by Pia Padukone
Kamini busies herself with Gita’s visit. She visits the shop and buys coffee. Americans drink coffee. She buys whole biscuits, not the broken ones at the bottom of the bin that Shankar sells for half price. She has the floors cleaned and the sheets that have sat idle in the cupboards for years washed. She checks on her chili pickle, inhaling the pungent fumes that curl out from the jar. It will be at its peak in three days’ time, when Gita and Karom arrive. She is tidying the table that has become her work space, with papers and pens and nubs of pencils cluttering the space around her laptop, when the doorbell rings.
Raj stands on the other side, grinning widely.
“Hi, auntie,” he says. “You’re a legend. You’ve done me proud with your computer skills. You’re quite famous in the office.”
“Is that right?”
“No one can believe that I’ve taught someone of your age how to email and use a computer. I mean—” He looks down, embarrassed.
“I know what you mean.” Kamini chuckles, patting his hand. “Come, come, come inside. To what do I owe this visit?”
“I can’t stay. I’m just to deliver this.” He thrusts a package wrapped in brown paper forward.
“What is it?”
“Something you should open on your own. I’ve got to run. We’ll chat on IM? It’s been a while.”
“My granddaughter is coming with her boyfriend.”
“Ah, you’ve got your hands full. Okay, I’m off.”
“Bye, child.”
Kamini closes the door and sits down at her desk. The brown paper has been folded around the contents with twine. It reminds her of that first meeting with Dev, the paper-wrapped book, the string, Great Expectations. She removes the string in front of her, smoothing the paper against the table. There is a book inside this package, too. She removes it from its wrapping and lets the paper fall to the floor. She picks up the book and caresses the cover. It is shiny and pristine, reflecting against the sun that glints into the sitting room. She opens the cover, and the crisp pages creak with newness. She puts her nose against the inner spine and inhales the fresh, inky scent. She flips the pages. It is there—the table of contents, all twenty-eight stories, the dedication page to Savita and Gita and Maila and Ranja, the About the Author page and on the back page, within the fold of the dust jacket, a grainy picture of herself that she has taken with the camera built into her laptop. She is old. She can finally see it with her own eyes, through her thick owl-like glasses, without a partner to mirror how she has aged. Wisps of gray hair have escaped her bun and halo around her head. Her skin is abrasive, like used sandpaper. Rivers of wrinkles run from her laughing eyes. Her chin dips below itself to produce its twin. But this is her face.
And this is her book. No one can take this away from her and no one can expose her now. She closes the cover and looks down on it once again, running her gnarled rootlike fingers over the raised black letters that seem to tower above the rest of the world.
Fairytales of Freedom. By Kamini Pai.
Lloyd
Lloyd has an affliction. He isn’t sure what to call it, really, other than a terrible way to live. At inopportune moments, he imagines the worst. When he flies, he imagines the plane crashing to the ground, splintering into indecipherable bits. When he took an overnight train from Paris to Amsterdam while visiting his parents stationed abroad, he imagined the metal bars that held his bed suspended above the bottom bunk caving and crushing his cabinmate in his sleep. Sometimes when he watches his father talk, he envisions him gripping his heart and a numb but distinct pain radiating down his left arm. He can remember the first time he had it. He was twelve, on a bus, somewhere in Baltimore. He was sitting in the solitary seat that comes after a row of two seaters and there was a little black girl seated in front of him who wouldn’t stop staring. He tried different tactics: eyes boring a hole into the pages of his book, pretending to sleep and then finally staring back at her unblinkingly, but she was unrelenting. He imagined the bus stopping short and her flying through the side window, glass shattering in slow motion, and the little body crunching to a halt in a tiny heap on the sidewalk.
