Delhi Dating Club Meera

Winner of the 2019 Waggenheim Prize for Best Short Story

The Delhi Dating Club Meera. Her name played over and over in Vir’s head as he drove to the restaurant, the only concrete detail he knew about her. Nathan had refused to tell him anything else, other than that she was about five-foot-five, Indian and in residency.

“We’re all in residency!” Vir had cried.

Her name, in and of itself, was misleading. It suggested fluidity, a noncommittal nod to each of the great altars that glared at each other across Chandni Chowk. It evoked in Vir’s head an unsettling memory from his adolescence, of a Pakistani film star who was jeeringly called

Meeraji. She belonged to the vulgar underclass of entertainers who had slipped past Indian border security and into Bollywood, with her textured complexion and eyebrows like unplanned ink-strokes on the plastic plane of her forehead. In the one film of hers Vir had seen, she played a dancing girl in navel-baring neon silk.

Khair, he might arrive at the restaurant to find a paragon of Hindu devotion. A Mira instead of a Meera, like the great Rajasthani poet whose ragas were staples in school curriculums. A theological gulf encompassed in that exchange of vowels.

Or she could be a Catholic, one of those bizarre Anglo-Indian hybrids who hung around

Delhi like a smog. The low-lying pollutions of the Raj, his grandfather would say.

The distinction, Vir thought, was hemispheric and would determine his ability to consider marriage. In the past, he had avoided romantic entanglements with Indian women for this reason.

It was more difficult with them, to keep things casual, to not fall into the familiar rhythms of couples he had known in school, all of them wed within months of getting together.

Vir wouldn’t even have gone on this date (and he cringed at the term for its subtle untruth) if Nathan hadn’t arranged it all, right down to making the reservations at a French bistro in Charlestown. He told Vir what to wear (“This watch, definitely--we want her to know you have money”) and order (“Nothing with onions”). Really, Vir thought, as he straightened his collar at a red light, this was almost a rishta.

Brokered by a third party, driven by the same mercenary politics which had united his parents and grandparents. Back home, matchmakers were well-meaning parasites, hovering close to the families of the nearly-betrothed. Their ranks were filled with the likes of nosy neighbors and overzealous aunts. Their weapon of choice was the local newsletter with its pages of marital ads.

But Vir’s rootless, untethered American life was free of such intrusions. His matrimonial prospects were of interest only to Nathan who, with his husband Andrew, made up the entirety of

Vir’s network in Rockport.

It was a tiny place, an hour out of Boston. Nestled away on the Cape Ann Peninsula, fitting neatly between a stretch of highway and a salt-and-granite shoreline. Its most remarkable feature was a quaint, contained isolation. An abundance of blank space. Vir had been brought there one year earlier by a job offer from a neighboring suburb. In his firm, among civil engineers and IT specialists, he was one of a dozen Indians. But in Rockport, he stood out.

He arrived at the restaurant before Meera did and was seated near the back wall. In past relationships, he had taken care to never be punctual, to never seem over-invested. He would attribute his perpetual lateness to a subcontinental quirk. But he could not make this excuse with an Indian woman.

He had been waiting for nearly twenty minutes when she finally walked in. Repeatedly, he had considered simply leaving, the back of his neck burning each time a server walked by and asked if he was ready to order. But he stayed, if only so he could tell Nathan with full confidence that the night had been a disaster. Then maybe, his friend would learn to not recommend every other Indian he encountered to Vir for marriage.

Vir had an unobstructed view of the entryway and saw her clearly from the moment she entered the room. She was immediately conspicuous to him, distinct in the space. So too, he knew, was he conspicuous to her. She saw him from where she stood and lifted her hand, a half-greeting. Vir nodded back to her, taking in the particulars of her appearance from his distance: the breadth of her hips, the dusky copper of her skin. She was shorter than he had expected and was wearing a navy dress with a pashmina hanging from her elbows.

As she walked toward him, Vir noticed how her eyes scanned the room, darting from face to face. He recognized those movements. He’d first engaged in that same exercise as he was initiated into his residence hall at Cambridge, the only Indian in the room.

“You’re Vir?” Although she was already sitting across from him, she posed his name like a question.

“Yeah--yes. Hi.” Vir was annoyed with himself. Seeing her glancing around the restaurant, a little critical, a little anxious, had left him feeling momentarily at ease with her.

“And you’re Meera.” He made a point of not asking her, stating it outright.

“I am.” She seemed to be appraising him like a jeweler would an antique ring, checking for flaws. She stared, a second too long, at the top of his face. Without thinking, Vir touched his

forehead, running his finger over the ridge where, at thirteen years old, he had sliced the skin open.

Her hair was cut short, almost to her chin--a style he could not recall seeing on a brown woman before. It suited her, Vir thought, falling well around the strange, proud angles of her face. Up close, he was still mystified as to her origins. In India, her accent alone would have been enough for him to determine where she had been educated, the circles her parents moved in.

