Quarantine: Stories (6 page)

T
he day of the exam they had to drive all the way down to Charleston, the state capital, and they were running late. First Ranjan was embarrassed to come out of her bedroom in her denim dress. Swati finally coaxed her out and everyone had to ooh and ah over how smart she looked, how very American. Ranjan didn’t know how to move in such a garment; all her motions were slowed and she kept looking at the dress and smoothing down the front.

Then, in the car, Ranjan fiddled and fussed with her seatbelt, and Swati had to count to ten slowly, like the television commercial instructed you to do to keep you from hitting your child. Ten minutes on the road, Ranjan remembered that she had forgotten her glasses, and they had to turn around. Swati told Pradeep, “I think you better take your grandmother on your own. I don’t think I can handle it.”

By the time they reached Charleston, there was no time to eat the teplas and drink the tea Swati had packed. Pradeep had wanted to eat them down by the river, the gold dome of the capitol building reflected in the water. He thought the scene might instill in Ranjan a sense of pride.

They stumbled through a maze of government buildings before finally finding the right office. Though they were a few minutes late, they were asked to wait almost forty-five minutes before being directed into a small room by a thin man with thick, black-framed glasses. He introduced himself as Mr. Parker. He asked them to sit in the chairs on one side of his desk, and then he sat on the other and opened a brown file and began sorting through papers.

“Well, ma’am, all your paperwork is complete,” he said.

Ranjan looked questioningly at her grandson. The man followed her cue.

“Your grandmother?” Mr. Parker asked. Pradeep nodded. “All her paperwork’s in order,” he said again. “All she needs to do is pass the exam, which I will administer orally. She needs to answer ten questions correctly. You’ll have to leave the room while I give the exam.”

Ranjan had trouble understanding the man and his thick Appalachian accent. She could only catch a few words here and there. His voice was nasal. His vowels were big and unwieldy, so that Ranjan found she couldn’t grab on. He sounded unlike anyone she had encountered in any of her children’s houses, or anyone on TV for that matter. She longed for the blond woman with the sparkling teeth from the videos. At the time, Ranjan hadn’t liked her, but at least she could somewhat understand her.

Pradeep patted his grandmother’s hand and got up to leave. When he was halfway out the door, Ranjan began to whimper. “No, babu, no.” She reached a bangled hand toward him.

“She’s afraid,” Pradeep said. “She’s old. Can’t I just sit with her?”

Mr. Parker considered it for a moment. The rules were clear: no other parties allowed. Still, he was not a heartless man. People liked to think of government employees as bureaucrats, insensitive and unthinking. Mr. Parker made a point to be neither. He could bend the rules when necessary.

“Fine,” he said. “You can stay. But you must not say anything during the exam. She has to answer the questions by herself, without help or translation. If you try to help, I will ask you to leave or fail her.”

“OK,” Pradeep said.

Mr. Parker turned to Ranjan. “Before I ask you questions, I need to test your English with dictation.” He handed her a blank piece of paper and a pencil. “Please write down the following sentence. I’ll dictate it slowly: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, comma . . .’ ” Mr. Parker paused to allow Ranjan to write the first phrase, but her pencil wasn’t moving. She was looking pleadingly at her grandson. Though she had written nothing, Mr. Parker continued, “ ‘ . . . that all men are created equal, comma, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, comma.’ ” Mr. Parker paused again, and Ranjan still wasn’t writing. “ ‘ . . . that among these are life, comma, liberty, comma, and the pursuit of happiness, period.’ ” As Mr. Parker was finishing reading the last phrase, Pradeep whispered to his grandmother in Hindi, “Likho.”
Write.

“I’ll repeat the sentence once more,” Mr. Parker said. This time, when he started reading, Ranjan began scribbling. When he was finished, Mr. Parker took the paper from Ranjan, squinted at it, and showed it to Pradeep.

Ranjan had written in Hindi.

Pradeep had never fully learned the Devanagari script, but he recognized enough of the characters to realize his grandmother had written the first couple lines of the Vishnu mantra she chanted to herself morning and night.

“She’s written exactly what you told her,” Pradeep said to Mr. Parker, “only in Hindi. She’s translated it. Actually, that’s higher-level thinking than simply copying dictation, don’t you think, to write ‘We hold these truths’ in Hindi?”

