Gods Without Men

2008

Lisa had the cases open on the bed. The room was small and cramped, papered with an unpleasant pattern of purple flowers. As soon as Jaz got him in, Raj stopped crying, wriggled out of his arms and went off to flush the toilet. Jaz hadn’t the energy to stop him. He was obsessed with toilets. Dabbling his fingers in the water. Sticking his head deep into the bowl to examine the flow. He tried the flush again, before the cistern had refilled. Jaz could hear the hollow thud as he pulled the handle. And again. He could do that for hours.

Jaz sat down in an armchair. The room stank of some kind of artificially scented cleaning product. Carcinogens and lavender.

“Do you need a hand?”

Lisa shook her head.

“You OK?”

“Sure.”

He tried to take over, pulling out one of his shirts and reaching for a hanger.

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“You’ll mix everything up.”

He sat down again. Raj came barreling into the room and tugged at Lisa, who tried to carry on unpacking as he violently twisted her T-shirt.

“Come on,” Jaz pleaded. “Leave Mommy alone. Here’s Bah.”

Bah. Once-white bunny. Bald patches, tufted graying fur. Bacterial Bah, sucked and wiped and dragged, spongy with goo and secretions. Raj threw him at his mother’s head. She ignored the blow, mechanically sorting through their things, shirts and pants and swim shorts, diapers for Raj, who was now happily wrapping himself in the curtains. Lately Lisa’s face had acquired a fixed cast. The girl Jaz first knew had been a flirt, a wearer of short skirts, a teller of dirty jokes. She liked to do things on impulse: grab a bag and head for the airport; check into the Mercer to watch TV. She once made love to him in the toilet stall of a Lower East Side sushi restaurant while their friends sat in a booth, thinking they’d gone to get money at an ATM. Jaz had known very few women in his life and none at all like her. She had amazed his senses. At heart he was still a typical immigrant’s kid, nervous, on the lookout for social banana skins. She showed him it was OK to take risks, to allow oneself uncalibrated pleasure. He wanted to remind himself of that woman; she must still be there, locked away inside this new version of herself, the princess in the tower.

“Are we going to go visit the park?”

Lisa shrugged. “I guess. It’s what we came for.”

“We need a picnic.”

“Damn it, Jaz. I know we need a picnic. I’m unpacking here, I can’t do everything—”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll take the boss to the market in town. We’ll pick up food, plastic plates, whatever we need.”

“Sure.”

“You could take a nap.”

“I don’t want — OK, sure, I’ll take a nap, whatever. Thanks.”

The boss. The young master. Those were their names for him. They’d become the serfs in his little feudal kingdom. Jaz chased him down, smeared sunscreen on his screwed-up face, collected car keys, dark glasses, the GPS device with its pigtail of black cable. They left Lisa sitting on the edge of the bed, robotically channel surfing the TV.

The motel manager was hovering about outside the office. Jaz hadn’t paid her much attention when they checked in. She was an odd-looking woman, with a mane of permed hair and a lot of turquoise jewelry.

“You all OK there?” she asked.

“Sure,” Jaz said, squaring up. “We’re absolutely fine.” Was she going to complain? Raj hadn’t done anything. The boy slipped his hand, started examining something on the ground. The woman smiled.

“Room to your liking?”

“Everything’s great. We’re just going to pick up something to eat, get a picnic to take into the park.”

“That’s nice. There’s a market on your right as you head down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.”

“You have a good day. Take plenty of water and don’t sit out in the sun.”

In the time it took them to exchange these pleasantries, Raj had vanished. Jaz looked around but couldn’t see him anywhere.

“My kid. Did you see where he went?”

“Oh, no, honey. I hope he didn’t go out front.”

Jaz jogged over to the corner of the building, where he had a view of the highway. He half expected to see his son playing in the traffic.

“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

The motel manager was pointing. The British junkie guy was standing at the door of one of the rooms, a small pink towel around his waist. Without clothes, his scrawny body was alarming, pallid and inked with tattoos, like raw chicken drumsticks scribbled on with a ballpoint pen.

“Mate? You looking for your boy? He’s in here.”

Jaz went over. The guy pointed him to the bathroom, where Raj was stubbornly pressing the toilet flush. “Sorry,” he said, gesturing nervously at his towel. “I was having, you know, a kip. Rough night last night. Heard the bog and there he was. Couldn’t get him to budge.”

“I’m so sorry. Raj, you’re not supposed to be in here. It’s not our room. This is the man’s room.”