But America was an eerie equalizer. Sitting across from him, sliding a single gold bangle back and forth on her wrist, Meera was stateless, casteless. Vir wondered if she was trying to decipher his background in the same way.

“I have to admit something,” she said, pulling him out of his thoughts. “And apologize. I was a little late on purpose.” Vir looked blankly back at her.

“Sorry?”

“It’s a bit juvenile, I know.” She pushed a lock of hair behind her left ear, uncovering a row of tiny gold piercings. “But I guess I didn’t expect you to be on time.”

“Because I’m Indian?” He looked briefly at his hand, as if checking the color of his skin.

“Isn’t that a stereotype?”

“No, yaar.” She shook her head. “It’s only a stereotype if white people know about it.”

She said the last part of this sentence in Hindi, glancing around the room.

“Is that a rule?” He pushed a menu toward her, watching as she turned the pages.

“Definitely. But you’re not one of those types of Indians, I think.” Meera told him, waving a server over to their table.

“Which type?” Vir’s mouth twitched.

“The always-late Indians. The ‘Desi Standard Time,’ ones, you know.”

He laughed. “We have a few of those in my office.”

“They’re everywhere!” Meera said. “Even at the hospital.”

She ordered the salmon, wrinkling her nose as she did so. Vir, ignoring Nathan’s voice in his head, chose a chicken and onion dish because it was the only one on the menu that he could pronounce. He asked for a bottle of wine, keeping his eyes on Meera as he did so. Her expression was aggravatingly impassive.

“So,” Vir said finally. “Nathan says you’re a doctor?”

If this was India, he wouldn’t have had to wonder. He would have known, before agreeing to meet her, where she worshipped and who her family was. He likely would have known other things too, that he supposed most Americans would never even discuss with their spouses: her measurements and most recent weight, her grade-point-average. The position of the moon on the night she was born. These were the types of facts and figures on the slim, typewritten biodatas his mother had taken to sending him with her letters since he moved to America.

One of them might read: Shraddha Sehgal. 24. Leo. M.A., Delhi University. 5 feet 3 inches, 53 kg. Jahez: Rs. 300K. Skilled in classical Hindi poetry, sitar playing and cooking.

Fluent in English. Virgin (and in his mother’s distrustful handwriting: maybe). Vir had taken to saving these circulars of potential brides and keeping them in an old manilla envelope in which he’d once been sent a department store catalogue. He never looked at any of them more than once. He wondered if Meera had a biodata.

He watched her, sitting across from him, as their server returned with the wine Vir had asked for. She did not move to pour it. He noticed that she had a mole below her left eyebrow and a diamond pin in her nose.

“So you came here from Delhi?” Vir saw how she was gripping the fingers of her left hand with her right, occasionally turning her head toward the exit. Her mouth was strained at the edges. He was suddenly ashamed for assuming that she would have been more interested in him than he was in her.

“Not directly,” he said. “I was in the city, for a while. I came from England, after my

Master’s. But I moved to Rockport last year.”

Meera raised her eyebrows. “The tourist town? Isn’t it...um, small?”

He smiled tightly. “It is. It gets smaller when you actually live there.”

“Wasn’t there a Christmas movie filmed in Rockport? I remember reading something in the paper.”

Vir rolled his eyes. She was referring to a cheap, direct-to-TV film that had been shot almost entirely on Rockport’s Main Street soon after Vir had moved there. He had first met

Nathan and Andrew at a town hall meeting where several residents gathered to complain about their homes being filmed, without their permission, in the movie’s establishing shots.

“Unfortunately, yes.” The finished film had been recently released and was quickly becoming a point of pride for Rockport residents. Vir had gone with Nathan and Andrew to watch a town screening of it in the local high school, nodding off several times throughout, his head falling into his chest. All he could recall were some vague wartime aesthetics, a family with a devoted father.

“It had an awful name,” Vir said, frowning. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas, or something.” “I love Christmas,” Meera said, as the server brought them their meals.

Vir cut tentatively into his chicken. He was reminded, after an under-seasoned bite, of how little he cared for French food. The cream in the sauce seemed to sit on his tongue, coating the roof of his mouth. He wondered again if she was a Christian.

“You know, my house actually made it into that movie,” Vir said, taking a sip of water.

“Really?” He noticed how eager she was to drop her knife and fork and turn her attention back to him. He made a mental note to never again take restaurant recommendations from

Nathan.

“In one of the transition scenes,” he said, “You see my house in the evening, with the snow coming down and the lights in my windows.”

“Incredibly cheesy,” she said.

“And almost impossible to sit through.”

“Are you kidding? Bad Christmas movies are the only good ones,” Meera said, unfolding her napkin.

“I never really understood the appeal,” said Vir. He had actually stood in his living room window at one point and flipped off the camera-people who were standing in his yard, but this never made it into the movie.

“My grandfather would be so disappointed,” Vir said, shaking his head, “If he found out my house was used in an American Christmas film. He’d probably say it was an embarrassment to the motherland.”

