by Antani, Jay
* *
A letter from Shannon arrived—finally!
July 2, 1988
Dear Vik,
Got your letter this afternoon and wanted to write you back right away. Emily wanted to go on one of her Saturday shopping sprees on State, and I had auditions at the Union, so we came down to campus together. I’m sitting on the terrace right now, and the sun’s going down, and I wish you were here enjoying it with me. Maybe you could calm me down. I just finished trying out for the drama festival. They’re doing two Tennessee Williams plays at the university theater in August. I think it went well, but you never know. You know I’m not the most confident about my auditions.
Vik, I really, really miss you. And as freaked out as you feel right now, I know that this is going to be the most amazing experience. Do you have any idea yet how long you’ll be there? Is it really for good? Somehow, I think you’ll be back, before you know it. And, to that end (drum roll, please!), I’m sending you an application for next fall. I know, I know. There’s a lot to this—it won’t be easy—you’ll need your own visa, and I’ve heard about how hard it is to transfer to the UW from overseas, blah, blah, blah. But who knows? Maybe we’ll be watching a sunset together this time next year … ?
I’ll officially be moved into Sellery Hall in a few weeks. I cannot wait. Free at last! OK, sweetie, I’m thinking of you, so you can put your worries to rest. And, no, there are no hot new men in my life. Just you. Here comes Emily, and she’s got three humongous bags in her hand, so I’m going to wrap this up and write you a proper letter as soon as I get a chance.
Miss you!
Love,
Shannon
p.s. Nate says hi. I’ve seen him and Karl a few times. They’re writing a script or something together.
p.p.s. Don’t you dare throw away the application.
* *
I wrote back to Shannon immediately, telling her about the stolen wallet. I had a couple of pictures of us already, tucked between the pages of my yearbook, but asked for another of her senior photos anyway. Mostly though, I was relieved that she was still thinking of me.
I thought about running the letter over to the Ghatlodiya post office but nixed the idea. I figured I’d better wait to mail anything till after we moved into the city, to that bungalow my father spoke about in a neighborhood called Navarangpura, and use one of the city post offices.
That Sunday, I packed up my suitcase and backpack. My mother wasn’t feeling well—stomach pains, she said—so I told her to lie down. I took the clothes from the line, folded them, and packed them in my mother’s suitcase. Anand had gone with my father in a rickshaw to the Institute to fetch the company Ambassador that would drive us over to Navarangpura.
The car pulled up. Behind the wheel, his neck craning so he could see over it, was the same driver who took my father to and from work every day. Our personal chauffeur, I thought, making extra on a Saturday.
“They’re here,” I said, poking my head into my parents’ bedroom. My mother was lying on her back, her palms crossed low over her abdomen. “How’re you feeling?”
She took a deep breath. “Better,” she answered.
Moments later, we were on the move again. The Ambassador banged and splashed its way through Ghatlodiya and into the busier neighborhoods of the city. The monsoon rains, like weeks of artillery fire, had left the roads potholed.
My father, sitting up front, spoke of hiring a cook and a maid right away to help my mother around the house. She would not have to deal with washing clothes, cleaning, or going to the market. Things would quickly fall into place, he said. He had already alerted the shipping company in Bombay, where the things we’d decided to bring with us—the TV, VCR, stereo, my father’s home computer, kitchen things, and linens—had already arrived and were waiting. In a few days, it would all be in Ahmedabad, and our lives would settle into a happy order.
If the need arose, like today, we would always have the car and driver at our disposal—and he patted the driver on the shoulder. The driver smiled back meekly. And, for me, he would buy a Kinetic Honda scooter, or whatever vehicle I wanted, so I could zoom around the city to my heart’s content. He was way more enthusiastic than I could handle. I’m glad all of this is working out so well for you, I wanted to tell him.
“No cook,” my mother said, her sunglasses on. She sat in the far corner of the backseat. I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. I wondered if her eyes were closed behind her sunglasses. “I don’t want someone else cooking for us. The Ahmedabadis always use too much oil, and that’s the last thing you need.”
