by Antani, Jay
The Leaving of Things
a novel by Jay Antani
Copyright © 2013 Bandwagon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0988419300
ISBN 13: 9780988419308
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9884193-1-5
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1
June 19, 1988
India wasted no time with me. Monsoonal air acrid with soot and sweat and something else—a densely Indian spice—slammed into my head, my lungs, my senses as I approached the door. I fell in behind my parents, a crowd of exiting passengers, and I felt every bit the prisoner as we trudged from the plane into a tunnel of dirty white light.
I wanted so badly to turn around and fly back home to America—to tell my parents, “Stop! This is a huge mistake.” I didn’t want to be here—certainly didn’t want to live here—but life wasn’t about choices. It was a sentence handed down to you.
From the mouth of the tunnel, we spilled out into the arrivals hall of the Bombay airport. The place echoed eerily with jostling bodies and announcements from an ancient PA system. I stared at the mishmash of Hindi and English: “Customs,” “Immigration,” “Baggage.” But what the Hindi really said to me was: “Kid, you’re not in Wisconsin anymore.”
In one hand, I clutched the hard plastic case containing my video camera—a high-school graduation present from my parents and my proudest possession. And in my backpack were a few prized Rolling Stone issues, my music tapes, and books (Bradbury, Tolkien, Vonnegut) I needed near me at all times.
Two children and a woman in a sari rushed past me, knocking my video camera case out of my hand. It clattered wildly on the floor. I half panicked, grabbed the case, and closed a tighter grip on it.
“Vikram, watch out,” my father reprimanded in Gujarati, a few steps ahead, “or you’ll lose or break that thing.”
The gall of that guy, I thought. Dragging us from our home to this, and all he could say was, “Watch out”? I stared at the back of his head. He was why we were here—because he’d taken a fancy job at some astrophysics institute in Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat about an hour’s plane ride north of Bombay. He’d even given up his work visa—the one thing that kept us tethered to our lives in America—to make good on his scheme to move my mother, my younger brother Anand, and me back to what he called “the land of our roots.”
India may have been the land of his roots. But it was the land of my exile.
Elbows and suitcases nudged and jabbed at me as we made our way down a set of steps to the immigration hall. A child stepped on both my feet. A fat Sikh with an Air India shoulder bag pushed past me, bellowing instructions and waving wildly to someone in front of him.
I checked to see how Anand was holding up next to me. He looked half asleep. His face was drawn and his backpack slung low at his shoulder. He still wore his headphones. He’d kept them on most of the trip, while thumbing through his baseball magazine or one of his Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks. I wondered if the headphones were his protection from all that was happening.
I glared at my father. He seemed so focused, so delighted to be back in India. You see, he had grown up in Ahmedabad. In fact, we had lived in Ahmedabad before we’d left for America eleven years ago. And it was there that my father expected my brother and me to settle right back in—Anand into the eighth grade and me into my first year of college.
And my mother, you ask? She’d worn her favorite salwaar kameez today—so tickled she must’ve been to be back here! She couldn’t care less about my brother and me, I’d bet. Clearly, that woman was in league with my father. I decided I wanted nothing more to do with them.
A frowning immigration officer stamped our passports. We collected our things—two large and two small suitcases—and went into the customs hall, about the size (and smell!) of my high-school gym and packed with worn-out travelers. Inspectors on the far side of the hall picked through passports, paperwork, everybody’s baggage like scavengers.
“Anand, what’re you doing?” my father asked sharply. My brother had unbuckled his suitcase and was rooting through it.
“Not now, beta,” my mother said.
But then, my brother found what he was looking for—his Brewers cap. He slid off his headphones and slipped it on.
“Why bother with that now?” my father shook his head, half amused, half irritated. He sized up the lines in the customs hall. “Forty-five minutes,” my father said.
“Forty-five?” my mother shot back. “This will take two hours minimum.”
My father turned to her and scoffed, “You’re sure of everything, aren’t you?”
Our connection to Ahmedabad left in three hours from the domestic terminal. I asked how far that was.
“Far,” my mother said.
My father pushed strands of thinning hair across his scalp and, with a long sigh, admitted, “Yes. It’s far.”
As long as we were waiting, I figured I’d better shoot some video. Since leaving Wisconsin (when was that—yesterday?), I’d been recording footage for a kind of video journal—my own firsthand reports on what it felt like to go from home-sweet-home America across Europe and on to the far Indian tropics. I planned on mailing the tapes to my best friends Nate and Karl and my girlfriend, Shannon, every month.
So I took the camera out of the case and panned across the hall, across the sea of faces, mostly brown faces, surrounding me: Some I recognized as tired fathers, much like my own father, in spectacles, short sleeves, and mustaches. I saw women who resembled my own mother, in their salwaar kameez, clutching purses, and duffel bags. They all stood silently or in tense conversation, tending to their luggage and their children.
They all looked so miserable, and here I was, no different from them. I was one of them. That got me dreading my fate even more, so I put the camera away and sat next to Anand on one of the suitcases, hoping for conversation.
