On Saturdays, the men drank whiskey-colas around the kitchen table. They ironed their slacks and swapped silver-buckled belts. They were living on top of each other, two to a bedroom, but on Saturdays this didn’t matter. The apartment smelled like six men and green-apple candy from the pomade they used to slick back their hair. Saturday nights were for dancing.

Raz was adopted into this tradition as soon as he arrived in Berkeley. The other coders took him in quickly, gladly. He belonged. Their tech firm had set him up in subsidized housing with the other Indians, and he did not mind the presumption. The rest of the coders were all from China—the office neatly divided itself along those lines.

The men insisted on showing him around after HR dropped him off at his desk. Raz learned fast. Leaving time was 5 p.m. but it was better to wait till half-past when the boss clocked out; if you couldn’t understand the receptionist’s thick American accent, the best strategy was to nod and smile; and it was wise to avoid the developers, especially the women. 

“And you’ll come dancing with us this weekend,” J said happily. When Raz resisted, he was waved off. 

“Of course you’ll come,” said S. “The only way to get settled is to throw yourself in, bro.”

The men loaned him a button-down, and he bought a squeaky new pair of dress shoes with his first paycheck. That first Saturday he couldn’t actually bring himself to join in, just stood at the edge of the room and watched his new friends pair off with girls. It was Beginner Ballroom, the instructors counting beats of four that threw Raz off. He didn’t think of himself as a particularly terrible dancer, had danced at all his cousins’ weddings back home, but there was no embarrassment there. Everyone joined in, children and elderly uncles following the music in a disorderly crowd. Here, 7 p.m. at Fairfield Community Center, the rec room was full of beautiful shining people. With the lights dim and the tap of high-heels on the linoleum, the bodies blurred into each other, a mass of red and black and polished shoes. 

That’s when Deb approached him. She was older, but it was hard for Raz to read white women, they never dressed exactly their age. Maybe thirty, maybe forty-five. Her long dress might have suggested modesty on someone else, but Raz noticed how fabric clung close to her body. A large silver pendant drew his eyes to the center of her sun-spotted chest. 

“Aren’t you going to dyans?” she asked. He blinked at her accent. 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“With me?” 

Raz had been warned off talking to women like her—definitely white, seemingly wealthy. They’ll only give you problems, the men said. They think we’re all perverts, J told him. Raz heard of the stereotypes, the hordes of lonely Indian men harassing women for nudes online. Unfortunately, Raz had discovered that J really was something of a pervert, at least based on the genre, duration, and volume of porn heard echoing through the thin walls of their shared apartment, so he didn’t know who to believe. 

“Are you here with someone?” the woman asked when he failed to respond. 

“My friends are over there.” Raz pointed them out, the raucous group of men now dancing with a gaggle of Dominican girls. 

“Do you have a lidul girlfriend here?”

“Not here. I mean, no.”

The day Raz had been approved for his visa, he went to his girlfriend’s apartment to break it off with her. I’m going to America, he had said, simple as that. She didn’t get emotional; that’s what he liked most about her. She understood, she said, she would do the same thing if she were in his place. But after they had sex one last time, when he peeled her sweaty arm off his stomach, her mouth twisted. You’ll miss me, she called out while he was in the bathroom cleaning himself. You don’t know it yet, but you will. 

And he did. Not just the sex—although, yes, the sex. Raz missed touching her knees, the soft handle of flesh that wrapped around her waist, the keloids on her shoulder he would press like the keys of a piano. He missed knowing a woman’s body in a way so intimate that you could touch her casually, carelessly, like it meant nothing. 

People in this country seemed afraid to touch each other. Or maybe just afraid to touch him. Back home, a friend might sling an easy arm around Raz’s shoulder walking down the street; might scold by leaning over and pulling his cheek; an elbow to the ribs to tease, or a poke in the stomach to get his attention. Here, the new boss hovered a strict six inches away when looking at his computer screen. Never did he receive a handshake for a job well done, a slap on the back when assigned overtime. He had even begun to miss the crowded local trains of Mumbai, where you couldn’t help but rub shoulders with other commuters. 

Deb held him like human contact was something to be rationed, each motion carefully considered before being realized. She seemed to savor her fingertips against his nylon shirt, how she moved her hand so slowly over his back. As they danced that first time, Raz could tell she knew it too: that touch was not something to be taken for granted. 

He liked how she stopped talking when they danced. It took a lot out of him to decode her words through her accent, so the silence gave him time to relax, regain his energy. 

She took him home in her car. She lived on the top floor of a townhouse by the water. From her bedroom window, Raz could see the lights of San Francisco across the bay. After they had sex, she threw back the covers and reached over him to the bedside table. Her breasts swung low over him, and Raz was shocked by the strength of his desire for her. 

