On a normal day, Sandip Roy could cover the distance between his Bangla Daily office and Festive Fashion’s storefront in 126 steps, given it was only three quarters of a block, with start and end points both located on Seventy-Fourth Street in Flushing, Queens. But this was a Wednesday afternoon, restocking time for Patel Brothers, the grocery store in the middle of the block, and Halal Meats, two doors down. February was wedding season, too, despite the icy slush on the ground, and the bridal-wear salons and jewelry boutiques on both sides of the street were vomiting shoppers. From the sweet shops launched pyramidal trays, sugary treats in pastel rows, grenades of syrupy goodness. Elsewhere bouquets tottering in arms, double-parked cars with trunks agape, gold brocade dragging through grime, the hell of other people.
Then there was the temperament of the acid he was carrying. Five hundred ml of sulfuric acid, 98 percent H2SO4. Colorless as vodka, but with a viscosity that caused it to creep up the sides of the Pyrex cup with every miniscule tilt. Sandip hugged the cup to his chest as if he’d acquired it at a Starbucks. Maybe he should have initialed his name on the side with black marker to complete the illusion. Or tied a string around the rim with a tag attached, and on the tag, in the cursive of his secret notebooks, penned the most feeling words of all: With Love.
• •
It was his therapist, Dr. J, who had given him the idea of feeling words. “Simple,” Dr. J said, one eye on the clock marking his exorbitant hour, “take your feelings, no matter how vague or complicated they seem, and force them into words.” He did not mean for Sandip to talk; they had tried that method for a month and failed. Instead all Sandip needed to do was find the right words, in any language, and write them down, for his own eyes only, Dr. J promised, and in doing so trick them out of his soul and expose them to healing sunlight. Sandip had been translator and copy editor at Bangla Daily since graduating college, six solid years, how could he resist such a suggestion? A search on the Internet threw up dozens of sites dedicated to such lists, to bristling dictionaries of feeling words, in a cornucopia of languages. Sandip invested in notebooks with pricey leather binding and paper as thin and translucent as her skin. “Use her name,” Dr. J said. “Remember, she is not all women.” So Pia, he had written, Pia, Pia, Pia, on every inch of the opening pages of notebook one. And his first feeling words: Koi No Yokan (Japanese)—the sense you may get, upon meeting a stranger, that the two of you are going to fall in love. There was no identical phrase in English, but it captured precisely the tickle in Sandip’s brain when he first saw Pia.
This was the spot, here in front of Regal Sari Palace, two buildings south of the Bangla Daily office, and sandwiched between Chikna Bazaar and Pure Veg Sweets. Sandip cradled the cup in his arms and gazed at the mannequin in the window. Six months back, on a sultry September morning, the mannequin had been naked, her molded plastic breasts devoid of nipples and the space between her legs missing that delectable notch. Such lack of authenticity broke Sandip’s stride and caused him to press his nose against the glass with such perturbation that when a girl climbed into the window from inside the store and proceeded to wrap the mannequin in a powder-blue petticoat and matching sari, he thought he might tell her to hurry.
She got in first. “Move along, perv. Never seen a girl naked before?”
“I have, in fact,” Sandip said, and wasn’t that the truth. Years of poring over medical textbooks interspersed with Nip/Tuck binges on Netflix had left him an expert on female anatomy. “That’s why—” He pointed, paused, dropped his finger. She was beautiful. The girl, not the mannequin. “You’re beautiful.” Five-foot nothing but with curls to her waist and what his mother would call childbearing hips.
“No kidding.” But she turned and looked him over, her lashes the flick of a swallow’s wing. As he debated whether to present his left profile, his way better side, she smiled. Those dimples in her cheeks were a muscular deformity; all dimples are indicative of a bifid zygomaticus major, but how they flashed in his eye and imprinted on his consciousness and brought about a wave of emotion he later, much later, transcribed in his notebook closely following Koi No Yokan as Gigil (Tagalog)—the urge to pinch or squeeze something that is irresistibly cute.
