The Leaving of Things

by Antani, Jay

  For perhaps the first time since coming to India, I felt the flush of privilege at being here, a discovery of heritage that I felt proud to share with everyone in the world, with all who were here, all who I’d left behind and held close to my heart. What a strange feeling.

  “You know,” I said, “if we had a boat, we could get out there. This camera is no good this far out.”

  He nodded vaguely, humming a tune, something else on his mind. “Definitely,” he said. “You think from here to the far side of the river is about the distance from home plate to the center-field bleachers at County Stadium?”

  I eyeballed the distance. “I’d say so,” I said.

  “So, Mr. Photographer,” Dharmanshu Uncle called from behind us. “Did you take any good snaps?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, “soon enough.”

  “You wish to become photographer, is it?”

  I looked at the old Minolta in my hands. “I’ve shot some Super 8 and video,” I said, “but never really shot still pictures before I came here.” I described to him the photos I’d taken over Diwali, the ones I’d taken so far on this trip.

  “If you enjoy it,” he said, “go as far as you can with it.”

  He stared out over the riverfront. I sensed he was negotiating a difficult thought.

  “At first, Alka was against going to America,” he said, half to himself. “‘This is our country,’ she would say. ‘Why leave it and raise Dilip where there is no family?’ She had a point, but finally I convinced her to go. The firm in New York was ready to sponsor my green card. We had visa, passport. We were only a week away from leaving.” He sighed. “Then came Alka’s accident.”

  I remembered my mother’s recollections of the telegram she received from Dharmanshu Uncle, informing her and my father of the road accident—he was fine, but she had died instantly—and the shock and grief of it.

  “After she left us,” he said, “I told myself I would do my best to make good on Alka’s wishes to stay on here. Honestly, America, India … it made no difference to me then.”

  “But don’t you think Alka Auntie would’ve wanted you to go?”

  He sniffed, pondering my question, and stared straight ahead. “Yes. But you realize only after you have lost someone how much that person truly meant. Without Alka and to raise Dilip in America without her, no, it didn’t feel right to me.”

  I weighed in my mind whether to ask him my next question. “Did you ever regret not going?”

  He nodded then added, “Thankfully, the toughest years are behind me, when the thought of leaving India was most strong. And now Dilip is a success, so there is satisfaction in that too.”

  Dharmanshu Uncle hadn’t spoken much of Dilip during our visit. “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

  “Four years back,” he replied. “Diwali ’84, just before London.”

  “You haven’t seen him since?” I blurted out, instantly feeling I’d breached a boundary.

  Dharmanshu Uncle smiled, keeping his stare straight ahead. “Maybe one day.”

  I heard Anand making whooshing sounds, imitating crowd noises, and muttering in his monotonous sports-announcer’s voice. He stood in a batter’s stance at the edge of the plinth, swinging an imaginary baseball bat, knocking homerun shots over the Yamuna River. “Pretend baseball again?”

  “Molitor just hit a grand slam, bottom of the ninth,” he beamed, both arms raised exultantly.

  “And the Brewers just won their ninety-fifth World Series,” I said.

  My parents approached. Taking the jacket draped over her arm, my mother slipped it on over her salwaar kameez. They walked closely, and my mother took my father’s arm.

  Dharmanshu Uncle touched my shoulder and leaned toward me. “To you I would only say go as far as you can with what you love. Youth is brief, hm?”

  * *

  The five of us stood on the plinth side by side for a while, quietly watching the villagers across the river. Small children scampered, shouting and playing among the women who washed clothes at the riverbank, dipping their pots into the water. It seemed serene, ancient, a world apart.

  “You got so quiet,” my mother said. “What you men were discussing?”

  “Man talk,” Dharmanshu Uncle joked.

  “He was telling me more about the Taj Mahal,” I said, turning to Dharmanshu Uncle. “How do you know so much about this place?”

  “What I know, I picked up from her.” He jerked a thumb toward my mother.

  “From Mummi?” I asked, surprised. “Were you so interested in the Taj Mahal?”

  “That was long time ago,” she said, casting a reflective glance at Dharmanshu Uncle. “I was here with you and Alka, I think so. Twenty years back.”

