by Leah Franqui
As soon as his body stopped trembling, he looked out of the window as the cat masticated happily, rubbing her entire face in her bowl. He had already fed her once today, he thought vaguely. She would grow fat and no one would love her.
They were still standing there on his lawn, looking lost. He opened his door.
“Excuse me, but who are you?” he asked them, politely, he hoped, trying to remain calm despite his temper still simmering.
The woman smiled crookedly. “We were about to knock on your door and ask you that same question.”
“Where is—”
“We don’t know.” This came from the boy, with something like deep petrified panic soaking his accented tone. Jake hardly thought one rogue Indian widow roaming the streets of Los Angeles should be the inspiration of this much terror; in fact, it almost made him laugh.
“We were giving her a tour. Satya”—the woman gestured to the boy—“is the tour guide and I’m the companion. Don’t ask. We started in New York and now we’re here. We don’t know Mrs. Sengupta very well, but when we got in the cab this morning she gave this address. I’m Rebecca. This is Satya. So who are you?”
Jake couldn’t think of a good response to that question. So instead, he asked another one.
“Would you like some coffee?”
Within fifteen minutes, they were seated once again in his living room, sans widow, sans Bhim’s ashes, with beverages. Satya, the boy, looked down with an expression of complete despair. Rebecca watched him nervously.
“We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”
“How?” Rebecca shrugged. Satya nodded. “It’s not so easy, to find people. They get lost. Sometimes you never see them again. How will I explain this to Ronnie? Just now she was here and just now she is gone. Where did she go? She ran so fast, I could not follow her.”
“She has money. She knows the name of the hotel, it was on the emailed itinerary and we printed her a copy, I know she keeps it in her bag. She speaks English, although here Spanish might help more—”
“She doesn’t speak Spanish!”
“She’s going to be all right, Satya. I was joking. She’s survived this long in the world, right?”
“You don’t understand what she is like, what these women are like, they are not like you, they can’t just do things!”
“Maybe not. But she arranged this trip on her own. And she chose to run and I personally would like to know why. Wouldn’t you?” He nodded. They both turned to Jake. He was struck by what a strange pairing they were, this graceful woman, poised and well put together, sitting next to this small man, his shirt a loud and violent mix of plaid colors, his pants unfashionably high-waisted jeans, and his face painfully anxious, boyish, with a sweaty brow.
“Well. I guess she left because . . . Look, my name is Jake Schwartz and her son, Rahi, who I called Bhim, we were in love. He was my great love.” Satya’s face had already begun to shrivel in disgust, and Jake stopped. He would not do this. He didn’t have to explain himself to anyone, least of all this odd pair of strangers. Rebecca caught his withdrawal and she hit Satya’s arm.
“Stop it.”
“He is one of those perverts!”
“Okay, great, he’s a pervert. Just shut up. You can deal with that in your own time, okay? You want to hate gay people, great, but keep your mouth shut here. We’re in his house and we need to find Mrs. Sengupta. Okay?” Satya pressed his lips together, angry. Rebecca turned back to Jake. “Sorry. Go on?”
“Bhim came out to his parents, and they rejected him. They told him never to come home. So he didn’t, and he hadn’t told me much about them, and we never talked about them again. And then he had a heart attack and he died and I . . . I called his parents . . . but his father hung up on me. I thought they didn’t care. But she showed up today and I knew, well, that’s Bhim’s mom. Who else shows up in a sari uninvited? And she wants his body so she can dump it in the Ganges or whatever the fuck and pray that the next incarnation turns out straight. So there you go. More coffee?”
They finished their drinks in silence with the purring cat sprawled contentedly on the counter. Rebecca thanked him, and Satya nodded, still meeting his gaze only in short bursts, as if Jake would seduce him with prolonged eye contact. Jake couldn’t summon the energy to care. He was suddenly exhausted. He felt as if a weight had been lifted off his chest, but he also felt hollow, like one of Bhim’s snail shells. There was one in the box with Bhim’s ashes, he remembered. She could have that, too. He had dozens.
As they rose to go, Rebecca turned back to him.
“She’s leaving Los Angeles in two days, but if she wants to come back, to apologize or, or anything, could I bring her? Would you allow that?”
Jake shrugged. “She won’t want to come back.”
“But if she does?”
He shrugged again. A memory flooded him: it was Bhim, lying in his arms on the sofa, slightly drunk, telling him about his mother, about how she had been the only soft thing in his life before he had met Jake. Jake had asked if Bhim was calling him fat and they had laughed and kissed and the night had gone on and Bhim had not mentioned his mother again.
“She can come. But she won’t. She got what she came for.”
Pival had not run in so long that her lungs burned like mad and her breath came hard and her heart felt like it would give up pumping at any moment. Her skirts weighed her down, holding back her body. She missed the days of her youth when she had run in shorts and a T-shirt and felt weightless and free. Now everything felt like it was pulling at her, and in her hands, her son’s featherlight ashes were made of lead.
