“Fareed Zakaria?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“I have it. Jagjit Singh! He may be hanging around here somewhere, I probably could even get him today.”
Tiger shook her head. “Only Sanjay Gupta.”
They came back around to the clearing in front of the tower, where a nursing home van had pulled up. “I can give you few weeks,” Tiger said, “but do it soon as I don’t come to America in winters. Okay, now I have to make a move.” She gestured with her chin toward the ramshackle Menlo Park Museum. “I am going for the 1:30 tour.”
The thugs dispersed and Prem returned to his bike. Its seat had become hot, so he walked with it for a while. If he just stayed calm and did the things he needed to do, it would all be okay, he told himself. He needed to produce CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Also, he needed to hire a team of bodyguards to follow Leena around without her knowledge. He repeated this simple list in his head throughout the long trek back to King’s Court that afternoon as the sun beat down on him. He would ask Pankaj to manage the guards and, when he had a chance, find out the date of Leena’s wedding to Mikesh.
40
The New York Times
VOWS
At a Far-Flung Wedding, a Confection Connection
Arthur Abrams had given up on love while Mikesh Aneja was living with a beard, until common friends and a love of cookies brought them together.
By STACY LEVINSON GERTEN June 8, 2003
When Dr. Mikesh Aneja and Dr. Arthur Abrams met at a wedding in Barcelona nearly eight years ago, they had no idea they were being set up. “I was on the groom’s side and Arthur knew the bride, and they plotted to seat us together,” Dr. Aneja said. “It was a Catalan conspiracy.”
“Fortunately, they knew what they were doing,” Dr. Abrams said. “We clicked immediately. And when the cookie talk began, well, it was all over.”
Dr. Piya Saraiya, the bride at the Barcelona wedding, explained that she and her husband had their friends’ obsessions with baked goods in mind. “We just thought, we know these two smart, kind, unsettlingly handsome guys who can’t stop eating Milanos. It was a no-brainer.”
“I just couldn’t get over that there was another doctor who loved competing in triathlons and also eating Thin Mints,” said Dr. Aneja, 38, an endocrinologist. For Dr. Abrams, it was as much the things they didn’t have in common that intrigued him. “I loved that Mikesh had grown up in India and gone to high school in Minnesota,” said Dr. Abrams, 37, a cardiologist. “His experience is so unique. I just wanted to know more.”
When the festivities came to an end, Dr. Aneja returned to Rochester, Minn., where he was beginning an endocrinology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Abrams went home to New Jersey, where he had grown up and was completing his medical residency at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; coincidentally, Aneja had earned his medical degree there. But neither could forget the connection they’d made in Barcelona.
It took only two weeks of talking on the phone followed by one meeting before the two began dating. For the next few years, the couple shuttled between Minnesota and New Jersey to spend time together while also establishing themselves in their respective fields. Dr. Abrams completed his cardiology fellowship and eventually joined a practice in Edison, N.J., while Dr. Aneja accepted a position at the University of Minnesota’s Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism in Minneapolis. It was during this time that Dr. Aneja became close with the Abrams family.
“They embraced me as their son-in-law immediately, which meant the world to me,” said Dr. Aneja, who had not yet come out as gay to his conservative Hindu parents. “Hannah even made rugelach, my favorite, every single time I visited.”
Dr. Abrams’ parents, Hannah Abrams and the Honorable Matthew Abrams, adored Dr. Aneja and were thrilled when he joined an endocrinology group in New Jersey to be closer to their son. “It was a great comfort to us to know that Mikesh was fully committed, despite the fact that he was living with a beard.”
The beard in question, Leena Engineer, was happy to pretend to date Dr. Aneja, even going so far as to feign an engagement and share an apartment with him. “My father threw this big party for us, and really, we felt terrible deceiving him and everyone that way,” said Engineer. “We both just needed time to figure out our lives without being set up left and right.”
When the time came to talk to his parents, Dr. Aneja flew to Minneapolis to have the discussion in person. “I was terrified. I thought it might be the last time I saw my parents.” Instead, Dr. Aneja’s mother, Sanjana Aneja, declared her exasperation about a related issue. “I was not mad that he was gay or that he had a boyfriend, I was mad he made me wait so long for a grandchild!”
Rohit Aneja, Dr. Aneja’s father, struck a more solemn note. “I said to him, ‘You are our son and we support you. We love you and we will love the person who loves you. End of story.’”
“I cried tears of relief and overwhelming love,” Dr. Aneja recalled. “Then I began planning the proposal.” True to their origin story, he took Dr. Abrams to a paella bar, and at the end of the night, presented him with a fortune cookie.
“We were strolling through the Village when all of a sudden he was on his knee,” Dr. Abrams said. “You can guess the question that was in the cookie.”
Soon after, the parents met and the wedding planning was underway. The grooms worried there would be tension between the families regarding where the wedding would take place, Minnesota or New Jersey, but were pleasantly surprised by Sanjana Aneja’s position. “For a half-Indian wedding, there is no better place than Edison,” she said. “It is like having the wedding in India itself!”
Though the dual ceremonies took place in Somerset, N. J., on the grounds of the Arsha Bodha Center, all the trappings of a glamorous Hindu wedding were brought in from Edison. An elegantly decorated mandap, which doubled as a chuppah, sat amid a field of native grasses and goldenrod, where the grooms were wed first by Swami Tadatmananda and then by Rabbi Edward Moskowitz, of Temple Beth Shalom of Westfield. In bespoke matching sherwanis by designer Tarun Tahiliani, their palms painted by top henna artist Neha Desai, the couple performed the Hindu and Jewish rituals before a crowd of 200 guests, after which they enjoyed a rustic South Indian lunch by Swagath Gourmet.
