The Leaving of Things (13 page)

I got the sense these were the popular kids at Xavier’s, the rich kids. Besides Priya and her friend—who introduced herself as Manju—there was a fair-skinned girl, half-German, half-Indian named Hannah and Ashok, a stout-shouldered, third-year guy seated next to her, who spoke of getting his M.Sc. in computer science at this place in Delhi. He told Hannah that computers were the wave of the future. Indeed, Ashok fixed all his attentions on Hannah, and they spoke closely; truly, this was the first coed gathering I’d found here, and I felt strangely like a transgressor as I sat here among them.

Ashok, Hannah, and particularly Manju fell over each other with questions about America, what brought me
here, and how I was adjusting. Vinod interjected with his own impressions of life in the States, which, somehow, seemed culled from American movies and sitcoms.

Priya leaned forward, sipping from her bottle of Limca, her elbow on the table and resting her chin in one hand. Her skin was a shade darker than the typical Gujarati’s, and her eyes glistened black. Her hands were slim, bare, the skin kept diligently soft and radiant with moisturizer. Except for the gold stud that she wore in her nose, Priya seemed free of any ornamentation, minus the touch of lip gloss, the kohl accenting her eyes, and the translucence of clear nail polish. A bump high on the bridge of her nose and a slight prominence to her lower mouth kept her features, thankfully, from reaching classical perfection, and I wondered if they didn’t make Priya even lovelier. I was desperate to ask her something, to hear her speak.

“What are you majoring in?” I blurted.

“Psych.” She wiped at her mouth. “Not crazy about it, but I was even less crazy about English and econ.”

“You could’ve gone to H.L. and majored in commerce or some other school, right?”

“I could’ve,” she sighed, either weary or bored. Her voice was so quiet, unfazed by the noise of the café. “But a degree from Xavier’s means more than one from almost any other college in the state. You know, you can go farther with it.”

I thought about that for a second, curious. “And where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” she said. “I’ve still got two years. Lots of time to decide.”

“So, now I have to ask,” I continued. “Why are you here? I mean, here in India?”

A measured pause, then, “My father’s a lawyer. About three years ago, he decided to leave his firm in Boston and start his own practice here.”

“Just decided to pack it up?”

“He wanted to raise my sister and me here, close to family, and …” Her sentence finished with a light toss of her head and the flick of an eyebrow.

“Wanted to keep an eye on you.”

She laughed, tipping back a bit more of the Limca.

I had not expected Priya, someone this close to my experience. I wondered if Shannon would be jealous if she saw me now and couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt. After her lack of letter-writing, though, I hoped she
would
be jealous. And what would Nate and Karl think of Priya? They would agree: she was beautiful. “Bring that lovely thing back to America,” I could hear Nate’s voice now, “and give your boys back home a chance.”

“Have you visited America at all since?” I asked.

“A couple times,” she said. “I’ve got cousins there.”

“Ever think about moving back?

“I could,” she said vaguely. “I was born there, so it’s always an option.”

That quickened my blood. “You were
born
there?” To be an American citizen: The ultimate blessing. “What are you doing here then? If I were an American, I’d be in America right now.”

She kept the Limca bottle tipped at her mouth, and I could tell I’d hit a nerve because her expression became serious. She lowered the bottle and spoke in a low, steady tone. “America isn’t the Holy Grail. I mean, everyone around here thinks it is.” She rolled her eyes toward Vinod, now in a heated discussion with Ashok about the relative
merits of Harley-Davidsons versus the indigenous Enfields. “But whatever. I just don’t get the America worship. There are plenty of places to live in this world. America isn’t the end-all-be-all.”

“This world is mostly shit,” I snapped. “Maybe America doesn’t matter because you can go back any time you want.”

Vinod’s voice suddenly leaped above all others. “A Harley will leave it in the dust, yaar!” he said forcefully, his palm angled as if here were going to karate chop Ashok’s neck.

“It’s not just power,” Ashok countered, sleepy-eyed and sure. “Enfield has class, a certain
swaad
, that Harley cannot match.”

“To hell with swaad, yaar,” Vinod pumped his fists. “What I want is power!”

Hannah laughed, covering her mouth.

“You should be wherever, do whatever you want, no matter who you are,” Priya said defensively, almost smugly.