When he was little, his eyebrows constantly scrunched together, as if he was worried all the time. His parents called him Chicken Little as he walked around clutching his stuffed animals tightly to his chest. They weren’t sure where the worry came from. He too isn’t sure why he imagines these scenarios. Suffice to say he’s never suffered from any form of PTSD and he had a solid, strong childhood with parents and an older sister who never teased him in front of her friends in order to appear superior. The moment these visions pop into his head, he spends every conscious moment fighting and trying to rid himself of them. He thinks of the mundane—his statistics final, sewing buttons on his overcoat, devil’s food cake.
Lloyd knows that Karom is haunted, too. They roomed together for four years of college, looking out for one another when one of them was stressed or anxious, bringing the other a boxed meal from the dining hall when the other had class that cut through dinner or lunch. They worked and got along, never divulging secrets to one another in an attempt to bond, but Karom and Lloyd knew enough about one another, probably more than anyone else whom either of them would call a friend did. For example, Lloyd knew that in their senior year of college, Karom began to cry out in the middle of the night, panting and bathed in sweat. Often it was garbled in another language, but one night during their last year of school when finals were over and everyone was counting down the dog days until graduation, Karom thrashed about violently in his bed just before dawn. He cried out, a single wail. It was the saddest sound Lloyd had ever heard, and he sat up, grappling with the bedsheets and groping for his glasses.
He’d become accustomed to Karom’s nighttime struggles, but he’d never intervened. “Hold me, hold me, hold me,” Karom cried. He had never spoken before, at least never in English. Karom continued to buck wildly in the bed, the sheets twisted about his lean frame. Lloyd crept over to him, afraid Karom would strike his arm against the wall and hurt himself in his sleep. Thick thatches of hair were plastered to his forehead and Lloyd reached out and moved one away from one eye. Karom continued his fit, now starting to weep with his words. “Hold me, please. I’m disappearing. Don’t let me go.”
Lloyd pulled the sheet back and carefully climbed in next to his roommate. Karom was glistening with sweat, yet his skin was icy to the touch. Lloyd put his arms around him and held him fiercely against his own body. Karom couldn’t thrash about anymore, but he shuddered like a wet fish out of water, moving against Lloyd’s body, whimpering softly and unintelligibly. Lloyd was as close to Karom as he’d ever been, the threadbare white shirt Karom wore to bed transparent and molded to his chest, slick with sweat. Karom sniffed a bit and burrowed his face into the warmth of Lloyd’s neck. Within moments, he fell back into a deep sleep, his breath creating soft puffs of condensation against Lloyd’s collarbone. Lloyd stayed there holding him tightly, and when the muscles of his arms began to ache, he loosened his grip on his roommate, slid his arms back from under Karom’s body and lay silently next to him for what seemed like hours before slipping out from the bed.
It happened again and again, over the course of the reading period, into the last week when clothes and books and bicycles were packed up and dismantled for the long drives or flights home. In fact, it happened eight more times after the first one, Lloyd understanding better how to handle Karom so that he wouldn’t thrash about and mistakenly cut his tongue on his teeth.
The two had never spoken of the incident; Lloyd didn’t even know if Karom had been aware of what was happening. But it stirred something in Lloyd. He understood slowly what it meant to take care of someone and then to care for someone and then, before he could understand what was happening to his own body during these episodes, to crave that moist touch and the unwashed smell of Karom’s sweat emanating from the sheets li
ke a fog. Each night as they fell into their own beds, exhausted by graduation parties and awards ceremonies and packing, Lloyd found himself praying that Karom would once again need the solidity of Lloyd’s body against him, his arms anchoring his chest, Lloyd’s legs entwined around Karom’s to prohibit the sudden jerking movements that racked his body. Now, just as much as Karom’s subconscious, panic-stricken body craved Lloyd’s protection, Lloyd felt himself awakening even before Karom to wait out those last few minutes before he knew the tremors would begin. And so he was by his bed, before Karom could even beseech him in the throes of his nightmare, to secure him, help him, hold him.
