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I was taking a Mr. P’s pepperoni pizza out of the freezer when I heard the front door slam. A moment later Dean, as my teenage son Dinesh prefers to be addressed, sauntered into the kitchen.

“Hi, Mom!” he said, running his hands through his hair which, since his latest visit to the barber, stands up like the bristles of a scrubbing brush.

The last of the sun glinted on his stud earring, making me blink. He was wearing his favorite T-shirt, black, with MEGADETH slashed across it in bloodred letters. I tried not to sigh. At least he wasn’t wearing his other favorite, in purple and neon pink, bearing the legend Suicidal Tendencies.

“Gourmet pizza again, I see.” Now the sun glinted on his teeth as well.

I didn’t know exactly how to read that smile—so many things were different about Dinesh in the last eleven months, since his father left. “Is that OK with you?” I asked, feeling a little guilty. “Shall I fix you something else?”

“Nah, don’t bother, pizza’s fine with me.” He shrugged, beginning to turn away.

“Dinesh …” I started, then broke off. I wanted to run my hand along the roughness of his cheek, to ask him, like I used to, to tell me all about his day. But the old words and gestures seemed somehow inadequate.

He gave me a quick, inquiring look over his shoulder. But when I said nothing more, he loped off down the corridor to the master bedroom where he now slept, calling, See you in a bit. In a few minutes, through the closed door, the cacophonous pounding of hard rock filled the house.

Dinesh had moved into the master bedroom a few days after the divorce papers were served. In a way, I’d been happy that he wanted to. I’d hoped it meant that he was beginning to accept the situation. The room had been lying empty, and it gave him a place to set up his musical equipment. At times I wonder, though, what he does in there when he’s not playing his CDs or practicing his electric guitar, when I don’t hear the rise and fall of his voice on the phone, the short, self-conscious laugh that means (I think) that a girl is at the other end. The nights when sleep eludes me, I sometimes stand in the passage and watch the thin strip of light that shows from under the door he always locks religiously behind him. I picture him lying awake on the big queen bed that used to belong to his father and me, and I want so badly to knock that my arm aches all the way from my fingertips to my shoulder.

I put the pizza in the oven and began rummaging for salad material in the refrigerator, where several plastic wrapped vegetables displayed various stages of fungal growth. After a search, I managed to come up with a quarter of a tired-looking lettuce, some radishes shriveled to half their size, a passable cucumber, and a couple of tomatoes that slid around only a little inside their skins.

That wasn’t bad at all. Since Mahesh left, I hardly cook anymore, specially Indian food. I’ve decided that too much of my life has already been wasted mincing and simmering and grinding spices. I’m taking classes instead at the local college, not something fluffy like Quiltmaking or Fulfillment Through Transpersonal Communication but Library Science, which will (I hope) eventually get me a full-time job at the Sunnyvale Public Library where I now work afternoons.

The last two quarters I’ve been taking a fitness class as well. I’d like to believe this has nothing to do with Mahesh leaving. I enjoy the class. At first I’d been out of breath all the time, my body a mass of clumsy, aching muscles. But now I can do them all, the high kicks, the jumping jacks, the more elaborate routines. At night in bed I run my fingers with bitter satisfaction over the trim new fines of calf and thigh, my flat, hard stomach. A pleasant tiredness tingles in my palms, the soles of my feet. It helps me sleep, most nights. If sometimes I miss those hours in the kitchen, the late afternoon light lying golden and heavy over the aroma of garlic and fried mustard seed, I would never admit it to anyone.

I wonder if Dinesh, too, misses the curries and dals flavored with cumin and cilantro and green chilies, the puris and parathas rolled out and fried, puffing up golden brown. Nowadays he mostly eats at Burger King, where he has taken a job. Perhaps he just has more important things to miss. I don’t know. We don’t talk that much since his father moved to San Francisco, to his new life in an apartment overlooking the Bay, where he lives with Jessica, his red-haired ex-secretary.

Recently when I think of Dinesh I have a sinking feeling inside me. I tell myself that I shouldn’t be too concerned about his clothing or hairstyle, or even the long hours when he shuts himself up in his room and listens to music that sounds furious. That they’re just signs of teenage growing pains made worse by his father’s absence. But sometimes I call his name and he looks up from whatever he’s doing—not with the irritated what, Mom, that I’m used to, but with a polite, closed stranger’s face. That’s when I’m struck by fear. I realize that Dinesh is drifting from me, swept along on the current of his new life which is limpid on the surface but with a dark undertow that I, standing helplessly on some left-behind shore, can only guess at. That’s when I fix salads, lots of salads, as though the cucumbers and celery and alfalfa could protect him from failing grades, drugs, street gangs, AIDS. As though the translucent rings of onions and the long curls of carrots could forge a chain that would hold him to me, close, safe forever.