“We can tell our cook to cook light.”
“I can manage,” my mother replied sternly.
My father looked at me, gesturing to a neighborhood of low-slung concrete apartments out beyond a shopping complex. Eucalyptus loomed up over it. “You were born just over there,” he said, his voice muffled by the wind in the open window. “Behind this is Jainagar Complex. Back then, there was nothing here. Just fields.” He shifted his look to my mother. “Remember that? Jainagar?” Then to me he said, “Your Hemant Uncle, Kamala Auntie, you, your mother, myself, and your grandparents, all under one roof. For only few years, then we left for America.”
My mother said nothing.
My father faced the road ahead now and chuckled to himself. “Simpler days,” he said, half in a dream.
The bungalow was in a row of them, just off a busy roundabout where four roads intersected. We crossed a wooden gate and a dirt driveway, fringed by what was once a garden, reduced now to briars, scrub, and weeds. The bungalow lay to one side of the drive, a two-story cement structure with a balcony overlooking these unruly grounds.
It seemed a repeat performance of our arrival a few weeks ago. Every suitcase, backpack, and handbag, everything lugged from the car. The driver, mild and solicitous, helped us, taking the suitcase from my mother’s hands. Up the dirt path and around the corner of the bungalow, we came to the front doors.
My father unlocked it, pulled aside the bolt, and opened the doors. Daylight leaked into a dark stairwell. The flip of a switch threw on a melancholy light from a single bulb, somewhere above. Our steps echoed; the luggage knocked against the stairs. It was kind of spooky. Up two flights and another door before us. This was it. Our home.
The place had the musty lingering nostalgia of British officers billeted here during the last days of colonialism. There was an airiness too, an Old World spaciousness here. Whitewashed walls, high wooden ceilings, stone tiling on the floors.
In the kitchen, veined granite countertops and wooden cupboards. We were relieved to find there was a tiny Kelvinator fridge installed and copper pots already on the two-ring gas stove. The living room, dining room, and the two bedrooms were all fully furnished. My parents had a small balcony off of their bedroom. I felt a small victory in discovering that the other bedroom—the one Anand and I would be sharing—had the big balcony. We stepped out onto it and took a look: straight ahead was a view of the weed-choked garden and University Road, and beyond that, the athletic field fronting the H.L. College of Commerce. Another vantage gave on a muddy shopping plaza.
At least we were in the city now. Not in the boonies. The world seemed slightly more within reach.
“At least we can rent videos now,” Anand observed, pointing toward the plaza. “Looks like there’s a paan shop with videos there.”
My father stepped out onto the balcony. “And your college is just there on the other side of that.” He indicated the roundabout straight ahead. “Maybe another mile. Just a straight shot.”
A sprawling peepul tree grew in a ringed plot of earth in the center of the roundabout, blocking the view beyond. I didn’t care for a look, though, and the last thing I wanted to hear was a pitch about how easy things would be, especially one coming from my father.
“And Anand,” he added, “your school is just a bit farther from there. Everything nice and close, right?”
“Yeah,” Anand said, �
��isn’t it right down the same road? Right past the college.”
“Exactly.”
Anand was really getting into the swing of things, I thought. Traitor. Cooperator.
“Where is the post office?” I asked. “That’s all I need to know.”
My father looked off in one direction, then the other. “I am not sure. But it’s here. Not far. This is Navarangpura, after all. Central Ahmedabad.”
In the kitchen, my mother began steeping chai. With a pair of tongs, she lifted the steel pot from the flames, waiting for the roiling brew to settle a bit, swirling it, concentrating the masala, sugar, and tea grounds before setting it back on the burner.
“How did you get the tea already?” I asked her.
