When Anjali sat down across from her brother and inquired about the boy, Vivek and his friends laughed as they slopped up bhaji.
“Sad fellow, what to do,” Vivek said. “Too studious, total pain. Gets ragged.”
“Class topper, though,” one of the friends said. “Got to respect it.”
“You don’t rag him, do you, bhau?”
Vivek mussed her hair with one large mitt of a hand. “Don’t be bothered, Anju.”
Anjali pictured a table of her classmates having this sort of exchange about her: Anjali Joshi, sad girl, don’t talk to her, her father is just an excise tax officer. . . . And so when she came to visit Vivek every month or so, she kept an eye out for Pranesh. She’d notice him crossing the grass with a robotic gait, and she’d jog to catch him up.
“What do you want from me,” he once demanded, in that voice of his that did not seem to contain in its repertoire question marks. She was taken aback. Gone was the boy who’d approached her to impress, replaced by a defensive creature. They stood in the shade of a flame-of-the-forest tree, but still they sweated. Fat brown pods dangled above them. Anjali tore one off.
“I hear you’re the class topper,” she said, fiddling with the pod. She took a finger to her loose hair and twirled it, as the Malabar Hill girls did. “I’ve never been much good at school.”
She was not sure what had come over her. Maybe it was that Pranesh seemed harmless, someone to practice on. Likelier, she was genuinely curious about his intellectual prowess. She was standing in the vicinity of the thing she’d been trained to recognize as power: academic achievement. She thought of how Vivek had described ambition years earlier, as an energy that runs in some bodies and not in others. She had begun to wonder what would happen if someone drank one of her gold earrings. Nothing, she suspected. Her wants were too nebulous.
“I used to use those as swords, when I was small,” Pranesh said, pointing at the pod. He took it and stabbed the air. He was so like a child. All that studying could not grow you up.
Slowly, they became friendly. Anjali shared a milky-sweet chai with him a few times. He reminded her of a teenage Dhruv, who had also been plump and bookish, to the extent that he barely existed outside his turning pages, his pencils on graphing paper. She felt for Pranesh when she learned he had been orphaned at fourteen; it explained—did it?—his coldness. Was there romance? There was a thrill in discovering that men harbored secrets, and that this thing called love might consist in part of teasing such privacies out, learning to hold them yourself. The fact that he told her so little gave her labor to perform, made her feel useful.
Vivek and his mates found the friendship odd. Particularly perturbed by Anjali’s affection for dumpy Pranesh was Rakesh Malhotra, a good-looking Punjabi with a reputation for being the hostel’s worst ragger. He dragged first-years from bed and made them march naked, gripping each other’s penises. When Anjali failed to notice Rakesh, he began to talk about her as a calculating manipulator of male attention—a portrayal that would make its way to my mother’s ears through his family, the Bhatts of Hammond Creek. Gold digger.
But things rolled on with Pranesh. When they strolled around the lake, she grilled him on his plans. He was going to get a PhD, in America.
“It’s cutthroat,” he told her expertly. “They do not let just anybody in.”
She began to tell him about Dhruv in North Carolina, the Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes, the Jolen hair cream. Pranesh asked where Dhruv had been in school.
He shook his head. “I will go somewhere better. Do not worry. I’ll do much more than all those people.”
She felt, for the first time, included in the fringes of someone else’s future.
* * *
? ? ?
In the spring of his final year, Vivek went on holiday. He was riding with friends on the roof of a train from Bombay to Kanyakumari. They had their guitars up there, and they were strumming Dire Straits the whole way south. There was a disconnect between landscape and soundscape—their twangs did not match the dry fields laden with yellow-green brush, baking beneath the cloudless sky. They felt thick with the possibility of what awaited them over the next several years, as some of them prepared to cross oceans, to make lives of their own.
The car passed under a low electrical wire. All ducked but Vivek. Beneath the relentless Andhra Pradesh sun, having brushed twenty-five thousand volts, he sustained third-degree burns. He died atop the train, miles from his parents, from his sister, from the elder brother who had set such a standard for him.