In Rishi’s head, a bell clanged. His first thought: Leave now. His second: What about Preeti Patel? Preeti sat framed on Sen’s desk, window-facing, oblivious. His third thought: Get. Out. Now. And he did, on mouse feet, soundless, thankfully, on the Persian rug.
“Rishi-bhai!”
Rishi stopped, considered making a run for it, but heard footsteps behind him. Sally, smoothing down her hair, gave him a pursed little smile as she passed, pulling down the sleeves of her sweater. Vikram Sen followed, holding his hand out to Rishi, his eyes fevered and glassy, his smile wide.
“Rishi-bhai! So good to see you! Come.” Rishi’s feet stayed planted on the rug. He felt sound vibrate against his lips but had no idea what he’d managed to say. Sen bustled him toward his office, a brotherly hand on his back. “Such industry!” he proclaimed. “At work on a Saturday? I see good things for you, yaar. Come in! Let’s talk!”
In his office, “Have a seat, man. Sally! Two chai, please!”
Sen motioned for Rishi to sit. Rishi avoided the sofa, steered himself to the smaller desk chair, and Sen propped himself on his desk, his knees just inches from Rishi’s nose. Rishi opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“So,” Sen said. “What brings you in on a beautiful Saturday afternoon?”
Rishi shrugged, said, “Work, I guess,” and felt utterly lame. “And you?”
“I live here now.”
Rishi smirked.
“No, actually, I live here now.”
Just then Sally entered with two steaming teacups on a tray. She placed them on the desk with a sugar pot and teaspoons and left. “Thank you, Sally!” Sen called after her. When the door clicked shut, he got up, walked the expanse of rug, and lay down, flat on his back, sock feet flexed to the ceiling, and sighed.
“Shoes off, please, Rishi-bhai.” He sighed harder, as if trying to expel some blockage of the spirit. He pressed his hands to his eyes. “What is this life, yaar?”
After a murky silence, Rishi rose. “I should go.”
“Stay. Stay!”
Rishi sat. “Everything all right at home?” And then, “Maybe it’s none of my business.”
“No, it isn’t. Any of your business. And no, it isn’t all right at home.” He opened his eyes. “What has Kavya told you?”
“Nothing.”
“Really?” He turned to his side now, propped his head on his hand. “I thought ladies talked.”
“Kavya’s been busy. We have a kid now.”
Sen seemed not to hear this, neither congratulated him nor asked for clarification. He lay back down. “Preeti was cheating on me.”
Rishi fought off a fresh impulse to run.
“The illustrious, the beautiful, the breathtaking Dr. Preeti Patel,” Sen continued, “was seeing another man. A married man. Before she met me. After she met me. And now? Who knows?”
Rishi’s mouth went dry. “Oh.”
“Oh, indeed.”
“And—and so you’re—”
“And now she says she isn’t seeing him, not since the wedding. I think I believe her. Why would she lie? Why not go and be with this other man? Free country, yaar, you know?”
Rishi clung fiercely to the positive. “So she’s not seeing him.”
“We’re getting better.”
“But you live at the office.”
“More or less. Not much different from when I lived at home.”
“But—” Rishi cleared his throat. “Oh.”
“Sally?” Sen cut in. “Sally is a girl I love. Sally is my survival, my right-hand woman. But she isn’t my wife.” He glanced over at Rishi. “You’re a handsome fellow, Rishi-bhai. You must know what I mean. Girls you like, girls you love, girls you go to bed with. And then there’s your wife. No one compares with the wife, right?”
The truth was, there had never been anyone after Kavya. He tried to imagine himself with another woman, with any of the women at Weebies who always had something to say to Rishi, whose eyes crinkled with pleasure at his arrival. He couldn’t. He tried again: The redhead with the nose ring? The one with the long curly hair and the tattoo that crept up her neck? Surely all men harbored secret cravings for other women. Surely he too had dallied with such thoughts, but they skittered away, untraceable now. Sitting in Vik Sen’s office, Rishi couldn’t muster an ounce of desire for any other woman, theoretical or real. A sweet chai-making blonde in a soft gray sweater? Nothing. As he watched Sen rub at his eyelids, flex and point his toes, Rishi felt the morning’s dissipated impulses gather like so many metal filings to a magnet, joining to form one clear and revelatory idea: Kavya was everything. He wanted nothing but her, frustrations and all. Regardless of whether she needed him, he needed her.
