The Leaving of Things (20 page)

She smiled to herself, studying the cassette’s track list, while I searched the menu board—stenciled black letters against white tube-lit paneling—above the order counter. The offerings sounded suspiciously like imitations of American cafeteria and diner food.

“Hot dogs?” I said quizzically. “Pepperoni pizza? I doubt they have actual meat, right?”

Priya put the cassette inside her purse. “No, it’s all the Gujarati vegetarian version. Edible,” she explained, “but not exactly the real thing.”

“I’ll say.” Rather than smoked meats, pizza sauce, and hamburger seasonings, the air was redolent with diced onions, cilantro,
mirch masala
and
pav bhaji
. The fact that it smelled like the Xavier’s canteen made my stomach a touch queasy.

“You going to order something?” I asked Priya. “Cheeseburger?”

She scrunched her eyes and nose. “Not in the mood,” she said tactfully.

I laughed, and we moved toward an emptying table. “How was your birthday?”

“Fun,” she said as she quickly scanned a group of teenage boys chatting loudly at the neighboring table. She turned to face me and added, “I had a cave party. Do you know what that is?” We sat down, and from her purse, she plucked out some photos. “We had part of our back patio done up to look like caves, see—” The photos showed a lavish party set inside what looked like an imitation cave. The papier-mâché walls were contoured and painted to look like a glistening rock surface. There was even a miniature waterfall emptying into a small pond lined with plants and flowers.

Diwali lights were strung up along the walls, giving the whole thing a festive mood, and a disco ball was suspended in the middle of the “cave.” Her friends crowded under the ball, dancing and goofing around, bottles of Limca and Thums Up in their hands. They mingled at small tables abundant with cake and snacks. I noticed Hannah—the half-Indian, half-German girl—cutting loose in one photo, in a T-shirt and jeans—laughing, her pinned-up hair unraveling. Ashok danced beside her, shy and stiff, a half-embarrassed smile on his face, while another shot caught Manju off-guard, her mouth full of cake as she gawked at the camera.

Seeing the photos made me relieved I wasn’t at that party. I wouldn’t have known what to do around these people. But then I saw photos of Priya, pressed up next to her friends, and she looked good, and the relief emptied out and became an ache. “Too bad you couldn’t have been there,” she said.

Priya suggested we take a walk up the road, past the students—a bunch of rowdy-looking guys hanging out
together on their motorbikes—and four or five children off the street milling about in front of the Havmor. Traffic honked and beeped and growled along the road. The dirt fringe of the road bustled with shoppers, strollers, loiterers, a few beggars, and the evening air was thick with that distinct odor of smoke and exhaust fumes.

“How’re you adjusting to life in India?” Priya asked as we maneuvered past a cow nosing through plastic bags.

For a second, I wanted so much to spill my guts, really let loose and tell her how upside-down everything had gotten. But I reined myself in and settled for, “I’m not.” She asked me about my family so I filled her in. I went on and told her about what the autumns were like in Madison and what my friends were up to at school. I hesitated but decided to mention Shannon and about the breakup, for no other reason than to impress on her that I had at least some experience in that particular department. Priya asked if we, meaning Shannon and I, were very close. “I guess so, but that’s how it goes,” I said, but in a casual way so I could show off how “tough” I could be.

But I don’t think Priya bought it. “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she said, smiling.

We walked up the road to the corner where she said there was a Vadilal ice cream counter and talked about the difficulties of adjusting to life in India. “The first couple of years were the toughest,” she said. “I thought of America all the time. In everything you do, you’re reminded of it. From the second you wake up to when you go to sleep.”

“How did you do it?” I asked. “You seem to be taking it all in stride.”

Priya shrugged. “I don’t really have much to complain about. I mean, I’m better off than most of the people at our college, you know.”

I nodded. “And not to mention most of the people around us right now.”

“For me, India and America always felt interconnected. I’ve been able to move from one to the other as I’ve liked, so maybe the transition to living here was easier for me.”

