by Pasha Malla
‘You’re leaving.’
‘Don’t poke me, that hurts.’
‘Couldn’t stand it here any longer?’ Her tone was fierce, her expression wounded.
‘Shit, Mona, you either want us here or you don’t. Which is it?’
‘Ash, I want you here. Just not him.’
‘That’s what I want too! Just us.’
She sat on the bed. ‘Yet you’re leaving.’
‘It’s not like that. Chip came all the way from London! He doesn’t get much chance to go out, what with his kid and all. And plus I have this interview…’
Mona shook her head: no excuses, no bluster. She gestured at the clothes piled around her on the duvet. ‘Some of this stuff would fit you,’ she said. ‘You should try it on. Before you go, I mean.’
‘I’m good for Y-fronts, thanks.’
‘Well, what about this?’ She held up a Kashmiri housecoat with a tasselled sash and intricate embroidery up the lapels. It had been their dad’s home-wear before giving way to a pair of grey joggers and an Expos T-shirt.
‘Hmm…I was looking for an outfit for my next puja.’
‘Just try it on, smart guy.’
A chance for absolution, maybe. So Ash slid his arms into the sleeves. With his hands at his forehead he bowed, rose with a head-wobble and a sly grin. ‘Memsahib.’
‘Come,’ said his sister, and tied the tassel. Her eyes glistened. ‘There.’
‘Could I pass for full Brahmin now or what?’
Mona wiped away a stray tear. Sniffled. But then laughed a little. ‘You look nice.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better on Harj?’ said Ash. ‘A real Hindu, I mean.’
‘No.’ Mona’s expression was wistful. It made Ash feel like a lens: not looked at, but through. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘It suits you.’
—
AFTER HE’D SPLIT WITH THEIR MOM, Brij had taken a few, faintly tragic cracks at homemaking: the dutiful replication of Ikea showrooms, a ‘play tent’ in the basement (commandeered by Mona; off limits to Ash) and some calamitous attempts at microwave cookery before discovering premade curry sauces: dump over meat, heat, ‘enjoy.’
He’d also stocked a games cupboard to rival any toy store, minus the awkward domestic values of Life. On the alternate weekends Mona and Ash spent at their father’s, this cupboard helped salvage Brij’s required Saturday morning of family time. Eyes on the clock, Ash and Mona trudged plastic avatars around the boards of Sorry! or Snakes and Ladders while their father cheered them on, delirious with caffeine, until his competitive streak took over and he crushed them both.
But as the years wore on the tradition turned nostalgic, and games before lunch became something they almost enjoyed on visits to the Townships. So just before noon Ash called everyone into the den to enact another old rite. The assembly happened grudgingly, like rival nations gathering for a forced truce. While Harj crafted a teepee of kindling and newsprint in the fireplace, Ash, still wearing his father’s robe, knelt by the games cupboard and proposed options. ‘Jenga?’
‘You’re too anxious,’ said Mona. ‘You knock it down every turn.’
From the window, watching snow machines paint the distant slopes, Matt called, ‘He can’t play Operation either. Shakes like a leaf.’
‘How about Monopoly?’
‘Capitalist propaganda,’ said Harj. He struck matches and flicked them into the fireplace. The kindling began to crackle.
‘Trouble’s more socialist,’ said Ash, ‘but I think the popper is broken…Scrabble?’
‘With you, Mister Word-Nerd?’ said Mona. ‘No thanks.’
‘Hey,’ said Matt. ‘I’m no Tolstoyevksy but I’ll lay tiles with frigging anyone.’
‘No, Mona’s right. Scrabble’s boring.’ Ash scanned the remaining games with urgency: Risk, chess, Chinese Checkers. Each more dreary than the last.
‘There we go,’ said Harj, stepping away from the fireplace, where a mighty conflagration snapped and snarled. ‘Now, that’s a fire.’
‘Clue’s a no for me,’ said Ash. ‘Mona always used to make me be Mrs. Peacock.’
She laughed. ‘Well, you’re certainly dressed the part now in that robe.’
‘What about charades?’ said Matt.
Ash turned from the cupboard. ‘What is this, drama camp?’
‘Don’t be a turd,’ said Matt. ‘It’ll get us off our butts and that.’
