Vimal wondered if he’d been hiding, to listen in on his conversation with Sunny. No other reason to be in the hall, except to eavesdrop. Son looked away from Father. “Nothing. I was just, you know. We were just saying stuff.”
“The news never said anybody was shot.”
“Because I wasn’t shot. I was just messing with him.” A nod toward Sunny.
“But something happened,” Papa said sternly.
“The bullet hit some rocks I was carrying. They stung me. That’s all.”
Papa was calling, “Divya! Come here. Come here now!”
Vimal’s slim, soft-spoken forty-three-year-old mother appeared in the doorway, looking affectionately toward her sons and then frowning as she saw her husband’s expression.
“What is it?”
“Vimal was hurt in the robbery. The man shot at him. He didn’t tell me.”
“No! That wasn’t on the news,” Mother said, her brow furrowed. She walked directly to her son.
“The bullet didn’t hit me. I was saying that. Some bits of rock. It was nothing.”
“My. Let me see.”
“It didn’t break the skin. Just some bruises.”
“You will show your mother. You will show her now.” Papa’s voice was a slow simmer.
“Where?” Mother asked, gripping her son’s shoulder gently.
“My side. It’s nothing.” Why had he said anything to his brother?
“Did you go to the hospital?”
“No, Mother. It’s all cool. Really.”
“Enough!” Papa snapped. “Let her look at it!”
Tight-lipped, Vimal turned to her, keeping his back to his father and brother. The woman—a pediatric oncological nurse at Mount Sinai Queens—knelt and lifted his two shirts. Only Vimal could see her blink when she saw the eggplant-purple bruises, the butterfly bandage and the Betadine stains. She carefully examined the wound that the kimberlite splinter had made and probably realized that an ER doctor would have stitched the site. His mother didn’t know about Adeela but she would guess that Vimal’s reluctance to say anything about the treatment meant that he’d sought help from a non-Hindu friend (that he’d gone to a Muslim he was sleeping with wouldn’t enter into any dimension of her thoughts).
Mother looked up. Their eyes met. She lowered his shirt.
“Vimal is fine. Some minor bruises. That’s all. Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat.”
Chapter 26
The Lahori family ate traditionally perhaps three nights a week, and Western the rest. There was no set schedule as to which cuisine would be served by Mother on which days, though when Papa was at bowling—he was in a league and very good—she made her sons dishes like meat loaf or spaghetti or pizza or sometimes soup, salads and sandwiches. Tonight she had made roasted chicken, corn on the cob, creamed spinach dusted with nutmeg. The concession to Indian cuisine was naan bread but that was less sub-Asian than a staple at Food Bazaar and Whole Foods and any Korean deli within walking distance.
Who didn’t like naan?
Mother was a good cook, with an instinct for seasoning. Vimal loved her food.
Tonight, though, it was no surprise to him that he had no appetite.
The last thing he wanted to do was eat—no, the second-to-last thing he wanted to do was eat. Number one on the list was not talk about the robbery. Fortunately, it seemed that Papa sanctioned this protocol. When Mother began to ask about Mr. Patel’s sister and children and funeral and memorial service, her husband waved a hand to silence her. It seemed to Vimal that the trembling in the man’s fingers was worse.
How patient Mother is, Vimal thought, as he had hundreds of times. He wondered if she’d developed this quality from her work. He imagined she would have to be resilient and strong and steady, yet kind, with those under her care, as well as with their parents. And she would have to practice these qualities all day long; doctors came by sporadically, of course; nurses were constants in hospitals.
The conversation skipped about absurdly. Papa asked Sunny about a test in his biology class. He asked Vimal several times how he had cut the parallelogram. Why had he picked that shape? What adjustments had he made to the dop sticks?
