The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Zubin said.

Julia looked bored.

“You try it first. If you get really stuck-then maybe. And I’ll help you think of the idea.”

“They give you the idea,” she said. “Remember?”

“I’ll take you to a couple of places. We’ll see which one strikes you.” This, he told himself, was hands-on education. Thanks to him, Julia would finally see the city where she had been living for nearly a year.

“Great,” said Julia sarcastically. “Can we go to Elephanta?”

“Better than Elephanta.”

“To the Gateway of India? Will you buy me one of those big, spotted balloons?”

“Just wait,” said Zubin. “There's some stuff you don’t know about yet.”

They walked from his house past the Hanging Garden, to the small vegetable market in the lane above the Walkeshwar Temple. They went down a flight of uneven steps, past small, open electronic shops where men clustered around televisions waiting for the cricket scores. The path wound between low houses, painted pink or green, a primary school and a tiny, white temple with a marble courtyard and a black nandi draped in marigolds. Two vegetable vendors moved to the side to let them pass, swiveling their heads to look, each with one hand lightly poised on the flat basket balanced on her head. Inside the baskets, arranged in an elegant multicolored whorl, were eggplants, mint, tomatoes, Chinese lettuces, okra, and the smooth white pumpkins called dudhi. Further on a poster man had laid out his wares on a frayed, blue tarpaulin: the usual movie stars and glossy deities, plus kittens, puppies and an enormous white baby, in a diaper and pink headband. Across the bottom of a composite photo- an English cottage superimposed on a Thai beach, in the shadow of Swiss mountains dusted with yellow and purple wildflowers and bisected by a torrential Amazonian waterfall-were the words, Home is where. When you go there, they have to let you in. Punctuation aside, it was difficult for Zubin to imagine a more depressing sentiment.

“You know what I hate?”

Zubin had a strange urge to touch her. It wasn’t a sexual thing, he didn’t think. He just wanted to take her hand. “What?”

“Crows.”

Zubin smiled.

“You probably think they’re poetic or something.”

“No.”

“Like Edgar Alan Poe.”

“That was a raven.”

“Edgar Allan Poetic.” She giggled.

“This kind of verbal play is encouraging,” Zubin said. “If only you would apply it to your practice tests.”

“I can’t concentrate at home,” Julia said. “There are too many distractions.”

“Like what?” Julia's room was the quietest place he’d been in Bombay.

“My father.”

The steps opened suddenly onto the temple tank: a dark green square of water cut out of the stone. Below them, a schoolgirl in a purple jumper and a white blouse, her hair plaited with two red ribbons, was filling a brass jug. At the other end a laborer cleared muck from the bottom with an iron spade. His grandmother had brought him here when he was a kid. She had described the city as it had been: just the sea and the fishing villages clinging to the rocks, the lush, green hills, and in the hills these hive-shaped temples, surrounded by the tiny colored houses of the priests. The concrete-block apartments were still visible on the Malabar side of the tank, but if you faced the sea you could ignore them.

“My father keeps me locked up in a cage,” Julia said mournfully.

“Although he lets you out for Fire and Ice,” Zubin observed.

“He doesn’t. He ignores it when I go to Fire and Ice. All he’d have to do is look in at night. I don’t put pillows in the bed or anything.”

“He's probably trying to respect your privacy.”

“I’m his kid. I’m not supposed to have privacy.” She sat down suddenly on the steps, but she didn’t seem upset. She shaded her eyes with her hand. He liked the way she looked, looking-more serious than he’d seen her before.

“Do you think it's beautiful here?” he asked.

The sun had gone behind the buildings, and was setting over the sea and the slum on the rocks above the water. There was an orange glaze over half the tank; the other, shadowed half was green and cold. Shocked- looking white ducks with orange feet stood in the shade, each facing a different direction, and on the opposite side two boys played an impossibly old-fashioned game, whooping as they rolled a worn-out bicycle tire along the steps with a stick. All around them bells were ringing.

“I think lots of things are beautiful,” Julia said slowly. “If you see them at the right time. But you come back and the light is different, or someone's left some trash, or you’re in a bad mood-or whatever. Everything gets ugly.”

“This is what your essay is about.” He didn’t think before he said it; it just came to him.

“The Banganga Tank?”

“Beauty,” he said.

She frowned.

“It's your idea.”

She was trying not to show she was pleased. Her mouth turned up at the corners, and she scowled to hide it, “I guess that's okay. I guess it doesn’t really matter what you choose.”

Julia was a virgin, but Anouk wasn’t. Anouk was Bernie's daughter; she lived in a fancy house behind a carved wooden gate, on one of the winding lanes at Cumbala Hill. Julia liked the ornamental garden, with brushed-steel plaques that identified the plants in English and Latin, and the blue ceramic pool full of lumpy-headed white-and- orange goldfish. Behind the goldfish pond was a cedar sauna, and it was in the sauna that it had happened. The boy wasn’t especially cute, but he was distantly related to the royal house of Jodhpur. They’d only done it once; according to Anouk that was all it took, before you could consider yourself ready for a real boyfriend at university.

“It's something to get over with,” Anouk said. “You simply hold your breath.” They were listening to the Shakira album in Anouk's room, which was covered with pictures of models from magazines. There were even a few pictures of Anouk, who was tall enough for print ads, but not to go to Europe and be on runways. She was also in a Colgate commercial that you saw on the Hindi stations. Being Anouk's best friend was the thing that saved Julia at the American School, where the kids talked about their fathers’ jobs and their vacation houses even more than they had in Paris. At least at the school in Paris they’d gotten to take a lot of trips-to museums, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and Monet's house at Giverny

There was no question of losing her virginity to any of the boys at school. Everyone would know about it the next day.

“You should have done it with Markus,” Anouk said, for the hundredth time, one afternoon when they were lying on the floor of her bedroom, flipping through magazines.

Julia sometimes thought the same thing; it was hard to describe why they hadn’t done it. They’d talked about it, like they’d talked about everything, endlessly, late at night on the phone, as if they were the only people awake in the city. Markus was her best friend-still, when she was sad, he was the one she wanted to talk to-but when they kissed he put his tongue too far into her mouth and moved it around in a way that made her want to gag. He was grateful when she took off her top and let him put his hand underneath her bra, and sometimes she thought he was relieved too, when she said no to other things.

“You could write him,” Anouk suggested.

“I’d love him to come visit,” Julia allowed.

“Visit and come.”

“Gross.”

Anouk looked at her sternly. She had fair skin and short hair that flipped up underneath her ears. She had cat-shaped green eyes exactly like the ones in the picture of her French grandmother, which stared out of an ivory frame on a table in the hall.