Anita’s mother, on the other hand, would tell you she ran a “catering business.” She filled in for working Indian mothers who wanted to serve their families proper home-cooked fare but who lacked either the time or the skill in the kitchen to do so. Occasionally she would do a graduation or birthday party, but for the most part, Anjali Auntie answered calls placed in response to flyers she hung up at the temple and in Little India strip malls—those two-story off-the-highway structures housing Kumon math tutoring centers and restaurants called Haveli or Bombay Palace or Taste of India and threading salons where women pruned themselves of excess ethnic hair. She drove all over the suburbs and did much of her cooking in other people’s homes, as though the women hiring her wished to think of her the way they thought of the help back in India. To admit that the prettier, younger mother was the “proprietor of a small business” would have been strange and modern and white.
Surely Anjali Auntie did not need this job—based on everything my mother said about Pranesh Uncle, money was flowing from the West Coast. But she did it nonetheless, perhaps because she was afraid, herself, of being left to do godknowswhat.
It was this job that threw me into close contact with the Dayal women for the first time in a month. At the end of May, my whole family donned our Indian clothes and headed to a big party celebrating the Bhatt twins’ graduation. I scratched at the blue kurta my mother had made me wear. Talk on the way there focused on the honorees: Jay was Ivy League–bound in the fall, while Meena would attend a state school, and not one of the “better” ones, in my parents’ eyes. Meena’s fate offended my mother.
“She fooled around all high school, didn’t she?” my mother said to Prachi. This was the latest tactic in the wake of Prachi’s Spring Fling moral miscarriage. My mother would ask her to recite the fates of those who “fooled around”—which might, in her view, include anything from neglecting to take AP Biology to shooting up hard drugs. She educated us about the wider world by assembling a kind of shoe-box diorama of other people’s lives—a cardboard drama. She arranged the characters, moved them about, and showed you how they were doing it wrong, turning the diorama into the set of a morality play.
Upon arriving at the Bhatts’， I prepared to abscond to the basement. Basements were the safest places to survive an Indian party in the suburbs. In a basement, the itchy clothes could be loosened, the girls’ dupattas dropped on the floor and trampled upon, the guys’ kurtas removed to reveal that all along someone had been smart enough to wear a T-shirt beneath the fabric, and jeans rather than churidars below. In basements you never encountered garish images of multiarmed gods, or family portraits shot in the mall photography studio—sisters draped in lehengas and brothers’ hair stiff with gel. In basements you found foosball and Ping-Pong tables, big-screen televisions, and, depending on the benevolence of the parents, video game consoles. In basements, I learned the secrets of sex, according to information curated from older brothers who were certainly still virgins. In basements, a semblance of our due—American teenagedom.
The Narayan family basement was, by the way, unfinished.
“Lavish-shmavish,” my mother whispered as I made for the underground. This was her general opinion on the Bhatts, and on any carpeting or televisions below the earth.
New graduates kicked back in oversize leather recliners. Meena Bhatt sat on the lap of George Warner-Wilson, who had spent high school as one of the only white people among Asians. He was going to Georgia Tech in the fall, where he might continue dwelling at this demographic crossroads.
“Neilo, Neilium, Neilius,” he said through his sinuses, saluting me. I waved. “Your crew’s in the exercise room.” He pointed.
As I opened the door, I heard Meena sigh, with a voice less damned （per my mother’s diorama） than insouciant: “Can someone bring me something that’s not frickin’ Indian food?”
The gym looked unused. Half the walls were mirrors. Folded up against an un-mirrored wall was a treadmill draped in plastic. Mounted in one corner, a television, and beneath it, a video game console. A report of gunfire went off on-screen.
“Fuck you, Osama, this is America!” yelled Kartik Jain, as Aleem Khan’s avatar, a square-jawed white soldier, expired.
Anita sat cross-legged on the floor, examining a glossy magazine. She hovered a pencil above the pages, marking off answers in some quiz.
“Oh, good, Neil! Everyone was wondering where you were,” she said in that brisk voice of hers. Her eyes alighted on me for only an instant. Anita was a bit like a windup toy, capable of spinning fast for a period—laughing easily, tending to social niceties—only to run out later, in private. When it was just the two of us, she’d always been slower, laxer.