“Want a lidul wadder?”

“What? No.” She had caught him by surprise.

She pulled an electronic weed pen from a drawer. He tried it; the vapor tasted like mint chewing gum, sweet and much smoother than the hand-rolled blunts he smoked in college. 

“This is bedder for the lungs,” Deb said around a mouthful of smoke. 

Without the burning pull of a lit joint, without the need for a lighter, it was too easy. It shouldn’t be this easy, he thought, as he puffed gently on the sleek, chrome tube between his fingers. There should be some barrier, some stopgap. How could the boundary between himself and the world be so permeable? Then, with a yawn taking over his body, he realized he was high.

His tongue felt soft and swollen, a quilt spread over his mouth. 

“I’m good, thanks,” he said when Deb offered him the vape again. The volume of his voice spooked him, this casual turn of phrase he couldn’t recall having ever used before. He was gripped suddenly with a certainty that he had unintentionally imitated Deb’s accent. He watched her from the corner of his eyes, but she looked neither offended nor amused. 

“Waw, that’s strong,” he spoke tentatively, testing himself. Surely there was an accidental touch of American in his voice, and he couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. 

When Raz woke the next morning, the sunlight was throwing a grid across the flowery duvet. He had never slept a full night beside a woman before. Back home, all the girls he dated lived with their parents, as did he. They would sneak out to hotels rented by the hour and be back home in time for dinner with the family. Raz felt as if he had made it through a trial, a long night of tribulations, waking as a stronger man. Deb had held him all night, looked over his entire body as if it were an artifact to be studied. His patchy chest hair, blemishes. She took his hand between both of hers and asked about the small gray mark on his finger, a scar he had suffered in primary school, when a girl assigned to be his science partner had stabbed him with a freshly sharpened pencil. A tiny shard of lead was now suspended in his skin forever, and Raz inspected it often. It was his left ring finger, and he was self-conscious of the location; a part of the body made to be looked at. He’d imagined telling the story to the person who might one day place a wedding band there.  

From the kitchen, the sound of an egg cracking into a too-hot pan. Deb was in her underwear, smiling as he padded into her sunny little kitchen. She pointed with a spatula, instructing him to make toast. Bacon grease sputtered onto her bare leg, and she jumped. 

“Shit, you’re a vegetarian, arncha?” 

“No,” Raz said. He wondered, again, how old she was—surely the oldest woman he had ever been with—but it felt inappropriate, in the morning light, to ask outright. Instead, he said “Do you have any tea?”

Talking to her, he realized how little he knew. It wasn’t healthy to drink six cups of black tea before noon, it turned out. In fact, tea was not good for you at all—it contained tannins, a kind of chemical that coated the stomach in a way akin to tobacco smoke coating the lungs, he imagined. She poured him a glass of kombucha instead, and he found that he didn’t really mind. 

As he collected his pants and socks from across her bedroom, Deb offered him a pale pink capsule with a glass of water.

“Morning vite-amins,” she said, swallowing a pill of her own.  

When he said he didn’t take any, she insisted on writing down a few ‘basic’ supplements that he was to start himself on as soon as possible. As Raz took the steps down from her apartment, he was reminded of the feeling he got when leaving a dentist’s office—a self-satisfaction, like he had done something he had been putting off for a while, something slightly unpleasant that was assuredly good for him. 

◆

On Monday, Raz made the mistake of calling one of the senior female coders ‘ma’am.’ He didn’t realize the error until she turned from her computer to look at him in surprise. When he returned to his desk, he saw that he had received an email from HR assigning him a new training module: American Workplace Etiquette for International Employees.

Raz wasn’t sure if this was routine, or in response to his transgression. He wanted to walk over to the cubicle across the hall and ask S if this was par for the course, but he was feeling warm around his collar. People always seemed to glance over when he talked to S or J, even when he tried to keep his voice down. The other men, Raz noticed, weren’t particularly good at talking in the hushed tones that seemed expected in the office. The Chinese programmers were far too quiet, and the white developers looked over curiously, as if surprised that anyone might have anything to talk about in the office. Whenever he whispered over the cubicles to J or S, Raz felt like he was back in college—boyish laughter in the back of the classroom, roadside tea and bummed cigarettes, whistling after girls from the convent high school. 

When his phone chimed with a text from Deb inviting him out to dinner, he decided it was time to ask for advice. He’d been warned, after all, to stay leery of white women. But it seemed Deb belonged to a different subcategory of white women, one to be sought out. When he recounted the night with her, the break room collapsed into hoots. “Ride her straight to a green card,” J yelled to scattered applause. So Raz agreed to dinner, even suggested The Cheesecake Factory. 

But now there was the module. 