“Don’t have a pop at him on my account. It’s just — you know — you don’t want some little kid in your hotel room. Looks a bit Gary Glitter.”

He nodded, pretending he understood the man’s accent, then took Raj firmly by the hand, apologized again and headed for the car. Raj didn’t make too much of a fuss, allowed himself to be placed in his booster seat and belted in. As Jaz settled himself behind the wheel, he tried to work out how difficult the shopping trip was going to be. They really needed a few easy days, so Lisa and he could remember what it was like to be decent to each other.

She had come along without warning, in his final summer of grad school. She was seated next to him at a potluck supper, gorgeous, blond, just finishing up a master’s in comparative literature at Brown. She talked about Henry James and Marrakech and the Kosovo war and the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and he had to stop himself smiling from the sheer pleasure of watching her mouth move. When he spoke, which he did hesitantly and (as he later heard) with painful seriousness, she focused on him so intently that he felt as if he’d been caught in the beam of a searchlight. For a few moments he was the only man at the table, the only man in the building. By the time the main course was served, he belonged to her entirely.

Lisa was well aware of the impression she’d made. As people started to gather their coats, she wrote her number down on the back of someone else’s business card. You need this, she said. He thanked her, flushing with pleasure. She smiled flirtatiously.

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“Sure.”

“Because you’re taking me to the theater next week.”

“What are we going to see?”

“Well, that’s up to you. But make sure it’s good. I get bored easily.”

That week, stochastic modeling took second place to frantic combing of the listings pages. It wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate. The numbers themselves seemed to have loosened their bonds. His distributions were all improbable, his scattering patterns shoals of little swimming fish. He bought seats for a production of The Seagull and waited nervously for Saturday night.

It seemed incredible to Jaz that a woman like Lisa would want him, let alone fall in love. Yet the week after The Seagull, she returned the favor, taking him to see a string quartet playing repetitive Minimalist pieces that he pretended to like much more than he did. Afterward they went for dinner and at the end of the evening he worked up the courage to kiss her. Soon they were seeing each other regularly. His life opened up like a flower. He was drunk with her, her ambition, her intelligence, her sense of entitlement. Academia wasn’t for her, she’d realized. She wanted to move to New York, to become an editor at a publishing house. He marveled at the precise picture she had of her future: children, a house with steps leading up to the front door, shelves of first editions, witty and fascinating friends. She asked him about physics, and surprised him by exhibiting a real fascination with his research. She also asked about his family, and for the first time he risked telling some version of the truth. Her reaction astonished him. She wasn’t mocking or disdainful. If anything, it seemed to make him more interesting in her eyes.

As their relationship grew serious, he realized he was going to have to work hard to keep her. She seemed to be friends with several ex-lovers. He found this intolerable; often he lay awake at night consumed by sexual images of her with these old boyfriends — positions, acts. He wanted to feel as if she’d come into existence the day he first saw her, that there had never been anyone but him. When he blurted something out, she had the good sense not to get defensive. He tried to explain that where he came from it was considered demeaning for a man to marry a woman who wasn’t a virgin. “Marry?” she said. “You’re very sure of yourself.” He blushed and spluttered, until he realized she was teasing him. “You’ll just have to accept it, Jaz. I’m not your veiled teenage bride. If that’s what you want, you better look elsewhere.”

She would talk about feeling rootless. She was an only child. As soon as she left home, her parents severed all ties with the Long Island suburb where she’d grown up and moved to Arizona. “So my dad could live on a golf course and my mom could get skin cancer” was how she put it, her voice dripping betrayal. Jaz had never felt anywhere belonged to him enough to feel strongly about losing it. He did his best to sympathize.

They flew to Phoenix for Thanksgiving. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzman lived in a giant subdivision of identical ranch-style houses. They were kind and curious, asking questions about his family and his “culture,” a word they used as if it denoted something fragile that might break if roughly handled. Her father drove him to the store to pick up wine for lunch, showing off the neighborhood as if it were his personal property. The tennis courts, the swimming pool, the landscaping in front of the clinic, all of it was important to him; in all of it he had a stake. Jaz felt awkward. The things he’d done with this man’s daughter! He felt he wouldn’t be able to look the man in the face unless he said something. Later, Lisa told him it was the phrase “honorable intentions” that made Mr. Schwartzman erupt into laughter.