Vimal demurred. He said he couldn’t recall. And this was not far from the truth. He was exhausted. And the horror of the past two days had made his heart and mind weary. Every few minutes the image of Mr. Patel’s feet, angling outward and pointed toward the dim ceiling of the shop, flared. Papa segued to Premier League and the UEFA Champions League as if he were out with his friends after a bowling tournament, sitting at Raga’s, over a Kingfisher. The Real Madrid game had been a nail-biter, he told his sons. And in another game, the striker from Man U had twisted and probably broken his ankle. Papa delivered this news, for some reason, with a wink.
Papa reminded Mother to collect a shirt of his from the tailor tomorrow. And complimented her, with sincerity, about the food this evening. He added that it was all right that it needed salt. Better to have to add it later than recook a meal that was oversalted. He smiled approvingly at her resourcefulness.
Vimal sighed. Papa didn’t notice.
When the meal was over and Mother cleared dishes, Papa gave a rare smile and asked an astonishing question: “Scrabble? Do we all want to play Scrabble?”
Vimal stared.
“What?” his father asked.
“I…don’t feel like playing a game.”
“No?”
“Vim?” his brother asked. Because Sunny would have felt Papa wanted him to. Sunny was often like the second wave of invading soldiers.
“Naw, not tonight.”
Papa nodded slowly. “Then what would you like to do?”
Looking into the man’s eyes, Vimal realized that the time had come. He was tired, he hurt, his plans had been blown apart like the stones he’d carried to Mr. Patel’s office.
“I’ll be downstairs in the workshop.” The inflection of this sentence made it a timid question.
Papa slowly nodded. “I’ll meet you.”
“I’ll be a minute. I want a thicker sweater.” Vimal rose and went upstairs. He found what he needed and then walked into the kitchen, to the basement door. He descended the steep stairs and went into the studio.
Here, nervous—actually nauseous—as he waited for his father, he sat on a bench. He was looking over one of his sculptures in progress. He was presently working on pieces in granite, nephrite jade, tiger’s eye, and celestial-blue lapis lazuli. In the corner of the room was a scaife turntable, similar to what he had polished the parallelogram on, and, on the wall, assorted dop sticks. Papa had been a talented, if uninspired, diamantaire himself and after he’d had to retire from the factory where he worked in the Diamond District, he’d continued to handle some jobs from home, here in the basement, for as long as he could. When he finally had gotten out of the cutting business altogether, Vimal had taken over the workshop to use as a sculptor studio.
This was where he could have spent every waking moment.
These rooms had begun life as an in-law quarters. There was a bathroom and a small kitchen with stove and half refrigerator. On the workbench, in what had been the sitting room, were carefully arranged tools and cartons containing rocks. There was a three-quarter-inch D pneumatic tool, hammers, cup chisels, bushing chisels, wedges and shims for cracking stone, ripper points, hand points. A set of diamond-encrusted blades for the rotary saw—similar to what he might have used for the parallelogram had he not opted for the laser. For the comfort of it he picked up his favorite hammer, four pounds, caressed the dented and scarred head.
Against one wall were cartons filled with a thousand Lahori artifacts, many from his father’s family’s harrowing flight from Kashmir to Surat in India and their less dramatic journey to the United States.
When taking a break from working on a piece, Vimal had spent time browsing through these cartons filled with the Lahori clan history, which he suspected his father had stowed there purposefully, to ignite within the boy a love of fa
mily tradition. Vimal hadn’t needed any prodding. He was fascinated to see pictures of his grandfather in a diamond factory in Surat. Sweaty, gritty, dark, the cutting room in which Dada sat was filled with maybe sixty or seventy employees, four to a scaife, bending forward with their dop sticks. The man had been in his twenties when the picture was taken and he alone, among the twenty or so looking at the photographer, was grinning. Most of the cutters seemed bewildered that someone wanted to record their monotonous chores.
Dada had eventually become one of the top cutters in Surat and thought he could do even better in New York. He used all the rupees he’d saved to bring his wife, young Deepro and his three brothers and two sisters, to America. The experience had not been a good one. Indians might have ruled the diamond business in Surat but it was the Jews in New York.
Little by little, though, they, and other Hindu cutters, had made inroads.
