by Antani, Jay
20
My father returned after sundown, straight from the clinic. Kamala Auntie had prepared food for us. We all sat at the table, our plates before us, and listened. The news was not good. The cells in the mass indicated cancer. More results were pending. We would know more as they came in. The doctor could then determine a strategy, my father said. His tone was even, almost matter-of-fact. He finished his dinner quickly, and we all cleared the table so that we could go to the clinic. Whether she was sleeping or awake didn’t matter. We wanted to see her.
“Does she know?” I asked.
My father nodded. “The doctor wanted us to wait till we knew the full results. But I didn’t want her to be in the dark.” He sighed deeply. “She’s knows. If she didn’t, she could well guess, I am sure.”
“How did she take it?” I asked.
“Better than I thought,” he said. “Your mother’s a strong woman.”
“I know she is,” I said.
“Always been that way. All those years of uncertainty till now,” he said, shaking his head, half admiringly, half regretfully.
At the clinic, none of us brought up the tumor. It hovered in the space above us, a toxic cloud, weighing down our minds.
My mother did say the pain was less, and they had removed the rat from the room. Still, her voice was weak, and she spoke little. It sapped her strength to speak. From where I sat by the door, her voice sounded gossamer-frail.
Kamala Auntie stood at the foot of the bed, told her there was nothing to worry about. She could take care of things back home till she was feeling better.
“Has the doctor come around?” my father asked. He clutched the metal railing at the foot of the bed. “How’ve you been eating here?”
She said the doctor had come by a couple of times. “Said temperature was normal, BP normal. They gave me dal, rice, yogurt.” She stopped to catch her breath. She winced.
“Still the pain?”
“Thodu thodu,” she replied, sounding muffled, as if she were speaking from the other side of a wall. “But you know …?” She paused and shifted in her bed. Kamala Auntie stepped around and adjusted the pillows under her head. “She says not much,” my mother said. “The doctor. Always looks at chart. Hardly answers my questions.”
My father told her not to speak too much. Told her be good, get her rest, and she would be going home very soon. Anand stood opposite my father. He mumbled a question, and my father said something in reply. Kamala Auntie added something to it. Anand nodded, biting his fingernails. Words and voices floated, unintelligibly, in the grainy half-light.
Then my mother spoke. “Whatever it is, I’m not staying here.”
“Soon.” My father nodded. “It’ll be soon. Don’t worry.”
They stood there, and their image began to warp together in my eyes. When I saw my mother turn her head, deciding to fall back asleep, alone in her weariness, something broke inside me. I began to cry. Not sobbing, but a steady stuttering in my chest, a tripping of breaths and tears. Something about the lack of answers did it, the lack of any alternative to this horrible thing and her surrendering herself to sleep.
* *
Lights came on one by one after we returned home. I realized I’d been standing in the dark when Anand turned on the light switch in our room, and the tube light above my desk flickered on. How long I’d been standing there thinking, I wasn’t sure. On the desk lay the envelope from Wisconsin, with its contents stuffed back inside. It was where I’d left it, before my father had come home and given us the news.
“What’s that?” Anand asked.
I picked up the envelope. “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said and put the thing into a drawer.
* *
Awoke early morning. Try not to think, I told myself.
Kamala Auntie was already in the kitchen, chai steaming on the burner.
I put on my sneakers. Nikes I had bought at West Towne Mall last summer. I went out and jogged my regular route. Read the Times of India on the balcony. Ate breakfast—a small bowl of cornflakes, a cup of milk, toast, a boiled egg. Filled the bucket in the bathroom with hot water from the mini water heater. Bathed and got dressed.
I could hear the radio from my parents’ bedroom: Hindi-language morning news, the shrill jingle of detergent commercials. My father sat at the dining table alone, sipping chai, eating pastry picked from a large steel canister. He poked his head into our room, told Anand and me he’d make a half-day of it at the office. Then on to the clinic.
