by Meg Wolitzer
Sharma did visit the following Thursday, though the matter of his absence the week before was not raised. Instead of their usual feast at home, they ate chili noodles doused with sugary tomato sauce at Jimmy’s Chinese Kitchen, along with stale pastries for dessert. Sharma was wearing Nikhil’s family necklace under his shirt, with just an edge of the queen’s image peeking out from the collar. Seeing his gift on his lover’s body released Nikhil from his brood, and for the first time that night, he met Sharma’s gaze.
“You’re cross with me,” Sharma offered.
It wasn’t an apology, but Nikhil was warming to the idea of a reconciliation.
“Anyway, Tripti and I have been discussing the issue of the baby.”
Tripti and I. He so rarely heard the name Tripti from Sharma’s lips, but that she could be in league with him, discussing an issue? Unjust was what it was.
“It’s in part the physical act. We eat our meals together. We take walks to the bazaar or to the pond. But that, no, we do not do that.”
“Don’t worry,” Nikhil said. “I shall do the deed. I shall be the child’s father.” While it was unpleasant to imagine the act of copulation itself, he’d studied the intricacies of the reproductive process and believed his chances were excellent for a single, well-timed session to yield its fruit.
“But you can barely stand the smell of a woman.”
What passed over Sharma’s face may have been described as amusement, but Nikhil refused to believe his lover wasn’t taking him seriously—not now that he’d opened his heart like a salvaged piano. “Sharma,” Nikhil said. “It shall be a small sacrifice for an enormous happiness.”
“Oh Nikhil, do you not see that we are already happy? Anything more might upset what we have. We should not tempt the gods.”
Nikhil ground away at the pastry in his mouth until the memory of sweetness dispersed. The things Sharma said. As if there were a cap on happiness in this world. It was Sharma’s village religion talking again, but there was something more. He sensed in the way Sharma held his hands in his lap, the way he kept to the far side of the bed when they retired for the night, that Tripti had wormed something rotten into him. He was vulnerable that way, Sharma was.
When Nikhil awoke the next morning, Sharma had already departed, but in the bathroom, which he’d lovingly reconstructed from Parisian prints, with a clawfoot tub and a nearly functioning bidet, he found Sharma’s stubble littering the marble sink. Sharma had always been fastidious in the house, taking care to wipe away evidence of his coming and going, and the patches of facial hair offended Nikhil. He studied their formations, searching for patterns. When nothing could be discerned, he called for Kanu to clean the mess.
Only one train went to Bilaspur, a commuter local. For two hours, Nikhil was stuck next to the village yeoman, who’d gone to the city to peddle his chickens and was clutching the feet of the aging pair he’d been unable to sell, and the bleary-eyed dairyman, who smelled of curd and urine. The only distraction was the girl with the henna-tinged hair who’d boarded between stops to plead for money, whose face looked entirely too much like the child he envisioned fathering.
When he reached the Bilaspur terminus, he was relieved to see the rows of wildflowers on either side of the tracks, to smell the bloom of begonias planted by the stationmaster’s post.
It wasn’t difficult finding Sharma’s home. With money from the foundry and regular gifts of cash from Nikhil, Sharma had purchased several hectares of hilltop land and built a concrete slab of a house, garrisoned with a garden of squash, cucumber, and eggplant, and with large windows marking the combined living and dining area. Nikhil found the structure too modern, but that was Sharma’s way—he had never swooned over the old colonials of Kakulia Lane.
From inside the house, Nikhil could hear the BBC broadcast, which was strange given Tripti didn’t understand English. Nikhil tiptoed toward the open living room window, and from there he spied. Sharma’s wife was holding a book on her lap, mouthing back the words of the BBC announcer.
“BER-LIN WALL,” she said. “DOWNING STREET.”
She had a proud bookish nose—adequately sized for the resting of eyeglasses—a forehead that jutted too far forward, reminding Nikhil of a depiction of Neanderthal gatherers, and the slightest of chins, which gave to her appearance a quality of perpetual meekness. Her sari was stained with years of cooking. Her only adornments were the bright red bindi on her forehead and the brass bangles that made music whenever she turned a page.
