Sexy

Dev is the older, married man with whom Miranda is having an affair. He grew up in India and was sent to college in the US to escape The Emergency (1975-1977), putting him in his early 40s, compared to Miranda’s 22 years. He is seen only from Miranda’s perspective, most often through her memories or imaginations. This adds a layer of narrative mystery to him as a character; his character exists through the prism of Miranda’s desires and the possibilities of her new city life and identity. Dev is an investment banker and is clearly wealthy. The glamor that his age and wealth bring to the affair is part of the attraction for Miranda, who details his expensive clothes, dates, and the high-end meals they share at first. This is added to the glamour of the stories he tells her about his youth in India: “he would come home from school and drink mango juice served to him on a tray, and then play cricket by a lake, dressed all in white” (90).

Dev is debonair, sophisticated, and courteous, but he also seems self-interested and lacking moral qualms about others’ feelings. There are many signs that he has been serially unfaithful to his wife and that he picked up Miranda in Feline’s to take advantage of his wife’s brief absence. When his wife returns, he assumes the affair will continue on entirely his own terms: only on Sundays at Miranda’s apartment, arriving in gym clothes and leaving quickly after peremptory sex (“he entered her without a word” (90)). His lack of emotional availability and Miranda’s growing sense of dissatisfaction is evident to the reader while it remains hidden to herself: part of Dev’s function as a character is to provide a means for Miranda to acknowledge her disappointment and grow in her own sense of worth as a young woman.

Dev is the focus of Miranda’s curiosity about Indian and Bengali culture. The story at first suggests that her interest in his culture is partly an extension of her infatuation with him, reflecting the power dynamic between them, and the fact that, given his absence, she spends much more time seeking ways to feel close to him than actually being with him. Eating Bengali food and reading the alphabet seems a proxy for his company although, in practice, the alienation she feels demonstrates the cultural gulf between them. Miranda’s childhood flashback, however, presents an alternative motivation for her, namely that she is subconsciously attempting to heal her feelings of shame in regard to the Dixit family. This makes Dev’s role more complex and evens out the apparent power balance between them: Miranda is also using him for her own purposes, albeit unconsciously.

Laxmi is Miranda’s coworker and is “only a few years older than Miranda, but she was already married, and kept a photo of herself and her husband, seated on a white stone bench in front of the Taj Mahal, tacked to the inside of her cubicle, which was next to Miranda’s” (82). Their connection is merely circumstantial at first, although Miranda hears a lot about Laxmi’s life through her private telephone conversations. Miranda initially finds Laxmi’s long personal chats “distracting” until she is drawn into the discussion of Laxmi’s cousin’s marital breakdown. Laxmi therefore provides the theme of the parallel affair which is so crucial to the structure and meaning of the story, and its ending. Her enlistment of Miranda’s help with Rohin unknowingly precipitates Miranda’s moral crisis and leads to the ending of Miranda’s affair with Dev.

Laxmi appears to be open, friendly, and unembarrassed about social chatter in the workplace, and her character is a foil to Miranda’s apparent reserve. The contrast between Laxmi and Miranda partly draws on cultural archetypes around privacy, social information, and attitudes to family and the work environment in Indian communities as compared to the US more generally. Laxmi’s character also functions as representative in some ways of middle-class Indians living in Western countries: she is “already married,” and has travelled overseas; she is multilingual and has an extended network of family and friends living far away but with whom she has close relationships. She is clearly financially comfortable in a way that Miranda is not, suggesting that her job provides the secondary income in her household. In this way, Laxmi’s character presents an Indian cultural backdrop for the presentation of Miranda’s relationship with Dev across a cultural divide. Although Laxmi doesn’t know about Dev, the information which she introduces to the story helps to contextualize and explore Miranda’s situation, and helps the reader fill in gaps around Dev’s family life, especially as viewed from an (Indian) wife’s perspective.