His headphones pulled over his Brewers cap, Anand bobbed his head, drumming his fingers on the suitcase and humming to the tune that filled his head. “Who’re the Brewers playing this weekend?” I asked him as cheerfully as I could.
“St. Louis,” Anand said without even turning to me. “Last game of the series.” He resumed his humming, his drumming. I left him to it. But I couldn’t keep it bottled up like Anand; I needed to talk, to stay braced against the anxiety in my mind.
I glanced at my father again. There he stood, oblivious as ever to Anand and me, one hand at his hip and the other picking at his mustache, staring intently at the front of the line. No way was I ever talking to him again. I turned to my mother, who had propped herself atop a suitcase, tapping her chin.
“Are you happy?” I asked. “I mean, happy to be here?”
“Mm-hm,” she said, sort of, nodding absently.
I didn’t want to believe her.
These past few weeks, I had been building a wall between me and the tide of fear, d
epression, and panic I could now sense rising. I knew it was there, filling up my heart. Keep it together, Vikram. Don’t break.
So I thought of someone who calmed me—Shannon. Last I’d seen her was two nights ago. I thought of her hand reaching for mine across the table at Rocky’s Pizza on State Street after spending our final afternoon wandering the record and clothes shops.
“Couldn’t you stay?” were Shannon’s words while she pressed my hand. “I’m staying in the dorms on campus this year. You could stay at my parents’. Work this year, go to school next year.”
The thought of living in the basement at Shannon’s parents’ house made me laugh. There I’d be: the strange Indian kid, their daughter’s boyfriend, holed up in their basement. I told her I’d feel like some goddamn refugee.
“I couldn’t stay if I wanted to,” I said. “And I do want to.”
Even though I’d racked up straight A’s over the spring and raised my GPA more than half a grade point, the odds were still against me. I hadn’t bothered applying to a single school because my father had told me it was out of the question. He couldn’t afford to send me to an American college. “You’d be on your own,” he said and left it at that. So I tore up my college applications and shoved them into the wastebasket. It was upsetting as hell, but if India was inescapably my fate, I figured I’d better learn to live with it. Besides, there was still the matter of a student visa; I’d need one once my family left the country.
Shannon sighed. “A visa? But you’re American, why would you need—?”
I shook my head. “I’m not American. I was never American.”
This was difficult (and awkward) terrain, having to explain to your American girlfriend the finer points of your immigration status. Then, almost for my benefit, I added, “My dad couldn’t turn down the offer in India. It’s a big deal. Really exciting.”
I held her arm, stroking the freckles there with my thumb. She didn’t much like the freckles, but I loved them, loved how they burst into starry patterns below her eyes, her shoulders, and the spaces above her breasts. She cried then, across from me, quietly. I saw the tears running down her face before she wiped them away and, more than anything, felt flattered that anyone would cry over me, let alone this girl—this American girl. Sitting with her, touching her, I felt like I had won her. And now, no sooner had she been won than I had to give her up.
God, I wished I could just snap my fingers, make the whole world stop so I could collect my breath and get my bearings. That’s when something did it: my parents’ and my brother’s silences, the acrid and smothering air, whatever it was, the anxiety broke and burst over the wall.
Shit.
I stood up from the suitcase, said I’d be right back, and set off looking for the bathroom. I needed a minute to myself, to hold off the panic. Steady, Vikram, but no, there it was—throbbing in my ears, thudding in my chest. I saw a sign for the men’s room and went in: a grimy cell with ancient sinks and urinals and closets hiding the toilets, everything reeking of mothballs. But I didn’t care. It was empty in here; there was privacy. I tried to quiet myself, hold the anxiety back. Then I heard someone walking into the room behind me, so I hurried into one of the closets and shut the door.
“Vikram?” It was my father. I didn’t say a word. I heard him humph and then the shuffling of his feet as he left, and he was gone.
Next thing I knew the wall simply crumbled away and the tears filled my eyes. I stood there over the pit toilet, my hands braced against the door of the stall, and kept my eyes shut. Don’t fight it, Vikram, no use now. So I let my feelings go. I saw the faces of all my friends, all the faces I might never see again. And I felt myself mourning—oh god, this was mourning! The feeling terrified me because mourning meant the end of something you loved. Was my soul acknowledging something I dared not admit to myself? I cried. It’s okay, Vikram. It’s no big deal. So you’re mourning, it’s okay. Sooner or later, you knew it would come to this.
Let it go.
I waited for the choking and tears to subside and for my breathing to even out. I wiped at my face, breathing in the mothballed air. I stared down at the hole in the ground at a glint of water. I was breathing steady now. The storm had passed. I opened the stall door, took a few deep breaths, readying myself to face my parents and get on with whatever this would have to be.
2
They took my video camera.
“How long are they going to hold onto it?” I managed to blurt out as we hurried through the terminal’s exit doors. My father grabbed two luggage carts from a train of them.
“Not long,” was all he would say.
The customs officer—a sweaty, jowly bastard—took the video camera and, with it, all that I’d recorded on the two videotapes I’d stored inside the case.