When the phone rang, I didn’t bother to stop slicing. I knew Dinesh would pick it up. All the calls are for him anyway. But then I heard him open his door and yell, above the din of the stereo, “It’s for you, Mom.”

“Ask who it is,” I shouted back without interest. I’ve cut myself off from most of the friends of our married days. At first I tried attending a few affairs, dinners and pujas and graduation parties for children going on to Stanford or Harvard. But I’d be the only woman in the room without a husband, and the other wives, even those too well bred to whisper, would look at me with pity, as though at something maimed, an animal with a limb chopped off. Behind the pity would be a flicker of gratitude that it hadn’t happened to them, or a gleam of suspicion because now I was unattached and therefore dangerous.

It’s probably another real estate agent, I said to myself as I started chopping the rusty edges off the lettuce, asking if we wanted to sell the house. They must subscribe to some kind of a divorce gazette, the way they’d descended on me in droves even before the legal settlements were complete, all of them speaking in exactly the same pinched-polite voice that makes me tense up even now. Those first couple of months, after the third or fourth call of the day, I’d be in tears. Remembering, I brought the knife down hard on the lettuce and watched with satisfaction as brown pieces flew out.

Eventually, of course, I will have to let the house go. The alimony payments from Mahesh are fair, and there’s my part-time job, but the money’s still not enough and every month I have to dip into my savings. “Why don’t you move to an apartment, Asha,” my supervisor keeps telling me. “It’d be a lot cheaper and you wouldn’t have to fight the memories.” She’s right. But Dinesh has lived in this house all his life. I feel that if I can hold on to it until he graduates, a year longer (eleven more payments, to be exact), I will have made up to him partly for my failure to hold on to his father. But perhaps once again I am mistaken in thinking that this matters to him.

“It’s someone called Marina-something. You going to pick it up or what?” Dinesh sounded irritated. He dislikes anyone disturbing him when he’s listening to his music. “Says she’s calling from England.”

I didn’t know a Marina. I didn’t know anyone, in fact, who lived in England. But I hurried to the phone guiltily, the way I always do when I know it’s long distance.

“Asha!” The woman at the other end sounded tantalizingly familiar. She spoke with the clipped British accent of affluent Indians educated at convent schools run by foreign nuns. “It’s Mrinalini!” She paused, confident of being recognized. Who … ? Then it struck me. How could I have not known, even for a moment, even though I hadn’t heard her voice in years? Because it was Mrinalini Ghose, who had been my classmate and best friend and confidante and competitor all through my growing-up years.

“Mrinal!” I whispered into the phone, and a mix of happiness and sorrow swept over me, making me dizzy. “How are you? What are you doing in England?” I spoke in Bengali, stumbling a little over the intimate tui I hadn’t used for so long. Were scenes flashing through her head, the way they were through mine? Our secret visits to the Maidan fair where we’d gorge ourselves on the fried onion pakoras that I could smell even now. All those nights I’d slept over at her house, in the big mahogany four-poster bed with the curved lion paws, both of us whispering and giggling for hours after the ayah turned the lights off. (About what? I couldn’t remember. It seemed unbelievable that once I’d stayed up half the night just to talk.) Every year before our final exams, we’d meet at her house—which was larger and quieter than mine—to study. We’d recite the names of the major rulers of the Mughal dynasty to each other, or list the metaphors in Hamlet’s To be or not to be speech, while the cook brought up yet another pot of ginger tea which she had brewed specially for us because it was supposed to clear the brain. “I can’t read another line,” I’d tell her when I left. “I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.” But once home, I’d force myself to stay awake and study some more because I wanted so much to beat her. Most times, though, she ended up with the higher rank. Maybe she was just smarter. Or maybe she too stayed up and studied after I left.

She had been sent by her computer firm in Bombay, Mrinal said, to attend a technology transfer conference in London. She was coming to another one in San Francisco next week. That’s why she was calling.

“We’ve got to get together, Asha! I haven’t seen you in ages. I’m dying to meet Mahesh, too—the time I saw him at your wedding was so brief, it doesn’t really count. And your son—so handsome, just like his father. Of course, I’ve seen so many photos over the years I feel I know them already. …”

I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cold white of the wall. The traditional Indian words of hospitality crowded my mouth. It’ll be so wonderful to see you after all these years. You must stay with us, of course. I knew they were what Mrinal expected. But I couldn’t say them.

The day my marriage had been arranged, halfway through my second year of college, I’d called Mrinal. I remembered it perfectly, a dim monsoon afternoon with gray-bellied clouds grazing the tops of the tall office buildings in the distance, and a salty, sulphur smell in the air, like lightning. Excited, I’d stumbled over the words as I told her how handsome my husband-to-be was, what a good job he had, how I would be moving to California to live with film stars. Under the excitement had been a secret triumph that I’d been the one to be chosen first, that I, who everyone said wasn’t as pretty, was going to be married before Mrinal.