After graduation Lloyd hadn’t allowed himself to think of those mornings. But it was like that age-old psychology experiment. Don’t think about elephants. So of course, what else are you thinking about? Elephants. It popped into his head, much like the other pessimistic random hauntings he found entangled in his brain. But now that he is getting married—in a matter of days—to a wonderful girl who will eventually erase all of this from his mind, it doesn’t matter anymore. He won’t remember the sweet smell of Karom’s sweat and the way his brow furrowed and then softened at Lloyd’s touch. He won’t have random violent thoughts amid serene moments. He won’t suddenly be jerked headfirst through a taxi windshield during a routine ride to work. And he certainly won’t be pulled under the river from a sudden surge of a heavy current, his fishing line entangled beneath a boulder. Lloyd reels his line in and stares at the hook dangling on the end. The bait is gone—again. He is no fisherman. What is he trying to prove? He certainly isn’t fooling Malina. She’d perched on his desk watching him pack for this trip, not saying a word until he zipped up his duffel bag and leaned over to kiss her goodbye. She’d leaned backward, putting a book between their lips.
“I want you to read this on the flight. No arguments.” Lloyd peered at the cover.
“Digging Your Own Toilet: Survival Tactics for Cosmopolitan Men. Come on, Malina.”
“If you insist on going alone, then at least read up on how not to get yourself killed by a bear. I’m serious, Lloyd. I’m terrified of you going off by yourself like this.”
“I’ll be fine, Mal. They wouldn’t let people camp out there if it wasn’t safe.”
“Well, I think they assume that those people have some notion of what to do if you twist your ankle during a lightning storm.”
“I was in Scouts, remember? I can tie a tourniquet with the best of them. And in a lightning storm, you just stay away from the trees. Piece of cake.” But he stuffed the book into his bag and leaned back in for his kiss. He knew Malina found it strange that he was going on his bachelor weekend alone. He has friends, or at least, he has people that he watches football with and drinks with and is sent Christmas cards with fat, ugly babies from. But he’d explained it to her time and again: this was the last time that he would ever be alone. “And thank goodness for that, baby, thank goodness. But there is some beauty in spending some QT getting to know myself, isn’t there? Because if I’m not at peace with myself, if I don’t know myself inside and out, how can I love you better?”
He ties a fly onto the hook and casts it out once again. The river gurgles gently at his toes, his socks strewn on the rock beside him, sodden with the warm mud and silt of the riverbank. Every so often a sickly sweet odor like the rotting leaves of ginkgo wafts through the breeze. Even at this early hour of the morning, the sun sparkles across the moving waters like thousands of untouchable jewels. In the middle of the river three large rocks jut out of the water, a few small roots and branches reaching out of them. On his first day Lloyd had tried to wade over to those rocks, sure that fishing from the center of the river would yield far more than from the banks. But the current had caught him by the ankles, so strong that it trapped his soles in the pebbled soil just inches into the river, and he’d hobbled, defeated, back to the shore.
This, he thinks, is what it means to be a man. Out in the open, with the fresh air and the trees and earth beneath your ass and dirt caked beneath your fingernails. It means dignity, building a fire and roasting what you catch. It means mosquito bites and sunburn and poison oak and skin rash. Well, okay, it only means all those things because in the past three days, he has acquired all of them. But that’s all right. Because he is feeling them through and through. The way his skin itches so hard but he refuses to touch it. The way his face is aflame each morning before he soothes it with a thick layer of aloe.
When he’d first arrived, Lloyd had pitched his tent on the outskirts of the Upper Pine campground, taking care not to interfere with the families and hippies who had set up camp within the demarcated ropes. His eyes had been drowsy from the early flight, but he’d skimmed a yellow sign nailed on a tree trunk to stay within the allocated portion of the campsite, at your own risk. He hadn’t read the rest of it, but he had read Malina’s handbook on the flight; now he could steer clear of bears and raccoons and unwanted creatures. He could smell packaged hot dogs and s’mores but he had headed straight down to the riverbank to catch breakfast.
