“Please just see me once,” he said. The only way to face his mother would be with Serena still in the picture. He placed the picture on an empty shelf and looked around the room. His room was bare and not just because he was packing. If someone came into his apartment, they would have no sense of who he was, he thought. The only hint of something personal, something deliberate was one framed postcard, not even a poster, advertising a Fellini retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He hadn’t even attended the exhibition; he had picked up the postcard from a table at a coffee shop downtown. If he really wanted to be a filmmaker, why hadn’t he gone to New York for the weekend and seen the exhibition, he wondered.
“I just get the feeling we don’t have the same goals in life,” Serena said. “I don’t have the big safety net that you have. I actually want to work. I don’t want to just fuck around. I don’t know if you thought we were going to have some kind of happily ever after, but, Rupak, we just don’t have enough in common. You can’t try to force yourself to be with me for the sake of your parents. I’m not from the world that gets impressed by fancy restaurants and jewelry from Tiffany’s.”
“Neither am I,” Rupak said.
“Well, that’s not really true, is it? I met your family. I don’t mean that to be rude. I just mean that we come from different worlds and that’s fine. We’re friends. And we’ll stay friends.”
Rupak wanted to slam the phone down, but he looked at his picture again. “Can you imagine this little boy is off to America to study?” his mother had said to all the neighbors of Mayur Palli when they got the news that he had been accepted to Ithaca College. His father had invited everyone over to celebrate and his mother had passed this picture around, beaming. “To our future,” his father had toasted, and Rupak had smiled, and his mother had put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
“Please just meet me for a cup of coffee,” he said in a quieter voice.
“Rupak,” Serena said, and paused. “You’re going to be in Delhi, right? I’ll be there for Christmas. I’ll see you then.”
“Okay, what if I see you and just say good-bye? You don’t have to react. We don’t have to discuss anything.”
“You’re leaving the country while the rest of us are studying for midterms. There’s no way to not react.”
Fine, Rupak decided. He couldn’t ask for more. He didn’t want to ask for more.
The next morning, Mr. Jha found Mrs. Jha sitting alone quietly on the front porch.
“Did you order the exercise machine?” he asked.
“No,” Mrs. Jha said. She continued looking out toward their front yard. There was nothing to see. No sights, no sounds. Nothing at all to link with.
“Good,” Mr. Jha said. “Now with Rupak coming back, an LRC membership makes even more sense. The whole family can use it. And Bindu, you were right—my jet lag has lifted completely. I feel wonderful. I’m off to the market. Do you need anything?”
Mrs. Jha continued staring into the distance.
Mr. Jha got in the car and went to buy some bottles of champagne. Mo?t had recently introduced a sparking pink wine—a sparkling rosé, if you will—to India, and Mr. Jha picked up three bottles and came home and put them in the freezer to chill faster. When he got home, Mrs. Jha was up in the bedroom lying on the bed, still staring into the distance. Two hours later, when he went to check on the bottles, he saw that one of them had exploded and left a pink syrup all over the freezer, so he removed the other two and put them down in the fridge. He would tell Mrs. Jha about the exploded one later—no point making her even grumpier than she already was; he was considerate like that.
In the evening, he went out to his driveway and sat near the gate with one of the cold bottles of Mo?t and two champagne flutes. He sat waiting for the sound of Mr. Chopra’s car coming down the road. He could hear Balwinder pottering around outside their gate, listening to the latest Bollywood song on his phone.
At about twenty minutes past eight, he heard the creak of Mr. Chopra’s gate being pushed open and the crunch of gravel as the Jaguar went into the driveway. Holding the bottle of champagne and the glasses, Mr. Jha rushed past Balwinder and said, “Mr. Chopra, we are celebrating! A glass of champagne for you! Rupak is coming back to India.”
“Lovely,” Mr. Chopra said, stepping out of his car. “For Diwali? Or have you found him a good Indian bride?”
Mr. Jha laughed while twisting the thin gold wire around the edge of the champagne bottle.
“No, no, no,” he said, turning the fat brown cork in the neck, paying no attention to where it was pointing or how much he had shaken it up in his enthusiastic run over to Mr. Chopra’s driveway. “Nothing useful like that. He’s taking a break from his MBA program. Coming back.”
At that, the cork popped and flew up and out of the bottle and landed at the base of the hedge shaped like a duck, and white fizzy bubbles spilled over the sides of the dark green bottle.
“I’m so happy he’ll be home soon. To that, we must raise a toast,” Mr. Jha said, and handed a glass to Mr. Chopra. “Both our sons will be home. We must introduce them soon. I have told Rupak a lot about you. Anyway, you must drop in for a drink and meet him when he arrives.”
“Indeed,” Mr. Chopra said. “This is very good news for you. Rupak will find a job here, then? Half an MBA means job prospects will be good.”
“Sadly, no. Now he wants to be a filmmaker. Idiotic dreams. As if there’s any money in filmmaking,” Mr. Jha said, emptying his glass of champagne.
“Well, well,” Mr. Chopra said. “Filmmaking these days can be very lucrative. Good for him. Much better than poetry, I tell you. Now that is a field with no money. Johnny should learn from Rupak. He gives absolutely no thought to the future.”
“Yes, maybe. But Rupak has little talent, so it is likely that he will fail completely,” Mr. Jha said.
Both the men laughed heartily.
“I’m not feeling too well,” Mrs. Jha said before dinner. “Will you manage dinner yourself? I think I’m just going to have a slice of toast and read in bed.”
“Are you feeling unwell? Should I sleep in the guest room? No sense both of us falling ill,” Mr. Jha said.
“I’m not falling ill, Anil. I’m worried. And you should be too,” Mrs. Jha said. “About our son. And his life.”
“Bindu, these things happen,” Mr. Jha said. “What’s done is done. Now we will simply figure out the best way forward.”
“What if you had never sold your website, Anil?” Mrs. Jha said.
“What are you talking about? What if we still lived in Mayur Palli with the neighbors interfering in our lives and bathrooms that are too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter? That’s what you’re talking about? What if we lived with seepage on our walls and electricity outages every other day? What if you still had to use a kitchen in which you felt suffocated by the smell of haldi and chili? What if we lived with no full-length mirrors? Why stop there? Let’s go back to the days before we could even afford air conditioners, let alone business class travel to America.”
“That’s enough; I’m going upstairs,” Mrs. Jha said.
“We have an upstairs to go to,” Mr. Jha said.
She went up the stairs to the bedroom and shut the door. She sat on the edge of the bed and picked the cordless phone up off the bedside table to call Mrs. Ray.