Anand, in his school uniform, went out to meet his rickshaw. The rickshaw puttered away. Kamala Auntie left too, her purse in hand, saying she was off to the market and to make arrangements for flour, oil, milk.
The door clanged shut.
I opened the desk drawer, dug out the envelope. Read the admissions letter again. The words were pearls to my mind. There was a visa form to fill out and bring with me to the consulate in Bombay. I tucked the envelope back in the drawer. The cleaning girl came, the hem of her skirt brushing against the floor, the bangles chiming at her ankles as she glided through the hallway and into the bathroom.
Before leaving for college, I knocked on the bathroom door and gently pushed it open. She squatted on a low stool, her back to me, pins holding the bun in place behind her head. She’d already turned on the tap. The water whooshed and splat on the tile floor, and she thwacked the sopping clothes with a short paddle. I watched her, mesmerized for a few seconds, as she wrung out my Clash T-shirt—thanks to Indian soap, it had faded to a pale yellow from its former neon splendor—and dropped it into a bucket.
“No one is home,” I told her. She started as if I’d barged in on her naked, and understanding me, she closed her mouth and tipped her head sidewise, a gesture that meant “okay.” “Didn’t mean to scare you,” I added in my pidgin Gujarati. (No response.) “Be back later. Let yourself out. Okay?” She tipped her head to the side again, half-uttering, “Okay.”
The next few days passed by in a numbing haze. A cloud of lectures and note-taking. Victorian literature. French. Psychology. I sat with Devasia in the mess while he ate and went to Pradeep’s hostel room to record lecture notes. I filled them in on the situation till there was really nothing more to add. I felt wrung out. My thoughts leaned toward the evenings, to the visits to the clinic where we waited with restless patience on the hard wicker chairs, in the pale shadows. My mother was recovering at least, the IV was out, and she could sit up, take steps, carry on conversations.
At the end of that week, while we were visiting, the doctor knocked on the door and entered. She was dressed in her white coat and sari, diminutive in her oversized glasses. She crossed to the bed with a folder in her hand. “Okay, now we have something,” she said.
Long pause. It was like any folder, but this one, it was an oracle. And everyone in the room, every atom, gravitated now to whatever it contained.
“Achcha,” my father said. He adjusted his glasses and ran his fingers through the thinning hair on his scalp. “Go on.” He focused on the doctor as if she were a colleague about to run a mathematical problem by him.
Kamala Auntie stood up and went over to the bed. “Do you wish to speak in private?” she asked.
“No.” My father shook his head. “This is fine.”
The doctor pivoted toward Anand and me, surprised at first, then a smile appeared on her face, and she said, “Okay.” She opened the folder. “As you know, we found malignancy.” I hated that word. It was a dragon in the night sky. “But the numbers I got back today show normal cell count. Your liver function, your lymph nodes, those tests are normal. Scans too are normal. All healthy. So”—she closed the folder—“we had scare. But this is good news. Growth contained malignancy. But those cells stayed inside it.” Her palms closed together.
Not a word from anyone for several seconds, just a deep sigh of relief that might’ve come from me. My father cleared his throat, but my mind was filled with this sensation of profound clearance. A renewal. As if
all the funk of the past weeks had been aired out, cleaned out of the room through its tiny barred windows.
“That appendix was a painful experience,” the doctor remarked, “but it was a blessing.” She rested one hand on the bed, stood next to my mother and said to her, “Because who knows how much longer before that growth would have caused you to see doctor. By then, cancer may have spread.”
My father went on to ask a slew of questions. His tone was direct, and he wanted to hit every angle: How many more tests? What sort? Any dietary changes? The doctor answered calmly, her answers brief but sure. She said we had crossed the most critical hurdle, but she still wanted my mother to see a specialist in Bombay for a more rigorous round of tests when she felt up to it.
“I will ring him up,” she said, “and tell him you’ll be calling. Make an appointment to see him, earlier the better.”
She took out a prescription pad from her coat pocket and wrote down the name of the specialist.