Mrinal had listened in silence for a while. Then in a quiet voice she asked, “Is this what you really want, Asha? It’s a big decision. You don’t even know him—you’ve only met him once.”

“What’s all this westernized nonsense about only meeting him once?” I snapped. Part of my anger came from disappointment. I had wanted so much to impress her with my news. “This is how it’s always been done, especially in traditional families like ours.” My voice sounded prim and pinched and terribly old-fashioned. I knew Mrinal was thinking of all our rebellious conversations about love and romance and choosing our life partners. But they’d only been foolish adolescent fancies, with no connection to our real fives. “Your mother got married this way, and so did mine. And they’re perfectly happy.”

“Yes, but our mothers didn’t even complete high school. Times have changed, and so have we.” Mrinal spoke in a maddeningly equable voice. “I wouldn’t be in such a hurry if I were you.”

“Oh, really?” my growing temper made me sarcastic. “And what would madam do?”

“I’d wait awhile, finish college, get a job maybe. Don’t you remember how we always used to talk about the importance of women being financially independent?”

“No, I don’t,” I lied.

“Ashoo!” Mrinal said reproachfully. Then she added, “And you write so well, too. Professor Sharma always says how you have the makings of a novelist.”

“And besides,” I said, choosing to ignore her last comment, “who says I can’t be financially independent after marriage?”

“All I’m saying is, I’d learn a bit more about the world and what I wanted out of it before I tied myself down….” The pleading note in her voice frightened me. I didn’t want to hear any more.

“Well, I’m not you, thank God,” I’d shouted and slammed down the phone.

We’d made up of course, and Mrinal had helped with all the wedding preparations—buying saris, making invitation lists, choosing luggage for the journey. On the morning of the wedding, she’d done my hair over and over while I wailed that each style made me look uglier. When it was time for me to leave with my new husband, we’d clung to each other, promising to be friends forever. But throughout—even as, exchanging the fragrant red-and-white wedding garlands, Mahesh’s hand had brushed my throat, sending a shiver through me—I was wondering whether I’d been too hasty, whether I’d made the wrong decision. Whether Mrinal had won again after all.

Now, with the phone pressing its coldness against my ear, I heard Mrinal’s voice, tiny, metallic, a little disappointed, asking if I was still there, if I was all right.

“Of course I am,” I said, forcing a laugh and switching to English, which seemed a more appropriate language for lying. “I was just checking the calendar. It’s really hectic for us all next week. Mahesh’s going to be out of town till Friday. They’re sending him to Philadelphia to straighten out some R and D projects. Dinesh is busy Mondays and Wednesdays with his karate, Tuesday he has Toastmasters,” (I was improvising wildly by now) “he’s the youngest member, you know, Thursday …”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement in the kitchen. It was Dinesh, checking on the pizza. He glared at me. My voice faltered, but I couldn’t stop now. “I can’t quite read what he’s written here—maybe volunteer work at El Camino Hospital. I’m pretty tied up, too…. What a pity, if only you’d let me know earlier. …”

“Ashoo, don’t tell me you’re too busy to see me!” said Mrinal, calling me by my special name that only she used. I could hear the hurt in her voice. “I found out about the U.S. conference just before I left India. I was so busy running around trying to get a visa that I didn’t have a chance to call. But I’ve been thinking about you all the way to London.”

Something twisted inside me then, like it was breaking, and I knew I’d have to meet her. The knowledge filled me with excitement and dread. “I’ll cancel something,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“What’s all this shit about me and karate?” Dinesh burst out even before I’d replaced the receiver. “And Toastmasters—Toastmasters, give me a break!” I could see an artery pulsing in his temple. He’s inherited that from Mahesh. “I’m not good enough for your friend just the way I am, is that it? And why’d you have to lie to her about him”—he wouldn’t use his father’s name—“being out of town on business.” He imitated my Indian accent, thickening it in exaggeration. “Why couldn’t you just tell her the fucking truth—that he got tired of you and left you for another woman.”

That’s when I slapped him. It shocked us both, the action, the way it happened, involuntarily almost, while a part of me was still trying to fathom the depths of hurt and rage from which his words had erupted. I’d rarely hit Dinesh when he was growing up, he’d always been such an obedient boy. What frightened me now was that I’d wanted to hurt him, that I’d put all the strength in me behind that swing of the arm. We stood there facing each other, my palm ringing with the impact, a splotch of red spreading over his cheek. I wanted to throw my arms around him and cry for what I’d just done, but all I could say, even though I knew it was totally wrong, was “never use that word in front of me again.”

Dinesh’s hands curled into fists like he wanted to hit me back, and I wondered wildly what I would do if he did, but all he said in a cold voice that went through me like a knife was “you make me sick.”

