“What do you mean?” Omkar asked
“You know the game where it’s like if I were a car, what kind of car would I be; or if I were an animal, like what animal would I be? It’s like that game. But we have to guess for each other,” Aria said.
“No, I’ve never played that particular game,” Omkar said, excited to give it a try.
“OK. I’ll start. If I were an animal, what would I be? You have to guess for me and I have to guess for you,” Aria said.
Omkar thought for a considerable amount of time with Aria staring him down, waiting for an answer. Eventually, a smile crossed his face. “You’d be a jungle cat.”
“Why would I be a jungle cat?” Aria asked, curious about his impressions of her.
“A … maybe because you look a bit like them. You remind me of a cat, but not like a small cat and not like a lion. You seem very independent and mysterious and majestic and a little bit wild,” he said, teasing her affectionately.
“OK,” she said, “let me think.” Aria paused for even longer than he did, scanning him for any resemblance he might have to any specific animal. “Ah, I got it,” she yelled. “A bush baby.”
“Oh my God, it’s because of my ears, isn’t it?” The embarrassment Omkar felt for the way his ears protruded was suddenly revived. Despite the dark shade of his skin, she could see the redness appear in his cheeks and neck.
“Maybe a little bit,” she said, holding up her fingers to demonstrate an inch to tease him before explaining her choice further. “Oh come on, they’re cute! And they are really smart but kind of silly too. Plus, they can see through the dark, I mean you saw through me!”
The sudden sentiment made him adore her even more. He had to remind himself to look at the road instead of at her face. They played the game back and forth, telling each other what fruit and vegetable and car and celebrity they thought each other would be, for as long as it took to reach a parking spot at the public beach.
When Aria got out of the car, the long roar of the ocean greeted her. Like a breath, its exhalation pushed water up onto the shore and its inhalation pulled it back again. Aria suddenly understood why people made such a fuss about the ocean. Its beauty was free from the bondage of the words that one could use to describe it. Little birds bounced around in the white foam at the edge of the waves, sticking their beaks like sewing needles deep into the sand.
She had not imagined the ocean would have a smell, but it did. At first she thought it might be the smell of fish, but that wasn’t quite right. It was something else, something she had never smelled before. Maybe some ancient breeze of kelp and salt mixed equally. She searched the curve of the entire horizon, unable to find any land, and felt the power and vastness of the water, which seemed to have a consciousness in and of itself. It seemed to be alive. It was a power that could not be shouldered by coral or bone.
The breeze kicking up off of the water played with her hair. It seemed to move in slow motion. The allure it afforded her beauty was not lost on Omkar, who stopped unfolding the blanket for the picnic site in order to stare at her.
Aria rolled up her pants and walked into the surf. The water was a shock. The cold of it caused a dull ache to rise from the soles of her feet past her ankles. She giggled to feel the way the sand was pulled out from under her by each wave, making her legs sink deeper and deeper. The Pacific did not feel like a friendly, loving ocean. It felt wild and impassioned in its depth.
A pelican interrupted her congress with it. She looked up to watch it looming through the air. It looked like a feathered dinosaur that had been granted amnesty from extinction. It was unlike anything she had experienced in all her life.
“Hey, come over here,” Omkar called to her, not wanting to abandon their belongings on a public beach in order to join her. Aria walked back from wet to dry sand and sat opposite him in front of the picnic items he had taken great care to display before her. He had already opened a few Tupperware containers. They were filled with some kind of homemade food that Aria couldn’t recognize. There were two sodas, two bottles of water, a few rustic-looking slabs of bread wrapped in paper towel and a blue package of Oreos, waiting to be opened.
“Did you make this stuff?” Aria asked.
“Actually, my mother made these. But I can make them.” Omkar felt shy to admit it. The truth was, he had taken some of the food his mother had made for dinner and told her he had to attend a late-night study group. “If you don’t like them, we can go get something else somewhere.”
He handed her a slab of bread. Demonstrating what to do with it, he tore through the structure of the bread with his hands, removing a piece from it. He used it to spoon some of the curry from a Tupperware container into his mouth.
Aria copied him gingerly. When she placed it in her mouth, she was in disbelief. The tomato was creamed; its flavor was heavy in her throat. It was suffused with spices that contained all the memories of a foreign land within them, all the celebrations. It tasted like pure indulgence, like luxury and wealth on the tongue. “What is this?” she asked him.
“This is chapati,” he said, holding up the bread in his hand. “That’s tikka masala.” He pointed to what she had just eaten. “And this is tadka dal,” he