  “Is that when that picture was taken?” I asked. “The one of you, Alka Auntie, and Dilip?”

  Her eyes widened as if the memory had blinked like a flashbulb in her mind. “Final year of college, yes,” she said. “I came here to do research.” She explained it was to gather data for a research paper on Mughal architecture. “I spent that day drawing sketches, taking pictures. All different details of the Taj.”

  “What was all that research for?” I asked.

  “It was for an architecture scholarship,” Dharmanshu Uncle said.

  “Wait,” Anand said, interrupting his own daydream. “You were an architect?”

  “Architecture student,” my mother said. “I got the scholarship but did not take.”

  “Oh, no,” I heard myself say.

  “The school was in Delhi,” my father said. “So we would have been apart and wait to get married, but I told her I didn’t mind …”

  “Water under the bridge,” she said.

  “Our father,” explained Dharmanshu Uncle, turning to me, “he was a man, let’s say, of different generation, a different time.” One side of his mouth turned up in a wry smile. “Neera, your mother, had already turned down one marriage match so both our parents were very upset.”

  My father began to say something, but my mother interrupted, a tad vehemently. “You have to know that it was not a good time under that roof, Dharmanshu. For any of us. No one will know but me the home I came back to after that Delhi trip. Mother was on her last breath, and Father … his spirit was gone.”

  Dharmanshu Uncle nodded contemplatively.

  “Did you feel guilty?” I asked. “I mean for turning down the match?”

  “Not just guilty.” My mother cast a glance at my father, her arm locked in his. “I remember thinking I had disappointed them. But mostly … I remember feeling angry at myself … for letting that guilt … make me turn down the scholarship.”

  “But was it guilt,” my father began, “that made you want to get married?”

  My mother considered that, an eyebrow arched for a moment. “To marry when I did, yes.”

  “Hmm,” my father nodded solemnly. I sensed that we had crossed into difficult, rarely breached territory in my parents’ marriage. And I wanted someone to steer us back to safer waters.

  “But I married the man I loved,” my mother added, pressing herself against my father, smiling warmly.

  “But, Neera, those sketches you did that day, they were beautiful,” said Dharmanshu Uncle.

  “She’s always been that artistic type,” my father said. “Always sketching and designing in those early days.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “Couldn’t you have gone back to it after you got married?”

  “My heart was not in it then, I don’t think.” She shook her head. “Then I had you, and everything changed. I cannot even remember now. So long ago.” She withdrew her arm from my father’s and huddled into her jacket, gazing across the river.

  That moment, I sensed a desert in her heart. A desert years and years from end to end, spanning between this moment and that day, twenty years ago, when she last visited the Taj Mahal.

  Far upriver, a lone fisherman hauled up a length of line into his small boat. From that dist
ance, his movements were barely perceptible, and the boat on the glassy river seemed as still as a heron eyeing its prey.

  Dharmanshu Uncle’s words echoed in my mind. Youth is brief. “I would’ve taken that scholarship,” I said.

  * *

  A few days later, on the crowded platform of the train station, Dharmanshu Uncle kissed my mother on the cheek, gave her a warm hug. The Rajdhani Express waited on the tracks as passengers boarded.

  Anand and I bent down, touched Dharmanshu Uncle’s feet, and he gave us his blessing.

  My mother wiped her eyes dry. “Only we missed Alka,” she said, half to herself.

  “She was here,” Dharmanshu Uncle said. “By remembering her, she is here.” He spun around to face us and, in his generous baritone, addressed us: “So, boys, come by on your summer vacation. We’ll go on grand tour of Sikkim, Darjeeling. You just write me if you’re coming, hm? Rahul bhai, don’t hesitate.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said. They slapped each other on the shoulder, and my father thanked him.

  Anand nodded, smiling. “You sure?”

  “Why not?” Dharmanshu Uncle said. “I take holiday every March-April. I can give you driving tour of some of the roadworks and bridges on which I have worked.”

  From the loudspeakers came the station announcer’s litany of garble about incoming trains, arrivals times, distant destinations. My father said we’d better get on board.