“You’re not supposed to talk,” Mr. Parker said. Pradeep mimed a zipper across his mouth.

“Let’s move on. Mrs. Shah,” he said, making an effort to speak slowly and enunciate clearly, “how many branches of government are there and what are they called?”

Ranjan looked at him blankly. She understood “branches.” She thought of a banyan tree and its knotted limbs.

“Shall I repeat the question?”

Ranjan looked to her grandson.

“OK,” Mr. Parker said, “let’s try something a bit easier. What are the colors of the American flag?”

Ranjan heard “flag” and perked up. This one she knew. She remembered the flag on the bedroom wall. “Vite?” she said. “Red?” she said. “Good,” Mr. Parker said. “One more.” Ranjan was confused. She only remembered the stripes.

Such an easy question, Mr. Parker thought. Poor woman. He thought of his own mother, how, toward the end of her life, she suffered with Alzheimer’s at a time when very little was known about the disease. Mr. Parker looked in the other direction as he pointed emphatically at his periwinkle necktie.

“Blue,” Ranjan said, and smiled such a big smile Pradeep had to break his silence with applause. Mr. Parker smiled, too.

Ranjan understood that she had to give a total of ten correct answers. She hoped this would count as three.

“I’ll give you another easy one,” Mr. Parker said. “What city is the capital of the United States?”

Ranjan knew she knew the answer. So many times Pradeep had asked her. So clearly Ranjan could remember the asking of the question; she could even see his lips forming the words. But somehow she couldn’t remember the answer.

“London?” she said. Mr. Parker looked at Pradeep and Pradeep shrugged.

“Hmmm . . .” Mr. Parker said. “Let’s try it this way: From which country did America win its independence in 1776?”

Ranjan was silent.

“What did you say before?” Mr. Parker asked. “Say it again.”

“London?” Ranjan asked.

“Close enough,” Mr. Parker said.

Pradeep clapped again. Mr. Parker laughed, and Ranjan laughed, too.

“Do you know the first line of the national anthem?” Mr. Parker asked. “Do you know the words to the song?”

Ranjan remembered the skinny black woman with her vocal flourishes. She liked Mr. Parker. She wanted to show him what proper singing sounded like. In a soft, even voice, doing her best Lata Mangeshwar, she began the first few bars of “Mujhe Kuchh Kahaa Hai” from the film
Bobby
.

Pradeep recognized the song instantly.
Bobby
was the hit movie in India around the time when Pradeep was a baby and his parents had first immigrated to America. Alone in a new country, they had played the soundtrack constantly, using an old tape deck with big reels. Pradeep didn’t bother risking the no talking rule to try to convince Mr. Parker that his grandmother had translated the “Star-Spangled Banner” into Hindi. The melody sounded nothing like it.

R
anjan and Pradeep sat across from the capitol building, eating their teplas, Ranjan sprinkling masala on hers and Pradeep dipping his in honey, and drinking tea. The legislature wasn’t in session. The buildings were deserted. Fall was on its way. Ranjan could feel its beginnings in her fingers.

Swati, Ranjan’s daughter, had become a citizen only eight years before. She had kept her Indian citizenship for a long time in case the family decided to go back, and even after they’d decided definitively to stay, she kept finding reasons to put off the exam. Pradeep remembered when she passed the exam, he and his father had bought her a big cake with the American flag drawn in icing, and candles that were like Fourth of July sparklers. There had been no doubt she’d pass, so they’d ordered the cake days before.

This time no one had ordered a cake for his grandmother.

Ranjan remembered what her daughter had said when she first brought up citizenship. She said if Ranjan was a citizen, no matter what, no one could make her leave.

Now, sitting on the bank of the river, Ranjan thought about how it would happen. She pictured men in suits coming to the door one afternoon when no one else was home. She wouldn’t be able to remember any of her children’s office phone numbers, and she wouldn’t know how to ask the men to wait until evening. Or perhaps there’d be an official letter, maybe even a telegram, which would tell her—in curt, urgent, uncompromising language—that it was time to leave, and her children would shrug and say there was nothing anyone could do.

As she finished her tepla and took her last sips of tea, Ranjan thought about Princess Gupta in her flat on Marine Drive. She’d be happy to see Ranjan again. Perhaps she’d ask her to move in with her: two old women, sitting on the balcony in the evenings overlooking Chowpatty Beach and the Arabian Sea, the teenagers below them with their Western tastes: eating pizza, and, over the loudspeakers, listening to singers like the skinny black woman who had sung the national anthem.

