she acquired lupine powers and became immortal, hungry for their blood, and, as a result of these first two circumstances, sexier than ever. The main character, Stasy, was obviously Stefanie. Stefanie changed the character’s hair color to blond, but she did not change the fact that Stasy loved to dye her hair practically every other week. Furthermore, Stasy wore a necklace just like the one that Stefanie wore, with the notable difference that Stasy’s snake was curled around an arrow instead of a dagger.
The foil in the group to Stefanie’s grand presence was Cassie, a soft-spoken woman in her midtwenties who normally dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater and who was, undoubtedly, the best writer of the lot. Unlike Stefanie, Cassie had presented only one work, a lavishly written story about a teenage girl who had the ability to move people’s hearts from one body to another, thereby changing whom her victims loved but without changing the knowledge they had of their pasts. It was a strange pitch—or “log line,” Roberta would have said, referring to how an editor at a publishing house might log in a submission—but the writing itself was so gorgeous that very few people in the group could offer legitimate criticism. Naturally, they were all jealous of Cassie’s ability, even Ranjana, especially because Cassie was considerably younger than the rest of them. She showed up in her dumpy clothes and no makeup—presumably straight from a nap, given her overall sleepy appearance—and bested them all.
Perhaps more revealing was when Cassie offered her criticism of other people’s work. In this, she was both reverent and utterly cutthroat. She knew that she was the best of all of them, and she milked her commentary, saying, “Well, hm,” biting her lip, looking down at the floor for a moment, then offering something candid like “I don’t think that your story is going anywhere. And how many times can you use the word rippling in one paragraph?”