There were certain topics Nikhil and Sharma had left to the wind, foremost the matter of Sharma’s marriage. In the beginning, Nikhil experienced a shooting pain in his abdomen whenever he thought about Sharma and Tripti coexisting in domestic harmony, though over the past few months that pain had numbed; the less he’d thought of Tripti, the less she existed, but here she was now—the would-be mother of his child. He rapped on the grill of her window.
“Just leave it there,” Tripti said without looking up from her book.
It was the first time she’d ever spoken to him. Her voice, which was composed of rich baritones, seemed rather forceful, and her demeanor, that of the lady of a proper house, left him feeling uncertain about his next move. At last, he said in a Bengali so refined it could have passed for the old tongue of Sanskrit, “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for the bringer of milk. I am not he. Madam, you know me but you do not know me.”
The words had sounded elegant in his head, but when spoken aloud he flushed at their foolishness.
She looked up to study his face, then his outfit, even his shoes now rimmed with the village’s mud. “I know who you are,” she finally said. “Why don’t you come inside?”
He had not planned beyond this moment. He had allowed his feet to step onto the train at Howrah, imagined a brief meeting, a quick exchange at the doorstep, ending with a mutually desirable pact.
“I can’t stay long,” he said. Sharma would be home in another hour, and Nikhil had no wish to see Sharma in the same vicinity as his wife.
While he settled into the living room, Tripti puttered around the kitchen. The house was decorated with woodcarvings and paintings of gods and goddesses. Parvati, the wife of Shiva, smiled beatifically from a gilded frame, and her son the remover of obstacles was frozen inside a copper statuette. From the plans Sharma had gloated over, he knew a hallway connected the three bedrooms of the house—one for Tripti, one for Sharma, and the last a prayer room—and he wondered now who slept where, how their mornings were arranged, what politics were discussed, what arguments were had, where the laundry was piled.
Tripti brought two cups of tea and a plate of sweets. “Homemade,” she said. He’d been raised to fear milk sweets from unfamiliar places, but out of politeness, he took the first bite—a little lumpy, only mildly flavorful.
“Sharma is always praising your cooking,” he said, but it was a lie. They never bothered to discuss Tripti’s cooking; in fact, Nikhil had teased that they were lovers because of his talents in the kitchen. Still, it felt appropriate to compliment this woman, and he continued in this fashion, standing to admire the Parvati painting, which he described as “terribly and modernly artful.”
“Nikhil Babu,” she interrupted. “Are you here to discuss the matter of the child?”
He sighed with relief. Until that moment, he’d been unsure about how to broach the subject.
“You know,” she said. “We discuss our days. We may not be lovers, but we are fair friends.”
He experienced what felt like an arthritic pain in his shoulder, but it was only the collar of his jealousy. At least they were not best friends.
She pointed to the book on her coffee table, an English language primer. “Unfortunately, it’s just not on our horizon. You see, I’m going to university. I shall be a teacher.”
“University,” he said. “But you did not even finish eighth grade.”
“That is true, but at Bilaspur College, the principal is willing to accept students who disp
lay enormous curiosities.”
He found it improbable that she would be able to absorb the principles of higher learning, but he had no particular wish to impede her efforts. Education was a challenge he understood. “You want to improve yourself? Wonderful. If you are with child, I will have tutors come to you. Not professors from Bilaspur College. Real academics from the city.”
But it was as if she had not heard him at all. She submerged a biscuit in her tea and stared out into the garden.
“Whose happiness are you after, Nikhil Babu?” she said. “Yours and yours only?”
He found himself grinding his teeth. The great bane of modernity. Though the country had opened itself to the pleasures of the other world—cream-filled pastries, the films of Godard, a penchant for pristine white-sand beaches—he did not care for the consequences, the dissolution of ordering traditions, with whose loss came poor speech, thoughtless conduct. A village woman addressing him without the slightest deference.