“You make me sick, too,” I heard myself yell as he slammed the bedroom door. “Just remember, I’m not the only one your father left when he moved out. I didn’t hear him asking you along, Mr. Smart-ass!”

And then I was so ashamed that I did feel sick. I went into the bathroom and tried to throw up, but nothing happened and I felt worse. I sat on the toilet seat for a while, trying to figure out how my life, which had seemed perfect a year ago, had turned into such a mess. When I came out, the smell reminded me of the pizza in the oven, by now a charred black mass. I threw it into the garbage and went to bed.

Dinesh was avoiding me. He left the house early each day—even on the weekend—and came back late, when he was sure I’d be asleep. In the mornings I’d go to the kitchen and find the dinners I fixed for him the night before still sitting on the stove top, untouched. When I lifted the lid, the congealed food would give out the faintly sweet odor of rot.

One Friday night, determined to talk to him, I waited up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say—something to explain my long and complicated relationship with Mrinal, maybe something to assure him I loved him just as he was. It had been a humid afternoon, the still, sticky air hard to breathe. I hurried home from work and then spent the rest of the day in the kitchen making kachuris, which have always been Dinesh’s favorite dish. For hours I stuffed the dough with the spicy crushed peas, rolling out the perfect circles, sliding them into the hot oil, and lifting them out when they were just the right golden color. Once in a while I would brush a floury hand across my sweating forehead, wondering if I was going about it all wrong.

In the evening, unexpectedly, it rained. I opened all the windows and the cool smell of wet earth filtered into the house. I felt a sudden happiness—though surely I had no reason for it—a sudden hope that things might turn out all right. I lay down on the sofa in the dark to wait for Dinesh, and when I fell asleep I had a dream. In the dream his face came to me. Not as it is now, with his earring and his mutilated hair and the anger wrenching at the sides of his mouth, but his baby face with its silky unlined glow. The way he slept on his side, his plaid blanket clutched in his fist, his pursed mouth making little sucking movements. The way his eyes would dart under his thin lids when he was dreaming. It was such a clear image that I could smell the milk-smell of him, and the side of my neck tingled where he always rubbed his face after I had nursed him.

The slamming of the door woke me. Then I heard his footsteps receding down the darkened passage toward his room.

“Dinesh,” I called.

He didn’t reply, but the footsteps stopped.

I hurried to the passage, groping for the fight switch. “Dinesh, I made some kachuris. I thought we could have dinner together.” Where was that switch?

“I ate out….” Already his shadowy silhouette was turning away.

“Dinoo,” I called desperately, using his baby name though I knew it was the wrong thing to do. “Dinoo, I’m sorry for what happened.” You shouldn’t have to apologize, a voice inside my head scolded. You’re the parent. And besides, he started it. I ignored the voice. “I want …”

“Spare me!” Dinesh said, holding up his hand, just as I finally found the switch. In the sudden flood of harsh yellow light, his expression was so forbiddingly adult, so like his father’s, that it hit me harder than any physical blow. I stood in silence and watched my son walk away from me until the bedroom door shut behind him with a final, decisive click.

*  *  *  *  *

Rummaging through my closet, I tried to figure out what to wear. In two hours I was supposed to meet Mrinal for dinner on the top floor of the Hyatt in San Francisco, (“my treat,” she had insisted, fortunately) and nothing I owned seemed right. In the afternoon sun that slatted through the blinds, the silk saris seemed either garish or old-fashioned. The kurtas looked drab. I didn’t have any fancy western clothes because Mahesh had never liked how they looked on me. I wished I could ask Dinesh for advice, but since the night of the kachuris we hadn’t spoken to each other.

It had been a summer day just like this one when Mahesh told me he was leaving. I’d been sifting through clothes, trying to decide what to wear to the Kapoors’ twenty-fifth anniversary celebration that night, while he sat on the bed, looking out the window.

“Which do you like better?” I’d asked, holding up a cream-and-orange sari and a blue kurta with silver flowers. Mahesh liked to choose my outfits when we went out. He knew exactly what made me look my best.

But on this day he kept staring at the lawn as though he hadn’t heard me. He’d been this way a lot lately, preoccupied. Worrying about work, I thought. But when I’d ask him if everything was OK at the office, he always said yes.

I asked him again which outfit he wanted me to wear.

“I don’t care,” he replied in a voice that didn’t sound like his. “I can’t take this anymore, Asha.”

All his life, he told me then, he’d been doing what other people wanted, being a dutiful son, then a responsible husband and father. Now he’d finally found someone who made him feel alive, happy. He wanted the chance to really live his life before it was too late.

