“Neeraj, you’ve grown,” he said. “Haven’t seen my wife.”
“Hi, Uncle. She went to get me a towel.”
“You’re all wet. Been dancing in the rain like some Bollywood star, have you.”
Anjali Auntie returned, handing me a huge fluffy green towel. I longed to lie on their floor and use the towel as a pillow and fall asleep, except that sleep offered no safe haven. Shruti populated my dreams. Sometimes she held my Swiss Army knife to my throat and demanded I pour out all the lemonade in the Dayals’ fridge. Other times she pressed me against a wall and kissed me and I didn’t resist. Still other times she sat silent, ashy, blinking; I’d wake in cold sweats and swear I saw her cross-legged at the foot of my bed, fingering the fringe of my comforter, frowning at me with that familiar chemistry class disdain—It’s really not that hard, Neil, if you’d just focus. I’d tried to call out for Anita’s help, to no avail:
neil_is_indian: i hate myself
neil_is_indian: and if u just didn’t hate me
neil_is_indian: idk id be rly grateful
Anita’s father looked between his wife and me and grunted. “Oh. Having a tough time, I imagine,” he said. He crossed to their dining room and drummed one broad hand on the table.
“Give me your hoodie, Neil,” Anjali Auntie said. I stripped it off and accepted the towel.
“Anjali. You need to—”
“In a minute, Pranesh.”
She tossed the sweatshirt over her arm and disappeared into the laundry room, leaving me alone with her husband, who was blinking indifferently. There was something relieving about his gaze; it was so unlike the practiced gentleness of the teachers, the other parents, the school counselor, who had called in known “friends of Shruti” to recite the same absolutions, how we never knew what was going on in someone’s mind, how sometimes there were simply forces at work beyond our control. I fled the meetings with these adults as fast as I could, trying not to look at the spot where I used to see Shruti kneeling by her locker.
Pranesh folded his arms. “This sort of thing used to happen at the IITs, you know. Some boy would come from a small town, all his parents’ money spent on getting him into this school. Fellow thinks he’s brilliant, then finds he’s now on some altogether different Gaussian curve, and he flunks some exam and, you know.” He clicked his tongue. “Calls it quits.”
“Pranesh, drop it.” Anjali Auntie returned to the dining room and shook her head briskly.
He waved his hand in dismissal. “They’d jump out some window or hang themselves. Nowadays it is all fashionable to blame the professors or the other students, but if you ask me—”
“Pranesh.”
“If you ask me,” he spoke over her. “I have an unpopular opinion.”
I had lost track of my limbs and my facial features. I only registered the general fact of gravity keeping me on the ground.
“Somebody wants to off themselves, they’ll do it no matter what. It’s a constitutional weakness.”
Two sharp female voices spoke at once: “Pranesh, stop!” and “Papa, stop!”
Anita stood on the cream-colored carpeting of the front staircase. She wore faded, frayed denim shorts and a blue tank top bearing her Bobcat Cross-Country logo—a dark, slender figure running on a winding road.
Anita’s father glanced between all three of us, shrugged, and walked to the kitchen. “Anjali, that idiot Hunt fellow keeps calling. For godsake call him back.”
Anjali Auntie followed. I was alone in the foyer with Anita. She was glaring at the floor. You’re supposed to imagine! How far she seemed from that little girl who’d brimmed over with myriad realities.
“So,” I said. “You’re leaving.”
“Yes,” she said, galumphing back upstairs. She was slight, but she had a soldier’s marching gait. “And I’m still not interested in talking to you.”
I let myself out; the rain had halted, and the sun was drying out the concrete and the asphalt. The foliage shone even brighter, glistening with raindrops; we were rich with the season, and no one seemed to know that the border between life and death had suddenly become as thin as gossamer.
I tossed the trophy in the Walthams’ garbage bin on my way home.
* * *
? ? ?
My parents had mostly gone mute after Shruti’s death, as though afraid that by comforting me they’d disturb some crucial rhythms of my newly acquired work ethic. But after debate nationals, after AP exams （which I roundly flunked—even Euro）， once summer had begun, my mother turned off my alarm clock and took to waking me up by sitting on the edge of my bed and placing her hand on parts of me that must have reminded her of me as a baby—the soft skin on my neck, the cushion of my belly. “It’s morning, rajah,” she’d try.