‘I haven’t played charades in years,’ said Mona. ‘Could be fun. Us versus you two?’
Matt moved away from the window, cracking his neck, limbering up. ‘Remember I’m a professional actor. You guys don’t stand a chance.’
Harj, who seemed to consider this a challenge to his marriage, swept onto the couch beside Mona like a general into battle.
‘Charades it is,’ said Ash with, he hoped, conviction.
With the fire roaring away, clues were written on Post-its and dumped in a bowl. Mona selected herself, the eldest, to go first. She opened with the movie camera motion.
Harj nodded, chin in hand. ‘Film.’
From there she operated with the bodily semaphore of a third-base coach: syllables tapped out on her forearm, an earlobe tugged, vigorous affirmations when her husband guessed a word. How in synch they were. How familial. And with the firelight shuddering over her, Mona looked radiant. What a good mum she was going to be, thought Ash.
‘A Passage to India,’ yelled Harj—and he and Mona high-fived. This had been Ash’s contribution, though he’d meant the book, not the movie.
Mona returned to her spot. ‘You guys are up!’
‘Let’s save me for the home stretch,’ Matt advised. ‘Ash, why don’t you give it a shot.’
Harj passed Ash the bowl and excused himself to the bathroom. ‘Okay, little buddy,’ said Matt. ‘Let’s do this.’
The clue was cold-snap. Easy enough. Ash loosed an arm from the sleeve of his dad’s robe and held up two fingers.
‘Peace,’ said Matt.
Ash shook his head.
‘War?’
One finger, then a second.
‘Counting…Counting to two…One, two. Uh, duh…twah?’ Ash tried a different tack: he held himself at the elbows and shivered.
‘Parkinson’s disease! Muhammad Ali, Michael J. Fox—’
Ash shook his head. His smile had faded.
‘Wait, are those guys dead?’ Matt sounded panicked.
Ash shivered again, then snapped.
‘Snappy? Sounds like: snappy. Snoopy? Snoop Dogg? I know—Charlie Brown!’
The room was cast in a spell of bafflement and wonder.
Ash shivered, then snapped.
‘Shiver-snap.’
He shook his head again. Repeated the simple, clear actions.
‘Snap…cold?’
With relief, Ash nodded and pointed at Matt.
‘Me?’
Ash shivered, snapped.
‘Me, snap? I’m cold? Sorry, bro, you lost me.’
Ash crossed his hands in a gesture of reversal: other way round.
‘Spell it backwards?’ Matt closed one eye; his lips moved. ‘Is it pans?’
Ash shivered. He snapped.
‘Snap, cold…Snappity-snap, chilly willy…Oh snap, that was cold!’ Matt guffawed. Mona looked stunned. Ash sighed.
And shivered. And snapped.
‘You’re cool, but you’re also snappy…Ice-T? West Side Story?’
Ash tried again, with urgency.
‘Snap, cold; snap, cold.’
And again—though the actions had become weary.
‘Tylenol Cold and Flu and Snapping…Frozen Fonzie…Cool Runnings…Snap! Cold!’ Matt reclined on the couch, looking like a beached walrus prospecting for a mate. ‘This is hard. Do another clue!’
Ash slumped against the hearth. He watched Harj’s fire shudder. From upstairs came a flush, the woof and roar of it, and the door opening. Surely sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for hand-washing?
‘Jack Frost!’
; Here was Harj, back and bemused: ‘You two still at it?’
Now Matt was snapping and shivering. ‘Snap!’ Snap. ‘Cold!’ Shiver.
‘Keep it up,’ said Ash, loosening the tassel on the robe; the lapels flapped freely. ‘I’ll be over here self-immolating. Just let my scorched carcass know when you figure it out.’
‘Hey,’ said Matt. ‘You’re not allowed to talk.’
‘Pay attention.’ Ash demonstrated. ‘Cold, snap…cold snap. Cold snap!’
‘Cold what?’
Ash closed his eyes. Opened them in a slow, pained way. ‘Seriously?’
‘Oh, cold-snap. Right. Duh, when you say it like that it seems so obvious.’
‘When I fucking did it, it was obvious too.’ There were echoes of his father in this petulance: how fragile the man who cares to win. When he looked up the room felt clenched. Everyone stared at him.
