No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  The Ford crap Pinto bucked uneasily under me. It had been a while since I had driven a stick shift. I lurched along until, after a block or two, it got easier. I kept thinking of taking my gloves off to drive, but the thought that Gillian had given them to me—in another, simpler life—made me keep them on. My protection, my talisman. I drove carefully, for I expected some deer to leap into my path, but none did.

  The supermarket was closed, its parking lot deserted, and all the other shops around it tight shut. Sitting in the car, my shoulders hurting, I felt a bleakness I had no strength to resist. I started the car and it lurched forward, then rolled on as if by itself.

  A misty rain began to fall. I had no idea how long I had been in the car, which had no clock, and I needed none; Gillian woke me in the morning and told me when to leave for work; at work, my foreman Peter Foley told me when to take my lunch and my breaks and when to go home. He wrote down my overtime hours as needed. When I got home, we were in our own universe, where all my time was ours, in that room with the hope chest at the foot of the bed.

  But here, and now, a strange twilight had given way to a stranger night. I was lost. As I turned a corner, the car fishtailed over thick wet leaves so that it careened across the double line, but I righted it with effort. The trees on both sides leaned into each other, so that I felt I was driving under arched wickerwork. The headlights picked out odd objects, a discarded mailbox, the remnants of a deer run over long ago. A doll, its vacant eyes staring from the middle of the road, made me swerve in sudden terror. Then I saw a building, tiny lights twinkling all over it. I brought my car to a crunchy, pebbly stop and stood before it, shaking with cold and indecision in the bleak drizzle.

  I walked in and asked for my friend Jack, straight up, as I slumped at the bar, clutching its polished wood as if it was the side of a storm-tossed ship. There was a large silent TV screen above the bar. On it drifted huge and improbable animals, floating above a mute city of lost and pointing children in a pantomime of joy. Jack and Djinn held me up and muttered into my ears in turn. I was back in my world of whispers.

  I stood hugging the car, for my planet spun. Man, it was beautiful, and the road undulated like a wave in the ocean, and the soil below me rose and fell. The surge underfoot rolled far away, followed by another, but now I knew how to ride it. It was the gentlest, the friendliest of billows, and I chuckled with the pleasure of riding the next crest, carried by the purring oceanic creature under me. Water beaded the window, but I had forgotten how to use the wipers. Through the thousand beads, I could see bright stars ahead and above me. Some were big red stars, which sometimes, magically, turned green for my particular delight, transforming into incandescent fruits hung like orbs in the sky above.

  I closed my eyes for just a moment and was startled by the crashing of branches all about me and a thud. The tide underneath had passed me and left me stranded. I had hit my face on a circular object in front of me.

  Blood poured from my forehead. I picked wads of tissue from the box beside me and dabbed my face, wiping the blood from my eyes. I could hear something loose inside my head rattling like a dried pea. I tried the door, but it would not give. I pushed at the other door, which opened suddenly, tumbling me out. The cold air made a plume of my breath.

  My head pounded. All about the car, broken branches, dry stalks of hedges impeded my sight. Home, I thought, I need to get home, feeling the weight of some terrible event, but unsure if I needed to be home to witness it, make it happen, or make it stop. I just knew I needed to get home. Setting off in a desperate half-run, turning corners, out of breath, bumping into picket fences and boulders, crossing black streets, panting past hunchbacked houses and wet lawns, I had no idea how I came to it, or whether it came to me.

  A fear began to build inside me, a drumbeat, as I gripped the latch. I could feel its metallic chill even through my gloves. If the front door is locked, I’ll creep away and sleep hidden and safe in my garage loft, I said to myself.

  I stood at the main door, and turned the knob. It was open. The lair of Archie Swint. The djinns were humming in my head. I could make out very little in the room, but the walls, the fireplace, and mirror above it. The scene hung exactly like a painted sheet before me, flat and unreal as I slipped across the living room in the dark. I knew it like the back of my hand. My home. In the kitchen now, I could make out the familiar cabinets on the far side, the pale gleam of the counter.