I remembered how calm I’d felt as I listened to him. Calm and mildly curious. Because of course this wasn’t really happening to me. Besides, I had a host of pictures inside my head to prove him wrong—Mahesh smiling into my eyes on our honeymoon in Kashmir, the night water shimmering beyond our houseboat on Dal Lake; Mahesh and I looking down at the tiny scrunched-up face of our new baby, then catching each other’s eye and breaking into the tremulous laughter of disbelief; all of us crowded into our bed Saturday morning, watching Bugs Bunny. And just the other day we had gone to buy a brand-new red Mazda Miata, father and son assuring me that a two-seater was not impractical, Dinesh excited, laughing, asking, Can I drive this as soon as I get my license?

“Haven’t you been happy with us, ever?” I’d asked, my voice even.

“I thought I had,” Mahesh had said. “I hadn’t known what real happiness was then.”

Now, as I noted how the dust motes hung in the sunlit air exactly like on that day, how the jasmines outside smelled the same, I feared that Mrinal would be wearing the latest fashions. Even when we’d been dependent on the meager pocket money our parents doled out, she’d had a flair for colors and styles. She’d go down to Maidan market and buy remnants from the wholesalers that sat outside with their bales of tie-dye cottons and silks, and then she’d create the most clever designs around the scraps she’d bought. And now that she was a top-level executive, she took good care of herself, as I could tell from the photos she sent me infrequently but regularly along with hastily scribbled notes that said she was thinking of me. The photos were of vacations in choice spots such as the Ooty hills or the beach at Kanyakumari where the three oceans meet. They hinted at glamour and allurement. In the latest one, sent a year ago, Mrinal was wearing a midnight-blue silk kameez with a daring scooped neck and golden chappals on her feet. She was leaning lightly against a good-looking man. The marble domes of the Taj Mahal shimmered in the background.

Sometimes, privately, I wondered how Mrinal felt about not being married. Surely she experienced some regret at family gatherings when sisters and cousins paraded their offspring and boasted about their husbands? But when I re-examined the photos where she posed against a fresco in the Ajanta caves or waved elegantly from the deck of a cruise ship with her direct, open smile, my doubts faded. She has the perfect existence—money, freedom, admiration, I would say to myself enviously, suddenly wanting it for myself, and she doesn’t have to worry about pleasing anyone. Underneath my envy, though, I was happy for her. Whenever my own life depressed me with its clutter and its ordinariness, I took a strange solace in thinking of Mrinal’s, which seemed to me to be fashioned with the same clean, confident strokes with which she had once designed her clothes.

I’d been hard put to match Mrinal’s photos, but I’d done my best with pictures of the Yosemite falls and the Golden Gate Bridge. I, too, accompanied my photos with hastily scribbled notes, though I could easily have found the time to write a letter. But somehow that would have been like admitting that my life, less busy than hers, was also less successful. After I received the Taj Mahal picture, I’d asked a friend to come over and take a picture of the three of us in our new Mazda. I still had a copy of that photo, Mahesh and myself sitting in front with the top down while Dinesh leaned against a car door, elegant as any model. I remember looking at the photo and thinking how much I loved father and son. How they seemed as much a part of me as my own body, so that I couldn’t imagine a life, ever, without either of them. Wish you could come see us, I had written gaily, unthinkingly, across the back of the copy I’d had enlarged for Mrinal before I slipped it into the envelope.

I’d fought the divorce every way I knew—reasoned, pleaded, tried the silent treatment, cooked Mahesh’s favorite meals. I’d even bought myself a gauzy black negligee from Victoria’s Secret. I’d taken a long time in the bathroom that night, brushing my hair till it shone down my back, rubbing lavender oil on my wrists and throat, trying different lipsticks. When I stepped out, Mahesh had looked up from the journal he’d been reading in bed. He’d taken off his glasses and rubbed tiredly at the corners of his eyes.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Asha,” he had said. The sadness in his voice had been worse than anger, or even contempt.

That was the night he had moved out.

Now, as I dressed myself slowly in a raw-silk salwaar-kameez that I hoped looked smart without being gaudy, I tried to figure out what I was going to tell Mrinal tonight. But all I could think about were the dark circles under my eyes that my makeup didn’t quite hide, the tell-tale streaks of recent gray in my hair.

“This way, please.”

The maître d’, a tall man in an intimidating black-and-white tuxedo, wove his way smoothly through the crowded restaurant. My legs trembled a little as I followed him. I was still tense from the drive. I wasn’t used to negotiating city traffic, and the ten-year-old Chevy that I drove (Mahesh had taken the Miata when he left) hadn’t helped matters. The plush burgundy carpet into which my feet sank, the tinkle of silverware and sophisticated laughter, the flash of a bracelet or a discreet tie pin, the gleam of a bare shoulder, of a wineglass held up to the light—all increased my discomfort. My experience with restaurants was limited to infrequent visits, when Dinesh was little, to Chuck E. Cheese, where we shouted out our orders to the sweaty, aproned pizza chef over the excited shrieks of children and the clang of pinball machines. Or, as he grew older, to the neighborhood Shanghai Eat-Here-or-Take-Out, where the sticky odor of chili-sesame oil hovered over orange Formica tables. As I awkwardly followed the maître d’ I knew I didn’t belong here, and that every person in the room, without needing to look at me, knew it too.

