by Pasha Malla
‘Says the kid who lives a province away.’
‘What does that have to do with it?’
‘You think I can just swing out here every weekend to clean the eavestroughs?’
‘Not once the baby’s here,’ said Harj. And quickly corrected himself: ‘Though of course I’ll be taking a pat leave too.’
‘That’s not a bad-sized hill over there,’ called Matt from the far side of the room.
Ash checked his phone. Sherene had written back: If you need to skip the interview that’s fine, I can get someone else. No acknowledgement of his invitation. Nor in her next message, which he tried not to read as an afterthought: Hope you’re doing okay! XO
‘Who are you texting?’ said Mona. ‘There’s so much that needs doing!’
‘Listen,’ said Ash, turning the phone facedown on the table, ‘I don’t want to say the body’s still warm—’
‘Ew,’ said his sister. ‘Then don’t.’
Ash chuckled, but her wounded expression chastened him. He softened his voice: ‘Just, maybe we shouldn’t rush into all this stuff while we’re still…sad.’
Too late: she was crying. Harj draped over her like a shawl, clucking softly. Ash swept up his phone and tapped out a reply: I’m fine.
Matt appeared with a fistful of Kleenexes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, indicating a box on the mantle, ‘they’re not mine.’
Mona accepted one, wiped her eyes. Asked Matt how long he was planning to stay.
‘Told you guys, as long as you need me.’
‘But aren’t you in school?’
‘Yeah. About that.’ Matt held out his right hand, scrunched his fingers: each one but the pinkie tucked at the knuckle. ‘Dropped digit.’
Ash pictured him blundering into some candlelit spa, solemnly kneading some poor geriatric’s bones to glue—and wounding himself in the process. ‘Jesus, what did you do?’
‘Check this out: in my head I think I’m moving it but the tendon’s just flapping around loose inside!’
‘It will heal,’ said Harj with beleaguered expertise.
Mona leaned in to get a better look. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘When I did it, yeah. Now it’s just numb.’
‘I’m waiting for the story,’ said Ash. ‘Because there has to be one, right?’
Matt grinned. ‘So this bartender I met out west, he’s an Ironman. With the swimming and biking and running and everything. Casper. Guy is forty-eight and jacked. Does the race every year. And, get this, he used to be a junkie, woke up in a gutter in Vancouver and was just like, Gotta get my life together. So he started training. Total carpe diem mentality. And just super happy in his own skin, you know?’
Ash had seen this before: between failed auditions, nonspeaking parts on unwatchable TV shows and the occasional commercial gig, Matt would meet a stranger to whom some hobby had brought purpose and fling himself at it wholesale—Ultimate Frisbee, improv comedy, a disastrous turn as a drum and bass DJ for which he went shirtless in faux-fur pants.
‘So you skipped Regular Person and went straight to Ironman.’
‘Part of making myself happen, bro.’
Mona tipped back her beer. She’d never had much time for people who floundered through life. Yet what had once been about asserting her own resolve had a tinge of elitism to it now—the stain, Ash thought, of Harj.
‘Except,’ Matt continued, on the verge of losing his audience, ‘my first long bike ride we’re going through the Kootenays, seventy clicks in freezing rain. Brakes are locked, no stopping. I go around one corner and everything just slips out from under me—bike goes one way, I go the other and slide right up to the edge of the mountain. Literally gravel avalanching down two hundred feet, and it’s lucky I was baked out of my tree because instead of tensing up and going over? All I did was smush my hand and burn up my backside something fierce. But’—he looked around the table to confirm he had everyone’s attention—‘not only was that it for training, I had to take the semester off school too. Which sucks, because we were just starting to work with actual bodies.’
‘So, wait,’ said Mona. ‘That means you don’t have anything to go back to?’
‘I told you: I’m yours however long you need me.’
‘How long before it heals?’ Mona asked her husband.
Harj’s shrug suggested that he reserved diagnoses for significant ailments only: malaria, typhoid, landmines.
‘Could be weeks,’ said Matt forlornly. ‘Maybe even months. Could miss this year’s ski season entirely.’ He displayed the busted finger again, like a sad Mafioso wielding a ring to be kissed.
