She realized that he was waiting for her to answer. “I don’t really go to a lot of parties,” she said.
“And what about your parents? Were they not pushing you to get married?”
Smita pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “They would’ve liked me to, sure. Mummy, especially. Wanting to marry off their children is part of the DNA of Indian parents, right?”
“Why just Indian parents? Don’t all parents wish this for their children?”
Don’t take the bait, Smita said to herself. “I guess.”
After a minute, she said, “Tell me something. Are you sorry you let Nandini talk you into accompanying me? Instead of being with Shannon?”
“Not at all. Shannon sounded so good when I spoke to her yesterday. They already have her doing physiotherapy. And this is a new experience for me, going on a story with a journalist. Although I’m not sure I should go in with you when you interview those brothers. Because I will want to kill them.”
“That’s the thing about being a journalist,” she said. “You can’t let your emotions get in the way. I have to be able to interview them without judging them.”
“I honestly don’t know how you can do that.”
But she had done it many times. Smita told him about her first tough assignment, as a young reporter in Philly. How she’d interviewed the two straight men who’d gone into a gay bar, left with a much younger guy, and then brutally beaten him and left him for dead. The boy, from a small town thirty miles from Philly, was nineteen years old and had screwed up his nerve to visit a gay bar for the first time in his young, closeted life.
“Did he die?” Mohan asked as he swerved to avoid a pothole on the road.
“Yes. After a week in the hospital. His pastor-father refused to visit him because that would’ve meant ‘condoning’ his sexual orientation.”
“I didn’t realize America was so backwards, yaar. I mean, we see pictures of those gay pride parades and all on TV.”
“Well, it’s still easier to be gay in the big cities than in small-town America. But things have definitely changed. This is from when I first became a reporter—from before I was an old maid.”
“What was the hardest story you’ve ever covered?”
She sighed, a hundred memories flitting through her head like macabre slides on an old View-Master. War. Genocide. Rape. And that was not counting the everyday outrages like domestic violence, the battles over transgender rights, or the abortion wars. Or stories like Meena’s, caused by twisted, patriarchal notions of family honor.
Smita hesitated, not wanting to confess this other thing to Mohan: As horrific as Meena’s injuries were, they were not the worst she’d seen. Not even close. And yet, Meena’s isolation—her complete dependence on a mother-in-law who hated her and blamed her for her son’s death—had triggered a corresponding loneliness in Smita. Perhaps it was as simple as this: She could cover heartbreaking events in Lebanon and South Africa and Nigeria and not feel complicit in those because they had not happened in her own country. But despite her American passport, despite the many miles between her American life and her Indian childhood, there was no denying it—sitting with Meena on that cot, she had felt complicit in what had happened to her. Listening to Meena’s slightly slurred speech, Smita had felt a mix of emotions, felt both American and Indian, a victim herself, but also someone who had escaped in a way that Meena never would. There was no way, however, to unspool this for Mohan without slitting open the yellowing envelope of her past.
“Smita . . .” Mohan said. “Actually, forget it. You know, we don’t have to talk about sad things, yaar. Let’s change the subject.”
She looked at him with gratitude. Every time she’d been with a nonjourno, she’d seen the curiosity in their faces, the voyeuristic curiosity as they probed her for the most sensationalistic aspects of her job. She could see them filing away the anecdotes she shared, adding to their cache of can-you-believe-this-shit stories, fodder for conversation at their next party. None of them had had the grace to restrain their prurient interest, despite her obvious reluctance. “Thanks,” she said to Mohan. “But tell me about your job. What exactly do you do?”
He spoke in his usual steady way, offering up droll, precise imitations of his colleagues, piquing her interest when he described the artificial intelligence project he was currently working on.
But after a while, she stopped listening. More than anything, she wanted to be engulfed in silence, and India was not a silent place. Smita felt suddenly, acutely homesick for New York. She longed to be flung back into the anonymity of Manhattan, to walk its crowded streets experiencing that thrilling dilution of her individual self. And New York on a crisp fall evening! The weak autumnal sun bouncing off the brownstones, the slow, drunken fall of the orange and gold leaves near the lagoon in Central Park, her face flushed and cold as she walked. She had first seen New York in autumn, when she had started grad school at Columbia, and maybe that was why it was the season she most associated with the city. These days, Smita spent so much time in places where famine or civil war had ravaged the countryside—where floods and hurricanes had uprooted hundred-year-old trees, where loggers or poachers had destroyed old-growth forests—that she felt intense gratitude for the neighborhood parks of Brooklyn and the vastness of Central Park each time she returned home. In the suburban Ohio community where they’d landed after Papa had secured a job at a small liberal arts college, she had felt like an alien, a guest in someone else’s country. It wasn’t until she arrived in New York that she experienced the sense of homecoming she hadn’t known she was missing. The first time she saw the city, it was as if something exploded in her chest—it was that visceral, that immediate a falling in love. New York didn’t feel like a city to her; it felt like a country. The nation-state of New York, where the world’s restless and ambitious gathered, where the misfits and the misunderstood arrived—and the city didn’t so much welcome them as shift just a tiny bit to accommodate them, to test them, to see if they had the right stuff. And if you passed the test, then all of it was there for the taking—the joyful riot of color and smells of Jackson Heights, the eclectic streets of Greenwich Village, the elusive tranquility of Prospect Park, the benches at the Battery, where one could sit undisturbed and stare at the “lady of the harbor.” Smita remembered what Shannon had once said: “This city is like some giant social experiment conducted every single day. This place should be a fucking powder keg—but somehow, it’s not.”