“You were good.”
“I was not.”
“Fine. But you’re not an actor. You’re Mashen’ka. You have to help me. You have to promise. Say it. ‘I’ll fight them.’？”
“Vinod.” His helplessness made her feel eleven again. Landing at the madhouse of an airport, her country’s proud bant in her hair, the sleek luggage carts, the advertisements for products that could not have possibly existed, the lack of caps with socialist insignia above the mustaches of the immigration officers. She was so small again. As small as him. Vinod, the once adjunct professor and short-order cook. When you circled too close to the country’s outcasts, they killed you. Just by association. This is what her old Soviet patients, the Laras, understood intrinsically: this country was a killing field. By associating with the killers, they hoped they would be spared. “I’ll do my best,” she said, wondering how she could keep that sentiment from just being words, “official phrases,” as they called them in Russian. Also, it was what the housemates said to each other on the Japanese reality show. I’ll do my best. As a worker, as a boyfriend, as an influencer. And then they failed anyway.
She and Karen walked him down the cedar steps and toward the bungalow, and he felt their warmth echoed in the warmth of the night. He thought of Uncle Vanya’s words, “This wonderful feeling of mine will be wasted and lost as a ray of sunlight is lost that falls into a dark chasm,” and thought: No, not for me. For me, it is not yet lost.
9
The spotlight fell on Dee, the moderator, in her spaghetti-strap dress and high-cut bangs. Her smile was just a shrug with teeth but he would take it anyway. “I am pleased to welcome you to the Other Voices/Other Shores reading series,” Dee said. “Tonight we have two of our nation’s leading immigrant voices, Sasha Senderovsky, author of Terrace House: The Dacha of Doom, and the newcomer Vinod Mehta, with his debut, Love Is Letting Go of Fear. We’ll start with a reading by Mr. Mehta.”
The spotlight now fell on Vinod. He brought his hand up to his face to shield himself from the light. “Please,” he said. “Can someone turn that down?” The light refused to dissipate. Vinod rose up, his body audibly creaking, some of the audience laughing. “I,” he said. “I haven’t prepared anything, I regret to say. I’m unprepared.” There was more laughter from the quarter-full auditorium, the vicious city kind.
The spotlight suddenly shifted from him to Senderovsky, who gladly sprang up with a sheaf of papers. “Thank you, Vinod,” Senderovsky said, pulling on his authorial turtleneck. “If no one minds, I will read from Terrace House extensively.”
And as the Russian writer did so, as he entered the performative space from which he declaimed all his work （overblown accents, overdramatic comic pauses）， Vinod sighed both in pain and relief. The spotlight had gone from him. He felt safe in its absence. And yet, there was also this fact: The spotlight had gone from him. He felt its absence.
“I’m sorry to stop you,” Dee said to Senderovsky, “but we wanted to leave room for a conversation between the two of you.”
“Oh,” Senderovsky said. “May I at least finish reading act one? I’m not sure how much Vinod has to say.” He sat down, dejected.
“Now, Vinod, you wrote this book in your late twenties,” Dee said. “Why did it take you so long to get it published?”
“I can answer that!” Senderovsky interjected. “In Soviet times, some writers did not publish their books, rather they wrote into their desks, as we say in Russian. That is Vinod as well. He wrote into his desk.”
“So he’s a dissident?” Dee asked.
“Yes!” Senderovsky said. “He is a dissident from America’s literary-entertainment complex. He is a dissident from the turbo capitalism that turns words into dollars.”
“Can we maybe hear from Vinod himself?”
“Fine, fine,” Senderovsky said. “He’s a grown bhenchod now. He’s even done uka-uka with our mutual friend.” He visored his eyes with his hand against the spotlight and scanned the audience. “Is she here tonight?”
“Vinod,” Dee said, “will you say something?”
The spotlight fell on him again. He saw his brothers in the front row, the two crorepatis in their finance vests, hairy knuckles, pointlessly elaborate wristwatches, the bright hum of their intelligent eyes that said all life was commerce and all commerce life. A stray thought embedded in his mind: Given the lay of the world, will they make it from London and San Francisco to my funeral?