The ice cream stand was a burst of candy colors: the Vadilal logo inside a red balloon, the stand painted bright blue, with red and pink lettering overhead, and the whole thing bathed in cool white light. A thin, mustached clerk in a paper hat scrambled from order to order, doling out cups of ice cream from tubs set inside the counter. The cold aromas of pistachio, mango, and saffron hovered and mixed with the smells of the street. We pushed toward the counter and ordered two cups of pistachio. I paid for them.

“Belated birthday present number two,” I said, handing her the ice cream with a wooden spoon tucked into it.

The ice cream was a sweet jolt to the senses, an expansion of the mind. We turned from the stand and began walking along a line of cars parked irregularly on our side of the road. I told Priya I couldn’t help but envy her freedom of movement, her being able to move between India and America as she pleased.

Priya laughed lightly. “I chalk it all up to the American passport,” she said, but there was a hint of irony to it, and there was a steady seriousness in her eyes. “I guess you could say the charm of America wore itself out,” she said. “Sure, I love it, and it’s given my family so much. It’s given my dad a great career for one thing … but we didn’t feel the most welcome there after a while.” Hesitant to say more, she took another spoonful of the ice cream.

“How’s that?” I asked.

She kept her gaze lowered. “It’s why my father decided to leave.” We arrived at her white Maruti—I remembered seeing it now, on that first visit to Xavier’s when I had seen her driving away in it. Priya leaned against the hood and propped a foot on the bumper. “It all had to do with this big scandal. The whole community got crazy over it. Old story, but let’s just say race becomes a target very easily when people stop liking you. Our house was vandalized, graffiti, spray paint, a lot of hateful stuff. The local news got into it. Quite a circus.”

“My god,” I said. “What was it all about?”

Priya shook her head, and her mouth formed a half smile as she reflected. “It started with a case my father was defending. He worked for this firm in Boston. The case was a pretty big deal. A real-estate developer who’d poured millions into some waterfront property was being sued by the city. Big environmental case. So my dad was already in kind of the spotlight. Then before we knew it he was getting charged with harassment.”

“
Sexual
harassment?” That was something I’d only heard about in the news back in the States.

Priya nodded, her eyebrow arched as if to say to me, what other kind is there?

“She was young,” she continued. “Some college girl interning at my dad’s firm. Real go-getter, you know? Out of the blue, she goes public with these terrible accusations. It came out much later that she made it all up because she was after my dad’s law-school connections, and he wouldn’t play that game.

“It probably would’ve all blown over too, except then the local news and the papers picked it up, all of them portraying her as one of these hard-working, all-American girls being victimized by the big-shot boss.

“On top of that, the case my dad was defending was controversial enough—I remember people picketing in front of the firm. The harassment charge just got them more riled up. The firm almost fired him. Anyway, my father just got disgusted by it all, the scandal, the media circus over the case, the case itself and …” she shook her head, “everything.”

“Do your friends here know all this?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She looked at me, her eyes vivid with alarm. “Do not tell Manju or anyone, okay?”

I assured her I would not.

She went on: “What hurt was that when people have nothing to go on, they start calling you names. Dotheads, towelheads—where did they get that one? We’re not even Sikhs. And ‘Go home this and that’ graffitied on the garage.

“Nigger,” I said. “That’s another one. It’s not easy out in white man’s land.”

“School sucked that last year.” She kept her eyes on her ice cream cup, “I’ve never felt so alone in my life. All the Indian families stopped coming by. My father realized he could never recover career-wise after that. So when my dad decided to leave the firm and come back, bring his family back, get a fresh start, I really didn’t mind much. It was great to get out of that.”

“I’m sorry.”

Priya laughed. Her spirits seemed back up again. “It’s okay. Like I said, old story. My dad isn’t exactly hurting, you know?”

I positioned myself beside her, but gingerly, keeping a half-yard distance between us. “Your nasty experience aside, I still wish I had your choices. I mean, your choices now.”

“Don’t,” she said. “You’re a guy, and your choices as an Indian guy are way more than mine as an Indian woman. No matter how rich you are. Or where your passport is from.”

Her reasoning was sound, but it rang hollow to me. I may have the advantage as a male in India, but I didn’t exactly see myself as belonging to the club of my fellow Indian males, wandering the streets of C.G. Road or the halls of Xavier’s College. I felt nothing like them. Still, I appreciated Priya’s words, and I was so happy she was with me now.

