Description
choose two discussion questions that ask you to analyze both Lahiri’s “Sexy” and Díaz’s “Cheater’s Guide.” Discussion Question 1: How do these writers capture and present unique voices? What are some techniques in their writing that convey a different voice, and thus persepctive? How is this relevant to the plot and/or the setting? You may choose to focus on one story or draw connections between the two. Discussion Question 2: What do you observe about the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and culture in these two stories? How do these intersecional identities play out or inflect the love plots? You may focus on one story or draw some connections between the two. Your responses should refer to details from the text and at least one quote. Your responses should be at least 8 sentences.No plagiarism all resources are provided
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Sexy
newyorker.com/magazine/1998/12/28/sexy
Jhumpa Lahiri
December 21, 1998
It was a wife’s worst nightmare. After nine years of marriage, Laxmi told Miranda, her
cousin’s husband had fallen in love with another woman. He sat next to her on a plane, on a
flight from Delhi to Montreal, and instead of flying home to his wife and son he got off with
the woman at Heathrow. He called his wife and told her he’d had a conversation that had
changed his life, and that he needed time to figure things out. Laxmi’s cousin had taken to
her bed.
“Not that I blame her,” Laxmi said. She reached for the Hot Mix she munched throughout the
day, which looked to Miranda like dusty orange cereal. “Imagine. An English girl, half his
age.” Laxmi was only a few years older than Miranda, but she was already married, and kept
a photo of herself and her husband, seated on a white stone bench in front of the Taj Mahal,
tacked to the inside of her cubicle, which was next to Miranda’s. Laxmi had been on the
phone for at least an hour, trying to calm her cousin down. No one noticed; they worked for a
public-radio station, in the fund-raising department, and were surrounded by people who
spent all day on the phone, soliciting pledges.
“I feel worst for the boy,” Laxmi added. “He’s been at home for days. My cousin said she
can’t even take him to school.”
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“It sounds awful,” Miranda said. Normally Laxmi’s phone conversations distracted Miranda as
she typed letters. She could hear Laxmi clearly, her sentences peppered every now and then
with an Indian word, through the laminated wall between their desks. But that afternoon
Miranda hadn’t been listening. She’d been on the phone herself, with Dev, deciding where to
meet later that evening.
“Then again, a few days at home won’t hurt him.” Laxmi ate some more Hot Mix, then put it
away in a drawer. “He’s something of a genius. He has a Punjabi mother and a Bengali
father, and because he learns French and English at school he already speaks four
languages. I think he skipped two grades.”
Dev was Bengali, too. At first, Miranda thought it was a religion. But then he pointed it out to
her, a place in India called Bengal, on a map printed in an issue of The Economist. He’d
shown her the city where he’d been born. It had a box around it, intended to attract the
reader’s eye. When Miranda asked what the box indicated, Dev rolled up the magazine and
said, “Nothing you’ll ever need to worry about,” tapping her playfully on the head.
Before leaving her apartment, he’d tossed the magazine in the garbage, along with the ends
of the three cigarettes he always smoked. But after she watched his car disappear down
Commonwealth Avenue, back to his house in the suburbs, where he lived with his wife,
Miranda retrieved it, and brushed the ashes off. She got into bed, still rumpled from their
lovemaking, and studied the borders of Bengal. There was a bay below it, and mountains
above. She turned the page, hoping for a photograph of the city where Dev was born, but all
she found were graphs and grids. Still, she stared at them, thinking the whole while about
Dev, about how only fifteen minutes ago he’d propped her feet on top of his shoulders, and
pressed her knees to her chest, and told her that he couldn’t get enough of her.
She’d met him a week ago, at Filene’s. She was there on her lunch break, buying discounted
panty hose in the Basement. Afterward she took the escalator to the main part of the store,
to the cosmetics department, where soaps and creams were displayed like jewels, and
eyeshadows and powders shimmered like butterflies pinned behind protective glass. Though
Miranda had never bought anything other than a lipstick, she liked walking through the
cramped, confined maze, which was familiar to her in a way the rest of Boston was not. She
liked negotiating her way past the women spraying cards with perfume; sometimes she’d find
a card days afterward, folded in her coat pocket, and the rich aroma, still faintly preserved,
would warm her as she waited on cold mornings for the T.
