“I’ve got those. Thanks, Neil,” she said brusquely, reaching out to hoist them onto her shoulder. She stood in her driveway, watching me expectantly, framed by their house—mustard yellow with a red roof, comical in our neighborhood of brown bricks and gray stucco.
I’d made it home when I realized I didn’t have my Swiss Army knife on me. I’d taken it out while loading the trays into the Dayals’ refrigerator, because the Saran-wrapped dish of dhokla needed separating into two containers. I’d slashed the plastic open and put the knife—and the key chain it was attached to—on the counter. I had been distracted, wondering if Anita could hear me in her kitchen.
I crossed the cul-de-sac again and knocked. The red door was framed by a few petal-shaped pieces of glass, as though the door were the pistil and the rest of the house the flower’s bloom. I didn’t see any light filtering through. But they couldn’t have departed so quickly. I knocked again, louder; no answer. I padded behind the out-of-bloom azalea bush, lifted the red watering can, and retrieved the spare key. In the foyer, I didn’t remove my shoes, only kicked any spare summer dust from their soles against the doorframe.
“Just gonna get my knife,” I said to no one. Anita’s house opened wide in either direction: to the left, her mother’s room, and a living room filled with formal stuffed chairs. To the right, a dining room with a long wooden table and a mahogany cabinet stocking china. Farther along, the lived-in parts of the place: the kitchen, a den with a plaid sofa and an unobtrusive television.
I made for the kitchen. But as I passed that china cabinet, I noticed an open door to my left, in the middle of the hallway—the door to the basement, which I knew to be unfinished, like mine, just cement floors and boxes and storage. Through the open door, light—the only light I could see anywhere in the house—was flowing.
I took one step toward the door, edged it further open with my toe, and listened for voices. All that came was a peculiar whirring and glugging. Something like a drill seemed to be buzzing, and I heard it the way you hear a dentist’s tools in your mouth: in your temples, in the space below your eyes. The sound lifted. Footsteps were coming up the stairs. I hurried to the kitchen and located, on the countertop, in the darkness, my knife.
The lights flipped on. Behind me were Anita and her mother. The door to the basement was flung open behind them. Anita looked perfectly vital, completely well. From Anjali Auntie’s arm dangled one of those totes that she had kept me from grabbing. In Anita’s hand was a glass that at first I thought was empty. But I looked again and saw that the bottom of it was filled with a kind of sunlight-yellow sediment. Some bubbles popped in a column. Anita quickly drained the sediment. That otherworldly yellow was gone through her lips in a moment.
“You look healthy,” I said. I held up my Swiss Army knife. “I left this.”
Anita was very still. Her breath seemed to be coming intentionally, as her chest rose and fell slowly.
The open basement door swung in my peripheral vision. Anjali Auntie took a step back and kicked it shut with her toe. She and Anita glanced at each other for the briefest moment. They really were starting to look alike. Anita was becoming a new creature and her mother had never looked much like a mother, anyway—no wrinkles, no crow’s feet, not a sprinkling of silver or gray in her hair. As Anita grew taller, grew breasts, it was as though they were not getting old and older but moving toward a prearranged meeting point in the middle.
“I was just making Ani some of the stuff my mother used to make me when I was sick,” Anjali Auntie said. I looked again at the glass. “You know turmeric milk, right, Neil?” she said.
I knew it: a horrible dark yellow thing my mother brewed whenever someone came down with a cold or cough or stomach bug. I knew turmeric milk, and I knew it had never and would never look like what had been in Anita’s glass just then.
“Sure,” I said. “Guess it perked you right up.”
I lifted my knife in the air again to remind them I had gotten what I came for, and walked to the door without saying anything else. I spent the rest of that night home, alone, attempting to wend my way through the gilded sentences of The Great Gatsby—my summer reading book—but instead staring out my bedroom window at Anita’s front lawn, where there was no seductively blinking green light like Daisy Buchanan’s, only a mustard yellow house with all its lights on, as though its denizens were having a party for just the two of them.
2.
In summers past, I’d traipse down to the neighborhood swimming pool with Prachi and Anita and Kartik and Manu, toting sunscreen that someone’s mother had prescribed, which we would all ignore, opting to become the color and texture of bottom-of-the-bag raisins. There had been a few day camps—one where I went trout fishing with a pink-skinned park ranger, to my Brahmin mother’s chagrin. In those summers, my dreams followed me into my waking hours, their logic lingering, turning the humid days magical, overlaying the season like a very thin net.