Rooms by the Sea, 1951
Edward Hopper
“The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing."
Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
___
i.
Prashanth sits on the deck of the turbulent boat, dotting over a small notebook in his lap. The touring vessel slowly turns back from its furthest point on Lake Michigan, now facing the steadily growing skyline of Chicago and its roughened concrete shores.
Prashanth’s family is a few rows ahead of him; his 5-year-old cousin Abhishek sits in the middle of the multi-headed ensemble, well-protected, carefully minding a worn iPad.
A not-so-subtle swell heaves the whole ship up, shooting the leather-bound book out of Prashanth’s lap, but it’s his knee-jerk snatch that slaps the book across the sandpapery deck. Turning from the bow of the boat, Prashanth’s uncle, Rahul — an older, yet fit man with short, salt-and-peppery hair — leaps down to pick up the sprawled book, its pages rippling in the maritime wind.
“What are you writing?”
“Nothing.”
“I mean, I’m just going to read it anyway.”
Prashanth rushes up, trying to snatch the book back before his uncle can read anything.
“Woah there, junior, chill. Now I’m definitely going to read it.”
Rahul manages to wrestle the book as high as he can, a firm length out of reach of the frantically chasing boy. Up top, he scrambles through blank pages for any traces of ink. His eyes grow with an excited gleam as he stumbles upon the most recent, half-filled page.
He looks to his nephew with genuine wonder before he turns to read further.
“Oh wow! Since when did you start writing poetry? I see you’ve taken inspiration here from our visit to the-”
___
ii. nighthawks
A group of us quietly surround
The lonely, green painting, that
Great big ship sailing through
That Great American City,
Or maybe the Great American
Street Corner, silent and deserted;
The warm diner lights invite
Us into fading conversations;
A life askew, a day gone wrong –
Or maybe it is about love, finally.
Or maybe it is just a lonely,
Green painting, shadows breaking
Their way out of every corner,
Some red there — everywhere,
Hiding around the edges.
I stay a little longer,
Hoping to hear a welcoming tone,
Maybe a bell will ring when
That smooth glass door swings open.
The group’s all gone by now,
Off trying to listen to the
Half-lives of others.
___
i. (cont.)
Rahul turns to the group of Indians in a sea of other tourists.
“O’ey! Hey, che-”
Prasanth finally gets the right launch off a deck chair, springing up to snatch the book out of the lowering hands of his unsuspecting uncle. He sprints a few spirited leaps around the perimeter of the gently swaying boat before collapsing down in a flimsy deck chair in one of the very back rows. He rifles through the thick, barely-tan, linen pages, out of breath, making sure all of his words are still there. Rahul traverses the perimeter of the ship in a few sneaky strides, arriving just in time to catch a peek over Prashanth’s shoulder as he holds on a shorter poem for a moment longer.
“What’s that one about? Huh? Some girl?”
“No.”
Rahul chuckles as he tousles his nephew’s unkempt hair.
“What’s with all the glum, man? You’re graduating. No more stress. Look, it’s sunny, and the city’s so beautiful!”
Prashanth looks up, but barely registers the crisp horizon and the small sun burning in the bright blue sky.
___
iii. streeterville
A rowdy group of Indians sits at an upscale(-ish)Thai restaurant, seated by seniority down the long table. Prashanth is assigned the penultimate seat, Abhishek ferociously tapping away to his left at the very end. Priya, Prashanth’s older sister, sits across from him, patiently listening to the spirited conversations on the elder’s side; Rahul and his brother, fiercely engaged in arguments over the troubled state of Indian Test Cricket and South Asian economic affairs. Prashanth’s grandfather silently listens at the head of the table.
Not much to say in the conversation, Prashanth looks out past his sister through the darkened establishment — a few dates murmuring in walled booths, candles fluttering in the cautious laughter. The restaurant was his choice, but he really didn’t want to still be there at that moment. He hoped some waitress or manager could storm through the doors and kick everyone out, some emergency or outbreak. Maybe all the cooks could get food poisoning, and they had to close up a few minutes early. This didn’t seem like that kind of establishment, though.
On the shiny black table, Prashanth’s phone rattles angrily as it yearns to read him a text, clattering all over until he has to turn to pick up his phone to look.
[how’s it looking]
[no dice]
Prashanth tries to hide the conversation in his lap, positive that no one at the table will notice. His sister kicks his shin hard under the table. He struggles to silence his pained yawp, his face going all funny before he smothers it into the vacant spot where his Veg. Pad Thai once sat.
Priya, in a hushed tone, asks in the general direction of her grimacing brother;
“Is that your girlfriend?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Checks out.”
Priya turns back to listen to the conversation, and Prashanth lifts his head up off the canvas to commiserate with Abhishek, preoccupied with his virtual villagers.