It included ten different videos: actors playing out various examples of bad workplace etiquette. Each video was fifteen minutes long and ended in a quiz. In the first, an older woman with a deep Arab accent told a younger employee to make her a cup of tea. After the scenario ended, she turned to the screen and spoke in a different voice, American: “Dijja notice anything wrong?” Raz was prompted to pick from a multiple-choice list of errors: 

1. Ms. Amer spoke to Ms. Watson in a rude, unprofessional manner. 
2. Ms. Amer asked Ms. Watson to complete a task outside of her job description.
3. Ms. Amer didn’t ask her colleagues if they wanted refreshments too.
4. Ms. Amer took an unscheduled break. 

Raz looked around. From where he sat, someone walking by to the bathroom or kitchen could quite easily see the contents of his computer screen. There would be no time for dinner. He minimized the module and emailed HR to say that he would stay late to finish the training. 

◆

It had been a long, difficult week; Raz decided he deserved something nice. He was going to take himself shopping, buy two new shirts for ballroom class: a black one, and maybe a blue one, then stop at the grocery store to replenish the apartment’s communal egg carton, which he had found disappointingly empty that morning. He was idling just outside the office parking lot, double checking on his phone the multivitamins Deb had instructed him to buy—B3 for mood, magnesium for virility—when the back door opened and a strange woman got into his car. 

The woman startled him; he turned and stared. She was pretty, fair, well-dressed. His first thought was she must be a prostitute, and had unknowingly parked in a pick-up spot while this lady mistook him for a potential customer. 

“Kel-see,” the woman said, shutting the door behind her.

His second thought was: this must be a hold-up. He had made the mistake of parking in what he had been warned was a seedy neighborhood, and he had heard of scams like these. This young woman was the bait, and the switch, some muscular carjacker in a ski mask, was surely getting ready to mug him at gunpoint. 

Raz twisted around with his whole body. When he got a good look at the woman, he recognized her. She worked on the third floor, and they had shared the elevator before. In the same moment, he saw recognition on her face too. 

“Oh my god, I am so sorry!” she yelped, clawing at the door handle. “I thought you were my Uber! Wow! Sorry!” 

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Raz said.

“Kelsee, hi,” she said. She stuck her hand in through the window and he shook it. “I guess we’re colleagues. You must have just started recently?” 

“Yeah, just last week,” he said. He could tell she was embarrassed. 

“Okay, well, welcome! Great! See you around, then!” She hitched her tote higher on her shoulder and hurried away. 

The wisest thing to do, Raz decided, was to drive straight home. He forced himself not to break the speed limit. Halfway there he realized he had forgotten the multivitamins. 

◆

How embarrassed he would have been once to get mistaken for a cab driver. In Mumbai, taxi men were lower-class sluggards in stained vests, their teeth stained red from chewing betel nuts. He considered them a different class of people: uneducated, beating their wives and spawning too many children. He considered himself about as far from a cab driver as he was from being Bill Gates. 

At home, he relayed the story to the other men. 

“The exact same thing happened to me once,” J said. “This big fellow got into my car, told me to take him to the airport. I said he had to pay in cash.”
“Did he agree?”

“Yes, brother. I charged him double. I said it was surge pricing.” 

Laughter rippled around the room. Raz felt his spirits lift. It was the weekend again. He poured himself a drink. 

◆

“I want you to lead,” Deb told him at ballroom the next night. 

Raz thought he had been leading, but maybe not. The instructors at the front of the room counted out the beats, which threw him off. Following the music was easier, but that wasn’t the right way to do it. 

He gathered Deb into his arms firmly, and she seemed to be happier. Raz had worried that Deb might be upset about how he canceled on her last week, but she hadn’t brought it up. He swung his hips with vigor. She did take him home with her again that night, so he figured he had passed the test. When they lay in her bed, Deb glanced at him from the side of her face. 

“How old are you?”

“Going on twenty-eight,” he said. Deb made a sound like a huff and he looked over. She seemed to be smiling. 

“How old do you think I am?”

“I don’t like that game.”

“You know I’m a feminist?”

Another test. “Okay?”  

“And?”

“It’s good,” Raz said. A quick survey of Deb’s face confirmed that this was the correct answer.

◆

In the days they had been seeing each other, Raz became more aware of his body, its shape and softness. He was beginning to see a resemblance to his father; thin-wristed, pot-bellied, a classic rotundness he recognized in uncles and friends. Indians, he learned, were more likely to store weight around the stomach. This type of self-consciousness was new. Raz conceived of himself, as far as previous girlfriends had revealed and how he measured up within the friend group back home, to be above-average in attractiveness. He considered giving up rice. The shared weighing machine in the bathroom showed him a surprisingly high number, until he realized it was displaying his weight in pounds, not kilograms. 

