Everything Happens for a Reason

She looked me up and down, clearly not enamoured of my outfit and puzzled by what to her must have looked like a razor slit above my cranium. And I knew when I left the house that the waist pouch was a bad idea.

‘You’re very nice-looking, but you might want to invest in a few new clothes,’ she said. ‘You’re the first person anyone sees when they walk through those doors.’

I nodded eagerly, but was wondering how I was going to get around that one. My in-laws frowned on what they called ‘very bad and sexy American-style clothes for cheap girls’ – which to them was anything but a baggy sweat-suit. If it were up to them, I would be cruising through Los Angeles in a burkha.

‘You’re lucky that we need someone to start immediately, and that I can’t be bothered to interview any more this morning. So I hope I don’t regret this, but I’m going to give you a shot,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the Hollywood Insider.’

Within minutes, I was signing contracts and having my social security card photocopied and being shown around a glossy set of offices by a man called Lou, Hilda’s assistant.

‘This is where the Hollywood Insider is put together. That’s just one division of the company, the one you’ll be involved with. The rest of the building is ours as well,’ Lou said, as if he’d recited the same speech a million times before.

I couldn’t help hearing snippets of conversation coming through the glass-enclosed booths, the tops of the cluttered desks filled with flat-screen computers, brightly coloured in-trays, stacks of pens and mobile phones charging. Everywhere there were photographs of movie stars – a big black-and-white shot of Jackie Chan lay on the floor, a signed picture of Julia Roberts was pinned to a corkboard. People were chatting on their phones, scribbling notes, yelling over their desks things like, ‘Harrison Ford’s guy is on line two.’ I was in the same room as people who knew people who knew Harrison Ford, who, like Brad Pitt, was famous even in India.

From what I’d seen in the movies, I had thought I would be sitting in front of a large wall repeating ‘Hold, please’ every five seconds, switching little wires in and out of sockets. Isn’t that what a receptionist did?

Instead, I was installed behind a large circular desk that had a counter above it, making me feel even smaller and more hidden. Jerry, a young man from the IT department, had come along to ask me if I had any questions about how the phone system worked.

‘Everyone here has direct lines, so most of their calls come through on those,’ he instructed. ‘But sometimes people call the main line – that’s you – and you’ll need to direct them. So here’s a list of everyone’s names, what their job titles are, and their extensions. And this row of buttons – that’s for you if you need to buzz anyone in-house, like my department, or accounting, or security. Especially security,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you think you got that?’

As soon as Jerry had gone I called Sanjay to tell him that I had got the job, was starting right away, and wouldn’t be home until evening.

‘Congrats, honey!’ he said. He had started calling me ‘honey’ recently, leading me to believe that he had been watching too much Days of Our Lives on the television in his office. ‘I’ve been a bit worried, didn’t hear from you all morning,’ he said. ‘I left a couple of messages on your mobile. As long as everything is OK …’

‘Yes, fine. Better go now,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want them to think I’m not doing anything on my first day. I’ll speak to you later, hah?’

Hollywood Insider, as I read from a company brochure I found in my desk, was a newcomer to the world of entertainment publishing. Its purpose was to ‘provide accurate, entertaining, informative and illuminating news and features on movie stars, their films, and the world they inhabit’. The parent company, Galaxy Holdings, also published a tabloid, called Weekly Buzz, which was located two floors down. Stardom, the cable television channel Galaxy owned, was an even more recent arrival on the scene.

In between taking and rerouteing calls, I leafed through a few recent issues of the magazine. There were long interviews with major movie stars, short items about production deals gone sour and a page devoted to who was wearing what at last week’s premieres. Everyone around me was beautiful and busy, and I gazed at them from behind my desk, where I was barely visible unless I stood up. They were the kind of people that my father, in his infinite cleverness, would describe as ‘the impression-making sort’.

In the middle of the morning, a smiling redhead came up to me with a trolley.

‘Hi, I’m Deanna from the mail room,’ she said. ‘You’re new here, right? Every few weeks, there seems like there’s someone new here. Not that it’s a bad job – in fact I think it’s a great job, but people don’t seem to stick around that long. What’s 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.

6

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 at work and then come home and work still?

‘Anyway, how did everything go?’ my father-in-law asked, his bald spot shining beneath the light, his thick and unruly eyebrows reminding me of a picture I had once seen of the jungles of Borneo. I was surprised by his interest; he usually only interacted with me to tell me that the cauliflower could be crispier.

‘Everything went well, Papa,’ I replied. ‘I think I will like it there.’

‘What is your salary?’