He needed to get home to Kavya, to the boy, as far as possible from this desert of parking lots and office space, back to the hectic and stifling Saturday sidewalks, the cool shadows of his home, his messy kitchen, a mug of tea.
“Stop,” Sen said. “Before you leave. Why did you come here today, Rishi-bhai?”
Rishi shook his head. “I don’t know. I needed to work. The VOC project—”
“Is causing you distress. I can tell. Is that why you came to see me?”
Rishi nodded.
“You’re afraid I’ve given you an impossible task,” Sen said. “You’re afraid you’ll fail.”
Not only this, Rishi wanted to tell him, but when he failed, he’d lose this chance, his one chance, to do something real at Weebies, to be a part of something bigger than his beige office and his duct-simulation software.
“Don’t be afraid of failing, Rishi-bhai,” Sen said, reading his thoughts. “I led four different companies to the brink of destruction before they hired me at Weebies. Did you know that? It’s not in my company bio. But it’s why they hired me. Failure is knowledge. Nothing more. A little bad luck, some stupid decisions. Nothing more.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t believe me.”
Rishi shrugged.
“You’ve been to India?” Sen asked. “So you’ve seen those buses, right? The buses with the men hanging off the sides?”
“Sure.”
“They hang off like this, no? Three, four, five of them across? And you wonder how the bloody hell they manage not to fall? What are they hanging on to? Who knows? But they hang on. Instead of saying Too full, I’ll get the next bus, they run for their lives and jump onto these overcrowded things. And every time they do it, someone catches them, holds on to them, and they hold on too, until they get where they need to go. No?”
“Yeah,” Rishi said. “You’re right. They do.”
“Imagine if they didn’t take that chance? If they played the cool guy and stayed on the ground?”
“Yeah. I think I see.”
“What would happen then?”
“They’d never get anywhere,” Rishi answered. “They’d be stuck.”
Sen raised one triumphant finger.
Feeling inexplicably uplifted, Rishi hopped to his feet and walked out.
“Run for the bus, Rishi-bhai!” Sen called. Rishi broke into a sprint down the hall, past Sally’s desk, and into a waiting, miraculously open elevator.
Driving home again, he could see the full vista of the valley: the deserted parking lots, checkered with cars, the Caltrain tracks, the expanses of brown ground, mottled with water and green. And because today was a clear day, he could see the two silent towers of the Golden Gate, more red than gold. He’d read that the air force had originally wanted to paint the bridge yellow with black stripes. Some decisions were wrong from the start. As he got closer to home and saw the ocean and the Oz-like spires of San Francisco, something within him settled. The buildings he drove past grew smaller and closer, the sidewalks crowded, traffic stilted. He’d returned to the East Bay, where he needed to be. He’d made some
wrong decisions and some right ones.
When Rishi got home and saw the kitchen light, he felt peace spread through him. He opened the front door. “I’m ho-ooome,” he called. There was no reply. “Kavya?” he called again. He followed her faint voice to the living room. He could feel the drift of fever even before he reached the sofa where Kavya lay. Ignacio stood at her feet, thumping his forehead against her shins.
“Jesus,” he said when he placed a hand on her neck.
Rishi carried her to bed, found the aspirin, and placed a wet towel on her forehead. She winced. “It’s cold,” she managed to say. “It’s too cold.”
He whipped the blanket off. “You need to cool off. Just for a while.”
He could hear the knock of her knees as she shivered.