So it was with Matt’s injuries, always turned into spectacle. A sprained ankle, a stubbed toe—even a sneeze!—became an occasion for theatrics, from grunts and groans to writhing on the floor screaming for a surgeon. Performances aside, he’d suffered his share of trauma: broken bones (eight), surgeries (two scopes on his left knee, a jaw hinged with plates and screws), concussions (‘Four officially,’ he claimed, ‘though probably more’). Vainly he’d turn in profile like a Roman emperor and sigh, ‘Busted my nose three times. Never breathe the same again.’
Though it wasn’t quite masochistic, Matt wanted to be hurt. Not to revel in the pain, but to have something to showcase for sympathy. Even as a kid, long before his mom took her own life, he’d been this way too.
‘Well, if we’re not going to go through the legal stuff,’ said Mona, returning the will and box to her bag, ‘what’s the story with dinner?’
‘Whatever you’d like, my darling,’ said Harj, stroking her hand.
But Mona’s eyes were on Ash, the family cook. Ash checked his phone. No new messages. So he scrolled through his conversation with Sherene, thinking that if Harj were taking requests, he could go ahead and make his own fucking supper.
‘Tons of chow right here,’ said Matt, nibbling grapes from the bunch.
‘I guess we could go out,’ said Mona.
‘Eat in public, are you insane?’ said Ash, looking up. ‘What if someone starts crying?’
‘What if we do? Aren’t we meant to cry? Our dad just died.’
‘Exactly!’
‘I, for one, will not support some chain restaurant,’ said Harj. ‘Well, there’s Chez Whatever,’ said Mona. ‘Remember that, Ash? That BYO joint down the highway where Brij said the wine was off?’
Ash pushed his beer away and snarled, ‘It’s corked,’ through gritted teeth.
Mona laughed her wild, chirruping laugh, covering her mouth with her hand. Just as she’d laughed as a kid.
At the time, it hadn’t been so funny. The waiter retreated two steps while Brij scowled at the bottle. With no explanation he stood, went to the car and drove off, leaving his adult children to fondle their menus for forty minutes before he returned with a replacement.
Mona shook her head, still smiling. Something had opened up. ‘That same weekend,’ began Ash carefully, with the warm look on his sister’s face urging him along, ‘you told us about jizz, remember?’
Matt leaned in. ‘Go on.’
‘Not like that! Mona was just back from Istanbul and she said that in Turkish the word jizz means sizzle, so when I served this sizzling reduction, we called it “jizz”—’
Mona smacked Ash’s knee under the table. ‘Oh my god! I totally forgot! Too funny. And then Brij—’
‘Right?’ Ash voice lifted. ‘We were cracking up, and Brij was laughing that big booming laugh of his—’
‘The fake-sounding one,’ said Mona. ‘The one you can spell.’
‘Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho! And I asked him if he knew what was so hilarious. And he got mad. “Of course I do, idiot.” ’
‘Too much!’ shrieked Mona. ‘You sound exactly like him!’
‘So I asked him what, then, he thought jizz meant.’
Mona placed her hands on her belly. ‘What did he say? I can’t remember.’
‘He got quiet, replaying the story, trying to piece it together. And then he stares us down, t
otally sure of himself, and with this gloating look goes, “It means…pubic hair.” ’
The laughter felt symphonic: Ash and Mona and Matt (even Harj, a little) howling in chorus, almost desperately, cresting out of grief and threatening, when it began to wane, to maroon them in sorrow. So when Matt reprised, ‘Pubic hair!’ the hysterics reignited with something like gratitude.
The second wave subsided. A round of final chuckles. A round of sighs.
‘Oh, man,’ said Mona. ‘Too funny.’
‘My stomach hurts,’ said Matt.
‘My everything hurts,’ said Ash.
‘Jizz,’ said Matt. ‘Pubes…Priceless!’
A pause, from which a flatter silence surfaced and settled over everything like a lid.
‘Brij,’ said Mona, smiling distantly. ‘What a guy.’
The words, her wistful tone—it was the saddest thing Ash had ever heard.
She yelped, her hand flew to her throat, her face collapsed, her body lurched. Ash reached for his sister across the table. But Harj, bursting into tears himself, swept Mona into his arms. From across the table Ash watched them hold each other, foreheads pressed and bodies heaving, their sobs coming in gasps.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, a squeeze.
