“Working. And my mother’s visiting so I’ll take her out for dinner tonight. She says she wants sushi, but her idea of sushi is only shrimp tempura rolls,” Elizabeth said. “How was your day?”
“Fine. Good. All my parents’ friends were over for dinner just now. I grew up around these people but I feel so detached from them now. It’s strange.”
Rupak tried to picture Elizabeth being a part of tonight’s dinner party. His parents would have no idea how to react to her and her snug jeans and T-shirts. They would all assume they knew everything about her based on what she looked like. She was about his height, and blond, and had visible collarbones, and Rupak himself found it difficult to see past her looks. She wore no jewelry and, as far as he could tell, hardly ever used makeup. She took her contacts out and wore glasses in the evening, before bed, but he preferred her in her contacts so he could look at her face uninterrupted. How would Mrs. Gupta talk to her, he wondered? How would he explain her to them and them to her?
His father, always aspiring, had sent Rupak to an elite private school in central Delhi, and the world of his rich classmates, the world his parents were about to have in Delhi, was so much simpler to explain in America. In his classmates’ homes, in leafy lanes in central Delhi where it always felt five degrees cooler than it did in East Delhi and where cars honked much less often and you could hear brief stretches of actual silence, at four p.m., trolleys with cheese toast and slices of Black Forest cake from Khan Market and bottles of Coca-Cola would be wheeled into the air-conditioned room where the children played. In his home, maids grumpily offered oily samosas from the local market and glasses of pink, syrupy Rooh Afza. When he was young, they had no air conditioner, only a loud cooler that sat outside the main window in the living room and did little to actually cool down the apartment. Their television had no remote. His India was neither rich nor poor. There were no huge homes and elaborate weddings, nor were there slums and water shortages and child laborers. The middle ground was too confusing to explain to an outsider. It was neither exotic enough nor familiar enough.
“Hang on. My mom’s calling for me,” Elizabeth said. And then Rupak heard her shout out, “I’m leaving in half an hour. I’m on the phone with Rupak,” and return to the phone and say, “My mom says hi.”
“Hi,” Rupak said.
“I miss you,” Elizabeth said.
Rupak turned to his side and looked at his bedside table. On the top right corner were the remnants of a sticker of the Indian cricket team from 1996. He had tried, over the years, to scratch it off, so you couldn’t make out the faces of any of the players anymore but you could see the blue uniforms.
He couldn’t help but think about what Mrs. Gupta had said tonight after his father told them about the move and after her husband was done trying to ask how much they had paid in black money. Mrs. Gupta, with a mouthful of chicken and rice, had simply said, “Why?”
Rupak had been wanting to ask his parents that himself, but he hadn’t, and seeing them stumble to find an answer made him glad he hadn’t asked. “Why not?” his father had said, and his mother had just gotten up and started taking dishes back to the kitchen.
“Escaping the minute you can?” Mr. Gupta had said with a laugh.
“Hardly,” Mrs. Jha had said from near the kitchen entrance. “This will always also be home. We raised our family here.”
“But it will no longer be your home,” Mr. Gupta had said, and Mrs. Jha had ignored him and walked into the kitchen.
And he was right, Rupak thought. This was no longer going to be home.
“It’s nice being home with my parents,” he said to Elizabeth. “Of course, I miss you too, though.”
“Tell them to come visit soon,” Elizabeth said. “Or I’ll come to India with you next time.”
Rupak scratched at the sticker of the cricket team again. A few small pieces came off under his fingernail, but the rest remained stubborn. He gave up and fell back against his pillow. Even though he was twenty-three, when he was at home with his parents, he immediately returned to feeling like he was fourteen. For the last two weeks, his mother had been reminding him every morning to pack up his room so everything could be moved to Gurgaon, and Rupak still hadn’t because he didn’t quite believe that they were actually moving homes. Had the money come just five years ago, he would have been part of the transition, but now, like the neighbors of Mayur Palli, he felt like an observer. The money had made his parents more youthful, less parentlike. Under normal circumstances he would get a good job after his MBA and then buy a Mercedes and show it off to his parents, who would look on proudly. Instead, yesterday, his father had taken him out for a ride in the new car and insisted on heating the car seats despite the summer temperatures.
Rupak suspected that if his father had waited, he could probably have sold his website for much more than he did, but when he sold it, the twenty million U.S. dollars that was offered felt like more money than there was in the whole world. Another small startup, www.justcall.com, bought the site and used the technology and was now worth close to two hundred million U.S. dollars. He wondered if his father ever felt angry about how little he had made compared to how much the site was now worth, but he realized, as he got older, that it was such an outrageous amount for his father that he could not actually understand the difference between twenty million and two hundred million dollars.
Mr. Jha had grown up with very little and, until the sale, earned the equivalent of two hundred dollars a month. Rupak thought now about how he had spent that amount on a pair of shoes recently.
“I think I would like India. Bring me back some books by Indian writers,” Elizabeth continued.
Rupak hardly read. He didn’t even know the names of the current Indian writers.
“Done. And you bring me books by writers from Pensacola.”
“There’s no such thing,” Elizabeth said with a small laugh. Rupak heard her let out a small moan as she stretched her body in bed. “I should get to work.”
“I really do miss you,” Rupak said.
“Send me more pictures. I like being able to see what you’re seeing. Your pictures make India seem not so far away.”
“What else should I get you from here?” Rupak asked.
“I don’t need anything else,” Elizabeth said. “Except knowing that your parents know about us. See if you can get me that.”
Rupak wanted to get her that. He pictured her languorously getting out of bed and stretching her arms up over her head, a sliver of her stomach exposed, and he wanted to get her anything she wanted.