That day Miranda had noticed a man standing at one of the counters. He held a slip of paper
covered in a precise, feminine hand. A saleswoman took one look at the paper and began to
open drawers. She produced an oblong cake of soap in a black case, a hydrating mask, a
vial of cell-renewal drops, and two tubes of face cream. The man was tan, with black hair
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that was visible on his knuckles. He wore a flamingo-pink shirt, a navy-blue suit, a camel
overcoat with gleaming leather buttons. In order to pay he had taken off pigskin gloves. Crisp
bills emerged from a burgundy wallet. He didn’t wear a wedding ring.
“What can I get you, honey?” the saleswoman asked Miranda. She looked over the tops of
her tortoiseshell glasses, assessing Miranda’s complexion.
Miranda didn’t know what she wanted. All she knew was that she didn’t want the man to walk
away. He seemed to be lingering, waiting, along with the saleswoman, for her to say
something. She stared at some bottles, some short, others tall, arranged on an oval tray, like
a family posing for a photograph.
“A cream,” Miranda said eventually.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
The saleswoman nodded, opening a frosted bottle. “This may seem a bit heavier than what
you’re used to, but I’d start now. All your wrinkles are going to form by twenty-five. After that
they just start showing.”
While the saleswoman dabbed the cream on Miranda’s face, telling her the proper way to
apply it, the man stood and watched, spinning the lipstick carrousel. He pressed a pump that
dispensed cellulite gel and massaged it into the back of his ungloved hand. He opened a jar,
leaned over, and drew so close that a drop of cream flecked his nose.
Miranda smiled, but her mouth was obscured by a large brush that the saleswoman was
sweeping over her face. “This is blusher Number Two,” the woman said. “Gives you some
color.”
Miranda nodded, glancing at her reflection in one of the angled mirrors that lined the counter.
She had silver eyes and skin pale as paper, and the contrast with her hair, dark and glossy
as an espresso bean, caused people to describe her as striking, if not pretty. She had a
narrow, egg-shaped head that rose to a prominent point. Her features, too, were narrow, with
nostrils so slim that they appeared to have been pinched with a clothespin. Now her face
glowed, rosy at the cheeks, smoky below the brow bone. Her lips glistened.
The man was glancing in a mirror, too, quickly wiping the cream from his nose. Miranda
wondered where he was from. She thought he might be Spanish, or Lebanese. When he
opened another jar and said, to no one in particular, “This one smells like pineapple,” she
detected only the hint of an accent.
The woman wrapped the cream in several layers of red tissue. “You’ll be very happy with this
product.” Miranda’s hand was unsteady as she signed the receipt. The man hadn’t budged.
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“I threw in a sample of our new eye gel,” the saleswoman added. She looked at Miranda’s
credit card before sliding it across the counter. “Bye-bye, Miranda.”
Miranda began walking. At first she sped up. Then, noticing the doors that led to Downtown
Crossing, she slowed down.
“Part of your name is Indian,” the man said, pacing his steps with hers.
She stopped. “Miranda?”
“Mira. I have an aunt named Mira.”
His name was Dev. He worked in an investment bank back that way, he said, tilting his head
in the direction of South Station. He was the first man with a mustache, Miranda decided,
she found handsome.
They walked together toward Park Street Station. A fierce January wind spoiled the part in
her hair. As she fished for a token in her coat pocket her eyes fell to his shopping bag. “And
those are for her?”
“Who?”
“Your Aunt Mira.”
“They’re for my wife.” He uttered the words slowly, holding Miranda’s gaze. “She’s going to
India for a few weeks.” He rolled his eyes. “She’s addicted to this stuff.”
