“My name is Tio Sancho, and I have made a taco shell that won’t fall apart.”
Tio Sancho was clearly not Indian, but, skin-wise, he was about as close to an Indian as it got on television. Now Vinod remembered trying to find his own face on his parents’ RCA, some sense that he had a counterpart who ate Quaker Oats chewy granola, and whose mother made him disgusting dry Skippy sandwiches and kept a hawklike eye over his single pair of Adidas and their gamy odor. Occasionally, Black people were allowed onto commercials, especially if it was for fast food or on a show with a large Black audience. And every once in a while, he would spot her. She was the lone East Asian girl, properly staid and sweet, always at the end of a medley of rambunctious white children, who feasted with uncommon grace on whatever junk was on offer. Maybe they let her drip some processed cheese out of the corner of her mouth, more out of being young than being mischievous.
Even then, even before he had met Karen, Vinod had kept an eye on those appearances, on those girls who were different, nonwhite, but unlike himself nonhated by the ad makers. And every time he saw a face like that he wondered what it would be like to be friends with that girl who surely had a dad who also hawked Texas Instruments computers and a mom who cooked food that would not go well with Hellmann’s （okay, Korean potato salad with Kewpie mayonnaise excluded） and was too pungent to be brought to school in a thali or dosirak or even a Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids lunchbox. But now he wondered if the Asian girl at the end of the commercials was not there to sell the Hostess spurting pastry or whatnot, but rather to sell America. Like the Statue of Liberty showing off her armpit at the end of the Sure commercial, the girl spoke more to a Cold War ideal of America—look who we let in! Hardworking Asians! Whereas a Vinod-type presence in one of his white V-neck sweaters （all three brothers wore them on special occasions, cute as lambs） might have confused the audience. Why isn’t that Brown guy selling us a taco shell that won’t break?
As he thought about the Asian girl, Vinod succumbed to a great grave sorrow. He did not want to relive the past, nor to memorialize it, but with each wheezing breath he was drawing closer to the end, and the end meant never allowing himself to understand it. And that was the gift Senderovsky had given himself, the gift of sitting around on his ass figuring himself out. Didn’t the Brahmin bhenchod deserve something similar?
But now he was back to self-pity, which was the one thing he wanted to avoid other than the thwoosh-click, thwooosh-click of the ventilator. Again, he whispered in his mind: I’ve seen Berlin and Bologna and Bombay, wondrous many-scented Bombay, and my beloved with her pants off.
Oh, mythical Karen of the CBS commercial break, with your Hostess mostess grin and your black silken bangs and your bridgeless button nose and your Technicolor dimples and Dolby laugh and your mother in the background, far behind the camera, watching her child star wearily as she thumbed through a copy of Golf Digest, must get home by six, yobo will be expecting dinner.
He opened his mouth but couldn’t call out her name. She was the girl on the screen, cheese at the corners of her mouth, and all he could do was move his lips and hope she could hear him across time.
8
Vinod was sitting on the covered porch, an oxygen cannula in his nose. Karen was next to him on the all-weather sofa, holding his hand or fiddling with the oxygen tank. A “stage” had been delineated by means of orange traffic cones on the natural terrace below, and to one side chairs were set up at a healthy distance from one another, filled with students from the local progressive college and some of the Actor’s team from Los Angeles who had flown in on the fractal plane. Senderovsky’s agent had an electronic cigarette dangling from her mouth and looked refreshed by the months of isolation in her Bel Air aerie. A camera crew was filming the proceedings and speakers were set up behind the audience so that the actors could be heard through their lavalier microphones.
The green lawn was littered with mousy rental cars and local hatchbacks, as well as one black pickup truck parked far by the road, its occupant leaning back in his seat with a pair of binoculars, his breathing hushed, his soul observant, ready to fall in love with the art.
Vinod took in the momentous scene in snippets, his eyes and brain and digestive system all failing to reach agreement on the import of the occasion. “You might have to take me to the bathroom,” he whispered to Karen.
The Actor emerged to applause. He appeared restored to the magnificent ambivalence in which Vinod had first found him in the spring, pre–Tr?? Emotions. He was dressed in long pants and a blousy shirt that brought to mind a Russian peasant on the steppes. “Tonight’s presentation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is dedicated to Vinod Mehta,” the Actor said, “who sits above us at his place of honor. Vinod, can you hear us okay?”