I recalled some commotion between my father and the officer about our not having a sales receipt for the camera, no proof of ownership. My father argued that the camera was our personal property, but the officer shook his head. “We detain item till you produce receipt,” he kept insisting. Finally, the officer grabbed the camera case and waved us on, saying we were holding up the line.
“How do we settle this?” my father demanded. “Give me an address, phone.”
The officer exhaled noisily and produced a business card out of his shirt pocket.
My father snatched it. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I thought I reminded you,” my mother said now, a taste of scorn and defeat in her words. “Put the camera receipt with all immigration forms.” But my father was occupied with loading bags onto his cart. He was in no mood for this conversation. “I knew he was going to forget,” she said to herself, hoisting a second suitcase onto a cart, its wheels wobbly, the whole thing tipsy.
“What good is screaming about it going to do now?” my father shot back. He checked his watch and said we’d better get a move on if we wanted to make the Ahmedabad connection.
That’s right, I thought, think only of your connection, I thought. God forbid anything interfere with your precious plans.
We left the building and stepped into the subcontinental sauna of the June morning. I heard car horns—shrill and testy—as fleets of black-and-yellow Fiat taxis maneuvered like hyenas around the hippopotamus-sized Ambassador sedans. There was a wildness here, stewing in jungle heat.
We soon crammed into a taxi and sped off on our way to the domestic terminal.
It was 8 p.m. back home, Madison steeped in beautiful summer twilight. And Shannon, I thought of her hair now, the apple-y fragrance of it, and the creamy skin of her arms, the adventure of her lips. Did she have that Smiths song on the stereo? It was one of her favorites. The one where the singer pleads with his lover to believe him—he meant to be with her—but he’s just had a near-death experience, getting his brains kicked in. She doesn’t believe him, but he loves her anyway. What I loved was that brief, beautiful guitar at the end—swaggering, bruised, and tragic (it spoke of me!). I could hear it now as we drove along, and, for a few seconds, I was with her, watching her dance to that song.
* *
Ahmedabad.
Pigeons racketed in the rafters, their droppings decorating the cement floor of the airport. Trunks and suitcases were piled up like a haphazard barricade next to the baggage chute. Passengers filed through, picked up what was theirs and proceeded to a barred gate behind which humans, pressed together, several deep, waited with anxious faces. The air wasn’t as muddy here as it was in Bombay, but I still had to work to breathe.
Right away, my father found what he was looking for. “Right there, right there,” he smiled, and pressed past the crowd toward a familiar face: my father’s younger brother, Hemant.
Hemant Uncle stood a couple of inches shorter than my father. Compactly built and copper-skinned (after a lifetime spent on the cricket field) with graying, sweptback hair and a cheerful face, he sauntered toward us in that trademark unhurried manner I remembered from my childhood. Kamala Auntie, his wife, stood
at his side in a purple sari with lilies on it. Her face looked lean, lined, and aged, I thought, by a combination of years, dust, and sun. The little girl with them was new. Anjali, their daughter, seven years old now. I’d seen her only in photographs, heard about her in letters. In a pink frock, her hair in pigtails, her complexion a shade darker than mine, she came forward with a bouquet of flowers in plastic wrapping.
Anand and I passed through an opening in the gate. We kept behind our parents now in the midst of a joyous reunion. My mother had tears in her eyes. So did Kamala Auntie. Hemant Uncle and my father threw arms around each other’s shoulders, traded Gujarati familiarities, and began chatting as if they’d only been apart a couple of months, not eleven years.
“Go on, go on,” Kamala Auntie said. Shyly, Anjali handed me the bouquet of flowers. I took it from her hands, smiling and telling her thanks as warmly as I could. Hemant Uncle, a pleased smile on his face, fixed his eyes on me as if he were trying to size me up, to see in me the six-year-old boy who lingered in his memories.
Kamala Auntie brushed my hair back, her eyes wet. “I saw you when—” and she held out her palm about waist-high.
“Anand, you’re very thin,” Hemant Uncle said in a voice as deep as my father’s but more booming, more theatrical. He wrapped one of his stout hands around Anand’s shoulders.
“I thought in America, everyone is big and very strong. No?” Anand snickered, a little unsure, uncomfortable, and kept quiet. “Vikram, you too. Very thin. Here we’ll give you proper food.” He suggested an immediate diet of dahi vada and bhelpuri, which got him roaring with laughter. I tried to laugh along like a good sport—these were smiling, unsuspecting, goodhearted relatives, after all—but felt only an intense loathing at being here and a powerful desire to escape. Escape! How absurd. Where would you escape to, Vikram? There was no escaping now.
In front of the airport, rickshaw drivers smoking bidis milled among khaki-clad policemen carrying wooden lathis. Motor rickshaws buzzed up and down like a swarm of yellow jackets, and I remembered them instantly from my childhood—three-wheeled canopied contraptions with narrow backseats where passengers bunched together and, up front, a seat for a driver who steered the rickshaw using a handlebar.