At his father’s insistence, Vimal had gone to his grandfather’s cutting shop on the top floor of a dimly lit, moldy building on 45th Street and sat beside him for hours watching the old man’s hands, curled around the dop, touching a diamond to the hypnotically spinning wheel.
It was there that the boy decided he was made to change stone into something else.
Though not exactly as his father had in mind.
What would Dada have thought about Vimal’s desire to abandon the world of cutting diamonds and become a sculptor? He had a sense that Grandfather wouldn’t have minded very much. After all, the man had taken a chance—the extraordinary leap of bringing his whole family to a new and possibly hostile country.
Vimal’s mother’s ancestry was less well documented, not because Papa wasn’t inclined to retain a woman’s history (well, not entirely) but because she was sixth-generation American, and the ancestors had come from New Delhi—the forty-million-plus National Capital Region, a very, very different place from Kashmir. Mother was thoroughly Westernized. Her ancestry was potluck, a bit of this, a bit of that. Her family’s roots included mixed marriages, divorces, a gay union or two. All this added up, within her, to an appreciation of—rather than devotion to—Hindu culture, and the assumption of a quiet, though not fundamentally subservient, role in her marriage.
Vimal now turned on his work lamp over the bench. He closely studied the piece he’d been working on. It was simple, carved from a rich piece of off-white marble from Venezuela: a wave of water at its apogee about to crest and fall down upon itself. He’d grown fascinated recently with the idea of representing the texture and motion of non-stone in stone: wood, steam, hair, and—as with this piece—water. He wanted to do water because Michelangelo had skimped on the waves when he’d carved his reclining Poseidon. Vimal hoped to one-up the master.
Wasn’t that an example of a mortal’s hubris, which brought the wrath of the gods down upon him?
Come on, he thought, looking up at the ceiling. Let’s get this over with. His heart was pounding and his knee bobbed from nerves. He found himself playing with his bracelet and then felt stunned he was still wearing it. Had Father seen? He pulled it off and put it in his pocket.
Now he was hearing the footsteps on the stairs and knew it was time to “have words,” as Dada used to say. A delicate euphemism for an argument. The look that passed between his father and himself upstairs made clear that, while a man-to-man talk wasn’t possible, a man-to-son talk was…and it was long overdue.
His father appeared in the studio. He sat on a stool. Vimal set the hammer down.
Papa wasted no time. “You wanted to say something.”
“We dance around the subject.”
Because you lose your temper and can’t stand anyone disagreeing with you. Which, of course, he did not verbalize.
“Subject?”
“Yes, Papa. But we need to address it.”
“What does this mean ‘address’?”
His father had come to America when he was two. He read two American newspapers a day, cover to cover, and got his news from Public Broadcasting, in addition to Indian sources. He knew what the word meant.
Waving a tremoring hand, Papa said, “Tell me. It’s late. I will be helping your brother with his homework. Tell me what you mean.”
The man’s intentional obliqueness angered Vimal. So he said quickly, “All right. Here: I don’t want to spend my life cutting pieces of carbon that bounce around between women’s boobs.”
He regretted the blunt word immediately and feared a fierce reprisal.
But his father just smiled, surprising him. “No? Why not?”
“It doesn’t thrill me, move me.”
Papa jutted out his lower lip. “Your parallelogram cut. It wasn’t like anything Nouri had ever seen. Or me. He sent me a picture of the stone.”
Why had I agreed to the cut?
The worst betrayal today had not been Bassam’s selling him out; it was Vimal’s own lapse. By agreeing to the cut for the money—his thirty pieces of silver—he had bolstered his father’s argument that he was a unique and brilliant diamantaire.
I’m my own Judas. His jaw was clenched. See, diamonds ruin everything.
Papa persisted, “Didn’t that move you?”
“It was technically challenging. I enjoyed the cut, yes. For that reason. I wasn’t, I don’t know, passionate about the cutting.”
“I think you were, son.”
“Whatever you want, Papa, I don’t want to devote my life to jewelry. It’s as simple as that.” This was the most defiant Vimal had ever been.
