“No. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Rupak said. “Sorry.”
“Jealous?” Serena said, looking closely into his eyes. “Come on. Come to the living room. I’ll introduce you to the others.” She took his hand and led him toward the rest of her friends from Delhi.
The party continued in a haze of marijuana and stiff drinks, and Rupak felt his voice slipping back into his comfortable Indian accent and bits of Hindi creeping into his sentences. Serena sat by his side and he rested his hand on her thigh and thought of Elizabeth. By now he wanted to kiss Serena, but he also wanted to go over to find Elizabeth and breathe in the smell of her tousled blond hair and hear what she had been doing all evening. He wanted to hear her talk about her home, her one home. The marijuana and the alcohol and the Indians were making his head spin and he wanted desperately to cling to something stable.
In Gurgaon, it was finally the day Mr. Chopra had been planning for. It was time to sit down and get to know the new neighbors.
“Is Johnny going to be home this evening?” Mr. Chopra asked his wife. “And did you have pastries picked up from the club?”
“Who knows when Johnny will come home? Who told you to buy him a new car? Now he will be even more useless,” Mrs. Chopra said.
She went back to playing Angry Birds on her iPad. She wasn’t as excited about the new neighbors as her husband was, but she was looking forward to having new friends. She went to the LRC on occasion, but those evenings were just an opportunity for their friends and neighbors to get drunk and flirt with each other. She had heard whispers of a few couples trading partners, and it sounded mad to her. Most of them were nearing sixty—they were trading partners for what? Rubbing Icy Hot on each other’s backs at the end of the day? All those women huffing and puffing on the treadmills, trying to be young women in old women’s bodies. After the gym, they would stop by the bar to see their husbands and have a drink, and they would laugh and shake their ponytails around like the young girls Johnny chased after. She was glad her husband had lost interest in those women with age. At least that was one thing he was sensible about.
“Have you checked the maids’ uniforms? And told them to put out the crystal glasses?” Mr. Chopra asked his wife.
“I’m sure it’s all fine. Why are you creating such a fuss? It’s a weeknight. They won’t stay that long. Will Upen be joining us?”
“No, he’s gone out for dinner with some college friends. Geeta, do you ever worry about the future?” Mr. Chopra asked.
“About getting old?” Mrs. Chopra asked.
“Worse—getting poor,” Mr. Chopra said.
“No, I don’t waste time thinking about that. And neither should you. Things are good.”
“For now. But what happens if the mine crumbles? Or I lose control of the management?”
Mrs. Chopra put her iPad down.
“That is why we bought property and jewelry and gold. What is wrong with you today?”
“What if everyone else in Delhi becomes rich and the people who are poor now move in next door and suddenly we are one of the poor. What then?”
“Then nothing,” Mrs. Chopra said. She knew her husband was impossible to talk to when he got in one of these moods. “You think about it all too much. We will be fine. Things don’t just fall apart all the time and economies don’t change overnight. Because of your hard work, Johnny will also always live well. Look at him, driving around all day, getting better and better at tennis. Not all fathers can provide that for their sons. Didn’t you say the next-door boy is studying in America? Poor fellow.”
“That is true. At least Johnny will not have to go in for postgraduate studies, thank God,” Mr. Chopra said. “I’ll go take a quick shower before the neighbors come.”
Next door, Mr. Jha was also taking a shower before their evening out with the neighbors. His wife was probably being stubborn as usual and sitting crouched on her haunches over a bucket of water, with a mug. Mr. Jha did not even like having an overturned bucket in the bathroom with him when he was showering. He liked to have the floor space open to move around freely, so in Gurgaon he installed a section under the sink with a drain where Mrs. Jha could store her bucket and mug after she was done bathing.
She also insisted on keeping a mug in the downstairs bathroom near the toilet. He had started noticing that fewer and fewer Indian homes kept mugs near the toilet these days. Almost all kept toilet paper, and most had traded in the mug for a water gun attached to the wall. Mr. Jha was getting used to those—it was like having a handheld bidet for easy aiming—and he had water guns installed in all the bathrooms, but even here, Mrs. Jha preferred using a mug and would often leave one near the toilet in the downstairs bathroom. He had repeatedly told her to hide the mug when it was not in use, but she always forgot. He would have to use the bathroom at the Chopras’ home to see how they had it set up.
They had been in Gurgaon for over a week now and had hardly seen their neighbors. Mr. Jha had left a note with the Chopras’ guard suggesting they get together for a drink. Of course they had not yet hired a guard themselves, so, in response, the Chopras had to throw a piece of paper over their gate inviting them for an after-dinner drink tonight. (A digestif, the note had said, and Mr. Jha had been using the term ever since.)
In the bedroom, Mrs. Jha took her gold chain out of the safe and put it around her neck. She usually only wore it to weddings or other fancy events, but maybe it was time to start using it more often. She smoothed down the front of her sari. She had changed into a starched yellow sari with a dark yellow blouse. An embroiderer in Jodhpur had worked on it. The pallu over her shoulder was covered with delicate patterns of birds and lilies in the same dark yellow as the blouse. She had ordered twelve of this design and color to be sold at the National Crafts Museum.