David steadfastly refused to abandon his project. He wanted more than ever to crack into Mrs. Shah’s world. There was something in her that he recognized: the way she walked, the little regard she had for the neighborhood, or for the particulars of the street, or for him, planted somewhere along her short path from train to apartment. That invisibility is not me, he reasoned. It is her. He didn’t know what part of India Reena’s family was from, but it was, he imagined, nothing like this. It was not squat gray buildings. It was not the south edge of Harlem. It was not kids in oversize black jackets huddled on corners, or the boom-bip of a snare drum escaping from the window of a Jeep. It was not lazy Spanish in bodegas, or Goya beans, or storefront windows that bathed cell phones in green neon light. It was not Malian women standing by the train, offering to braid hair with nimble fingers. Wherever Mrs. Shah was from had none of these things. And so, Mrs. Shah could walk through it, as if in a fog, and not see it, and not care; and David could smile and nod a hundred times, and never be seen. Her husband was dead. Reena was the only real person in her city.
The first snow fell and melted into black-brown sludge, piling icy and unclean in the city’s gutters. On a Thursday afternoon, David waited for Mrs. Shah. He sat on the front step of the building, holding a stack of books and folders full of papers. The director had assigned social work readings for an upcoming staff development day. Upstairs, Reena was yellow and sick, drowsy with pills. She complained that the medicine was making her gain weight. David pretended not to have noticed.
The block was quiet, in its winter grays. At the bottom of the hill, Mrs. Shah emerged from the train station. David gathered his things and made his way down the hill to meet her. To walk by her. He would make eye contact this time. He would nod. He would offer to carry her bag for her. The sidewalk was slippery. David wiggled his toes inside his boots. And Mrs. Shah trudged slowly up the block, arms empty, wearing a grim, determined expression, as if fighting the cold. These were sad visits. She was wrapped in a black wool coat, her head covered by a bright orange scarf. She looked straight ahead.
Halfway down the block, David felt the helplessness of that moment just before one is ignored. It stung. Reena, he felt certain, would kill him for what he was about to do, but, in any case, it was done: a few feet in front of Reena’s mother, David pretended to stumble and then, despite himself, he did. He lost his balance on the slick pavement. His books and papers spilled everywhere. He slid back until he was down, ass on the cold, wet sidewalk, Mrs. Shah standing over him. He was out of breath. He looked her in the eye.
“Young man,” Mrs. Shah said, with a look of surprise and worry, “are you all right?”
He’d crossed some line. She seemed genuinely concerned, more than simply polite. She would remember his face. She looked as he imagined Reena’s mother should: with Reena’s deep brown eyes, her full lips, her delicate nose. Mrs. Shah was a little darker than her daughter, who was a bit darker than David. She smiled kindly, the lines on her face deeper and more noticeable than when he had last seen her. She had aged in these months, carrying the burden of her daughter’s illness.
Mrs. Shah asked again, “Are you all right?” She offered him a hand.
“Me? Oh yes,” David said. “Tik. I’m fine.”
“Sorry?”
“Tik,” he repeated. He hadn’t expected to fall. He’d only wanted to drop the books. He felt his palms sweating on the inside of his gloves. “I’m fine.”
By the look of befuddlement on Mrs. Shah’s face, David knew he had gone too far. She would mention it to Reena. Tik. It would become a question. She would want to know what was going on. “Thank you,” David said as Reena’s mother passed him a book. She stood there, watching him as he stacked his things on the sidewalk.
“Thank you,” he said again, then he took his books and papers under his arm and barreled down the hill toward the train.
When they met and started dating, Reena often described the situation ironically: a bind, she said, a circumstance. A context. They talked for hours and hurt themselves laughing. Her situation didn’t change or go away; they simply chose to ignore it. There was no logic to it, no forward thinking: they had no other choice.
Fathers are worse, Reena had said. They’re rock, unmovable stone, bulwarks of tradition. Fathers are more protective of daughters, less understanding, have more invested in the idea of good marriages. Mothers want sons so they can browbeat their daughters-in-law one day, the way they themselves were tormented by their mothers-in-law years before. In fact, everyone wants sons. Daughters: they should marry well and early, avoiding the Western problems of dating, boyfriends, and sex. Prospective husbands: caste matters less than profession. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, in that order. Reena claimed not to know which caste her parents were from. She said it exactly that way, with those words—my parents are from—because she didn’t belong to any caste at all. She was American. A Desi, but still American. I’m both, she said. I was raised this way. They would find her a husband. It wasn’t foreign or strange. It simply was.
“But,” she said to David once, “you could almost pass, you know? You’re vaguely something.”
Ideas were being kicked around, ways to circumvent the context. David raised an eyebrow. “Pass as?”
“They’re your color in the north. With green eyes. Kashmiri. I’ve seen it.” Reena smiled mischievously. “Time to learn you some Punjabi, babe. Teach you to dance Bhangra.”
“And become an engineer.”
“Yep. Social work won’t do.”
“And I gotta rock more gold.”
“And we should clean that Spanish off you.”
They’d been dating for four and a half months when she announced she would try her mother. It surprised him. And it might have surprised her to know that, though he was touched, the first question that crossed his mind was, What will this require of me? He asked her carefully, not wanting to dissuade her, and not at all sure what any of it meant. “Why me?” he said.
“Because I love you,” she answered.
Her father he had a picture of: not well, grumpy in the face of prolonged illness, furrowed brow, deep-set eyes. Probably hated white people more than he hated blacks. At best, indifferent to Spanish folks. Dissatisfied. Nostalgic. David’s first, unspoken question grew specifically out of Reena’s description of her father. The rust-red color of his angry face. How he would disown her. Curse her. Die. Disruptions to the tranquility of the context were described in terms of international crisis areas, civil wars. A family torn asunder, a daughter abandoned, an unsuspecting boyfriend wondering what the hell happened.
Mrs. Shah was his ally against Reena’s father. She was reason, and reason would prevail. Mrs. Shah would recognize that he loved her daughter. She would be his foot in the door. That Reena would risk telling her mother anything at all touched David. It was Reena’s leap of faith.
“I like a boy,” she told her mother.
And this is what Mrs. Shah said, according to Reena: “No, you don’t. Your father is sick. It’s your last semester. You’re going to have to find a job. How can you think about a boy?”
Reena laughed when she told him, recounting the whole incident with an amused smile. Cluelessness. Foreignness. Her poor mother. David felt disappointment and relief in equal parts. He bristled at the notion of being called a “boy” by both his girlfriend and her mother. Reena was something less than a woman if she had to ask permission to see him. On the other hand, it was a war that she probably only wanted to fight once: was he worth it? Reena wouldn’t want to fight alone. War implied all kinds of commitments.