• •
The cup in Sandip’s arms grew warmer as he walked, past Peak Time Travels and Delilah the Psychic. Delilah, whom Sandip had known as Dolly Auntie since she babysat him years zero through four, had hung a new solar system decal over her door with the legend: NEW! Get your horoscopes drawn HERE! Her Venus was laminated gas-flame blue.
Sandip shifted his palms, felt the temperature of the cup’s lip versus its base, yes, ten-degree difference, give or take. The real Venus was the color of radioactive piss, and her surface temperature never dropped below 880 degrees Fahrenheit. Use her name, Dr. J would say, she is not all planets. Even though she was the only one named after a woman, symbolic of love, sex, beauty, and babymaking, and pirouetted around space spewing clouds of sulfuric acid, Dr. J would call that irony, with a disapproving frown.
Dolly Auntie had introduced Sandip and Pia in more formal fashion a week after the Sari Palace window incident. “Meet our new neighbor,” Dolly Auntie said, dragging Sandip into her lounge and plying him with over-boiled tea. “Pia Ganguli.” Pia’s hand felt smooth as silk when Sandip shook it, the silk she was learning to drape on all the mannequins up and down Seventy-Fourth Street, Dolly Auntie explained; she was training as a window dresser.
“Visual merchandiser,” said Pia.
“Paying occupation these days,” Dolly Auntie said, as if her own shtick were a sacred calling. “And she plans to keep working after marriage, too, just so you know.”
It was a setup, a matchmaking match struck against the cold, dead lump of hope in Sandip’s heart.
“Your mothers think you are suitable,” Dolly Auntie went on, “for each other. Caste, language, religion, all same-to-same, important. Age little this-that, but can adjust. Horoscopes compatible on twenty-three out of twenty-four counts, by my own calculation. But who listens to their mothers and Dolly Aunties these days? Meet, talk, make up your minds, and let me collect the fee. Yes?”
Pia sipped her tea, dimples blinking in indecipherable code.
“Invite her to dinner.” Dolly Auntie poked a finger in Sandip’s ribs.
Sandip opened his mouth, not to talk, but to let the breath inside him escape. Pia’s eyes met his, her pupils the color of the toffee he kept in a jar on his editing desk, hard and slightly salty until worked on good, a gnaw or two, and then the rushing sweetness, and then, and then—
The phrase fit perfectly, the feeling word for that moment he was sure, even now, he could not have misinterpreted: Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego)—a look shared by two people both wishing to initiate the same thing but where each is reluctant to make the first move.
• •
In the end, he suggested a low-stakes ice cream at Jackson Diner next door, and she accepted. The place was deserted at four o’clock when they strolled over from Dolly’s, the linoleum tables wiped clean, and the dishes of the lunch buffet rinsed and stacked along the back wall. Sandip ordered a pistachio kulfi, she a strawberry sundae, and as her lips blushed from the maraschino sauce, Sandip found his leg doing the tailor dance, an uncontrollable jiggling that his mother liked to say meant he belonged behind a sewing machine. Jigga-jigga went his leg, and his spoon sank lower and lower in its pool of pistachio until Pia’s hand slipped beneath the table and cupped his knee. Freeze, be still, be electrocuted still, be screaming from every pore.
“San-dip.” She said his name as if turning it over for flaws. “Ever met someone through the family circuit before?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” Her tongue curled around her spoon like a cat’s. “Do you know what the missing point in Dolly Auntie’s horoscope compatibility count was?”
“No?” Sandip’s mouth hurt from wanting to mimic hers, to open, to purse, to clamp, to nibble, to bite until she bled.
“The twenty-three out of twenty-four score. I asked her what number twenty-four was, and she dropped hints but wouldn’t say.”
“Zat so?” His IQ had tested over 140 on more than one occasion. But all he could track now was her chin, a curve all its own, the feathering of tiny, sun-bleached hairs marching up to her ear, with its cosmic whorls and tumescent lobe pierced through with a thin, gold loop.