The party reconvened in the evening, by which time a tent aglow with candles and twinkle lights had been erected by celebrated Indian wedding decorators House of Nilam. During a family-style dinner by Moghul Fine Indian Cuisine, friends and family offered toasts that were by turns humorous and heartfelt. “I told Mik so many times to just tell his parents about Arthur,” best man Parth Saxena said. “I mean, a doctor son marrying another doctor? What more could an Indian mother want?”
Sanjana Aneja did not miss a beat. “Grandkids!” she shouted from her seat.
Hannah and Matthew Abrams spoke together, wishing the newlyweds a lifetime of “love, trust, companionship and biscotti.” The last to speak, Rohit Aneja brought the crowd to tears. “We Indians like to add one extra dollar when giving cash gifts,” he said. “Plus-one is meant to bring luck to the recipient. Arthur is the greatest plus-one our family has ever received. Thank you, Abrams family, for this most blessed gift.”
The party carried on late into the warm night, DJ Saji Saj spinning as the grooms were lifted in their chairs for the Hora. In the early-morning hours, Milano cookies and milk shots were served and guests settled into cushioned loveseats and chaises placed around the dance floor. Bleary from the revelry, Engineer reclined with her head on Dr. Aneja’s shoulder. “What a love story,” she sighed. “What a wedding.” There was nothing cookie-cutter about it.
41
It was true, Leena loved Mikesh very much, just not like that. He was sensitive and patient, gentle, yet slightly wicked in the way he talked about people. She never tired of his company. They seemed to have a special connection, one that had begun many past lives ago, they agreed. So when he asked her to participate in an elaborate ruse with him, she had no qualms about it. The pieces fit perfectly together. He wasn’t ready to talk to his family about who he was; she was unattached. Both needed time to grow into who they were without the unending onslaught of questions from aunties and uncles, friends and family about why they were still single, had they considered the future, don’t they want a family, do they want to meet my accomplished and attractive offspring.
Neither party had planned for the charade to last as long as it did, but it was working so well, they were reluctant to disturb the balance. A few years into it, Leena spoke with Mikesh about the possibility of her quietly getting back out there and starting to date. They agreed she needed to move forward with her life, but also that she could do so without giving up her role as his cover. She would keep her romantic activities confined to New York City or other far-flung cities to which she might travel. No place really would be off-limits except for Edison.
After it was decided she would enter the dating pool, she had to figure out how. Some of her friends tried to meet their soulmates at the enormous annual conventions of their respective Indian American ethnic subgroups—Jain, Marathi, Telegu, Gujarati, et alia. A few attended the conferences of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, with no medical degree but with the express purpose of landing a doctor. Others went to the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, with no Super 8 franchise but with the express purpose of landing a hotelier. The convention path was too public and risky for Leena, which was not a disappointment to her in any way. For a while, she did the usual thing, waiting for strangers to approach her at the airport, but this did not yield the hero she was searching for. She then took a more proactive approach, accosting handsome men at Penn Station, deliberately bumping into them at Hudson News or in building elevators. A couple of suitable boys were thus unearthed but soon proved to be cads, regular char sau beeses. There were stretches during which she wrote off men altogether and focused on her work, and other times when she wanted to date but had no time. And when the era of online dating dawned, she dabbled in it, beginning with shaadi.com, née sagaai.com, which yielded mainly duds. As her business grew, she sometimes met interesting men that way, but they were easily scared away by her success; one bald mogul even used the end of open bar as an excuse to flee her. By the time she turned thirty, the age when Bollywood actresses were historically herded into the category of “mature,” she had accepted that finding a partner may not be in her stars.
So when she was thrown together with Prem at her father’s bedside, she was single, albeit theoretically engaged, and she wondered if the same was true of him. At first, she was startled by his presence and found it odd that he should be there, but after the initial uneasiness, she saw him for what he was: a sincere, helpful friend to her father, unassuming and still attractive, with sideburns stuck in the past. She had thought very little of him over the years, though she was generally aware of his success and his reputation as a peculiar person hovering on the fringes of proper society. He was no longer that same boy with whom she’d had a dalliance in her youth.
Mikesh and Arthur’s wedding was as much a milestone for Leena as it was for the grooms. The frequent unsolicited comments from acquaintances transitioned from “Still no wedding, Leena?” to “Poor Leena, he left you for a man?” She had broken the news to her father before the Times piece ran, hoping to soften the blow and also to avert a second heart attack. He had been discharged from JFK and was resting at home when she approached him. She braced herself for anger, confusion, and disbelief, but he turned out to be far less disturbed by the turn of events than she’d expected—almost too undisturbed. Maybe he was tired of waiting for progress with Mikesh, or maybe he was just tired. In any case, with the help of a small army of aunties, he spread the word that his daughter had never been engaged and look what a selfless thing she did for her persecuted friend! To the Engineers’ great surprise and, they felt, to the community’s credit, people were more shocked by the Leena of things than the gay of them.
And no person was more shocked or happy to hear the news of Mikesh’s wedding than Prem. For him, it was even better than if the man had died. Leena had never been his at all. There was nothing like that between them. All this time.