‘We’re out of beer,’ Matt whispered, shaking his empty. ‘You think your old man would mind if we got into his wine?’
—
STANDING BEFORE A WALL of bottles in the basement, Ash tried to imagine which one Brij would pick to go with cold meat and cucumber spears. Yet for his dad wine was less of an accompaniment to food than an occasion for ceremony: the opening, the swilling, the sniffing, the nod. Having long ago forsaken Hinduism, like most apostates he’d adopted new sacraments. It felt right to honour his rituals, now. It was, maybe, all they could do.
Except Ash knew nothing about wine. He got his phone out to text Sherene but no signal reached the basement. She’d told him once, maybe sarcastically, to bet on rural origins (villages, mountains, farms, etc.), so he grabbed some dusty French number—2005, was that a good year? He looked over the bottle for some memo of complementary foods: none, not even a schedule of how it would taste.
Whimpers trickled downstairs. Ash hoped his quick exit had seemed less an escape than allowing his sister her space. The way he grieved was just different. He wasn’t a crier. Nor had his dad been, either. At ten, when his parents announced their divorce, while Mona and their mom wept Ash had absconded to shoot hoops in the driveway; he’d looked up at one point to discover Brij observing from the window. It wasn’t until high school that sadness arrived—the brutal, adolescent monsoon of it, manifest as vandalism, negligent hygiene and shoplifted CDs.
Matt’s voice rumbled down the stairs: ‘You stomping grapes down there or what?’
‘Coming,’ Ash called.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to head back up. His failure to cry suggested some more profound deficiency. (Though Harj, who could bawl on command, surely had defects of his own.) Even before Brij’s stroke Ash had been feeling a little lost to himself, waking each morning in a disoriented panic. Back in October he’d got in a cab and been struck by the voice on the radio, discomfiting and oddly familiar. It wasn’t until the speaker laughed—a hiss, like air escaping a slashed tire—that Ash recognized himself.
—
IN THE END, Matt’s suggestion of takeout won the day. But first, Mona announced, there was still time to ‘climb the mountain,’ which meant the 45-minute trudge up a nearby hill that had provided Brij his daily exercise. Another ritual, another way to pay homage. Yet to Ash it offered a chance, with the house emptied, for solitude.
‘Should be nice,’ said Ash. ‘Great views if you can get to the top before dark.’
Mona looked dismayed. ‘You’re not coming?’
‘I really want to’—Ash winced in a pained, regretful way—‘but I’ve got this interview on Tuesday that I need to prep for. Also the house needs cleaning…’
‘I’ll go get the food in the meantime,’ Matt volunteered. He seemed twitchy; his edges were showing. ‘Can’t do hills anyway with my knee.’
Watching his foot thrum under the table, Ash realized that Matt likely hadn’t smoked up since before the funeral. So this was less helpful errand than self-care. Even after twenty years he could still get secretive, almost embarrassed, about his weed habit. Not always, and sometimes he’d coerce Ash into joining him. The shame was of dependence, of weakness.
Once Ash was alone, the house settled into an eerie stillness. Heading upstairs, he even imagined a spectral presence at his heels and, upon reaching his dad’s office, slammed the door and pressed his back to it. Once his pulse had steadied he sat in Brij’s reading chair with the book he would be discussing in two days, but had yet to start.
The best part of Ash’s job was when he and Sherene picked their guests and sketched out the interviews together. She was the most confident and insightful reader he knew, tempering Ash’s need to impress the author with a steady critical eye. With their co-written scripts in hand Ash approached these episodes with vigour, and when the on-air light extinguished and the headphones came off, nothing pleased him more than being told how good it had been to be read so closely, so accurately—to be understood. He felt sanctioned, a peer and not just a patron.
However. Occasionally interviews were handed down from on high. For their Christmas Eve programme, Ash and Sherene had been appointed, as they called him, ‘The Behemoth.’ The Behemoth’s novels (manually typed, of course, in some log cabin on some lake in some deep dark woods) tended to launch directly from the printers to the bestseller list. His sixth book, the portentously titled Into the Night, had already received the expected, weirdly combative notices (an absolute triumph over what?) and could now be found stacked like sandbag barricades by the cash registers of the nation’s biggest, boxiest bookstores. In his jacket photo, The Behemoth glared headlong into the camera while caressing the cinderblock of his jawline, presumably to communicate a hostile intellect—or intellectual hostility.