“I have a theory, though. Which I intend to test, if that’s all right with you.” She released his patella, let her hand toy with her earring. “Look. This is hard for me, too. But my last four boyfriends turned out such losers, and staring twenty-nine in the face is a scary thing. So I figured, why not? I’ll talk straight with you, and you with me, cut past the bullshit, and see how it pans out?”
“Test, how?”
Her shrug swallowed the air around her, a dancerly move. “I think Dolly Auntie was acting coy about physical compatibility. Chattered on about wifely duties and the consolations of kids, but hey, I love my orgasms as much as anybody else. Don’t you?”
Sandip nodded as if his collection of bobbleheads had commandeered his neck. He drank his ice cream and agreed to pick Pia up in front of Apsara Salon and Spa Saturday evening for dinner, their first proper date. The fact of his rustiness was a mere footnote; he had the logistics memorized, sequences mapped, maneuvers on tap. Strolling the streets the next few days, he marveled at the sculptural quality to the slush, the angle of a sunbeam strafing the clouds, the crystal tang to the air he breathed that brooked no meteorological explanation. He smiled at babies, and the elderly, and everyone in between. He examined for the first time the finery of the male mannequins in the windows, their sharply cut suits, their sleek tuxedos, the magnificent turbans on their heads. His own reflection grew tolerable, hypnotic, handsome, some might say, likable at last, and maybe and forever, worthy of her love. Of those moments, those hours, those too brief days, he wrote: Voorpret (Dutch)—pre-fun, a sense of pleasurable anticipation leading up to a specific event.
• •
By now the cup in Sandip’s arms felt an extension of himself, like a football to a quarterback, or a dandelion seed to its stalk. On he walked past Studious Uniforms, Prabhu Money Transfers, Payless Shoe Source, T-Mobile Express, and the storefront of Tawa Tandoor, whose charcoal grills and cylindrical oven triggered the salivary glands of passersby with rack upon rack of roasting lamb and malai chicken and masala prawns. The heat in the tandoor built from the bottom and pulsed its way up the curved terra-cotta sides until the temperature pushed nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit (booyah, Venus!) and a naan slapped to its inner lip bubbled to done in seconds.
For the meats, a little more preparation was due. A rub with yogurt to soften the protein, then the working in of onion and ginger and garlic through an appropriate salute of tears, and a generous sprinkle of chili powder and salt, homage to quality muscle. A skewer through the chunks, no fuss, no hesitation, and a placement over the coals just so, so that the skin is crisped to the point of blackening, while the flesh inside still weeps.
Sandip considered and rejected several feeling words while mulling over his plan. His tentative choice: Po Guan Po Shuai (Mandarin)—smash a cracked pot (idiomatic); overreaction to a blemish, defect, error, or setback.
• •
The first Saturday they ate at Island BBQ, the next at Merit Dumpling Palace, the third at Nizam’s Original Kati Rolls. Pia insisted on splitting the check. “I consider myself a feminist. I’m old-fashioned that way.” As she spoke, her nose twitched in a manner that could be telegraphing amusement or scorn, but that also reminded Sandip of the hamster he’d named Hamster One in fourth grade and fed pellets mixed with paint chippings and turpentine until it molted all its hair and its eyes turned the same burnt ochre color of the paint chippings before it died. “Besides,” Pia said, “I know how much you make. I did a little digging at Bangla Daily.”
After the third date—during which Pia made pointed references to skipping the raw onions in her kati rolls and twitched her nose again when Sandip did not follow suit—she suggested they return to her apartment already. Once there, Sandip did his best, which admittedly was a low-interval grading scale, and she did her best, too, giving him three comprehensive chances and plenty of tactile support and audio-visual encouragement. But when they had settled back onto their pillows after too short an interval of time, she sighed in a way that caused her cup size to jump from B to C and said, “Bitch drafts a mean horoscope.”