Then I saw her. She was sitting at a window table, facing away from me. I stopped, in spite of the maître d’s questioning look. I wanted a moment to compose myself, to observe her before she knew I was there. Perhaps I was hoping to learn, from her unguarded posture, something that would give me an advantage in our coming meeting. Outside, the Bay Bridge strung itself over the water, a glimmering necklace of light. The evening was so clear that one could see all the way across to where the bell tower of Berkeley pierced the dark like an illuminated needle. But Mrinal wasn’t looking at the view. Instead she stared down at her hands. I tried to read the slope of her shoulders, the curve of her cheek. I wanted—I admit it—to discover a secret sorrow, perhaps a weariness with life. But all I could see was the easy grace with which she held her body, like always.

She must have sensed my presence, because she turned. When she saw me, a smile of such pleasure crossed her face that I felt ashamed of having spied on her.

“Ashoo dear, how lovely you look!” She rose and hugged me tight to her. “You’re a lot slimmer than in the photo you sent me last year!” I could smell her perfume, something musky and expensive. Behind her shoulder the sparkling skyline of the city changed slowly as the restaurant revolved. Mrinal’s face sparkled too. She had on a glittery foundation and just the right amount of mascara, and she looked a lot younger than her age, which, like mine, was thirty-eight. She was wearing a maroon off-the-shoulder tunic with narrow churidar pants, a chic blend of East and West. It was perfect for her.

“I can’t tell you how much I’ve looked forward to this!” Mrinal laughed out loud. It was a glad, full-throated sound, uncaring of being overheard, just the way I remembered it. “How many years has it been? Almost twenty? There’s so much you can’t write, that you have to share face-to-face….” She held my hands in hers and, looking down, I saw the polished ovals of nails the exact maroon of her outfit. A diamond glittered on her ring finger.

“You look lovely, too,” I said, making an effort to smile back. There was a heaviness in my chest. I couldn’t tell if it was dejection or envy. “Yes! There’s tons of news to catch up on! But first, tell me about that divine ring! Could it be an engagement? Is there a lucky man waiting somewhere?” My voice sounded coy and false even to my ears.

“No,” said Mrinal. A shadow seemed to flit across her face, but perhaps I was only seeing what I wanted to see. “Do you like it? I bought it in London this time. A sort of be-good-to-myself gift.”

I was impressed, more than if a man had given her the ring. Mrinal and I had both been brought up by mothers who believed that women should be happy with whatever their men decided they ought to have. A woman who grasped things for herself, we had heard over and over, was greedy. Selfish. The most expensive thing I’d bought for myself in my entire life had been a bottle of Chantilly perfume, $19.99, at Ross’s Dress for Less. It had taken me twenty minutes of feeling guilty in front of the fragrance counter before I paid for it, and then I’d justified it by reminding myself that Mahesh’s company’s Christmas party, which I was expected to attend, was coming up. I wanted to tell Mrinal that it was great that she had been able to overcome our childhood conditioning, but the waitress was asking us what we would like to drink.

“How about two vodka martinis, shaken not stirred?” Mrinal smiled. “Remember?”

I nodded. We’d been avid James Bond fans all through high school, fascinated by his violent, magical world—so different from ours—of golden guns and intricate machines and bikini-clad beauties. If we ever escaped our conservative, teetotaler parents, we had vowed, if we ever made it to the promised land, England maybe, or America, we would celebrate by drinking Bond’s special drink.

“Do you know, I never did try one all these years,” I said. “Mahesh”—it was not impossible to say his name, after all—“only likes wines.”

The waitress was putting our drinks on the table. She wore a short black skirt and a sequined halter top. Her red hair fell in flipped layers to her shoulders. I tried not to think of Jessica.

“Oh yes,” Mrinal was saying as she raised her drink to her lips. “Mahesh. Tell me all about the mysterious and romantic Mahesh!” She drank deftly, tilting the glass as though the gesture was an old, accustomed one. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am at not meeting him. And your charming son, too.”

The floor tilted and spun. Maybe it was the martini, bitter and burning on my tongue, making me cough. Another disappointment. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth. The words poured out, all the right ones. It wasn’t difficult at all.

“You’re so lucky,” Mrinal said when I finished talking. She was pleating and unpleating the edge of her napkin, and this time there really was a shadow in her gaze. It spilled into the hollows underneath her eyes. “You don’t know how lucky you are, Ashoo, to have such a loving, considerate husband, such a good, responsible son.”

