Fiction: What do you cook when your son invites an American friend home for lunch?

Padmanabham clasped his hands to his chest when he found out what happened. Vikas, his 12-year-old son, had invited a white boy to their house for lunch.

“He’s coming tomorrow, not today,” Vikas said, but the shock remained. Paddy took off his work bag and plunged into the sofa. He turned to Latha. “When did you find out about this?” he asked his wife. “He told me an hour ago,” Latha said. “An hour ago!” Paddy said. He hadn’t expected this one bit. It had been a month since they’d exchanged their small town in India for a small town in the States, as he joked in the office. The move had been rough on the kids; they moped around the house and cried a fair bit, and so he’d advised them to make friends in school. The advice was no more than a day old; he had assumed Vikas and Niharika would befriend desi kids first and then slowly branch out. None of them knew how to survive more than five minutes of conversation in English, let alone an entire meal. And now Vikas had signed them up for this test.

Something was not right. If a bug got resolved in the first attempt to fix it, the fix was likely incorrect. This was true of both programming errors and parenting errors.

“I don’t know what they eat. What should we cook?” Latha said. Paddy put his hands on his head. He didn’t know what white people ate. He saw them eating things at work: cheese, fruit, cake, salad. But what did they eat at home? What did they like to have for lunch? What was white-people food? He had no knowledge of what constituted a salad. Was a salad more than an assemblage of leaves and vegetables? Rice wouldn’t work. Once his office had gotten Mediterranean food catered, and he’d watched as each of his colleagues transferred exactly one spoonful of rice onto their paper plates from a bowl he could have finished all by himself. And they’d said the food was spicy. It was bland.

“If you called me as soon as you knew, I’d have asked in the office,” Paddy said, glaring at Latha. What could they do now? Latha adjusted her pallu. “Why can’t you call your friends now? All you do is sit down and google. Even the other day, I told you to stop and ask for directions. But you never listen. You fiddled with the GPS, and we missed the first twenty minutes of the movie.”

“You can’t do that in this country!” Paddy shouted.

“Can’t you talk without shouting? The neighbors can hear us.”

“Stop.” Vikas waved his hands. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have invited him.”

Paddy lowered his voice. “Come here.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell Mike not to come.”

Vikas stormed toward his room and slammed the door shut. “This is your fault,” Latha said, proceeding to the kitchen. Paddy suppressed a sigh and walked toward Vikas’s room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Niharika hunched over a book. Normally a good sign, a hum of approval should have reached his chest, but his daughter was too mischievous to be unaware of the outside world, and he resolved to see what she was up to after he spoke with Vikas. The door to Vikas’s room was locked.

“Open the door,” Paddy said.

No response.

“I’ll rip your skin off if you don’t open the door now.” Vikas opened the door and fell facedown on the bed. Paddy asked him to sit up. When Vikas didn’t move, Paddy sat on the bed and turned him with force. Tears slid down Vikas’s cheeks. “Why are you crying? You cry if something doesn’t go your way?” Paddy told him that lunch with the white boy wasn’t a problem. Vikas should listen to his father and trust that he’d come up with a solution. Paddy asked about Mike. Why hadn’t he told him about this new friend?

Vikas stopped crying and explained that he’d asked Mike to come over that day after math class. Paddy couldn’t focus on what his son was saying; he didn’t like that he’d had to make an effort to stop the boy from crying. Even Niharika, two years younger, didn’t cry as often as Vikas did. Paddy had seen enough of the world to know what it did to sensitive types. He wanted to toughen Vikas up a bit, but Latha kept interfering whenever he tried. And the move had complicated things. He’d promised them that America was a welcoming place, that they’d have a great life. But what place doesn’t have its challenges? Vikas asked him something, if something was okay, and Paddy said of course, unthinkingly. Then he parsed what Vikas had said. His son had lured the white kid over by asking if he wanted to play Call of Duty. So now Vikas would become addicted to video games, and worse, the white boy would stick around after the meal.

Paddy asked Vikas, “Do you know what he eats?”

Vikas shook his head. “Sandwiches?”

Paddy clasped his hands. Where would they learn to make sandwiches now? Back home people ate bread only when they were sick. Even if they bought a loaf at the store, what would they put in the middle? Paddy made his way to the kitchen to speak with Latha and stopped at the sight of Niharika scribbling something furiously.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Niharika continued to write in her notebook. “Nothing.” It was never nothing with her, she was always up to something, but Paddy let it slide; he would deal with her later. In the kitchen, Latha cut onions and chillies in preparation for a curry. Paddy remembered the last meal she’d prepared for guests before they left India. She’d taken offense at his suggestion that they get a couple of curries from a takeout to ease some of the cooking burden during the chaos of the move. “What’s the point of life if you can’t cook a simple meal for guests?” She’d made spinach dal, eggplant chutney, mutton keema, sambhar, and a plateful of sun-dried and deep-fried plantain chips. Everyone had raved about all of it and asked when they’d get a chance to eat her food again. Now there was a guest coming and her dishes were of little use.

Excerpted with permission from “The Lunch at Paddy’s” in The Best Possible Experience, Nishanth Injam, HarperCollins India.