I told them, and my in-laws promptly proceeded to work it out in rupees, causing them to ooh and ahh with delight. It then fell upon Sanjay to remind them that while two hundred thousand rupees was, indeed, a fortune in India, forty thousand American dollars was just forty thousand American dollars, a lot less after tax.

‘Better you open a bank account,’ my father-in-law advised. ‘We will see how much goes towards your own savings, and how much we can use for the house expenses. Also, we have to remember that you won’t be working for long. Soon, God willing, baby will come, yes?’

I looked over at my mother-in-law, thankful that she wasn’t wielding her wooden spoon just now, although she was waving a spatula around somewhat menacingly.

‘So, tell me about the job,’ Sanjay said to me later, as we lay on our bed, watching television. ‘Are you enjoying it so far? You know, if you don’t we can find you something else.’

‘No, no, I really like it. The people seem nice – at least the four that I’ve met so far. And it’s such a great place. They run all these different magazines, and even some TV thing, and I work on the floor of a magazine called Hollywood Insider, which reports on celebrities and movies.’

‘Wow! Do you think you’ll ever get to meet anyone famous?’ Sanjay asked.

‘I doubt it. I’m just a girl answering the phones in reception. But I really am enjoying it,’ I said, snuggling up to him and enjoying the privacy of our bedroom. I knew it would be short-lived; in an hour, as was his habit every night, my father-in-law would summon me downstairs to make hot pista milk for him. And once I was in the kitchen, my mother-in-law always found something else for me to do.

‘Hey, I have a great idea!’ Sanjay exclaimed. ‘I’ve always wanted to get one of those deals where we make bags for when a movie comes out – you know, with cartoon characters and stuff. Now that you know these people at the studios, maybe you can help me do that, introduce me to the right people. Shall I give you some samples to take into the office tomorrow?’

‘Sanjay, I don’t know if that’s appropriate,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know these people. I’m just a receptionist there. How can I carry a load of bags in tomorrow as if I’m selling something. It looks a bit tacky, no?’

Sanjay thought about it for a minute. ‘Hah, maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s too soon. Let’s wait a few months. I hope you’ll still be there by then.’

‘I hope so also,’ I said. ‘But you know, there is one thing. I know it’s my first day and all, but I think I’ll be needing some new clothes. The people who work there are very fashionable. Not that I have to be very fancy-fancy or anything, but just something that looks a little more decent than what I have now. Do you think that would be OK?’

‘I think so,’ Sanjay said, wrapping his arm around me. ‘We’ll talk to Mummy and Papa about it and get their permission. You know how they feel about Western clothes. But maybe they’ll agree. Then this weekend, if we have time, we’ll go shopping.’

I was up at six the next morning, making the tea, which I stored in a Thermos, pending the awakening of the rest of the household, and left slices of bouncy white bread ready to be toasted in the miniature oven. Then I got going on dinner, which wasn’t to be served for another fourteen hours, but at least prepared all the vegetables and left them covered in the refrigerator so my mother-in-law could cook them later. I unloaded the dishwasher from the night before, put everything away, cleaned the counters and was running upstairs to take a shower when Malini emerged from her room.

She was in a pair of white pyjamas with little red lips printed all over them, the top held up with two small straps, her nipples showing through underneath. I knew she was only wearing them because her parents were still asleep. As soon as they awoke, she would run into her room and throw on a dressing gown. Now, she yawned and stretched, revealing the tiny silver ring clipped through her belly button. I looked down at my high-collared floral nightgown and felt like an overstuffed chintz sofa.

‘Have a great day at work, bhabi,’ she said. I had always thought that she looked, dressed and sounded like one of those girls on Beverly Hills 90210. I couldn’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, when nobody was looking, she acted like one of them too.

‘Thank you, Malini,’ I said, as I sprinted back into our bedroom. ‘You have a nice day too.’

I found a place to park in the shade right beneath the building, and noted that it was exactly nine seventeen. I pulled out a Wet Wipe from the glove compartment, and ran it down my hair, removing the sindoor I had just applied before leaving the house. I had a small silver container of it in my bag, and would replace it later before I went home.

Office hours were nine thirty to five thirty, so I was early. I even had time to do what all the other early arrivals around me were doing – buying coffee and a pastry from a stall on wheels outside the entrance to the building.