“Anyway,” she went on, “you’ll be fine. You’ll finish your B.A. at Xavier’s and move on. Probably back to America, and this will all seem like a weird dream.”

“What about you?” I asked. “You think you’ll get your B.A. and make your move?”

“Yes and no,” she said with a confidential air.

Four young men sauntered by, all giddy in the warm November air. Their intrigued glances in our direction reminded me that I was not a native Ahmedabadi. I did not belong. I wondered if Priya got that feeling too. No matter your skin color. The way you dressed, behaved, the vibe you gave off, gave you away. The men passed us slowly, checking us out. Then from one of them came a whistle, and from another a kissing sound. “Abbey oy! Sweetie!” The third one turned his head toward us and whistled again. Then they laughed among themselves as they drifted into the haze of headlights and mingling human beings.

“We’re causing a minor scandal of our own around here,” Priya remarked. “We’re gonna have to keep our interactions to college, I think.”

I felt crushed by her decision. “Really?”

Priya slid off the hood of the Maruti, licking her fingers. I offered to take the empty ice-cream cup from her. “I’ll take it home,” she said. “You won’t find a trash can around here.” She turned and opened the driver side door and tossed the cup inside. “Thanks for the tape,” she said, patting her purse before she took it off her shoulder.

I stood, hand in pocket, at the front of the car. “Okay, well, I’ll see you in college then.”

She placed a foot inside the car. From her lowered gaze and vague nod, something seemed on her mind. “Vik, I know you feel like you got your hands tied. But … remember, it can only get better.” The remark made her smile briefly before she disappeared into the Maruti.

She turned on the ignition, flicked on the headlights, and pulled out into the commotion of C.G. Road. I saw her silhouetted against the glare of the road as she waved goodbye before she sped up and was lost in the anonymity of the nighttime traffic.

I began walking back to the Havmor where my Luna was parked.
It can only get better?
Worse, yes, but I couldn’t see how things could get better, especially after her telling me we couldn’t hang out together outside of college. I wished we could spend more time together, but her decision that we should limit our socializing threw a wrench into those chances. A brief encounter it would have to be, a conversation in the cocoon of a shared language. Perhaps that would have to do. Perhaps here in Ahmedabad, that was more than I had any right to expect.

* *

I came back from the holiday to learn I had done well on the midterms. First class across the board. Devasia and Pradeep too. We congratulated each other as we stood before the message board in the college lobby. The board was wallpapered with dot-matrix printouts that listed every student’s marks.

We began walking toward our lecture hall. It was almost time for Sridharan’s fifty minutes of windbaggery.

“Any word from Vinod,” I asked Pradeep, “since his Diwali meltdown? You know—” I imitated the act of toking, but of course, Pradeep couldn’t see what I was doing, and Devasia was slow to understand.

“Ah, yes,” Devasia said finally, then vigorously shook his head, shut his eyes. “No, I do not know.”

“I am worried about him to tell you the truth,” Pradeep said. “He has not been at college this week.”

As we entered Sridharan’s lecture hall alongside a stream of students, we bumped into Priya and Manju. I said hello, hoping to have a few words with Priya, to ask her if she’d had a chance to listen to the mixtape. But she paused only long enough to smile and say hi, her hands clasping her notebooks close to her chest. Even Manju acknowledged me with her customary bright, solicitous smile over her shoulder as she drifted past me. Priya’s attitude threw me off, and I chalked it up to the fear of gossip at Xavier’s and went off to my seat.

15

I
got the Diwali photos developed. Six rolls’ worth. Most of them were junk. Over- or underexposed, some too blurry. I realized I was making a basic camera work too hard. Except for the focus, everything else on the camera—shutter speed, aperture—was preset and fixed. A few of the photos surprised me, though, especially those from the first night in Baroda, setting off fireworks with Anjali, Anand, and Hemant Uncle, and from the Xavier’s Diwali festival with Pradeep and Priya aglow in the golden lights. I made more copies of these and sent them to Karl, an early Christmas present.