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babysitter’s here. What will I do? What is a man to do in such a situation? How should a man in the twentieth century keep himself busy while his baby is sat?”
    She laughed. “You should propose to her and take her back to India. She’s fairer than I am. Your mom and dad will be pleased.”
    Eventually, after much cajoling, he made a deal with her that he be allowed to sit in the car as well, and Rashmi agreed on the condition that they wouldn’t exchange a word the entire time—if she went shopping in the mall, he’d shiver and quake in the parking lot with his hands thrust into his pockets; if she pulled into a gas station, he’d not be the least bit chivalrous and would in no situation offer to fill up the car and would instead fiddle with the knobs of the stereo like a distracted boy. Rakesh agreed to all these ridiculous terms because he’d always feared the worst from Rashmi’s angry solitary drives (she was willfulbut absentminded), and he felt better, as the object of her rage, being by her side.
    “You’re too much, Rakesh,” she said. They’d been silent for a good twenty minutes and were slowing down by the mall.
    “I know. I know,” he said. Then he grinned. “So are you.”
    He also knew this was the end of the argument: she lay her hand on his; she had forgiven him; they were quits. Then Rashmi parallel-parked the car in a tight space on the narrow road with breathtaking skill and stepped out of the vehicle on the side of traffic and in doing so found herself in the direct path of a motorcyclist who had careened the wrong way down a one-way street; and with that, Rakesh’s time in America was over. The motorcyclist slammed straight into her and carried off in a whirling agglomeration not only Rashmi and three-fourths of the open door and a stack of magazines crammed into the driver-pouch but also managed to tilt (in the manner of water pushing open a sluice) the parked car away from the pavement so that Rakesh, who was stepping out from the passenger’s side at that very moment, was whooshed onto the ground, his head stunned by debris, his left eardrum punctured by a flake of glass, his palms bloodied by savage, cold concrete. The sun overhead was gorgeous and blinding and Rakesh sat up on the pavement and waited for someone or something to strike him down as well. Nothing happened; no one came for him. He was already struck down. The sun was maddening. For two hours he could make out nothing in the left ear, then the doctors worked a minor miracle and left him tolerably deaf.About Rashmi, though, nothing could be done. She had died on the spot.
    It would be incorrect to say Rakesh stopped functioning: if anything, relatives said he took the death very well, as best he could have—what else could the poor boy do? He disavowed America and all the promise it supposedly represented (the motorcyclist had died, too, a month later, never waking from his coma) and flew back to India with his son. He started living with his parents again in their cavernous Greater Kailash house, Arjun left to the devices of his grandmother while Rakesh brimmed with rage and hurled himself into politics with a newfound fervor. He knew it wasn’t his parents’ fault that he had fallen in love with Rashmi, even if they had introduced them—but he blamed them nevertheless. He blamed them for his disastrous temperament. He blamed them for the sharp tongue that sent Rashmi shooting out the door and into the car. He blamed them for their inhospitality and bad cooking, for not keeping a home in India that would have tempted Rashmi to return. He blamed them for their legacy of bad luck that wasn’t bad enough: Why else had he survived?
    Worse, he worried that his son’s life, Arjun’s life, would also be ruined by his mother’s disastrous ineptitude at child rearing: hadn’t she produced one failure already?
    So, when his parents suggested a second marriage and Rakesh said yes, he did it with the irony and bitterness