“Thank you also,” she said, “to the fellow contestants, who have been such an inspiration, and whose best qualities I will try to incorporate into myself.”
On the ride home, my mother went in on Anjali Auntie’s activities backstage. The moms had been in close quarters all afternoon, pinning and making up, and now my mother reported that Anjali Dayal had been “behaving like one cow, only.”
Prachi sat glumly, her made-up face pressed against the station wagon window. She drew back. Whatever cakey stuff she was wearing left behind a ghostly print. Through Prachi’s window I made out a looming church sign—stop, drop, & roll does not work in HELL—and past it, silhouettes of two buildings on the meager Atlanta skyline. But they were smeared by that makeup stain, so I felt I was seeing the city as through a shaken snow globe.
“Not only that,” my mother was saying. “When Prerna Mallick got sick, no one could find water for her, na? Someone’s asking those hotel employees, water please, water, and no one’s coming, and poor Prerna Mallick’s mother is asking Anjali, ‘Can you just give her some of your daughter’s water?’ and she reaches for this bottle, and Anjali grabs it and says, ‘Germs, she did just get sick,’ and everyone back there, we’re all thinking, ‘Just let her pour it in her mouth, no lips-touching, like a proper Indian.’ Shameless woman.”
The car went quiet. I was developing a migraine, and leaned forward, pressing my forehead into the back of the driver’s seat.
“What is it, Neil?” my father inquired, feeling me headbutting him. “Why so sullen?”
“I’m so tired,” I croaked. “I’m just so tired.”
My mother whipped her head around. I feared a shouting match would begin, that she might demand to know what right I had to be tired, that she would recite all she and my father had been doing when they were my age. Instead she reached her hand back and cupped my kneecap, and then did the same to Prachi. “You are both working very hard,” she said.
She switched on the CD player. A bhajan filled the car, “Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram.” My parents hummed along to the prayer song, both off-key. Where it all went, what gods might have been listening in that land of church signboards, I couldn’t have said.
Next to me, Prachi stared out the window toward the Spaghetti Junction, where the veins of Atlanta converged into a Gordian knot of concrete and cars. The shape of Prachi’s forehead remained on the window, the self she had worked so hard to become left behind on the glass.
• • •
I did not make it to Shruti Patel’s pool party. The night of the event, as I lingered on the doorstep waiting for Kartik’s mom to pick me up, my father stepped outside, waving the cordless phone, a rare fury on his face. He had just gotten off the phone with Mr. Lee, my Kumon instructor, who informed him that I’d failed to turn in any work at all for the past two weeks. What I had completed, Mr. Lee went on, was abysmal. I’d wasted hundreds of dollars of hard-earned immigrant income.
And so, I found myself spending my evening futzing with trigonometry at the dinner table. My father sat next to me, trying to teach me mental math tricks. I absorbed nothing. After two or more hours, I finally begged for a break. He softened.
I took a Popsicle from the freezer and tried to walk off the night as I made a loop around the cul-de-sac. I wished everyone would give up on me. Their gazes were too forceful, their hopes for me too enormous. For it felt, back in Hammond Creek, that it wasn’t our job just to grow up, but to grow up in such a way that made sense of our parents’ choice to leave behind all they knew, to cross the oceans. I couldn’t bear to be the only one among them—Prachi, Manu, Anita—who failed to achieve anything, who ultimately became nobody at all.
I sat fiddling with the gluey part of the Popsicle stick, on the curb a few feet from the Walthams’ red bush/cheney: four more years sign—which had remained staunchly on their lawn for two of the four years. Just then, Anita’s mother’s Toyota rose over the crest leading to our cul-de-sac. Anita stepped out of the car. She didn’t see me at first; I was sitting beneath the out-of-commission lamppost, in the dark. She wore a crimson tankini. A blue towel was slung around her hips. Her birdlike, still-childish shoulder blades pinched together as she stretched her arms wide. They looked like a hinge beneath her skin, opening something behind her sternum. In there, somewhere, was the Anita I’d grown up with.
What had we played? House. It wasn’t, with Anita, a game of cooking or cleaning, but a game of arranging the components of a neat life. She’d grill me: Name? I’d pick Ben or Jake or Will. One day I said, Neil, and she said, That sounds like Neeraj, so she made me Neil. Age? she’d ask. Occupation? Having nailed down the particulars, she’d then grow wistful. Look outside, she’d say. Tell me what you see. What I saw: the loops and twines of our neighborhood and neighborhoods like ours—trees and asphalt and medians and sedans. Hot southern sky. Hot Georgia asphalt. Suburbs, endless suburbs. I’d remain frozen, afraid of making a mistake. As a child, I feared mistakes. In the face of my paralysis, Anita would lay a small hand on my shoulder and shake me. Neil, you’re supposed to make it up! You’re supposed to imagine!
Other times, she would decide we needed to be productive. Once, she had us publish and circulate a newsletter for the neighborhood, reporting on the Walthams’ church and