“Perhaps you should enroll in a school for proper manners,” he said.
Tripti eased her teacup down. He followed the geometry of her sloping wrist, but there was no break of anger in her face.
“Listen,” he said. But how could he explain that his want for a child had become rooted in his body, in the bones of his hands and the ridge of his knee, where just that afternoon the girl on the train who’d emerged from the rice fields to beg in the vestibules, whose outstretched palm he would normally loathe—there was no way to lift the country by satisfying beggars—had touched him. Had he not smiled back and touched her hair?
“If you’re planning to catch the last train back,” she said, “it’s best you go now.”
He chewed another of Tripti’s lumpy sweets. When properly masticated, it would have the consistency to be spat and to land right between Tripti’s eyes. But Tripti had turned away from him and resumed her studies. Soon he was all chewed out; he had to show himself out of the house.
By the time he reached the train station, the six o’clock was arriving at the platform. He squatted behind the begonias by the stationmaster’s post and waited to see if Sharma was aboard. With the afternoon’s disappointment, he felt he deserved to see Sharma’s face, even if only covertly. See but remain unseen. In that moment, he could not have explained why he did not peek his head out of the tangle of flowers, though a glimmer of an idea came, something to do with the freedom of others—how, in this village of Sharma’s birth, unknown and burdened, Nikhil could never be himself. Sweat pooled where his hairline had receded. How old the skin of his forehead felt to the touch.
As passengers began to disembark, those who were headed for the city clamored aboard. He looked at the faces passing by but did not see Sharma. The first warning bell sounded, then the second, and the stationmaster announced that the train was nearly city bound.
He saw Sharma as the crowd was thinning out. He was walking with someone dressed in the atrocious nylon pants that were the fashion, and perhaps they were telling jokes, because Sharma was doubled over laughing. In all their evenings together, he couldn’t recall seeing Sharma laugh with so little inhibition as now, so little concern about who would hear that joyous voice—who would think, What are those two doing? He watched Sharma walk along the dirt road toward his house, but it was an entirely different progress; he was stopping to inspect the rows of wildflowers on the path, to chat up the farmer who’d bellowed his name.
He kept watching Sharma’s retreating form until he could see nothing but the faint shape of a man crossing the road. It was then he realized that the city-bound train, the last of the day, had left without him; he sprinted into the stationmaster’s booth and phoned his house. It took several rings for Kanu to answer. “Yello?”
“Oh, Kanu,” he said. “You must send a car. You must get me. I am at Bilaspur.”
The connection was poor, but he could hear Kanu saying, “Babu? What is happening? What is wrong?”
There was no way to express how wounded the afternoon had left him, and he knew the odds of securing a car at this hour, so he yelled back into the phone, “Don’t wait for me, Kanu. Make dinner, go to bed!”
He asked the stationmaster if there were any hotels in the village. A room just till the morning, he said. The stationmaster shrugged and pointed vaguely in the direction of the dirt road.
There were no hotels, he soon discovered. Either he would sleep underneath the stars or he would announce himself at Sharma’s house to spend the night. He was certain he couldn’t do the latter—what a loss of face that would be—but the former with its cold and its unknown night animals, seemed nearly as terrifying.
He paced the town’s only road until he grew hungry. Then he headed in the direction of Sharma’s house, following a field where fireflies alighted on piles of ash. He had no wish to be discovered, but in the waning daylight that would soon turn into uninterrupted darkness, he felt as anonymous as any of the mosquitoes making dinner of his feet.
When he reached the entrance to Sharma’s house, he could smell the evening’s meal: lentil soup, rice softened with clarified butter. He could see the two of them together in the kitchen. Sharma was slicing cucumbers and Tripti was stirring a pot. The way Sharma’s knife passed over the counter seemed like an act of magic. Such grace and precision. Soon, he knew the lentils and rice would be combined, a pair of onions diced, ginger infused into the stew, the table set, the meal consumed. He watched, waiting for the first word to be spoken, but they were silent partners, unified by the rhythm of their hands.