He had given them to her, Jake, the evil person who had taken Rahi, only he hadn’t seemed so evil as she sat in the middle of his living room. She had looked around the room because she didn’t want to look in his face and all she could think was, This looks like a place Rahi would like to live, and then she understood that it was the kind of place she, too, would like to live in, with all its glorious light, and she understood with shocking clarity that she hated her home in Kolkata and she had never known that before. And her words about Rahi’s liking the place had jumped out of her. She didn’t know why she would say that there was something about this life with this man that her son had liked, because clearly he had been manipulated and seduced, hadn’t he?
He had had wide large brown eyes, Jake, and she could see how Rahi would have liked those, too. Looking at him, all she could imagine was what Rahi saw, what love had poured from her son like milk onto this man. She wanted to hate him, she did hate him, but she realized she was looking for things to love as well, the things her son had seen. When she had told him their love was wrong she had spoken more to herself than to him, reminding herself. But then he had given her the ashes and she knew that she had never needed to go on this trip and confront him for keeping her son from her. Here Rahi was, hers for the taking. There was nothing that had held her from her son, ever, but herself.
She had suddenly thought that she had done this trip for nothing. She could have gotten the truth about Rahi, gotten his ashes, and killed herself months ago. But she knew that she wouldn’t have wanted any of that, that she was happy with the way things had been and that she wouldn’t have changed it. This epiphany had made her dizzy and nauseated, and she had had to leave. She was crying, she knew, from the new things making space in her head. They pushed out old thoughts, which turned to water and leaked out of her eyes. She was happy she had taken the trip, had come all the way here. She was happy she had been alive all this time to do so.
Pival had run without looking to see where she was going. She had run down sunny streets with small houses and then down cement sidewalks with strange faces that stared at her as she ran, but she clutched the box to her chest and kept running and it was only when she felt that she might collapse and spill Rahi’s ashes here instead of at home that she stopped and tried to catch her breath. She found a tree off the road, and under it a large rock, and she sat down, her
head tucked between her knees. She held the box inside the curve of her body between her chest and her thighs. Her lungs, so underdeveloped, according to so many doctors and healers, had gotten her quite a long way.
Pival straightened up and felt something shift inside the box. Her heart began to race again. Had he tricked her? Was there something else in here, something to get her out of his house while Rahi’s real ashes were somewhere else? Or maybe he hadn’t been cremated at all? With shaking hands she opened the box. Yes, it was the ash that came from the cremation of a body. She had seen that enough times in her life to recognize it. Nestled into it was a small plastic bag. She delicately fished it out, making sure that the ashes clinging to the sides were brushed neatly back into their box. She shut the lid and looked at the bag. It was a small shell. This must have been something that mattered to Rahi. It was something precious to him that this man, Jake, had included with his ashes to keep him company. She vaguely remembered something in some letter about snails, about his studies and his work, which he discussed so rarely that she wasn’t sure whether her lack of understanding was due to her ignorance or his reluctance to explain. Perhaps this small creature had been Rahi’s life, his study, the subject of his doctorate. And she never would have known, if this man had not put it in the box to keep her dead son company.
She could not cry more. The breakneck run with the wind in her face had dried up all her tears. Pival looked around, wondering what to do now. Suddenly she realized that she was alone, which had been, of course, her intention, but the implications of that had not occurred to her until this moment. She was alone. Satya and Rebecca were far away and who knew where they had gone. After all, she had been the one to leave them. They could be anywhere by now, looking for her, perhaps, or maybe not. The world around her seemed to be suddenly a very dangerous place, because she was truly alone in it. Surely she should be used to that?
She wondered if she should simply kill herself now. She knew the truth, she had confronted the man and taken back her son. The next step was to die. She looked out onto the hazy mess of traffic in front of her, overlooking the highway. The cars were driving quickly, speeding down the road. She could jump out into them and that would be that. She could wait for a truck, something large, and take her son’s ashes and they could go away together, they could take a trip together. She had never gone anywhere with Rahi. Even this trip had been, she realized, with stunning clarity, a wild attempt to be with him, to see the country she had lost him to. When they had sent Rahi away they never knew he wouldn’t be coming back. She couldn’t blame him, not when she had seen how people were here, how easy it could be to be a person without the rigid structures of duty and the crushing weight of other people’s opinions.
She could not survive here, she thought, nor thrive as Rahi had. America wasn’t the country for her, but for the first time she did not resent it for taking her child. America had been a much better place for Rahi to be.
The trucks sprinted past on the road. Pival watched them, her body frozen. Why didn’t she do it? All she had to do was walk into the path of a moving car and it would be over. She would never have to feel anything, ever again. She couldn’t make herself move. And then at last she knew it was because she didn’t want to go.
She had thought she wanted to end her life because it was a life not worth living. This was still true. She had no obligations left in the world, no ties pinning her into place. No one she truly cared about who still existed. Nothing about her life had changed, really, since she had come on this trip, but now she was unwilling to end the pain. The pain that had changed, become a hunger. There was more that she wanted now than death.
