As a distraction from the daily misery, Leena began to allow her mind to wander as she worked. She thought of her father working happily in the fields, her mother singing as she busied herself in the kitchen. She pictured them taking a break from their work to share a simple meal of lentils and rice, garnished with fresh cilantro her father had brought from the garden. At times, she envisioned herself as a younger girl, roaming the terrain outside their home. The daydreams first came to her while she was performing mundane tasks like scrubbing clothes in the washbasin or chopping vegetables. As she ate alone on the floor of the kitchen, she imagined that she was sharing meals with her parents, passing vegetables and yogurt to them, smiling at companions who were not there. Soon, she was escaping into the fantasies any chance she could, even when her husband mounted her in their bed at night.
One day in the kitchen, Leena was remembering the Holi celebrations she enjoyed as a child, her father rousing her in the morning by calling through her window. When she ran outside to find him, he would be waiting to douse her with handfuls of colored powder. Leena always squealed as clouds of turquoise and magenta engulfed her. Her father pretended to run away as Leena and her mother chased him, but in the end he was also covered from head to toe in a rainbow of colors, and the arrival of spring had been properly greeted.
The crack of a rolling pin against Leena’s knuckles made her gasp.
“Stupid girl!” Rekha snapped. “Don’t you smell that?” She yanked a pot off the open flame. “Stupid, slow girl. Mind wandering to God knows where when the rice is burning right beside you.” She slid the lid off the pot and tilted the vessel toward her. “Look at that!”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Leena said as the scent of burned rice flooded her nostrils.
“Sorry?” Rekha grabbed Leena’s wrist and twisted it toward her. “You should be sorry!” she shouted. “Sahib is very particular about his rice. You can’t just scrape this off. You’ll have to start over, and now dinner will be late!”
Rekha yanked Leena’s hand to the stove and held it over the open flame. Leena felt the sear of the heat against her skin and tried to wrest her hand away, but Rekha’s grasp was firm. The sharp ache of burn spread through Leena’s hand, and an involuntary moan escaped from her. When Rekha finally let go, Leena cradled her hand against her chest and looked at her sister-in-law in disbelief.
“Now that you know how it feels to be burned, maybe you’ll take greater care with the food.” Rekha glared at her. “Hurry up, clean this pot and make some new rice. I’ll have to go tell Sahib why dinner is late.”
With tears streaming down her face, Leena filled a small steel pot with cold water and immersed her hand in it. After a few moments, she found a clean kitchen towel and, recalling how Anil had bandaged the injured bird’s leg, gently wrapped her hand, crisscrossing the ends of the towel to hold it in place and tucking in the end at her wrist.
For weeks afterward, there were blisters on the palm of Leena’s hand. She could cope most of the time, except when she had to roll chapatis and the pain was unbearable. She was vigilant about Rekha and her whereabouts, never turning her back when her sister-in-law was present. Leena’s mother-in-law was no better: the old woman was feeble and couldn’t strike with as much force as Rekha, but her tongue was her sharpest weapon. Leena came to prefer Mother’s tepid slaps across the face or on the bottom to the terrible names she called her. Stupid. Lazy. Ungrateful. One day, she called Leena garbage, which quickly became her favorite pet name for her daughter-in-law. Even after the bruises and blisters healed, those cutting words remained.
Leena began to look forward to the days she was sent out to the fields. Picking cotton was difficult work, the nettles leaving her arms scratched and her fingers bloody, but at least she could escape the evil occupying the house. What was she doing to arouse such anger? She remembered her mother’s counsel about being compliant to her new family. Leena didn’t know if her experience was unusual or normal for a marriage. She had no older sisters to ask, and she’d been the first of her friends to wed. Her parents had made great sacrifices, having handed over their life savings for her dowry. Leena knew she had to find a way to make the marriage work.