The next weekend, Deb wanted to go hiking. This was not something he had ever considered trying before. To simply walk from one point to another arbitrarily chosen point seemed a uniquely American activity. But the woods of California were beautiful. When Deb suggested an eight-mile hike along the Big Sur coastline, Raz had no conception of how long this would be; he accepted. 

The signs around the trail warned of bobcats, another concern Raz didn’t know how to assess. They crested the first hill, and he was breathless. Yellow flowers painted the hills in generous strokes. The ocean was dazzling, painful to his eyes. The path ahead wound through the gorse bush, and Raz saw the future version of himself walking down it, in just a few seconds. The breeze ran through him like he was a hollow reed. 

They ran out of water before they had reached the halfway point. Deb held her bottle upside down above her, trickling the last few drops into her mouth. She glanced over at him. 

“We should have brought more wadder,” she said, wide-eyed. Raz knew she meant that he should have brought more, but the only water bottles Raz owned were plastic ones he took from the office fridge and refilled in his kitchen. Raz had brought two and sucked them both dry hours ago. Deb had allowed him a few small sips from her Nalgene, but now that was empty too.  

His tongue felt fuzzy. It wasn’t the hottest he’d ever been, and Raz hadn’t expected how the dry breeze would leave him parched. He plucked half-grown blackberries—or were they raspberries? Still yellow and tart—and squeezed the juice into his mouth. If they had seen any other hikers, he would have surely begged them for some water; embarrassment forgotten. 

But they saw no one on the path ahead. The only way was forward. 

It was Deb’s idea to swim. It would cool them down, she said, and refresh them, give them the energy to finish the hike.

It was also her idea to get naked, like it was the most natural thing in the world. 

“No unda-wear allowed.” Deb stripped, then helped him undress. 

Cursory worries flashed through his head. Being arrested for public indecency, registered as a sex offender, deportation. But the sun was scorching, it felt good to be naked, to feel a light breeze dry the sweat from under his arms. His lips were dry and chapping in the ocean air. Deb was running into the water now, and Raz followed her. The flesh of her body bounced as she ran on the sand. 

The water was heavenly, cold. It woke Raz up from the heat. Deb jumped in headfirst at the next wave, a strong breaststroke into the gulf, a little leap like a dolphin. Raz waited as long as he could to put his head under, but eventually a wave subsumed him.

Raz emerged, eyes stinging with salt. Deb was two waves away by now, whooping with glee. He remembered reading once, in childhood, about sirens that lured sailors into deep water and drowned them. He really was awake now. 

Each wave crashed over him before Raz could recover from the last one. He wasn’t able to fully catch his breath. When Raz emerged, briefly, he saw Deb writhing, towards him, or maybe further away. She was gesturing something, her voice whipped away by the wind. Then another wave took him, hard, and his mouth filled with sand. Raz banged his elbow against something, against the ocean-bed, he was tumbling over and upside-down. His nose burned, his mouth, his lungs. 

Raz felt something touch his leg. He kicked out hard, but it grabbed him again. It was Deb, clawing at him, trying to find the surface of the water. Pushing him down to push herself up. He grabbed her back, and now they were no longer wrestling the waves but each other.

His head broke the surface first. He could see no shapes, but colors—the blue, the blue, and then the white sand of the shore. He struck out for it, Deb still clinging to one side of his body. When Deb realized what he was trying to do, she began to help. They made their way toward the shore as if in a three-legged race, propelling themselves against each other. 

They waded out until the waves broke against their thighs. Salt and mucus dribbled from his nose. The water pushed them back once or twice, toppling Deb in the shallows, but they were free from the waves. 

Raz collapsed, shivering on the hot sand. His ear popped painfully, and sound came rushing back. The seagulls, the gentle breeze in the gorse bush. The peace unbroken, as if nothing had happened at all. 

On the walk back to the car, he could tell Deb was upset. She had silently yanked on her clothes over her wet skin, then looked away impatiently while he shook the sand from his shorts.  

“Why didn’t you help me?” Deb said, when he tried to take her hand as they walked up the beach. 

“What? When?”

“I was waving, screaming for help. You swam away.” 

He didn’t know what to say. The narrow trail separated them into single file, and Deb took the lead. He watched the back of her head, wet ponytail frizzing up in the sun. 

Raz’s thighs chafed against his damp clothes. There was sand on his face, in his shoes. His head throbbed, and the swim had done nothing to alleviate his thirst. In fact, it was worse now, with the taste of salt in his mouth. 

He didn’t know if he might collapse; having never pushed his body in this way, he did not know its limits. Raz assumed if he was going to pass out, he would have a few seconds to shout a warning before he cracked his head against the rocky path. 

As they approached the end of the hike, Raz tried to catch up with Deb, but she walked faster. 

He sped up, and so did she, until he felt like he was chasing her down.