Pival turned away from the highway and walked toward the street, still clutching the box. People stared at her as they passed her in their cars. There were no other pedestrians on the roads. What a strange place this was, without people in it. She looked out at the road. She stepped toward it and flung her hand up, as she had seen Rebecca do. Her body swayed almost into the path of oncoming cars, but the taxi that saw her stopped and she got into it, and told the driver where she wanted to go.
When they arrived at Jake’s house again, Pival realized that little time had passed. The sun was high in the sky, just starting to shift west. It was a very green part of town, she thought, where other things she had seen through the cab windows had looked dry and brown and hard. She paid the cab with money she had tucked into the waistband of her sari. Her mother had carried all her money this way, she remembered, keeping her money close to her body in a gesture of protection. Pival had always done the same, an unconscious repetition.
Here she was, she thought as she once again crossed the infinite expanse of Jake’s lawn and with trembling legs returned to the doorway of his home, caught between the little gesture left behind of her mother and the nothing she had left of her son. She rang the bell and waited.
He came to the door warily, like a wild animal. She held the box of ashes out in front of her like a talisman, though whether it was to ward him off or beg him to let her in she wasn’t quite sure. He looked at her and took the box, cradling it like it was something precious. This was how he had thought of her son. Something precious. The thought did not disgust her. She still did not understand what had been between them or how Rahi had loved someone in this way, but this was the only person who existed who still cared this way for her son, other than herself. She was not as completely alone as she thought. He stood aside, once again, and let her in.
This time they did not sit on the couch. This time he kept on walking and gestured wordlessly for her to follow. He opened a door to a room and turned on the light. It was packed full of boxes, neat cubes of plastic all labeled.
“This was Bhim’s. All of it. I kept it because, I don’t know. You can look, if you want. See what there is. There was no one else to take it, so I took it.”
“It was not here?”
“It was in Berkeley. That was where Bhim was doing his research. He had an apartment there.”
She had not known this. She had not known anything.
“He did not live with you?”
“He came on the weekends. He lived up in Berkeley, though. He was close to finishing his PhD. His professors came down, for the funeral. The service.”
“There was a service?”
“There were a lot of things.”
They stood, wordlessly, looking at the boxes together. It was a sea, but a carefully organized one. What would have happened to her things, had she died as she was supposed to? There would be no one who cared about her to pack away her life into boxes and keep it safe. Here was Rahi’s life, waiting for her all this time.
“Thank you.” She said it to Jake, although she meant more. She had never thought she would thank this man, and now it was all she wanted to do. “May I look?” Her voice wavered as she spoke, that tremble that Ram had mocked and hated so. Jake looked at her with something in his eyes like sympathy. What was he seeing in her? She hoped it was Rahi. That was the best of her, after all.
“It is yours to see,” he said, and turned away, moving to go. She looked at the expanse in front of her. There was nothing of Rahi left at the house in Kolkata. Ram had made sure of that, clearing his room as soon as he had died and giving all his belongings to beggars on the streets, leaving his prized possessions and childhood treasures out for the rag pickers to harvest. She had watched them scavenge through her son’s early life, fighting over his baby clothing and ripping apart his books until she couldn’t stand to watch anymore, until she thought she might scream. It had been the right thing to do, Ram had insisted. She wondered what he had meant by right.
“May I stay?” Her voice was stronger this time. She didn’t want to go back to the hotel. She wanted to stay here, near all the things that were left of her son, including this man. He looked at her and hesitated.
“I don’t know.”
“Please? I am very sorry for what I said to you and for taking his ashes. But
I have brought them back, and if it is not trouble for you, I would very much want to stay. Please.” She was not begging, but she would, soon. She would go on her knees to stay here. If she wasn’t going to die, she needed to see how her son had lived. He looked at her with so much pain, this man, this boy, really, for he was not much older than Rahi. He was as broken as she was, she knew.
“I’ll make up the couch. You can sleep there.” An Indian boy would have given her the bed. She didn’t care. She would sleep on the floor if she needed to.
“Thank you.” She turned back to the room of things.
“Did you call them? Your friends?”
She started. What friends? “Oh. I did not.” She had not even thought of Rebecca and Satya. Now she felt ashamed. They would be worried for her, terrified. “May I use your phone?” He nodded. It rang and rang and then a breathless Satya picked up.
“Madam? Is that you?”
“Hello, yes, it is me. I am sorry. All is all right.”
“Where are you, madam? I am coming, I am coming just now.”
“I am at the man’s house, from this morning. I am there only.”
“I am coming just now.”
“No. I will stay here. Thank you. I am sorry for worries, for giving you fear. But I am all right now. You may come in the morning only, or not at all.”
“But, madam, he is a pervert! And the tour!”
“My tour is done. Thank you, Satya. Thank Rebecca. God bless you both.”
She thanked Jake and turned back to the room. Like an explorer on the edge of the jungle, she stepped in, desperate to see what she could find.
She never made it to the couch. She fell asleep hours later, clutching a paper on saltwater plants that she had been struggling to read and now let rest against her face as she lay on the floor of the room surrounded by the artifacts of her son’s life and felt at home for the first time in years. She felt like she was floating in the ocean, and it was warm, and soft, and it accepted her, and she was not alone.