A Precious Natural Resource

A Short Story on Desire

Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Rosa Canina Burboniana, 1817, The New York Public Library

Once upon a time, a boy became obsessed with his friend.

The boy’s name was Prashant, and he was tall, dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, brilliant. He impressed the other boys in his dorm at the elite American university by playing chess with them blindfolded, sometimes undertaking three or four games simultaneously. The hardest thing was that often, when they described their moves to him, he’d know the moves were wrong because they didn’t quite know the names of the rows and columns on the board. So, he’d need to correct their game and then make his own move. They found this very impressive, but it was actually pretty simple, if you’d practiced. It wasn’t real chess, only a parlor trick.

Prashant spent a lot of time in the room of a girl on the third floor. Avery was tiny, athletic, very peppy, very cheerful. She was always grabbing him by the hands and maneuvering his big body around, or bursting into his room late at night to tell him about some lecture they needed to attend.

One day, when they were on the shuttle coming home after a dance class, she snuggled close to him, put her head on his shoulder, and said, “Prashant, you are so smart. You are so wonderful.” Her warmth oozed through him, her breath looped from her lungs into his — they were warmly, hazily together.

The next day, he bicycled into the town center to purchase some flowers. He wrote a card to Avery, saying, “It has been so wonderful getting to know you, and I would very much like to take you out sometime on a date.” He crept into her dorm room while she was in class and put the flowers on her desk.

She never mentioned them!

For a few months, she avoided him. But then she started drinking and going to parties, and one day he found her lying drunkenly on the carpet in their dorm common room. “Prashaaaaaa,” she said. “You’re hereeeeee! Heellllp me!”

He picked her up and carried her up the stairs like the prince in a movie. By now, he’d witnessed the antics of many drunken white girls, so he put a bucket next to her bed and made sure she drank water. He rubbed her shoulder a few times. She was quite beautiful, with her brunette hair and slender nose. He sat on the couch doing a problem set on his laptop for a bit, occasionally looking up at her, imagining the two of them married. Once, a brown friend had said, “But wouldn’t your parents be upset?”

“No dude,” he’d said. “My family isn’t like that!”

What Prashant didn’t totally understand, because he was relatively free of ego, was that his family stood in awe of him and would’ve accepted anyone he brought home. In fact, what nobody understood — not Avery, not the members of his dorm, not even Prashant himself — was that Prashant was quite literally the hope of his nation. He was one of their finest products: a man of the people, gifted with a powerful mind and a gentle nature. He’d even been discussed, at times, in the conference rooms of his country’s secretariat. There’d been at least one meeting where a government official had said, “We need to ensure that Prashant returns home.”

He hadn’t thought overmuch about his future. He had a social conscience, of course. But mostly he just had a boundless youthful energy. He’d get interested in a subject, then suddenly he’d be reading up about it, emailing people, visiting offices, going on expeditions. Last summer, he’d learned to drill wells on the leeward side of his island. He was interested in it, so he’d just done it!

Prashant was so unassuming and gentle that most people naturally wanted to help him. But some professors, particularly white women, were dicks. He had one writing professor who kept marking up his papers with red, critiquing his English. He asked for meetings to figure out how to improve, but she said, “I don’t have time to teach remedial English — your high school really ought to have prepared you better.”

Her harangues against Prashant somehow became general knowledge, and one day Avery asked, “What is going on in your writing seminar?”

“Oh, I’m having some trouble,” he said.

“Prashant,” she said. “You are an incredible, amazing, brilliant person. I cannot believe this woman is treating you this way. Should I talk to her?”

Prashant cocked his head. Somehow, though he’d lived on this earth for nineteen years, nothing in his life had ever seemed as consequential as this decision. He’d never asked for help before, and his first instinct was to tell Avery no. After all, it was only a grade. Prashant had always gotten straight A’s, but he wasn’t particularly worried about tests or exam scores. He’d never cared about grades. He always just dug straight through, to the substrate, and did the thing that need doing. If you can do the thing well, then you’ll get an A in the class, of course. But Avery explained to him that actually his English was fine and this woman was bullying him because she was a bitch.

