Once, Sunny had been mugged as he walked home from his night shift at five in the morning, by a boy who appeared to have a gun, but it might have been a stick held under his shirt. When he woke Ulla, she insisted that a reluctant Sunny report the incident. The cops arrived and drove Sunny around in their patrol car to see if he could spot the boy again. But when Sunny saw the boy he looked away.

“No?” the detective asked, lean, alert, chewing nicotine gum.

“No.”

“Why did you do that?” Ulla was upset when Sunny told her. “They get away with a small thing, then another small thing, then they do a big thing.” But she knew that, if Sunny had identified the boy, she’d have taken the opposite side of the argument.

“We are more guilty,” Sunny said, “in the scheme of things.”

“Get out of our neighborhood, you bourgeois white motherfucker!” a man had shouted at a new neighbor moving in next door. And, although Sunny’s sympathy lay with the man who yelled, he knew it was a hypocritical sympathy. He hoped, in fact, to get a free pass, that as a dark-skinned person he’d be seen to have more legitimacy here than a white person. But his smiling at Black people on the street felt false and condescending, rooted in a wish to be accepted into this neighborhood of elegant brownstones and a quick subway line to Manhattan, while also cohabiting with Ulla, who was essential to his self-respect. He wondered if Ulla felt less guilty to be invading the place because she was with him. Both of them, in conversation with others like themselves, made certain to mention the well-off African Americans buying homes, to shift the conversation from race to class.

Sunny registered his own hypocrisy, too, when he looked away from other Indians he saw on the street—Indians who were also avidly ignoring him, trying to make it in America by avoiding one another, as if it were better to be one Indian than two Indians, better to be two Indians than three Indians. And better an Indian in New York than an Indian in India. Even more so an Indian in a village in France that was entirely empty of other Indians, especially Indians of the same class who would undo your poise, shine a light upon your shame, your lies.

And then there was Satya. Satya was Sunny’s childhood friend who would never in a million years comprehend that it might be better to be one Indian instead of two Indians or two Indians instead of twenty Indians. They’d attended Tiny Tots in Delhi together, in miniature blue shorts and miniature ties already knotted onto elastic bands that fit under their collars. They’d gone to Mount St. Mary’s in Delhi together, they’d had mumps together, they’d taken a delightful trip together when Sunny was a bachelor’s student following a story in Mysore about the government’s curtailment of subsidies for traditional weavers. In a case of misjudged importance, Sunny had been assigned to a scheme encouraging journalists to promote tourism and invited to stay at the Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel. They had gone swimming in the maharaja’s pool at sunset, a warm wind carrying the aroma of the sere hills and stirring the papery bougainvillea. Satya—black hairs on his chest so extravagant they whorled and formed black roses upon him—couldn’t swim, but he pawed with such wild energy that his splashing carried him from one end of the pool to the other.

When they had dined in a romantic alcove of enamel-and-gold mirror-work, it had seemed a little peculiar, Sunny registered, to have Satya opposite him sharing a mango kheer and later to have Satya snoring by his side in bed, the pillows lavished with sandalwood perfume and rose petals. Their friendship had begun to take on the attributes that should have been assigned to a romantic partner, and perhaps they had each begun to wonder if their formative moments would take place not with wives or children but with each other. Together they had decided to apply to study in the United States, Satya for medicine, Sunny for a master’s degree in journalism. But here their paths had diverged—Sunny’s to New York City, Satya’s to Rochester. They missed each other, and one weekend, when Sunny and Ulla were still residing in the international students’ hostel, Satya had taken a Greyhound bus all the way down.

Ulla had claimed a deadline for a class, and Sunny was embarrassed by his girlfriend’s departure, as if she did not love him. Then, trying to look at Satya through Ulla’s gaze, he thought Ulla was disdainful of Satya’s roly-polyness, encased tightly within a home-knitted pullover, and his ardent and frank conversation. Keenly aware of Satya’s lack of sophistication, Sunny felt exposed by it—as though he’d tricked Ulla.

Satya didn’t mention Ulla as they walked about Union Square and Washington Square Park, and neither did he show the slightest tourist interest in Manhattan on this his very first visit. He noticed neither the skyscrapers nor the homeless people on the subway grates, neither the Buddhist monk on a skateboard nor a gaggle of models with poodles in booties. Interspersed with some aimless humming, he told Sunny about his running battle over the television in the residents’ lounge, where only Satya wished to watch “Golden Girls.” And why was it against the rules to dry his underwear out of the window?

Back in Sunny’s hostel room, Satya made a phone call: “Double the dose of amlodipine, test for uric acid and glucose, check the potassium level, prescribe gabapentin for the nerve pain.” He was being asked to give his opinion on a patient for whom he had been part of the monitoring team. How the different parts of Satya melded was a mystery.

He began to tuck sheets about the inflatable mattress on the floor, and got plumply into bed, folding both hands under his cheek as in a child’s picture of godly sleeping people. Sunny climbed into his bed as well and burst out, “So, what did you think?” For Satya not to have an opinion on the first occasion either of them had met a proper girlfriend was impossible.

“About what?”

“Ulla, of course.”

Deep soul sigh. “Ulla sees you as an Indian, and you see her as an American. The whole thing is based on a misunderstanding.”

“She isn’t only an American to me.”

“How can she not be an American to you?”

“I said only.”

“The main reason you want her is that she is American. You will get very angry at me for saying so, but, when you fight, you won’t be able to tell the real fight behind the fight.”

“A person is not only their nationality and race, Satya,” Sunny persisted. “After a bit, you no longer notice you’re a different color. At least inside the house you don’t notice it anymore.”

This had been a revelation to Sunny and Ulla, this mystical lightness.

When Ulla had heard Sunny with Satya, she’d said, “How chatty Indian men are!”

“Quarrelsome Bong!” she’d said of a Bengali she’d met at the gym.

“Tambram snob!” she’d said of a colleague. She’d pointed to a woman skipping the line “in her Indian manner.”

“I can say ‘Bong’ and ‘Indian manner,’ ” Sunny had said, “but you cannot.” But where could she have learned to brandish local prejudice with insider’s pride but from Sunny himself, or from Mala, her old nemesis?

“You criticize America all the time!” she’d retorted.

“God, you Protestants, don’t you ever talk openly?” he had said. And then, when he didn’t receive an answer, “Why don’t Americans have passports? Weren’t your parents curious about the world?”

“They had other priorities—like saving for my college fund. They weren’t rich.”

“With a big house and two big cars?”

“Two cars are a necessity where we live. And, in fact, my parents did go to Mexico.”

Ulla’s parents had exulted in Cancún because of the exchange rate; Sunny remembered a previous conversation about how they’d been excited to eat four tacos for a dollar twenty-five.

“Why do Americans endlessly talk about the best deal?”

“All travellers talk about the best deal.”

“No, the British still exchange the weather: Today a spot of sun, such fun; tomorrow rain, such a shame.”

“And what do Indians say?”

“Indians come up close and stare: ‘What, you are bald and still not married?’ ”

They’d laughed then.

“My hot samosa,” she’d called him.

“Ulla, you are not to say that!”

Almost choking with laughter: “O.K., O.K., my bad-tempered Bengal tiger.”

There was no hope all over again.

“Flaky blonde!”

“Bossy Indian patriarch!”

They were failing to keep their arguments personal, or unique and respectful to their individual beings, or even to the situation. Was it true, then, that there had been something to Satya’s warning? Should you live with an American in order to beat the American over the head for being one? Should you find an Indian to complain about Indians?