Meera smiled, as if at some distant memory. “Bharat before everything? My nana was like that too.”

“This was my dada.” Vir said, pouring himself a glass of wine in the hope that it would add something to the food. “He took it a bit far sometimes.” He remembered the old man in his study, pacing the room as Vir and his brother stood in the entrance, knees knocking together. He would lecture them for hours, ranting about loyalty and Shiv Sena, about patriotism and the purity of their Hindu blood, until he grew tired and called for a servant to bring in tea.

“Your family is from Delhi?” Meera asked, still not touching the wine. She was eating around her food, separating the fish from the vegetables.

“I was born there,” Vir said. “But my parents are from Madras. My grandparents still live there.”

“What do they do?”

“They’re in auto-parts, mainly. Some factories.”

“I see.” Meera paused for a moment. Vir seemed to have answered a question that she had not yet asked. “And what about you? Not passionate about auto-parts?”

“My little brother had more of a head for it than I did,” Vir shrugged. “And it wasn’t something I wanted to take on.” Meera did not respond, looking at him expectantly.

“He married the right woman for it,” Vir said, running a hand over the short, prematurely gray hairs by his ears. “It made more sense for him.”

Vir’s sister-in-law was the daughter of a prominent steel magnate who had done business with

Vir’s father since the early sixties. Her union to Sanjay was featured in the Finance section of the

Delhi Times, halfway down the page: Royal Wedding of Chandrasekhar Auto-Parts and Malhotra Steel--Merger Marriage of the Decade!

“What were the chances,” Vir’s mother had gushed to all the wedding guests, “that

Sanjay and Bhumika would meet at that friend’s party in Goa? We were so surprised when he told us about the engagement, but of course we were thrilled…” The truth, as Sanjay privately admitted to Vir a few days before the wedding, was somewhat less romantic.

“Malhotra Sahib--I mean Uncle--was thinking about taking on some international clients,” he said, as their family tailor stuck straight pins into his gold silk wedding sherwani.

The turban he wore gave him the air of a scrawny rooster, with a tuft of stiff fabric sticking up at the back of his head. “We’d never have been able to compete.”

Vir had been smoking, ignoring the tailor’s pointed coughs and glares. He had flown in from Boston earlier that same day, missing most of the pre-wedding activity, the flurry of dances and teas his aunts and uncles had thrown for Sanjay, the first in that generation to be married

(“first but not last,” their mother would say, pressing her hand into Vir’s shoulder). In the tailor’s shop, with its low, mirrored ceiling and its walls covered with American and Indian suits, Vir felt a similar weight, nailing his feet to the carpeted floor.

“So you’re saying,” He said slowly, turning to his brother, “that you’re marrying

Bhumika so you can keep getting a friends and family discount?” “No, of course not,” Sanjay said patiently, shrugging off his sherwani, revealing the Polo t-shirt he had on underneath. “But it was one of the factors.” He grabbed the pack of cigarettes from Vir’s hand, and turned to leave the shop.

“I don’t think I could ever do that,” Vir said, following his brother out into the smoggy summer heat.

“What do you mean?” Sanjay had parked his car between a row of motorbikes and a mound of garbage, fitting expertly into the narrow spot.

“I mean, all of it, getting married for convenience’s sake,” Vir said, settling into the passenger’s seat, wiping beads of sweat from his neck. “It seems wrong.”

“So you’d only get married for love? Like an American?” Sanjay shaded his eyes as he pulled into the densely packed traffic, moving at its sluggish midday pace. A little girl was tapping on his windshield, asking him to buy a garland of flowers. Sanjay rolled down the window and paid her too much, taking the garland and tossing it to Vir. The car filled with the scent of jasmine and rose, a few petals falling into the leather seats.

“I don’t know,” Vir said, weaving the flowers through his fingers. “I’m not sure if I’ll ever even get married.”

“I think you will,” Sanjay said. “If not for love, then for Maa.”

“Would you? If it wasn’t for the business?”

“I think so. I always liked Bhumika, even when we were kids.” Sanjay pulled onto their parents’ street, where he and his bride would be living after the wedding.

“And anyway,” he added, turning to Vir after honking his horn outside the gate of their parents’ home, “you remember what Dada used to say?”

“Ram needed Sita and Sita needed Ram?” Vir chuckled. “What does that have to do with

Chandrasekhar Auto?”

“Bhagvan makes the rules,” Sanjay said, imitating their grandfather’s gravelly voice.

“Our job is to follow, and get rich. And in this case, the rule is ‘get married.’”

A servant opened the gate, letting Sanjay bring his car into the courtyard. Vir followed him inside the house, tossing the garland into the garden, where the stray cats would tear it apart.

Initially, Vir’s grandfather had inherited a block of factories in the Madras Industrial District. In several years, their family enterprise procured some recognition from the otherworldly realm of

Indian Big Business for being one of the largest manufacturers in the region. They were once even invited to a state dinner where other attendees had included the U.K. Foreign Secretary,

Lata Mangeshkar and the Chief Financial Officer of Otis Elevator Company.