“I think that was quite rude, no?”
Abhishek looks up from the game for a moment to look his cousin in the eyes. He shakes his small head fast, from side to side, before looking back down to his dragons and battalions of mighty warriors.
Defeated, Prashanth turns around to daydream through the wide windows behind him. Outside, the day’s last traces of blue trickle from the criss-cross overgrowth of giant, towering metal buildings. He used to coach tennis just down the street, at some courts in a gym above a grocery store. No joke. He really used to tell everyone:
“I got to coach tennis in the city. Above a grocery store. And it was awesome. The commute tho-”
“O’ey! Mr. Numbers!”
Rahul calls out from the opposite end of the table, and the crowd turns to the only person facing in the opposite direction. Prashanth slowly turns back, wide-eyed, his mouth agape.
“Uh-"
“These guys can’t seem to find any good options for ‘d-e-s-s-e-r-t.’ Any good spots around here?"
Prashanth turns to look back out the grand windows.
___
iv. oh lord, don’t let them drop that atomic bomb on me
Prashanth sits at his cluttered desk, carefully rolling a half-rolled joint in his hands. Raucous commotion pounds from outside his closed bedroom door; a half-open accounting final lies open, numbers spilling off the sides of the screen.
To the noise, Prashanth shouts out:
“Could you shut the fuck up?”
Beckett, a hyped-up skater kid rushes through the flimsy white wooden frame.
“What’s taking you so long?”
“All this goddamn ruckus you’re making…”
He trails off, engaged in packing the last section of his unwieldy creation. Beckett scans the cluttered room, the floor barely visible under an overgrowth of last week’s laundry.
“How’s the test going?”
“Thank god they didn’t have me turn on my camera or anything.”
Prashanth takes a light blue BIC lighter out of his pocket and pushes some things on his desk before kicking his feet up and placing the paper tip in his mouth. He ignites the twisted end into a flurry of smoke and flame, and exhales smoke over all the scattered papers on his desk. His roommate looks at him, a bit shocked.
“Are you serious?
“Whatever, man.”
They sit in silence, quietly passing the softly smoldering thing.
“Can you believe it’s over?”
Prashanth looks out his bedroom window, to the distant vast, and dark sky, the full moon burning aglow.
“No. I really never thought I’d get out of this place.”
Beckett laughs a little, handing the joint back to his roommate with a friendly tap on the shoulder.
“Well, hey, Sunday morning, your wish will come true, my friend. And all this shit better be out of here.”
Prasanth looks at all the junk still on his walls and smiles at all the work it’ll take to tear it all down. His planning is quickly interrupted by his phone zipping around, muffled under a pile of garbage.
[hi]
[can we talk?]
Prashanth turns the phone around to show his roommate, whose face scrunches with deliberation as he reads the brief message.
“Still, with this one?”
“Can you really blame me?”
Beckett looks down at the joint in his hand, the pulsing ember starting to burn unevenly down one side.
“You do, you man.”
He hands the joint back to Prashanth, who unconsciously begins to scroll up through the previous messages as he takes a deep pull.
“You’re a real dweeb, you know.”
Prashanth dissolves into a cloud of smoke-filled laughs.
___
v.
Prashanth sits atop the final boxes in his small, now-empty living room. He looks out the open windows, thick warm wedges of sun spilling in while birds sing merrily and dance outside.
Rahul storms through the roughened black front door, sweat dripping off a painted, slightly tattered US Open shirt.
“Let’s go, mate, almost done.”
Prashanth sits a little longer, looking around at his newly old apartment.
“Starting to miss college already?”
“God, no.”
He shuts his eyes for a moment.
“This apartment. It’s all I really had here. I just figured out how to work the stove.”
Rahul takes a half step into the room and lightly leans on the supporting wall next to the ruffled/white fridge.
“You’ll get the next apartment.”
”Man, I don’t even know where I’ll be next year. I don’t have a job, it’s all…”
He had a start to the sentence, but when he can find no end, he groans and mumbles and puts his head down.
“You didn’t like living here?”
Prashanth pokes at the well-worn inner lining of his barely white sneakers.
“Everyone else seemed to like it a lot more.”
Rahul takes a moment. He walks past the sad boy sitting on the box, to the windows looking out a small distance to the expansive brick wall. He goes along to the very edge, to the very left corner, where he can barely make out the narrow shaded street to the old apartment building.
“There must have been something you enjoyed?”
___
vi. the tennis store around the corner
Prashanth leads his uncle down the bustling street, pointing to things here and there as they trudge through the searing Summer sun.
“I used to coach there as well.”
He points to the Fullerton Racket Club with its horribly faded collage of grotesquely happy people.
“I called it the Death Star.”
