Key Highlights
- Samar’s T-shirt was tight around his chest in a film-hero kind of way, the polyester adhering to the curves of his boyish biceps, and he later admitted to Yogan that this elasticity, rather than the English word on his chest, was what had convinced him to make the purchase. It was the T-shirts that had sparked their first conversation, each asking the other, “Do you speak English?” English was necessary in order to navigate the airport, and, they expected, life in this new city called Dubai, which was in so many ways an imitation of a major Western city.
- But English had come to both men only piecemeal, from the dazzling, incongruous lines in Bollywood films.
- The plots of those movies and their many twists had vanished; what Yogan and Samar recalled was Shah Rukh Khan, with his signature wide-eyed look, ordering Kajol to “take a chill pill!” And Kajol, mocking her hoity-toity London neighbors with “Would you like some tea?” Thanks to a joint effort drawing on both men’s vocabularies, they made it through immigration and baggage claim and out to the arrivals hall, where a red-haired woman with a laminated sign motioned for them to wait for the shuttle that would take them to their accommodations. Only a few months earlier, Yogan’s wife had sent him out to look for more long-term work.
- His last construction contract had recently ended, and Roshni had suddenly vomited a hot stream of bile onto her bare feet after her morning tea.
- That afternoon, a drug-store test had informed them that she was pregnant with their second child.
