your name?’ she asked, finally stopping for breath.
‘Priya,’ I said, standing up. ‘Very nice to meet you.’
‘Anything to send out?’ she asked, scanning the top of the counter above my desk. ‘I’ll be coming by a few times a day, but this is the first call.’
‘Um, nothing yet. Is there anything else I should know?’ I asked.
‘Well, let’s see. For the most part, everyone is supernice. But,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘there’s a couple of people down there,’ and she motioned with her thumb to the corridor where all the writers sat, ‘that can be really mean. Just, what’s that word, terrestrial?’
‘I think you mean territorial,’ I said.
‘Yeah, that, whatever,’ she continued, flicking my words away with her hand. ‘Some of them down there get really snippety about newcomers, think that everyone is after their jobs. I mean, so paranoid!’ she said, rolling her eyes, and fingering one of the six silver rings that lined her left ear.
‘So where you from, anyway?’ she asked, cupping her chin in her hand and leaning against the counter on an elbow. ‘You got a real unusual accent. What is it, like, Toledo?’
‘Um, India, actually,’ I said. ‘Not Toledo. Delhi.
‘Are we allowed to be talking like this?’ I asked, looking around nervously. ‘I don’t want to get caught.’
Deanna looked at me disbelievingly and giggled.
‘Where do you think you are – boarding school? It’s just an office, for God’s sake. Sure we’re allowed to talk. It’s not like we’re in some lock-up, although I guess sometimes it might feel that way!’
Lou came by, and I shuffled some papers, lowered my eyes, and said goodbye to Deanna, who shook her head, rolled her eyes and walked away.
‘You can take an hour off for lunch, between one and two,’ Lou said. ‘Just don’t forget to turn the system to voicemail, and check any messages when you get back.’
I was suddenly hungry – I hadn’t had any breakfast this morning, convinced I’d be back home in no time – so at exactly one, I made my way back down in the lift, which stopped on each floor until it was filled. I kept my eyes lowered as I heard these people in their relaxed, slurry accents talking about what had happened this morning or debating between Chinese and a sandwich. I was the last to emerge when we reached the lobby, stepped out through the big glass doors, and wasn’t sure where to go next. Everyone else had gone off in pairs and groups, leaving me standing there alone. The sun was beating down strong and hard, causing me to squint to find my bearings. Cars whizzed back and forth as I stood in the parking lot, looking out across the wide, busy boulevard. There were dozens of places to eat, and I just had to choose somewhere to go. In a way, it felt lovely to be this free; that the next hour was mine to do with exactly as I wanted, instead of having to cut short my shower, which I often had to do at home, because the aubergine might be burning.
I opened my wallet and found that I still had the twenty dollars that was left over from last week’s housekeeping money, which would buy me just about anything, food-wise. A bright yellow awning down the block beckoned me, and I found that it was a little Italian café. I went in, said the radical words ‘for one’, and was escorted to a small table against a wall. A slim novel was tucked into my handbag – one of my sisters had taught me never to leave home without one – and I ordered a dish of vegetable pasta and some water. I was the only person in the restaurant dining alone, and while I recognized some of the other people there from the office, I know that they didn’t recognize me. I kept my eyes on my book the whole time, as if raising them and looking around would mean that I was opening myself up to the humiliation, surely, that women feel eating by themselves. And when these people around me laughed, as they did often while in conversation, I was certain that they were laughing at me.
As awkward as I felt, however, this was so much better than standing in the kitchen with my mother-in-law, grinding cumin seeds.
Even if I would still have to do that later.
Finally, I knew what people meant when they talked about being in ‘commuter hell’. I had been told that once anyone drives in India, getting behind the wheel anywhere else in the world is a dream; Los Angeles, especially, with its infamous freeways, which were never particularly free. There were rules in this country. In Delhi, people parked sideways along narrow streets or in front of entrances or on top of the pavement, safe in the knowledge that it would take two days for a tow truck to get there. Speeding tickets would be torn up with an offer of a few hundred rupees, and it didn’t matter if you didn’t have your licence on you – or if you didn’t have one at all, for that matter. But here, in this land of rules and regulations, I knew that I couldn’t just slide by. It had taken me three attempts to get my licence; I kept knocking down those orange cones during the test. And when I was finally a fully qualified member of the driving community, I refused to use those freeways.
‘I’m scared to merge,’ I said, crying to Sanjay. ‘So many cars coming, one after the other, nobody letting me go. I want to stay in one lane only.’
‘If you do, you’ll end up in Santa Barbara,’ he said. ‘If you want to live here, you have no choice.’ This was why I knew I would never fit in. Other drivers slid in in front of me, whether I was prepared for them or not, and barrelled through lanes as if they owned the roads. I always gave them priority, convinced they had more right to be there than I did. I would rather end up in Santa Barbara than fight for the right exit.
Tonight, after shifting and merging alongside the rest of the cars on the 101 freeway, filled with their stressed-out lone occupants, it wasn’t till seven thirty that I finally pulled into the drive of our house.
Our home was distinguished from all the others on the street only by the bunch of dried chilies suspended above the front door, and the small plastic mural of Laxmi embedded into the stucco wall on the right of the entrance.
I opened the door, and saw my family seated around the dining table, about to tuck in.
‘Priya, glad you made it home in time. We weren’t sure when you would be back. Terrible traffic, right?’ said Sanjay, rising from his chair.
My in-laws looked up, while my sister-in-law, Malini waved casually across the room.
‘Hiya, bhabi,’ she said, referring to me in the way that all good girls are meant to call the wives of their elder brothers – although I knew, based on the contents of her closet and the secrets that I sensed lingered in the walls of her bedroom, that Malini wasn’t really a good girl.
‘We ordered Domino’s pizza and garlic bread,’ my mother-in-law said, huffily. ‘It became late; nothing was ready.’
‘Sorry, Ma,’ I replied. ‘Rush-hour traffic. I think it’s going to be like this everyday. I don’t know what else to do.’
‘Hah, never mind, we’ll work something out,’ she said, surprisingly sympathetically, cutting stretchy string cheese that connected a slice of pizza to the plate. ‘Maybe you just do all the chopping and cutting in the morning before you go, and then Malini and I can fry everything later.’
My sister-in-law, nibbling on a piece of bread, did not look amused.
‘You have to learn eventually, beti,’ my mother-in-law said, addressing her. ‘You are twenty now. Soon, we will have to find a boy for you and then what will you do?
‘And then,’ she continued, turning back to me ‘on weekends, we can do everything else – cleaning, dusting, sweeping properly. We will have to make new arrangements because of your job.’
That seemed a pretty equitable arrangement. Besides, didn’t everybody in America live this way? Work