Somehow, without the wife there, it didn’t seem so wrong. At first Miranda and Dev spent
every night together, almost. He explained that he couldn’t spend the whole night at her
place, because his wife called every day at six in the morning, from India, where it was four
in the afternoon. And so he left her apartment at two, three, often as late as four in the
morning, driving back to the suburbs. During the day he called her every hour, it seemed,
from work, or from his cell phone. Once he learned Miranda’s schedule he left her a
message each evening at five-thirty, when she was on the T coming back to her apartment,
just so, he said, she could hear his voice as soon as she walked through the door. “I’m
thinking about you,” he’d say on the tape. “I can’t wait to see you.” He told her he liked
spending time in her apartment, with its kitchen counter no wider than a breadbox and
scratchy floors that sloped. He said he admired her for moving to Boston, where she knew
no one, instead of remaining in Michigan, where she’d grown up and gone to college. When
Miranda told him it was nothing to admire, that she’d moved to Boston precisely for that
reason, he shook his head. “I know what it’s like to be lonely,” he said, suddenly serious, and
at that moment Miranda felt that he understood her—understood how she felt some nights,
after seeing a movie on her own, or going to a bookstore to read magazines. In less serious
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moments Dev said he liked that her legs were longer than her torso, something he’d
observed the first time she walked across a room naked. “You’re the first,” he told her,
admiring her from the bed. “The first woman I’ve known with legs this long.”
Unlike the boys she dated in college, who were simply taller, heavier versions of the ones
she dated in high school, Dev was the first always to pay for things, and hold doors open,
and reach across a table in a restaurant to kiss her hand. He was the first to whisper her
name again and again when they made love. Within days of meeting him, when she was at
work Miranda began to wish that there were a picture of her and Dev tacked to the inside of
her cubicle. She didn’t tell Laxmi about Dev. She didn’t tell anyone. Part of her wanted to tell
Laxmi, if only because Laxmi was Indian, too. But Laxmi was always on the phone with her
cousin these days. When she wasn’t speaking to her cousin she spoke to her husband,
shorter conversations, in which she ended up arguing about whether to have chicken or lamb
for dinner. “I’m sorry,” Miranda heard her apologize at one point. “This whole thing just makes
me a little paranoid.”
Miranda and Dev didn’t argue. They went to movies at the Nickelodeon and kissed the whole
time. They ate pulled pork and cornbread in Davis Square, a paper napkin tucked like a
cravat into the collar of his shirt. They went to the M.F.A and picked out a poster of water
lilies for her bedroom. One Saturday, following an afternoon concert at Symphony Hall, he
showed her his favorite place in the city, the Mapparium at the Christian Science center,
where they stood inside a room made of glowing stained-glass panels, which was shaped
like the inside of a globe but looked like the outside of one. In the middle of the room was a
transparent bridge, so that it felt like standing in the center of the world. Dev pointed to India,
which was red, and far more detailed than the map in* The Economist*. He explained that
many of the countries, like Siam and Italian Somaliland, no longer existed in the same way;
the names had changed. The ocean, as blue as a peacock’s breast, appeared in two
shades, depending on the depth of the water. He showed her the deepest spot on earth,
seven miles deep, above the Mariana Islands. They peered over the bridge and saw the
Antarctic archipelago at their feet, craned their necks and saw a giant metal star overhead.
As Dev spoke, his voice bounced wildly off the glass, sometimes loud, sometimes soft,
sometimes eluding Miranda’s ear altogether. When a group of tourists walked onto the bridge
she could hear them clearing their throats, as if through microphones. Dev explained that it
was because of the acoustics.
Miranda found London, where Laxmi’s cousin’s husband was, with the woman he’d met on
the plane. She wondered which of the cities in India Dev’s wife was in. The farthest Miranda
had ever been was to the Bahamas once when she was a child. She searched but couldn’t
find it on the glass panels. When the tourists left and she and Dev were alone again, he told
her to stand at one end of the bridge. Even though they were thirty feet apart, Dev said,
they’d be able to hear each other whisper.
“I don’t believe you,” Miranda said. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d entered.
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“Go ahead,” he urged, walking backward to his end of the bridge. His voice dropped to a
whisper. “Say something.” She watched his lips forming the words; at the same time she
heard them so clearly that she felt them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and
full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.
“Hi,” she whispered, unsure of what else to say.
“You’re sexy,” he whispered back.
At work the following week, Laxmi told Miranda that it wasn’t the first time her cousin’s
husband had had an affair. “She’s decided to let him come to his senses,” Laxmi said one
evening as they were getting ready to leave the office. “She says it’s for the boy. She’s willing
to forgive him for the boy.” Miranda waited as Laxmi shut off her computer. “He’ll come
crawling back, and she’ll let him,” Laxmi said, shaking her head. “Not me. If my husband so
much as looked at another woman I’d change the locks.” She turned to Miranda. “Wouldn’t
you?”