  “I’m only sorry Dilip could not be here to share,” my mother said and proceeded (I sensed) delicately, “You should visit him in London. He would like to see you, I’m sure.”

  “Perhaps,” Dharmanshu Uncle said, a note of skepticism in his voice. “He’s only begun his job there. He may not have time for an old man visiting.”

  We gathered our luggage together. “It’s been a real pleasure, Dharmanshu bhai, after so many years,” my father said, hoisting up a shoulder bag.

  “Happy New Year,” I said to Dharmanshu Uncle, and, taking up my suitcase, moved toward the train.

  “One minute,” I heard him say. “Here you go.” From his coat pocket, he pulled out two envelopes and gave one to Anand and me. There was a hundred-rupee note and a one-rupee coin in each of them. Dharmanshu Uncle clapped our shoulders. “New Year gift,” he said.

  We said goodbye, and I stepped onto the train. In two days, I would be back at Xavier’s. A new year had almost begun. As I thought about the pulverizing boredom of the lectures ahead, the hellish rote-cramming for more exams, and the month after month of awaiting word—any word—from home, the year already felt dead and worthless, like I’d lived through it all in my mind—and now I had to live it all over again.

  In Dharmanshu Uncle, I had found, if not an older version of myself, one possibility of it. In him, there had been joy and ambition and dreams. His spoke of his dreams in the past tense, but he had not abandoned them, at least I didn’t think so. They were there but bound up in his grief, his guilt, prowling like beasts in a cage. He had confided in me as much, and for that, I felt forever a kinship with him. I wondered why he didn’t see more of his son and hoped, for both his sake and my own, that he had it in him to set right all the matters of his heart. We waved goodbye to him as the train pulled forward along the platform. He watched us recede, keeping his hand raised as the train put distance between us. Even after he dropped his hand and we’d pulled farther and farther away, I noticed he stayed where he was, staring out in our direction, as if he were pondering his own way forward.

  18

  We got back to Ahmedabad on midmorning the following day, New Year’s Day. Before I even unpacked or went downstairs to check the mailbox, I opened the top drawer of my desk and took out the Wisconsin admissions booklet.

  From behind the half-closed door to my parents’ bedroom across the hallway, I heard them unpacking their suitcases, the clanking of clothes hangers, the opening and closing of the metal cabinet. I heard their muffled voices over the filmi music on the radio—a frolicsome number probably from an early ’60s movie that made me imagine Dev Anand and his heroine in a swishing sari romping across a Himalayan pasture.

  “What’s he sitting on all his savings for?” I heard my father ask. “His house is bare-bones. Lives like he’s making a clerk’s salary.”

  “If it bothered you so much, we won’t go there again, okay?”

  “Did I say it bothered me?”

  “Maybe he’s saving for retirement, I don’t know. He won’t tell me anything. Never has.” More unpacking. “He’s saving what he earns for the retirement maybe. Something I wish we could have started long ago—”

  “Stop that bukwaas. Things are not the same now. How many times must I say it?”

  “Sorry,” my mother sighed. “I don’t know. To be honest, how he and Dilip are relating, I have my doubts. No word from his own son in three years. Since Alka died, it’s like this. Life in limbo.”

  “Gotten worse it seems,” my father said. “All that angry talk about India, doesn’t mix with anyone anymore. His life is in standstill.”

  “He’s given up. Is that what you think?”

  “That’s the feeling I get,” my father answered. “Don’t think I don’t remember the way he used to be. That’s what struck me this time. That feeling he’s in limbo.”

  I strained to hear more, but all I got were the needling violins and pattering tablas and then the crooner’s high voice coming from the radio. “What is he waiting for?” I heard my father say. “Future doesn’t make itself.”

  Their voices fell quiet after that. I took a deep breath, and turning my attention to the booklet in my hands, I detached the application from its spine. Before I knew it, I’d begun filling out the form. It felt absurd, silly—I didn’t have the grades, I didn’t have money—but I knew I had to do this. I had to get back to America. I couldn’t languish here forever. And the future didn’t make itself.