“No,” Prashant said. “Do you think so? Is my English really serviceable? I am not the best writer.”

“Prashant,” Avery said. “I’ll prove it. I’m an English major. I’ll edit your next essay.”

And, sure enough, it came back with a B- and a referral to the campus writing center. Prashant was bemused. He’d written the assignment in a few hours, but Avery had spent many hours in his room, folded up in one corner of the futon, chewing on her pen, rewriting the paper before he turned it in.

“Okay,” he said.

“I can do it?”

“Go speak with her. Go do it.”

“Do you want to come?”

“No.”

A week later, Prashant got a terse email from his professor stating that she was dropping him from the course and invalidating his grades. He was referred up the chain through some byzantine bureaucratic process, all handled by Avery. She spent hours and hours preparing his case — for what? Prashant couldn’t even understand what was happening!

One day, Avery and Prashant were working in his dorm room when his phone rang. It was his country’s minister for “Technology and Business Development.” The man was in town for some meetings and had some hours free and wanted to get lunch with Prashant — the minister’s car was outside right then.

“Oh shit!” Prashant said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“What?”

When Avery heard what was happening, she came outside. The minister was in a slick business suit and wearing sunglasses — his eyes flicked over Avery’s body and he said, “Would your friend like to come to dinner as well?”

So the three of them went to a hotel on the outskirts of campus, where the minister probed Prashant on his studies and plans.

“You will do graduate studies?” the minister asked.

“I think so?” Prashant said. “Perhaps a PhD. I am drawn to civil engineering?”

“Not software development?”

“I think no,” Prashant said. “Coding is too much time at a desk. It is fun, but not serious work.”

“You need me to write letters or call anyone?” the minister said.

“Wait, actually,” Avery interjected. “There’s one thing.” Then she described the situation with the professor.

The minister frowned. “I will handle it.”

Afterward, the Honor Code case against Prashant disappeared. Somehow, his life became markedly easier — something he wouldn’t have thought possible. He got a summer internship at a civil engineering firm, and Avery’s dad got all of Prashant’s stuff and took it up to San Francisco, where he’d be staying in Avery’s guest room.

For her part, Avery did cool-girl things: interned at an art museum, took drugs, went to parties, flitted around the edge of his life while Prashant went out to construction sites and drew up plans. Avery’s dad absolutely loved Prashant, and Prashant loved his stories about Avery as a kid. She’d often return from a party to find her dad and Prashant standing in the kitchen and chatting.

“Why don’t you ever take Prashant out?” Avery’s dad said.

“Oh, are you into parties and things?” she asked.

“I could go to a party!” Prashant said.

So he went to a gathering as her date, but he could feel that he simply wasn’t . . . right? She swirled around the room, introducing people to him, talking him up, saying the hopes of an entire nation rested on his shoulders. People were interested in him, as a spectacle of sorts, and he was happy to speak with them. All he wanted, though, was to be close to Avery, to hold her gaze, to soak up her attention. He’d never wanted anything so badly in his life.

---

A few years later, a brown girl spotted him, dragged him to bed, and suddenly they were dating. This brown girl was beautiful, sophisticated, charismatic. His friends were like, “You found a brown Avery!” After his master’s degree, he joined a company that did large civil engineering contracts across the world, while his girlfriend worked a management consulting job in New York.

The brown girl wanted him to stay in the United States, while he preferred to go home — not because he yearned to help his people, but because there were some very interesting problems in hydroelectric power provision and he thought it was time to get cracking on all these big projects that the government had promised now for decades without ever making progress.

“Well, do you have a job out there?” his girlfriend asked.

“No,” he said. “But I can do something.”

