He drifted into a knot of guests where someone was retelling the post she’d written about it. “This whole long thing online,” the man said, fondly, rolling his eyes. “An exciting new chapter. Full of possibility.” The circle laughed, and the laugh had an edge. “Blessing in disguise,” another offered, and they laughed again. Ali pictured the post: the careful paragraph, the photo cropped just above the stack of unopened bills, the comments below swearing that everything happens for a reason. Good vibes only. He had thought, hearing it, that he was better than the post. Then he remembered the sentence he had laid down at the door not five minutes earlier, and the thought went quiet.
He let his eyes move around the room. On paper everyone was doing fine—decent jobs, decent houses, decent clothes—but what he saw were people who could give the bullet points of their lives and still not say, with any accuracy, how they were. He used to think they were fooled. That was the thing he kept getting wrong and correcting. They were not fooled. You could watch them know, in the half-second before each answer, the small decision to hand over the smooth one instead of the true one. It wasn’t blindness. It was a courtesy they were all extending to one another, the way you don’t mention the stain on a man’s collar.
Near the window, a man with carefully gelled hair was telling a woman in a blue scarf that it had been—what, seven years? “Where does it go,” he said. “At least nine,” she said, laughing. “We’ve gotten old.” And for a moment—he watched it happen—she seemed about to say something underneath that, her mouth opening on a heavier, different sentence. Then she chose the laugh instead, and the gelled man chose it with her, and the two of them stepped back from the edge of the thing together, relieved, and moved along to the next person.
“How are you? It’s been so long.” An aunt had turned to him, a cup of tea in her hand. She sounded curious, but the words were worn so smooth they nearly vanished on the way out.
“Good, thanks. You?” His answer left him like a sneeze—involuntary, already gone. She nodded, satisfied, and turned toward the food. He had not decided to lie. That was what unsettled him afterward: there had been no moment of choosing. The smooth “thing” simply arrived where the true “thing” should have been, on time, in his own voice.
All evening the same reflex kept arranging itself on the faces around him: the corners of the mouth lifted, the eyes faintly glazed, the whole thing held in place by muscle rather than mirth. He had a private name for it—the checked-out smile. It took him until the kitchen to wonder whether he had been wearing it too.
He found Kajol restocking the naan basket, her movements quick and practiced. Her makeup had begun to smudge at the corners of her eyes; her shoulders dropped a little when she thought no one was watching. She did not look as though she had sat down all night.
“Need a hand?”