11
ANIL OPENED HIS EYES TO THE BRIGHT SUNLIGHT STREAMING through his bedroom window and grabbed for his alarm clock. Why hadn’t it rung? Boisterous voices came from down the hall, and he remembered it was Saturday: he had the day off and his roommates were home as well. As Anil lay in bed waiting for his heart rate to subside, he thought, as he had every morning for the last several weeks, of the morbidity and mortality conference at which he would have to appear.
Anil had already mentally revisited Jason Calhoun’s case many times. It was easier to decipher what had gone wrong without the chaos and exhaustion of that night. He had been biased by what the other intern, Jennifer, had told him—Calhoun just needed babysitting and pain meds. While Calhoun’s blood pressure was dropping precipitously, Anil was distracted by the patient with seizures and the one with kidney failure. And although the presentation of the ruptured aneurysm had been atypical and subtle, the fact remained that Anil had simply missed it.
There was nothing anyone could say to Anil at the M&M conference that he hadn’t already tormented himself with. He’d even prepared himself for the probability that he would stammer his way through the whole meeting. There would be public humiliation, of course: Trey Crandall and his buddies never missed an opportunity to witness others’ mistakes. But Anil’s real concern was being on trial in front of Casper O’Brien. Thinking about what he would have to face in just a few weeks, Anil was tempted to stay in bed, but he swung his legs over the side and stood up. He was not going to squander away his first day off in two weeks.
Baldev let out a holler and dropped his game controller when Anil entered the living room. “Oh-ho, what are they doing to you at that place?” He playfully slapped Anil’s cheek.
Anil shook his head. “Believe me, you don’t want to know. But today, I’m free.”
“Well then, let’s go make the most of it.” Baldev smacked Mahesh, still engrossed in their video game, on the back of the head. “Come on, look at this beautiful day.” He pointed toward the sunlit window. Anil looked out at the wide swath of clear blue sky, the fresh air he’d been denied inside the hospital, its antiseptic environment to which he would return the next morning.
As they discussed where to go, Anil realized he’d forgotten his pager in his car and went to retrieve it. Jogging back through the parking lot, he spotted Amber emerging from her car in black running shorts and a fitted pink top. He stopped, his heart pounding from the physical exertion of running, or the heat, or her proximity, he couldn’t be sure.
“Hey there.” Amber took a long pull on her water bottle. “I just got back from the lake. Have you been out there? Looks like you’re a bit of a runner.” She smiled.
“What? Oh me, no.” Anil shook his head, smiling. “Just forgot my pager.” He held it up in his palm.
“Oh, too bad. The lake is my favorite place to go running in Dallas. I go there every weekend.” Amber wiped perspiration from her upper lip. “Hey, would you like some tea? It’s pretty hot out here.”
Anil followed Amber into her apartment, a smaller mirror image of his, with an identical kitchenette and living area, and the same long hallway leading to the bedroom.
“Your roommate, Dave?” Amber called out from the kitchen. “He seems nice.”
It took Anil a moment to realize she was referring to Baldev. “Oh yeah, he’s great. There are three of us, actually.” Anil glanced around the apartment, stunned at how different the same space could look. Amber’s couch had four matching pillows propped neatly in the corners. The dining table was a clean white circle, its surface free of the papers and dishes that cluttered theirs. A small glass jar of flowers sat on the kitchen bar.
“You’re lucky to have roommates,” Amber said. “Must be nice to always have someone to do things with. I
don’t really know anyone in Dallas, except for a couple of people at work.”
Anil heard clattering from the kitchen, and was unsure what to do. In India, offering to help someone, particularly a woman, with the common hospitality task of making tea would be considered an insult.
“I didn’t realize how hard it would be moving to a new city and trying to make friends.” Amber appeared from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two tall glasses filled with ice cubes and a pitcher of dark liquid. “Here we go.” She set the tray down on the table and began to pour from the pitcher. “It’s unsweetened, but I have sugar if you like. Lemon?” She looked up at him. “Oh, what? Is something wrong?”
“Oh, no, no.” Anil shook his head and let out a chuckle. “It’s just . . . when you said ‘tea,’ I assumed you meant hot tea, like chai. I’m still figuring things out here.” He laughed again at his mistake.