Years ago, circumstances had forced Princess Gupta to sell off all her royal jewelry. Before she sold them, she had costume copies made of all her favorite pieces. Ranjan imagined the two of them wearing them, the costume copies—the earrings, the crowns, the diamonds and rubies and sapphires—around the house, in the kitchen, on the balcony, even in the bathroom. It would remind them both of better times. Princess Gupta would start calling Ranjan “princess,” too, just for fun.

Their children would telephone, now and then. The princesses would answer the phone, if they were home, but often they wouldn’t be. In which case, their servant would say, “They’re out, painting the town red, as always,” in such rapid-fire, colloquial Hindi that the servant would have to repeat it several times before the children could understand, and even then the servant couldn’t be sure that they did. The children would just grunt, grudgingly, and hang up.

Yes, Princess Gupta would be happy that Ranjan had returned.

Ranjan felt the coolness of the approaching autumn on her face, and she looked at the oak trees across the river with their strong, straight branches.

Her grandson, who had finished packing up the picnic items in the car, stood next to her now. He took her hand, and his hand was warm. The two watched the river for a moment, the gold dome of the capitol reflected in the water.

“Chalo, Nani,” he said. “It’s time to go home.”

F
rank is on the phone with my brother’s wife, Ellison. They talk often, which surprises me because they are nothing alike. Ellison has decorated her and my brother’s house with gold-framed posters of Impressionist paintings and plastic flowers in white urns from their wedding. Frank, on the other hand, pisses out the bedroom window when he’s drunk. I don’t worry about him hitting people on the street, because the window faces an alley. But on summer nights, when everyone’s windows are open, I wonder if some of it sprinkles into the apartments below. I once asked him this, but he shrugged. In New York, he said, worse things come through your window than piss.

That makes Frank sound like a loser, but he’s not. He loves me, though he wouldn’t admit it. Not in those words. I wouldn’t either. I don’t think I’ve ever said “I love you,” except maybe in an ironic baby voice.

But I know Frank loves me. That’s why he talks to Ellison on the phone. They compare notes about me and my brother.

Ellison must have asked about me now because Frank says, “Deepu’s been sulking all afternoon.” He smiles at me, and I scowl back. “He always mopes on Sundays.” I don’t need to hear my boyfriend talking about me like I’m not there, so I take my coffee mug and pack of cigarettes and go into the living room so I can do what I do best: chain-smoke and play scratch-’n’-sniff with my body parts, while obsessing about how much I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.

Though Frank and I have been going out for three years, we had no intention of moving in together. It just happened. I lost the lease on my sublet and planned to stay with him a couple of weeks until I could find a new place. Then, without warning, his roommates Jack and Carly moved out. That was three months ago. So we were stuck.

Jack and Carly took everything: the stereo, the TV, all the furniture. Frank doesn’t own anything. My sublet was furnished, so I don’t own much either. We look like squatters, sleeping on a filthy futon, both of us sharing one nubby gray towel. Neither of us has lifted a finger in three months. What few dishes we have—mismatched and chipped—are perpetually dirty in the sink, and we only wash them one at a time when we need them. There are spaghetti sauce stains on the linoleum floor. Dirty clothes everywhere. Soap scum in the sink and tub. I have to close my eyes when I lift the toilet bowl lid, it’s so disgusting.

We haven’t figured out what we are going to do in the long term. Maybe we’ll stay in the apartment. Be a real couple. Buy a bed, a couch, some plants. Invite people over for dinner. Or maybe we’ll decide we’re not ready for all that, and I’ll find a studio for myself in Brooklyn Heights with a loft-style bed so close to the ceiling I can’t sit up and read, and a bathroom so small I’ll have to squeeze in sideways. Or maybe we’ll leave this city, one at a time or together—new apartments, new lives. Who knows? Since Jack and Carly moved out, we haven’t even talked about it. The first of the month I give Frank a rent check and without a word he stuffs it, with his, into a white envelope and mails them. Each time I think to myself:
Next month . . . we’ll talk about it next month.

On my fourth or fifth cigarette, Frank finishes his phone call and comes out of the bedroom.