She could have left it at that, and Sandip could have taken her subsequent and firm rejection of a future for the two of them as the natural conclusion of an experiment gone wrong, an objective and thoughtful and even wise move, a mutual decision where the fault, if any, and the blame, if some, would be borne by the both of them, or neither. But she laughed, her teeth shining in the gloom of her third-floor walk-up with the unwashed and therefore distracting dishes in the sink and the spider web in the northwest corner, and made the episode personal and specific and hurtful in a way that seemed custom-crafted for Sandip, by adding, by adding, by gesturing, and by adding, a final anatomical detail.
Here Sandip thought the word he found later for his notebook did wonderful double duty, communicating the insult and concomitant feeling in the recipient, layering literal and metaphorical meaning while retaining its cutting edge: Ikibari (Japanese)—lively needle; one who is willing, even eager, but under-endowed.
• •
In the weeks that followed, Sandip’s senses cranked on high. Indiscriminate swings in dopamine levels left him sniffing his armpits for olfactory alerts. He gained nine pounds. As the air grew chill and the sun dimmed with the passing of September into October, he reread poems that trafficked in the melancholy of fall. When the leaves of the plane trees on Seventy-Fourth Street lost their chlorophyll and spiraled to the ground, he stepped on them to see how badly they might crumble, but then they stuck to his shoe as if daring him to lose them by scraping his sole against the curb until the leather wore a hole, which in turn made him kick the curb, forgetting it was poured from solid concrete and that he’d stub his toe and fracture his fourth distal phalange and hop around like a lunatic. His mother muttered about “girls these days” and “for shame, for shame,” and Dolly Auntie pulled him into her lounge to suggest he wait until his Saturn Return for his fortunes to turn, a once in twenty-nine-year phenomenon. And then there were the women who worked in the shops whose windows Pia decorated. They huddled and giggled when Sandip passed, their glances flitting up and down his torso but mostly down, their X-ray vision impervious to the look on his face but which he caught sight of in a careless mirror and sank into a paroxysm of, of, of—
Litost (Czech)—state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
Also, Vergüenza Ajena (Spanish)—feeling shame on behalf of others who seem oblivious to their own stupidity.
And while he was at it, Kummerspeck (German)—grief bacon; increase in weight due to emotional overeating.
• •
But more than all the rest, it was the sight of Pia going about her work in unexpected windows, squatting here, leaning there, draping this, pinning that, that took a surprising toll. As a defensive measure, Sandip established the sequence and timing of her weekly assignments, Sari Palace on Mondays, Diva Boutique on Tuesdays, and so on, but even then, accidents happened. When Pia noticed Sandip standing on the other side of the plate glass displays, discreetly to the side, or walking by real slowly, and she did sometimes notice, she always paused and smiled in a nonthreatening, almost wistful way, as if she regretted certain things she might have said and done, or maybe he was only imagining that part, but still, it was a friendly smile. “I hope we can continue to be friends,” she had said in parting at her apartment that night. But when she started interfering in his REM sleep as a fully dressed mannequin mouthing those words, Sandip sought an appointment with Dr. J.
“Can you articulate—” Dr. J began.
“If only I didn’t have to see her face everywhere I turn,” Sandip said, and fell silent.
Besides the notebooks, Dr. J suggested redoubled attention to work might help numb Sandip’s pain. Sandip agreed. He spent long hours in the Bangla Daily office, ordering in dinner, and locking up as a matter of course. He lavished time on the weekend edition layouts and pored over galleys, reading the news with appreciation and relief: in faraway West Bengal and Bangladesh, the journalistic stomping grounds of Bangla Daily, life was carrying on. Rail carriages collided, ferries sank, tsunamis came and went, jilted men threw acid on their former lovers’ faces, garment factories hired, then fired, seamstresses not old enough or literate enough to sign their names—
L’espirit d’escalier (French)—staircase wit; when a response to an argument comes to mind, but in belated fashion.
Sandip ran a search one evening in February after the office had emptied. Not new news, quite a tradition it seemed in the swampy lands his parents had fled three decades prior. Dozens of incidents reported in the past half-decade alone, aided by easy and unregulated supplies in auto repair garages, leather tanneries, hardware stores, gold and silver workshops—
Shodanai (Tamil)—severe trial, specifically of soul or conscience.