“Hot tea? In this weather?” Amber looked at him like he’d proposed climbing Everest, then she began laughing as well. “What are you, a glutton for more punishment than 110 degrees?”
“No, no.” Anil wiped a tear from his eye as he tried to stop laughing.“We drink hot tea in India to cool down. No, really!” he said, seeing the dumbfounded look on her face. “It’s a scientific fact: when you take in hot liquids, you reduce your body temperature.” He shrugged. “Either that, or a billion people have been making the same mistake for centuries.”
Amber shook her head. “Well, I don’t know about that, but in Texas we drink our tea ice-cold all year round.”
Anil took a sip from the glass she’d poured. “Mmm. Very refreshing. Maybe you’re onto something with this iced tea.”
Amber smiled as she sat down. “So why did you decide to become a doctor?” She filled her glass from the pitcher and topped up his as well.
“That is a very long story,” Anil said. “And I don’t want to bore you.”
“The first time I really understood what doctors did, I was ten years old. Dr. Jupiter.”
Anil raised an eyebrow. “That was his name?”
Amber smiled. “No, not really. It was Juniper, but I couldn’t pronounce it, so he told me to call him Dr. Jupiter. He saved my momma’s life. Probably saved mine too.”
“What happened?”
“I found my momma passed out on the bathroom floor. Scared me half to death. Thought she was dead. She was in a diabetic coma, but we didn’t know that yet. Dr. Jupiter diagnosed her with type 2 diabetes. She was thirty-two.”
Anil swirled the ice cubes around in his glass and waited for her to continue. He’d learned from interviewing patients on sensitive topics when to speak and when to listen.
“I had to start giving her insulin injections because she couldn’t stand to do it herself. Dr. Jupiter taught me how. He also told me I had to eat better and start exercising if I didn’t want to end up like her.” Amber looked over at Anil and smiled. “I was kind of a pudgy kid back then.”
The image was hard to reconcile with the slender woman before him, but Anil just nodded for her to continue.
“He was so calm and confident, and it was such a scary time. My momma was sick, and my dad didn’t know what was going on. Dr. Jupiter sat us down and explained everything. He knew how to make things better. Gave me my momma back when I thought she was gone.” Amber took a long sip of her tea, then placed her glass down carefully on the table. “I think it’s pretty amazing what you do every day, the difference you make in people’s lives.”
Anil’s fingers slipped on the condensation on his empty glass. No one had been impressed about his being a doctor since he’d left India. At Parkview, he always felt stupid for how little he knew. He swallowed hard. “Thanks. Thank you.”
Amber smiled. “So what are you up to on this beautiful Saturday?”
“Oh,” Anil said with a start. “I should be getting back. My roommates are cooking up some big plans for my day off.” He stood up. “Thank you for the tea. It was perfect. I’m a convert.”
Amber walked him to the front door. “See you soon?”
When Anil returned to his bedroom, he could hear the shower running through the wall that bordered Amber’s apartment. Such an innocent sound—the cascade of water against tile—but imagining her on the other side of that wall, his mind filled with thoughts not innocent at all.
Back home, the rules of behavior had been clear. In medical college, boys and girls largely kept to themselves. Most of Anil’s generation expected to have their marriages arranged by their families. Parents submitted portfolios and took out matrimonial ads. Family trees, diplomas, medical records, and astrological charts were compared. Prospective brides and grooms were interviewed for suitability, and when a marriage was arranged, the couple had a few chaperoned meetings. The notions of flirting and dating were foreign to Anil.
The closest Anil had come to such interactions was with Sujata Lakhani, his lab partner in medical college. Sujata was fair and pretty, and wore colorful glass bangles that tinkled on her wrists. They spent hours next to each other in the lab, hands and shoulders touching as they worked, and Anil came to know the scents of her soap and hair oil, the mixture of sandalwood and coconut. The crook of her elbow became familiar to him, as did her thin forearms, the parts of her body that he could gaze at undetected as they sat next to each other. She was a serious student, but he could make her laugh if he said just the right thing. At night in his hostel, Anil imagined what her body looked like under the salwar khameez and those tinkling bangles as she moved above him.