“There’s trouble in paradise,” he says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Ellison and Rajiv may be splitting up,” he says. “She suspects he’s about to leave her.”

“Rajiv didn’t say anything to
me
,” I say.

“I’m sure he’ll call you.”

Frank says he’s going to take a nap. I finish my cigarette, then join him.

W
hen Rajiv and Ellison married two years ago it was a big deal in my small town in West Virginia. It was the first Indian wedding, and my parents spared no expense. The ceremony was so lavish, the Sunday paper ran a full-color, front-page photo of Rajiv and Ellison flower-laden on the red mandap making seven circles around the wedding pyre. The caption read:
Tradition has it whoever returns to his or her seat first will be the one who controls the relationship.
The caption didn’t identify who won: Ellison. Later, Rajiv told me he let her.

Rajiv rode a white horse to the ceremony, and I walked next to him, carrying an enormous square-shaped parasol over his head, red with gold bells jingling from each corner. That’s not what scared the horse. My cousins did, though not on purpose. When they lit the firecrackers, the horse whinnied, reared up, and galloped into the woods. Rajiv was barely hanging on, and the trainer had to chase them and coax the horse back to the wedding hall.

When they returned, Rajiv’s turban, stitched with real gold zari, was missing. We sent a search party into the woods, but no one could find it.

When Rajiv and Ellison got engaged, they had only known each other a few months. I thought it was too soon. I remember when the horse ran off with my brother, I thought, first,
Please don’t let him get hurt,
and then,
Here’s your chance, Rajiv: Run!

I was bored during the ceremony, the Hindu priest droning in a dead language I couldn’t understand. The twins kept stealing Rajiv’s shoes, and each time he sent me after them with twenty dollars for payment. By the third time I was so irritated I didn’t even pay Dilip and Meena. I snatched the shoes and pocketed the money.

Actually, there were two weddings. The day after the Hindu ceremony there was a Jewish one at a Unitarian church. It almost didn’t happen because the string quartet didn’t show up and Ellison sat in her dressing room crying. She said, “There has to be music when I enter.” I was the one who found the girl, a distant uncle’s daughter, who could play “Für Elise” from memory on the piano, stopping and stumbling when she forgot a chord. Ellison was born Protestant but had converted in college, around the same time she became a vegetarian. At the Jewish ceremony, there were exactly three Jewish people present: Ellison, the rabbi, and the ex-roommate Ellison claimed was responsible for her conversion. I didn’t understand that ceremony, either. I focused on my father standing next to my brother and how strange he looked in his white satin yarmulke and morning suit, so unlike any father I knew, and my father’s father, who had refused to wear the yarmulke, thinking it was a Muslim skullcap and in his old age unwilling to be convinced otherwise. It was hot that day. In all the wedding photos, my brother’s hair is wet and flat against his forehead, his clothes are in disarray, there are dark stains under his arms and around his collar, and Ellison’s face is streaked with sweat.

W
hen we wake up from our nap, Frank wants to fuck. I don’t. In my head I count how long it’s been since we last had sex, and when I calculate it’s only been three days I decide I can safely push him away without his complaining. I’m right. He lies on his side, his head propped on his arm, and looks at me, his hand gentle on my back.

Last week during one of our marathon telephone conversations, my mother asked me which one of us, me or Frank, was the woman in our relationship.

“Neither of us, obviously,” I said. “That’s what makes us gay.”

“Very funny,” my mom said. “Someone on
Oprah
said that often gay couples have one person who plays the man and the other who plays the woman. So I was wondering which you were.”

“Frank and I don’t believe in hetero-normative gender roles,” I told her. I knew my mom didn’t know what “hetero-normative” meant, so I figured she’d drop it.

“So who does the cooking and cleaning?” she asked.

I could have truthfully answered “neither of us.” Instead I asked, “Is that what you think womanhood is, Mom, cooking and cleaning?”

My mom got quiet. I felt bad. I imagined her cursing herself for coming to America and raising such a disrespectful son, for letting him attend a liberal-arts college and take women’s studies classes and think he knows more about womanhood than his mother. I started to apologize, but she cut me off. “It’s OK,” she said. “I know you didn’t mean anything. I didn’t either. I’m sorry for asking you those questions.” Like every phone conversation I’ve had with my mother, she ended, “I love you.”