When Lisa announced that she was moving to New York, he felt like a sinkhole had opened up beneath his feet. By that time he was writing up his thesis and thinking about applying for postdoctoral jobs. He knew their life, commuting between rooms in shared houses in Boston and Providence, wasn’t sustainable “in the long term.” But that was the long term, not the short term, let alone now. He was happy. He didn’t want anything to change.

“Jaz, I’ve been talking about it ever since we met. It’s not like I’m springing it on you.”

“Sure, but I thought — well, I thought we’d at least talk about it.”

“What’s to talk about? You know it’s what I want.”

“But what about us?”

“It’s up to you, Jaz. If you’re serious about me, you’ll think of something.”

“I am serious.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“How can you say that? I love you!”

“I know you think you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t believe I know my own mind?”

“Well, what about your family? It’s hard, I get that. But if you won’t even introduce me to them, what does that say about us? Jaz, deep down I think all you really want is a Punjabi girl. You’ll string me along for a while because it’s comfortable and — oh, I don’t know — because you like the sex, but you’ll never commit. And then you’ll marry someone else, some girl who can make samosas with your mom.”

“Lisa, that’s not true.”

“I think it is.”

“So you’re going to do this? You’re just going to leave?”

“Well, it looks that way, doesn’t it.”

They didn’t speak for several days. He lay curled up on the couch, watching whole seasons of a TV show about an alien invasion. And then she was gone, staying with a friend in Brooklyn while she looked for an apartment. He thought his life was over. A friend had to explain it to him.

“Go get her, Jaz. She’s waiting to see if you’ll come after her.”

It was the best decision of his life. He rented a car and drove to New York, getting horrendously lost somewhere in Queens. At last, late on a Saturday night, he found himself pressing a buzzer on an old industrial building in Williamsburg. There was no reply, and he hung around outside for more than an hour before Lisa turned up, several cocktails into her evening, hanging on to her friend Amy.

“I want to be with you,” he said to Lisa, as Amy hovered indiscreetly close, covering her mouth with her hands and making little cooing noises. “I’ll live anywhere. I’ll introduce you to my family, all the cousins, my aunts and uncles, so many relatives you’ll beg for mercy. Just say you’ll be with me.”

In later years Amy would tell elaborate, highly embellished dinner-party accounts of the scene, “the most romantic thing she’d ever witnessed.” Lisa always blushed and made feeble attempts to stop her, but it was clear she enjoyed the tales. It had been a proposal in all but name, though Jaz saved the real proposal for after he’d fulfilled his promise. As he made arrangements for the trip, he hid how nervous he was, trying not to frighten her with too many instructions about what to wear and how to behave. He knew the meeting would go badly — it was just a question of whether she’d come away too scared to stay with him. As they drove down to Baltimore, he felt like a condemned man on his way to the chair.

His parents had taken the news of Lisa’s existence about as well as could be expected. On the phone, his mother asked her family name, where her parents lived. When he raised the subject of a visit, she responded with a sort of icy neutrality. If God wills it, she said, you will come. His father was warmer. Your family misses you, beta. It’s been too long. Jaz booked a motel room, so the question of sleeping arrangements didn’t arise. Lisa wore a pantsuit and a long-sleeved shirt, despite the humid summer weather. As they passed block after block of boarded-up row houses, she looked uneasy, and was visibly relieved when they pulled up outside his parents’ place, which, though small, was at least not in a neighborhood that looked abandoned.

They ate lunch, which his mom had prepared with help from Seetal and Sukhwindermassi. There was none of the usual bustle, no running around, no jokes or high jinks. For long periods the rattle of the elderly air conditioner was the loudest noise in the room. His dad offered Lisa a whiskey and was displeased to see she accepted. As she sat and sipped her drink, Jaz shuffled his feet and tried to keep the conversation from petering out. In vain he translated some of Lisa’s approaches to his mother, questions about her house, compliments on the food. She wouldn’t respond, just scurried back into the kitchen and pretended to busy herself with pots and pans. Bravely Lisa persevered through the meal, trying fruitlessly to make a connection, helping Seetal and Uma carry dirty plates, even attempting to take charge of doing the dishes; Uma led her politely back into the living room, where Jaz was chatting with his uncles about real estate. She looked thoroughly dejected. Discreetly he squeezed her hand, earning an extra look of disapproval from his father.

Later they sat in the car outside the house. Lisa fumbled angrily in her purse for tissues.

“It’s not you,” he told her. “You understand that, don’t you? They’d be like that with anyone.”

