“Don’t you live here?” someone new asked.
The next evening, Prem was not alone with Leena, as Hemant convened his committee meeting in the apartment at the same time. Tun-Tun, Nalini Sen, Sanjay Sapra, and Hemant debated the merits of staging a peaceful protest march while Prem and Leena wrote letters from a preapproved template in silence. Prem tapped the end of his pen on the table, hoping to irritate her into talking to him, but she was resolute. He finished a letter and she slid him an envelope, which he took as a positive gesture, but after two more such exchanges, she shoved the entire stack of envelopes over so it sat squarely between them and he didn’t have to ask for one again. Then she proceeded to churn out letters at breakneck speed. Seeing as she had the matter covered, Prem decided to focus his epistolary efforts in another direction:
Dear
What a stupid idiot I am. I could fill 11 pages on this topic. You also, I know, could fill 11 pages on this topic. Please do not. I did not tell you everything about the other girls because I did not want you to think that maybe you should also reject me like they did. I did not want you to believe I was too poor or smelled too much like gasoline. I was scared. Now here is a poem:
Whenever life brings me to your presence,
This earth seems lovelier than the moon,
Your memories, sometimes knocking, sometimes whispering,
Wake me in the late hours of the night.
Whenever life brings me to your presence,
This earth seems lovelier than the moon.
Why does each meeting have to end in separation?
This thought torments me always.
Whenever life brings me to your presence,
This earth seems lovelier than the moon.
Of course, these lines are from Umrao Jaan, the award-winning film of 1981. I do not know how to write a poem. But I know I only understood the meaning of these words after meeting you. I know you are not afraid of anything. I know you love your father and take care of him. I know you like to watch cricket and eat mango achaar directly from the bottle. You have a fire in you I cannot be without. I know I must be honest with you, forever.
Your Prem Kumar
Prem folded the letter and tucked it into an envelope. He tried to slip it to her suavely under the table, but when she steadfastly refused to receive it, he ended up batting at her knee with it.
“Uf! What are you doing?” she said in an angry sort of whisper.
“Read it,” Prem said. “Please. It’s for you.”
“It’s not for Senator Lautenberg?”
“No, I wrote a letter to you.”
“So you did not write the letter to Senator Lautenberg?”
“No, there is no letter for Senator Lautenberg.”
“Fine,” Leena said, snatching the letter from him. “But please, write the letter for Senator Lautenberg.”
When Leena emerged from her room the following morning, she went about her routine, preparing her father’s mung sprouts, packing their dal and rice lunch, and ignoring Prem, but when her father was safely out the door and Viren Bhai was mired in eight-angle pose, she plunked a cup of chai down on the table in front of Prem. “It was a good letter,” she said.
Prem, who had been slouched over a piece of burned toast, straightened up. Leena continued to move around the kitchen, and he awaited her next words with the bright-eyed optimism of a terminally ill Rajesh Khanna in the 1971 classic Anand.
“Hold it,” Leena said, quashing his hopefulness before it got out of hand. “I am not done with being mad yet.”
As 1987 came to an end, Indian American women in New Jersey wore fewer saris and more jeans, and many stopped wearing bindis altogether, just in case. Legendary playback singer, actor, director, composer, and producer Kishore Kumar passed away, and Black Monday happened to the world’s stock markets without much alarm from the residents of King’s Court. Prem continued to apply himself at his job at Exxon, taking on extra shifts in the hopes of demonstrating his indomitable work ethic to Leena, who had barely spoken to him since the letter. She had softened a bit, making him the occasional chai and letting him help with the dishes again. Prem lived for these moments and hung all of his hopes on the word “yet.”
In January, all of King’s Court as well as Hidden Valley Manor and Brighton Village decided to go to the United Skates roller-skating rink. This epic outing of proximate apartment complexes had its beginnings in a heavy snowfall when three women, one from each complex, pushed their way forward, the accumulation already four inches at their ankles. “This is too too terrible,” Rachna Bajaj of Brighton Village said, digging her hands further into the pockets of her puffy coat.
Shanta Bhatt concurred. “What sins did I commit in my previous life that I was sent to live in such weather?”
“I am cold,” Priti Sinha, a no-nonsense dental hygienist, added.
They pressed on. They were coming from the Metro Park train station, having spent the day in New Brunswick assisting with preparing sweets for a wedding. When they reached Oakwood Plaza with the United Skates sign at a remove, Rachna had a thought. “We need something for making this winter go faster. Everyone is working so so hard in so much of cold. We need to try roller skating.” Shanta and Priti got on board surprisingly quickly. In the next few weeks, the three women negotiated a discounted rate with Mr. Ramondi, the muscular rink manager, who gave them an extremely fair price for guaranteeing three hundred people, which was just one hundred above maximum capacity. Priti, who inexplicably had a certain rapport with Mr. Ramondi, got him to agree to play Hindi music that they would provide. Each woman spread the word in her respective complex, and soon, a sizable portion of Edison was looking forward to it.
“I don’t see her,” Prem said, hugging a carpeted pillar in the center of the rink, trying not to fall down, like most of the rink’s patrons that day except Beena Joshi, who was bafflingly good at roller skating.
“She will be here,” Beena said, executing a kind of grapevine move back and forth before him. “Don’t you live with her? Was she getting ready to come here or no?”
Prem, still in his Exxon jumpsuit, attempted to turn around and lean casually against the pillar. “I am coming from the job,” he said. “They are going to stop letting more people in when it gets too full. What if she does not come in time to get in? What if she decided she doesn’t want to see me, I mean, more than she already sees me every day in the apartment? What if she found a new boy she likes?”
Beena did a quick spin and came to an abrupt stop. “Stop this nonsense before I hit you with my rolling pin.”
Prem slid all the way down the pole and landed with a thump on the wood floor.
“There she is,” Beena said.
In the midst of a horde of young women—sideys, all of them—there she sat, lacing up her skates, her silkier-than-ever hair cascading down her back in a luxurious torrent into which Prem longed to immerse himself headfirst. She wore a soft pink churidar while everyone around her wore varying shades of brown and gray. From his place on the floor, Beena moonwalking in the background, Prem openly stared at Leena until he willed her to look up. The meeting of their eyes, their aankh milana, set off a spark of renewed affection that erupted on the skating-rink floor.
He stood up easily and glided around the rink, gathering behind him a band of young men, some of them his friends but many whom he’d never before met. They were somehow all six inches shorter than him and fifteen to twenty pounds heavier, with unflattering, puffy hairstyles. Assuming a wedge formation with Prem at the apex, they skated toward the oncoming women’s wedge helmed by Leena. As the groups approached each other, the playful, hopeful jukebox jingle “Papa Kehte Hain,” from the soon-to-be-released Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, kicked on, causing the crowd to go wild and the wedges to dance in perfect synchrony, with Prem and Leena clearly demonstrating the most talent and star quality. While it was not a love song, per se, for Prem and Leena, the upbeat number with its earnestness and undertones of rebellion embodied Prem’s lifelong struggle to be something in the world other than what his father wanted him to be, which, though it caused him to lie prolifically, ultimately brought him to her. Leena was a vision, her dupatta fluttering behind her, and when the song came to an end, she fell into his arms and he dropped her back into a low dip. They remained frozen that way, like an ice sculpture from a lavish New Jersey Indian wedding from the near future, until one of Leena’s sidey friends broke her wrist.