They moved into the dining room with their meal, and he crawled to the open kitchen window. Sharma had left his mother’s necklace on the kitchen counter, next to the cheap china atop the stains of all meals past. What he was seeing couldn’t be dismissed: Sharma had treated his greatest gift as if it were nothing more than a kitchen ornament. Nikhil’s hand snaked through the window to recover the heirloom, and he knocked over a steel pan in the process.
Sharma rushed to the kitchen and began to yell “Thief, stop” as if it were a mantra. Nikhil scurried down the hill, the necklace secure in his grip, and when he paused at the mouth of the town’s only road and turned back, he thought he saw Sharma’s hands in the window, making signs that reminded him of their first meeting, when in the darkness those dark fingers had beckoned. Nikhil almost called back, but too much distance lay between them. Whatever he said now wouldn’t be heard.
EMMA CLINE
Arcadia
FROM Granta
“There’s room for expansion,” Otto said over breakfast, reading the thin-paged free newspaper the organic people sent out to all the farms. He tapped an article with his thick finger, and Peter noticed that Otto’s nail was colored black with nail polish, or a marker. Or maybe it was only a blood blister.
“We draw a leaf or some shit on our label,” Otto said, squinting at the page. “Even if it just kind of looks like this. People wouldn’t know the difference.”
Heddy simmered slices of lemon at the stove, poking at the pan with a chopstick. She’d changed into a sweater dress and her legs were rashy. Every morning since she found out she was pregnant, she’d been drinking hot lemon water. “It corrects your pH levels,” she’d explained to Peter. She used the hot water to wash down all her prenatal vitamins, big dun-colored pills that smelled like fish food, pills that promised to soak the baby in minerals and proteins. It was strange for Peter to imagine their baby’s fingernails hardening inside her, its muscles uncoiling. The unbelievable lozenge of its heart.
Heddy pursed her lips sideways at her brother. “That’s kind of stupid, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, why don’t we just get certified, the real way?”
Otto fluttered his hand. “Got a few thousand lying around? You’re certainly not contributing.”
“I’m broadening my mind.” She was starting her first semester at the junior college in town.
“You know what broadens after that?” Otto said. “Your ass.”
�
�Fuck you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I had to hire more people and that costs.”
Peter had seen these new workers: a bearded man and a woman, who’d moved into one of the trailers a few weeks ago. They had a young boy with them.
“It all costs,” Otto said.
Heddy narrowed her eyes but turned back to the pan, intent on fishing out the lemon.
“Anyway,” Otto continued, “we can still say ‘natural’ and all the rest.”
“Sounds good,” Peter said, trying to be enthusiastic. Otto was already shuffling the pages, on to something new. He seemed to like Peter as much as he liked anyone. When he found out that Peter had gotten Heddy pregnant, it was his idea that Peter move in and work for him. “I guess she’s eighteen,” Otto had said. “No longer my worry. But if I see so much as a bruise, I’ll end you.”
Heddy put her hand on Peter’s shoulder: “He’s teasing,” she said.
Peter had moved into Heddy’s childhood bedroom, still cluttered with her porcelain dolls and crumbling prom corsages, and tried to ignore the fact of Otto’s room just down the hall. Otto managed the hundred and fifty acres of orchard surrounding the house. The land was near enough to the North Coast that great schooners of fog soaked the mornings with silent snow. When it rained, the creek outran its banks, a muddy, frigid surge that swamped the rows of apple trees. Peter preferred it up here, the thousand shades of gray and green instead of Fresno with the sameness of heat and dust.
By the time he and Otto had finished breakfast—eggs from the chickens, fried in oil and too salty—Heddy had gone up to their bedroom and come down with all her things, her raincoat already zipped, a canvas backpack over her shoulder. He knew she’d already packed it with notebooks, a separate one for each class, and her chunky cubes of Post-its. No doubt she’d devised a color-coded system for her pens.