‘Don’t act like you two’d be any different, stuck with this idiot on your team.’
‘Hey. I’m right here.’
‘I know. You always are.’ Ash looked out the window. The day was overcast, the trees mostly bare save a few dead and orphaned leaves. He stood. ‘I need the bathroom. For once in your life, can you not follow me?’
As Ash stomped upstairs, Matt’s voice broke the silence: ‘Got him.’
‘What?’ said Mona. ‘That was a joke?’
‘Cold—brr—snap.’ And Matt snapped. ‘I told you guys I was an actor!’
Locked in the bathroom, Ash pretended he hadn’t heard this. He was struck by a distinctly Indian smell, that sickly, putrid stench of shit-pasted latrines. And floating in the toilet was a single wisp of toilet paper bearing a brown tinge. This was too much: Harj had wiped once, then left the evidence like some sick calling card!
Ash pissed upon it hard.
Once the flush had quieted he noticed that the voices downstairs had gone hushed. Sensing that he was being spoken about, Ash cracked the door slightly. Yes, there it was: whispering, a conspiracy. He thought to stride out onto the landing and interrupt: What are you all gossiping about? And then crush them each, one by one.
Matt—all it took to ruin him was to claim that he was just like his father, heedless, self-obsessed and doomed, an abandoner of people and an absconder from life.
Then there was Harj, whose smug self-righteousness was the flimsy armour of an inadequate soul. Never mind his hygiene: twice Ash had caught him knuckle-deep in his nose. And with him dripping from her like dank lichen, Mona’s fiery spirit had dampened. What sort of kid would they have? A self-righteous, deluded snob whom the real world would summarily crush. Better if the pregnancy—
Too vile, too much. Ash retreated instead into his dad’s office, where what had risen as loathing collapsed in despair. He felt hollow, gutted by his own malice. His presence in the house had soured from inept to toxic. Brij’s robe was suddenly oppressive. Ash shrugged it off and closed the door.
Better, he thought, to leave Mona alone.
And maybe better still that he was leaving altogether.
—
THE LAST DOCUMENT in the WRITING folder was double-sided and single-spaced, with no paragraph breaks, like a readout from the subconscious or a missive written in a fever dream. There was no title. It simply began:
On the day in question our hero ceased to be a hero, perhaps he had never been, perhaps none of them had, he was only the first.
What was this? Ash leafed through. Such strange, halting diction, as if translated poorly from some lost language. On the final page, things cut off mid-sentence:
And when he reappeared
That was it. The ending was missing, or unwritten.
He returned to the opening line and began to read. It was a story. Maybe even the beginning of a book. The author, Ash assumed, was his father. Or, more so, a version of his father he’d never known: one who wrote fiction. The voice was alien. It did not suggest the man he thought he knew. Yet the setting—snow-capped mountains and pale glacial lakes—was certainly Kashmir. These forty-odd pages were Brij’s attempt to novelize his homeland. His vitriolic response to ‘Lines of Control’ now made sense. Ash’s story had seemed like competition.
The novel continued:
The hero woke and the mountain loomed above and atop its slopes he knew was the answer. He gathered his things and crossed the meadow gone golden in the sun and along the path once trod by so many thousand pilgrims he went, yet alone, down first and then up over a little bridge over a brook chortling along, the icy blue tumbling water haunted with silver, and saw no one save a few sheep, strays perhaps from a nearby flock. So a shepherd was nearby. But he could not be seen. Swirling mist gathered. The hero walked alone.
And on it went, and on he read, turning pages in a sort of reverie until the spell was broken by a knock. Ash looked up: the room was unfamiliar; the walls seemed to reel. He felt roused from sleep, and at the edges of waking life lingered the shimmer of a dream. It took a moment to place himself: Brij’s office in the Townships. Reading a book his father had written. About a man climbing a mountain. A hero, at that. And something high above, it seemed, that might save or heal his broken soul.
Another knock.
‘What?’ Ash called sharply.
Matt peeked in through a crack in the door. ‘You’ve been up here over an hour, everything okay? It’s gone one o’clock…’
‘Yeah, just a little tired. Didn’t really sleep last night.’
Matt’s eyes were glazed and pink. And Ash understood the real reason he’d come up. Not to apologize. To satisfy his munchies. To order a meal.
