Riot by Shashi Tharoor Page A

you know you can do better. What about that nice boy on the debate team? He wanted to take you out, and you never—’ And of course the boy on the debate team was smart, and rich, and white, and Darryl fell short on all three counts. Which made me love him all the more.” Her voice lightened, as if to take the drama out of her next sentence. “Love in the face of impossible odds. I began to convince myself that Darryl and I would be together forever.” She laughed a little, as if at her own naiveté. “But of course it wasn’t going to last. And our problem was not that he was black and I was blonde, not even that he was a jock and I was a straight-A student. It was that we didn’t talk to each other. Darryl was uncomplicated, and affectionate, and pretty straight with me, but again unlike my father, he was a man of few words. And he didn’t particularly want to listen to mine, either. If I tried to tell him about my family, or about India, or about a book I was reading, he would simply smile a big, gleaming smile and shut me up with a kiss. Which would go on to more than a kiss. And afterwards, he’d want to go get a bite, or a drink, or go dancing; but he wouldn’t particularly want to talk.
    â€œI just accepted that as part of how we were. I would talk instead with my girlfriends, especially Cindy, who’s the closest friend I have, someone I’d known since grade school, since before we went to India. And I thought, well, he doesn’t talk much, but I know he cares about me, and that’s what matters. I didn’t mind his laconic ways till the day he told me, in that happy, direct way he had, that he had received a basketball scholarship from Gonzaga. In the state of Washington, for God’s sake. And he was planning to take it.
    â€œ ‘Gonzaga?’ I practically yelled. ‘You never told me you’d applied to Gonzaga. I thought we were going to stay here, near the City.’ And none of the colleges I’d applied to were anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. Well, it turned out that a Gonzaga talent scout had come around to one of the high school games, liked him in action, and arranged the scholarship. We’d gone to a movie that very evening, and he’d forgotten to tell me about the encounter. So I was completely stunned. ‘What about us?’ I asked at last. And then I realized the question hadn’t even crossed his simple mind, that basketball was what, at that point in his life, he lived for, and I was completely incidental. I had spent so much time in his arms, but I had no idea what was going on inside his head.”
    She turned to me then, looking directly into my eyes. “He was the first boy who’d really kissed me, you know, kissed properly, not just pecked on the cheek after a date, and of course the first man I’d ever slept with. And in all the ten, eleven months we were together, he never once told me he loved me.”
    â€œBecause he didn’t, Priscilla,” I said, pricked by jealousy. “He didn’t love you.”
    â€œHe could have said the words,” she replied. “They’ve been said to me by so many guys who never meant them. But Darryl was too honest to mislead me. I’d merely misled myself.
    â€œI turned to Mom after this, and she was there for me, you know? She was patient and loving and nonjudgmental, and she helped me get over the pain. And she said one thing I never forgot. She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.
    â€œBut Darryl did one thing for me. He cured me of my father. He went off to Gonzaga, and I wept for a week, and when I stopped weeping I realized he’d freed me. From himself, but also from the distaste and the fear that the thought of sex had evoked in me since the time I saw my father with that — that whore. Through Darryl, I’d sort of become normal again. You know what