As she scans the room, she notices a lot of people are facing his direction.
But then she takes another look, and his face registers. She knows him. She’s read about him multiple times. How is he here?
“Holy crap. Do you know who that is?” Simran leans toward Vishal and catches a whiff of his minty Armani Code.
Vishal shrugs. “No. Why, do you?”
Simran takes a deep breath. “That’s Neil. The Neil. Neil Desai.”
Vishal responds with a blank, wide-eyed stare. Simran can see that the only thing this means to him is that this guy’s parents gave him a name that automatically pardoned him from the cringe-worthy discomfort many Indian kids experienced whenever a teacher called roll.
“Neil Desai, Neil Desai,” Simran repeats. “New York Times Neil Desai? Ring a bell?”
“No.” Vishal almost chokes. “It can’t be.”
But of course it is.
The Neil freaking Desai!
Neil Desai is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the New York Times, which has also been part of her breakfast for the past two years. He generally writes satirical pieces about economics and politics, until last year, when he compiled his pieces into a bestselling book. Neil rarely interviews and prefers to keep a low profile, even refusing to have a public Facebook page.
Simran’s learned everything about him through her mastery of Google: he graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, almost followed the Indian path of becoming a doctor but decided to pursue journalism, is happily single, has two siblings, and is a die-hard fan of Duke basketball. Every time she acquired a new fact about him, she shared it with Kunal, who would roll his eyes, as though she was divulging trashy celebrity gossip from Star magazine. The truth is, she does swoon over accomplished writers the way other people gawk over movie stars or musicians (and Kunal couldn’t care less about either).
“Shut up,” she whispers in awe, digging her nails into Vishal’s arm. “No way. There. Is. No. Way.”
“I guess there is a way,” Vishal says.
“What the heck is he doing here?!”
“He must have been invited through someone. It was an open Facebook event, and your parents told everyone to bring their friends.”
“Wow, he doesn’t look how I thought he would,” Simran says, before realizing that judging someone by their writing is probably just as unreliable as judging them by their voice on the phone.
“Very different from his picture,” she adds, referring to the faded headshot that was on his first Google hit, which eventually became his website. “I mean, that looked like some awkward yearbook picture.”
Not that she has any right to talk; every yearbook picture of hers is unflattering, off-center, or both.
But before they can continue to dissect Neil’s appearance, he approaches the table, gripping a copy of her thin collection of essays. She becomes giddy, embarrassingly giddy, the way she was when she was five years old and met Cinderella at Disney World and thought she was actually the cartoon from the screen.
“Am I too late for an autograph?” he asks, skipping an introduction and flashing her a flawless smile. Her mother says she always studies teeth because she’s so conscious about her own, but she thinks anyone would notice his.
She puts down her champagne glass on the table. “Only if I can get yours.”
He raises his eyebrows, sincerely surprised that she knows who he is. She takes the book from him and tries to keep her hands steady enough to turn to the title page.
“You know, I wouldn’t have thought you were the type of guy who read essay collections about being an Indian adolescent girl. I should have known that whole economics thing was a facade,” she blurts, surprised at how naturally the remark flows out of her, as though she’s teasing a friend, not a writer she’s admired for years.
“Okay, well, I haven’t read your work,” he admits. “Or heard of you before tonight. But I’m supposed to keep up with new Indian writers since I joined the South Asian Writers Association as a mentor. They told me about your event.”
“Of course,” Simran says. How could she assume someone like him would seek out anything of hers?
“But if it counts for anything, my niece did read your essays.”
“She did?”
He nods. “She did. And she loved it. Said I had to bring her a signed copy.”
“That’s so nice to hear,” she says.
“I’ll attempt to read it and decide for myself. No promises, of course.” He gives her a quick wink.
Her heart rate palpably increases as she imagines him in his frameless glasses, sitting in front of his silver laptop (he strikes her as an Apple user), scrolling through her words.
“Thanks, I appreciate that,” she mumbles. “I’m, uh, a huge fan of your work. I actually just read your piece on the US healthcare system this morning.”
“Oh yeah?” He laughs, a dimple chiseling his right cheek. “Well, it’s nice that somebody actually reads my stuff. Even my parents get bored of it.”
“Oh, I know what you mean by that!” she exclaims. “Definitely know what you mean,” she repeats in a softer voice. “My parents don’t really read my stuff, either.”
He nods. “I’m glad I’m not the only one. How’d you get into this project, anyway?”
She refrains from giving him her rehearsed speech. “To go all the way from the beginning, in high school, I thought about pursuing journalism because I liked the idea of educating others about what was going on in the world. Then, I double majored in psychology and journalism at NYU. I was working on an article about Indians raised in America for one of my journalism classes. And I realized that there were so many issues that affected Indian girls during adolescence and nobody had depicted those. So then I thought maybe I could be the one who educated others on what that experience was like. I started writing down my friends’ stories and kept finding all these common themes, and then this data to back that up, which resulted in this essay collection. Of course, then I went all the way with my psychology major, and the journalism part sort of faded away. . . .”
“And why Indian girls and why adolescence?” Neil asks.
Nobody at the party has asked that (or anything else about the book) yet.
“Adolescence is hard enough, but when you’re Indian, you deal with different hurdles, like your mom not letting you shave your legs or your parents saying you can’t like boys because you have to do well in school.”
“I see,” he says. “That’s very insightful of you.”