Alikhan arrived almost last, easing his dented sedan to the curb a few yards short of the host’s house, and then he did not get out. He sat with the engine off, hands resting on the wheel, and said it one more time to the windshield, quietly, the way you test a stair you aren’t sure will hold. She’s sorry. She wasn’t feeling up to it tonight. It came out smooth. He had been working the line since the freeway—trimming a word here, softening a tense there—until it sounded less like something he had built than something that had simply always been so.
He checked his watch, then checked it again, though the time had not changed since the first look: late. The passenger seat beside him was empty, though it did not feel vacant so much as occupied — by the afternoon, by the words, by the part of them that had been his. Through the glass the house glowed, and the other guests’ cars stood nosed in tight against the driveway, as near the door as they could get. He had timed his arrival to be swallowed by the crowd already inside. Lateness, he had decided, might make him smaller, harder to question.
When he finally got out it felt less like a decision than a tug, as though a rope had been looped around him and someone, somewhere, was slowly reeling it in. The night air was thick with cardamom and grilled meat, expensive perfume, the sour thread of a cigarette drifting from the backyard. The lawn glittered with dropped sequins and foil from gift wrap that had escaped the bag. Inside there would be the same evening there always was: the greetings, the circling, and at some point near the end a spoon against a glass, a toast, everyone lifting what they held to a year none of them could see. He slid through the narrow gap between a black SUV and a pearl-white sedan that looked as though it had never known dust, and went in.
“Alikhan! You made it!” Kajol, the host’s wife, called over the noise. She laughed at something someone had said, but the laugh ended a fraction too early, and her smile held both welcome and apology, though he could not have said for what.
“Of course,” he said. “Wouldn’t miss it.” And then, before she could ask—because someone always asked—he set it down, lightly, the way you put a thing down so gently no one hears it land. “Sana’s sorry. She wasn’t feeling up to it tonight.”
“Oh,” Kajol said. “Send her our love.”
“I will.”
It was astonishing, how easy. The words went out and the question closed behind them like water, and for a moment he felt the clean relief he imagined a diver feels surfacing—he had gone down into the dangerous place and come up with air still in him. He filed the feeling away without looking at it too closely.
He went looking for Rahman, his cousin’s husband, an engineer out of Berkeley, the one person here in whose company he could let his face go slack. But Rahman wasn’t there. His wife—Alikhan’s cousin—had been let go from her job that week, and the two of them had stayed home. So there was no slack face to be had tonight. There was only the room.