“That’s not too deep,” she said. “I’ll get some Neosporin in a second. But listen to me. Just—just do what I say. Otherwise it’ll be a total waste.”
My head was drooping between my legs as I heaved like a spent athlete at the end of a trying sprint. Anita’s hand rested on the nape of my neck. At any other point in my adolescence, that touch would have been miraculous.
“I think I can do this,” she said. That furtive glance back toward the ceiling, like she was taking permission from her mother’s sleeping form. “Okay. You should, um, close your eyes.” I did, and watched strange neon fractals form behind my lids. “So, uh— focus on something you want.” The first thing I thought of was her hand on my neck, how it was a continuation of her hand shaking my shoulder all those weekends of our childhood: You’re supposed to make it up! You’re supposed to imagine! She amended: “Something you want to achieve.”
A series of those fractals passed before me, and then something settled. I was in the car with my father, holding a golden trophy, which kept me rooted to the car seat, to the earth. My father, next to me, radiated not his usual stoicism, but rather something I can only describe as supreme understanding. I was known. The world stilled, turned briefly safe.
“You’ve got it,” Anita said. I wondered how she knew. “Your breathing’s steadier.”
She was right. My pulse had slowed. But beneath my stabilized heart rate was an elevated energy that made me want to open my eyes and welcome back the world. The room came into view. Everything quivered at its edges before erupting into brighter, more saturated color.
“You’re okay.” Anita sounded both surprised and relieved, and then stepped onto the stairs, walking softly on the balls of her feet. “I’ll get you the Neosporin and—”
“Anita!” I spoke louder than I meant to. “Tell me what I fucking drank!”
She glanced at the ceiling as toward some higher power, or maybe just toward her mother’s room again, and there was distress on her face. “Technically, lemonade—but a special lemonade. Ah. Well. Gold, Neil. You drank a shit-ton of gold. Half our best stock, which is honestly pretty infuriating.”
Before I could reply, Anita raised a shaky finger to her lips and hissed shhh. It was too late. The basement door was swinging open, and Anjali Auntie was standing in the hallway, darkened by the bright lights she’d flipped on around her. Anita stepped not up toward her mother, but down, closer to me.
“Ani? Anita Joshi Dayal, what are you doing down there?” Anjali Auntie always said Anita’s name the Indian way, with a soft t—Anitha—but I heard that th with special resonance that night. Our parents could do this in anger, jerk us back from drawly Anita to terse Anitha, from mild Neil to positively spicy Neeraj. And Anjali Auntie reminded me of my own parents in another way just then: her voice resembled their shouts the night of the dance; running through their fury at my sister had been a vein of fear.
“If you’ve been meddling with my supply,” she went on, “I’ll—”
Anjali Auntie stepped onto the top stair and into the light, which was when she saw me. She was wearing powder blue pajama shorts patterned with dancing penguins. Her mouth was slightly agape, and her face looked puffy.
“My god, you two,” she sighed. “What have you done?”
* * *
? ? ?
Before she was Anjali Dayal, my neighbor, she was Anjali Joshi, just a middle-class Bombay girl.
Bombay, a city where Gujaratis and Maharashtrians and Tamilians and Parsis become Bombaykars, allegiances shifted to contemporary urban existence rather than to the regions that created them. The Joshis considered themselves modern, but in one respect they rang a bit of the bygone days: the parents—an excise tax officer and a housewife—privileged their sons’ education over their daughter’s.
Anjali grew up flitting about with friends in the housing society, playing with her two older brothers when they were free, reading English novels. She did fine in school, though not spectacularly, and no one told her to put in more work. There was an understanding: her brothers were to one day become somebodies; she was to one day become married. When Anjali was in fifth standard, she watched her eldest brother, Dhruv, sweating through entrance exams, mortgaging his adolescence for a chance to study at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. He made it to IIT’s Delhi campus, setting the bar high for the younger brother, Vivek, who did not display the same innate brilliance or work ethic as Dhruv. As Anjali crested into her teenage years, in the mid-1980s, Dhruv was accepted to graduate school in a place called North Carolina. Vivek came under even more pressure to follow in his brother’s footsteps.