“Anyone white.”

“It’d be the same with a lot of Indians.”

She smiled wanly, dabbing at her eyes. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“Yes, it was.”

“You’re right. It was awful.”

She saw the look on his face and reached out to squeeze his hand. “Don’t worry, Jaz. I won’t run away.”

A few weeks later he took her to an expensive French restaurant in the West Village and asked her to marry him. He was still half expecting her to say no, but she looked at the ring and grinned and kissed him and a waiter materialized with champagne and the other patrons clapped politely, inaugurating what he now remembered as the best year of his life. They moved into a tiny walk-up in Cobble Hill. He commuted back to Cambridge to see his adviser and she started reading manuscripts for a small publisher. They bought flea-market furniture and went on long walks and made love so frequently and loudly that the crazy French woman downstairs began phoning the super. They cooked pasta and risotto for other young couples, drinking red wine out of ill-matched glasses and arguing about books and films. Once they roasted a chicken for Lisa’s parents, the four of them squeezed around the little kitchen table, clamping their elbows to their sides as they cut up their food. His own parents never saw that apartment. They were too busy, they said, to come to New York. “With what?” he asked. “So many things,” said his father, his voice trailing away.

He complained to Seetal. “How can they visit you?” she snapped. “You aren’t even married yet. And she’s—”

“She’s what? Go on, say it.”

“You chose this, Jaz. You knew what it would mean.”

Jaz successfully defended his thesis, then spent a thankless summer tutoring entitled suburban college applicants, while halfheartedly looking for academic jobs. Then he ran into Xavier, an old MIT friend. He and Lisa were eating in one of the new neighborhood restaurants that had sprung up all across gentrified Brooklyn, a place that served steaks and oysters out of a storefront that retained some of the fittings from the old pharmacy that previously occupied the site. Xavier came over to say hi, and ended up joining them for dessert. He’d been a particle physicist, but had left academia for Wall Street. He wasn’t the first person Jaz had heard of who’d done this. The application of physical models to the financial markets was something of a trend. Banks and hedge funds were hungry for specialists in so-called quantitative finance, mathematicians and computer scientists who could tame the uncertainties of international capital flows. Xavier used words like revolutionize and transformative. There was serious money involved: He was earning more in a month than Jaz could expect to make in two years as a junior lecturer. He left behind a business card and a waft of personalized cologne. The next day he phoned to say his firm was hiring. Was Jaz interested? Sure he was. He went for an interview with no special expectations. He didn’t think he’d get the job. Yet six weeks later he found himself in front of a screen, writing code that used the same modeling techniques he’d employed on quantum-probability problems to track fluctuations in the bond market.

Jaz tried not to feel angry that money brought about a reconciliation with his family. Nothing else had worked. Since 9/11 his parents had become increasingly paranoid. They displayed a big American flag in their front window in case anyone mistook them for Muslims; on his first visit after the attacks, Jaz had been furious to find his mother sewing a flag patch onto his father’s work overalls, another charm against white malice. As the war on terror intensified, they seemed more sympathetic to their son’s choices, his decision to “blend in.” Jaz’s rebellion was recast as immigrant cautiousness.

With his Wall Street salary swelling their joint bank account, he and Lisa made an offer on a duplex in Park Slope and began preparations for their wedding. He was so desperate for his family to be there that he resorted to bribery, paying off the remainder of his parents’ mortgage and sending cash to Uma to finance long-deferred dental surgery for her younger son. Coincidentally or not, his mother and father finally found time to visit, a harrowing weekend that began with a two-hour wait at Penn Station (they’d missed the train and, because neither owned a cell phone, didn’t call to let him know), then continued through a minute examination of their son’s domestic arrangements, several excruciating restaurant meals (Italian food they refused to eat; Indian food his mom excoriated, dish by dish, in stage-whisper Punjabi) and sightseeing. The high point was a trip to the Statue of Liberty. Jaz took a photo of Lisa, standing between Amma and Bapu against the rail of the ferry, the three of them smiling bravely into the wind.