Settling in behind my desk, I sat and waited for the phones to start ringing, for people to start coming through, for deliveries to pile up. At nine thirty on the dot, it seemed as if the whole place jolted awake and came to life. I could hear phones jingling all over the office, and the little system on my desk was flashing and beeping too. The doors swung open every minute or so, the reporters and researchers and photographers filing in, carrying computer bags and trendy totes and chatting with each other, occasionally and unthinkingly throwing a smile my way. I sat behind my desk and wanted to greet them all individually, making eye contact and nodding my head eagerly.

‘Good morning,’ I said, as they whisked by me, on their way to their offices. The only people who stopped to chat were Lou and Jerry, both asking me how I was settling in or if I needed anything.

‘I’m doing fine, sir,’ I said to Lou, who had already asked me four times not to call him that.

It wasn’t too hard to feel invisible; all day long, people stood around me and chatted as if I wasn’t there.

‘So, did you get your period yet?’ one girl in a short white skirt and black boots asked another. ‘You must be freaking out! Does Simon know? Are you gonna tell him, or wait until you know for sure? I mean, you don’t want him to marry you only because you might be pregnant, right?’

I cowered beneath the counter, answering phones, but couldn’t help overhearing every word.

‘He’ll probably dump me,’ the other girl replied. ‘Don’t think he’s ready for any big commitment, you know? I’m screwed,’ she said, turning paler than she already was and shaking her head. ‘Anyway, forget all that. How are you and Patrick doing?’

‘Yeah, great. He wants to go on holiday, asked me to pick where. There’s a place I keep hearing about, but don’t know too much about it. The West Bank?’

Later, in the elevator, I saw the same two women, still talking. When I got in with them, they stopped for a second, looked me up and down, and proceeded on their conversation, evidently deciding that I was too simpleminded to pay any heed. I stood in one corner, staring down at the light blue-with-black-trim salwar kameez, which was one of the nicest outfits from my trousseau. I thought I looked smart, and was hoping that the girls might comment on the exotica of my dress sense, but they said nothing, instead carrying on with their chat about missed menstruations and sun-tanning on the Gaza Strip.

Deanna was my only real link between the desk that I sat behind, and the far more vivid world that seemed to exist beyond it. During her four-a-day visits, she would tell me stories about people I hadn’t spoken to, and give me glimmers of insight into the lives of colleagues that I would probably never meet.

‘And that girl, Aimee, you know, the one who covers the nightclub scene, tall, skinny, blonde, beautiful, makes you sick just to look at her? You know? Anyway, she snuck her boyfriend in here, and was caught making out with him on the desk of the photo editor, who now wants to move out of his office because he says he can’t imagine using that desk again! Can you believe it? Hysterical!’ she said, as I stared at her, baffled at the things that went on in corporate America.

‘And,’ she continued, pausing for emphasis, ‘that overweight movie reviewer – you know the one, really serious, thinks he knows everything, total snob – he’s about to get fired because they found out he was taking money from a studio to write good reviews. Isn’t that outrageous?’ she screamed, giggling.

‘Not really,’ I replied, whispering. ‘In India, everyone does that.’

7

If everything were exactly according to the order of Hindu cultural law, I shouldn’t really be living in America.

I shouldn’t really even be married.

I am the youngest of four girls – which some would say is a disaster in itself. But, until a couple of months ago, I was also the youngest of four unmarried girls, which is something that parents with a weaker spiritual constitution than mine might forever be on Prozac for.

Where I come from, these things happen chronologically. Sisters get married in succession. The youngest waits her turn.

But by the time I was twenty-four, and my sisters still weren’t married, my parents just didn’t see how they could turn the offer down.

My mother never listened when she was told she had been cursed. Multiple girls, no sons, everyone kept saying, as if she needed reminding. But she simply shrugged, smiled, shook her head and patted ours. She called us her ‘little Laxmis’.

‘Just you see,’ she said to all those who tut-tutted at her perceived misfortune. ‘My girls will bring us great luck and joy. Just you see.’

She was right, and she was wrong. The luck came as my father’s small construction business grew at a steady pace, and he was able to provide somewhat comfortably for us. But the joy faded as we grew older and our hands remained, mostly, unasked for, our hearts unattached, our dowries ready-in-waiting for years upon years.

We are all exactly two years apart in age, all of us born in the same last week of December, which made birthday parties convenient, if rather chaotic.

According to my grandmother, at the naming ceremonies for each, our family priest had cautioned my parents against giving any of us names that began with an R.

‘It doesn’t match your own initials,’ he’d said, consulting his almanac. ‘It will surely spell disaster on some level.’ But my mother, who pooh-poohed anything to do with the occult, stood her ground. She adored the idea of having a gorgeous, voluptuous ‘Rrrrrr’ trip off her tongue each time she might call her girls to her.