Ash tucked his dad’s novel back inside the folder. ‘So I guess you’re hungry.’
Matt grinned. ‘I’m glad to make lunch, long as you don’t mind Doritos sandwiches and pickle juice straight from the jar.’
‘No, let’s not do that.’
‘Find anything juicy up here?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, you know. A secret family, a map to buried treasure.’ Matt closed the door behind him. His face turned grave. ‘Sorry. I know I’m too much about me sometimes. Just, my mind’s got a mind of its own.’
‘Right.’
‘Honestly, I know what you’re going through. This stuff’s hard. But you have your best friend here to crap on if you want. So go ahead. Crap away. Crap on my face if it’ll help. Or in my mouth. Drop a hot two right in here.’ Matt tilted his head back and yawned. ‘Is this meant to be helping?’
‘I just did it again, didn’t I?’ Matt pounded his forehead with a closed fist. ‘I’m trying, Dhar. I’m trying. Do you wish I hadn’t come?’
‘No,’ Ash said obediently. ‘Of course not. It’s great you’re here.’
‘I’m glad you think so! There’s nowhere else I’d want to be. Though it’ll be good to go out tonight in the city with Chip, really tie one on like old times.’ He paused. ‘And no problem, is all I meant. As far as you losing it on me.’
‘Okay.’
‘I just want to be the right amount of here for you.’
Ash laughed. ‘You sound like a Neil Diamond song.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Did you just take that as a compliment?’
Matt struck a baritone: ‘I’ll be what I am…A solitary man…Solitary…man.’ Then there was some humming.
‘Very nice,’ said Ash.
‘My mom’s favourite tune.’ Matt ran a hand over his head. Seemed on the verge of something else. Instead nodded briskly and slipped back out into the hall. And, like a summons, failed to close the door.
—
WHAT A BIG, BIZARRE HEART thumped in that huge body, thought Ash, spinning lettuce for a salad for lunch. In high school, when his chemistry lab partner had died in a car accident, Matt had claimed her suddenly as ‘one of my best friends’ and required a week off school to recuperate. Or, years after graduation, when a vice-principal whom Matt had never liked—who, in fact, had suspended him twice—passed from cancer, M
att had sat front row at her funeral, holding her sister’s hand.
And then there were his ‘memories’: the time he and an associate piloted a hot air balloon over the cornfields outside London in search of weed, logged some grow-op’s coordinates into their GPS, and returned under cover of night only to have their asses spackled with buckshot. Or the boss’s daughter he pleasured orally in the company van—while he was driving (‘Just hold the wheel and enjoy,’ he quoted himself in the retelling). Or the time he’d eaten poison ivy for cash. Matt didn’t make memories for himself; these stories were a way to exist in the thoughts of others. So he blundered from one set-piece to the next, always with the goal of recounting it all to someone—anyone!—later.
Brij, too, had existed through stories, though whenever he’d summoned one, usually from his youth in Kashmir, he’d gazed past his audience to tell it. Never a performance, more of a retreat. But then what, thought Ash, tearing leaves onto plates, about this unfinished novel or whatever it was? What did it mean, this interminable climb? If fiction offered keys to the author’s soul, then Brij’s manuscript ought to have unlocked some secrets. Yet with no ending it only obscured him further.
From outside came a crack and hollering. Ash moved to the window. Although he’d already split enough kindling to warm the house through spring, Matt had returned to finish off the woodpile. But now this: the axe had lodged in the block and he had a foot up to jimmy it loose. ‘Come on, you frigging jerk!’ Matt roared, and toppled backwards, and lay there in the dirt like a clown pandering for laughs. When none came he stood, dusted himself off and, after glancing around, pulled the thing free with one hand—the hand, Ash noticed, allegedly stricken with a dropped finger.
—
‘SO,’ SAID MONA, BETWEEN MOUTHFULS OF SALAD, ‘anything interesting up there?’
‘I asked him the same thing,’ said Matt. ‘Treasure maps, dick pics, whatever.’
‘Classy,’ said Mona.
‘Well?’
Ash drank wine. ‘Not really. Standard stuff, most of it for the shredder.’
‘When I went up he looked like I’d caught him watching porn,’ said Matt.
‘If there’s porn up there,’ said Mona, ‘I don’t want to know about it.’