  Oh what if Archie came down and found me here? I thought, like a cornered cat, hackles rising, peeing in fear, but claws out. Where are my claws? I thought desperately. I saw the kitchen knives, handles protruding from the wooden block. I took the largest one.

  I began to climb the stairs. My gloves that Gillian had given me were a perfect fit. I could hold the knife firmly. I had had enough of being scared. Once Archie Swint was afraid, all my terrors would go away, forever.

  I pushed their bedroom door open. It opened with a familiar squeak. The bed seemed larger, and the two of them lying in bed, smaller. Because I’m no longer afraid, I exulted.

  He stirred and rose up, looking directly at me. Mom shifted and sat up in a trance, blinking, her mouth shaping words. Why must she always put up with him? But suddenly Archie reached out with both hands.

  “Love, is that you, is that you?” he whispered.

  I had never heard him mention love, and he was mimicking Mom’s disgusting submission. My gorge rose in an acidic slosh, for he was mocking me. Dizzy with rage, I made two slashes. I wanted to cancel them out.

  The first slash made her fall back. The second evaded Archie’s reaching hands and found his face.

  Love? he whispered again.

  Holding the knife with both hands, I drove it into his chest, leaving it there.

  Even as I ran through the empty streets, wheezing past the railroad tracks, I felt protected by the gloves that Gillian had given me. They were wet, with brown splotches on them. Blood, I thought, from when I hurt my head in the car. I’d clean them at home.

  Archie must have been afraid, so he cannot ever catch me again. Ever never, like I used to say as a child. But I’m all grown up now.

  Kush

  Clairmont, Upstate New York

  November 23, 1989

  I stare in consternation at my proud and lovely daughter, who is flushed, on the point of tears, her plate untouched. I wish Seetha were here with us, but she had been called away to the hospital; babies are born even on Thanksgiving. I have not cooked turkey, for neither my wife nor daughter likes it; instead I had made saffron pilaf, ginger-sautéed shrimps, and for dessert, Devi and Seetha’s favourite South Indian payasam, with a top layer of toasted slivered almonds.

  “Stay with us,” I plead with Devika. I cannot help looking at her belly, though it will be months before she shows, marveling, my grandchild!

  “Neel has no idea, Baba. He has gone down to New York to meet up with his grandfather, who is visiting from India. I don’t really know his plans. He probably intends to return to India now that he’s almost finished his dissertation. He may not want to get tied down. Oh, this is so tacky, Baba.” Her head is bowed.

  “But Devi, surely he loves you?” I venture, and know immediately I have said too much.

  “What if Neel wants no part of this. I just can’t imagine what he will say!” Devi moves back in her chair, holding her palms together, clenching them. She stares at her plate. There is a smear of saffron on the white china, the pilaf untouched, the curled digits of shrimp growing cold.

  “Oh, such a horrible cliché,” she whispers to herself, then adds defiantly, “Why should I even tell him? I may never want to see him again.” Her tears are silent. She does not wipe them away. I am confused by the complexity of her reaction. Don’t young people nowadays talk to each other about love? “Stay home with us,” I whisper. “Your Ammu would want it too.” My palm extended, fingers tentative, but my daughter is too far away for me to touch her.

  A picture from years ago flits throu
gh my mind: Seetha at work, and me feeding Devi in her highchair, one hand pretending to fly a yellow Fisher-Price plane, the other tugging at her bib with its green clover pattern. I feed her pureed peas, opening my own mouth as she opens hers, pink gums with a little mother of pearl sliver of tooth.

  “Baba-and-Daughter Team,” I plead with my pregnant daughter, hoping that she will remember the old phrase. I feel undone by my love. “No,” she says vehemently. She pushes back her chair, which scrapes on the hardwood floor. “I’ve already called and made an appointment at the hospital.”

  “At the hospital?” I repeat, in confusion. “It’s all right then. They’ll tell you everything’s fine.”

  “No, Baba,” she says, glaring at me. “Why can’t you see! I’m twenty-three, I’m supposed to go off to Ireland next summer. Not this . . .”

  “Didn’t you discuss—” I begin, but I can see that Devi is not listening.