“Really? And you want to be in Ahmedabad, huh?” I hoped that hadn’t come out snobby.

“What I want is no one’s business,” she said. “I’m here right now. And when I want to leave, I will.”

I was not enjoying the direction this conversation was going. I wanted to like this girl and for her to like me. So far, neither was happening. What nerve had I struck?

“You’re right,” I managed to say. “It’s your call. We should be and do whatever.”

I was happy for the interruption when Manju leaned over the table to ask, “You are going to be in our French class, no?”

“French? Uh, yes, I am.” Then I began to ask, “But how did you know … ?”

Manju giggled. “Madame Varma told us we will be having one student joining class late. I thought it must be you, as you cannot take Farsi or Sanskrit or like that.” She smiled and shrugged coyly. I told her and Priya about the class I was enrolled in at the Alliance Française.

“I was in that same class last year,” Priya said.

“We both were,” said Manju, all teeth and fluttering eyelashes.

“It’s not so bad,” I said.

“It’s a breeze,” Priya said, “But then you’ve got Madame Varma to deal with.”

“She’s tough, huh?” I braced myself.

“I hope you like
Les Misérables
,” Priya said.

She finished her Limca then slid back her chair to leave. Straightening the hem of her kurta and brushing her hair back over her shoulder, she said she’d see us all later, and that it was “nice” to meet me.

I told her goodbye as pleasantly as I could. But I still tasted a lingering bitterness from our conversation. In a flurry of goodbyes around the table, she clipped away on heels that peeked beneath the cuffs of her jeans. Priya’s exit was a cue for the rest of us to go our separate ways. I shook hands with Ashok and Vinod, waved to the girls, then turned and sped toward the college gate.

“Hey, take it easy, man,” Vinod called out.

I spun around, noticed him following me, hand extended. I shook his hand again. This time, he grasped my hand three different ways, in that typically American switch-up handshake. “Whatever you need, man, I can arrange whatever, I’m here for you,” he told me. “You want to get friendly with Priya?” he half-whispered with mock sleaziness and slapped my shoulder, laughing.

“Ha-ha.” I played along like a goddamn good sport but felt the need to extract myself immediately, unsure if I was annoyed at Vinod, at Priya, or my whole goddamn life. I thought if I didn’t get out now, I might take a swing at Vinod or start shouting obscenities at him—and what an impression that would make here in the middle of the Xavier’s quad! So, with an abrupt wave goodbye, I pulled away, anxious to gather my thoughts on the fifteen-minute walk back to the bungalow. Meanwhile, the sky grumbled, and I noticed it had darkened since morning.

As I stepped past the college gate, I felt the first drops of rain, and I picked up my pace. What was Vinod going on and on about? “Get friendly with Priya”! Did that mean what I thought it did? And what made him think he could make that happen? Priya had hardly given me the time of day, and she’d stung me with her words.

“Viiikraaaaam!” came a girl’s voice several paces behind me. Oh, no! It was Manju. She held a black umbrella in her hand, stood at the college gate, and motioned toward the rickshaw that she had just hailed. “Do you need a lift?”

“No, thanks,” I shook my head vigorously enough to cover the distance between us. “I’m not that far. Bye!”

She may have said something else, but I didn’t want to stick around. I just turned and walked away as fast as I could, keeping my ear tuned for the motor of her rickshaw, assurance that she was going away. I did not fancy a ride with Manju, any more than I did falling face-first into warm cow dung.

As I walked home, Priya’s words stuck like burrs in my brain:
be wherever, do whatever you want, no matter who you are.
Isn’t that what she said?
When I want to leave, I will.

What a fucking luxury, I thought to myself, feeling an envy and bitterness I never expected to feel toward her. The luxury of choice. Because being able to choose one thing over another—one place over another, one kind of life over another—that was something I could never imagine feeling. That must be true freedom.

By the splat of raindrops on the road and on my head, I knew we were in for a heavy rain shower; I’d be drenched by the time I reached the bungalow. I thought of the hours ahead: after lunch came the journey aboard the number “67” to the Alliance Française. Then back home for dinner, studying, and cramming for the midterms. I wondered, as I did each afternoon, if any letters might arrive for me that day.

None did.