“But you’re lucky, too,” I said, a little surprised at her vehemence. “You’re doing so well in your career, traveling whenever you want, moving up in the company, never having to worry about money. You’re so much prettier than me, there must be dozens of men dying to marry you. Sometimes I wish I could change places …” I stopped, unwilling to divulge my fantasies.

Mrinal sat silent for a moment, looking down at her ring, twisting the diamond around to catch the light. Then she said, “You’re right. There’s a lot in my life that I’m proud of. The freedom. The power. Walking into a room full of men knowing none of them can push me around. Seeing the reluctant admiration in their eyes when I close a tough deal.” She spoke slowly, consideringly. “It’s what I always wanted. I’d never give it up to dwindle into a wife, like that woman—what was her name—said in that play we studied in Lit class.”

Dwindle. I tried not to flinch at the word. I remembered the woman who said that, Miramante in Congreve’s Way of the World. We had studied her speech together after class, Mrinal and I, sitting in the back of the college library, underlining our favorite lines and repeating them to each other. Her words had seemed so spirited and clever in that musty hall hung with dim oil paintings of old dead men, founders and principals, who stared down disapprovingly at our excited, laughing faces.

“The truth is not as simple as we thought then,” I said, sighing.

“I know.” Mrinal sighed too. “Some mornings when I wake up I don’t want to open my eyes. I know exactly how everything will be—the color-coordinated bedspread and carpet and curtains and cushions….”

“Mrinal, please,” I interrupted urgently. Somehow it was very important that she not say any more.

But she went on, inexorable. “… the four-foot-high TV, the stereo speakers in the corners, the hanging plants placed just right, the bright light falling on it all …”

She ground her knuckles into her eyes and when she brought them away her mascara was smudged. I stared at her. It was the first time I’d seen Mrinal cry.

“I was going to pretend everything was fine,” she said. “I wanted you to admire me, envy me. That old competition thing. But when I heard you talking about your husband and your son”—her voice faltered on the word—”when I saw the love shining in your face, I couldn’t keep it up.”

The tears made black streaks down her cheeks. She wept like she laughed, unashamedly, without reserve. I wanted to go around to her side of the table and hold her. I wanted to weep like that too, to confess. But it was as though I were trapped deep inside something, a tunnel perhaps, or a well, with all that dark, cold water pressing down on me. So I sat there, silent, while Mrinal wiped her eyes and apologized for creating a scene, saying she didn’t know what got into her. And then it was too late.

“I’m happy for you, Ashoo, I really am,” she said when we kissed each other goodbye. “Take good care of those two wonderful guys that God has given you.”

*  *  *  *  *

When I pull into the garage late in the night, I use the remote to shut the garage door behind me as I always do, but I don’t switch the engine off right away. I sit with the window open in the old brown Chevy, picking at the cracked vinyl of the dashboard, listening to the familiar, comforting thrum. The events of the evening replay themselves in my head, over and over. In the back of my mind a small, seductive thought swims in and out of focus: how easy it would be to just sit here until the fumes fill my lungs. I close my eyes and see the gray, gauze-like smoke drifting gently into the cavities inside me, taking over.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting in the garage. There’s a sweet, heavy smell in the car now. It laps at me, rises past my hips and breasts and mouth to my eyes. And I’m crying—all those tears I didn’t shed when Mahesh left, and when Dinesh turned away from me down that harshly lit night corridor. I’m crying for Mrinal in her spacious bed in her luxury apartment, lying alone for the rest of her life, and for myself, who will probably do the same. But most of all I’m crying because I feel like a child who picks up a fairy doll she’s always admired from afar and discovers that all its magic glitter is really painted clay. Somehow believing in Mrinal’s happiness, thinking that unregretful lives like hers were possible, had made it easier to bear my individual sorrows. What would I live on, now that I knew perfection was only a mirage?

The smell is heavier now. I can feel it in my pores. It begins to layer itself over my skin, thick and glistening as oil. It’s getting harder to think. I need to wait only a little longer for it to cover me completely.

But I know that’s not the answer. Not that I’m sure of what the answer is, of even if there is one. I just know I must turn off the engine before I’m no longer able to. I reach for the key, but I can’t see it. I grope in the dark, viscous swirl that has opened up around the steering wheel, and for a panicked moment I think I’ll never find it. But then it presses its metallic coolness into my palm, precise and reassuringly solid in a world of amorphous shapes. I twist it sharply and stumble from the car toward the switch that will open the garage door. In the new silence my coughs are a sharp, tearing sound, loud enough, I think, to wake the neighbors. When the garage door rumbles open, I am almost surprised to find no one waiting outside, robed and belligerent, armed with questions.

“Mom.”

