Our Country Friends(58)

In Vinod’s victorious smile, Karen would sometimes espy an element she had not encountered since his illness a decade ago: the wiggly little cornichon of want, the added heat of his smile, and the embarrassed way he clutched his arms to his sides after a victorious serve, to hide the rivulets of sweat pouring down over his wrists. To hide them from her.



* * *



—

    It was the book that changed her mind. She had read Vinod’s essays and short stories here and there—some of them had been well received and had earned her friend the sad status of a floating adjunct in several suburban university systems. She and Senderovsky would often groan privately about Vinod’s lack of wolfish ambition. When they had been younger and battling for their reputations, they would find Vinod’s softness a necessary antidote to their own ferocity. “What’s up with our boy?” Senderovsky would ask into his little Finnish cellphone of the era. “He didn’t submit his dossier in time,” Karen would say, “so he’s out of the running for the tenure-track job.” “Can you please try to smack sense into him?” “Me?” “Yes, he loves you. I’m just his brother from a freckled mother.” “Well, it’s too late now.”

It was always too late. Though it had taken time for Karen’s own career to spark. Despite her geeky C++ childhood and the immigrant-ridden math high school she had attended with Vinod and Senderovsky, she had gone to the city’s fashion institute and only crossed over from fashion (with its impossible margins) to technology in her midthirties. (“In some ways, it’s the same shit,” she had told her first interviewer, a bit too truthfully, after Tr?? Emotions had scaled. “You’re trying to get a mass of people to mistake themselves for someone else.”) At first, she was dismissed by the all-male start-up ensembles where she worked as the resident hipster, the cool Asian girl who played ukulele at a bar in Bushwick no larger than a subway car and designed mind-bending logos, but Karen was taking notes all along, slowly assimilating information as she had her whole life. Her secret weapon: she had no one to impress, not the office cast of code-crunching megalomaniac Aspergerians, many graduates of her specialized math high school, not even her mother or father, both of whom had no idea who she was or what she did, and wanted simply for her to produce two brilliant children, at least one of them male.

    During the rough years before her success, however, Vinod’s meandering lack of progress felt like a balm. “I’m going to turn into Vin,” she’d tell Senderovsky after a setback. “I’m not sure how that’s possible,” he’d snort. “No, we’re going to move in together. I’ve always wanted to live above a bodega.” “Think of the convenience!”

But now there was the book. Karen still read a decent amount, but she certainly never saw herself as a committed reader like her two friends. There was a Japanese writer she loved because his clear sparse prose always put her in a settled mood. (The reality show she watched at Ed’s bungalow sometimes gave her a similarly peaceful and satiated feeling.) Vinod’s book came at her from a different direction.

If he had set it in Queens—her borough, their borough—the signposts would have been there for her, and she would have sailed through the pages laughing at the familiarities between her immigrant upbringing and his, in the same way she did with Senderovsky’s novels. But this book was set in India, at a university in a large city that she presumed was not Bombay. (For one thing, it was inland, and there were many allusions to its provinciality.) She would read five pages a day to herself and then quote some of it to Nat just to hear his language leave her mouth. And then they would sneak into the main house to look up terms they did not understand, Nat happy to be in on a secret project with Karen-emo.

The Congress Party. Partition. Sikhism. Jammu and Kashmir. Pukka sahibs. Indo-Saracenic. Lakhs and crores. An aarti. The text was dense with the lifeblood of a country, with arguments and counterarguments, with political shenanigans and the postcolonial habits of a Westernized elite. She still didn’t understand all of it, didn’t know which bits were comedy and which were not (Senderovsky would liberally supply exclamation marks to guide his readers), but the density of the text made her feel that the author was trying to mimeograph the past that had made him into Vinod Mehta, and if there was beauty or laughter amid the ten-point font, fine, and if not, then no one could accuse him of cleverness or lying.

    But, more important, it was also a love story between two people and a society that would rather see them apart. This was conventional to be sure, especially for a story set in India, with its frequent allusion to family status and fairness of skin and the brutal constraints of caste. But the protagonists were familiar to her. They were his mother and his father, their love treated almost as a sacred object, Vinod’s only birthright. This was his parents’ passage out of innocence, the jerky years between a decent middle-class upbringing in a poor country before the travails of immigration to a wealthy one.

Here, the young man who was Vinod’s father did not strike him across the temple, did not disburse a daily cry of bhenchod over the strum of his own impotence, and the young woman who was his mother did not belittle him, did not compare him with his two older brothers whose many-toothed smiles and simple mercantile greed were an engraved invite to American success. Because this was a “love marriage,” rare for its time and place, the protagonists had to fall in love. And because they had to fall in love, Vinod had to plumb the best his parents had to offer each other during their youth, ignoring the dross of their later lives, the inevitable disappointments of Queens, the stark hatred of their respective families.