“Your father’s surprise,” she said, lifting the pot and pouring the chai through a small strainer into a ceramic teapot. As she poured, she nodded toward the pantry, “Look there.” I checked it out: the shelves were already full of oil, sugar, flour, tea, spices, corn flakes, even Parle-G tea biscuits and Indian snacks, all in canisters, set up side by side, as if some magical delivery boy had shown up here in advance and set everything up. Shopping bags bulged with all kinds of produce. The fridge as well was stocked with sliced bread, eggs, butter, sealed plastic bags of pasteurized milk.
“When did you do all this?”
My father, seated at the dining table off the kitchen, arched his brows and shrugged enigmatically.
“But when?”
“I’ve got my ways,” he said coyly, nodding his head. “Your mother told me what all she needed, and I made the arrangements.”
I slid into a chair at the table. Anand and my father munched on Parle-G biscuits straight out of their wrappers and bowls of murmura, seasoned puffed rice. My mother brought out the teapot and cups and poured steaming chai. She sat down, raising her cup with both hands.
“How do you feel, Ma?” I asked.
“Much better.”
“It’s going to get easier,” my father said again. “Wait till everything arrives in a few days.”
“We should give the driver some food,” my mother said. She put together a plate of murmura and biscuits and poured a cup of chai and water in a steel tumbler.
“Vikram, would you mind going down and giving him?” my mother said.
The driver was reclining in the back seat of the Ambassador with a towel over his eyes, arms folded, when I found him.
I cleared my throat. “Hi,” I said, hoping he wasn’t sound asleep.
“Hm?” The driver removed the towel from his eyes, squinted at the food I’d brought out and smiled. He opened the passenger door and took the plate, cup, and tumbler I was balancing in my hands. He set the plate and chai on the seat beside him and tipped the tumbler into his mouth, keeping it inches above his lips, and emptied it.
“Thank you.” He sounded so grateful and sincere. It made me feel sad for some reason.
On either side of our bungalow stood identical bungalows, only with better-tended grounds. Peepul trees towered between them, their leaves lying everywhere. There was something ghostly about this place, a peace that felt out of time, out of place.
I half-expected to see a sahib in his jodhpurs reclining under a canopy, sipping whiskey and polishing his elephant gun, while a turbaned servant fanned him. A shrill cawing cut the air, and I traced it to a peacock strutting across the roof of a storage shed next door. I’d never seen a peacock in real life before, and I marveled at its bearing, the royal blue of its neck and breast, the tiara-like crest and the sweeping green of its tail. The peacock bobbed its head in my direction for a moment, then, fluttering its wings, it dropped out of sight onto the far side of the shed.
I found a wooden box, about the size of a birdhouse, hung on a nail beside the bungalow’s entrance doors. The box had a mail slot along the top, a plastic see-through panel on the front and a tiny door that opened after you pulled a hasp on the side. Here it was. My mailbox. But it was more than a mailbox. It was my lifeline.
9
Our things arrived from Bombay. We unloaded boxes from the truck’s battered wood-framed bed and laid them out in heaps resembling barricades. Slowly, we fell to the task of unpacking and organizing. My parents got their kitchen appliances set up, the Hindi movie collection arranged next to the TV, VCR and stereo all set up and plugged into power transformers.
Soon enough, the others’ lives settled into a harmonious daily rhythm. Every morning, before I even dragged myself out of bed, Anand would be up and dressed in his school uniform. I could hear him and my mother in the kitchen before the put-putting rickshaw pulled up in the drive—the one assigned to transport him to and from school, along with a few other classmates who lived in the area. That made it a kind of rickshaw pool. The babbling of my brother’s rickshaw companions carried up over the balcony into the bedroom. “Anand!” one of them shouted. “Chalo, yaar!” Then I heard Anand rushing out of the house, followed soon by the whirring away of the rickshaw. From my parents’ bedroom across the hall, I could hear my father tap-tapping away at his computer and, above that, the booming announcements of All India Radio interrupted by jingles for Lifebuoy, Raymond Shirts, or Thums Up cola. The same ones over and over again, every morning, every day.