Ignacio scooted around the living room wearing nothing but a diaper, and the evening chill had raised a rash of goose bumps down his back. “C’mere, Ignacio. Let’s put a shirt on.” He scooped the boy into his arms. He felt the rattle in Ignacio’s breath, the slight rasp in his chest. In the other room, Kavya lay in the dark, a wet towel over her eyes. Rishi had spent so much time outside of his home that he hadn’t noticed the cloud of illness that permeated it. He had been neglectful. In the months since the Stratosphere project had begun, he’d retreated into himself, and now his family suffered. He went to the cupboard to search for the menthol rub, thinking he might clear up Iggy’s chest. He lifted Ignacio and carried him into the kitchen. Against his own chest, through the boy’s very skin, came a heated and harried thump, a small heart working fast. Ignacio’s cheeks were hot, and his chest rose and fell more rapidly than it should have. From his throat, Rishi heard an alarming rattle. He picked up the phone and dialed.
The doctor was out of the office, his exchange said. The on-call physician would phone by dinnertime. Ignacio coughed again, this time wheezing violently. Rishi yanked open the kitchen drawer and riffled through it until he found a dog-eared black notebook, bent nearly in half, names and numbers and addresses rammed together in Kavya’s frantic hand, a train wreck of information. From this, somehow, he picked the word Preeti, the numbers 415. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of Vikram Sen, wary of encountering a teary and conflicted Preeti Patel. In the other room, Kavya moaned. Rishi dialed.
• • •
KAVYA PULLED HERSELF from a well of sleep and, surfacing, followed voices to the kitchen. Ignacio was holding himself up by Preeti Patel’s knee but dropped to the ground when he saw Kavya.
Preeti beamed.
“What are you doing here?” Kavya asked.
Preeti’s smile wavered. “Rishi called me. He couldn’t get a hold of your doctor.”
Kavya grew dizzy again and sat. Even in her fog, this sounded like judgement—of Rishi, of their doctor. “Can I have some 7Up?” she asked Rishi. She knew very well that they had no 7Up. She hadn’t had 7Up for years and was unsure if it even existed anymore, but it was what her mother used to give her when she was sick.
Rishi sat next to her and took her hand. “I could get you some,” he said. “I could get you some 7Up.”
Preeti cleared her throat and produced an oblong case. She unlatched it and took out a stethoscope. “You say he’s been coughing for how long?”
“Since we’ve known him,” Rishi said. “For almost two months now. There’s a thing in his chest, I think. A rattle . . . or something.”
“And how are you feeling, Kavya?” Preeti asked. “Have you taken anything?”
“Just aspirin.”
“Have you been drinking fluids?”
“Not really.”
“How about some tea?” She turned to Rishi. “Can we get that 7Up, maybe?”
He nodded.
Kavya flopped back on the couch and closed her eyes and blew horsishly through her lips. She could feel Rishi and Preeti watching her, blinking. The sound of blinking in the room was deafening.
Preeti kneeled next to Ignacio, stethoscope in hand, and let him play with it. She showed him how to press the flat, round disc to his chest, to hers. And then, speaking in bright whispers, she placed the earbuds in her own ears and pressed the disc to his chest, his back. He squirmed.
“Hold still, sweetie.” She listened again. She turned to Kavya. “Okay. He has a fever. That I can say for sure. It could be more.”
“What does that mean?” Rishi asked.
“It’s astonishing,” Preeti said, “what small children can live with. They seem fine on the outside, and on the inside, they’re barely holding on. But I’m not saying that! I’m not saying he’s barely holding on. He might have a chest infection, that’s all.” She sat flat on the ground. “Sorry. I’m not great at this.”
“So,” Kavya said, sitting up now. “What exactly are you saying?”
“Come here.” She took her stethoscope off and placed its buds in Rishi’s ears. “Have a listen.” When Rishi kneeled beside Ignacio, he sank into his arms. He let Preeti guide the disc along his chest, then his back.
“Around here,” Preeti said. “Do you hear that? Sort of a hissing, staticky sound?”
What Rishi heard was a rush of wind, sprinting through trees, having its way with sun-dried leaves.
“So we’ll call the doctor,” Rishi said.
“Definitely,” Preeti answered.