  * *

  January 7, 1989

  Dear Vik,

  Happy New Year. Madison’s in its January deep freeze. I spent Winter break watching a ton of films—Fellini, Godard, Polanski mostly. Otherwise, I’ve been tooling around campus with Nate, at the Union mostly where it’s warm while the students are all gone and the place is still deserted.

  So, here’s the scoop. Before break, Bridget told me she was having doubts about us. Says she’s not ready for a serious relationship. Go figure. And she’s the one who got us started down this road in the first place. I didn’t know what to tell her except that she should use the break to figure out her feelings. But I still care for her, and I’m not sure how I’d handle it if she killed the relationship. So I’ve been slumming a bit. How’s the woman situation at your end? You mentioned a girl that you sorta had the hots for (Nate wants to see a picture).

  Hope you enjoyed your trip out to Delhi. Can’t wait to see the pics. Speaking of pics, I loved what you sent a couple of months back. You say it’s not much of a camera, but if that’s true, I think your eye more than makes up for it. Keep ’em coming.

  Your last couple of letters have sounded a bit, I don’t know, aloof. I do think there’s a lot for you here if you do decide to come back. Though I know there are hurdles to jump through, right? Admissions, finances, etc. Let me know what I can do, and I’ll do it.

  I’m sending a mix of Warren Zevon, Kate Bush and Camper van Beethoven. You’ll dig it.

  Write soon,

  Karl

  * *

  I filled out the application in a rush. What did it matter? At the very least, it would give me fleeting hope, something to break the dismal routine of the next few months leading up to the finals in April. I figured I could seal the application up and mail it out quietly, and no one would be the wiser. It was a long shot, so why bring my parents into it? But as I signed it, I noticed in fine print a note below the dotted line reminding me of an application fee: $15. Shit.

  My parents sat in the living room, watching episodes that they had recorded of The Mahabharata TV seria
l. Me, I couldn’t stand the show. All loud acting and in-your-face theatrics. I groaned and considered backing out of the room, but my purpose held. The application in my hand, I took a seat.

  On TV, armies on chariots massed on a chroma-keyed battlefield, the orange banners snapping in the studio’s fan-driven wind. Foot soldiers stamped their spears on the sand-strewn studio floor, and the blowing of conch shells rang across the soundtrack.

  “I need to borrow some money,” I began. “Er, would you mind if …?”

  “Not now, Vikram.” My father’s gaze was fixed on the TV screen.

  I left the application on the coffee table and walked back to my room. I decided to write Karl a letter. I pulled out a sheet of airmail paper—crinkly-thin, as translucent as onionskin—and started writing. But my thoughts kept pulling me to Priya. I’d said nothing about her to anyone since we last met, in the deep dark of the library, but all through Christmas Break, I couldn’t escape her.

  I looked out my room’s open doors to the balcony as the afternoon light mellowed to evening. Priya was probably married by now. She may not even be in Ahmedabad. Maybe she was in New York. Or maybe she and her new husband were honeymooning somewhere.

  She was not in my world anymore. She’d passed through it and was gone. The thought worked its way like a splinter in my chest. Perhaps, I thought, she would stay on in college till we graduated. Maybe merely hearing her voice would be enough—that lovely accent that brought me home—even if she never spoke to me again. Shannon too. She was even farther. I couldn’t believe we were even on the same planet. And I realized I would have to suffice with the memory of lying together on her bed and the memory of what we did but now regretting what we did not do. She had wanted to do it, but I couldn’t. Fine work, Vik. What are you? A monk? Why don’t you go join a monastery like your friend Devasia? You would be a perfect little monk. Couldn’t bring yourself to have sex with Shannon when you knew, she told you, she wanted it. What’s the matter with you? Shame, wasn’t it? The thought of your parents so devastated, bottomed-out, at the police station to pick up their delinquent son. I was spared jail time that night, but wasn’t shame another kind of jail time? Jail time you imposed on yourself? Nothing to be done about it now. College would be starting tomorrow, and three months to follow of boredom and drift. Then the finals. Then the goddamn April-May-June of summer. Then the monsoon again. Another year of Xavier’s. Repeat twice over.