The Ad Rem photographs of the women were almost as informative as the take-apart-and-learn model Sandip had purchased at a medical supply store and affectionately dubbed Mr. Zombie Potato Head: the shredded tissue and coagulated fat of their faces peeling back in megapixel resolution to expose the pitted residue of bone, the seared lips and shriveled nostrils revealing a pulsing, still-alive layer of glands and nerves and veins underneath, the reality, and if Sandip were pressed to confess, the true, heartbreaking beauty of the human form. The psychology of the men as addressed in the accompanying articles was blurrier, their motives pat—to teach the woman a lesson, some said, to erode her value in the marriage mart, to destroy her identity, to restore the man’s honor, to deny her the mercy of death. Not one person offered the most plausible, most literal reason: to not have to see her face.
Snow was falling in lateral flurries by the time Sandip locked the Bangla Daily office and contemplated the workshop of Alankar Jewelers across the second-floor landing. The shop’s main entrance downstairs had bulletproof glass and buzzer access and an intimidating alarm system. But the workshop was secured by a lock that gave way to a twist of his pocketknife. The room glowed in light from the street, bouncing off the fresh snow, revealing benches with lacquered worktops, fluorescent magnifying lamps, bins of drills and pegs and anvils and pliers and other nameless tools. On a bench closest to the door, pairs of gold loop earrings dangled in a row from a display tube, ranging in diameter from penny-sized eighteen mm discs to three-inch whoppers that could let a baseball through. Toward the back of the workshop, next to a deep ceramic sink and descaling trays and a Pyrex cup of brass tweezers, sat a jug of sulfuric acid helpfully labeled with its concentration and cautionary small print.
As Sandip left, brimming Pyrex cup in hand, he paused to slip a pair of the eighteen mm gold loops into his pocket. He knew without measuring that they would fit.
• •
Today, Wednesday, was Festive Fashion’s turn on Sandip’s mental calendar, three to four p.m. On step 126, just as he had calculated, Sandip arrived before the store window, another glutinous, overheated liquid pumping through his heart. Behind the glass, Pia kneeled with her back to him, facing a mannequin already dressed in a ruby velvet floor-length skirt and a cream bustier trimmed with brocade and embellished with pearls. Pia unfolded a matching stole crafted out of alternating strips of velvet and chiffon, heavy and light, red and cream, matte and shiny, and as Sandip watched, she stroked the fabric, held it to her cheek, and in one smooth movement, flung it over her head as if playing bride. She rose to her feet and swiveled to the right, slowly turning, draping the stole low over her eyes and staring at the plate glass as if seeking her reflection but not seeing beyond it to where Sandip stood, his eyes dazzled by the glare of the afternoon sun glancing off his side of the window. Pia turned, turned, in time to some inner music, continuing her swivel 360 degrees, arms hoisted over her head, chin tilted so she gazed at the ceiling, pinches of the stole held in each hand and the rest of the fabric rippling over her curls and down her back and past her waist and those childbearing hips running out of biological time. No one on the sidewalk noticed her slow-motion performance. Nor did anyone inside the packed store look up when Sandip pushed open the front entrance with his free hand and ducked through the trapdoor immediately to the right that led into the display window. Pia stopped, her hands dropping to her chin so that the stole draped over her shoulders and cascaded to the floor.
“Here.” Sandip held out his left palm, the eighteen mm loops glinting.
“For me?” Her voice rasped, enough for Sandip to tiptoe past the surprise and recognize fear.
“They’ll go well with that stole.” His gold-filled palm stayed cupped like a beggar’s, while his mind considered for future notation:
Farpotshket (Yiddish)—make something worse by trying to fix it.
Alternatively, Qaamchi’ip’q’i (Ubykh)—filigree metal ornament on the handle of a whip, idiomatic term for someone whose kind outward appearance is deceptive.
And most of all, Saudade (Portuguese)—the love that remains after someone is gone; intense nostalgia for an object of longing that may have never existed in the first place.