Hari Kunzru - Transmission

A group of them drove downtown, and she and Arjun wound up in a bar sharing a pitcher of bad margaritas with some of her Microsoft friends. The conversation circled round the usual stuff: apartments, jobs, where people were going on vacation. She gave Arjun the executive summary of her life (family in New Jersey, college years at Stanford, always wanted to be a programmer, weird for a girl, but there you go) and found out some surface information about him. He was, as she suspected, on one of those slave visas, being paid a fraction of what it would cost Darryl to hire an American engineer. She dropped in what an asshole she thought Darryl was, with his bits of moon rock and his I-was- in-Wired Ghostbuster bullshit. Arjun seemed really uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to say bad things about his boss. He seemed to miss his family, especially his kid sister. He had a picture of her in his wallet. His sister. Chris was not given to fits of girlie emotion, but the only available term for that was sweet. When she asked what he did when he wasn’t working, he hedged, saying something about personal projects. When ten thirty rolled around, he looked at his watch and announced he had to go.

‘Up early tomorrow?’

‘I suppose so. I have things to do.’

‘Where’s your car? Did you leave it at Microsoft?’

‘No. I don’t have a car. I’ll walk home.’

Out it came, bit by bit. He didn’t drive? Chris was actually shocked, wondered for one dumb moment whether this was a sort of Hindu religious thing, like orthodox Jews not being able to tear toilet paper on the sabbath.

‘It must be hard for you.’

‘It’s OK. I like to walk. It gives me time to think.’

‘How about a bike?’ suggested one of the other guys.

Arjun nodded uncertainly. Chris found one of those third-margarita sentences forming on her lips.

‘I’ll teach you.’

‘What?’

‘To drive. If you want, I’ll teach you. I’m a good teacher. I have strong interpersonal skills.’

His face crumpled into a huge grin. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘You mean it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Great. That’s so — so great. Fantastic! You know, Chris, you really are a very nice person.’

Out of anyone else’s mouth that would have been ironic.

He ended up getting a ride from one of the Microsoft guys, who lived near Berry Acres. Chris finished margarita número cuatro and wondered what she had gotten herself into.

‘OΚ, now turn the wheel. That’s right — no — other direction, you were OK the first time. There you go. Check for traffic. Mirror. Signal. Now move off slowly…’

Teaching Arjun to drive turned out to be — well, not the lowest stress activity Chris had ever undertaken. More than once she said a prayer for the Honda’s mirrors, and the front bumper lost a low-intensity conflict with a wooden planter in the Virugenix parking lot.

‘Slow down, Arjun. Brake… brake!’

The car was a piece of crap anyway, so Chris could be reasonably zen about the damage. From her point of view the first lesson was a qualified success, apart from the weird moment when Arjun burst into tears. Two or three sessions in, he could more or less propel the car forwards and backwards, understood the basic rules of the road and even seemed intermittently aware of other road users. After an hour of white-knuckle 15-m.p.h. progress round Redmond, Chris tended to need a drink, which was how the two of them came to be regulars at Jimmy’s Brewhouse, a snug little place with a neon Budweiser sign in the window and a selection of microbrew ales which Arjun was working through in strict alphabetical order.

Chris liked him. When he drank, his shyness evaporated and he became animated, waving his arms and laughing. He talked a lot about his extended family, which seemed to have more members than American Express, and he had a habit of comparing events in his life with scenes in Indian movies. Since Chris had never been to an Indian movie, the parallels were mostly lost on her, but it became clear that at least some of his hidden life was spent in a swashbuckling world of passionate love affairs, family feuds, epic struggles and big MGM-style production numbers.

‘You’re not gay, are you?’ she theorized one night, after one too many pints of Jimmy’s Big Bear Porter. Seeing his crestfallen face, she backtracked hurriedly. ‘Forget I said that.’ Later she caught herself flirting, wagging a finger and giving him arch smiles. ‘You know,’ she heard herself say, ‘you should shave off that moustache. You’d look much better without it.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘You think so?’

The next day at work the moustache had gone. Despite the warning bells ringing in her head, Chris decided she was pleased. He did look better.

Another night at Jimmy’s, they worked a little too far through the alphabet. By the time she found herself staring down into a half-drunk glass of Sammamish Steam Ale, Chris was reconciled to leaving the car on the street and getting up early to pick it up before it got a ticket. Arjun was propped up on his elbows, staring at her tattoos. ‘They’re intense,’ he said in that odd in-between accent of his — American vowels caught between treacly Indian consonants.

‘It’s a tribal design,’ she told him.

‘Of which tribe?’

‘I don’t think it’s from anywhere, Arjun. It’s more of a generic thing. Just generically tribal.’

He considered that for a moment.

‘Didn’t your parents mind?’

‘They didn’t really have a say. I wanted to do it, so I did. End of story.’

‘But why?’

‘Why? It was something I wanted. Nic and I both got tattooed around the same time, at this place in San Francisco. The scene is really big here, Arjun. It’s a kind of a ritual act. You guys do it in India, right, the holy men or whoever…’

She trailed off. Arjun was not listening. His eyes looked glazed.

‘Who’s Nic?’ he asked.

‘I’ve told you about Nic,’ she said, but realized she hadn’t, not really.

He nodded, jutting out his bottom lip in a sagacious expression. ‘I think I need to go home.’ As he tried to stand up, he knocked his chair backwards on to the floor and staggered into the table. Beer spread across the wood-effect surface. One or two of Jimmy’s patrons turned round from the bar to watch.

Chris grabbed on to his arm. ‘Hold on there, partner. Let’s just take it one step at a time.’

There was no way he was going to make it back to Berry Acres so Chris took a blurry executive decision and steered him in the direction of her place. Nicolai wasn’t home, and she deposited Arjun on the couch in her living room while she searched out some extra bedding and drank several glasses of water, hoping to stave off the worst of the hangover which was already bearing down on her like a truck. When she went back in to check on him, he had passed out. She arranged him lengthwise, removed the sneakers from the feet dangling over the end of the couch and laid a quilt over the top like a shroud. Then she went to bed.

When Nic tumbled through the door an hour later, loaded and horny after a night out with his buddies, he made so much noise that Chris was sure Arjun would wake up. Even when the two of them went at it like teenagers, Nic yelling incomprehensible Bulgarian sexy stuff and taking her hand away from his mouth every time she tried to shut him up, there was no sound from the next room. Arjun was probably down for the count.

Unfortunately not, though he had no memory of arriving in the dark place. His head was spinning, his mouth was parched, and somewhere off to his left someone was shouting. He listened, trying to gather his consciousness into one portable bundle. There is something about the sound of other people having sex which clears the head, and little by little he was drawn through the wall towards the noises, gradually discerning ragged breathing, muffled groans and unmistakably Chris-like giggles beneath the repetitive beat of the thumping headboard. There is also something about the sound of sex which, if you are lying on a lumpy couch with the beginnings of a hangover and your feet sticking out from under a strange-smelling quilt, can induce feelings of melancholy. For a few moments Arjun contemplated the world’s colder and lonelier aspects, then blacked out into a turbulent alcoholic void.