* *

My father offered to buy me a Kinetic Honda scooter, sleek and sturdy. I chose the Luna moped.

“The Kinetic will last longer,” my father said.

He was right: Compared to the Kinetic Honda, the Luna was a skin-and-bones machine—just sinews of cables running from a pair of handlebars and tires that looked hardly more durable than a bicycle’s. The Luna was just the basics, the kind of vehicle the lurked along the edges and got where it needed to go without attracting attention. It was a machine meant for transience, and transience was my ally.

“The Luna will do,” I said.

With the Luna, I no longer had to sweat and shove my way along on buses. It would zip me around wherever I
needed to, and that meant college, mostly, and the Alliance Française.

The French course went on for six more weeks. It was set up to give students a practical knowledge of the language, but what it did, more than anything, was thoroughly dislocate me. Our lesson book contained short sketches—dramatic scenarios that we read along to cassettes in which actors voiced the lines, acted the parts, and the whole thing was done up like a mini French radio play. A broadcast from another world.

“
Je m’appelle Jacques Martineau
,” said a Continental, disembodied voice. “
Je suis pianiste. J’habite à Paris, place de la Contrescarpe.
”

And that’s all it took for the boundaries in my mind to crack open. I imagined a world outside the immediacies of Ahmedabad, a clean and cosmopolitan Parisian universe in which this blonde, supple-voiced musician Jacques Martineau lived (Place de la Contrescarpe had to be galaxies removed from anything I knew, might ever know) and conducted his affairs free of despair and circumstance. A part of me deeply wished to be this fictional Frenchman, far away from here, living in another reality entirely.

Another grammar lesson involved a carload of teenagers on a road trip through rural France. They suffered flat tires and surly farmers (who eventually welcomed them into their home and served them delicious plum-dark wine). In the next lesson, the teenagers rolled into a cobblestoned village and danced to a bandstand concert during the
Fête de la Musique
. I imagined myself in each of these adventures, wishing I were out in the European country myself, with Shannon at my side.

In another, a father came home to announce to his children that he had been promoted and they would all be moving
from Paris to a distant city called Montpellier. The children whined and stamped their feet, lamenting how they’d lose their friends and how their schooling would be disrupted. But nothing doing. Their father packed them up and off they moved. The kids’ antics amused me. Parisian wimps. What they needed was to spend a few weeks in Ghatlodiya.

The course ended with an exam, which I passed, and on my way out, I picked up my certificate from the instructor. She was still sweet and pleasant but looked worn-out after almost two months of vocabulary drills, conversation exercises, pop quizzes.

I asked her if she planned to keep teaching at the Alliance. “No, this was it,” she said with a warm, pert smile. “I’m getting married in the winter, and he is French.” She and her fiancé had met while she was living in Paris the previous year.

“Congratulations,” I said. A chorus of congratulations and surprised “wows” erupted among the few others lingering in the classroom.

“So,” she took a deep breath, “I’ll wrap up here. Visit my family in Delhi for a few weeks. Then push off.” She smiled modestly, casting her eyes about the room, lost in thought. She handed out the certificates, exchanging goodbyes with her students, calm and cordial, but I could tell there was an eagerness in her heart, a happiness radiating from her center, just waiting to burst. I basked in it and could feel her joy for days afterward.

* *

Letters from Nate and Karl arrived. They were indeed, as Shannon reported, working on a script—a spy comedy. Karl
was quite serious about it, but for Nate, it was a lark. Otherwise, he was spending his summer the way he’d spent his past several summers—painting houses. He planned to rake in as much cash as possible before moving into his dorm in August.

Madison was roasting through a drought, Nate wrote. “I don’t think we’ve had weather like this since the dustbowl days, and it’s making the housepainting a real bitch!” Nate mentioned his fathers’ yellowing lawn, the withering golf courses, and the refuge of the swimming pool and the multiplex. With the letter, he sent a clipping from
Rolling Stone
about R.E.M.’s next record, coming out on Election Day in November, and an article about Michelle Pfeiffer from
The New York Times
(Nate was a fan of hers and thought I was too). “I hope you’re hanging in there, Vik,” he wrote, “We could use some of that rain you’re getting! Take comfort: new R.E.M. in only three months! Oh, I ran into Shannon on campus a couple of times now. I think she really misses you.”