Lightning People (13 page)

“Well, I've really appreciated attending this lecture. What is it called?” Del pushed herself into the soft cushions and fought the urge to roll a cigarette. “When Will America Stop Loving Art and Start Respecting Money? You've grown disgustingly practical lately. You do get that this is all about Raj. You're just a jilted sibling trying to beat up your brother because he won't go to India with you or say you won the race to the top. Or whatever it is your pissed at him for.”

Madi sucked her teeth, darting her eyes to the side in fair consideration.

“Maybe so. You always treat us Singhs so cruelly. Did I tell you he called me the other day at work to say how hurt he was about your getting married? I guess that doesn't surprise you.”

Del looked down at her chipped fingernails. The flashback to her visit to Raj's studio last week stung too deeply to repeat the scenario now.

“He's just lonely,” she finally said.

“Oh yes, my brother is big on loneliness. The deeper the ditch, the better for his mind to sink. You think I would have broken that news to him? It's better that you didn't have a big wedding, or there would have been trouble. I don't mean a scene or anything. Can you imagine Raj barging into the ceremony? He's just like our mother. He takes all of the small problems as proof that life is awful. Okay, life's awful. But why add to it? Why make an art out of suffering? You know he refuses to talk to our own father. They never got along, but you'd think a phone call every few months wouldn't kill him. The poor thing can barely find the strength to dial a phone number.”

“If your brother is so terrible, I'd like to know why you set me up with him in the first place.”

Madi whistled, shoving her chin in the air to let her eyes ponder the ceiling rafters.

“Because, you ingrate, I wanted to hold on to you. It was purely selfish. I'd get you tangled up in the Singh psychosis until you'd be the fly stuck with us spiders. Plus he's attractive. And for all of your social consciousness, you're a complete sucker for a pretty face. Otherwise, explain the husband.”

It was not always hard to love Madeline Singh. Del leaned over the teak tray and wrapped her arms around her friend's waist, resting her head against the scratchy linen that bound her thighs.

“And what about you?” Del asked. “When are you going to start loving someone so we can stop talking about Raj all the time?”

“Groan,” Madi said, scooping up Del's hair and running her violet fingernails softly over the nape of her neck. “Do we have to do that?”

“Do what?”

“That awful cliché of asking each other about who we're dating or not dating, giggling about love and sex and vibrators. We aren't those women, are we?”

Del lifted herself up, almost knocking over the teacups, and examined Madi's face. Her muscles tightened along the jaw, which made her look momentarily weaker, gripping in defense.

“I just want to see you happy.” Like Del had to explain that. When was the last time Madi had lent her heart out for a night? When had she woken up naked in another person's bed, called in sick to fester in that bad after-sex smell of used tissues and unwashed armpits, felt the whole world constrict temporarily to the size of someone else's bed? Madi was right, there really was a Singh psychosis—pushing away those who tried to interfere, assessing the risk and finding the costs too great. Del sensed that Madi was reading her thoughts, because her eyes went wet, and she pinched them closed with her finger and thumb.

“Sorry,” Del said.

“No, you're right. I don't know how couples do it. I see two people kissing in the street and wonder how they could have possibly worked themselves into such a state that they can't stop hanging all over each other. I can't imagine it anymore. How do people get together and stay that way?”

“By trying, I guess.”

“You can't try. It happens or it doesn't. Half the time I really do see it as this infantile utopia of thinking that you're a better, more complete person if you aren't by yourself. It's a sick fascination. Totally anti-individualistic. I think some people are born with Velcro for skin. They can't stop sticking. Others of us, well . . . ” she looked down at her chest, “steel plates.”

“It happens by putting yourself out there. Why don't we go out one night? Why don't we get drunk anymore?”

“We have gone out. You do get drunk.” Madi cleared her throat, pressed her bare feet onto the floor, and walked over to a set of oak drawers. “I have something for you,” she said, returning with a small envelope. “A wedding present. I know it's tacky to give money, but . . . ”

“Please don't,” Del said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Put that away.” But Madi grabbed her wrist and pressed the envelope into her palm.

“Take it, Fiend. I don't know what you need, and I don't know Joseph well enough to get something he'd hate and you'd love. It isn't much. I was going to buy you a tablecloth or a colander, but what fun is that? Just get something ridiculous you'll only wear once.”

Del opened the envelope and found a check for two thousand dollars written out in her name.

“That's too much. It's more than we spent on the wedding.”

“Now that's just embarrassing. Take the damn money, will you? Try to enjoy it.”

“Then promise you'll come shopping with me.” Del felt like she was always begging for this, for time, and Madi scanned some mental calendar for a rivulet of white between meetings.

“In this heat?” Madi bunched her long black hair in a fist and swept it behind her shoulder. “Fine. Next week. Or when I'm back from my trip. I have all this space and I never use it. We can make dinner. There's something empty about rooms no one has sex in, don't you think?”

Del put the check in her billfold among the crumbled twenties, and they stood smiling at each other in silence. She got the sense Madi was waiting for her to leave, like she was one appointment that was breaking in on another, so she slid her hand around Madi's arm and steered her toward the elevator that opened directly into the apartment.

“So we won't go see art. That's decided.”

“I didn't mean to say all of that. I'm just overworked. Be honest with me. Have I started looking like a middle-aged man? Take me out of this dress. Could I be selling incense sticks on a foldout table in Curry Hill?”

Madi lifted her chin as if posing for an imperial portrait.

“Not a bit.”

Madi wrestled her arm free when the doors split open, and, with a surprisingly hard push, sent Del sailing into the metal tank. “Go home to your movie star. I'll call you tomorrow.”