She nodded. Dev’s wife was coming back from India the next day. That afternoon he’d called
Miranda at work, to say he had to go to the airport to pick her up. He promised he’d call as
soon as he could.
“What’s the Taj Mahal like?” she asked Laxmi.
“The most romantic spot on earth.” Laxmi’s face brightened at the memory. “An everlasting
monument to love.”
While Dev was at the airport, Miranda went to Filene’s Basement to buy herself things she
thought a mistress should have. She found a pair of black high heels with buckles smaller
than a baby’s teeth. She found a satin slip with scalloped edges, a knee-length silk robe, and
sheer stockings with a seam. She searched through piles and wandered through racks,
pressing back hanger after hanger, until she found a cocktail dress made of a slinky silvery
material that matched her eyes, with little chains for straps. As she shopped she thought
about Dev, and about what he’d told her. It was the first time a man had called her sexy, and
when she closed her eyes she could still feel his whisper drifting through her body, under her
skin. In the fitting room she found a spot next to an older woman with a shiny face and
coarse, frosted hair. The woman stood barefoot in her underwear, pulling the black net of a
body stocking taut between her fingers.
“Always check for snags,” the woman advised.
Miranda pulled out the satin slip. She held it to her chest.
The woman nodded with approval. “Oh yes.”
“And this?” She held up the silver cocktail dress.
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“Absolutely,” the woman said. “He’ll want to rip it right off you.”
Miranda pictured the two of them at a restaurant in the South End they’d been to, where Dev
had ordered foie gras and a soup made with champagne and raspberries. She pictured
herself in the cocktail dress, and Dev in one of his suits, kissing her hand across the table.
Only the next time Dev came to visit her, on a Sunday afternoon, he was in gym clothes.
After his wife came back, that was his excuse: on Sundays he drove into Boston and went
running along the Charles. The first Sunday she opened the door in the knee-length robe,
but Dev didn’t even notice it; he carried her over to the bed, and entered her without a word.
Later, she slipped on the robe when she walked across the room, but he complained that she
was depriving him of the sight of her long legs, and demanded that she remove it. So the
next Sunday she didn’t bother. She wore jeans. She kept the lingerie at the back of a drawer,
behind her socks and everyday underwear. The silver cocktail dress hung in her closet, the
tag dangling from the seam.
Still, Miranda looked forward to Sundays. In the mornings she went to a deli and bought a
baguette and little containers of things Dev liked to eat, like pickled herring and potato salad.
They ate in bed, picking up the herring with their fingers and ripping the baguette with their
hands. Dev told her stories about his childhood, when he would come home from school and
drink mango juice served to him on a tray, and then play cricket by a lake, dressed all in
white. He told her about how, at eighteen, he’d been sent to a college in upstate New York
during something called the Emergency, and about how it took him years to be able to follow
American accents in movies. As he talked he smoked. Sometimes he asked her questions,
like how many lovers she’d had (three) and how old she’d been the first time (nineteen). After
lunch they made love, on sheets covered with crumbs, and then Dev took a nap for twelve
minutes. Miranda had never known an adult who took naps, but Dev said it was something
he’d grown up doing in India, where it was so hot that people didn’t leave their homes until
the sun went down. “Plus it allows us to sleep together,” he murmured mischievously, curving
his arm like a big bracelet around her body.
Only Miranda never slept. She watched the clock on her bedside table, or pressed her face
against Dev’s fingers, intertwined with hers, each with its half-dozen hairs at the knuckle.
After six minutes she turned to face him, sighing and stretching, to test if he was really
sleeping. He always was. His ribs were visible through his skin as he breathed, and yet he
was beginning to develop a paunch. He complained about the hair on his shoulders, but
Miranda thought him perfect, and refused to imagine him any other way.
At the end of twelve minutes Dev would open his eyes as if he’d been awake all along,
smiling at her, full of a contentment she wished she felt herself. “The best twelve minutes of
the week,” he’d sigh, running a hand along the backs of her calves. Then he’d spring out of
bed, pulling on his sweatpants and lacing up his sneakers. He would go to the bathroom and
brush his teeth with his index finger, something he told her all Indians knew how to do, to get
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rid of the smoke in his mouth. When she kissed him goodbye she smelled herself sometimes
in his hair. But she knew that his excuse, that he’d spent the afternoon jogging, allowed him
to take a shower when he got home, first thing.
