By now, he was used to the scratch of the alcohol at the back of his throat, but he also had no idea what it was like to drink in front of someone—or, more precisely, what it was like to be drunk in front of someone. It was this worry that made him order a Coke.
“A Coke?” Teddy said. “I didn’t take you out so that you could order a Coke, sweetheart. Time for a big boy’s drink. I’ll have a vodka soda, and make his a rum and Coke,” he said to the waiter, a butch young man with spiked hair, huge arms, and orange-tanned skin.
“Sir, please, a Coke,” Harit said, stroking his hair nervously with his right hand.
“Absolutely not!” Teddy laughed. “Rum and Coke. Rum and Coke.” He pounded on the table with his fists and chortled. The waiter gave an exasperated sigh and walked away. “Well, what’s her problem,” Teddy said. His face transformed from gleeful mockery to discomfort as his fleshy checks and thick neck erupted in a hectic blush. Harit was confused, assuming that Teddy was referring to the hostess, who was not even in sight.
A minute later, the waiter reappeared with a glass of clear liquid over ice for Teddy and a Coke for Harit. Teddy sat quietly as the waiter set the drinks down and walked away.
“Well, cheers, dear,” he said, raising his glass into the air. Harit picked his drink up, clinked it against Teddy’s glass, and took a sip. He gagged. The burning sweetness in his mouth must have been rum, and the rum must have been half-piss. Teddy burst out in laughter again.
Harit had always thought the jolly dry heave of Teddy’s laugh to be comical, but here, in this crowded restaurant where the people in the booth next to theirs peered over the partition to give a stern eye, he hated it.
“Honey, don’t tell me you’ve never had rum before.”
“No.”
“Have you ever had a drink before?”
Harit looked at Teddy angrily and said, “Yes. I have had several.”
“Oh, really?” Teddy was chortling again. “When?”
“After my sister died.”
Harit hadn’t expected to be so mean-spirited, but the words came out of his mouth quickly. He didn’t regret speaking them. If anything, he felt empowered, especially when he saw Teddy’s face fall and his blush darken to purple.
“Oh, my God, I am so sorry,” Teddy said. “How did it happen?”
Instead of responding, Harit took his glass and tipped the rest of its contents down his throat. He closed his nose as he had done years ago when taking his mother’s sore throat remedy of honey, black pepper, and masala. Then he said, “Where did the waiter go?”
*
The inaugural outing ended as Teddy gave Harit a ride home in his beige Camry, Harit fumbling to find his house key because he was tipsy and because it was ten after nine and the baseball field lights had gone off. He had just enough presence of mind to make his costume look presentable and carry on the usual level of conversation as Swati with his mother (which wasn’t much). Contrary to what he thought would happen after the initial rush of rum at the restaurant, he did not get sick but fell into a pleasant sleep the moment he lay down. He woke up two hours late the next morning. He sat up in bed and was greeted with a pain that reminded him immediately of how he had felt upon spotting Swati’s crumpled body at the foot of the stairs—a punch to the forehead. He managed to get dressed and take a few sips of water from the kitchen tap, and then he realized that he had not given his mother her usual cup of tea that morning. Her grief and fading vision had confined her, and she relied upon him to do little things like these when Gital Didi wasn’t around.
He looked into the living room. His mother’s head was drooping, and there was no music playing. He started forward but then noticed over the rim of her sunglasses that she was looking at her hands. He realized, his brain like a rusty machine sputtering into action after neglect, that she had been in this exact same position last night. She had not met his eyes but had been looking at her hands, and he had been so worried that she would not believe his clumsy disguise that he had not thought about why she had been doing so. Now, he saw that she was holding a teacup, and he realized that he had no idea how long it had been there. It could have been since yesterday morning, although he normally remembered to take it out of her hands before leaving for work. He had no recollection if he had. The pain in his forehead was making him forget.
“Ma, are you all right?”
She looked up at him and shook her head.
Harit wanted to ask her if she needed another cup of chai, but for some reason he felt that the room had become menacing, that another word would make his mother crumble or disappear. He heard a car whiz past outside, then another car’s engine start. He heard the drip of the kitchen faucet, which never stopped making noise however hard he twisted its knobs shut. And there was the swish of his mother’s breath as it exited and entered her nostrils. He could not remember the last time that he had looked at his mother like this, without speaking. Perhaps more notable, he could not remember the last time that his mother had observed him. Despite her failing vision and her oppressive eyewear, she seemed to be seeing right into him.
Now was the moment when he should come clean. He could stop this charade and tell his mother the truth. No more nights twisted into a sari, no more makeup, no more tiptoeing.
As he looked at her, he thought of a story that his mother had told him when he was a child: a crow, weary from flying, chanced upon a jug of water in the forest. He perched on the rim of the jug, his ribbed black claws clutching the clay, and put his head down to drink. However, his beak was far too small to reach the water. He tried several times, and every time, he found himself even wearier than when he had begun. Eventually, he had no choice but to fly away, cursing the fact that he had ever stopped.
“But you see,” his mother said those many years ago, “another crow came along, and after seeing that his beak was far too short to reach the water, he thought of a plan.”
Harit could see his childhood bedroom now—its yellowed walls veined with cracks, the blue stripes of his bedsheet, the honey-like spill of a lamp lighting his mother’s lively eyes, and Swati’s hair, spread like a dark wooden fan on her bed, which sat opposite his.
“This clever crow grabbed a nearby pebble in his claws and plopped it into the jug. He found another pebble, and another, and another, until the level of the water came to the rim of the jug. He then dipped his beak in and drank to his heart’s delight.”
Harit remembered how joyous the story had made him. Like every child, he thought his mother had made the story up herself—a sentiment echoed by the look in Swati’s own eyes and, of course, in the grin that bloomed on her face.