They walk past the Dunkin Donuts and the 7-Eleven , but stop before the tall green bank. There’s a quaint little store there on the SW corner of the arid intersection. If you look through the big glass windows, you’ll see a world of tennis-related everything; a lone stringing machine standing at the front-facing window. Rahul walks in first and is immediately caught by the expansive mosaic of racket frames filling the entire left wall of the store. Prashanth walks in behind, already smiling.
“What’s up, my boy?”
Unaware of who his nephew is talking to, Rahul turns to the empty store and is startled by the sudden appearance of a scrawny teenager, peeking from under all the chaos of the desk in the back corner. The tired but cheery brown boy gives Prashanth a curious smile.
“Hey. How’s it going?”
“Is the boss in today?”
As Prashanth asks, he habitually leans over the counter, checking the balance of strung rackets lined up on the back wall behind the register.
“No, he’s up at the other store today.”
“Damn.”
Prashanth looks around the store and checks if everything is in the same place. He’s a bit disappointed, entirely unsure of what to do.
“Could I string a racket or two?”
The kid takes a beat and can’t hide a little bewilderment as he looks at Prashanth, dead set, then to Rahul, with his own share of quiet confusion.
“Sure?”
___
Prashanth stands over a rapidly spinning whirlwind of a machine, wielding a length of thin, opaque string in his right hand, threading it through a half-strung racket mid-revolution. Rahul looks at the chaotic dance with an amazed sort of grin.
“You should do this for the pros.”
“Nah, I wish. Those guys are insane.”
He runs a brief loop through the bottom left corner of the frame, whipping one end of the string through, then across the whole apparatus to pull the final knot. He lazily whips up a small pair of red wire cutters to nip off the excess string.
“And it’s absolute hell on the hands.”
Prashanth unscrews a black knob at the base of the device, freeing the frame from the vise-like grips of the many-armed machine. With a proud half-smile, Prashanth pops the freshly strung racket out and checks each cross individually, making sure each inch of the taut nylon multifilament pattern is perfectly in line.
As he reaches the bottom of the racket, the front glass door swings open and two affluent-looking women walk in. They look at the Indians standing near the stringer in the big window. One of them takes their sunglasses off.
“Hi. Does one of you work here? We were told that we might be able to get a tennis racket here.”
The two in the window stand there for a second, dumbfounded. Prashanth takes the initiative to look at the counter, and after a second, can’t help but grin when he finds nobody there. He shakes his head at the two women, who look back at the empty store, grumbling as they huff out the door.
Rahul looks at his smiling nephew with shock.
“Oh my God. Was everyone that short with you when you worked here? They didn’t even . . . look around.”
Prashanth laughs. He looks out the front window, trying to measure a politically correct response. There’s no one outside in the dense afternoon heat, just the chorus line of smokers in scrubs outside of the old-age home, standing just to the right of the bus stop.
___
vii.
Prashanth takes one final check of his cream-colored shirt as the elevator doors open to an open-air rooftop bar. Above, the circular neon moon breaks off into fragmented gleams across the steel city; the gently lapping river below glints up the cool, white rays.
Prashanth takes a long, slow walk around the length of the bar — an oval island in the middle of a wide rectangle, very high up in the world. He takes a seat at the far end, in the quiet corner. After ordering a clear drink with a thin, green slice of lime, he watches for a bit, the yellow-orange city lights, these buzzing orbs, floating above the sprawling city.
His phone vibrates in his pocket, and he pulls it out with a sort of pained anticipation.
[hey I’m sor-]
Prashanth doesn’t continue reading. He holds onto the first few words in his mind, savoring them a moment before he has to let in the inevitable deluge of pain. He reads the rest, although it could barely be described as reading, the boy practically dragging his (barely) welling eyes across the bright screen.
[-ry, I just can’t tn]
He looks into the waning ice of his drink, the melting blocks dripping into a clear nothingness. Prashanth looks over the railing for a moment and can’t quite see over the distant edge, the world dropping off an unimaginably steep height
“What am I doing here?”
He can’t stop himself from speaking the words, and was a bit startled when, maybe for the first time, said exactly what he felt. He turns his head down to the flat white background of the text message screen, losing himself in the backlit pale white.
“Can I get you something else, boss?”
A cheerful bartender wearing a black shirt and wacky glasses walks over to the customer in the corner. Prashanth quickly turns his head up, yet struggles with the words.
“No. Could I just close out?”
The bartender nods politely as he reaches over and plucks the empty glass, catching a glimpse of the phone on the way back.
“Any luck?”
Prashanth thinks for a moment, but can’t even force a shake of the head. After what feels like an eternity of a moment, he lets out a wounded:
“No.”
The bartender, with so many other things to do at that moment, offers the simplest explanation he can muster, a shrug of the shoulders, and a compassionate:
“That’s life, man.”
___
viii.