Apart from Laxmi and Dev, the only Indians Miranda had known were a family in the
neighborhood where she’d grown up, named the Dixits. Much to the amusement of the
neighborhood children, Mr. Dixit would jog each evening along the flat winding streets of their
development in his everyday shirt and trousers, his only concession to athletic apparel being
a pair of cheap Keds. Every weekend, the family—mother, father, two boys, and a girl—piled
into their car and went away, to where nobody knew. The fathers complained that Mr. Dixit
did not fertilize his lawn properly, or rake his leaves on time, that the Dixits’ house, the only
one with vinyl siding, detracted from the neighborhood’s charm. The mothers never invited
Mrs. Dixit to join them around the Armstrongs’ swimming pool. Waiting for the school bus
with the Dixit children standing to one side, the other children would say “The Dixits dig shit”
under their breath, and then burst into laughter.
One year, all the neighborhood children were invited to the birthday party of the Dixit girl.
Miranda remembered an aroma of incense and onions heavy in the house, and a pile of
shoes heaped by the front door. But most of all she remembered a piece of fabric, about the
size of a pillowcase, which hung from a wooden dowel at the bottom of the stairs. It was a
painting of a naked woman with a red face shaped like a knight’s shield. She had enormous
white eyes that tilted toward her temples, and mere dots for pupils. Two circles, with the
same dots at their centers, indicated her breasts. In one hand she brandished a dagger. With
one foot she crushed a struggling man on the ground. Around her body was a necklace
composed of bleeding heads, strung together like a popcorn chain. She stuck her tongue out
at Miranda.
“It is the goddess Kali,” Mrs. Dixit explained brightly, shifting the dowel slightly in order to
straighten the image. Mrs. Dixit’s hands were painted with henna, an intricate pattern of
zigzags and stars. “Come please, time for cake.”
Miranda, then nine years old, had been too frightened to eat the cake. For months afterward
she’d been too frightened even to walk on the same side of the street as the Dixits’ house.
It shamed her now. Now, when she and Dev made love, Miranda closed her eyes and saw
deserts and elephants, and marble pavilions floating on lakes beneath a full moon. One
Saturday, having nothing else to do, she walked to Central Square, to an Indian restaurant,
and ordered a plate of tandoori chicken. As she ate she tried to memorize phrases printed at
the bottom of the menu, for things like “delicious” and “water” and “check, please.” She
began to stop in a bookstore in Kenmore Square, where she studied the Bengali alphabet in
the Teach Yourself series. Once she tried to transcribe the Indian part of her name, “Mira,”
into her Filofax, her hand moving in unfamiliar directions. Following the arrows in the book,
she drew a bar from left to right from which the letters hung; one looked more like a number
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than a letter, another like a triangle on its side. It had taken her several tries, and even then
she wasn’t sure if she’d written Mira or Mara. It was a scribble to her, but somewhere in the
world, she realized with a shock, it meant something.
During the week it wasn’t so bad. Work kept her busy, and she and Laxmi had begun having
lunch together at a new Indian restaurant around the corner, during which Laxmi reported the
latest status of her cousin’s marriage. Sometimes Miranda tried to change the topic, but
Laxmi spoke of nothing else. “If I were her I’d fly straight to London and shoot them both,”
she announced one day. She snapped a papadam in half and dipped it into chutney. “I don’t
know how she can just wait this way.”
Miranda knew how to wait. In the evenings she sat at her dining table and coated her nails
with clear nail polish, and watched television, and waited for Sunday. Saturdays were the
worst, because by Saturday it seemed that Sunday would never come. One Saturday when
Dev called, late at night, she heard people laughing and talking in the background. “I can’t
hear you that well,” he said. “We have guests. Miss me?” She imagined him whispering into
his cell phone, in a room upstairs, a hand on the doorknob, the hallway filled with guests.
“Miranda, do you miss me?” he asked again. She told him that she did.
The next day, when Dev came to visit, Miranda asked him what his wife looked like. She was
nervous to ask, waiting until he’d smoked the last of his cigarettes, crushing it with a firm
twist into the saucer. She wondered if they’d quarrel. But Dev wasn’t surprised by the
question. He told her, spreading some smoked whitefish on a cracker, that his wife
resembled an actress in Bombay named Madhuri Dixit. For an instant Miranda’s heart
stopped. But no, the Dixit girl had been named something else, something that began with
“P.” Still, she wondered if the actress and the Dixit girl were related. She’d been plain,
wearing her hair in two braids all through high school.
