“He’s different. But nothin’ special,” she told Ashley.
Whenever Uma thought she was nothing special or if some wise-ass told her so, Ma would say, “You’re special to me.”
Karan, her father. Strange foreign guy, but he doesn’t seem like a terrorist. A two-inch dagger hangs from a chain around his neck — a kirpan, that’s what he called it. Said the charm is religious, to remind him of his duty to defend the weak. Boy, all that education and he’s superstitious as a Lions fan.
And he really believes in God. Uma usually flies under God’s radar, but she could easily believe in God on a day like this. God’s a typical guy, Ma used to say. Gets all the credit, never the blame, never apologizes.
She hears the distant howl of sirens. Fire trucks, ambulances.
Can’t stop bad things from coming at the people you worry about. Madmen fly planes into buildings, kidneys fail, pregnancies happen when you don’t have your own act together.
She rolls over. Warm sand shifts beneath her spine, grits into the midriff of her tankini and fills her navel. Maybe she’ll plug her navel with a stud when she goes home. Every woman her age on this beach has either a stud or a navel ring. Each seems so sure of herself.
Coming to Santa Barbara, she expected to arrive magically at a station and see a sign that said Answers.
Blue above her. So much blue.
The earth’s coordinates lie within her.
Karan leads the way home. Warm and cool bands of wind alternate on his cheeks. He’s pedalling under a canopy of trees. He’ll have tortilla soup and the chili-marinated ahi at the Faculty Club. Maybe Uma would like to try their soba noodle salad — that is, if it isn’t made with eggs.
A sickening odour of burning.
He sails around the corner.
Five red trucks. Big ones.
He squeezes his brakes. Uma comes to a stop beside him.
From the Storke Road and UCSB stations. Firemen, hoses. A small crowd keeping a safe distance.
A black-orange nebula billows and floats over a lawn.
Hai Rabba! That’s his lawn.
A ragged blot spreads across the sky. A whoosh like ghee igniting over a body. A crack like a skull bursting from heat. The pungence of ash and uncertainty.
His home! His new home!
Karan scrambles from his bike and runs as he’s never run before.
Smoke-steam. Hot, hot, hot, like the open throat of a dragon. Padded arms come at him from all directions, snagging him like branches. Hands claw at his back. He feints, evades, elbows them away, runs toward his goal.
“My books — all my books!”
Shouting. “Easy! Easy now!”
Uma is screaming, “No, don’t! Don’t!”
A blow takes the air from his lungs; someone’s arms have him around his stomach, and another grasps him across his chest. Karan goes down hard on his hip. His turban tumbles from his head, falls, unravels. Hot grass grinds against his cheekbone, slicks into his beard.
Gasping, choking, shrugging them off, he struggles to his feet.
Arcs of water, clouds of steam.
He gulps searing breaths, shakes men off him. Stands, absorbing each lick of flame in his gut. Boundaries of skin and time fall to thin lines. His eyes burn and tear. He is on fire as his home burns.
A man is running, dragging a spurting garden hose across the street to help. Uma is coming toward him.
The kid. Sandy hair, pale freckled face. By the mailbox, with three or four look-alikes standing right behind him. Watching the firemen. The kid turns.
A smirk passes across that face. Then quickly affixed innocence.
Blood gusts in. Karan’s heart pounds against the barricade of his ribs. Events align themselves in orbit around him. A broken windshield, the mailbox, kill the ragheads, the break-in, this fire. Events past and present, people, things, moments. Each hyperlinks, connects like a giant nerve system.
The kid backs away one step, then another, and he’s running. The other kids scatter. Karan lunges a fraction of a second later, and he’s off, sprinting after the kid through intervening trees, picture-perfect lawns.
He’s caught the kid. He’s rolling in mud and wet grass and smearing mud into the smirk and all over the face and hair of the little bag of stupid stupid malicious ignorance till it yells, coughs, spits, begs and weeps. Whistles, strong hands grasp at his shoulders, pulling, pulling him back.
