“I really wish we were having a quiet family dinner tonight,” Mrs. Jha said to Mr. Jha in their bedroom. The windows were large, nearly floor to ceiling, but outside all you could see was darkness. They hardly ever bothered pulling the curtains shut in Gurgaon. Mrs. Jha wondered what they would look like to someone standing on the street. Yellow lighting, a bed with more pillows than two people would ever use, and a normal, well-to-do middle-aged couple getting ready for an evening with friends. Mr. Jha held his skinny tie from New York up against his collar. He was wearing brown slacks and a darker brown collared shirt.
“You’re the one who says it’s too lonely and quiet here. It’s only the Chopras and I told them to just drop in for a quick drink, say hello. Is a tie too much? It’s probably too much. Why don’t you wear a skirt tonight?”
“We need to talk to Rupak. I don’t know how to speak to him anymore.”
Mr. Jha laughed and shook his head.
“Marijuana. They call it four twenty,” he said. “There’s some debate over how that became the popular term for it.”
“Drugs,” Mrs. Jha said, and sat down on the edge of their bed. “What did we do wrong?” She ran her hand along the off-white duvet and smoothed it down.
“Speaking of skirts, do you think we need to get a bed skirt?” Mr. Jha asked, looking at where his wife was sitting at the edge of the bed.
They had a coir mattress on a wooden frame, the bottom part of which had drawers that could be pulled out to provide storage space for their extra linens. Why would they want to put a bed skirt on that, and when had her husband learned what a bed skirt was?
“You know what? I’m going to change. This looks too formal. Like you said, it’s basically a family dinner tonight,” Mr. Jha said.
“That isn’t what I said.”
“I’ll put on my tracksuit. Casual but still fashionable. As if maybe I’ve just been to the gym. Oh, Bindu, we simply must remember to speak to the Chopras tonight about joining the LRC. I want to start using the gym.”
Mr. Jha went into the master bathroom and left the door half open so he could change into his tracksuit while still talking to his wife. They had installed two sinks and two mirrors in the bathroom because Mr. Jha had once seen that in a movie and he liked the idea of it, but Mrs. Jha never used the bathroom at the same time as him.
“You’ve never been to a gym in your life,” Mrs. Jha said. “If you want to start exercising, come for evening walks with me.”
“Nobody walks here, Bindu. We’ll make people nervous.”
“That’s exactly why it’s pleasant to walk here—the roads are nice and empty. We don’t have to watch for rickshaws and cars and cows. Nobody walks on the empty roads here, but the roads around Mayur Palli just get more and more crowded. I don’t understand it.”
Mr. Jha came out and stood in front of the mirror admiring his tracksuit.
“Perfect,” he said. “But I think I need to get the elastic in the waist loosened a bit. I seem to be gaining weight. Have you noticed, Bindu, that men usually put their pants either above their paunch or below their paunch? But Mr. Chopra wears his pants smack through the middle of his paunch. What confidence that man has.”
“Anil, listen to me. Tomorrow we need to have a serious talk with Rupak. Tonight you’ve left me no choice so we have to have the neighbors here, but only one drink and then I want them to leave, okay?”
“And the soup,” Mr. Jha said. He had insisted that it was rude to send the guests away without at least a small snack, so he had made Mrs. Jha prepare six bowls of mulligatawny soup. He had heard on MasterChef Australia that soup was the in thing to serve these days. “I’ve heard cold soups are particularly in fashion, so see if you can put it in the fridge for some time before the neighbors arrive.”
“I’m not serving anyone cold soup,” Mrs. Jha said. “I don’t care what the fashion is in Australia or America, but in India, serving someone cold soup is rude.”
Despite everything, Mrs. Jha was relieved in a way. She wasn’t ready to speak to Rupak yet. Mr. Jha was still standing and looking at himself in the mirror, playing with the waistband of his tracksuit.
“I’ll leave the shirt tucked in and the jacket unzipped,” he said.
He patted his face, pulled back his jowls, and sucked in his cheeks. “You know there’s a new type of facelift you can do that specifically makes you look good on Skype and FaceTime. What a world we live in.” He lifted his chin and looked down his nose. “The best plastic surgeon in Delhi is a Mr. Trehan who also lives in Gurgaon, you know.”
The doorbell rang. He looked at his watch and said, “Who comes at the exact time? Bindu, can you go and answer the door? And where are my white sneakers?”
He bent down and peeked under the bed. His dark brown leather Woodlands shoes were lying there but not his sneakers. He pulled out the leather shoes and looked at them.
“Look at how scuffed these are. I shouldn’t have returned that shoe polisher. We could have just kept it upstairs where nobody would have seen it,” Mr. Jha said.
“What shoe polisher?” Mrs. Jha asked.
“Bindu, please just go and open the door. I need to find my sneakers,” Mr. Jha said, and walked into the closet to search for his shoes.
Mrs. Jha patted some baby powder on her nose, checked the pleats of her sari in the mirror, and headed down the stairs to greet the guests.
“Hurry up, please,” she said. “I don’t want to be the one to explain why Rupak is visiting again so soon.”
“I already told them he’s in town,” Mr. Jha said, emerging from the closet with his white sneakers in hand.
“What?” Mrs. Jha said. “What did you say to them?”
“Nothing, Bindu. Nothing much. I just bumped into Dinesh and told him that Rupak had decided to take some time off from his program. I didn’t say anything more than that.”