“And how long must I be here?” my mother asked.
“You can check out tomorrow,” she said, tearing out the sheet from the pad, “and call this number. He is in Breach Candy Hospital—”
“He’s good?” I was startled to hear my own voice. I stood up. “This specialist in Bombay, he’s good?”
The doctor turned to me, surprised to hear from me. “He’s the best that I know,” she said, turning back to my father. She handed him the paper. “You can trust him.”
Trust. Such a lonely and fragile word, as uncertain as a sheet of ice on a frozen lake. I hoped it would hold.
* *
Kamala Auntie stayed several more days after my mother’s return home. She cooked and made sure the house was tended to while my mother rested and my father returned to work. The mood slowly lifted, normalized, and we began to go about our lives as before. Anand and I came home in the afternoons to find my mother chatting casually with Kamala Auntie as if nothing had happened. We lingered in that momentary suspension, when normality could roam about the home, an eager dog set free of its leash. I loaded a new roll into the Minolta, a more light-sensitive stock than I’d yet used, sat with my mother and Kamala Auntie at the dining table—the sashes open to let in the light filtering through the peepul trees—and snapped off shot after shot. Close-ups and group shots of Anand, intent on his Hindi homework, and the women in conversation, sifting mung beans or snapping peas out of their pods onto large steel plates.
The glint in my mother’s eyes had mellowed now, as if the steel within them had cooled and hardened. I tried to capture it and thought I did once on the first evening she stepped outside since coming home. The groundskeeper was surprised and happy to see her. My mother remarked how nicely the flowers were doing, and she stooped down to take a closer look at the marigolds. The sun was flush with the tile roofs of the neighboring bungalow, slanting orange against the purple tint of the evening as I bent down on my knees, level with my mother’s gaze, and took the picture.
Later, when I saw the picture, it took me a second to recognize her. Sure, her face was a touch thinner, the creases around her eyes and mouth were deeper. But what got me were the eyes: they seemed defeated yet undefeated at the same time.
She’d been fighting a continuous battle, not just with her illness but these past twelve years against displacements—first, from one country to another, then from town to town across America—while being as steady a supporter to my father and nurturer to my brother and me as she could be. She’d made sure we were clothed, schooled, fed, that our bills were paid and we still had money in the bank, no matter where we ended up from one year to the next. I knew that America hadn’t gone the way of her dreams, not even halfway, not with our yearly uncertainties and upheavals. Yet here she was in this picture, on the other side of all those years, a steady, solitary figure. And that’s what that picture said to me—that we steadily endure our lives and ultimately we are alone in our endurance. In this aloneness, we find our strength.
As we walked along the rows of jasmine and marigolds that evening, she stopped in the path, looked up from admiring the flowers, and told me that at that moment she felt happiness for the first time since … And here she trailed off. “Since?” I asked. “Since coming back to India?”
After a pause, she shook her head and said, “Since we left India.”
And I wished that what she felt at that moment would set the new standard of happiness in her life from then on for all the years to come.
I’ve kept that picture of my mother ever since.
* *
Six weeks to go till another round of wretched exams. The finals. Six weeks holed up inside the barracks of rote learning. I had to comb through sheaves of notes, memorize dates and definitions, and throw together another set of practice essays. An essay a day—that was the goal.
At my desk, poring through my Macmillan textbook and my Sridharan lecture notes, I felt slow-burn despair. I decided I could not do this anymore, not two more years of this. But at the same time, I no longer felt right about leaving for Wisconsin after everything my mother had been through—and would continue to go through. It wasn’t about feeling guilty; I just couldn’t consider leaving her now, not like this.
But if I was going to stay in India, I had to consider alternatives to Xavier’s. I had to find another school I might actually find relevant and meaningful to me, even semi-enjoyable.
There was a step I’d yet to take—a stone yet unturned, an option my father had once mentioned, worth investigating.
