“Bhai,” Vinod said, the word leaving his mouth like a short, pretty explosion.
“Bhai,” Senderovsky replied. The word meant “brother” in Hindi. During their college years and beyond, the two had lived together for a decade in an up-and-coming neighborhood just like the one where they now stood （until the neighborhood finally came, and they were asked to leave）， and through all those years Vinod referred to Senderovsky either as a bhai or a bhenchod, which was a man who enjoyed relations with his sister. （Although bhenchod was also used in an almost ambient way to label anyone or anything unfortunate, in the same way Russians use blyad, or “whore,” to describe the unforgiving world around them—“When will this whorish snowstorm end already?”）
Senderovsky spread out his arms. “Can’t hug,” he said. “And, just to warn you, Masha’s gone all epidemiological.”
“She is a doctor,” Vinod said.
“Psychiatrist.” Senderovsky could air his grievances to Vinod with just one word, in a way he couldn’t to his more prosperous and competitive friends.
“I’ll get in the back seat,” Vinod said as Senderovsky arranged his shiny luggage amid the cartons of alcohol.
“Are you sure? You don’t have to. I’m very healthy. Though I have lost some weight.”
“This way I can pretend I’m in a cab and you’re my driver.”
They quickly made a joke out of it, jousting in the accents of their parents, or, in Vinod’s case, an accent he had never really outgrown. “Zis taim of day, I vood take Belt Parkvey,” Senderovsky spoke in his gruffest Leningrad.
“Sir, do you vish to rob me?” Vinod protested. Senderovsky had failed to notice that, unlike most of his passengers, Vinod did not brace himself against the seat in front of him as he sped off, had not offered a prayer to any god, nor made use of his grab handle as Senderovsky swerved onto the bridge barely pausing to have his toll collected. He did register a very loud yawn, the kind he had never heard before his friend was diagnosed with cancer a decade ago. Before his illness, he could stay up all night, reinforced by a carton of Marlboros and a friendliness that rivaled Senderovsky’s, but sprang from the same lonely fount.
“We’ll be home in ten minutes,” said his driver, but Vinod knew their exact point in the journey, the car suspended above the river, leaving the continent proper in the rearview. He looked behind him to catch the very last light of the day. It was like putting on a new pair of glasses. Green grass, gray sky turning deep blue around the horizon, a screen of unblemished purple mountains. If this was all a computer simulation, then it was a very good one. Someone, something, in some interstellar version of Bangalore, had really poured its all into this construct.
Vinod had memorized the Declaration of Independence in third grade to prove to the nativist school bullies how much he belonged here. In the last two weeks, as people started to die in earnest, as he understood the gravity of what was about to happen to him and to others, and when in the course of human events it became necessary for one person to dissolve, Vinod thought he could be that person. He accepted his friend’s invitation to visit the countryside as a chance at dissolution, not so much into the usual alcohol and mild drugs, but into the stories he shared with the others. And if it came to it, he had papers at the bottom of his luggage, notarized papers, which would prepare him for any eventuality.
Now, despite Senderovsky’s jerky driving, he fell asleep, dreaming of his father’s Buick and all the places it had tried to go. Senderovsky watched Vinod sleeping in the back seat, his face pressed deep into the tinted Swedish glass, and he could not escape the strength of his own feelings, the untinted brightness of his love. Uncharacteristically, he slowed down to let the moment take.
4
Vinod stood by the garage while Sasha rolled out his suitcases. A city boy from birth （Ahmedabad, 1972）， Vinod did not know which components made the air sweet, didn’t know what a passing storm could do to the senses. “I’m sorry about all those dead branches,” Senderovsky said. “I’m trying to muster a posse to clean them up.”
Vinod had no idea what he was talking about. He looked up at the main house, at the lit kitchen, and saw two figures moving about, one auburn haired, the other dark. It must have been her. He laughed to himself. All those novels he had read, and the one he had written, and still there was no way to summarize the eternal feelings of unrequited love. “You really are a bhenchod,” Senderovsky had told him on a grisly, condom-strewn pier back in the city, back in 1991, when he had first confessed his love for their sisterly mutual friend. But now the need for phantom caresses （and worse） had passed. He just wanted to talk to her, to ask her how she was at this late hour.