  “It will look as if I’d planned this,” she whispers to herself, tormented, “to make him stay.” She twists the napkin in her hand, until it drops unnoticed to the floor. “I need,” she adds to herself slowly, louder now, “I need to get rid of it.”

  “Get rid of it?” I could not keep the horror out of my voice.

  “Don’t keep echoing what I say, Baba,” blurts Devika in undisguised irritation, “Yes, that’s what I said. I’ll get rid of it.” She stands clutching the back of the chair. “You . . . you should be relieved,” she weeps in accusation. “After all, you’re the immigrant Indian. You’re supposed to be dead set against unmarried pregnancy. What will the other Indian immigrants say: Let’s keep it quiet, et cetera, et cetera. Don’t tell me you suddenly turned pro-life and Republican!” She sounds hoarse. It was as if she is teasing me, I think dully.

  In a rush of surprise, I feel words bubbling up within myself: Is that you, Laub, is that you? I had never thought of myself particularly as a Hindu, as someone who believes in rebirth and all that. Do I know what I actually believe in . . . Mathematics, certainly. I shake my head, as if that would help clear it.

  “This is your baby,” I begin slowly, trying to be as calm as I know. “I love you, for you are my daughter. Logically, therefore I love . . .”

  “Cut it out, Baba,” she says sharply. “You’re supposed to make it easier for me. It’s not a baby. It’s a first-trimester embryo.” She is weeping bitterly now, chest heaving as if she has run out of breath. By the time I look up from the table, my daughter has stormed out of the room, and left the house.

  • • •

  I PUT THE leftovers away, leaving the smeared dishes in the sink, too dispirited to do anything else. My heart sore and troubled, I went to my study and listened to music. First a little Bach, then an evening violin-raga of Pandit Jog. Devi’s happiness was like a country that I needed to defend. I had always believed it was the right of a woman to decide about her body. But this was my daughter: Was she able to decide about her happiness as simply as she spoke about her right to decide?

  What about my concern for the child growing within her—for whom society dictates that I feel affection after its birth, but gives me no right to guarantee its safe arrival? The immigrant Indian community would become a buzzing beehive of gossip. Everyone within it pretended that their daughters were, by some divine decree, virginal—or at least inviolate from premarital pregnancy. Yet I also knew from Seetha the number of deniable Indian pregnancies discreetly terminated at her hospital. She would never discuss names, but I surmised that some were girls Seetha herself had delivered years ago.

  I also knew, with certainty, that if Devi gave us her baby to raise—for whatever reason—Seetha and I would joyfully do so. I had a quick vision of the two of us with the child in our backyard garden under the dappled shade of the flowering horse chestnut, and imagined myself showing the child a leafy branch, explaining how the Fibonacci series of numbers could be seen in the parting of twigs, in veins of leaves, and high above—in the formations of Canada geese flying overhead. I shook my head, to clear it of these vivid pictures.

  I shut off the music and sat alone in silence. Who am I to decide anything? Only her father—who merely brought her into this world, I thought ruefully. I would reason with her. I could talk about . . . about what . . . I wondered. Love? Childhood? Death? Why do we talk so often about death when we talk about love, I wondered helplessly. Is death a game God invented, then decided it was going to be part of everything? I felt no wiser now than I had felt at twenty. I simply loved more helplessly, without the resilience of childhood. Almost four hours later, Seetha returned home from the hospital. I was reading in bed, unable to sleep. I could hear her tired steps on the stairs.

  “Devi’s left, I see. I don’t want anything to eat, Kush.” Seetha yawned and sat down on the bed. “Sorry it took so long, a difficult birth. A boy,” she said. “But something interesting happened today.”

  “What?” I was always fascinated by her work.

  “You’d think it would have happened earlier, in all these years of my career. But it didn’t until tonight.” She was smiling. I waited, for I knew she wanted to tell me her way.

  “She was in labour for eleven hours, absolutely exhausted, but it all worked out well in the end.” I nodded.

  “She held her little boy to her chest after I had cut the umbilical cord and cleaned him off. I like to do that myself, Kush. Remember?”