My father hired a man to clean the floors and bathrooms. Grizzled, gaunt, and wearing round Coke-bottle glasses, he showed up cheerfully each morning with his rags, brushes, brooms, and bottles. Squatting on his haunches, he would move through the house and sweep with a short broom made up of thin, bunched-together shoots. Then he would splash bleach and water all over the bathroom before scrubbing it all down with a hard brush, sweeping all the tracked-in dirt into the drain in the middle of the floor.
There was also a cleaning girl. She was young, probably in her teens, and lived in the shantytown that sprawled along the road a few blocks west of us. She would come in the mornings, announcing herself with her bangles and her anklets, swishing by my room in her ankle-length skirt, her bright-colored, full-bosomed choli. Her nose and ears shimmered with jewelry. She would do the wash, hang it out on the line on the balcony, and, in the evenings, reappear to clean the dinner dishes. I couldn’t help but steal glances at her as I sat on the balcony on mornings before class, scanning the Times of India (for any item about or from America), as she leaned over the parapet to wring out the wash or as she hung clothes over the line, the cleavage of her choli fully in view. She couldn’t be more than nineteen, I guessed, and she was scorched bronze by the Gujarat sun, and she smelled of the dust of the shantytown. When she spoke or smiled, her teeth shone stark white against her face.
“She’s quite something,” I told Pradeep, the blind student, one day before the start of Sridharan’s lecture.
“Vikram bhai,” he said grinning mischievously, “I thought you were already having girlfriend, no?” He shifted on the bench, too giddy to sit still. “Now you must ask yourself,” he leaned toward me, his hand on my arm, a brotherly warmth between us, “is it worth to drop your American girl for this village beauty? If so, count on me, eh, bhai? I myself will sing at your marriage function!” He laughed convulsively, his shades nearly falling off his face.
“I just wanted to describe her to you.”
“And you’ve done wonderful job, bhai.”
“Because around here,” I said, “it seems that men don’t really chat up women, do they? I mean, the guys are happy to just stand around and stare at them.”
“It is the great tragedy of our nation. See here in this lecture hall,” he whispered. “Boys are on one side, girls on other side. You don’t have to see to see that. We want to mingle, but it’s the tragedy of our culture, you see. It forbids that.”
“Why such a long face, Pradeep?” The American voice again, the words like waterfalls in paradise. I sat up. There she was, today in a brown kurta top and jeans, hair flowing to her shoulders. At her heels, that tagalong friend of hers, with her overeager smile, dressed today in a lime-green salwaar kameez patterned wi
th flowers.
“Priya, Priya, Priya,” Pradeep said. “My dost Vik and I were only discussing you girls. That’s why long face.”
“So predictable.” She began to walk toward her side of the lecture hall, her notebook pressed to her chest. “That’s all boys ever talk about, isn’t it?” Her eyes moved from Pradeep to me.
“What else is there?” I said, smiling. Were my words too forward? I hoped I hadn’t embarrassed her. Feeling somewhat embarrassed myself, I extended my hand and gave her my name. Tentatively, shyly, she took my hand and asked me where in the States I’d moved from.
“The Midwest,” I said. “Wisconsin.”
She said she didn’t know the Midwest too well. Her home had been in Massachusetts. “Boston. But I moved back three years ago.”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s been three years,” I said.
She smiled. “You don’t lose the accent if you don’t want to.” As she turned to walk away, I noticed she wore a tiny gold stud in her nose—a traditional Indian touch—and the paradox of that and her American accent together in one package excited me. I watched her go, but I couldn’t help noticing that her friend paid particular attention to me, unable to suppress her smile, holding her stare a second too long.
Priya drifted away toward her side of the hall when, suddenly, she became obscured from my view by a black T-shirt. “Side, boss,” came a gruff voice.
I looked up to discover Harley-Davidson in the aisle, wanting to slide in next to Pradeep and me on the bench.
Sridharan entered the classroom, and the whole class was on its feet. He leapt onto the dais. With his typically haughty disregard, he gestured for us to sit down—the emperor before his subjects—and went about arranging his things on the table.