“He’ll be fine,” Rishi said to Kavya.
Kavya pulled herself back to the sofa and dug her face into a pillow.
“Ignacio?” Preeti said. “Is that your mama? And your papa?”
Ignacio fixed his gaze on Kavya.
“Papa?” Preeti said again. She pointed to Rishi. “Papa!” she said. Then she turned to Rishi. “Is that what he calls you?”
“Well,” Rishi said. He and Kavya blinked at each other. “He doesn’t—I’m not sure.”
The room went silent.
Kavya lifted her head. “Rishi hasn’t been around much. Iggy doesn’t call him anything.”
Preeti pursed her lips. “Papa? Dada?”
“Nana?” Rishi tried. “That’s what I call my dad.” He turned to Iggy. “Nana?” he asked.
Ignacio angled on Preeti a heavy-lidded gaze. A delicate bubble of saliva ballooned from his lips and burst. “Papa!” he said, and pointed to Rishi, the two syllables sharp enough to form a command.
Rishi, newly christened, took Ignacio for a walk to the store. Preeti and Kavya watched them leave, Preeti perched on the arm of the sofa, her gaze following the two out the door and, turning to the window, down the sidewalk.
Preeti leaned toward the window to watch them. “Do you think they’ll be all right?”
“Is it that obvious he doesn’t know what he’s doing?”
She shrugged. “He probably knows more than I do.”
Kavya covered her hands with her eyes, meshed her fingers against the room’s stark ceiling light. It hurt to look at anything directly.
“He sounded pretty worried when he called,” Preeti said. “And I was in the East Bay anyway, so . . .”
Kavya turned. “Worried about me?”
Preeti hesitated. “Yes. And Ignacio, of course.” She paused. “He’s wonderful, Kavya!”
“Iggy?”
“Yes, Iggy!”
Kavya smiled against her palms. “He is.” She didn’t tell Preeti of her deeper worries, the idea that her wonderful boy could be taken away. It wasn’t a small possibility; she wasn’t being a neurotic mother who feared her healthy child would stop breathing. She knew her only certainty was uncertainty. She knew that Iggy’s real mother—she couldn’t stop calling her that—could come back any day, and that Kavya’s commitment wouldn’t matter. Kavya had made a mansion of her love, but built it on shifting land.
“The fresh air’ll be good for him,” Preeti said, looking out the window at Vine Street. “What I heard was probably nothing.”
&n
bsp; “Probably.”
“I think he really was worried about you, actually. Rishi, that is.”
Preeti seemed to sense more than she should have, but this didn’t surprise Kavya. Of course Preeti would know everything about her.
A quiet settled over the room.
“How are things with you?” Kavya asked.
Preeti shrugged. “Vik’s taking me back. So that’s good. I guess.”
“Have you figured out the—situation?”
She considered this. “It depends what you mean. I guess the situation is managing itself. Huntley fucked with my head, and then I went to Vikram for love and security. And that’s where I am now. That’s a situation, right?”
Kavya tried to smile.
• • •
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Rishi turned onto Vine with a canvas bag of soy milk and 7Up, Ignacio perched on his shoulders. Preeti’s white Prius was still parked at the curb. Through the living room window he could see the two women, both standing now. He wasn’t ready to go in. He wasn’t sure why. He turned and headed back to Shattuck.
In August, Berkeley went to sleep, its inhabitants trailing to the coast, the woods, the mountains. Those who didn’t leave drew into themselves, their homes, their cocoons of quiet routine. They hid in the muggy mist of that month as college students returned, blocked up the crosswalks and the cafés. The people of Berkeley grumbled at the thought of giving their city back to twenty-year-olds. They groused about students who dripped across crosswalks in twos and threes, forcing drivers to idle endlessly. They resented the fact that their own college days were long behind them. They grumbled about the heat, and the cold. They grumbled about the unpredictability of this place that they loved, most essentially, for its unpredictability. And they tucked themselves into smaller versions of their lives, as the impatient night brought each day to a quicker close. They waited for a new beginning.
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