“I don’t eat here. I eat in the kitchen,” Alipio said.
Mrs. Zafra was going to say something, but she held back. Monica was talking again.
“But it must be hard, that you cannot deny. Living from day to day. Alone. On what? Memories? Cabinets and a refrigerator full of food? I repeat, I admire you, sir. You’ve found your place. You’re home safe. And at peace.” She paused again, this time to sweep back the strand of hair that had fallen on her brow.
Alipio had a drugged look. He seemed to have lost the drift of her speech. What was she talking about? Groceries? Baseball? He was going to say, you like baseball also? You like tuna? I have all kinds of fish. Get them at bargain price from Safeway. But, obviously, it was not the proper thing to say.
“Well, I guess, one gets used to anything. Even loneliness,” Monica said in a listless, dispirited tone, all the fever in her voice suddenly gone.
“God dictates,” Alipio said, feeling he had found his way again and he was now on the right track. What a girl. If she had only a little more flesh. And color.
Monica leaned back on her chair, exhausted. Mrs. Zafra was staring at her in disbelief, in grievous disappointment. What happened, you were going great, what suddenly hit you that you had to stop, give up, defeated, her eyes were asking and Monica shook her head in a gesture that quite clearly said, no, I can’t do it, I can’t anymore, I give up.
Their eyes kept on talking a deaf-mute dialogue. Mrs. Zafra: Just when everything was going fine, you quit. We’ve reached this far and you quit. I could have done it my way, directly, honestly. Not that what you were doing was dishonest, you were great, and now look at that dumb expression in your eyes. Monica: I can’t. I can’t anymore. It’s too much.
“How long have you been in the States?” Alipio asked Monica.
“For almost a year now!” Mrs. Zafra screamed and Alipio was visibly shaken, but she didn’t care. This was the right moment. She would take it from here whether Monica liked it or not. She was going to do it her way. “How long exactly, let’s see Moni, when did you get your last extension?”
“Extension?” Alipio repeated the word. It had such a familiar ring like “visa” or “social security,” it broke into his consciousness like a touch from Seniang’s fingers. It was almost intimate. “You mean . . .”
“That’s right. She’s here as a temporary visitor. As a matter of fact, she came on a tourist visa. Carlito and I sponsored her coming, filed all the papers, and all she had to do was wait another year in the Philippines, but she couldn’t wait. She came here as a tourist. Now she’s in trouble.”
“What trouble?” Alipio asked.
“She has to go back. To the Philippines. She can’t stay here any longer.”
“I have only two days left,” Monica said, her head in her hands. “And I don’t want to go back.”
Alipio glanced at the wall clock. It was past three. They had been talking for hours. It was visas right from the start. Marriages. The long years and the o.t.’s. Now it was visas again. Were his ears playing a game? They might well, as they sometimes did, but his eyes surely were not. He could see this woman very plainly, sobbing on the table. She was in great trouble. Visas. Oh, oh! Now he knew what it was all about. His gleaming dentures showed a half smile. He turned to Mrs. Zafra.
“Did you come here . . .” he began, but Mrs. Zafra quickly interrupted him.
“Yes, Alipio. Forgive us. As soon as we arrived, I wanted to tell you without much talk, ‘I’ll tell you why we’re here. I have heard about you. Not only from Carlito, but from other Filipinos who know you, how you’re living here in San Francisco alone, a widower, and we heard of the accident, your stay in the hospital, when you came back, everything. Here’s my sister, a teacher in the Philippines, never married, worried to death because she’s being deported unless something turned up like she could marry a U.S. citizen, like I did, like your first wife Seniang, like many others have done, are doing in this exact moment, who knows? Now look at her, she’s good, religious, any arrangement you wish, she’d accept it. But I didn’t have a chance. You welcomed us just like old friends, relatives. Later, every time I began to say something, she interrupted me. I was afraid she had changed her mind and then she began to talk, then stopped without finishing what she really wanted to say, why we came to see you, and so forth.”