“Maniac! Criminal assault!” cries a man. The kid’s father?
A great weight rests on Karan’s chest, pinning him to the grass. Air, he needs air!
Paramedics are helping the kid up, wiping his face. The kid is wailing, shocked — never expected Karan to fight back, did he? Somewhere above, Uma is crying, pleading with someone to let Karan up.
The weight lifts. Air rushes in. He lies there till he contains himself again.
Yes. He, Karan, was going to keep on beating the shit out of that kid.
Lawn chair behind him; Karan staggers to it, sits down. Fire truck beside him. Uma comes up, hands him his besmirched white turban. What is she thinking, feeling? That he’s a violent awful chap to go after a kid, a fifteen-year-old kid. But did she see that smirk?
It’s over. She’ll never want to be with Karan again. She’ll tell them what she knows.
He smoothes his hair up into his topknot. Re-ties his turban slowly.
Hands shaking.
A black policeman holding a scarf over his nose and mouth with one hand approaches Karan. Asks the questions he should ask. Takes Karan’s alien registration card and reads its number over his radio. Snaps his PDA shut and gives Karan a long hard look.
“This here could be careless smoking, overheated stove, faulty wiring,” says the cop.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Yeah, well, someone else might have lit up? Like your little white girlfriend, maybe?” “That’s my daughter.”
“Uh-huh. You lucky you and your, uh, daughter weren’t inside. And how come you’re sure it’s arson and it’s him? You gone and had the trial all by y’self, made up the sentence y’self. And what if some other guy did it?”
Karan’s gaze travels over the policeman’s face, then back to his eyes.
“I know, I know. You think it’s racism. You don’t know jack shit about racism. Us Black Muslims could tell you a thing or two about racism, going back to Elijah Mohammed and Malcolm X. But you — d’you understand anything? You assault somebody, people gonna think all Muslims are —”
“I’m not Muslim.”
“You ain’t gotta lie to me, brother.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Okay, okay. We’re going to question the young gentleman, seein’ as you accuse him. All I’m saying is you could be mistaken.”
Sensations cascade over Karan so fast he cannot name them. The flames are subsiding now, rustling, creaking, hissing less and less. The walls, the floor of his home are caving in. The air stings his eyes. Sweat trickles down the back of his legs. A membrane rises between him and the policeman.
“I am not mistaken,” he says. Words taste acrid in his mouth, go up with the smoke.
A crackle sounds at waist level. The cop takes the radio off his belt and listens. “Your resident alien card checks out. No prior record of violence — that’s good, man. Checks out that you’re a prof at UCSB too. But we’re gonna talk to you some more. I’m going to have you report to Goleta Station, with your green card and passport.”
My passport. It was in the house.
These things happen. You call the Indian Embassy, you apply for a replacement. You have your green card, your driver’s licence and credit cards. That’s all this chap wants.
“Monday morning, ten o’clock. Got that?”
The kid, his blackened hair and face perched on the white pole of his neck, gives Karan the finger from the paramedic van.
Karan goes over to Uma. “I was angry. Couldn’t stop myself. I’m sorry —”
“Don’t you kn
ow a cop might have cracked your head? Could have killed you!” Her face is contorted with what seems like anger. She looks away. “It would be too much — both of you.”
A Red Cross woman interrupts to offer Karan a hotel voucher.
The guy who ran across with the garden hose waves her away. “You come stay with us tonight,” he says.
Karan begins to say, “Thank you, sir, that’s very kind.” But his mouth feels sealed; no sound comes.
If Uma could click Undo she would return to the bright shining morning at the beach and forget the lick and snap of flames, the taste of burning wood.
Ma, you were right. Life is just one goddamn thing after another.
Like Uma didn’t have enough problems. Like she really needed this. She’s always the one that gets stuck looking after someone.
But what’s she supposed to do? Leave her dad and just walk away?
Karan’s eyes were like red blisters on his face.