By the time Vir was born, there were more than three dozen facilities, half of which had been shifted to Delhi. He and Sanjay spent most of the year in their parents’ Gurgaon home, with its marble floors and custom woodwork, enduring their mother’s penchant for constant renovation. But their summers were marked by the ritual migration back to Madras, to their ancestral home among the city’s old-monied neighborhoods.

“It was like...a business trip in a foreign country,” Vir said to Meera. “We barely spoke the language, so we needed a servant if we wanted to go anywhere. And it never felt like a vacation, there was so little to do there.”

“Did you like the house, at least?” She asked, tilting her head and laying her fork down.

“I didn’t dislike it,” Vir said slowly. “It was beautiful, and my dad grew up there. But it was always empty in the summers. Quiet.”

The house was built around a courtyard interspersed with greenery. In it, there were large apartments for Vir’s father and paternal uncles, meticulously maintained in anticipation of their periodic visits. His grandfather’s office had shelves full of Literary books (with Gentlemanly titles), which sat, immobile and elegant, throughout the year. His office seemed, with its wall display of antique rifles, to be transplanted from an English manor. At the back of the house, there was a narrow passage and wooden gate which opened onto the street. It was from here that the Untouchable maids would enter, so as not to pollute the main rooms with their touch.

Vir’s family was, generally, deeply pious. His grandfather had read the Mahabharata, in its bloodthirsty entirety, so many times he had it effectively memorized. There was a copy in nearly every room of the house. His favorite section was the Bhagavad Gita, an interlude which, he was always quick to point out, was quoted by Nehru and Gandhi alike. In it, Lord Krishna told Ram to go to war, to kill his own brothers if it would prevent the gravest of all sins--intercaste marriage. This, Krishna told Ram, would bring about the end of civilization as he knew it.

“One thing I did always like was listening to my grandfather’s records,” said Vir to

Meera, recalling rainy days in the house. Thumbing through his grandfather’s music collection, the thick vinyl encased in brittle paper. Reading on the album covers, the names of the singers his grandfather liked to listen to. Clear-voiced women, virginal sopranos. Wearing white saris and with mother-sister names, emblems of national pride.

“If you listen to these,” his grandfather used to say, gripping Vir’s arm, “You will go closer to Bhagvan.”

Vir didn’t believe with the same ferocity of his elders. He was hesitant to trust the new generations of India’s right wing, for whom the Gita was almost a weapon. They would come to dominate the news cycles in future years, characterized by their intense hatred of those they viewed as outsiders, grifters in Krishna’s paradise.

He never mentioned his feelings to his grandfather. The old man was a caste-purist, who, in the decades since Partition, had become almost fanatical in his hatred of Englishmen and

Muslims. It was from these two groups, as far as he was concerned, that all earthly evils originated. He told Vir that, as members of the merchant class, their family’s wealth was celestially ordained.

“And what about you?” Vir asked Meera.

“Born in Delhi, and so were both of my parents,” Meera said, twisting her hair into a bun that immediately unraveled.

“Family?”

“Mom, Dad. Two sisters and a brother. It was pretty crowded, growing up.”

She had been raised in a five room flat in the North of the city, an area of which he was only peripherally aware. Her siblings had all left India and were resettled in incongruous corners of the world--Leicester and Johannesburg and Dallas. Her parents, Meera said, were planning to spend their retirement years in a state of constant transit, shuttling between the homes of their children.

“They have next to nothing saved.” She spoke casually, reaching across the table to pour herself a glass of water. Vir held his glass out as well, and, still speaking, she refilled it, rolling her eyes at him.

“They spent everything on our schools, those god-awful convent ones where the nuns would cane you for having sinful thoughts.”

“I went to one of those, too,” Vir said, forgetting for a moment the question which had been lurking in the back of his head since before he had arrived.

“It was terrible,” Meera said seriously. “But once I got accepted to an American medical school, it was all worth it for my parents.”

“If they’re happy, we’re happy,” Vir said, remembering the phone messages from his mother which were piling up, unanswered.

“Pretty much,” Meera smiled, a little sadly. “I miss it, though.”

“Has your family always been in Delhi?”

“Mostly. They moved around a bit before Independence, but always ended up coming back. My nana was actually in Madras for a few years, if you can believe it, but I’ve never been.”

It turned out, her maternal grandfather had served as a minor clerk for the administrative arm of the Madras Presidency. He’d participated heavily in the freedom movement there, protesting during every phony election, risking his job if any of his supervisors were to see him.

He even shook hands once, she said, with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, at a rally to free political dissidents from prison.

(Vir did not tell her that his grandfather would spit on the floor at the mention of Jinnah’s name.)

“Anyway, I’ve always wanted to visit,” Meera said. “Madras is so interesting in my grandfather’s stories.”