  Yes, yes I did. She had insisted on doing that even for our Devi, after her own birthing. She wouldn’t let old Dr. Hennessy do it. She cut her own umbilical cord. Is that why Seetha can be so calm today? I fretted. My umbilical connection with my child was invisible, thus impossible to cut; so it must remain always between me and my daughter.

  “As she was nursing him for the first time, she looked at me and said, ‘Please name our baby boy.’ The father—he was all smiles now—said, ‘Yes, yes, please give our child a name. Your choice. Any name. We will accept. You helped him so much.’ ” Seetha was smiling in recollection.

  “And did you?” I asked, although I knew she did.

  “Yes,” said my wife. There were silver glints in her hair. She was the most elegant woman I had ever known, still mysterious to me.

  “I named the child Manu.”

  “The First Man—from our ancient texts! Where are his parents from?”

  “Syria. Their son’s name will be Manu al-Sadegh.”

  “A fine name.”

  We sat in companionable silence. But I still felt restless. Seetha looked at my troubled face.

  “Did Devi choose to abort?” she asked me. Bluntly, I thought. The question burned through some tender part of my mind.

  “How can you let her?” I asked, already knowing the answer Seetha would give me.

  “We have always supported her decisions—if they are rational.”

  “Is this a rational one?”

  “She has to decide if it is.”

  “How can you be so hard, Seetha?” Am I angry? Who am I angry with? I wondered. “You are so happy about Manu al-Sadegh. How can you let our daughter—”

  “I am not letting her do or not do anything. Devi has to make up her mind, Kush, don’t you see?”

  “To let her child die?” I said in torment, unable to explain myself, but decided to go to my daughter tomorrow. I must get her to talk to her young man. Would she let me do that? Would her pride keep her from speaking to him? I kept thinking of all the things I wanted, needed, yearned to say.

  “I’ll go talk to Devi tomorrow,” I said, “first thing in the morning.”

  “Yes, Kush,” she said.

  I put down the book I had been reading and watched Seetha getting ready for bed, putting the fragrant creams on her long brown arms, her comely face that still moves me deeply. She smelt of sandalwood paste and jasmine, aromatic herbs, things she gets sent to her all the way from Kerala. I watched her in the mirror.

  “I’ve been reading the Upanishads,” I said to her. “Want to hear a bit?”

&nb
sp; She nodded, sitting on our bed, brushing her hair rhythmically, a ritual that helped her to fall asleep.

  Even as a burdened cart trundles on creaking, just so does the carriage of our mortal body, within which abides the Soul, moving on when a man gives up his vital breath of life . . . And like to the caterpillar, reaching the end of one leaf of grass, moves with ease to another and undulates itself across it, in the same manner does the Soul, abandoning the body and its burden behind, proceeds on to another body and moves onwards . . .

  I closed my eyes and felt her come close and kiss me. “You’re a sweet and strange man, Kush,” she whispered. “I tell you good things about birth, and you tell me lovely things about death.”

  “That was what the ancients said, Seetha. Do we know any better?”

  She lay on her side, hugging a pillow. I opened the window a tiny crack. Seetha liked a tiny trickle of fresh air, no matter the weather. I did it for her every night, and she knew I remembered. I thought of our years of marriage, our small acts of comforting each other, as I switched off the light and lay down beside her. She turned and put her arm across me. I could feel her breath on my chest. “Kush, I’m glad you will talk to Devi,” she whispered before she sank into sleep.

  I looked up at the milky suspension of the ceiling. Despite the room’s darkness, sleep evaded me. “When is the right time to have a baby anyway? What if Devi, my headstrong, prideful child, went and impulsively put an end to the child within her?” I asked myself. “The ancient Upanishads speak of the soul moving on, like a caterpillar from one leaf to another, with ease, with insouciant grace. But my daughter’s child—this would be a soul I would never get to know—a child of my blood, my flesh,” I mourned. I was in a strange half-sleep, and the thought of my brother, Laub, returned unbidden to me.

  I had never been able to talk to Seetha about Laub. She knew about my dead twin, of course, but did not know about Laub’s presence in my childhood. I thought with longing of that distant day at the university when I had walked into a world of swirling snow, the one magical day in adult life that Laub had made his presence known to me.