Concentrate on small details. Hold it together. Accentuate the positive, as Ma used to say. Here goes: Karan’s neighbour, Chris, turned out to be an okay guy. His girlfriend, Jena — he calls her his partner — is about the same size as Uma, hence the Diesel jeans Uma is wearing, along with a T-shirt from Belize.
The living room where she’s sitting is scattered with do-dads from all over the world — Chris and Jena joined the Peace Corps in the seventies. Karan is sleeping in the bedroom that belonged to their son. The son is now almost thirty and, Jena says, is cool with the idea that his parents have never married. But then, he’s Californian.
Oh, and Uma’s figured out how to wash and fold a turban so Karan can put it on when he wakes up. He’s exhausted and in shock but so freaking worried about having new underwear for tomorrow that he gave her his credit card to go buy some right away — his “kachcha,” he calls it. Rhymes with gotcha. That’s in his religion too. First she’s heard of a religion that says you gotta wear clean underwear every day.
What needs to be done now?
She calls Ashley, changes her return from LA — luckily, there is a frequent flyer seat on Wednesday. She calls a friend to cover her shift, then calls her manager at work. She gets on Jena’s PC and uses Karan’s credit card to order some new clothes for him, for her. And a suitcase for each of them. Details jump and swarm through her mind, each begets another.
She calls information, gets hold of Karan’s dean. “I’m Dr. Karanbir Singh’s daughter,” she tells Bradnock. “Visiting from Detroit.”
Did she really say “daughter?”
This morning at the Goleta police station, a stiff-backed Karan swore it was another racist attack. A hate crime, he called it. The cops didn’t believe him. Particularly the black guy, the cop who was at the fire — and you’d think he’d get it.
“You smoke, don’t you?” he’d said to Uma. Like it might be her fault.
Uma told the cop she saw a creepy smile flick across that kid’s face right when she first saw him. If homes were built closer here, like some in Detroit, the kid could have burned down a whole block.
And the father — he’s going to press charges for criminal assault. Rita would have had Uma doing a year’s community service if Uma had given anyone a look of such hatred as his little turd son had.
The black cop warned Karan he could end up with a police record. Assault is criminal, he said. They could start deportation proceedings for that alone. There might be mitigating circumstances, like if the fire inspector finds arson and it can be traced back to the kid — but that’s up to a judge.
“Right this minute, you don’t have no country,” he said to Karan as they left the station. “If I was you, I’d get my Indian passport reissued pretty damn quick. And I’d call my immigration attorney and have him check the status of my application for citizenship.”
Uma thinks of Will, of telling him she’s an Indian immigrant’s daughter. Words that meant little then. And now? She’s just met her dad and now he can be sent away to prison — who knows where, or for how long?
She leans back on the couch and closes her eyes. In a second, she is back in that bright spot of shock when she first saw the fire.
Her psyche has been reformatted; she could just scream.
The next day Karan’s footsteps squelch on marshy ground. Heat lingers over the stinking mess that covers his lawn like an oil spill. Smog hovers over the wreckage, as if a piece of LA sky were snipped and pasted above Santa Barbara’s. The skeletal remains of the house will be cordoned off with yellow tape until the fire inspector’s job is done, but Karan can grope through a mess of salvage splayed beneath the tattered trees.
A flutter of black ash. A beam shifts and thuds in the debris.
What’s left of Karan’s belongings lies bare, cardboard boxes in each room having capitulated to flame and smoke. The Gandhi slippers are a smudge soldered to the remains of the coffee table. Moldy smell of wet charred books. Impotence rebukes him, leaves the odour of humiliation. He replays the moment when the kid smirked and everything clicked into place.
He flexes his hands. Detained or not, he will add the fire to the other incidents logged in the Sikh Coalition database. He’ll donate more to the American Civil Liberties Union. Some of this failure is his — he should have been more cordial. Should have introduced himself to the family next door, to all the neighbours. He could have held a housewarming party. Explained, wooed, befriended, charmed the kid and his friends.
He can’t imagine doing any of that — he’s always lived separate in every city, except when he lived in Madison with Rita.