His father’s eyes went to yet another sculpture. The work was a series of geometric shapes, one morphing into another. He called it Telephone, after the game in which players whisper a phrase to the person beside them and so on, during the course of which the words become something entirely different. The marble piece had won first prize in a competition at the Field Gallery in SoHo. Vimal couldn’t help but reflect that while everyone complimented him on it, no one was interested in buying. It was priced at a thousand dollars, a third of what he’d been paid for the diamond cut today.
Papa continued, “I don’t understand, son.” A nod at The Wave. “You’re an artist. Obviously, you’re talented. You understand stone. Not many people do. That’s so very rare. But why not be an artist who makes—”
“Money?” Vimal surprised himself by actually interrupting.
“—a difference in the world of jewelry.”
Vimal said, “There is no difference to make in that world. It’s the world of cosmetics. Nothing more.”
He’d just insulted his father and grandfather and many blood relations in the Lahori family. But Papa didn’t give any reaction.
“This…plan of yours. Running off. What were you going to do?”
Vimal’s steam was up. He didn’t evade, as he usually did. “Go to California. Get an MFA.” He’d started college at seventeen and graduated early. Learning, like sculpting, came easily to him.
“California? Where?”
“UCLA. San Francisco State.”
“Why there?”
They both knew the answer to that. Twenty-five hundred miles’ distance. But Vimal said, “Fine arts. Good sculpting programs.”
“You’d have to work. It’s expensive there.”
“I intend to work. I’ll find something. Pay for my tuition.”
His father examined the work-in-progress again.
“It’s good.”
Did he mean this? Vimal couldn’t tell from his eyes. He might. But then it might be the way a customer would look over a ring or pendant. The husband or boyfriend’s face would shine in admiration. But the lady with him, the recipient? Her mouth would smile and she would whisper, “Oh, my, lovely.” But her eyes said something different. She’d been expecting more. Flashier. More spectacular.
Or usually what she meant was: bigger.
“Listen to me, son. I can see you’ve thought about this for a long time.” He sighed. “And I see too that I haven’t really listened to you. This terrible c
rime with Mr. Patel, it’s made me look at things differently. I want to understand it. Will you stay here for a few days—let the police catch that man. Then, well, we can talk. I want to hear more about what you want to do. We can work something out. Really. I promise we can.”
Vimal had never heard his father sound so reasonable; so he too had been shaken, fundamentally, by the crime. Vimal felt that tears might swell. He fought the urge. He embraced his father. “Sure, Papa.”
The older man nodded again at The Wave. “It really does look like water. I don’t know how you’ve done that.” He left, closing the door behind him.
Vimal looked over his sculpture. He pulled on gloves and goggles, powered up the grinder and continued the heavenly task of turning stone to water.
Chapter 27
The Henri Avelon was perfect.
Beautiful. No, breathtaking.
Judith Morgan, soon to be Judith Whelan, had been uncertain about the choice. The bridal boutique, on upper Madison Avenue, offered easily fifty different wedding dresses and so the decision had taken some time. Sean couldn’t help her with this one, of course. No groom was going to see his bride’s wedding dress before the aisle walk. And her mother, a woman who was convinced that price was the best measure of quality, would have bankrupted the family with the dress that she wanted her daughter to wear. Not what Morgan wanted.
The blonde looked at the satin confection in the mirror once more and, while she didn’t smile, was pleased beyond words. She turned slowly, viewed as much of the back as she could and returned to pole position. She’d stayed true to her goal of dropping the thirteen pounds and the dress curved the way it should curve, clung the way it should cling, but had plenty of drape and spare room in reserve.
Eyeing the scallops, the reasonable train (half the length of her sister’s monstrosity), the shimmery cloth and the tulle at the shoulder, she knew she’d made the right decision.
“It’s a winner, my dear,” Frank said and though, sure, he had an interest in selling her the three-thousand-dollar dress, she knew he meant it.
The Cutting Edge Page 17