As the pair walks out of the store into the blaringly bright intersection, Rahul tries to take one last look into the store through the glass, but can’t get past his glaring reflection.
“I really wish I could have met this guy.”
“Yeah, you would have liked him. When he was 22, he drove a van from the UK back to Pakistan.”
Rahul laughs off the notion, but Prashanth just looks out into the disheveled street as the cars storm up and down the avenue.
“When he first started the store, he had to string 70,000 rackets his first year. And now he’s got kids, he’s married. Somehow in this place, he did it.”
“Seems like he had help.”
Prashanth just shrugs.
“Man, I really hate to ask you this, but… has something happened to you? Last time we saw you, you seemed like you were having a blast over here!”
Prashanth thinks for a moment, and his mouth folds down a little, and his left eye closes, as if he was flinching from a pain that was about to come.
___
ix. dark was the night, cold was the ground
Prashanth’s nice shirt has come untucked as he walks slowly down the street on his long walk back, as always, making sure to take two steps on each concrete block. Music pours down from parties above, people dancing and singing, at least giving Prashanth something to listen to as he stumbles home.
His phone honks and shimmies in his back pocket, but he takes his time before reaching to answer.
“Hello?”
“Hey, what's up, Mr. Numbers? Sorry to bother you this late, man, I just wanted to double-check what time we had to be at the ceremony tomorrow.”
“Um…8 a.m.? I think?”
“Bwuh, damn. Anyways, your mom wants to know where you are right now. Yours?”
“No, just out.”
“Oh, Out. He’s ‘o-u-t’ right now. With someone interesting, perhaps?"
Prashanth walks a few paces, a few streetlamps and the full moon his only company.
“Just someone’s grad party. It was pretty lame, actually.”
“Oh. Rough. Well, if you’re bored or hungry, just come to the hotel; there's talk of Pictionary over here if you’re interested.”
A rowdy party behind Rahul whispers out from the small speakers in Prashanth’s phone.
“Yeah, I’m not sure. I’ve got to get up pretty early tomorrow.”
“Hey, I get it, I get it, no worries. I’ll leave you to it. See you tomorrow!”
“Ye-” the call ends.
He looks down at his phone. It’s 10:30 p.m. His calendar reminds him that tomorrow is Father’s Day. There was really nothing else of note. Prashanth stands alone in the pitch black of night. A light breeze slowly tosses his rowdy hair.
As he goes to slide his phone back into his pocket, he notices a bright store across the street, empty, unassuming, hiding under two massive concrete buildings. But the light from inside spills out just so, enough to drag Prashanth across the wide road.
It’s a paper shop, of sorts, a deceivingly big room with lit-up shelves and glass displays, all filled with thick personal pads and leather portfolios. Prashanth meanders to the glass window, marveling at the pristine order of things; the neat stacks of small cards and cheap letters filled with tiny, loving quotations.
All of a sudden, a woman, mid-40s with frizzled black hair, comes out from a back room. She looks up and is immediately startled by the sight of a well-dressed Indian boy looking through the front windows of her store. She taps at her Apple Watch sharply and mouths the words:
‘c-l-o-s-e-d’
Prashanth nods politely and backs away from the window, a little shocked as he feels, from somewhere inside him, the last bit of life vanish. He trudges down the street in the direction of the apartment he has to pack up, wishing someone would just turn the damn music back on.
___
viii. (cont.)
Prashanth and Rahul walk alongside the cars lining the length of Fullerton Avenue, the stretch beyond the horrifyingly complex intersection, where the brick houses run like two mighty walls on either side.
“Damn.”
Prashanth keeps walking.
“What happened to that girl?”
“I’m not sure. She kind of disappeared there.”
“You liked her a lot?”
“Yeah. It’s strange. I didn’t think I would, but— I don’t know, there were things about her I just couldn’t get enough of. Anytime I could get her to laugh, like really laugh, I could always see it in her eyes. For as long as I’ve known her, I’ve been trying to get her… even when it was bad, even at the end there, I guess. Whenever she looked at me, I felt that I was alive. Like, I really meant something. And she always smelled nice.”
Rahul looks down the street in solidarity with his nephew, trying to stay as close to his side through the unyielding stream of people pushing against them, going the other way.
“Wow, you did like her.”
A cheeky grin spreads over the young man’s face as his thoughts race over the hoods of shiny cars.
“Remember that poem I didn’t want you to read?”
___
x. epilogue (or, the way you look tonight)
Oz Park on an Early Summer Day
A lone swallow sings
softly over the heavy,
summer breeze that sways
your soft, thin hair against
the midnight blue sky.
Your face stands above me;
distant eyes covered with
black – or maybe gold
sunglasses that I lost
some time ago.
I wonder where
you are.
****
This piece was originally published in 14 East Magazine on Jun 8, 2025.