One night at the library, he nearly asked her to join him for dinner, but he never worked up the courage, and by graduation Sujata’s parents had arranged her engagement to a surgeon in Ahmadabad. Anil had seen the man once, after their graduation ceremony, and was surprised he was not as tall or handsome as Anil would have expected.
And what did Leena’s husband look like? Ever since Piya had mentioned her marriage, Anil found himself wondering about this, trying to picture the man who stood beside Leena at their ceremony, joined to her by a knotted shawl. She must have made a beautiful bride.
ANIL AND his roommates spent the afternoon at the apartment complex’s pool, which was filled with other young people, most laughing and talking rather than swimming. Mahesh sat in the shade reading a newspaper while Baldev surveyed bikini-clad girls behind his mirrored sunglasses. After they returned from the pool and showered, Baldev proposed going to a karaoke bar. Mahesh, who loved belting out Bollywood tunes in his car, agreed immediately.
“But I can’t sing,” Anil protested.
“Everybody can sing after a few beers,” Baldev said. “One hundred percent.”
The bar was crowded with young people, all of them happy and beautiful. Music pulsed through the floorboards, which were covered with broken peanut shells. The peanuts sat in large barrels at both ends of the bar, where they could be scooped into small paper cups by patrons who alternately ate them or threw them at the stage in disapproval.
Both Anil and Mahesh were amazed at the open vats of peanuts, free for the taking. Back in India, street vendors sold these same nuts in rolled newspaper cones for a few rupees. A bearded old man sat on the street corner near Anil’s hostel, making a living—indeed a whole career—off the very same commodity given away here. And not just given away, thrown away.
Anil had been reticent about singing even before they’d arrived, before he’d seen others get pelted off the stage with peanuts. But after he and Baldev finished one large pitcher of beer and began a second, he started to come around to the idea. After that first margarita, Anil had tried drinking beer a few times with Baldev, and he preferred its gradual effect to the margarita’s quick impact. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way: loose, warm, and happy. Unencumbered. His head was pleasantly spinning, and all thoughts of the hospital drifted away. How wonderful it was to be somewhere no one expected anything of him, except to drink down his beer and sing a song.
They took the stage to the opening
beats of the Village People’s “YMCA.” It was a good choice by Baldev, a crowd-pleaser and one that required no real musical talent. The three of them swayed together on stage, arms around one another’s shoulders, as the audience sang along, throwing their arms up in the air to spell out the letters. There were so many pretty girls in the crowd, jumping and bouncing and smiling at Anil, encouraging him to sing with gusto. Not one peanut was thrown during their performance, and the crowd cheered wildly when they finished. After they had settled back into their booth, Anil felt at once elated and thirsty.
“So, Mahesh, you think you’ll hear this week?” Baldev turned to Anil. “He’s up for a promotion at work. Senior . . . what is it?”
“Senior software group manager,” Mahesh said proudly. “There’s no reason I shouldn’t get the position over the two other guys on my team. They pal around with our manager, but I’m better.”
“Well, I wouldn’t leave it to chance,” Anil said. “You should put together your case on paper. Ask for a meeting with your manager and lay it out for him. Just be calm and clear, not aggressive. Tell him you’d really like the position and you believe you’re the most qualified.” Anil nodded in response to Mahesh’s skeptical expression. “You should, Mahesh. It doesn’t matter if you’re better. What matters is his impression of you.” Anil wished he had followed this advice himself—with Casper O’Brien, or Sonia Mehta in the ICU, or Eric Stern in the ER—before he’d made so many bad impressions.
“The doctor’s right,” Baldev said. “Impression is everything in America. Talent, not so much. Why do you think I do so well? Customers love me.” He leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial tone, “Especially the ladies.”