No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal

When he drank, Harit began to notice things about Teddy that he had never noticed before. Teddy brought to this action the same sort of ﬂair he had for delinting suit jackets and wrapping a scarf in tissue, and Harit had to admit in spite of himself that he loved the way Teddy’s agile ﬁngers pulled at the napkin and brought it ﬂuttering onto the tabletop like a light bird. He delivered their drinks “as if they were on ﬂombay”-another Teddyism-which meant that he spilled a part of the drinks on the table with every visit, and it was a rare evening when Teddy didn’t have to take a napkin and sweep up the swirls of liquid before they trickled off the edges. The waiter was not particularly thrilled with this arrangement, and he had given up speaking to them altogether. It became a ritual: Harit and Teddy went to have drinks on Thursday after work, always at TGI Friday’s, always in the booth at the back of the restaurant, always with the same hostess and waiter.

Satyal received a 2010 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and has twice been a Fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Rakesh Satyal is the author of the novel Blue Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award and the Prose/Poetry Award from the Association for Asian American Studies and which was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award. No One Can Pronounce My Name is an insightful look into the lives of immigrants and outsiders, who must reconcile the strictures of their culture and traditions with their own dreams and desires. The following is from Rakesh Satyal’s novel, No One Can Pronounce My Name.

No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal