hair three different ways. From my mother’s rusted-out trunk, I extracted one of her few Lahore saris, a pale peach silk embroidered all over with gold leaves. I added Pitaji’s dark glasses—I would put them on only when we got to the cinema house. At the last minute, I stuck a jasmine wreath in my hair.
I have no idea how I looked that night—the only mirror in our hut was a rearview rectangle that Arvind-prar had twisted off a UN jeep he’d found rusting in the demilitarized zone near the border—but I know how I felt. A goddess couldn’t have been surer. At the bottom of the mirror were some English words I didn’t exactly understand but took as a kind of mantra:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
We rode Hari-prar’s scooter over sticky and rutted kaccha roads, Hari-prar steering and Arvind-prar holding a tarp over our heads to keep us from some of the rain. The roads closer to the bazaar were paved and slick. The scooter skidded only once, spilling Arvind-prar into a construction pit where an American-style “super bazaar” was being put up by Potatoes-babu with some money from Vancouver Singh. Arvind-prar’s khaki pants got khakier with mud. “Son of a pig!” he yelled at the pit. “Baboon!”
When we got to the movie theater, people were already massed outside the door, but Hari-prar decided we’d arrived too early and led us into a tea shop across the street. The tea shop had been a garage not long before, and still looked it. The owner had dropped out of the same technical college in Jullundhar as had my brothers, and at about the same time, so there was some backslapping to get through before we were seated at the best table, just out of the rain but with the fullest view of the sidewalk.
The owner was a conspicuously charming man, but hiswasn’t the voice that had seduced me weeks ago. I put on the dark glasses to look movie-starrish and scanned the tables for the man I was supposed to accidentally bump into. I didn’t come up with a single possibility.
“You are so kind to grace my humble shop.” The owner was at our table, ordering the small boys and old men who did the serving to bring cleaner glasses, hotter tea, spoons for the gulab jamuns. He paid me more compliments. “What, you are trying only one spoonful of my world-famous sweets? A pretty lady always has a delicate appetite?”
Our waiter, a stooped old man in khaki shorts that didn’t hide warty growths on one thigh, served me steaming tea in a cup with a saucer. Everyone else got tea in glasses. I read the sign: I was special. I was a pretty lady with delicate taste, not a dowryless fourteen-year-old. I poured a little tea into the saucer as I had seen Vimla do many times, and blew and sipped and blew some more.
The tea was barely warm enough to fog up the bottom rim of my sunglasses, and it was weak. I brewed better tea.
A bald man two tables away joked, “Kapoor sahib is trying hard to impress someone.”
I was meant to hear the joke. Did that mean that the man with the laugh in his voice had shown no interest at all? That this evening wasn’t planned for Prakash, whose last name I still didn’t know?
The owner bumped my shoulder, faking clumsiness, on his way back to the kitchen to scold the cook. “Pardon me, pardon me. I am an oaf!”
I stopped sipping. The tea had cooled enough for a patch of brownish skin to form in the middle of the cup. I did not want to spend my life with an oaf who had to fake an accident in order to touch me.
The moviegoers were now massed on the street and on both sidewalks. They fluted around vendors’ stalls and pressed into our tea shop. One man about Arvind-prar’s age walked past (a little too casually, I thought) and looked at me (again, a little too casually). I stared back. He walked back the way he had come, or tried to. The movie line’s swelling and rippling forced a stumble out of him. When I gasped (I hadn’t meant to), he swiveled back to smile at me. A
I have no idea how I looked that night—the only mirror in our hut was a rearview rectangle that Arvind-prar had twisted off a UN jeep he’d found rusting in the demilitarized zone near the border—but I know how I felt. A goddess couldn’t have been surer. At the bottom of the mirror were some English words I didn’t exactly understand but took as a kind of mantra:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
We rode Hari-prar’s scooter over sticky and rutted kaccha roads, Hari-prar steering and Arvind-prar holding a tarp over our heads to keep us from some of the rain. The roads closer to the bazaar were paved and slick. The scooter skidded only once, spilling Arvind-prar into a construction pit where an American-style “super bazaar” was being put up by Potatoes-babu with some money from Vancouver Singh. Arvind-prar’s khaki pants got khakier with mud. “Son of a pig!” he yelled at the pit. “Baboon!”
When we got to the movie theater, people were already massed outside the door, but Hari-prar decided we’d arrived too early and led us into a tea shop across the street. The tea shop had been a garage not long before, and still looked it. The owner had dropped out of the same technical college in Jullundhar as had my brothers, and at about the same time, so there was some backslapping to get through before we were seated at the best table, just out of the rain but with the fullest view of the sidewalk.
The owner was a conspicuously charming man, but hiswasn’t the voice that had seduced me weeks ago. I put on the dark glasses to look movie-starrish and scanned the tables for the man I was supposed to accidentally bump into. I didn’t come up with a single possibility.
“You are so kind to grace my humble shop.” The owner was at our table, ordering the small boys and old men who did the serving to bring cleaner glasses, hotter tea, spoons for the gulab jamuns. He paid me more compliments. “What, you are trying only one spoonful of my world-famous sweets? A pretty lady always has a delicate appetite?”
Our waiter, a stooped old man in khaki shorts that didn’t hide warty growths on one thigh, served me steaming tea in a cup with a saucer. Everyone else got tea in glasses. I read the sign: I was special. I was a pretty lady with delicate taste, not a dowryless fourteen-year-old. I poured a little tea into the saucer as I had seen Vimla do many times, and blew and sipped and blew some more.
The tea was barely warm enough to fog up the bottom rim of my sunglasses, and it was weak. I brewed better tea.
A bald man two tables away joked, “Kapoor sahib is trying hard to impress someone.”
I was meant to hear the joke. Did that mean that the man with the laugh in his voice had shown no interest at all? That this evening wasn’t planned for Prakash, whose last name I still didn’t know?
The owner bumped my shoulder, faking clumsiness, on his way back to the kitchen to scold the cook. “Pardon me, pardon me. I am an oaf!”
I stopped sipping. The tea had cooled enough for a patch of brownish skin to form in the middle of the cup. I did not want to spend my life with an oaf who had to fake an accident in order to touch me.
The moviegoers were now massed on the street and on both sidewalks. They fluted around vendors’ stalls and pressed into our tea shop. One man about Arvind-prar’s age walked past (a little too casually, I thought) and looked at me (again, a little too casually). I stared back. He walked back the way he had come, or tried to. The movie line’s swelling and rippling forced a stumble out of him. When I gasped (I hadn’t meant to), he swiveled back to smile at me. A
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