Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

A truck pulled out in front of her, forcing her to brake. She swore and leaned on the horn, but even as she was giving the finger to the giant white shape she knew she was in the wrong. Come on, girl, she admonished herself. Sleep or no sleep, get a grip. What would happen if you got killed? Who’d look after the poor kid then? Not Jaz, that was for sure. He wouldn’t know where to begin.

She pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s and sat for a moment, examining her hair in the mirror, putting on lip balm and checking her purse, conjuring up a routine to compose herself. Then she went in and ordered coffee.

So the “healing family vacation” idea was a bust. By the time they got to Phoenix things between her and Jaz would be as bad as ever. Her dad would probably try to mediate, though he didn’t understand the first thing about Jaz, was secretly a little afraid of him, treated him like some impressive but unpredictable exotic pet, an iguana or a kinkajou. Her mother would give her that terrible doe-eyed look of pseudo-sympathy, and Lisa would feel like tearing her eyes out of her discreetly worked-on face.

A group of boys was crammed into the next booth, so young that at first she thought they must be from the local high school, a club or a sports team. Then she took in the cropped hair, a certain coiled surliness in their manner, and realized they were from the Marine base. One had his leg in a cast, stretched out straight into the aisle. A set of crutches lay beside him on the floor. A football injury? Or a war wound? Had these kids been in Iraq? She overheard some of what they were discussing. Not cars or girls but the state of the nation. She caught the words honor, decency, fags .

She’d known more or less what her parents would think of Jaz before she introduced them. Her father was a simple soul: Poppy just wanted his little girl to be happy, for her to hug him sometimes and give him useless golf accessories on his birthday and to never ever stop calling him Poppy for as long as they both should live. So an East Indian was fine by him — he seemed to find it necessary to add the “East,” some tic he’d picked up since they moved down there, as if suburban Phoenix was confusingly full of Hopi and Apache who needed to be filed separately. Jaz was Educated, Polite, earned Good Money, was Kind to His Daughter. Check, check, check and check. Due diligence done. So Poppy had signed off and headed back to the den for the Sunday-afternoon football. Mom was trickier, one of those women who made a picture in her mind of how things ought to be and then panicked when reality deviated. Jaz was a major deviation, an unknown unknown, and Patty Schwartzman’s attempts to figure him showed her daughter an ugly side. She’d insisted on a “girls’ day out” at a spa right before the wedding. It was obvious she had something on her mind. So Lisa had sat through the manicure, the pedicure, the hot-stone massage; Patty waited to say her piece until they were slumped on loungers in matching robes, sipping fancy imported European spring water, a vile chocolate facial (chocolate, of all things) caking fecally on their skin. Within two minutes they were hissing at each other, Lisa raging, Patty feigning wounded incomprehension.

“They’re different from us. That’s not calling anyone names.”

“Mom, if you bring up Jason Elsberg now, I’m going to slap you.”

“You know he got engaged. Don’t look at me like that. I’m just saying, when it comes to women, the men are very old-fashioned. They like things a certain way.”

“And you’d know because, what? You had a thing with an anthropologist? He’s not Osama bin Laden. He wears polo shirts. All my friends think he’s a Republican.”

“You always liked to make things difficult for yourself, even as a little girl.”

“You know, Mom, you look exactly like someone smeared your face in shit.”

Lisa would rather have died than admit she’d ever had doubts herself. Back when she and Jaz first met, she’d probed for signs that he was about to tear off his genial mask and reveal an Oriental Bluebeard who’d keep her cooped up in the kitchen and beat her for showing her ankles to other men. Of course all that turned out to be ridiculous, but at the same time there were things about him, sore spots — the pitch of his jealousy about her exes, a certain physical prudery — that you’d have to call Indian, or Asian, or Punjabi, or whatever. Or maybe not; maybe it was all just Jaz. By that time Lisa had long since worn herself out with such questions.

She had breezily assumed Jaz’s problem with his family was more or less in his head. She was a good person, and she loved their son; surely anyone — anyone who got to know her — would be pleased to have her as a daughter-in-law? She’d even entertained one or two pleasant fantasies of being absorbed into an old-fashioned extended family, a sort of subcontinental version of Little Women , with meals around a big table and parties where she’d get dressed up in beautiful fabrics and silver jewelry, one of a crowd of giggling brown-eyed sisters. Then came the terrible trip down to Baltimore, the desolate neighborhood, the cramped strange-smelling house full of inscrutable angry people. She tried everything she could, every tactic to ingratiate herself, but it was plain they didn’t want to know. To be hated just for who she was, and not to be able to do anything about it! To be hated behind a mask of dogged politeness, by people who ate off plastic plates and had a cabinet of cheap tourist tchotchkes and a decaying Tercel parked on the street outside, people who lived like immigrants . A shameful thought. An unsayable thought. That was the worst of it, the way those people made her feel like some red-state bigot, made her feel like her mom.

Lisa was too proud to let anyone know how much the visit scared her, and Jaz was so sweet and tragic that somehow it made everything OK. He wasn’t his family; he wasn’t a bit like them. As he drove her back to the motel, nervously making jokes about their terrible day, she reminded herself of the things she loved about him, his tenderness, his nerdy way of treating her problems like Rubik’s Cubes, puzzles that he could solve to be helpful. He was the kindest, most decent man she’d ever known. Their life together was beautiful. Of course she wanted to marry him.

The first wedding was the day she wanted. Surrounded by all their friends, she felt so charged with happiness that she coasted through the Sikh ceremony a week later, contentedly sitting in the gurdwara with her eyes lowered while her in-laws chanted hymns and adjusted the cloths covering their holy book. It was fun to have her old roommate Sunita by her side, squeezing her hand and helping her mother lead her in — yes, Patty Schwartzman, wrapped in a sari, goggling with concentration as she tried not to upset the natives. Poppy sat on the men’s side, legs crossed, handkerchief on his head and camcorder in hand as if it were all no more strange than a luau or a ceremony at his lodge.

After that the two of them were married enough to please everyone who felt they had a stake in the matter. They went back to their life, cocktails and book parties and tasting menus and theater tickets, and everything was fine, family-wise, until she got pregnant and once again the whole world started acting like it had a right to interfere. Jaz would hunch over the phone for hours, listening to instructions from his relatives, saying nothing but ji, haan ji . Her mother angled to come and stay, “just for six months or so,” to help them get settled. That catastrophe averted, Jaz broke the news about the baby’s name. Lisa had always expected a ceremony of some kind, but hadn’t realized God would want such a say. She’d filed away names for her child — Conor or Lucas or Seth, if it was a boy, Lauren or Dylan for a girl — names she liked, that felt connected to her life. The idea that there’d be a lottery element, opening up the Guru Granth Sahib at random to find the initial letter, seemed like an imposition. It was one thing to dress up and get bored for a couple of hours to placate your in-laws, another to allow them to dictate the sounds you murmured as you held your infant to your breast. When Raj was born, rigid and screaming, they just called him “baby” or “the egg,” deferring the question. Then Jaz let her know that circumcision was strictly prohibited in Sikhism and the full extent of their trouble dawned. She wished she and Jaz had been less good, more independent, had been happy to say to hell with family and tradition and God in whatever hat or turban or yarmulke he was currently wearing; but as they talked, she realized with a sinking feeling that both of them half believed, that in some sentimental way they both wanted to do right by their people.