The summer when Del moved back to New York and she and Madi had lived in that railroad-style apartment in Alphabet City, they had a system for looking out for each other. It was when dope was still sold on the corner and every shadow looked like a rapist and cuatro music played all morning from every other apartment tuned to the same Puerto Rican station. It was a summer where white women, even dark, street-minded ones like Mad Fiend, were indications that the neighborhood was changing hands, reshuffling its race cards. Their system: When one of them was coming home late at night, she would call the apartment to announce her imminent arrival from the pay phone on the corner. The one at home would climb out onto the fire escape and watch as the other sprinted down the center of the street, making as much noise as possible, waving arms wildly, screaming “del del del del” or “madi madi,” until she got to the front door of the building, unraped and unmugged.

They had both moved out by winter. But this had been their way of keeping each other safe. This had been their way of loving each other when no one else did.

ON THE CORKBOARD behind her desk, Post-its—red and pink and yellow and toxic orange—were tacked like butterflies, each luminous wing addressing a new concern. “Lunch with the Indian embassy press attaché, 12:30, Raol's.” “Intel Corp conference on satellite hookup, 4:15, Friday.” “New World Foreign Policy Briefing, Marriott Marquis, 8/28.” Underneath the Post-its, glimpsed by the occasional rapid rise of air-conditioning from the vent, the photograph of a man could be seen. A man with a mustache rolled across his reddened face and tucked into a powder-blue turban. A man carrying the weight of old age in his cheeks and a Bud Light in his left hand. A photograph taken on a long dock in the Florida Keys three summers ago. Her father. Her bloodline to the continent whose economic development had been her mission to nurture for the past six years. The continent that was making her rich.

“My daughter. You make me proud. You have not forgotten,” her father had told her on that trip to Florida and, several times since, on their weekly Sunday phone calls. “Your brother may not want to believe. But you believe. You are still Sikh.”

Six years ago, you couldn't talk an Indian-made watch onto the
wrists of an American venture capitalist. When Marcus Villareal, a freckled Swiss banker with a five o'clock shadow creeping over his chin around noon, had opened two management consultant offices, one in New Delhi and the other in the very office where she sat as vice president today, he had taken a chance on hiring a second-in-command with little business experience other than a part-time job reading investment strategies on Latin America for a big-name brokerage. But it didn't hurt to have an attractive half-Indian with an Ivy League pedigree on a team selling the third world to the first.

“Data sweatshops,” the grunt against Indian tech centers went. Their fledging consultancy was called Eval-ution. “White-collar saris, I'm sorry, but no stockholder would risk a dime on that,” the market had grumbled. But six years ago, Madi dressed herself in silks from a tailor in Curry Hill to sell a country she had not yet stepped foot in to corporate heads who didn't want to hear it. “Firing members of your own demographic and shipping the jobs overseas isn't very popular, you'll find,” one man had said to her as he slid a presentation packet into his briefcase.

She didn't stop, though, building her case in front of long tables littered with paper cups, pencils, and investment strategies. “Send your customer-service jobs offshore and you'll be delivering them to a population of men and women with pitch-perfect English and advanced degrees. Do it at salaries one-third what you are paying some high-school dropout in the Midwest who wants health care and paid vacations. I'm asking you to do the math. Outsourcing your calling centers, your computer tech help desks, your frequent flier programs, you debt collection agencies, fill in the proverbial blank. Folks, this all has the potential to double profits within a matter of two years.” Madi spent every square on the calendar selling desk jobs out of America, advertising Bangalore as a global back office to the richest conglomerates under the Western sun. She discovered right away what India meant to the ladies and gentlemen of the business class. They worried about inferior service. They imagined phone lines that crackled and went dead in the night to due to flash floods, one power strip to light an entire warehouse, low-caste workers who couldn't relate to flag-waving patriots pissed about a broken laptop.
“I've been to India. I've seen the buses those people take,” a young executive said raising her hand against the rhythm of Madi's sales pitch. “When the motor breaks, they are stuck for hours. How can we be sure they'll even get to work?” Madi had to explain in reductive outline the history of a British colony, a top-notch educational system liberated into a new democracy, a nucleus of PhDs simply waiting to be put to use.

Then, four years ago, lightning struck.

By one and two and then twenty, companies began to shut their home centers in Seattle and San Antonio and St. Paul and relocate East, following her numbers, watching her six arms dribble zeroes like basketballs across a global court and shoot them into open hoops. The details had a way of hitting her with unexpected emotion—not just the money but the stories. She cried when she accompanied a delegation of future prospects to Bangalore, each loaded with green and saffron-colored caps and cocktail stirrers, and found that managers were trying desperately to sell their stock of old sewing machines for telephone headsets. The latest reports showed that India could soon see a growth of double its gross domestic product. Eight billion. That was how much money had already been lost overseas. Lost or made.

A year ago the current prime minister of India, a Sikh no less with the last name Singh, had written a commending letter to Evalution. Thanking and encouraging them. It hung framed in their sparse beige lobby, over the mail bins that so often came filled with letters from hate groups telling them they were destroying America, stealing jobs, ruining good, honest American lives.
Evil
-ultion, most of them began.

That was a year ago.

The fact was, India was not a bubble created in shatterproof glass. Problems, four years into the windfall, were growing. Problems that suggested call centers did not simply close in St. Paul and open in Bangalore without a certain gravitational shift.

Those were the problems that brought Madi to work on the Saturday afternoon shortly after she had said good-bye to Del. Her eyes froze on the picture of her father standing in front of that ribbon of blue water, when she heard a knock on her door.

The building doorman craned his neck into her office, holding a vase of flowers.

“I thought they'd die before Monday. Should have guessed you'd be in today.”

They were from Marcus Villareal, currently in the New Delhi office, telling her in a short typed note to keep up the good work, that he was dealing with the wrenches. So should she. He was scheduling their meeting in Bangalore on her next trip with the prime minister himself.