Our Country Friends(102)

The spotlight now fell on Vinod. He brought his hand up to his face to shield himself from the light. “Please,” he said. “Can someone turn that down?” The light refused to dissipate. Vinod rose up, his body audibly creaking, some of the audience laughing. “I,” he said. “I haven’t prepared anything, I regret to say. I’m unprepared.” There was more laughter from the quarter-full auditorium, the vicious city kind.

The spotlight suddenly shifted from him to Senderovsky, who gladly sprang up with a sheaf of papers. “Thank you, Vinod,” Senderovsky said, pulling on his authorial turtleneck. “If no one minds, I will read from Terrace House extensively.”

And as the Russian writer did so, as he entered the performative space from which he declaimed all his work (overblown accents, overdramatic comic pauses), Vinod sighed both in pain and relief. The spotlight had gone from him. He felt safe in its absence. And yet, there was also this fact: The spotlight had gone from him. He felt its absence.

“I’m sorry to stop you,” Dee said to Senderovsky, “but we wanted to leave room for a conversation between the two of you.”

    “Oh,” Senderovsky said. “May I at least finish reading act one? I’m not sure how much Vinod has to say.” He sat down, dejected.

“Now, Vinod, you wrote this book in your late twenties,” Dee said. “Why did it take you so long to get it published?”

“I can answer that!” Senderovsky interjected. “In Soviet times, some writers did not publish their books, rather they wrote into their desks, as we say in Russian. That is Vinod as well. He wrote into his desk.”

“So he’s a dissident?” Dee asked.

“Yes!” Senderovsky said. “He is a dissident from America’s literary-entertainment complex. He is a dissident from the turbo capitalism that turns words into dollars.”

“Can we maybe hear from Vinod himself?”

“Fine, fine,” Senderovsky said. “He’s a grown bhenchod now. He’s even done uka-uka with our mutual friend.” He visored his eyes with his hand against the spotlight and scanned the audience. “Is she here tonight?”

“Vinod,” Dee said, “will you say something?”

The spotlight fell on him again. He saw his brothers in the front row, the two crorepatis in their finance vests, hairy knuckles, pointlessly elaborate wristwatches, the bright hum of their intelligent eyes that said all life was commerce and all commerce life. A stray thought embedded in his mind: Given the lay of the world, will they make it from London and San Francisco to my funeral?

May 21, 2017.

October 3, 2018.

The day his father and mother died, respectively.

And only four days after his mother died, Karen’s had as well. An orphan and a near orphan, the two of them mostly on their own now. But would Senderovsky, for all his familial books and protestations, ever be anything other than his parents’ son?

“Vinod,” Dee prompted him with the Aryan blaze of her eyes.

Vinod turned to Senderovsky: “I saw your life and I didn’t want that.”

“Not want that?” Senderovsky said. “What was there not to want? I went from strength to strength for twenty years. I was unstoppable. We’re boys from Queens. We’re supposed to just sit back and let the world decide for us?”

    “Just the same, I did not want it.”

“And look at you now,” Senderovsky said.

“Love Is Letting Go of Fear is about your parents’ courtship in India,” Dee said to Vinod, “but it asks the same question Senderovsky’s books ask of his parents. How did they turn out the way they did? How much was history and how much was them?”

Vinod now saw what was lying on the glass table in front of him, next to the pitcher of water and the vase of fake flowers. He opened the Teva box. Inside, he saw the manuscript. Hotel Solitaire by Vinod Mehta. He picked up the first handful of pages and got up, then walked over to the podium. “Wait a second, wait a second,” Senderovsky said. “We’re supposed to be in a conversation right now. He can’t just start reading from his shoebox! Wait a second.”

But Vinod began to read, and with each solemn word, with each descriptor of time and place, he felt his parents absence alongside him, the television set blaring in front of him with 1980s color, the pleather sticking to his shins, but the kitchen behind him empty of their tired voices, their anxiety humming like a cut nerve. It wasn’t about history in the end, his novel, it was about them clinging to each other as the tidal wave of time rushed in and then slowly let out. It was about the elegant seething of the wave against the sand as it retreated back to where it came from.

“I’m sorry,” Karen said to him from the chair Dee had just been occupying. She was dressed down in a sweatshirt that read MEDITATE and looked like she had just popped in off the street on the way to the laundromat. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, honey. But our time is up.” She turned to the audience. “Won’t you please give these two old friends a round of applause?”

The lights came on with a snap of an ugly circuit; they rose in heat and intensity until they crowded out everything before them, until everything was coated in 1980s nuclear movie light (The Day After, Threads, Testament). The light continued to envelop Vinod, and now he could hear something like rotor blades turning, churning, his papers flying off the table and into the audience. What was he to do? What were his instructions? From first grade on, he had always had instructions. He couldn’t just stand there and be enveloped in light. That’s not why his parents brought him to this country, to be bathed in lumens. But then the audience and the stage and the light itself disappeared and Vinod was—