“No, no!” Monica cried, raising her head, her eyes red from weeping, her face wet with tears. “You’re such a good man. We couldn’t do this to you. We’re wrong. We started wrong. We should’ve been more honest, but I was ashamed, I was afraid! Let’s go! Let’s go!”
“Where you going?” Alipio asked.
“Anywhere,” Monica answered. “Forgive us. Forgive me, Mister Alipio.”
“What’s to forgive? Don’t go. We have dinner. But first, merienda. I take merienda. You do also, don’t you?”
The sisters exchanged glances, their eyes chattering away.
Alipio was chuckling. He wanted to say, talk of lightning striking same fellow twice, but thought better of it. A bad thing to say. Seniang was not lightning. At times only. Mostly his fault. And this girl Moni? Nice name also. How can she be lightning?
Mrs. Zafra picked up her purse and before anyone could stop her, she was opening the door. “Where’s the nearest grocery store around here?” she asked, but like Pilate, she didn’t wait for an answer.
“Come back, come here back, we got lotsa food,” Alipio called after her, but he might just as well have been calling to the Pacific Ocean. Mrs. Zafra took her time although the grocery store was only a few blocks away. When she returned, her arms were full of groceries in paper bags. The two met her on the porch.
“Kumusta,” she asked, speaking for the first time in the dialect as Monica relieved her of her load. The one word question meant much more than “how are you” or “how has it been?”
Alipio replied, as always, in English. “God dictates,” he said, his dentures sounding faintly as he smacked his lips, but he was not looking at the foodstuff in the paper bags Monica was carrying. His eyes were on her legs, in the direction she was taking. She knew where the kitchen was, of course. He just wanted to be sure she wouldn’t lose her way. Sometimes he went to the bedroom by mistake. Lotsa things happen to men of his age.
SURROUNDED BY SLEEP
Akhil Sharma
One August afternoon, when Ajay was ten years old, his elder brother, Aman, dove into a pool and struck his head on the cement bottom. For three minutes, he lay there unconscious. Two boys continued to swim, kicking and splashing, until finally Aman was spotted below them. Water had entered through his nose and mouth. It had filled his stomach. His lungs collapsed. By the time he was pulled out, he could no longer think, talk, chew, or roll over in his sleep.
Ajay’s family had moved from India to Queens, New York, two years earlier. The accident occurred during the boys’ summer vacation, on a visit with their aunt and uncle in Arlington, Virginia. After the accident, Ajay’s mother came to Arlington, where she waited to see if Aman would recover. At the hospital, she told the doctors and nurses that her son had been accepted into the Bronx High School of Science, in the hope that by highlighting his intelligence she would move them to make a greater effort on his behalf. Within a few weeks of the accident, the insurance company said that Aman should be transferred to a less expensive care facility, a long-term one. But only a few of these were any good, and those were full, and Ajay’s mother refused to move Aman until a space opened in one of them. So she remained in Arlington, and Ajay stayed, too, and his father visited from Queens on the weekends when he wasn’t working. Ajay was enrolled at the local public school and in September he started fifth grade.
AKHIL SHARMA was born in Delhi, India, in 1971. He immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight. His novel, An Obedient Father, was published in the United States in June of 2000. One of the most acclaimed debuts of 2000, it won the prestigious PEN Hemingway Award and the Susan Kaufman PEN
Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Award Winners, and textbooks on creative writing.
Before the accident, Ajay had never prayed much. In India, he and his brother used to go with their mother to the temple every Tuesday night, but that was mostly because there was a good dosa restaurant nearby. In America, his family went to a temple only on important holy days and birthdays. But shortly after Ajay’s mother came to Arlington, she moved into the room that he and his brother had shared during the summer and made an altar in a corner. She threw an old flowered sheet over a cardboard box that had once held a television. On top, she put a clay lamp, an incense-stick holder, and postcards depicting various gods. There was also a postcard of Mahatma Gandhi. She explained to Ajay that God could take any form; the picture of Mahatma Gandhi was there because he had appeared to her in a dream after the accident and told her that Aman would recover and become a surgeon. Now she and Ajay prayed for at least half an hour before the altar every morning and night.