The voice from behind startles me. I swing around to face it and am struck by a sudden dizziness. The floor beneath my feet is rippling treacherously, preparing to dissolve.

“Do you feel OK?” Dinesh’s hands grip my upper arms. His fingers are strong and confident with youth. “Mom, are you drunk?”

I can’t focus too well on his face, but I hear the shock in his voice and beneath it a surprisingly prim note of disapproval. It makes him sound almost … motherly. I want to laugh. But then he sniffs, and his face changes, its features wavering as though seen through water. “What’s with all the fumes in the garage? Mom, what were you doing?”

His voice shakes a little on the last word. I notice with surprise that he’s wearing a blue pajama outfit that I bought him sometime back. Along with his tousled hair, it makes him look unexpectedly young. Afraid of what I might say.

I want to respond with something positive and significant, perhaps something about how I love him too much to abandon him no matter how enticing suicide might seem. I want to hold him tight like I used to when he was little and there had been a thunderstorm. But all I can manage is to whisper, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Whoa, wait till I get you to the bathroom,” Dinesh says. He wedges a shoulder into my armpit and half drags, half carries me to the sink—so dexterously that I wonder if he’s done it before, and for whom. He holds my head while I bend over the sink, retching, and when I’m done, he wipes my face carefully with a wet towel. Even after he finishes, I keep my eyes tightly shut.

“Be back in a minute,” he says. He shuts the bathroom door—an act of kindness, I think—behind him.

In the mirror my face is blotched, my eyes swollen. I stare into them, feeling like a complete failure. I’ve lost my husband and betrayed my friend, and now to top it all I’ve vomited all over the sink in my son’s presence. I think of how hard I always tried to be the perfect wife and mother, like the heroines of mythology I grew up on—patient, faithful Sita, selfless Kunti. For the first time it strikes me that perhaps Mahesh had a similar image in his head. Perhaps he fled from us because he wanted a last chance to be the virile Arjun, the mighty Bhim. And for a moment I feel a sadness for him, because he’s going to realize it too, soon enough—perhaps one morning when he wakes up in bed next to Jessica, or as he throws her a sidelong glance while maneuvering the Mazda into a parking spot—that the perfect life is only an illusion.

Dinesh is back, with a red plastic tumbler which he fills with water. “Drink this,” he says in a tone I myself might have used when he was a sick child. I raise the tumbler obediently to my mouth. The water is warm and tastes of toothpaste. Even without looking at him, I can feel him watching me, waiting for some kind of explanation. I can feel, too, the fear still rising from him, can almost see it, like the waves of heat that shimmer off summer pavements at noon. But I can’t think of a single thing to say. So I stand there under the loud, accusing whirr of the bathroom fan, staring at the worry line gouging Dinesh’s brow (he’s got that from me), running my finger along the edge of the empty plastic tumbler.

Slowly an image takes shape somewhere behind the stinging in my eyes. It is so disconnected from what’s going on that I think I’m hallucinating from all the carbon monoxide. It’s a fired clay bowl, of all things, simple and unadorned, its glaze the muted brown of fallen leaves. For a moment I’m confused, then I recall that I saw a slide of it in my spring Art Appreciation class, I’ve forgotten the time period and the potter’s name, though I know he was someone old and famous. I turn the bowl around and around in my mind till I come upon what I’m looking for, a small snag on the paper-thin lip, and I hear again the teacher’s nasal New York accent telling us that this was the master potter’s signature, a flaw he left in all his later works, believing that it made them more human and therefore more precious.

“Mom!” Dinesh’s voice breaks through my thoughts. There’s an anxious edge to his voice. I realize he’s been asking me something for a while.

“Sony,” I say.

“I said, how did your evening go?”

I pause for a moment, tempted. Then I say, grimacing, “I made a mess of things.” I’m surprised by the lightness the admission brings. In the rush of it, I daringly add, “I’ll tell you about it if you want. I could make us some hot pista milk. …” I reach out to draw him to me, a little afraid that he will pull away, will say, Nah, Mom, I got stuff to do. But he lowers his head so that his bristly hair tickles my cheek and gives me a quick, awkward hug.

“Sounds OK to me.” He is smiling now, just a little. “Hey, Mom, you haven’t made pista milk in a long time.”

Later I stand over the stove, stirring the blended pistachios into the simmering milk, watching with wonder as it thickens beautifully. I know there will be other fights, other hurtful words we’ll fling at each other, perhaps even tonight. Other times when I sit in the car, listening to the engine’s seductive purr. Still, I take from the living-room cabinet two of the Rosenthal crystal glasses Mahesh gave me for our tenth anniversary, and when the creamy milk cools, pour it into them.

Tomorrow I’ll start a letter to Mrinal.

The glasses glitter like hope. We raise them to each other solemnly, my son and I, and drink to our precious, imperfect fives.