In the end they had two weddings: one in a synagogue in Prospect Park, attended mostly by their friends and Lisa’s relatives, the second in the storefront gurdwara where Jaz had spent so much of his childhood. Jaz’s close family went up to Brooklyn for the Jewish ceremony, where they allowed themselves to be shepherded around, listening politely to the explanations of the various prayers, the chuppah, the broken glass. In Baltimore, Lisa brought an Indian girlfriend for support, who helped her dress and provided a buffer against various aunties who’d appointed themselves to oversee her preparations. Her mother, father and a cluster of Brooklyn friends joined the crowd. At the reception, in a nearby community hall, the two sets of parents attempted conversation, using Uma as an interpreter, while the DJ (one of Jaz’s cousins) spun bhangra at ear-splitting volume, so the younger ones could dance. Jaz was glad none of their Brooklyn friends understood Punjabi; at the reception he overheard some drunken uncle making a remark about gori sluts and had to be restrained from throwing the man out.

Married life was good. Lisa got a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. Jaz swapped his first bonus check for a classic Mercedes sports car, a seventies model that Lisa pretended to dislike. Together they dove into the city, angling for tables at hot new restaurants, taking the subway to the outer boroughs on weekend excursions. They attended charity benefits where traders from Jaz’s firm bid thousands of dollars for dive vacations or the chance to spend a day with the Mets, and book parties where Jaz felt the icy chill of being a “Wall Street guy” among innumerate arty types who disapproved of the way he made his living. Little by little, the apartment silted up with books. They took a summer rental in Amagansett, bought mid-century modern furniture from design stores in TriBeCa and hung over their fireplace a painting by a fashionable young artist, which Lisa had fallen in love with at a Lower East Side gallery. Looking at the collection of gestural swirls and neatly painted little skulls that gave his wife such inexplicable pleasure, Jaz felt replete.

Then Lisa got pregnant. She told work she thought six months off would be sufficient. On the scan Raj looked like a little white ghost, a rag of ectoplasm. Jaz phoned his parents to say it was a boy, and the joy in his mother’s voice affected him so strongly that he had to hold the phone away from his face as he sobbed. Raj arrived, a beautiful little person with olive skin, a mop of black hair, a big Punjabi nose and brown eyes that would have been the delight of Jaz’s life, had he been able to see anything human behind them.

It felt like a long time ago.

He started the car engine and let it run for a moment, glad of the sudden blast of air. The Mojave sun was high in the sky, bleaching everything white, except for the black strip of the road into town. He reached into the glove compartment and fingered his mom’s latest letter, addressed in Sukhwindermassi’s shaky handwriting. On the backseat, Raj moaned and wriggled in his harness. Jaz opened the envelope and took out the little locket his mom had enclosed, to ward off the evil eye. What could be the harm? He reached back and hung it around Raj’s neck. The boy put up a hand to feel the string and for a moment Jaz thought he’d tear it off, but he settled down, staring at some object on the other side of the window.

Pulling out onto the highway, Jaz reflexively switched on the radio, then turned it off again. Lately music had begun to frighten Raj. The doctors said his hearing was abnormally acute. As a baby he’d cried at the sound of the vacuum cleaner. The subway was impossible, and it took a long time before he was comfortable in a car, but when he was a newborn music always used to soothe him. Another depressing thing, another loss. The drive from L.A. had been undertaken in silence, boredom filling the car like carbon monoxide.

They headed down the hill into town, past billboards advertising attorneys and retirement communities. The sun was fierce. Heat haze splashed mirages across the highway and for a moment Jaz wasn’t sure if the thing he saw was real: a group of women walking by the roadside, swathed in sky-blue Afghan burqas. It was as if a shard of television had fallen into his eyes, a stray image from elsewhere. He slowed and checked his mirrors. There they were, incomprehensible cobalt ghosts, making their way from one place to another. Involuntarily he glanced around to see if everything else was still as it should be — the billboards and power lines, the creosote bushes — as though he might find himself suddenly transposed, peering at a mud-brick village through the reinforced windshield of a Humvee.

At the market they got a spot right by the entrance. Raj was docile and allowed himself to be led inside. They walked through the aisles, adding items to their cart: sliced turkey, bottled water, crackers, all the things they’d need for a picnic lunch. Raj was fascinated by the shelves stacked with canned goods. He loved to make piles, putting one block on top of another or lining his toys up in a row, and here was an environment with just the regimented order he liked. He clicked his tongue and flapped his arms, expressions of pleasure that Jaz had learned to read and enjoy. When Raj started to fill the cart with cans of corn Jaz managed to divert his attention by handing him an orange, an object he always found absorbing and could carry around for hours, like a plush toy or a pet. There were a few tears at the checkout when he had to give up the slightly squashed fruit to be scanned, but otherwise their expedition went smoothly. On the drive back Jaz whistled and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Raj clicked and hummed. Jaz looked out for more sky-blue women, but saw none.