And would it have made a difference?
Thanks to the quick response of the firemen, the Toyota is damp and soot-speckled but miraculously intact in the garage. A wash and day with the doors open to the sun — that’s all it needs. The other salvageable item is the steel file cabinet containing the folders for his taxes.
Uma tosses the remains of her tapestry bag back on the rubbish heap. She’s been sifting ash, searching for the shoebox of photos and her CD player, but she hasn’t found them.
Karan cannot believe he is still here. Each limb feels thick and leaden, and he hasn’t found his passport.
Maybe Uma didn’t report what she knows to the police because they didn’t ask her. She never said she wouldn’t. If she lets it slip, even inadvertently … he cannot think of that now.
“What will you do?” says Uma. “I mean, if the judge lets you off.”
Karan sinks to a squat, picks up a stick and jabs at the debris. His blackened frying pan shakes loose.
“I’ve lost relatives and friends before now. These are only things. This is nothing! Nothing! My grandfather — your greatgrandfather — survived Partition. And this is not as bad as the Delhi riots in 1984 — fires everywhere, then. Three thousand Sikhs slaughtered.”
“What’s any of that got to do with this? You need to leave this area. You can’t wait till it gets as bad as — whatever. Or until thousands of people are killed. Thousands!” She stamps her foot. A cloud of ash rises, starts her coughing. “Jeez, if it happens to one person, it’s too much!”
If the judge issues a deportation order, the insurance company will low-ball and stall, knowing Karan won’t be around to sue. And Karan won’t have much time to sell the plot before he’s sent away somewhere. But if the judge believes Karan or the fire inspector’s report points to the kid, Karan can press his claim. Then the insurance will pay and Karan will replace this home.
He won’t buy or build right here, but close by. Nothing and no one will decree his self-elimination.
Uma is stomping and shouting. “Shit, you should go teach in some other university. You could move to Detroit.”
The books. Some irreplaceable. His marginalia — gone. These ashes will someday mingle with the Pacific.
Karan rises to his feet. “I am where I am supposed to be,” he says. “Why should I walk away from what I’ve built because of one halfwit American? Why should I be the one to leave? How many
places can I leave?”
“You can leave this one, anyway. Oh, you’re as pig-headed as Ma!”
He looks at her, wounded. “No, I’m not. Unlike Rita, I continue learning. That’s what being a Sikh means.”
“Learning what?” says Uma, obviously exasperated.
At this moment, speaking feels like trying to paint darkness.
“I’ve been focusing on aggregate data; I’ve never truly understood till now how a man feels when his slum home is bulldozed. How a villager feels when they build a new dam and flood his home. And tsunami survivors — how must they feel?” Uma runs a hand through her hair.
“You’re pretty crazy, aren’t you? How about taking that turban off, or at least wearing a cap?” She sounds scared. Even worried. Didn’t she say, It would be too much — both of you? And just now, didn’t he hear, You could move to Detroit?
She’s thinking about her own welfare, isn’t she? Self-interest — the American creed.
“No,” he says. “If not my turban, people like that kid will find other things to hate or envy. This is about economics and power. The rest — just cover.”
“So how will you fight it?”
He sighs, “One person at a time, Uma, one person at a time.”
Two days later, Karan drops Uma at the main entrance of the train station, then goes to park. Walks into the station, glances around, consults the schedule. Uma’s is the last train of the day.
There she is, sunflower sandals crossed one over the other. Beside her, the new bag he bought her.
“Want coffee?” He strives for nonchalance.
“Sure. I’ll get it.”
His hand extends a five dollar bill, like a ticket-spitter.
She returns from the coffee kiosk carrying a cardboard tray. Two cups.
“Orange pekoe,” she says.
Uma thought of him. Beyond emergency assistance, voluntarily. Optimism shakes loose, like snow-melt from a mountain, pours into Karan’s empty space.
He cannot demand love, anyone’s love. Like oil, it’s in limited supply. But there’s always hope for equilibrium.
We Are Not in Pakistan Page 24