An Unexpected Meeting with Lila and Raj
Lila Introduces Raj at the Park
On this occasion, Lila had brought Raj along. I tried to remember if we’d ever had a proper conversation before. Raj’s family was from Delhi, but he grew up in Dubai and studied in the US. He and Lila met in business school.
I was only invited to their wedding reception, not the wedding itself, mehendi, or sangeet – a testament to my relationship with Lila. I attended the reception briefly, out of politeness and curiosity about the man Lila chose to marry. Lila wouldn’t divorce; she saw it as a failure. If her husband were cruel, drunk, or unsuccessful, it would reflect poorly on her judgment. If he were unhappy or unfaithful, it would indicate her failure to try hard enough. She wouldn’t fail at such a thing.
Raj’s American Broadness
At the reception, Raj looked more suited to playing American football than to any Indian idea of marriage. He had changed out of his wedding sherwani and into a navy suit that seemed too small for his broad shoulders. The suit was Italian, not American. I had never seen a man so broad in such a slim suit.
His broadness was American, not Punjabi. He had no belly and his square neck was firm. Wojciech might say he was too chunky, like a Hummer instead of a McLaren, but at least his chunks were muscular. Raj’s Punjabi heritage was evident in his nose and chin. He would be considered handsome in any Punjabi family from Vancouver to Singapore. I remember wondering, What does Lila want with this block of tandoori beefcake?
Raj’s Transformation
Today’s Raj didn’t look fit for the football field, but his unfitness didn’t fit the usual pattern of male aging. He lacked the heavy, sagging appearance of an athlete who had let himself go. Instead, everything but his hair had receded. His shoulders and calves had narrowed, and his neck looked weak. There was still no belly, but his flatness was of a different kind. He had been married for eight years and seemed to have spent little time eating. How much of this was due to Lila?
The Sweltering Heat
We sat on a familiar bench while Raj chased Kabir around, his polyester T-shirt darkening with each step. The weather had turned, or rather, it had reached a deeper, more grueling level. If Delhi’s human-fucked seasons were a series of tests on the viability of life in escalating horror, then July was the point at which one had to question whether life was worth preserving.
Kabir didn’t seem to mind the heat. Lila looked at my face and neck and said, “I’m sorry for doing this to you. I may be pushing it too far.”
“We’re just sitting here. Raj is the heroic one.”
“Heroic?” She gave me a smile I hadn’t seen before. “I won’t tell him you said that. He’ll think you were being serious.”
Father and son jogged over to the other side of the park. Kabir looked back at us a couple of times on the way. I regretted not being able to ask Lila, How often do you have sex with your husband? How often do you still want to? Deepti was the only friend I could ask, and in her case, there was no need.
Lila’s Opinion of Woj
“You were going to tell me what you thought of Woj. I didn’t know you knew him.”
“Everyone knew him. He made it his business to be known, didn’t he?”
“He was doing his job. Him being known was an achievement. Whoever went to an event at the Polish embassy before Woj?” And then, before she could answer: “You think I’m defending him, defending my dating him. I’m just stating a fact.”
“I never understood what you saw in him. He was just so thoroughly … average. Which is fine. Most people are. But he didn’t wear average particularly well. Average that thinks itself special, yuck.”
“What are you basing this on? You met him, what, a couple of times? Did you actually speak?” If we had to have this conversation, why couldn’t it be indoors, in the air conditioning?
“Twice was enough. One of those times I was stuck next to him at a dinner. Two hours of him trying to impress and charm me with one side of his mouth, and shame me for working in PE with the other. Oh, and the usual clichés about the cultural superiority of Europe to the US. At the end of it, I told him, ‘I hope you know more about French poetry than you do about economics, because you speak about them with equal omniscience,’ and I tapped my bump and said, ‘This fetus of mine knows more about economics than you do. It knows nothing, but you have negative knowledge, anti-knowledge.’”
Woj’s reply she did not quote. “You never heard about this dinner? I’d have thought he came home and crowed all night about how he rattled the hell out of some banker chick.”
Woj’s Crows
Maybe he had crowed, who knows. There had been a lot of dinners. At least three nights a week, I’d be eating Maggi noodles in the office while he was at a dinner, and when I was too tired to listen to his account, he’d do his best to hide his annoyance with sympathy.
“So when I heard he was with you, I wondered. It can’t have been the white thing, Tara—?”
“What do you think?”
“You couldn’t call him good-looking. Not ugly. Just average, like the rest of him.”
I didn’t say: facially, Woj was about as good-looking as I am. Facially, we’re both in the happy middle of the distribution. No one would fall for us based on looks alone – no question of love at first sight – but if they liked us in other ways, we were good-looking enough. I’ve always thought this was the best place to be. No need to ask, Does he only want me for my looks, and no need to worry too much about aging. No walking into a bar or party and thinking, Is that girl prettier than me? No walking into a bar or party and thinking, Do I still have it? When you add it all up, the privileges and burdens of conventional prettiness don’t really appeal. Woj’s case was more complicated – he had his body.
“You’ve never seen Woj naked, clearly.”
“You of all people, falling for a set of abs.”
Her face softened into a kind of contrition. “I’m being unfair, I know. It’s just – it’s you. I’d always want the best for you, the very best. In the end, I rationalized your choice by saying, Delhi men are such a useless lot, she wants someone she can talk to, someone who reads.”
Later, she would tell me that I was made vulnerable by my lack of a Western education – that Woj’s Cambridge degree had given him false glamour. If I had studied abroad, I would have seen through him.
“Tell me,” said Lila, “did you ever hear him saying anything funny? Actually funny, not just snide.”
Had I? We had laughed a lot – but now I realized, always at someone or something Woj