Vir nodded, gently tapping the face of his watch. “I didn’t think it was interesting until I stopped visiting.”

“You were lucky,” Meera told him, softly.

Her hand was on the table, separated from Vir’s by only a few inches. His fingers twitched toward her, but he pulled them back toward his palm. She was wearing a long gold necklace which disappeared into the neckline of her dress and he found his eye flicking down, distracted by this detail, the expanse of uncovered skin.

Much later, before they were married but after they had slept together, Meera was in Vir’s kitchen, watching him make breakfast. The food was Indian, filling the room with the sound of crackling oil, the scent of eggs (lightly singed) and chilli powder. The water was boiling on the stove and she made the chai, Delhi-style, shaking in the loose tea and adding in milk, keeping the mixture moving. Vir watched, impressed, as she rifled through his cabinets for cardamom, black pepper and cinnamon, grinding the spices in a bowl with the back of a spoon. As she added the masala to the chai, the stove was enveloped in the aroma, covering the lingering odor of burning things.

“I haven’t had chai like this in a while,” Vir said, sliding two mugs down the counter toward her.

“It’s my speciality,” Meera said, rolling her eyes. “Back home, this was the only thing my mom trusted me with.” She drank her tea without sugar, taking long sips which would have made the back of Vir’s throat burn.

Their morning had been spent spreading puris--at one moment paper-thin and the next puffing up like clouds--in a frying pan never intended for such cooking. Vir made aloo sabzi, cutting the potatoes with a clumsy hand and seasoning them with cheap American substitutes.

But still, he was pleased with his efforts. He remembered how, before leaving India, he used to go months at a time without setting foot in the kitchen.

They ate in the dining room, which had an iron chandelier and its original chair rail.

There were a few folding chairs around a shiny laminate table on slim, wobbly legs. In the corner, there was a stack of boxes Vir had left unopened after his move from Boston. The furniture was dwarfed in the room, and Meera pointed this out to Vir as she sat down.

“How do you live like this?” She asked, arranging her food neatly on her plate with her fingers. She had borrowed one of Vir’s sweaters without asking, the sleeves rolled far back on her elbows.

She had said the same thing the first time she’d seen his home, on the night after their third date. Pausing at the threshold, removing her shoes without needing to be asked, she raised her eyebrows at the bare floors, the unadorned walls.

“Your place is...great,” she said slowly, walking inside, shrugging off her coat. “But I thought you’d lived here for what, a year?”

“Almost exactly that.” Vir said, shutting the door behind them.

“Oh, my.”

His house was one of those prim Colonial structures, so distinctive of the region and so counterintuitive to the landscape. Vir had been drawn to the history of the brick facade and wide-planked floorboards, the Puritan beauty of it. The irony, too, pleased him, the fact that this

Colonial house came into existence a century before the British had sunk their teeth into India.

He gave Meera the tour, guiding her through expansive, unfurnished rooms. She remarked at the beauty of his front door, which was made of rosewood and stained-glass. Four centuries earlier, Vir told her, it had been removed from the entry of a countryside chapel and taken to the colonies on an English warship, wrapped in bolts of silk. He remembered a story he’d heard from the realtor who had sold him the property: the longstanding rumor that the first resident of his home had been a madman and aristocrat, an illegitimate heir of the Earl for whom

Rockport was named.

“Okay, but why haven’t you done anything to it?” Meera asked, her hand resting on the mantle of his fireplace.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why haven’t you done anything to the house...how do you live like this?” She pointed at a stack of old books next to the sofa, on which he had balanced a lighter, a pack of

Gold Flake cigarettes (he had purchased a whole carton after Sanjay’s wedding, to bring back with him) and an old teacup, overflowing with ashes.

“The smoking?” Vir asked. “Sorry, Doctor Sahiba, old habit.”

She looked at him in disbelief.“Such a Desi man response,” she said mournfully.

“Do you think,” Meera said, setting down her empty mug at the breakfast table,“that your parents expect you to marry someone they choose?”

Vir had learned by this point to not be surprised by her direct, unembellished way of speaking. But this was the first time marriage had come up between them. He looked curiously at her face, but she seemed focused on rationing the last of her puri to finish her eggs.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly, leaning back in his chair. “I think my mom wants me to.”

He remembered a phone call from his mother, after he’d bought his house, a shrill ring in the middle of the night. He had told his family about the purchase in a letter, several days earlier.

This, he felt, would be easier than breaking the news to his mother over the phone. He knew, before picking up, that she would be on the other end.

“Is your brain defective?” His mother had cried, the Hindi idiom transporting Vir momentarily back to his childhood.

“I knew you’d be upset,” he’d said, running a hand over his eyes, still stuck together with sleep.

“You bought a house?” He could hear the imminent threat of tears in his mother’s voice.

“So, you’re just going to stay there in that snowy hell? Forever? What will you do when I die?

