Neeraj emerged from his bedroom to join them. He was no longer bellicose. Though he still maintained something of a graceless attitude, a smile just peeked out from beneath the bramble of his beard when he greeted Omkar.
Omkar introduced him to Aria as if they had never met before. Though Aria found it strange to pretend as if nothing had ever happened between them, she went along with it. When Neeraj took her hand, he held it instead of shaking it. Without thinking, she responded by doing a miniature curtsy. It made her feel like an idiot. A dense awkwardness trespassed between them. In response to it, they all put their focus on the cooking.
Jarminder pinched off a piece of dough from the rest and rolled it in her hands. She smacked it against her palm while rotating it again and again until it was flat and circular enough to her liking. She placed it on an unoiled griddle and turned it from one side to the next. Just like a tortilla, the bread began to blacken in spots. Just when Aria thought that Jarminder was about to put it on a serving plate, she took the griddle off of the flame of her little gas stove entirely and held the roti with a pair of tongs over the open flame. The roti responded by puffing up so it was no longer flat, like a pancake filled with air. When Jarminder took it off the flame, she ladled a spoonful of clarified butter onto the roti and spread it across the surface with the back of the spoon.
Omkar took Aria over to the living room in order to show her some of the items in the house. He made her touch the yellow flush of the curtains, which had been sewn by hand by his grandmother. He showed her a pair of ornately embroidered fabric shoes, called jutti, on a shelf and joked that they were his mother’s best weapon in the house when he was growing up. He explained the portrait of Guru Nanak as well as the sheathed sword, which was mounted on the wall beneath the painting. There was no plan behind the decoration of the house. Oil marks still stained the wall in rectangles where pictures used to hang. The items that served as decoration had been added over the years one by one and as a result, it boasted no aestheticism. Like a nest for a magpie who had been collecting things, the house served as a personal treasure box for Jarminder. And Neeraj had let her do whatever she wanted with it.
Omkar pulled a photo album out of the bookcase and started flipping through it for Aria to see. Most of the pictures had yellowed; the plastic covering them had lost its flex. They cracked with stickiness when Omkar opened the pages. Aria found it painful to see so many years of a life that he had lived before her. She watched him lose his baby fat, learn to ride a bike, spend his first years in America and every birthday that had passed before she’d met him. She saw his aunties, who, according to Omkar, could give the FBI a run for its money when it came to keeping tabs on everyone they knew. She saw the faces of his brother and sister who had died. The tragedy had projected sorrow over their smiles.
“I thought your last name was Agarwal. Why does your name here say Singh?” Aria asked, pointing to the names written beside the pictures.
“Actually, it isn’t a last name, it’s a kind of middle name. Every man in our culture has the same middle name, which is Singh, which means lion. And every woman in our culture has the same middle name, which is Kaur, which means princess,” Omkar replied.
“Ooh, that’s sexy, the lion and the princess,” Aria whispered under her breath, softly enough so that Omkar’s parents wouldn’t hear her or see her wink at him.
When the food was ready, they all sat down at the tiny dining table beside the kitchen. Neeraj and Jarminder studied the lines of Aria’s face. They found it beautiful, but distrusted the motives beneath it. The conversation that happened at the dinner table was a concerted effort to avoid sitting there mutely. Though they had set the table with utensils, they ate with their hands instead. Aria copied them, leaving her fork untouched, which made them smile.
Omkar spent the time offering up details about Aria that he imagined would convert his parents to some shade of approval of her. Aria was so nervous that once she finished eating, she realized that she hadn’t even really tasted it. When their plates were empty, Omkar insisted upon doing the dishes, despite Jarminder’s protests. Neeraj turned on the television to watch a cricket game and sat in front of it, finding it hard to take his mind off of what was happening in the kitchen. Jarminder allowed herself to be consumed by a project that required her to carry things up and down the stairs from the store to their apartment at least a dozen times.
Aria stood next to Omkar with a cold glass of mint chaas in her hand. She sipped on the freshness of the mint, cumin and green chili in the cream of it while watching the look of worry play across the side of his face. Omkar spoke low enough that his parents couldn’t hear him over the chatter of the television. “I’m sorry if all of this is a little weird. Some of this stuff we do is kind of stupid. When we moved here, my parents never got it that we live in a different country and
