“Have some dhokla,” Anita’s mother said, placing one on a Styrofoam plate. She drizzled it with tamarind and coriander chutneys. It melted into my gums.
“It’s good,” I said.
“I offered to make ice cream, but they said no. I should have said kulfi. Should have said, ‘I’ll make some saffron or pista kulfi,’ and then the Bhatts would have said oh yes oh yes please.” She said that last bit in a put-on accent. Anita’s mother did not speak like the fobbier parents; her vowels were wide and practiced, and she did not strike her consonants too hard. Her voice was all mongrel, almost English on some words （you knooow, she’d say in a pinched pitch） and mimicked American drawl and zing on others （you guuyz）。 My parents referred to this accent as “pseud.” They had kept their r’s and v’s and w’s just the way they had been when they crossed the ocean.
“Can you start boxing up leftovers? I have to get the cake from their basement and bring it upstairs for after their toasts. Know what? They made me put those kids’ faces on it.” She rolled her eyes. “These people.”
Someone with more sense of society than I possessed at the time might have called her bitter. But to me, Anjali Dayal was a minor thrill. She laughed at those who most annoyed me—the ones who so scorned her—and in that way, she debilitated them a little.
When the party wound down and the twins’ face-cake had been consumed—I got the corner of Meena’s kajal-lined eye—my family found me in the garage, still putting away accoutrements. Anita’s mother was carrying containers into the house so the Bhatts could freeze leftovers. My mother waved hello.
“Congratulations,” she said, a bit icily. “You and Pranesh must be very happy.”
Anjali Auntie blinked. “Pranesh?”
“About Anita’s new school.”
“Oh, yes,” Anita’s mother said, her voice suddenly at a steeper pitch. “Yes, I—we’re very excited—you know Pranesh, always so focused on her academics, good IIT man.”
“How nice that Anita has his brains,” my mother said. “We haven’t seen him in quite a while, isn’t it? Tell him Raghu and I say hello.” Before Anjali Auntie could reply, my mother turned to me. “Neil, come. We have to go to the Nagarajans’。”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Another party?”
Prachi gave me a look as if to say, I’ve already tried. But I had something in me at that moment, something copped from the careless way in which Meena Bhatt had been draped over George Warner-Wilson, some absorbed averageness.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to another party. No one will miss me. I’m not going.”
My parents were, for a moment, rendered immobile; we rarely bristled against them. They must have felt dread, sensing the emergence of adolescent rebellion, must have feared it, in the wake of Prachi’s Spring Fling missteps. But I was thinking about the constrictions of the rest of the summer, of all I was supposed to achieve or become in the next three months, and I felt choked, and I reacted. I threw a finger in Anita’s mother’s direction. “Auntie can take me.”
“Neeraj,” my mother hissed, using my damned real name. “Anjali Auntie might have things to do. Come.”
“Auntie,” I said, turning to face Anita’s mother, who was feigning deafness. She glanced back, her arms piled high with paper plates. “Would you mind bringing me home? I can help unload the car and stuff, since Anita’s not feeling good.”
She seemed to want to resist intervening, but I mouthed please, as though I was talking to one of my own friends, and she sighed.
“I can do it, Ramya,” she said. “It’s okay.”
My parents appeared torn, afraid to display disharmony, and Prachi glared, seeming to feel she couldn’t tag along since it had been my brilliant escape plan. And so they left. I packed up Anita’s mother’s Toyota with her, and answered her questions about debate, back in a Neil-and-adult script that excised me from the situation and concerned itself only with the exoskeleton of a human, teenage boy. When that had run out, silence filled the car and I watched the suburbs flail by—in the distance, the flank of I-285, that perimeter, and somewhere beyond, a city. From here, all I could discern were the churn of asphalt and concrete, a single white cross piercing the sky, and the flash of a few green highway signs.
At the Dayals’， I hauled in the leftovers the Bhatts had told Anita’s mother to take back for herself. The house was silent. “Anita sleeping?” I asked, and her mother said she must be. I went back to the car to grab the last bags, a couple of grainy cloth totes in the front passenger’s seat. Anjali Auntie arrived before me, brushing past so quickly I startled.