At first, she prayed with absolute humility. “Whatever you do will be good because you are doing it,” she murmured to the postcards of Ram and Shivaji, daubing their lips with water and rice. Mahatma Gandhi got only water, because he did not like to eat. As weeks passed and Aman did not recover in time to return to the Bronx High School of Science for the first day of classes, his mother began doing things that called attention to her piety. She sometimes held the prayer lamp until it blistered her palms. Instead of kneeling before the altar, she lay face down. She fasted twice a week. Her attempts to sway God were not so different from Ajay’s performing somersaults to amuse his aunt, and they made God seem human to Ajay.
One morning, as Ajay knelt before the altar, he traced an Om, a crucifix, and a Star of David into the pile of the carpet. Beneath these, he traced an “S,” for Superman, inside an upside-down triangle. His mother came up beside him.
“What are you praying for?” she asked. She had her hat on, a thick gray knitted one that a man might wear. The tracings went against the weave of the carpet and were darker than the surrounding nap. Pretending to examine them, Ajay leaned forward and put his hand over the “S.” His mother did not mind the Christian and Jewish symbols—they were for commonly recognized gods, after all—but she could not tolerate his praying to Superman. She’d caught him doing so once, several weeks earlier, and had become very angry, as if Ajay’s faith in Superman made her faith in Ram ridiculous. “Right in front of God,” she had said several times.
Ajay, in his nervousness, spoke the truth. “I’m asking God to give me a hundred per cent on the math test.”
His mother was silent for a moment. “What if God says you can have the math grade but then Aman will have to be sick a little while longer?” she asked.
Ajay kept quiet. He could hear cars on the road outside. He knew that his mother wanted to bewail her misfortune before God so that God would feel guilty. He looked at the postcard of Mahatma Gandhi. It was a black-and-white photo of him walking down a city street with an enormous crowd trailing behind him. Ajay thought of how, before the accident, Aman had been so modest that he would not leave the bathroom until he was fully dressed. Now he had rashes on his penis from the catheter that drew his urine into a translucent bag hanging from the guardrail of his bed.
His mother asked again, “Would you say, ‘Let him be sick a little while longer’?”
“Are you going to tell me the story about Uncle Naveen again?” he asked.
“Why shouldn’t I? When I was sick, as a girl, your uncle walked seven times around the temple and asked God to let him fail his exams just as long as I got better.”
“If I failed the math test and told you that story, you’d slap me and ask what one has to do with the other.”
His mother turned to the altar. “What sort of sons did you give me, God?” she asked. “One you drown, the other is this selfish fool.”
“I will fast today so that God puts some sense in me,” Ajay said, glancing away from the altar and up at his mother. He liked the drama of fasting.
“No, you are a growing boy.” His mother knelt down beside him and said to the altar, “He is stupid, but he has a good heart.”
Prayer, Ajay thought, should appeal with humility and an open heart to some greater force. But the praying that he and his mother did felt sly and confused. By treating God as someone to bargain with, it seemed to him, they prayed as if they were casting a spell.
This meant that it was possible to do away with the presence of God entirely. For example, Ajay’s mother had recently asked a relative in India to drive a nail into a holy tree and tie a saffron thread to the nail on Aman’s behalf. Ajay invented his own ritual. On his way to school each morning, he passed a thick tree rooted half on the sidewalk and half on the road. One day, Ajay got the idea that if he circled the tree seven times, touching the north side every other time, he would have a lucky day. From then on, he did it every morning, although he felt embarrassed and always looked around beforehand to make sure no one was watching.
One night, Ajay asked God whether he minded being prayed to only in need.
“You think of your toe only when you stub it,” God replied. God looked like Clark Kent. He wore a gray cardigan, slacks, and thick glasses, and had a forelock that curled just as Ajay’s did.