A few days later Miranda went to an Indian grocery in Central Square that also rented
videos. It was dinnertime and she was the only customer. A video was playing on a television
hooked up in a corner of the store: a row of young women in harem pants were thrusting
their hips in synchrony on a beach.
“Can I help you?” the man standing at the cash register asked. He was eating a samosa,
dipping it into some dark-brown sauce on a paper plate. Below the glass counter at his waist
were trays of more plump* samosas*. “You like some video?”
Miranda opened up her Filofax where she had written down “Mottery Dixit.” She looked up at
the videos on the shelves behind the counter. She saw women wearing skirts that sat low on
their hips and tops that tied like bandannas between their breasts. Some leaned back
against a stone wall, or a tree. They were beautiful, with kohl-rimmed eyes and long black
hair. She knew then that Madhuri Dixit was beautiful, too.
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“We have subtitled versions, Miss,” the man continued. He wiped his fingertips quickly on his
shirt and pulled out three titles.
“No,” Miranda said. “Thank you, no.” She wandered through the little store, studying shelves
lined with unlabelled packets and tins and with vegetables she didn’t recognize. The only
thing she did recognize was bags of the Hot Mix that Laxmi was always eating. She thought
about buying some for Laxmi, then hesitated, wondering how to explain what she’d been
doing in an Indian grocery.
“Very spicy,” the man said, shaking his head, his eyes travelling across Miranda’s body. “Too
spicy for you.”
By February Laxmi’s cousin’s husband still hadn’t come to his senses. He had returned to
Montreal, argued bitterly with his wife for two weeks, packed two suitcases, and flown back
to London. He wanted a divorce.
Miranda sat in her cubicle and listened as Laxmi kept telling her cousin that there were better
men in the world, just waiting to come out of the woodwork. The next day the cousin said she
and her son were going to her parents’ house in California, to try to recuperate. Laxmi
convinced her to arrange a weekend layover in Boston. “A quick change of place will do you
good,” Laxmi insisted gently, “besides which, I haven’t seen you in years.”
Miranda stared at her own phone, wishing Dev would call. It had been four days since their
last conversation. She heard Laxmi dialling directory assistance, asking for the number of a
beauty salon. “Something soothing,” Laxmi requested. She scheduled massages, facials,
manicures, and pedicures. Then she reserved a table for lunch at the Four Seasons. In her
determination to cheer up her cousin, Laxmi had forgotten about the boy. She rapped her
knuckles on the laminated wall.
“Are you busy Saturday?”
The boy was thin. He wore a yellow knapsack strapped across his back, gray herringbone
trousers, a red V-neck sweater, and black leather shoes. His hair was cut in a thick fringe
over his eyes, which had dark circles under them. They were the first thing Miranda noticed.
They made him look haggard, as if he smoked a great deal and slept very little, in spite of the
fact that he was only seven years old. He clasped a large sketch pad with a spiral binding.
His name was Rohin.
“Ask me a capital,” he said, staring up at Miranda.
She stared back at him. It was eight-thirty on a Saturday morning. She took a sip of coffee.
“A what?”
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“It’s a game he’s been playing,” Laxmi’s cousin explained. She was thin like her son, with a
long face and the same dark circles under her eyes. Her black hair, with a few strands of
gray at the temples, was pulled back like a ballerina’s.
“You should have heard him in the car,” Laxmi said. “He’s already memorized all of Europe.”
“It’s not a game,” Rohin said. “I’m having a competition with a boy at school. We’re
competing to memorize all the capitals. I’m going to beat him.”
Miranda nodded. “O.K. What’s the capital of India?”
“That’s no good.” He marched away, his arms swinging like a toy soldier’s. Then he marched
back to Laxmi’s cousin and tugged at a pocket of her overcoat. “Ask me a hard one.”
“Senegal,” she said.
“Dakar!” Rohin exclaimed triumphantly, and began running in larger and larger circles.
Eventually he ran into the kitchen. Miranda could hear him opening and closing the fridge.
“Rohin, don’t touch without asking,” Laxmi’s cousin called out wearily. She managed a smile
for Miranda. “Don’t worry, he’ll fall asleep in a few hours. And thanks for watching him.”