You won’t come home then? What did I do--”

“No, I’d come back for that,” Vir had said, instantly filling with regret. His mother cried some more. She hung up the phone after informing him that she’d be consulting her guru about his delinquencies.

Meera went into the kitchen for a second cup of tea. Vir liked this daily habit of hers, the indulgence of the routine. It reminded him of breakfasts with his family in Delhi, which could stretch out until early in the afternoon.

“What about you?” He asked as she returned and took her seat across from him. “Do your parents want you to go home and get married?”

She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “They don’t care, thank God.”

“They haven’t even tried?”

“Not since my older sister got married,” Meera said. “She just came home one day when she was in university and told my parents she had met the love of her life, and that they should stop trying to find her a rishta.”

“What did they say?”

“They didn’t believe her,” Meera laughed. “My dad said to come back to them after he’d actually asked her, and she did. After that, they’ve pretty much left us to our own devices.”

“I’m jealous,” Vir admitted, thinking of the steady stream of biodatas coming to him from Delhi.

Meera went to work, leaving Vir’s sweater folded at the foot of his bed. After only a few weeks, there were traces of her throughout the house: a woolen scarf, looped around the banister of the staircase, a toothbrush and contact lens case in the bathroom. The tea she drank, which she bought from an Indian grocery in the city, sat next to his Lipton in the kitchen.

It was not difficult, Vir realized, as he picked up the sweater and returned it to his dresser, to imagine Meera living in his house. He liked waking up to her in his bed, sleeping with the

covers pulled over her head. He had grown to appreciate the songs she hummed while cooking, the same love ballads and (decidedly un-hummable) ghazals which had accompanied the movies he’d enjoyed as a teenager. He had been struck, the the morning after their first time, by the stark, unfussy beauty of her face without makeup, the veins beneath her eyes tracing spindly purple pathways in the weak light.

She had been disturbed by the spartan conditions in which he was living. Vir could not help but wonder, as he noticed an errant earring on top of his dresser, what the house might look like if she moved into it.

Vir remembered a conversation he’d had with Nathan and Andrew, after their first visit to his home, a tepid October afternoon. Vir had made lunch, preparing the food with less spices than he would use normally. Still, they were clearing their throats throughout the meal and continually reaching for water.

Vir told them stories of his childhood, noticing how surprised they were to hear about his background, about the vacations his family had taken in Europe every other winter. He was used to this. Americans tended to see him as an economic opportunist, the type of person who sent money back to an entire village of undernourished relatives. He did his best to correct these misconceptions in small ways, by wearing expensive clothes and driving an expensive car. He would emphasize, in public, the convent-school lilt which could come out in his speech when he wanted it to. He did not speak in Hindi to the cab-drivers and grocery-store clerks who would look at him hopefully for some sign of recognition, an acknowledgement of a shared past.

As Nathan and Andrew were leaving, shrugging into their coats and stepping into their shoes (which Vir had asked them to remove), Nathan paused and took in the vastness of Vir’s house, letting his eyes rest on the single sofa in the living room, the windows without curtains.

“You need to get married,” he said to Vir, standing in the doorway. “Or at least start dating.”

“Sorry?”

“This isn’t a one person house. It will mess with your mind, all this empty space.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Look around, Vir.”

Vir saw nothing wrong with his sparse, uncluttered life in Rockport. He liked having the space to breathe. His family’s home in Delhi was, like the city around it, stuck in a loop of perpetual revision. It was an ongoing project of his mother’s, a ceaseless quest to find the best paint colors and textiles and furniture for a given room. Their space was a dissonant blend of imported and Indian objects, with modernist sculptures coexisting with their household gods and

Persian carpets haphazardly covering the floors.

After Vir moved out, his apartments at Cambridge had all been provided by the university. They were identically grim and functional, with thin mattresses on the beds and cheap coverings on the windows. The uniformity had been easy to settle into, a welcome reprieve.

Rockport offered something of the same, with its convenience to Vir’s work, the orderliness of its streets and roads. His home was built with a colonial sense of economy--broad, boxy rooms with their purpose clearly defined.

But Nathan pointed to the empty space above Vir’s fireplace, it’s brick hearth thrice a centenarian, and told him to imagine stockings hanging there, at least four or five, and a string of lights.

“But I’m not a Christian,” Vir protested.

It didn’t matter, according to Nathan. Christmas, like barbeques, like buying suburban houses and filling them with children, was as much an American institution as the type of manifest destiny which had driven Vir out of Delhi, and which predated him by many hundreds of years.

After Nathan had left, Vir walked through the rooms of his house. He took note of details that normally slipped beneath the radar of his attention: the plaster carvings of cherubs and vines on his mantle, the sloped ceiling in the pantry off the kitchen which, in years past, was the place where the housemaid would have slept.

