Chapter 2: Prabhu’s Cake

The resort was Ravi’s idea, because everything is Ravi’s idea, and it had his fingerprints all over it before we’d even parked: the cottage with the river at the bottom of the lawn, the string lights the staff had strung between the palms like a festival nobody had announced, the smell of the backwater at dusk, mud and jasmine and somebody’s barbecue drifting across the water. Prabhu’s eighteenth. Ravi had booked the whole place for the night, which was the first hint, because Ravi’s wallet has never met a bill it couldn’t talk its way out of, and he was spending like a man who had already been paid.

The family part happened first, because it always does. Cake on the lawn, the wives arranged in a half-circle of folding chairs, Prabhu’s mother — Ravi’s wife, whose name I can never keep straight because Ravi only ever calls her “the management” — beaming like she’d personally built the boy. Anu had come with us, in a green churidar I hadn’t seen before, and I watched the uncles watch her over the rim of their tea cups, and I felt that familiar animal shift in my chest, that quiet, terrible pride. Seema stood beside me with her hand in the crook of my arm, and I remember thinking how ordinary we must have looked. How normal. The couple at the birthday party, the husband with his hand over his wife’s, smiling at the boy with the knife in his hand.

Then the wives left. That was the arrangement, announced by Ravi with a sweep of his arm: the women would take the car back to the city, the men would stay for “a small one,” and Prabhu — Prabhu would stay, because he was eighteen now, and eighteen means you get to see what your father and his friends actually are. Seema kissed my cheek, and I felt her lips there, cool, and she said, “Don’t let them make a fool of you,” and I laughed, because that’s what husbands do, and I watched her walk to the car with the other women, and I did not know — I could not have known — that I was watching the last honest minute of my marriage.

They made their way off the lawn, the car doors slammed, the engine faded down the gravel, and Ravi turned to me with a grin like a wound and said, “Now. Now the party starts.”

It was seven o’clock. I remember the exact hour because I checked my phone, and because I would need to remember it later, the way you remember the time on a ticket stub. Seven in the evening, the light going amber over the river, and Ravi producing not one bottle of Old Monk but a crate of it, and Raman appearing from the cottage with a bag of beef fry wrapped in newspaper, and Ashok with his phone already hooked to a speaker, and Anil with his nervous giggle and his careful way of sitting, and the five of us — six, with Prabhu — settling into plastic chairs on the verandah like we were settling into an argument we’d been having for twenty years.

The boy sat at the edge of his chair like it was a bus seat and he might have to jump off at any moment. He had Ravi’s mouth and his mother’s eyes, and he was trying very hard to be a man, holding his tumbler the way he’d seen us hold ours, taking his first sip of Old Monk and hiding the shudder.

“Easy, boy,” Raman said. “It’ll put hair on your chest. More than your father managed.”

“Fuck off,” Prabhu said, and we all roared, because that’s the currency, and I saw Ravi’s eyes go soft and bright on his son, and I thought, good. Good for him. This is what it’s for, all of it, the nights and the lies and the bribed children — this, a boy learning to drink with his father’s friends.

I had no idea what was coming. None. I sat there in my plastic chair with my tumbler in my hand and the river going dark beyond the lawn, and I drank, and I joked, and I watched Ravi’s face, and I should have seen it then. I should have seen the way he kept looking at his watch. The way he and Raman kept exchanging looks with the corners of their mouths. The way Ashok had gone quiet, which for Ashok means he’s holding something in his teeth.

The hints came slow, the way they always do, dropped like stones into still water.

“Big night for the boy,” Ravi said, raising his glass. “Eighteen. You know what that means?”

“It means he can vote,” Anil said.

“It means he can fuck,” Raman said, and Prabhu laughed, too loud, and went red, and I laughed with him, and Ravi said, “Exactly. And a boy on his eighteenth deserves a proper gift. Not a watch. Not money. A proper gift.”

“A girl,” Ashok said, to his glass.

“A girl,” Ravi said. His eyes slid to me, and something in them made my stomach turn over. “A birthday cake with a cherry on top.”

I looked at him. I looked at Raman, and Raman was looking at me with that look, that greasy, knowing look, and I understood, with a slow sickness that was also, god help me, a slow thrill — they were going to give him Anu. My daughter. My Anu Kutti, fifteen years old, wrapped up and handed to Ravi’s boy like a present under a tree. I thought of her in the green churidar, standing at the cake with her hands clasped, and I thought of Raman’s lap, and Ravi’s mouth, and the keyhole, and I drank, and I thought, yes. Yes, I can watch that. I can watch my daughter give his son his first night.

I was so sure of it. That’s the part that kills me now. I was so sure, I’d already started rehearsing the feeling — the pride, the hunger, the sweet sickness of it — and I was wrong. I was wrong about everything. I was wrong about my daughter, and I was wrong about my wife, and I was wrong about every single year of my married life, and I didn’t find out any of it until it was too late to un-know.

The drinking went on. Seven became eight became nine, and the bottles went down, and the talk got loose, and Prabhu got looser, his collar open, his tie — Ravi had given him one of his own ties, can you imagine, a silver thing — hanging loose around his neck, and he was telling us about a girl in his class, some Sherin, and we were all leaning in like he was reading us scripture.

“She’s got a mouth on her,” Prabhu said, and we roared, and Ravi said, “That’s my boy,” and Raman poured another round, and I was measuring my drinks, because I had a plan. The plan was simple: I would drink enough to look drunk and stay sober enough to see. I had done it before, at Raman’s house, in the corridor, at the keyhole. I knew how to be invisible. I knew how to stand at the edge of my own life and watch.

Around nine-thirty, I began to sag. It’s a trick, a good one, and I’ve had years of practice: you let your head get heavy, you let your words get long, you let your eyelids take their time, and the men — they see what they expect to see. They see a man who’s had too much. They don’t see the man behind the man, the one who’s wide awake, counting the seconds.

“Get him some water,” I heard Ravi say, somewhere above me.

“Leave him,” Raman said. “He’ll sleep it off. Better for everyone.”

And I felt myself being arranged — hands under my arms, a cushion behind my head, my feet up on another chair — and I let my mouth fall open, and I let out a snore, and I thought, good. Good. Now show me. Show me what you’ve done with my daughter.