Miranda fastened the chain on the door. Rohin was in the living room now, at the dining
table, kneeling on one of the director’s chairs. He unzipped his knapsack, pushed Miranda’s
basket of manicure supplies to one side of the table, and spread his crayons over the
surface. Miranda stood over his shoulder. She watched as he gripped a blue crayon and
drew the outline of an airplane.
“It’s lovely,” she said. When he didn’t reply, she went to the kitchen to pour herself more
coffee.
“Some for me, please,” Rohin called out.
She returned to the living room. “Some what?”
“Some coffee. There’s enough in the pot. I saw.”
“You’re too young for coffee.”
Rohin leaned over the sketch pad, so that his tiny chest and shoulders almost touched it, his
head tilted to one side. “The stewardess let me have coffee,” he said. “She made it with milk
and lots of sugar.” He straightened, revealing a woman’s face beside the plane, with long
wavy hair and eyes like asterisks. “Her hair was more shiny,” he decided, adding, “My father
met a pretty woman on a plane, too.” He looked at Miranda. His face darkened as he
watched her drink. “Can’t I have just a little coffee? Please?”
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She wondered, in spite of his composed, brooding expression, if he was the type of child to
throw a tantrum. She imagined his kicking her with his leather shoes, screaming for coffee,
screaming and crying until his mother and Laxmi came back to fetch him.
“Thank you,” he said when Miranda put a mug on the table. He took short sips, holding the
mug securely with both hands.
Miranda sat with him while he drew, but when she attempted to put a coat of clear polish on
her nails he protested. Instead he pulled out a paperback world almanac from his knapsack
and asked her to quiz him. The countries were arranged by continent, six to a page, with the
capitals in boldface. Miranda turned to the middle of the African section and went down the
list.
“Mali,” she asked him.
“Bamako,” he replied instantly.
“Malawi.”
“Lilongwe.”
She remembered looking at Africa in the Mapparium. She remembered that the fat part of it
was green.
“Go on,” Rohin said.
“Mauritania.”
“Nouakchott.”
“Mauritius.”
He paused, squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them, defeated. “I can’t remember.”
“Port Louis,” she told him.
“Port Louis.” He began to say it again and again, like a chant, under his breath.
When they reached the last of the countries in Africa, Rohin said he wanted to watch
cartoons with her. When they ended, he followed her to the kitchen, and stood by her side as
she made more coffee. A few minutes later she went to the bathroom, and when she opened
the door she was startled to find him standing outside.
“Do you need to go?”
12/18
He shook his head but walked into the bathroom anyway. He put the cover of the toilet down,
climbed on top of it, and surveyed the narrow glass shelf over the sink that held Miranda’s
toothbrush and makeup.
“What’s this for?” he asked, picking up the sample of eye gel she’d got the day she met Dev.
“Puffiness.”
“What’s puffiness?”
“Here,” she explained, pointing.
“After you’ve been crying?”
“I guess so.”
Rohin opened the tube and smelled it. He squeezed a drop of it onto a finger, then rubbed it
on his hand. “It stings.” He inspected the back of his hand closely, as if expecting it to change
color. “My mother has puffiness. She says it’s a cold, but really she cries, sometimes for
hours. Sometimes straight through dinner. Sometimes she cries so hard her eyes puff up like
bullfrogs.”
Miranda wondered if she ought to feed him. In the kitchen she discovered a bag of rice cakes
and some lettuce. She offered to go out, to buy something from the deli, but Rohin said he
wasn’t very hungry, and accepted one of the rice cakes. “You eat one, too,” he said. They sat
at the table, the rice cakes between them. He turned to a fresh page in his sketch pad. “You
draw.”
She selected a crayon. “What should I draw?”
He thought for a moment. “I know,” he said. He asked her to draw things in the living room:
the sofa, the director’s chairs, the television, the telephone. “This way I can memorize it.”
“Memorize what?”
“Our day together.” He reached for another rice cake.
“Why do you want to memorize it?”
“Because we’re never going to see each other, ever again.”
The precision of the phrase startled her. He tapped the page. “Go on.”
She drew as well as she could. He sidled up to her, so close that it was sometimes difficult to
see what she was doing. He put his small brown h