In Ash’s opinion Into the Night was, probably, a 320-page epitaph for literature. Though he’d yet to read a word, he could predict what was in store: its touchstones would be Hemingway, manual labour and the films of Clint Eastwood. Its main character would be a Broken Man of few words fuelled by booze and penance. Its politics would be ‘common sense,’ viz. intolerant of anything beyond their own chauvinistic purview. The prose, like The Behemoth himself, like his fictional proxy, would be muscular. The plot would be one of vengeance, illuminating the innately violent nature of Man. The movie version would make a trillion dollars; a sequel was likely already in the works.
Here was the novel’s opening line: Man is pain.
Ash pulled out his phone, took a photo, and sent it to Sherene with a sad face. Set book and phone down. Scrubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hands (a gesture inherited from Brij, performed in moments of weariness or disbelief).
Sherene’s reply: Tell me please you’re further in than that!
Ash put aside Into the Night to look through Brij’s stuff. Among folders dedicated to TAXES and HOUSE he found one labeled WRITING. Inside was a story, ‘Lines of Control,’ Ash’s own last real foray into fiction, a decade old now and never published. Its prominence among his dad’s papers, printed on the corny marbled stationery Brij favoured for documents of import, struck Ash as both comical and depressing.
Begun a year or two after the publication of Ash’s first and only book, the story had seen many drafts but never gone anywhere. Sharing it with Brij had been a capitulation to his requests to see Ash’s fiction in its infant and most mortifying stages. (‘When’s your new novel coming out?’ he would ask; ‘I’m working on it,’ Ash would lie; ‘Well then send me what you’ve got.’) Brij seemed to believe that fatherhood entitled jurisdiction over his son’s creations, whatever state they were in. Ash’s book, after all, was the closest he’d come to continuing the family name.
Reading the story was like encountering some past version of himself, one yet to see his dreams wither and perish. ‘Lines of Control’ wasn’t good, but there was a lightness to it that, as he read, made Ash embarrassed, then amused, then nostalgic. Life had been simpler then. His only goal had been to make up things that were both funny and sad, as if striking that balance were some grand artistic feat.
Still, it was kind of funny, and maybe even a little sad. Though not really a story, more a quirky vignette about a young man and his dog bumbling through a warzone looking to buy, of all things, a peach. After twelve pages it attempted a metaphysical ending: while gunfire crackles around him, our hero bites into his peach, finds it rotten, and hurls it straight up in the air, as high as he can—and it never comes down. If he’d intended some symbolic resonance Ash couldn’t think of one now.
On the back of the printout was a letter in his dad’s handwriting, that jagged scrawl Ash had described in his eulogy as a polygraph readout spiked with lies. ‘My thoughts,’ it began. Why had Brij bothered to write out comments on the story, only to never share them with his son? Whatever his reasons, Ash stopped short at the first line: ‘If one is to write about Kashmir…’ Confusing! The story was not about Kashmir at all. He’d intended the setting, a war-ravaged village amid mountains, to be generic.
Certainly Ash’s second book, if he’d ever got round to writing it, was supposed to have been ‘about Kashmir.’ Yet for various reasons (an inability to invent characters, resistance to research, misgivings about treating tenuous cultural heritage as material) he’d been too paralyzed to begin. Besides, who was he to speak about a place whose name he couldn’t pronounce? Ash had tried imitating his dad’s Kuss-meeher once, to Sherene, and her cockeyed response had flooded him with shame.
What would a novel ‘about Kashmir’ even be? Surely there were stories ‘about Kashmir’ that never touched on Partition, or the Troubles, or the military occupation, or the exile of Pandits like the Dhars. A book truly ‘about Kashmir’ would be the size of a sofa, a tale from all sides that included the subjective, the objective, the factual, the impressionistic—even the clueless and misguided, even the ideologically deranged. Anything less would be akin to summarizing a film with a single frame snipped from the reel. But such a project was impossible. So—for virtuous reasons, Ash preferred to tell himself—the novel was never begun, and now he only read other people’s books, and talked about them on the radio, and was considered successful in a small, Canadian way.