Fiction: Deepa and Ruchi weigh the tangled bonds of their friendship as immigrants in America

“You don’t really want it, Ruchi. All those years just studying,” said Deepa. Once the crust was gone, her friend stuck her finger in the filmy center of the toastie and examined it. “If you wanted it, you would do it anyway.”

“Ere, how do you know?” Ruchi said, though Deepa had unsettled a doubt. What did Ruchi know about what she wanted? So little. Deepa had a habit of making her feel shaky, uncertain, which Ruchi took as a sign of internal weakness, some lack of decisiveness on her part. She was going on sixteen and all she’d known was what was asked of her.

“In any case, they’re witches, the sisters,” Deepa said as Sister Ferrao strode into the middle of a group of fourth-standard girls, then took hold of an ear and twisted. “They only want to say they sent someone from this horrid school to Medicine. Someone from an easy, ‘forward-thinking’ family. They don’t care about you.”

Deepa couldn’t have known that this hurt her and made her feel small. Ruchi thought of her precise writing inside the blue form booklet. She’d slept with the booklet under her gadda until it went missing. She blamed Aruna or Tejas, but maybe it was a sign that the booklet hadn’t mattered. Any girl could write nicely. It didn’t make you special.

At least she had Deepa, though every day she was on guard for when their friendship would end, leaving Ruchi alone again. During recitations, she sometimes saw Deepa whisper and throw smiles to everyone but her. Or some girl would approach them at the banyan tree and mention a film that Ruchi didn’t know Deepa had seen and the two would trade plotlines and song sequences like two intimates. It was as if Deepa craved Ruchi’s longing, and then Ruchi would worry, what did she really know about the girl? She’d never been to Deepa’s flat and had seen her mother only from the school gate where she dropped her daughter every morning, her cheeks orange with rouge, kohl thick under her eyes, diamond studs in her ears. A filmy woman, Ammi called her.

Ruchi wanted to ride in the lift with the liftman to see if he’d wink at her, too, see if the metal jaws were as sharp as Deepa said they were, if the flat was draped in fabrics, if they truly had only atta and rice for food. She had no reason to disbelieve Deepa except that the left side of her mouth curled in a dare. Ruchi wanted to scrub the expression off her face, just as Ammi used to scrub her upper lip to depress the hair follicles, which had done nothing in the end.

But then, as if sensing Ruchi’s desire to know her more, Deepa asked her to come to the Mahalakshmi Temple that her mother insisted they visit on holy days.

“What holy days?” Ruchi asked, though she didn’t care. Of course she’d go. It was the end of January, two months before the exams, but she’d forgo studying for this.

“Whatever day my mother says is holy,” Deepa said. “I hate it.”

They followed Auntie up the hill on Bhulabhai Desai Road toward the temple steps where devotees thronged. The heat had finally broken, and a chill threaded the morning. Auntie wore a white kurta that clung to her back and hips, studded chappals over beige socks. Like her daughter, she was beautiful; she had the same deep smoke around her eyes that made people stare. Ruchi detected no great feeling between the two, neither animosity nor love. They hardly looked at each other. Ruchi couldn’t fathom it: to live with a person and not be either berated with constant criticism or suffocated by incessant worry.

Auntie had them keep their shoes with a flower vendor at the base of the steps instead of the chappal depot where they charged the price of milk. She then joined the mass of people, but Deepa pulled Ruchi back. “Shouldn’t we keep up?” Ruchi asked.

“She doesn’t care as long as I’m here. Up front is for all the shaking ladies who pretend a goddess has taken them.”

Inside the temple, a statue of Durga’s silver-coated lion separated the crowd of men to the left and women to the right. Ruchi could no longer see Auntie, who must’ve pushed to the front, where a bald, bare-torsoed priest in a flimsy dhoti chanted and flicked holy water into the air at the three disembodied, crowned heads of goddesses. Ammi had told her the heads had been found in the bed of the creek that once divided Worli from Malabar Hill, back before Bombay’s islands had been taped together with mud and concrete. Maybe the goddesses’ bodies were still down there, trapped in silt.