“If you want to help your country, you can do it much better from here! You can make lots of money, you can start a business, you can do so many things . . . .”

“Hmm . . . .”

He proposed marriage to his brown girlfriend, and shortly after the engagement was announced on the internet, he got a text message from Avery.

“Wow!” she wrote. “Congrats! Who is this girl?”

Through the course of a long conversation, over text and face to face, Prashant told Avery all about his girlfriend. He said the girl was really smart, driven, ambitious. His friends called her “the brown Avery.”

“Oh Prashant,” she said. “You can’t be this stupid.”

“What?” he said.

They were at a coffee shop in New York. Avery was in a slim black dress and wearing silver earrings. She touched Prashant’s hand.

“You’re not gonna be happy with this girl,” she said. “You’re a superstar. You’re, like, a precious natural resource. Does this girl even get that?”

“That’s too much,” he said. “I’m only a person.”

“People should just give you whatever you need,” she said. “Just write you blank checks. Take care of you so you can do great things. This girl isn’t like that. She’s trying to . . . to guide you or something. Makes no sense.”

“Avery, this is a very strange conversation,” he said. “I asked you out on a date, and you ignored me. I don’t know what strange ideas you have about me. I’m only a person.”

“Oh, Prashant,” she said. She reached out and touched his face. “Okay, fine. Let’s do it.”

“Do what?”

“Have sex.”

“Are you joking?”

“I’m calling a car. Let’s do it.”

They went to a hotel room. She took him by the hand, dragging him to the elevator. He took off her dress, bit her shoulder, did the whole thing. The next morning, he broke up with his fiancée.

He moved temporarily into Avery’s condo, but after a few months, they went on a tour of his home country. Everyone was very bemused by their rainforest wedding and by the life they subsequently led: Avery would take her calls and meetings from the capital of this little island nation while her husband spent months ranging over the country in his jeep, wrangling construction teams and overseeing projects.

After ten years as a contractor, he was invited to join the government’s infrastructure team, which meant standing for election in a safe district. Avery tried and tried to learn the language of his country, but she was always hopeless at it. Her own children were at home here — they hardly knew America.

Avery’s dad, of course, hated Prashant. He’d liked the guy as a friend, thought he was really bright! But to carry off his only daughter to the end of the earth? That was too much.

“What about you?” Avery’s dad asked. “Are you happy out there? Does he think about you at all?”

“I’m happy. And no, he’s pretty busy.”

“But Avery, you did so well in school. You loved your art. Is this the life you dreamed for yourself?”

“Not really.”

“So come on then! Why are you over there?”

For their twentieth anniversary, Prashant rented out a castle. It was a giant forest redoubt, from which Buddhist kings had once ruled with unimpeachable propriety. Prashant paid for dozens of their college friends to fly out for a weeklong party. And through hints and sketches and fragments, Avery and Prashant heard their “love story” repeated over and over again. “You guys were just thick as thieves, from the moment you got to campus,” said one former dormmate.

On the last day of the trip, Prashant came upon his wife sitting in her pajamas in the window seat of their palace hotel. She was sketching a flower that she’d seen through their window.

“Those are the same as the roses I left you,” he said.

“What roses?”

“You can’t remember? Are you kidding me? Back in undergraduate, when I bought you roses for a gift. Do you remember receiving them?”

“Oh. Yeah,” she said. “Those.”

Prashant had long since ceased wondering why she had never mentioned the roses or reciprocated his affections in college. He’d retreated back into his happy technocratic bubble, full of games and projects. He kissed his wife on the neck, and she shivered slightly, but when he pressed further, she chivvied him away, saying, I think I’d like to be alone for a while.

Naomi Kanakia is the author of four novels and a non-fiction book about the classics, What’s So Great About the Great Books?, that will appear in 2026 from Princeton University Press. She also writes a (somewhat) popular literary newsletter called Woman of Letters that’s been mentioned by the New Yorker, New York, and Vox.