God and Ajay had begun talking occasionally after Aman drowned. Now they talked most nights while Ajay lay in bed and waited for sleep. God sat at the foot of Ajay’s mattress. His mother’s mattress lay parallel to his, a few feet away. Originally, God had appeared to Ajay as Krishna, but Ajay had felt foolish discussing brain damage with a blue God who held a flute and wore a dhoti.
“You’re not angry with me for touching the tree and all that?”
“No. I’m flexible.”
“I respect you. The tree is just a way of praying to you,” Ajay assured God.
God laughed. “I am not too caught up in formalities.”
Ajay was quiet. He was convinced that he had been marked as special by Aman’s accident. The beginnings of all heroes are distinguished by misfortune. Superman and Batman were both orphans. Krishna was separated from his parents at birth. The god Ram had to spend fourteen years in a forest. Ajay waited to speak until it would not appear improper to begin talking about himself.
“How famous will I be?” he asked, finally.
“I can’t tell you the future,” God answered.
Ajay asked, “Why not?”
“Even if I told you something, later I might change my mind.”
“But it might be harder to change your mind after you have said something will happen.”
God laughed again. “You’ll be so famous that fame will be a problem.”
Ajay sighed. His mother snorted and rolled over.
“I want Aman’s drowning to lead to something,” he said to God.
“He won’t be forgotten.”
“I can’t just be famous, though. I need to be rich, too, to take care of Mummy and Daddy and pay Aman’s hospital bills.”
“You are always practical.” God had a soulful and pitying voice and God’s sympathy made Ajay imagine himself as a truly tragic figure, like Amitabh Bachchan in the movie “Trishul.”
“I have responsibilities,” Ajay said. He was so excited at the thought of his possible greatness that he knew he would have difficulty sleeping. Perhaps he would have to go read in the bathroom.
“You can hardly imagine the life ahead,” God said.
Even though God’s tone promised greatness, the idea of the future frightened Ajay. He opened his eyes. There was light coming from the street. The room was cold and had a smell of must and incense. His aunt and uncle’s house was a narrow two-story home next to a four-lane road. The apartment building with the pool where Aman had drowned was a few blocks up the road, one in a cluster of tall brick buildings
with stucco fronts. Ajay pulled the blanket tighter around him. In India, he could not have imagined the reality of his life in America: the thick smell of meat in the school cafeteria, the many television channels. And, of course, he could not have imagined Aman’s accident, or the hospital where he spent so much time.
The hospital was boring. Vinod, Ajay’s cousin, picked him up after school and dropped him off there almost every day. Vinod was twenty-two. In addition to attending county college and studying computer programming, he worked at a 7-Eleven near Ajay’s school. He often brought Ajay hot chocolate and a comic from the store, which had to be returned, so Ajay was not allowed to open it until he had wiped his hands.
Vinod usually asked him a riddle on the way to the hospital. “Why are manhole covers round?” It took Ajay half the ride to admit that he did not know. He was having difficulty talking. He didn’t know why. The only time he could talk easily was when he was with God. The explanation he gave himself for this was that, just as he couldn’t chew when there was too much in his mouth, he couldn’t talk when there were too many thoughts in his head.
When Ajay got to Aman’s room, he greeted him as if he were all right. “Hello, lazy. How much longer are you going to sleep?” His mother was always there. She got up and hugged Ajay. She asked how school had been, and he didn’t know what to say. In music class, the teacher sang a song about a sailor who had bared his breast before jumping into the sea. This had caused the other students to giggle. But Ajay could not say the word “breast” to his mother without blushing. He had also cried. He’d been thinking of how Aman’s accident had made his own life mysterious and confused. What would happen next? Would Aman die or would he go on as he was? Where would they live? Usually when Ajay cried in school, he was told to go outside. But it had been raining, and the teacher had sent him into the hallway. He sat on the floor and wept. Any mention of this would upset his mother. And so he said nothing had happened that day.
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