Vir realized that he likely had an experience with hired help which would be foreign to most people here. His mother, in Delhi, employed no less than seven or eight people to keep their household running with a razor-sharp precision rivalling that of his engineering firm. Vir had not ironed a shirt or cleaned a bathroom until his early twenties. His first experience doing laundry was in a college dormitory and he almost destroyed the washing machine by pouring in nearly three times the recommended amount of detergent. For a time, he had fallen into old habits and sent it out. The thought of being waited on was uncomfortable for him now, something about it seeming perverse and archaic.

And yet, he could admit to himself, he enjoyed the exclusivity that came from owning a home like this one. His neighbors might be suspicious of him, eyeing him in the mornings when

he would shovel snow from his driveway or collect his mail. But he knew some of them were also envious. Vir remembered something he had read once, in the Delhi Times, that Americans in New England were descended from old, unpedigreed families. The ones who came to the colonies with debts and murder convictions, escaping prison or hanging.The castaway pilgrims.

In this sense, Vir thought, he was at an advantage. His family had owned the same land since before Rockport was even established.

In a short time, he had achieved more in America than many of those who could claim it as their birthright. He had a home of his own and a salary which promised him an easy retirement. Marriage was the next logical step. When Nathan mentioned a woman he had met several times at the home of a doctor friend, Vir allowed himself to be talked into having dinner with her.

They were halfway through their desserts when Vir finally asked Meera about her name. He admitted that he couldn’t quite place it, that, even after meeting and talking to her, it was a puzzle.

“There actually is a story behind it,” Meera said. When she wiped her mouth with a napkin, Vir noticed the deep stain her lipstick left behind.

She began: “My parents met when my mom was in university. My dad had just started his first job, at the Yes! Bank--you know that chain?” Vir nodded.

“Well, Dad’s family is from Old Delhi.”

Vir leaned back for a moment. He knew that area--that strange, ghettoized corner of the city which had resisted modernization in the decades since Independence. During Islamic

holidays, goats were slaughtered out in the open, their blood seeping into the pavement of the roads. (Vir’s grandfather said that this practice was barbaric and unhygienic. He cited it as an example of the intellectual inferiority of Muslims).

“Well, anyway, they were really traditional and wanted him to have an arranged marriage. They were even looking for him, but then he met my mom at a tea-shop. It was that sort of place, you know, that iconic sort of neighborhood place. It was exactly halfway between his work and her university, which I’ve always thought was just so sweet.

“So, mom was studying to be a teacher. Her parents were even more old fashioned than

Dad’s, even for a girl in those days. It was always straight home from university, no socializing whatsoever until she convinced them to let her have an extra hour after classes ended, to study with her girl-friends. But, that hour happened to be the same time my dad was getting off work and going to get chai with his coworkers. And mom was studying in his favorite chai place.”

As the story went, he sat with his friends and she with hers. For months, they exchanged only halting glances and shy smiles, never daring to speak to each other.

“And then, one day, miraculously, she was alone,” said Meera, dramatically, lifting her hands slightly off the table.

“It was definitely a scandal,” she said. “Half the invited guests didn’t even come to the wedding, but they still decided to cover all their bases.”

They had chosen to have a Hindu ceremony alongside the Islamic one, walking around the Sacred Fire seven times after signing the Nikkah papers. It had been a mess of Sanskrit and

Arabic and Hindi, Meera noted, with admiration in her voice, and many would have considered it a sacrilege.

Vir had not realized, as she was telling him this story of her lineage, how close he had moved toward her. His shoulders were hunched over the table, his elbows sprawled in front of him, narrowly missing her half-drunk cup of tea.

“So you’re Muslim?” He leaned back in his seat, trying to look casual. But his hands betrayed him, tapping erratic rhythms onto the base of his wine glass.

“Not really,” she shrugged. Her parents kept an irreverent, irreligious household, she told him. Meera and her siblings had all been given names which lent themselves to ambiguity.

“We went to all the major holidays,” she said. “So both mandirs and masjids. But it was mostly for my grandparents. None of us really know too much.”

“And your parents?”

“They’re great.”

He called for the check, draining his glass.

At the end of the night, Vir walked with Meera back to her car. His hands were in his pockets, hers wrapped around the ends of her shawl.

He considered the night over in his head. He had noticed, throughout dinner, how she would occasionally glance at his scar, not necessarily curious about it, but aware of its presence, short and sunken, above his left eyebrow. He imagined telling her the story of it.

It had been a particularly balmy, claustrophobic summer in Madras, the year he turned thirteen.

The monsoons seemed to stretch out for twice as long as they normally did. One day, when the

rains had slightly abated, Vir and Sanjay had snuck out of their grandparents’ house, desperate for some change in scenery. It was a Friday, late in the morning.

The boys had walked farther than they were normally allowed to go. Their Tamil was broken and unpracticed--they moved like tourists through the streets which had been frequented by their ancestors for more than a century. There was a sheen of dampness covering the cars and roads, glinting dully in the partial light.