Ruchi and Deepa sat the way they always sat, their arms touching. Deepa whispered every now and then in her ear as women prayed on either side of them. The white tiles were both cold and damp. Ammi warned Ruchi that it was bad for girls to sit directly on cold floors, that the cold would ride up their legs and freeze their wombs. As she got older, everything became about the viability of marriage, as if her parents might have to disclose on her biodata each time she’d folded her legs and taken a seat on the ground.

Young men with pencil moustaches stole glances at Deepa. Men were always staring; it was nothing unusual. Deepa didn’t avoid them, but neither did she return their looks. She simply swept over them as if they were invisible.

“Which ones should we marry?” Deepa asked. “That one for you.”

Ruchi felt her neck go hot and turned away from the men. “Don’t be stupid. He’s so old.”

“He’s the handsomest one.”

“I don’t care.” She could hear the amusement in Deepa’s voice. She focused on Saraswati’s gold bust, eyes painted black under a long, flat brow.

“We could marry the same one,” Ruchi said. The priest passed around an aarti tray, and people rummaged in their handbags for coins and notes. Ruchi reached in her pocket and crumpled the ten- rupee note Ammi had given her.

“Same one?”

“Why not?” Ruchi asked, though she wanted to scuttle out of the room, away from the odor of feet and incense, the aarti tray now snaking its way toward them. She wanted to keep the note in her sweating palm for a cone of cashews or meetha paan or fresh milk to drink straight from the bag.

Deepa whispered into Ruchi’s hot ear, “Why not?”

The ladies around them pressed their hands in prayer, lips muttering mantras. “We could live in a bungalow,” Ruchi whispered.

“In the hills.”

“Overlooking the ocean.”

“A view.”

“Every day he’d take us to a different film,” Ruchi said, louder now, emboldened. “And he’d buy us nimbu pani and cutlets at intermission.”

“You can’t eat oily cutlets every day. You’ll have loose motions.”

“We’ll teach him cooking.”

“We’ll teach him cleaning.” Deepa surveyed the men bowing their heads to the floor. “But chi, none of these. Not even your Mr Handsome.”

“No, none of these,” Ruchi said, her heart lifting.

“We’ll have to see about his height once we stop growing.”

Ruchi shrugged. “Fine.” “Will you feel bad if I make him fair- skinned?” Deepa asked.

Ruchi considered the back of her hands, the darkest part of her. “No problem,” she said, but flushed with embarrassment.

“No, no. We’ll make him of chocolate instead. Chocolate and rose syrup.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you like chocolate?” This was Deepa: say something biting then pull back, pace over it until it was smooth and you couldn’t know if anything sharp had been there at all.

The aarti tray grew closer with its wobbling oil lamp. Ruchi thought of the note in her pocket and dreaded giving it up.

“We should give him a name,” Deepa said. “A good name. High caste.”

Ruchi didn’t want to give him a name. She wanted him to be a vapor, or more sound than substance. She loved her father and uncles, though her stomach turned at the grunts she heard at night, muffled but still clear through the walls, their animal efforts, her aunts’ silence. Her mother’s. Ruchi knew what she was supposed to want, she knew what happiness looked like. It was in every film, and in Ammi’s face when she received inquiries about Aruna, Ruchi’s older sister. Happiness was a relief, the disaster of an unwanted woman avoided. And yet here was Durga, unwed. Brahma was Sarawati’s second husband, but she’d cursed him and lived alone. But Lakshmi. Lakshmi changed forms to be with Vishnu in every incarnation, as if she existed only for him. Ruchi quietly found it all rubbish, but only quietly. She didn’t want to provoke bad luck. All she wanted was to be with her friend, not because Deepa was always kind or caring or particularly nice, but because of an inexplicable need.

Excerpted with permission from Every Happiness, Reena Shah, Penguin Random House India.