On this third morning, he has grown hungry and tired of fish. He has been throwing his catch onto a small grill fashioned out of an old waffle maker. He has eaten a single brown trout for the past two days, the only fish currently appropriated for camper consumption. But there is no way he will allow himself to approach the general stores that feed the steady stream of amateur campers with Pop-Tarts and hot cocoa. This is camping, he’d scoffed, watching them exit the stores with their arms full of unnecessary snacks. When you got tired of eating fish, well, then you learned to hunt something else. Rabbit, maybe, or the fat brown squirrels that scamper around his campsite. However, one thing nature doesn’t provide is beer, and so begrudgingly, he enters the store and goes straight to the fridge section to remove two six-packs of pale brown ale. As he approaches the counter, a man wearing a red lumberjack shirt smirks at him.
“I thought you’d give in,” he says.
“Excuse me?” Lloyd sets the beer on the counter and fumbles with his wallet.
“You’re the only one at this campsite who hasn’t been in here yet.”
“Oh, well. Beer. You know. How much do I owe you?”
“Even ten.” As Lloyd passes him the bill, the man catches his eye.
“Learning to hunt and gather?”
“Something like that.” Lloyd swings his beer over the counter. “It’s my bachelor party.”
“No kidding. I didn’t think you were here with buddies.”
“I’m not. It’s a solo thing.”
“Never heard of that. Well, have fun. Watch out for bears.” The man winks at Lloyd and moves to help the next customer.
The night is chilly, though it is June, and Lloyd zips up the mouth to his tent. He settles deeply into his sleeping bag wearing two pairs of socks on his feet and another on his hands. He nestles his head carefully on his bag of soiled clothes and allows his mind to wander. His wedding is in two weeks. Malina’s family will arrive in one. His parents will arrive from their current posting in Prague, and his best man from New York, who is supposed to feed him shots and coaxing words of advice in the hours getting ready, roughhousing and knotting neckties. He hasn’t seen Karom since last summer, when their suitemate got married in Vermont. But of all the people in Lloyd’s life, Karom is the one he wants standing next to him when he takes the most important vow of his life.
Lloyd thought of those mornings in college with Karom on the first day he pitched his tent. It was the tent, in fact, that had reminded him. The tent was erected and stood straight at attention: this was Karom’s picture-perfect posture, whether he studied at his desk or ate fish tacos in the dining hall. The way the canvas stretched taut against its poles, straining against the pressure of being pulled in two opposite directions, was how Karom’s ropy muscles engaged under the crevice under his arm when he changed his T-shirt. The T-shirt. Lloy
d dropped the pieces of the tent in a heap and scrabbled in his duffel bag, his fingers reaching through thermals and socks until they encircled capably around the piece of cloth that links him to his roommate. It is a nothing T-shirt, one that Malina had tried to wash and convert into a rag but Lloyd had rescued from the laundry hamper just as he’d done the first time in their dorm room nine years ago.
“That thing is practically see-through. After one more wash, it’s going to become Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak,” Malina had said, gently prying it out of Lloyd’s hands.
“It still has some years in it,” Lloyd had said defensively. “And it wasn’t dirty.”
“It’s just an undershirt, babe. Do you even know where it was? Wedged between the mattress and the box spring.”
“I know. That’s where I put it.” Lloyd had grabbed it back and folded it among his undershirts.
But it still has that smell: the musky, spicy, smoky smell that emanated from Karom when he returned from squash practice or squirmed in his sleep on those troubled mornings.
This night yields weakness. Lloyd is pulled in all different directions, whipping about in the clammy blackness of his tent and sleeping bag. He is visited by visions and memories, of college and childhood, but Karom is there throughout. He is there at his home as a young man, and again when Lloyd loses his first tooth. He is there when Lloyd’s parents hand him the keys to his first car, before they get into a different one and drive off to the airport to a new destination that will be their home for the next two years. Somehow in his dreams, Karom ascends all levels of Lloyd’s life and he is omnipresent in his past, present and future.