They wandered into a neighborhood they had never seen before. The houses were smaller here, closer together than the ones on their grandparents’ street. People walked in neat pairs and trios on the side of the road, men in their work clothes and women in long black abayas over their saris and kurtas. Soon, they were at the entrance of a mosque.

The boys shared a look. They knew their grandfather would not want them here.

“What should we do?” Sanjay asked, looking up at Vir.

“Not sure,” he’d responded, running his fingers over his chin, feeling the hairs which had just begun to spring up, in downy patches. He was both embarrassed and strangely proud of the inflamed constellation of pimples which had recently appeared on his cheek, and he touched these as well, as though to check if they were still there.

Neither Vir nor Sanjay knew much about mosques. Their grandfather said that they were all just madrasas, chock-full of anti-Bharat bullshit and extremists-in-training. In school, the unit on Islam was confined to a single page which spanned almost nine hundred years, from

Muhammad to the Mughals. Delhi was full of mosques, with the call to prayer ringing out five times a day throughout the city. But Vir and Sanjay’s parents had never expressed an interest in the religion beyond complaining about the nuisance of a the interruptions.

They would only be gone a short time. It was unlikely that anyone they knew would see them. So they went in, curious about what lay within. They half-expected to see rows of identically-bearded mullahs wrapped in black turbans and robes, like the men they’d see on news broadcasts, yelling violent slogans into megaphones.

Instead, Vir was surprised to find a metrical familiarity in the preparation for prayer. Just as he would in a temple, he removed his shoes and tossed them into a heaping pile of sneakers and chappals.

There was a fountain in the courtyard of the mosque, tiled in white and blue. At ceaselessly running taps, over the glimmering pool of the fountain, men washed for prayer, allowing water to fall from their cupped hands, three times over their heads and arms, the tops of their ears and the backs of their necks. It reminded Vir of water from the Ganges, which people would save for illness, pouring it over their heads as they prayed for divine intervention. His mother kept a bottle at home, next to the altar to Saraswati in the sitting room.

He and Sanjay sat in one of a seemingly endless series of orderly rows. A speech was made, in Tamil, about the importance of charity, citing quotations and examples from the life of

Muhammad. Vir hadn’t known that languages outside of Arabic existed in mosques.

The prayer was short and simple. Vir was surprised at how easy it was for him to follow along to the cadenced movements of the men around him, the synchronized way they rose and fell and bowed to God.

When the prayer let out, their curiosity abated, Vir and Sanjay retrieved their shoes and shuffled out into the street. They had been gone less than an hour.

When they left the mosque, they saw Kabir, one of their grandfather’s servants, waiting outside with his hands folded in front of him.

Sanjay ran to him, excited. Kabir’s younger brother was the same age as Sanjay and the three of them would sometimes play cricket in the garden to fill the time during the most unbearable parts of the afternoon, when the air was like an over-soaked sponge, and Kabir had finished all of his errands for the day.

But Kabir was quiet today, shaking his head at the boys. Vir placed a hand on Sanjay’s shoulder.

“Dada sent him,” he whispered. Sanjay looked suddenly terrified.

When they got home, their grandfather was waiting for them in his study.

“What in the bloody hell!” The phrase was a singular holdover from his life among

Englishmen. He shouted at Kabir to reveal where the boys had gone. Kabir, glancing at the boys, who were still standing in the doorway, their thin limbs smudged with dust, did not speak. Their grandfather swore and moved as if to throw a punch.

“We were at the mosque!” Vir had cried out. His grandfather was silent. The expression on his face, up to that point so angry, melted into neutral nothingness.

“We wanted to see what it was like.” Smaller voice, trembling a little. “We left right after the prayer.” Their grandfather’s face went ashen. He turned from them, leaning on an end table for support. The only sound in the room came from an ancient ceiling fan, clicking rhythmically in the close, humid room, and a mumbled prayer, coming from their grandfather’s mouth.

“Dada?” There was a sudden swish, an object flying through the air like a leather-bound bird. It hit Vir in the forehead and he crumpled, falling to the floor.

The Mahabharata lay next to him, open to the first page, slightly dented. A drop of blood slid down Vir’s face like sweat, coming to a rest at his chin. Sanjay, tears leaking out of his eyes, ran toward Vir and kneeled by him, unsure of what to do.

“Bhaiya?” He hadn’t used the old term for ‘big brother’ in years.

Vir struggled to sit up. He felt his head in his ears, throbbing in a steady rhythm.

But their grandfather simply left the room. After a moment, Kabir followed, shooting

Sanjay an apologetic look.

“I’ll send Neeta in with some ice,” he whispered, and then rushed out.

Vir thought about telling Meera that story as they leaned against the door of her car, her shawl trapped beneath him, both of them remembering Delhi, the different places they missed.

He reached out while she was talking and looped a finger through her gold bangle, as if he were taking her hand. He wanted a cigarette, but didn’t want her to know that he smoked. The parking lot was still slick in places from rain, and the reflection of an errant street light rippled in a puddle near their feet.

“Meera?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we do this again?”