Back at the motel, they found Lisa sunbathing by the pool, her long legs splayed over a sun lounger. She looked good in her bikini and Jaz felt an unfamiliar moment of passion for his wife. He reached down and kissed her, running his fingers over her thigh. She smelled great, like suntan oil and fresh sweat.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

She sat up and felt Raj’s forehead.

“You’re so hot. Come on, let’s get you into your swim things.”

Jaz kissed her again. “It’s OK, I’ll do it. You lie down.”

In the room Raj made no complaints as Jaz put him into cloth swim diapers and rubbed sunscreen on his body, but when he tried to slip the locket over his head Raj let out a fierce yell and gripped onto it. Jaz decided the battle wasn’t worth fighting. No big deal. The kid could keep it if he wanted.

“Come on, let’s go find Mommy.”

Out at the pool, Jaz saw Lisa talking to the motel manager, laughing over some joke. The woman walked off as he approached, and Lisa propped herself up on one elbow, shielding her eyes against the sun.

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“That piece of crap round his neck.”

“Oh, something my mom sent. He liked it, wouldn’t take it off.”

“You put that on him?”

“Yeah. It’s just a — a traditional thing. She sent it as a present.”

“Damn it, Jaz, I thought I’d made it clear. I don’t want your mom’s superstitious bullshit anywhere near our son.”

“There’s no harm in it.”

“No harm? As far as she’s concerned, her family’s been cursed because you married a white woman. She thinks Raj is our punishment.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

She pulled the boy toward her and tried to slip the locket over his neck. He grabbed at the string and began to wail.

“You’re hurting him.”

“Raj, let go!”

Finally the string broke. Lisa swore and hurled the charm over the fence. Raj began rocking backward and forward, craning his head into his shoulder like a hibernating bird. Jaz sank down onto a plastic chair.

“Perfect. Good job.”

Lisa glared at him. He got in the pool and swam a few lengths, trying to control his anger. Finally he pulled himself up onto the side and sat with his legs in the water, feeling the heat evaporating the moisture from his back.

“Lisa?”

“What?”

“Could you — I don’t know — just try to see how hard this is for me? She’s my mom.”

“Jesus, Jaz. Sometimes I think you actually believe it. You think there’s something wrong with him.”

“Well, there is something wrong with him.”

“The evil eye?”

“What do you want me to say? That my mom and dad are ignorant? That we’re just poor brown-skinned immigrants who don’t understand your big modern American world? Between you and them — God, you have no idea of what I have to do, how hard it is.… I mean, look at him, Lisa! He’s not normal. No amount of PC language is going to change that. And if you really want to know, yes, sometimes it feels like a curse. It feels like I’m being fucking punished.”

He knew he’d gone too far.

“Lisa—”

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t mean that. I love him just as much as you do. But look what it’s done to us.”

“What he’s done to us, you mean.”

“We were never like this.”

“It wouldn’t be so hard if you’d just support me sometimes, instead of behaving like I’m the problem.”

“Come on, baby. That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. You could at least stand up against your family. You don’t think it’s hard for me — to know what they think? According to them, this is my fault.”

“They don’t think that.”

“Yes, they do, Jaz. And you let them think it. You’ve never stood up to them, not once.”

“We barely see them.”

“That’s not the same thing. Running away isn’t the same as fighting.”

“And what do you expect me to do? Disown them? I have a duty. They’re my family. Family’s everything to us — that’s what you people never understand. I love my parents, and I love my son.”

She stared at him as if he’d just slapped her.

“You people?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Christ, now I’m ‘you people.’ Well, you know what, if you love your son so much, you and your wonderful Punjabi family can take care of him without me. Everyone will whoop for joy. Ding dong, the witch is dead! The nasty white witch has vanished and all the happy villagers can celebrate. You people? I don’t fucking believe you, Jaz. Where are the car keys?”

“What do you want them for?”

“Just tell me where the fucking keys are.”

“On the table by the bed.”

“Right.”

Grabbing her towel, she stalked off to the room. Jaz sat with Raj, trying to work out what had just happened. A few minutes later she came out again wearing a T-shirt and shorts, a pair of owlish oversized sunglasses screening her face. Without a glance over at the pool she marched around the corner to the car. He heard the starter motor squeal as the key was turned violently in the ignition. Then, with a screech of tires, she drove away.