I began going through the last several rolls’ worth of photos, going back to the past Diwali and the trip to Delhi. There were a few I was actually impressed with. I considered these photos, then shoved them inside an envelope, and set out on the Luna for N.I.D., the National Institute of Design.
It was a dust-strewn haul along my side of the Sabarmati, south past the Alliance Française. I rode past the Alliance’s redbrick complex, and I thought of my teacher. I wondered if she was there now, teaching introductory French, or if she had made good on her plans and left for Paris to begin a new life. I sped on farther south, into Paldi, a neighborhood raucous with traffic, both hoofed and wheeled, and found the massive tree-lined enclosure that I knew had to be the N.I.D.
I stood the Luna on its stand. Clutching the envelope, I stepped through narrow iron gates and into a plot of spacious green. Eucalyptus and bougainvillea flowered here, rows of them jutted off on either side of the gate, muting out the city noise. On the far side stood the cement buildings housing classrooms and the hostel. These buildings were modern, not like stodgy Xavier’s colonial loggias overrun with Hindu-Catholic moralists and the Old-World commingling of paan, sandalwood, and coconut oil. I passed large polished windows with steel-black sashes and structures built like interconnected redbrick rectangles and squares set high over landscaped greenery on tall stem-like pillars. This campus was some modernist art project, and I was pleased that it existed in Ahmedabad.
On the far side of the green, an entrance led into a hallway. I noticed a lounge off to one side and, around the corner, males and females together at work in video editing suites. They conferred confidentially, partners in a secret creative endeavor, with their headphones on, hands adjusting control knobs. Images played on monitors, stopped and started as they worked the editing decks. I turned the other way and saw an office, its door shut. On it a nameplate read, “Prof. Sheshank Menon, Director.”
I knocked on the door.
“Yes? Come on in.”
I turned the handle and peeked in. It seemed a tornado had just blown through, shaking and reshuffling the whole room. Tottering piles of paperwork and videotapes lay on the desk, smaller piles were strewn like coral around the cramped floor, and the bookshelves too were stocked full but in disarray. Menon was graying and straggle-haired, lanky, in a checked short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks. He leaned against the desk and looked up from a thick volume in his hands. Seeing me, he bunched his brows together. “Oh,” he shu
t the book, “I thought you’d be one of my students.”
I took a step inside, introduced myself, shook his hand. I asked if he would mind if I talked to him for a moment. “Or I could come back if you’re waiting for someone.”
“No, no, what is it?” he said, setting the book on a stack of videos on his desk. I noticed it was an Eames volume on industrial design. Menon raised himself to his feet. “It’s rather cluttered here.” He looked around with an expression of mild despair. “Why don’t we step outside?”
We walked together as students passed by or lounged on chairs in the hallway. I told Menon I’d arrived from the States recently, that I’d heard about the N.I.D. and wanted to see about enrolling myself. I told him about my photography, about the short videos I’d made in high school. I knew the school had programs in all those things. “And it’s what I really want to do,”—it was the first time I’d heard myself say those words—“and I’ve brought some samples here for you to take a look.” I held out the envelope to him. But his attention was on a student rolling out of one of the chairs nearby, hoisting up his backpack and preparing to take off down the hallway.
“Mr. Bose,” he commanded. The student froze, turned toward us, eyes wide with surprise. “Were you not aware of our meeting?”
The student—Mr. Bose—chuckled nervously. “Oh, Professor Menon,” he said. “I was, in fact, on my way to see you. I just remembered the letter you wanted, from the judge in Bhopal, and I was on my way to get—”
“I won’t have you putting my program in legal troubles.”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Bose said. “No, sir. If only they had warned me before I conducted my interviews with the victims’ lawyers, whatnot—”
“Tomorrow be in my office at noon, I want all transcripts from your interviews, all video footage, and this cease-and-desist order in my hands, understand Mr. Bose?”
“Tomorrow, yes, sir. Of course.”
“Good day.” The student turned on his heels through the entryway, out onto the lawn. Menon stood his ground.