When I was ten and my mother went back to work full-time outside the house, she stopped watching prime-time television with my dad and my brother and me. If I listened, beneath the laugh track, I could hear kitchen cabinets shutting, pots clanging, or the vacuum cleaner humming in the other room. Sometimes late at night while I tried to sleep, my bedroom directly above the kitchen, I could hear the sound of water and gold bangles clicking against ceramic plates. Early the next morning, she’d be up long before anyone else, already in the kitchen, another long day begun. Perhaps this is what my mother really meant when she asked, “Who is the woman?” She meant:
Who is the better person?

Instead of cooking and cleaning, if my mom had asked me which one of us gets fucked up the ass, me or Frank, I would have said I do and that still doesn’t make me the woman, it only makes me the
bottom
, which isn’t the same thing at all. Though I had an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t understand that. One morning after sex, he had held me in his arms and begged me to move in with him. Rubbing my stomach, he said, “Let’s settle down; let’s make babies.”

After Frank and I have been lying awake in bed for several minutes, he asks me what I want to do tonight. Back when Jack and Carly were here and we had a TV, we would all watch the
The X-Files
on Sunday nights. Jack and Carly would sit together in the oversize chair, bundled up with pillows and blankets. They were always touching each other, even when they were in the kitchen or walking down the street, and it made Frank and me sick. To prove a point, we sat extra far from each other on the couch whenever they were around.

Now with no TV, Frank offers Chinese take-out and a movie, neither of which appeals to me.

“What about going out?” I ask.

“Like,
out
-out?” Frank asks.

“Let’s go to a club,” I say. “We haven’t been dancing in forever. We only ever go to bars. I wouldn’t mind sweating out some toxins.”

“And ingesting some new ones?” Frank adds.

I think about it. Sunday night is a great going-out night, not too crowded, because all the bridge-and-tunnel kids have gone home and all the yuppies have to wake up early. I have to wake up early, too, but all I have to do at my job is answer phones and type and file, so it doesn’t matter if I haven’t slept. I remember a club on Avenue B that’s trashy and fun. We used to love it there. We decide to go.

W
hen my brother got married, I had asked my mom whether it was OK for me to bring Frank to the wedding. “You’re kidding, right?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, “I’m kidding,” though I wasn’t.

Two days after the wedding when I returned to New York, I called my brother and cried. I hadn’t meant to cry. I had meant to say I had a nice time, it was good to see him, I’m happy for you. Instead, when I heard his voice I bawled. I wasn’t sure why.

“It’s OK,” Rajiv said. “We’re all having post-wedding depression.” He paused, as if to consider something. “Last night Ellison shoved a fistful of pills in her mouth. She did it right in front of me. I had to make her spit them out.”

I pictured this, Ellison walking into the room, crying, her mouth stuffed with pills, one or two slipping out, glistening with spit. Then Rajiv panicking, prying her mouth open, reaching his fingers in, bending her over the toilet, and forcing her to spit them out. What did they say to each other afterward? How did they sleep?

“I’m so sorry,” I told Rajiv. “Is she OK?”

“She has episodes. She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he said. “See, you’re not the only one. We’re all fuck-ups. Don’t tell anyone.”

That night, as I lay down to sleep, I thought of Rajiv and Ellison in their house. During the wedding, there were women in diamonds and saris singing in the front room, applying intricate mehndi designs to each other’s hands, and men in gold silk breaking coconuts on the porch. But not anymore. They were gone and the house was empty. Rajiv and Ellison were alone, listening to each other breathe.

A
round midnight, Frank and I take the subway to the club. I want to ask him about the apartment, what we’re going to do about our future and living together. That’s what I mean to say when I open my mouth. That’s what I’m thinking in my head. But instead it comes out, “Do you think we should have affairs?”

“What?” Frank says.

“Do you think we should have sex with other people?” I ask.

“I know what ‘affairs’ means,” Frank says.

I don’t think he’s surprised by my question. We’ve discussed it before, whether or not we should have an “open” relationship. Some of our friends think monogamy is unnatural, bourgeois. Frank and I sometimes agree with them in theory, but in the three years we’ve been dating, neither of us has strayed.

“You mean tonight?” Frank asks. “You want to have affairs tonight?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“At the club?” he asks.

“If I remember correctly, anything goes in the back room,” I say. “Of course, it wouldn’t be serious. Just anonymous. Meaningless.”